Such work as this had to pass as ‘promise’; work better than this will undoubtedly have to pass for a time entirely unnoticed; because variety itself, especially when it becomes a social programme, tends to harden into defined types, or groups, of variety. For an individual poet to achieve the smallest popular reputation to-day he must, indeed, have a certain ‘groupish’ quality, or, to put it differently, he must suggest a style capable of being imitated; or he must be a brilliant group-member or imitator. Otherwise he is likely, as one of the consequences of the diversification of poetic activity, to be lost to the literary news-sheets of every critical colour and not even to occur as a subject of the plain reader’s suspicion or of the critic’s caution: to exist, in fact, only unto himself. Which is not, if the poet appreciates the privilege of privacy, so bad a fate as it sounds. Never, indeed, has it been possible for a poet to remain unknown with so little discredit and dishonour as at the present time. The prima donna reputation acquired by Mr. Humbert Wolfe with work of the most crudely histrionic and imitative brilliance (his original comma-effects in Kensington Gardens began it) should not only comfort the obscure poet but drive him further into his obscurity.