’Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
  When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone,
  Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?’

So he descends to a poetaster’s padding.  He does not stop to consider whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or, if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference occurs again and again.  And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the thematic outline itself emerges.

In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.  We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more irrevocably itself, is pretty strong.  We catch in his hurried verses at the swiftly passing premonition of a frisson hitherto unknown to us in poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist in verse.  It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the labour.  His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its quality.  We can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be well requited.

[SEPTEMBER, 1919.

Ronsard

Ronsard is range now; but he has not been in that position for so very long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us.  Sainte-Beuve was very tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious, half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm.  And, even now, it can hardly be said that French critical opinion about him has crystallised; the late George Wyndham’s essay shows a more convinced and better documented appreciation than any that we have read in French, based as it is on the instinctive sympathy which one landed gentleman who dabbles in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to them—­an admiration which does not exclude familiarity.

Indeed, it is precisely because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him more closely seems to be tinged with rancour or ingratitude.  There is something churlish in the determination to be most on one’s guard against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large.  One must regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; and the third aspect has a chance of being the most important.