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retardent sur Joyce. Yet to lag behind Joyce is in itself not contemptible, and the significance of The Undertaker's Garland is that it is the first recent native work to pass beyond the Nineties and to the threshold of our own time. Both of the authors do this in their unlaboured association with ancient literature and modern art; Mr Wilson, after writing a preface which virtually lays down his life for his friend since after reading it one would be justified in omitting everything else of his own in the book, passes from a successful, but not significant satire (in The Death of an Efficiency Expert) to a piece of dignified and very nearly noble irony in the story of Emily in Hades. The grey is a little too black; but it has the tone of our time. Mr Bishop's two successes are The Death of a Dandy, successful for its hard, specific, certain pictures of things in themselves sentimental and soft; and The Death of God in which a number of sculptural images (The Thinker and The Hand of God, notably) are the conveyors of a profound emotion. It is necessary to mention also The Death of a Soldier because the greater part of it is built out of the spoken word, recorded with an exceptionally accurate sense of the stress and cadence of vulgar speech. The whole book is far more noteworthy for its intelligence (for its ideas) than for any outstanding method or technique of presentation. Structurally the prose pieces are better because their proportions are suitable to their content and the disposition of the parts is well arranged; those in verse are almost without exception too long, the procession of ideas and the procession of images fail often to coincide, and lengths turn into longueurs. But nothing in the book gives evidence of haste or indolence or contempt for the practised art, and nearly everything in it has something of an alert, a sophisticated and watchful intelligence. It has gone far, but not far enough; for in writing about death it has failed to express the deep and calm and unhurried desire of an age which like the Cumaean Sibyl wants only to die.

Gilbert Seldes