e spirits he has evoked.
Dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably
managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. Mr
Aiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is protean
and unsatisfactory.

'I am confused in webs and knots of scarlet
Spun from the darkness;
Or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders.

Madness for red! I devour the leaves of autumn.
I tire of the green of the world.
I am myself a mouth for blood....'

Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things
mean, exactly, anything? Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has been
to use the idea--'the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to
another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new
and subtler fiction'--'as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a
kind of absolute music.' But having given us so much instruction, he
should have given more; he should have told us in what province of music
he has been working. Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for
a musical elaboration of an intellectual theme? We infer, partly from
the assurance that 'the analogy to a musical symphony is close,' more
from the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration
of a theme. In that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp of
the theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itself
points to failure. In the poem 'stars rush up and whirl and set,'
'skeletons whizz before and whistle behind,' 'sands bubble and roses
shoot soft fire,' and we wonder what all the commotion is about. When
there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity,
but precisely of 1890:--

'And he saw red roses drop apart,
Each to disclose a charnel heart....

We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemical
compound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we
do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into
those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency
in the poem called 'The Charnel Rose.' 'Senlin' resists disruption
longer. But the same elements are there. They are better but not
sufficiently fused. The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in
rhetoric. We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his
own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a
violent clashing of the cymbals whe