in varying words, but still giving the spherical effect which I have frequently spoken of as imperative in all poetry.

"It will be seen, therefore, that 'polyphonic prose' is, in a sense, an orchestral form. Its tone is not merely single and melodic as is that of vers libre, for instance, but contrapuntal and various."

CONRAD AIKEN ON THE STYLE OF AMY LOWELL

Of Can Grande's Castle, the poet and critic Conrad Aiken writes: "This is an astonishing book; never was Miss Lowell's sheer energy of mind more in evidence. Viewed simply as a piece of verbal craftsmanship it is a sort of Roget's Thesaurus of colour. Viewed as a piece of historical reconstruction it is a remarkable feat of documentation, particularly the longest of the 'epics,' the story of the bronze horses of San Marco. Viewed as poetry, or prose, or polyphonic prose-or, let us say, for caution's sake, as literature—well, that is another question. It is a tribute to Miss Lowell's fecundity of mind that one must react to her four prose-poems in so great a variety of ways.

The real touchstone of a work of art is not, ultimately, the taste or feeling of the author (a singularly unreliable judge), but the degree to which it 'gets across' (as they say of the drama) to, let us say, an intelligent audience.

"And here one may properly question whether in their totality Miss Lowell's prose-poems quite 'get across.' They are brilliant, in the aesthetic sense; they are amazingly rich and frequently delightful in incident; they are unflaggingly visualized; they are, in a manner, triumphs of co-ordination. And yet, they do not quite come off. Why is this? Is it the fault of Miss Lowell or of the form? A little of each; and the reasons are many.

"In her preface Miss Lowell says that she has taken for the basis of her rhythm the long cadence of oratorical prose. In this, however, she is mistaken. She has an inveterate and profoundly temperamental and hence perhaps unalterable addiction to a short, ejaculatory, and abrupt style-a style, indeed, of which the most striking merits and defects are its vigorous curtness and its almost total lack of curve and grace. This is true of her work, whether in metrical verse, free verse, or prose; it is as true of 'The Cremona Violin' as of 'The Bombardment.' This style, obviously, is ideal for a moment of rapid action or extreme emotional intensity. But its effect when used passim is not only fatiguing, it is actually irritating. Its pace is too often out of all proportion to the pace of the action. One feels like a horse who is at the same time whipped and reined in. The restlessness is perpetual, there is no hope of relaxation or ease, one longs in vain for a slowing down of the movement, an expansion of it into longer and more languid waves. One longs, too, for that delicious sublimation of tranquillity and pause which

comes of a beautiful transition from the exclamatory to the contemplative, from the rigidly angular to the musically curved.

"This misapplication of style to theme manifests itself as clearly on the narrowly aesthetic plane as on the rhythmic. Here again one sees a misuse of pointillism, for Miss Lowell splashes too much colour, uses colour and vivid image too unrestrainedly and too much at the same pitch of intensity. The result is that the rate of aesthetic fatigue on the reader's part is relatively rapid. So persistent is Miss Lowell's colouristic attitude, so nearly unvaried is her habit of presenting people, things, and events in terms of colour alone, that presently she has reduced one to a state of colour blindness. Image kills image, hue obliterates hue, one page erases another. And when this point has been reached one realizes that Miss Lowell's polyphonic prose has little else to offer. Its sole raison d'être is its vividness.

"One wonders, indeed, whether Miss Lowell has not overestimated the possibilities of this form. It is precisely at those points where polyphonic prose is more self-conscious or artificial than ordinary prose-where it introduces an excess of rhyme, assonance, and alliteration—that it is most markedly inferior to it. Theory to the contrary, these shifts from prose to wingèd prose or verse are often so abrupt as to be incongruous and disturbing. But disturbance as an element in aesthetic attack should be subordinate, not dominant -the exception, not the rule. Miss Lowell's polyphonic prose is a perpetual furor of disturbance, both of thought and of style. Again, refrain should be sparely used, adroitly varied and concealed; and the counterpoint of thought, if it is not to become monotonous, must be a good deal subtler than it is, for instance, in 'Bronze Horses.' All these artifices are used to excess, and the upshot is a style of which the most salient characteristic is exuberance without charm. 'Taste' and the 'rhythmic ear' too frequently fail."-From "The Technique of Polyphonic Prose: Amy Lowell," in Scepticisms, by Conrad Aiken (Alfred A. Knopf, 1919).

JAMES HUNEKER AND THE SEVEN ARTS

"The acute sensitiveness, the instability of temperament, the alternations of timidity and rashness, the morbid exaltation and depression which were, and still are, the stigmata of my personal 'case'as the psychiatrists put it come from the Irish side of my house. When President Woodrow Wilson spoke of his 'single-track mind,' he merely proved that by powerful concentration he was able to canalize one idea, to focus it, and thus dispose of it. This inhibitory power is not possessed by everyone. I, for example, have a polyphonic mind. I enjoy the simultaneous flight of a half-dozen trains of ideas, which run on parallel tracks for a certain distance, then disappear, arriving nowhere. This accounts for my half-mad worship of the Seven Arts which have always seemed one single art; when I first read Walter Pater's suggestion that all the other arts aspire to the condition of music, I said: 'That's it,' and at once proceeded to write of painting in terms of tone [See the article on Botticelli, entitled 'Painted Music,' in Bedouins], of literature as if it were only form and color, and of life as if it is [sic] a promenade of flavours. Now, I admit that this method apart from its being confusing to the reader, is also aesthetically false. It didn't require Professor Babbitt to tell us that in his New Laocoon. The respective substance of each art is different, and not even the extraordinary genius of Richard Wagner could fuse disparate dissimilarities. The musician in him dominated the poet, dramatist, and scene-painter. And in this paragraph I am precisely demonstrating what I spoke of -my polyphonic habit of thinking, if thinking it may be thus called. I often suffer from a 'split' or dissociated personalities, hence my discursiveness to call such a fugitive ideation by so mild a name. But I started to tell you of my maternal grandfather and I am winding up on Wagner. Talk about 'free fantasy' in a modern tone-poem, or a five-voiced fugue, or a juggler spinning six plates at once!"Steeplejack, by James Gibbons Huneker, pp. 22-23 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920).

NONSENSE NOVELS

"Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labors of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica."-Sunshine Sketches, by Stephen Leacock, Preface. John Lane Company.