hensiveness of the emotion. You will recognise that the tricks of
the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability
can conjure emptiness into meaning.

It seems hardly worth while to return to _Wheels_. Once the argument has
been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the
contents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we
will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false
sophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare
Mr Osbert Sitwell's _English Gothic_ with Mr T.S. Eliot's _Sweeney_; and
you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with
the emotions of a complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing as
that of the similar process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, in
general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely
irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively
noxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great deal
better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones.
In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its
way through a chaotic technique. She represents the solid impulse which
lies behind the opposition in general. This impulse she describes,
though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not
uninteresting verses:--

'But since we are mere children of this age,
And must in curious ways discover salvation
I will not quit my muddled generation,
But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.

'Although I know that Nature's bounty yields
Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
Will I give back my body to the fields.'

There is the opposition. Against the righteous man, the _mauvais
sujet_. We sympathise with the _mauvais sujet_. If he is persistent and
laborious enough, he may achieve poetry. But he must travel alone. In
order to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your age
is. To be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a
muddled generation.

[DECEMBER, 1919.

_The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield_

Mr Masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end,
which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. _Reynard the
Fox_ marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal.
He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so s