While envying those profound students of Art who find idealistic beauty of a significant message in the Epstein bust in bronze (modern, ætat 20 years) lately purchased by Melbourne Gallery, the average man, when he will frankly admit it, owns himself as greatly puzzled by the sculptures of Epstein as he is by the theories of Einstein.

Sometimes I risk a faltering step
To meet these -steins, both Ein- and Ep-:
   But hesitate and halt at last,
   Finding the works of each too vast
For such a finite brain as mine.
They gravel me, both Ep- and Ein-.
 
Ein-'s themes on space, Ep-'s things in stone
Both leave me gasping.  Tho' I own
   They're "after something," as men say,
   What master minds, what years away,
Will fully grasp at last those fine
Profundities of Ep- and Ein-?
 
I sometimes like to think, if Ep-
Could be induced to take the step,
   He might translate and bring in bounds
   Vague theories that Ein- propounds --
Carve them in stone, that, in the end
Mere fools like me might comprehend.
 
Working together thus they might
To a dull-witted world bring light.
   But when each labors all alone,
   Ep- at his monstrous things in stone.
Ein- with his talk of time-light-space
Just leave me with a wooden face.
 
Tho' here and now I own the twain
Bring but a bussing in my brain,
   Yet I, like others of my kind,
   Keen to be thought a "modern" mind,
If asked, will learnedly admit,
Each is indutitably It.

"Den"
Herald, 25 February 1933, p8