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Two impulses dominate Lindsay's latest volume; two tendencies that are almost opposed in mood and mechanics. Sometimes the Jerusalem theme is uppermost; sometimes the jazz orchestration drowns everything else. Frequently, in the more successful pieces, there is a racy, ragtime blend of both. But a half-ethical, half-aesthetic indecision, an inability to choose between what most delights Lindsay and what his hearers prefer is the outstanding effect—and defect—of his new collection. Lindsay, the grotesque entertainer, he of the moaning saxophone and the squawking clarinet, is continually disturbing—and being disturbed by—Lindsay the mystic, the cross-roads missionary, the small town evangelist.

Had Lindsay been let alone, he would undoubtedly have developed the romantically religious strain so pronounced in his earliest pamphlets and in the tentative Rhymes to be Traded for Bread—the strain that was amplified in General Booth Enters Into Heaven and extended in that tour de force of spiritual syncopation, The Congo. But, with the sweeping success of the latter poem, a new element began to exert a potent influence on Lindsay's subsequent work: the element of popularity which, beginning by smiling on the astonished poet, immediately made fresh demands of him. And Lindsay complied. The surge and gusto of The Congo, the uncanny power of Simon Legree, the panoramic dignity of John Brown were forgotten and only their loudest, most sensational, lowest-common-denominator qualities retained. Result: The Daniel Jazz, The Blacksmith's Serenade, The Apple Blossom Snow Blues, Davy Jones' Door-Bell, A Doll's Arabian Nights. Undeniably light-hearted and humorous some of these are; their incongruities and release of animal spirits are contagious, particularly when the audience helps to make them a communal performance. But Lindsay is beginning to step over the delicate line that separates buoyance and even boisterousness from burlesque. He continues to