Critic Finds 'Sound Supplants Sense' in Work of Hillyer, Boylston Professor

The following article was written for the Crimson by Robert T. S. Lowell, an undergraduate here for two years, who transferred this year to Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio. It is being published under a policy of presenting articles which concern University affairs.

THESE poems do not, as some critics have asserted, show particular technical incompetence. Doubtless even in the 18th contury when critic and publisher were more fastidious, technically Mr. Hillyer's couplets would have been printable, although their manner would have been considered peculiar. This manner (I mean by manner a mingling of substance and style), however, because of its diffilusiveness and giddiness is discouraging.

The quotation of a lengthy paragraph is expedient to illustrate, completely and without partisanship, so muddled a volume. Mr. Hillyer is denouncing experimental novelists:

(1) Art in so long and human life so short,

In hurried years young novelists resort

To sweet publicity, that freely offers

Headlines to vanity and cheques to coffers.

They snatch at tribute due a deathless name,

The fruits, without the patient growth, of fame;

(2) Like millionaires, impatient of slow Nature,

Who transplant trees grown to their fullest stature,

Till bankruptey and weather overwhelm

Both pocketbook and unancestral elm.

As fast as pen can trot, young writers build

Volumes, compact of words, but unfulfilled;

(3) The sound and fury so intense, that often

The Muse's corpse is justled from her coffin,

Where she lay dying in a rattling hearse

Driven by Faulkner, Wolfe, and even worse.

When tragedy descends from Court to hovel

Fit men make no fit subject for a novel,

But only monsters whose creators, even,

Confuse them, and John reappears as Stephen,--

(4) A trifling slip, no doubt, it yet suffices

To limit the consistency to vices;

Except that one must ponder if the style

Or matter is consistently more vile.

They look not to the distant mountains, Death

Is in their eyes and madness in their breath.

(5) Around, in neber-lifting vapors surled

Lie all the fetid miseries of the world;

While, as through city snow, on muffled feet

The baffled spirits move in long retreat,

Passing, repassing; slantwise through the haze

Their bloodshot eyes in dying sockets glaze

If one were recognizable as man

(6) We'd tremble, as perhaps their authors can,

But Ariel's as true as Caliban.

Sentence (1), stating that young novelists, because permanent art is arduous, angle after contemporary applause, is simple in meaning though rhetorically sprawling. Sentence (2) restates in altered words the argument of the first sentence, employing the awkward, "a deathicss name"; but afterwards expands, paralleling with the figure of the millionaire and the transplanted elm. After scrutinizing cogitation the transplanted elm appears blatantly impossible, either in its own context or in relation to the young novelist and his contemporary applause. Sentence (3) commences firmly to distinguish between "compact" and "fulfilled," but instead of focusing his point the frivolous poet appends an incomprehensible commentating clause. Sentence (4) is a compression of the defects of the "Letters" at large. Sordid subjects, prevalent among social novelists are ridiculed; a digression is made on obscurity; this obscurity is commented on; and the sentence lamely concludes declaring that one must ponder whether matter or style is more vile. Artistically the word "vices" is wishful and unproven; Mr. Hillyer's couplets have not made tangible that confusion is a vice and what he actually means is: "Their only consistency is inconsistency." The word "except" is grammatically unsupported, and "consistently" is a filler elbowishly attempting to link a couplet with one preceding. In the next group of sentences, which I can compesitely number (5), the satirist temporarily abandons satire for a hurried description of municipal squalor. The passage is undigested and out of control. The professional coupleteer such as Gay or Churchill does not pamper his polemic with unadulterated description. Sentence (6) impulsively reassumes a satirical tone, but inasmuch as the preceding description has not been made convincingly inhuman enough, Hillyer's conclusion has a fatuous unearned air, lacking inevitability. The final line projects certain rhyming dexterity, although what it implies is that if Ariel is as true as Caliban then Caliban is as true as Ariel, a conclusion counter to all the previous satirical trend.

Mr. Hillyer's couplets represent what might be the effusions of a conscientious disciple of Goldsmith, although enervated by 19th century flatulence, composing on vaguely Popeian themes. Insistent lapses into vulgarity putrefy the poet's whimsical sentimental touch. Concluding an emotional and facetious description of Bartlett Wendell appears this line:

"Of all the eyes I've ever seen the saddest eyes"

Rereading of the quoted paragraph makes manifest that no argument is held to and that nothing is established. Sound supplants sense; familiar cadences camouflage banality and intellectual inconsistency.