ous visions of wondrous colour move majestically over the ear." Um, perhaps. Here is an example of Mr. Scott's "poetry":
"Sounds of colourless dreams, of strange vagueness telling:
Immaculate music, heralding the life of sighs,
Bells across the lone lassitude, rising, rolling, endlessly swelling
Over the wasteland—solitude lost in the clear chaotic skies."[1]
Immaculate music, heralding the life of sighs,
Bells across the lone lassitude, rising, rolling, endlessly swelling
Over the wasteland—solitude lost in the clear chaotic skies."[1]
It may be noted that Mr. Scott is troubled with a mania for alliteration. Such other instances as "mournful melodies," "shadows of silence," "a far-off flute has faded," "dreamful daffodil," "ambient arms," "future fiends," dribble through his work. It is perhaps a coincidence that Mr. Scott's alphabetical position on the poetry shelf lies half-way between that of Laurence Hope and that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
In prose Mr. Scott has written a book called The Philosophy of Modernism. For a chap-
- ↑ In a paper printed on page 16 of A Musical Motley (John Lane; London; 1919), Ernest Newman makes the interesting statement that "the defects of his poetry are unmistakably those of his later music . . . he commits just the same fallacy in verse that he sometimes commits in his music—he mistakenly imagines that a vision not clearly seen by him in the first place can be imposed upon the reader, in spite of its obscurity and its lack of outline, by means of resonant and parti-coloured diction."
