In effect, the Soldan, snapping his fingers (pulling a fico) with a stoccado (a lunge as in fencing) and a gambado (gambol) said--but by this time Miss Sitwell, who has been going very fast, has left her audience far behind: they have either deserted her, or are a dozen lines behind fumbling in the dictionary. So at this point she whips up her horse and goes faster than she knows herself. Even the dictionary sense, at this speed, falls to pieces and the words themselves turn into clowns. It no longer matters that ‘orchidaceous’ means ‘belonging to the orchid family’ or that ‘porraceous’ means ‘belonging to the leek family’ or that (unless Miss Sitwell has a bigger dictionary than ours) ‘laceous’ and ‘corraceous’ are mere nonsense-words. For by this time nothing matters and nothing makes sense, not even what the great Soldan says. Indeed the boisterous collapse is so sudden and so complete that ‘laceous’ and ‘corraceous’ may be deliberate misspellings to indicate the state of merry disintegration that the poem has reached. The principal observation to be made about this performance is, perhaps, that it has two separate aspects, a theatrical aspect and a poetic aspect. The first is the poem as a visible gesture which either is or is not a signal to the reader’s wit. If it is, the reader may perceive the poetic aspect according to his capacity or leisure. The theatrical aspect at any rate remains and, if the eye is quick, includes the poetic aspect. For it is possible that a sensitive audience which did not catch all her words, so to speak, might by the excellence of Miss Sitwell’s pantomime follow with perfect understanding her light-hearted gallop to despair and self-stultification. If it could not, then be assured Miss Sitwell would _not_ slap herself in the face. Limitations in the sense of humour of the critic-reader have thus the effect of making the modernist poem more and more difficult. For, the poet tells himself, if the reading public is bound anyhow to be a limited one, the poem may as well take advantage of its isolation by using references and associations which are as far out of the ordinary critic’s reach as the modernist sense of humour. When, for example, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell both introduce a Captain Fracasse into their poems as a symbol of the comic opera sword-and-cape hero, they are going too far for the average English reader and critic who is perhaps entirely unaware of Gautier’s romance of that name or of Catulle Mendes’ comic-opera drawn from it, but would immediately recognize a character corresponding to Fracasse in English literature. Fracasse is used because French comic opera heroes have an eccentric quality not to be matched quite accurately in the English Classics; but he would undoubtedly not have been used if a freer commerce in humour existed between the reader and the poet. Again, when Miss Sitwell writes of: winding Roads whose dust seems gilded binding