The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE EQUINOX utterly breaks the first (and last) rule: ‘Rules are the devil.” He writes like a schoolboy for whom a false quantity means a basting. He counts his syllables on his fingers; he never writes by ear, as one whose ears are open to the heavenly melody of the Muses. So we have all the artifice—and perhaps the worst artifice ever invented—but no art, no humanity. As a mountaineer (I have seen very many of the greatest mountains of the earth) I must admit that “ : . . phantom fair Was Monte Rosa, hanging there, A thousand shadowy-pencilled valleys And dewy dells in a golden air” is a very decent word-picture of the great mountain. But a Man would have felt his muscles tighten; and the lust to match his force against the stern splendour of those glittering ridges would have sent him hot-foot after rope and axe. A great artist would rarely see so tremendous a vision as that of a mountain without emotion of terror and wonder and rejoicing. Tennyson sees it as a mere sight—he ticks it off in his Baedeker. He sees the dolly side of everything. Everything he touches becomes petty, false, weak, a mirage. He degrades the courteous Gawain to a vulgar lecher—but his lechery is as mild as an old maid’s Patience; he ruins women as a child plucks a daisy. Lancelot commits adultery with kid gloves on; and Enoch Arden moralises like a Sunday-School Teacher at a village treat. In the mouth of this soft-spoken counter-jumper the wildest words take on the smoothest sense. By sheer dint of cadence 396