Such work as this had to pass as ‘promise’; work better than this will undoubtedly have to pass for a time entirely unnoticed; because variety itself, especially when it becomes a social programme, tends to harden into defined types, or groups, of variety. For an individual poet to achieve the smallest popular reputation to-day he must, indeed, have a certain ‘groupish’ quality, or, to put it differently, he must suggest a style capable of being imitated; or he must be a brilliant group-member or imitator. Otherwise he is likely, as one of the consequences of the diversification of poetic activity, to be lost to the literary news-sheets of every critical colour and not even to occur as a subject of the plain reader’s suspicion or of the critic’s caution: to exist, in fact, only unto himself. Which is not, if the poet appreciates the privilege of privacy, so bad a fate as it sounds. Never, indeed, has it been possible for a poet to remain unknown with so little discredit and dishonour as at the present time. The prima donna reputation acquired by Mr. Humbert Wolfe with work of the most crudely histrionic and imitative brilliance (his original comma-effects in _Kensington Gardens_ began it) should not only comfort the obscure poet but drive him further into his obscurity. CHAPTER IX THE HUMOROUS ELEMENT IN MODERNIST POETRY THE motto to Mr. Hemingway’s modernist novel _The Sun Also Rises_ is: ‘“You are all a lost generation”--Gertrude Stein, in conversation.’ The title (“The sun also ariseth”) is taken from Ecclesiastes, from the passage in which occurs the better-known text: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” This is the conclusion of the greater number of the modernist poets, though not a counsel of altogether unrelieved gloom. Miss Sitwell’s chief message, if she may be said to have one, is the endless, minute triviality of life. Mr. Eliot’s _Waste Land_ is prefixed by a Latin motto which relates how the Cumaean Sibyl, when asked by the acolytes what her wishes were, replied (exhausted by her prophetic visions) “I wish to die”. But in general, although the total effect of modernist poetry on the reader may be depressing because it does not shine with those convictions and grandeurs which have made poetry in the past a beacon of seldom-failing optimism, the modernist poet himself is gay--if drearily gay--under the triviality of life or the philosophy of gloom to which he may be committed. The vanity of the world seen without other-worldly compensation does, in fact, demand a wilful cheerfulness in the poet. And it is this gloomy cheerfulness, if anything, which produces an effect of gloom on the reader; and perhaps rightly, if the reader’s temperament is not thus complicated. The temper of this generation, however, is not to be confused with the temper of two other previous lost generations, the generation of Byron and the generation of the ’nineties.