EDITORIAL NOTES
THE first whole year of peace has ended, and it is natural to throw a backward look upon its literary production. It is certain that to the historian it will be a year in which various tendencies continued to act; it is possible that his eye, in long retrospect, will observe in it the appearance, the sudden appearance, of new literary developments and important personalities. But it is, as a rule, only in long retrospect that such portents are recognised as such; and though we think that during the year certain movements which have been for some years in existence have been continued, that there are drifts which are easier to perceive than to analyse, we cannot persuade ourselves that 1919 added more than the normal amount to the existing volume of good English literature. It was, in fact, as a literary year very much like one of the war years. Perhaps it should properly be regarded itself as a war year. The principal physical factor which, in our present relation, operated during the war was the absence on service of the great majority of those young men who would have been beginning to write. These were, with rare exceptions, precluded by sheer force of outer circumstances from literary enterprises of a sustained kind; and, as most of those who survived have left the Army within the last year, we could scarcely expect so soon as this to find them producing large and ambitious books. It may also reasonably be argued that the war-atmosphere still prevails. Peace has come—and it has not yet come universally or conclusively—not suddenly but with the slowness of a northern dawn. Problems from which even the most self-sufficing mind cannot escape harass the intellect and weigh on the spirit of the civilised world. We are not yet in a position to estimate post-war literature, for we have not yet got post-war literature.
The opinions of intelligent men may differ to some extent as to which were the most remarkable novels of 1919; that they were very few is, we conceive, a matter of general agreement. Of the older novelists, Mr. Conrad produced in The Arrow of Gold (a work begun long ago and recently completed) a book which, though not among his masterpieces, was worthy of him. Mr. Wells, in The Undying Fire, a modernisation of the Book of Job, wrote an imaginative, an exciting, and an eloquent book. It was much better shaped and trimmed than has lately been usual with his books, and, for the first time since he abandoned scientific romance, he concentrated entirely on doing what he can do better than other people instead of trying to do what he cannot do. The other elder novelists did nothing that was unexpected and little that was good; and their successors have not appeared. A Fielding or a Dickens is a rare product; but we see no young novelists of whom it can be predicted with any assurance that ten years hence they will occupy places such as are now occupied by Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett. It seems certain that they will not be found amongst that pre-war group whose merits Henry James examined with such generous consideration, whose defects he indicated with such delicate diffidence, in a famous article which "betrayed" rather than stated his alarm, even his pity, for the English Novel. There have been a few books which have attracted attention by their qualities of construction and detail or by touches of original genius; but of most of their authors we could not be sure that they will become even habitual, much less great, novelists. The book which more than any other appeared to us to be notable, both for its workmanship and for its imaginative power, was Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer's Java Head—and Mr. Hergesheimer is an American. It was not so good a book (we think Java Head was the earlier written) as The Three Black Pennys; but the two books are certainly the work of a born novelist. Miss Romer Wilson, whose Martin Schuler (1918) was a vivid, vigorous, and original book, published another, and a dull, novel, If All These Young Men, the subject and setting of which offered less scope to her peculiar gifts: but she is clearly capable of doing something surprising. Miss Dane's Legend was a remarkable technical achievement; and Mr. Cournos's The Mask, Miss Macaulay's fantasia, What Not, and Mr. Brett Young's The Young Physician were all, in their degrees, notable for a poetic quality.
Mr. Beerbohm's Seven Men could scarcely be classed with novels. It was Mr. Beerbohm's best book, than which those who appreciate him could pay no higher compliment; but Mr. Beerbohm is an artist who stands outside contemporary movements, literary and other, and one of whose charms arises from that very detachment. "W. N. P. Barbellion's" Journal of a Disappointed Man was a full and poignant record which will probably continue to be read in a narrow circle as Marie Bashkirtseff's memoirs are read; his posthumous essays, Enjoying Life, are even more convincing evidence of what their author might have done had he not been stricken by disease. Amongst works of critical and miscellaneous literature those which will continue to be enjoyed, or—in some cases—used, are Mr. Festing-Jones's Life of Samuel Butler, Professor Gregory-Smith's Ben Jonson, Mr. Gosse's Diversions of a Man of Letters, the late George Wyndham's Essays in Romantic Literature, certain books on the old Drama (Swinburne's The Contemporaries of Shakespeare, and Mr. J. M. Robertson's study of Hamlet especially), and Miss Ethel Smyth's Impressions that Remained. This last is one of the best autobiographies that have appeared in our time, and Dr. Smyth during a long and active life as a composer has been nursing a rich and racy English style.
