[In the following review, Humphries offers positive assessment of Siegfried's Journey, which he describes as the work of a “dilettante.”]

How pleasant, one is tempted to reflect on reading these memoirs, how pleasant to be born in the leisure class, with a sense of aristocratic tradition, including the medieval, in the blood and bone; to be a welcome guest, for as long as one liked, at great houses with names and ivy and lawns with ilex trees; to have friends, male, like Robbie Ross, who would sympathetically draw out of you every impulse you had toward creativeness; or friends, female, like Lady Ottoline Morrell, a little over-enthusiastic, perhaps, but given to “innumerable acts of generosity and affection.” How pleasant to circulate freely, with just the proper amount of diffidence, among the respected writers and artists of one's time; to have the entrée to drawing-rooms where Bach was played for enjoyment; or to go, if one felt in a simpleminded mood, for a jolly canter with the Acting Master of the Southdown Hunt! How pleasant to know the right people, so that after the recovery from wounds the leave could be extended ever so little; so that the pacifism could be diagnosed as shell shock; so that the objector to war could be lectured, benevolently if sincerely, by no less a Dutch uncle than Winston Churchill himself!

These are advantages not to be sneered at: Mr. Sassoon comes closer to taking them for granted, with due appreciation, than to making light of them. It was during these four years, 1916-1920, that his reputation was made, founded on acts of courage. He was brave enough to win the Military Cross for heroism in action; he was also brave enough to write, and have published—the publishers are also entitled to credit—the anti-war poems that have been, are now, and will for some time be, in all the anthologies. Rereading those poems and others in the same volume, one feels that the denunciations of the war, half a dozen items or so, are Sassoon's best work, and that the anthologies are not unfair in representing him by these, as they are unfair in making Rupert Brooke the poet of “If I should die, think only this of me,” and so on. Some of Sassoon's war poems, even, tended to degenerate into formula once the ironic method had been established there came to be a bit of trick to it; but on the whole he shows here a tenseness, a humor, plenty grim, and a sense of reality that do not impinge elsewhere on his amiable Georgian melodies. Writing about these years, Mr. Sassoon is rather more candid about his innocence than his luck. He has kindly feelings, and kind words, for almost everyone—Bridges （though the Laureate did manage to make himself a little disagreeable）, his devoted friend Owen, Masefield, Hardy, T. E. Lawrence, the Sitwells, and many others.

“Dilettante,” like “amateur,” is a word which has—as Kenneth Burke might say—pejorative semantic connotations. But the roots mean something else—delighting, loving—and what's the matter with that? Not very important, really—for Mr. Sassoon has lacked either the capacity or the will to live up to his advantages—this memoir of his most important years is nevertheless readable, pleasant, engaging, polite, agreeable. I hope it does not sound too pejorative, or sneering, to dismiss its author as a dilettante who has had moments when he was close to being an artist.