out does not entirely lay such rising doubt. One of Mr. Aiken's most marked virtues is his aversion for the authoritarian and the official. Never is he guilty of the parade of judgement. "Where all is relative," he plainly implies, "let him who dares be pontifical." How negative a virtue such an aversion can become is seen only when the attempt is made to construct a book of it.
The defect of his attitude does not lie in a lack of positive particularization. Few more definite, rational, and in the better sense sophisticated characterizations of individuals than Mr. Aiken's are to be found in contemporary discussion of poetry. However he may confess fallibility and involuntary prejudice for those poets most like himself, and negate his judgements in consequence, when it is the consideration of properties and merits in a poem or a book of poems, he exhibits—perhaps derivative from being a poet—a quick, sensitive, expert discrimination and right understanding that are the rare fortune of a critic. On such matters his convictions want no emphasis of statement. He expresses a view, for instance, as to the essential sterility of Ezra Pound's Pavannes and Divisions which is less suave than definite; his belief in the inferiority of the Chinese Nightingale and other later poems of Vachel Lindsay is such that he forsakes relativity once and couches his statement as an epitaph; and there is no lack of directness in his characterization of parts of the second Others anthology as "proudly absurd and naively preposterous." The terms of his individual descriptions are sharp and certain. The defect of his attitude is its lack of affirmative completeness.
It is rarely that he will undertake that step from consideration of the properties of works to conclusion as to the qualities of workers, which completes judgement. One finds that he really attempts no more in his book of Scepticisms than a sheaf of rather extemporaneously collated feuilletons, which are on the whole rather better considered than many, perhaps most, of their congeners. The summary characteristic of his work in this volume might be placed at disillusioned straight competence. He is true to his title in being gratifyingly anti-idolatrous; yet he is rarely unjust or inimical, notwithstanding provocation. His inquisition is rapid and skilful and his evaluation of merits and defects in particular works is conducted with an assurance derived surely not from mere revolutionary zest but from thorough possession of modernly repu-
