none the less, at dewfall and moonrise, in a dark tree, a birdsong. The inflections of the human voice, as he hears them, are as tender as in the hearing of Mr. Masters they are harsh. And can Mr. Robinson be thought a commensal of either? His again is a prolonged enquiry into the why of human behaviour, but how bared of colour, how muffled with reserves and dimmed with reticence! Here, indeed, is a step toward romanticism. For Mr. Robinson, though a realist in the sense that his preoccupation is with motive, turns down the light in the presence of his protagonist that in the gloom he may take on the air of something larger and more mysterious than the garishly actual. Gleams convey the dimensions--hints suggest a depth. We are not always too precisely aware of what is going on in this twilight of uncertainties, but Mr. Robinson seems to whisper that the implications are tremendous. Not least, moreover, of these implications are the moral--the mirror that Mr. Robinson holds up to nature gives us back the true, no doubt, but increasingly in his later work (as in “Merlin” and “Lancelot,” particularly the latter) with a slight trick of refraction that makes of the true the exemplary. We cross a chasm, from these sombre psycho-realists, to the colourists. To these, one finds, what is human in behaviour or motive is of importance only in so far as it affords colour or offers possibilities of pattern. Mr. Fletcher is the most brilliant of this group, and the most “uncontrolled”: his colourism, at its best, is a pure, an astonishingly absolute thing. The “human” element he wisely leaves alone--it baffles and escapes him. One is aware that this kaleidoscopic whirl of colour is “wrung out” of Mr. Fletcher, that it conveys what is for him an intense personal drama, but this does not make his work “human.” The note of “personal drama” is more complete in the poetry of “H. D.,” but this too is, in the last analysis, a nearly pure colourism, as static and fragmentary, however, as Mr. Fletcher’s is dynamic. Mr. Bodenheim is more detached, cooler, has a more conscious eye for correspondences between colour and mood: perhaps we should call him a symbolist. Even here, however, the “human,” the whim of tenderness, the psychological gleam, are swerved so that they may fall into a fantastic design. Miss Lowell, finally, more conscious, deliberate and energetic than any of these, brilliantly versatile, utterly detached, while she “sees” more of the objective world (and has farther-ranging interests), sees it more completely than any of them simply as raw colour or incipient pattern. If the literary pulse is here often feverishly high, the empathic and sympathetic temperature is as often absolute zero.