careful casualness, he certainly does well. He is careful, more careful and rational in his individual descriptions and characterizations than, for example, Mr. Untermeyer. He is casual, amid the general acclaim, to the point of dryness; it would appear that he has made a study of it, for it is a fact with many aspects. His censure is forthright but as nearly without malice as one can find at present; he is collected, in the mêlée of new pretensions, very little overlooking real, or being imposed on by sham merit. He almost alone maintains no particular pose and has. room, or makes room, for every inconsistency which his view of the truth impels him to utter. There are no instances in the book in which one feels that the author is abstaining from saying what he thinks for consistency's sake.
It is because he has done so much carefully that dissatisfaction arises at the incomplete significance of the whole work. The fact is that this book, full of care and sense, lacks the momentum which carries the author of the New Era in American Poetry, for instance, with so much nonchalance over such doubtful going and often uncertain judgements. One arrives by degrees at the conclusion that skepticism as a point of view comes near being a failure for lack of centrality and completeness. Mr. Aiken speaks of having been accused of chameleonism. It is true that those who recognize no obligations to consistency are elusive in the extreme; and he recognizes few, though he is definite and coherent in his specific statements. His general point of view is anything but coherent and illuminated and his book of skepticisms is a series of short, well handled drives, not a coördinated campaign; it is an accumulation, not a construction. Completeness could have been fairly readily secured by merely an evolution into its details of the natural and defensible point of view which he must surely have, but which cannot be found for relativity. Mr. Aiken, however, perhaps to satisfy his sense of contrast, has been so intent upon the exclusion of the official accent from his pages that he has unnecessarily dissipated the rightful authority of his just opinions.
It is probably a question of what you want; and there is little doubt that Mr. Aiken knows what he wants and what he does not want. He evidently does not want to be positive and consistent if that means rigidity; he would repudiate generality lest it lead him into too rigid commitments. The consequent series of skepticisms are searching—illuminating, but not an illumination.