The department—it is difficult in making such a summary to avoid the language of the catalogue—in which life has been healthiest has certainly been poetry. Several of the best and most promising of our living poets published no book in 1919, but what is incontestably a revival has continued. Several poets of established reputation have done better work than ever before. Mr. Hardy has published little, but his Collected Poems, now published, establish once and for all—and, old as he is, he belongs as a poet to this generation—his right to a place among the great poets. Mr. Masefield's Reynard the Fox is as certainly his finest book, as Mr. Herbert Trench's play Napoleon, whatever its defects on the stage, is Mr. Trench's. There is the largeness about this long and ambitious piece that there was about some of his earlier and shorter poems, and supremely in his Requiem of Archangels. Mr. Binyon's The Four Years was a collection of the verses its author had written concerning the war. It contained several poems made beautiful by the straightforward utterance of a noble and suffering spirit. Mr. Yeats's The Wild Swans at Coole it would be affectation to describe as equal in interest to his earlier volumes, but there were one or two lyrics in it which would adorn any anthology of English verse; and in Mr. Kipling's The Years Between there were also flashes of genius. From Mr. Yeats and Mr. Kipling, however, we do not now expect the unexpected. It is in the hands of the young that the immediate future of our literature lies. The most notable volumes by young poets have been (we are tempted to add Mr. Waley's More Translations from the Chinese) Mr. Brett Young's Poems and Mr. John Freeman's Memories of Childhood. But in periodicals and anthologies there has appeared much new and genuine work. A great deal is to be found in the fourth volume of Georgian Poetry, which was reviewed in our last number. Mr. de la Mare's latest poems show that his thought is steadily deepening, whilst he is losing none of that delicacy of music and beauty of phrase that made his early lyrics as lovely as any in the language; and both Mr. Sassoon and Mr. Nichols have done work which makes their future a matter for profound curiosity. Scattered about in other volumes there have been many single good poems: and it is the characteristic of a prolific lyrical age that a few good things are written by many men. We would mention as especially interesting, in that it is one of the few long successful narrative poems of recent years, Mr. Aldous Huxley's Leda; the myth was difficult and dangerous, the versification often ungainly, but the poem contained passages of great strength and beauty. We may add finally Captain Scott-Moncrieff's fine translation of the Song of Roland.
We used the term "a lyrical age." Opinions may and do differ as to the number and quality of good short poems that have been written in the last ten years, but that the prevalent tendency amongst the most intelligent young men is to write poems, and short poems, cannot be disputed. The paucity of good novels, and especially good novels by young writers, is not entirely to be ascribed to the fact that during the war many of those who might have written, and may write, good novels were not in a position to write books at all. The deflation, temporary perhaps, of the Novel has been proceeding for some years; the absence of even tolerable new novelists has been too nearly complete to be attributable to the peculiar war conditions. The novel of "psychology," the novel of minute observation, the propagandist novel are still produced in quantities; but the best literary brains are not going into them. The drift towards poetry was noticeable before the war; the war accelerated it. It is not a mere matter of change of fashion, of a form being worked out and becoming tedious—though we do, in fact, believe that the next revival of the novel will see a new development of the novel. It is a matter of a change in attitude towards life; a return on the broader emotions; a desire to acknowledge and praise the things men love and find beautiful rather than to labour at analysis and at speculation—not to mention sophistry. It is mostly lyric poetry that men are writing; and it is one of the results of the war, which has intensified our awareness of the old familiar things around us, which were in a sense threatened for all, and the loss of which was imminently before millions of individuals, that much of it is poetry of the English landscape and especially of the English landscape as a historic thing.
