The moon is as complacent as a frog.
She sits in the sky like a blind white stone,
And does not even see Love
As she caresses his face
With her contemptuous light.
She reaches her long white shivering fingers into the bowels of men.
*****
She is Death enjoying Life,
Innocently,
Lasciviously.
Of that kind of thing, usually done with a little less force in the images, but always meandering, stupid, and utterly unrhythmical, good American journals have lately been full. It has ceased to be amusing; but we don't think that anybody need be alarmed; nobody can like it, and in the end those who, from restlessness or fear, have pretended to will revolt against a diet of wind and sawdust and return to something more palatable.
For the simple truth is that the trick of incomprehensibility is the best trick that has ever been invented for the benefit of writers who, if they can feel or think, do not know how to translate their thoughts and feelings into the language of art. Twenty years ago the swarm of useless young writers discoursed on common themes in common metres imitatively, after the manner of Tennyson or of Swinburne or of Verlaine. If they favoured dignity and nobility they wrote sonnets beginning:
Under the high invulnerable stars,
or plays like Savonarola Brown's; if Nature was their theme we heard of
The blackbird's descant from the bough.
The virtuous wrote of love in the manner of: