The whole of the second section of Friends is clear and passionate, and there are lines at the beginning in which he makes the comparison of a thinker with a child looking at pebbles in a pool, which are of the last simplicity and completeness. He oscillated between an extreme analytical habit and a profound love for ordinary things. The first mood may be illustrated by his strange poem on Words:
I watch you talking, catching mouthfuls of air,
Which you twist around till you throw them out
In various shapes, such that each is clear.
Patterns of sound: some soft, some you shout;
Some are round and soft or dimpled and thin,
Some writhe and quiver fantastic about,
Some slip through the lips, and turn whispering in,
Till the waves of silence shut them out.
So, if we could not hear any sound,
But could see air moving like waves in a pond,
And the shape of every word had been found
Till they faded away in the air beyond,
And words came twisted in breaths of air,
You could tell each one by a careful stare.
The other is naïvely expressed in his phrase:
There is as much of beauty in one breath
As there could be upon the largest star!
He was immature; but he need not have troubled to cross-examine himself about
These three last years of fraudulent
Subconscious plagiarism,
For there never was a person so unable to be anything but natural.
A CHALLENGE. By Maitland Hardyman, Lt.-Col., D.S.O., M.C. Allen & Unwin. 2s. 6d. net.
Col. Hardyman was a young civilian soldier who believed in peace, was on the committee of the Union of Democratic Control, and died at twenty-three at the head of his regiment. "I have never seen or heard of a man," says Mr. N. H. Romanes, in his introduction, "to whom not merely a lie, even a harmless one, but any kind of misrepresentation, was so abhorrent." He wrote his own epitaph thus: "He died as he lived, fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe in." The verse of the man described here cannot but be interesting. But it would be an affectation to call it poetry. Genuine feeling often comes through, but in an amateur way. The nearest thing to good poetry in the book is Via Crucis, which begins:
Lord Jesus of the trenches,
Calm, 'midst the bursting shell,
We met with Thee in Flanders,
We walked with Thee in hell;
O'er Duty's blood-soaked tillage
We strewed our glorious youth;
Yes, we indeed have known Thee,
For us the Cross is Truth.