sight or sound or smell. That, in an old world, ought to assure him of fame. Tomlinson has never sought eternal youth he is the eternal youth. Men who grow old lose the capacity for enjoying things. They think less and less of their birthdays except to count them morosely-and they care nothing for candles and a cake. To use a figure, Tomlinson can still enjoy a birthday party. For him, at each affair, there never was another party like it and never such a fine company gathered together.

To read "Tide Marks" and see how surprising it is to Tomlinson to set sail on a ship; to see how splendid all the sailors are and how glorious every prospect (nor is man vile), is to be convinced that Tomlinson never rode a ship before. You believe he is young, inexperienced. You become startled to learn that although he may be easy to surprise, he is not young in years or in experience. You wonder at his fifty or more years.

This youth, or freshness, is a quality of good literature. We must grant Tomlinson much for it. Many wise men regret its passing. Wordsworth always did: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.

Longfellow bewails his lost youth, and when we look for what distinguishes an artist from other men, we usually come back to this freshness which enables him to enjoy what is to other men dull or stale.

There is a subtle suggestion in this which hints, however, that Tomlinson is mature despite his youthful zest. Where young writers wage combat, Tomlinson never grows angry. He has lived too long to think that eccentric battles against restrictive convention avail. He brings heightened delight instead of growing pains. Such peace is not often found in young men.

III

But criticism, as usual cold and somewhat clammy, cannot accept this enthusiasm without what may be some de

rogatory qualifications. It must be remembered, however, that whatever adverse judgment may, within this article, be passed, it is, nevertheless, the opinion of a reader who has found in the prose of H. M. Tomlinson a steadfast pleasure.

Enthusiasm, or freshness, is never good because of itself. Freshness is either arrested development—immaturity or genius-hypermaturity, to use a parallel phrase. Sherwood Anderson, in some of his moments of infantile admiration, may stand as an example of the freshness of immaturity. John Keats, who delights justly in a nightingale, represents the freshness of genius.

Is the delight of Tomlinson's the one or the other? Let us take up the case of arrested development first.

One way to keep enjoying experience and to get what the motion pictures term, so justly, a thrill, is to hypnotize yourself into thinking every strange view perfect and every visible man splendid. It is the way of the professional optimist, and it implies shutting your eyes to all evil and surrendering your common sense. It means neglecting what your senses tell you smells bad or tastes bad and it means neglecting what your mind tells you is ugly or miserable or unhappy. Such delight in a young world is a symptom of arrested development.

That way of enjoying life lacks common sense. It wants perspective and wisdom. It is the way of the traveler who comes back from his journey full of the glory of himself he has seen so much; he has discovered this, and this, and this. He has no sense of the other man's experience, no realization that other men may have seen all this years ago without shouting so loudly about it. He forgets that the enthusiasms he has may not be those of other people, and he may bore instead of please his listeners. Such freshness is the result of a young mind rudely shocked and unable to grasp what has hit it. This is not Tomlinson. He is not a professional optimist. He is not a babbling mouth.

A second example of arrested development is exhibited in getting enthusiastic over things not worth your enthusiasm. There are trivial minded men-and they write books -who are pleased inordinately by the lavender pastel shades of smoke and fire from a blast furnace at night. They do not understand what labor and pain go into the making of those pretty colors they adore. The lover of the lights must not forget their meaning. Women lavish affection on dogs and cats. Similarly, artistic delight can be lavished on trivialities, and since there are more trivial things in the world than there are valuable, petty-minded enthusiasts can be perpetually amused.

In English literature there are many things which seem through centuries to have given lasting pleasure. They are, some of them, the stars, flowers, stretches of country and forest in mid-summer, the smile of a beautiful girl, the sound of a brook at night, the gentle animals on a farm. To find that your heart can lift up when you see daffodils is to be young in the right way. It is no sign of arrested development. It is an indication that you have not been dulled by living. The clouds of glory have not all passed away. The prison house has not yet built its walls. To hypnotize your mind into unvarying enthusiasm or to be pleased by ignoble things is a sign of arrested development. To have the capacity to enjoy what is worth your devotion is one of the marks of genius.

IV

H. M. Tomlinson, then, does seem to get excited over the proper things. His is a genius for discovery, and a genius for appreciation. He has an unusual ability to find pleasure. But there is this detraction. Although he gets his pleasure from things honestly worth the effort, I sometimes wonder whether they are worth the amount of enthusiasm which he expends.

In "Tide Marks," Mr. Tomlinson describes a splash bath, one of those tropical inconveniences by which many Euro

peans on tour have kept themselves clean. Now, a splash bath, I am told, is a novelty, rudimentary, honest, but nevertheless a very ordinary and sometimes messy substitute for the delights of sanitary plumbing. To the traveler weary of civilization, it may seem refreshing in its Biblical simplicity, but it is, after all, a splash bath.

But to Mr. Tomlinson there never was such a thing as a splash bath! There never will be again so splendid, so delightful, so humorous, so insinuating a diversion as a splash bath! It pleases him in the same unmeasured way as a tin toy gratifies a youngster. He will not eat, he will not sleep, he will not work while he has a splash bath. True, sometimes Mr. Tomlinson plays with his delight in a thoroughly knowing and sophisticated way. He tells us, by his style, "This is just fooling; it isn't worth much; but it amuses us both." He realizes his own extravagance and sometimes plays on it. That takes some of the sting away. It makes him less of an enthusiast.

It shows us our answer. Tomlinson does possess a certain genius, even though he steadily grows rapturous where passing interest would be sufficient. But he does find joy in the honest and simple things of experience. He is able to keep his ability to be surprised, and he can laugh at objects even while he relishes them.

V

This brings us to the dangers of Tomlinson's style and structure.

In general, all this can be put down by saying that Tomlinson's writing is a highly personal method of explaining the world. It is only the world impinging upon his own consciousness that counts, not the great sweep of life which may be more important but which has not touched his senses. He has little objectivity. His attitude colors reality. This is usually a delightful color, but that is beside the point.

No author ever achieves perfect objectivity. What I

mean, though, is the desire on the part of many men to discover the great meaning of the world even when that world's action has not become a personal experience. It is what might be termed an abstract philosophy. Tomlinson has little of this; he lives in a world of vivid sights and sounds and smells, and he communicates these with rare skill. He "philosophizes" much, but he never drops his enthusiasms sufficiently to order them and to give them intellectual plan and relative importance. It is not that he neglects the cosmic, but he invokes it on almost every subject and with equal fervor.

If Tomlinson had no more than an attitude to communicate, he would be bad. He has more, despite what has just been said. But he is not able ever to create more than himself. In his own mind, I dare say, there lies a scheme of faith and a way of life as beautiful as his prose, but what I get from his books is always the intimate sense of a new concrete experience. There is seldom any valuable intellectual residue. I am not trying to lecture an author for failing to write as I want. This is merely an evaluation of Tomlinson, the eternal youth.

John Keats used to write about "negative capability." By that he meant the ability of a poet to forget himself in the intensity of things greater than himself. Keats did it. Tomlinson cannot forget himself. It is too wonderful that all this should have happened to him. He is a traveler and he writes travel essays because such writings are the reactions of objects and persons and places on one observer. They require almost no objectivity and take energy from their surcharge of personality. They are not the highest type of literature, certainly. That objectivity which let Thomas Hardy picture men and places and let him forget himself—and lets us now forget the author-is the path to genius of the first rank.

VI

Tomlinson's enthusiasm for new experiences finds perma