The last principle of Imagism concerns the attitude of the artist to life. The artist should realize that if he is not to be the slave of life he must not attempt to be its judge. He must not obtrude his petty personal judgments and vanities between the reader and the subject he writes about. He must not, in short, moralise about life, or gush over it, or make others feel anything else except what he has felt about it. In this respect the Imagist poets are in very firm reaction against the sentimental and pious optimism of the mid-nineteenth century, against the equally sentimental and fallacious aestheticism of the eighties and nineties, and—it may be added—against a good deal of the wishy-washy suggestiveness and sex-obsession that seems to be getting the upper hand of so many writers of today. The Imagist does not weight the balance, either for “morality” or “immorality”: he states, and lets the reader draw his own conclusion. With these four principles in mind, we may now ask ourselves how the Imagists have carried them into practice. For practice is, after all, the supreme test of any theory of art. There are signs that Imagism is getting itself taken more seriously, not as a mere passing fad, but as something that has at least established certain guide-posts and land-marks for future poets, who wish to renew the traditions of good writing. I maintain that it has done more. It has permitted three poets, at least, to start from the same principles and to produce among them a very respectable body of poetry, which in each case is filled with the individual flavour of the personality who wrote it. That the Imagist principles should display such applicability and elasticity is, I maintain, very remarkable. We shall now see who these three poets are. II. Mr Richard Aldington, the first of the three to be considered, has recently brought together some thirty of his poems in a small volume, entitled _Images_. That this selection does not represent all of Mr Aldington’s work, must be apparent to all who are familiar with it. His long poem, _Childhood_, is not here; nor is his other long poem on the war, which surely deserves mention as being one of the few really humorous war poems ever written. To come to the shorter pieces, surely all admirers of Mr Aldington’s talent must deplore the absence of _Daisy_, _Round Pond_ and _The Poplar_—the latter one of the most beautiful poems he has ever written. But whether Mr Aldington has omitted these pieces from a too severe critical judgment, or whether because they seem to interfere with the unity of his book, the fact remains that they were omitted, but that enough is left to give nearly all sides of his achievement.