Coming to his views upon religion and upon Christianity, I find myself not so much hostile to Mr. Pound as bewildered by him; and yet not bewildered to the degree of much curiosity. Certain critical views of religion are stimulating. Nietzsche’s, for example, or Huxley’s, or W. K. Clifford’s, or even Frazer’s. You feel they come from minds serious enough to take religion seriously, and that they are expressive rather of impatience with the superficiality of current religion than of hostility to religion itself. Nietzsche and the rest, in fact, were not critical of religion and of Christianity because they were themselves indifferent to religion, but because they were too intensely concerned with the religious problem to accept the popular solutions. Mr. Pound, on the other hand, does not appear to me to be a serious thinker on the subject. He dismisses the current popular solutions not only as if they were, as they mostly are, superficial and absurd, but as if the problems of conscience, the soul, sin, and of salvation, to which these solutions are trial replies, were non-existent or trivial. It is his indifference to the reality of the problems, and not his criticism of the popular solutions, that keeps my mind at a distance from Mr. Pound’s when he is writing on religion. He does not so much as even irritate me, he simply leaves me as indifferent to his opinions as he is himself. MR. POUND, CARICATURIST.—Mr. Ezra Pound comes in for it again—as he always does. His idiosyncrasies are the enemies of his personality, and they will always, unless he can amend them, militate against both his work and his success. Mr. Pound appears to love to give his readers the impression that he is no end of a fire-eater, and that he is a charlatan of the first-water, setting up to lecture better men on the virtues he himself has never cultivated. It is an absolutely incorrect picture, an exceedingly bad self-portrait, a malicious caricature of himself. A psycho-analyst would attribute it all to “compensation,” to an attempt on the part of Mr. Pound to disguise his qualities as defects. In brief, Mr. Pound has not the courage of his virtues. “No one,” says Mr. Hartley in the _Little Review_, “admires Ezra Pound more than I do ... but it is his celestial sneer I admire.” A sneer, celestial or mundane, is, however, the last gesture of which Mr. Pound is capable. If anything, he is too benignant, too enthusiastic, too anxious to find excuse for admiration.