Long poetical works, large essays in the poetic drama, are complacently manufactured by mediocre writers in most literary epochs. But it is commonly remarked that in this age men of genius, and particularly young men in whom genius is suspected, are mostly content with "short pieces." It is rash to theorise about such things, as the wind has a way of blowing where it listeth. No one can desire that men should systematically force themselves to literary undertakings which are uncongenial and towards which they feel no inner impulse. If a man agree with that poet who—acutely conscious, it may be, of the nature of his own talent—said that no good poem should or could be longer than a couple of hundred lines, he will serve no useful purpose by manufacturing large patchworks in cold blood. The presumption that any long work is better than any short one by the same hand is made by those (we are referring to intelligent men) who do not go to poetry for the quintessence of poetry, the thing peculiar to it: it is from those that we hear most insistently the demand for works on the large scale, and the complaint that modern writers mostly insist (these are the stock, if unjust and inaccurate, phrases) on writing sonnets to their mistresses' eyebrows and carving peach-stones.
The fact remains that by the common consent of mankind lyrics alone—even the lyrics of a Heine, a Herrick, or a Burns—will not give a man rank with the greatest poetic artists. It may be that in Poe's sense a work of thousands of lines, which maintains the highest level of poetry, is impossible; that what Professor Quiller-Couch calls "the Capital Difficulty of Verse" is insuperable: but this does not invalidate the claim of the Iliad or Paradise Lost to be considered greater than Lycidas or the songs of Meleager. That they share in some measure the defects of The Purple Island and Pharonnida does not prevent The Fairy Queen and Faust being the greatest of their respective authors' works. From a poet as from another we want something beyond "jewels five foot long," the loveliest impressions of the most beautiful particular scenes, reflections of moods, verbal chamber music, momentary vision, sensibility, song. By the common consent of mankind the greatest things in the world are those works which, while full of beautiful details and informed with the poetic spirit, are moulded to a larger conception and attempt a larger picture of the Universe, of the destiny of man, or of the moving life of the world. We can, therefore, to some extent sympathise with those, however broody and disgruntled, who, when they meet a volume of new and exquisite lyrics, complain that the author has not written an epic or a tragedy. Is it likely that the present imaginative revival, assuming it to exist, will produce tragedies or epics, or works on the scale of such?
To us it is difficult to believe that it will not: unless the nervous unrest, the absence of leisure and of the inclination so to employ leisure, are worse even than we suppose them to be. We see in much of the work of the younger men a vigour, a passion, a catholicity of interest, a zest for all life, that nothing but the most ambitious tasks could satisfy. But when we ask of what nature such works are likely to be we cannot answer. This one observation may be made: the demand for long poems is commonly coupled with a demand for doctrine. The poets are to add to scientific knowledge or to contribute new notions towards political or moral development: they are to dogmatise, to enlighten, to direct. Well, poets have done such things. But not all poets have considered it their business to be religious teachers, political liberators, or contentious intellectuals. The question: What did Shakespeare stand for? is disputed to this day. They have read many theories into him but got very few out of him. That he admired fidelity, hated cruelty, believed in honour, and loved his country, might be postulated of him; but the truths he stated there were old truths, and he stated them only incidentally: he did not write his plays with the primary object of illustrating principles, above all principles invented by himself. Milton has been called the poet of Puritanism, and Shelley the poet of Liberalism, but there is no "ism" for Shakespeare, and a very, very small one for Keats. The very persons who most insistently demand "ismatic" poetry are most contemptuous of the didactic, informative and disputatious parts of the works of the late Lord Tennyson, who began as a pure Keatsiam poet. Non omnia possumus omnes: and, over and above this, it is most important to remember that poets, like other men, are affected by the intellectual conditions of their own times. If there is a clear tendency some of the poets will be caught up in it. But the men are very rare who generate their own spiritual revelations in some secluded corner of an antipathetic world. Wordsworth and Shelley were what is called "philosophic poets," but their age was the age of Rousseau and Godwin, of the Libertarian movements that were part cause and part effect of the French Revolution. If the human spirit is moving in one definite direction at this moment we can only say that we do not know what that is. A generation of thorough and often conscienceless scepticism, followed by a breakdown of civilisation, has produced a mental and moral chaos, a welter of doubt amid which numbers of the doubters make random and mutually contradictory affirmations. Something concrete will, if the race is to live, emerge; but we are not yet in a position to see it. Nor are we, as mere holders up of the mirror of nature, in a position as yet to see the vast events in our own material world. For the great philosophic poem we have probably still many years to wait; for the epic of the German war we may have a century to wait; for a great drama we may arguably, owing to the peculiar conditions of the theatre, have to wait for a generally accepted scale of values which does not at present exist. But the imaginative temper is abroad, and the next generation may be a great era in English literature.