For the rest, there is no man even though he dare who can make beauty his own and “so at last live,” at least there is no man better situated for that achievement than another. As Prufrock longed for his silly lady so Kensington longs for its Hardanger dairymaid. By a mere twist of the imagination, if Prufrock only knew it, the whole world can be inverted (why else are there wars?) and the mermaids be set warbling to whoever will listen to them. Seesaw and blind-man’s-buff converted into a sort of football. But the summit of United States achievement, according to Mr. J.—who can discourse on Catullus—is that very beautiful poem of Eliot’s, La Figlia Que Piange: just the right amount of everything drained through, etc., etc., etc., etc., the rhythm delicately studied and—IT CONFORMS! ergo here we have “the very fine flower of the finest spirit of the United States.” Examined closely this poem reveals a highly refined distillation. Added to the already “faithless” formula of yesterday we have a conscious simplicity: Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand. The perfection of that line is beyond cavil. Yet, in the last stanza, this paradigm, this very fine flower of U. S. art is warped out of alignment, obscured in meaning even to the point of an absolute unintelligibility by the inevitable straining after a rhyme, the very cleverness with which this straining is covered being a sinister token in itself. And I wonder how they should have been together! So we have no choice but to accept the work of this fumbling conjurer. Upon the Jepson filet Eliot balances his mushroom. It is the latest touch from the literary cuisine, it adds to the pleasant outlook from the club window. If to do this, if to be a Whistler at best, in the art of poetry, is to reach the height of poetic expression then Ezra and Eliot have approached it and _tant pis_ for the rest of us. The Adobe Indian hag sings her lullaby: The beetle is blind The beetle is blind The beetle is blind The beetle is blind, etc., etc. and Kandinsky in his, _Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst_, sets down the following axioms for the artist: Every artist has to express himself Every artist has to express his epoch. Every artist has to express the pure and eternal qualities of the art of all men. So we have the fish and the bait, but the last rule holds three hooks at once—not for the fish, however.