bias, would identify with an agricultural worker as he would never have
done with a town worker. Most boys had in their minds a vision of an
idealized ploughman, gipsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a
wild, free, roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring, cockfighting,
horses, beer, and women. Masefield's 'Everlasting Mercy', another
valuable period-piece, immensely popular with boys round about the war
years, gives you this vision in a very crude form. But Housman's Maurices
and Terences could be taken seriously where Masefield's Saul Kane could
not; on this side of him, Housman was Masefield with a dash of
Theocritus. Moreover all his themes are adolescent--murder, suicide,
unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple, intelligible
disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the 'bedrock
facts' of life:
The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood has dried;
And Maurice among the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.
And again:
They hand us now in Shrewsbury jail
And whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men who die at morn.
It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes unstuck. 'Ned
lies long in the churchyard and Tom lies long in jail'. And notice also
the exquisite self-pity--the 'nobody loves me' feeling:
The diamond drops adorning
The low mound on the lea,
These arc the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee.
Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for
adolescents. And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or
marries somebody else) seemed like wisdom to boys who were herded
together in public schools and were half-inclined to think of women as
something unattainable. Whether Housman ever had the same appeal for
girls I doubt. In his poems the woman's point of view is not considered,
she is merely the nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature
who leads you a little distance and then gives you the slip.
But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were
young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was
his blasphemous, antinomian, 'cynical' strain. The fight that always
occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the
Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an
indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle
was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and
security of life in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many
people whose ideas were formed in the eighties or earlier had carried
them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as
the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were
dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for
instance, was spectacular. For several years the old-young antagonism
took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war generation had
crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the
slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing
under dirty-minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman
appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance
against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless
old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and 'God save the Queen'
rather than steel helmets and 'Hang the Kaiser'. And he was satisfyingly
anti-Christian--he stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, the
conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly
fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in charming fragile
verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.
It will be seen that I have discussed Housman as though he were merely a
propagandist, an utterer of maxims and quotable 'bits'. Obviously he was
more than that. There is no need to under-rate him now because he was
over-rated a few years ago. Although one gets into trouble nowadays for
saying so, there are a number of his poems ('Into my heart an air that
kills', for instance, and 'Is my team ploughing?') that are not likely to
remain long out of favour. But at bottom it is always a writer's
tendency, his 'purpose', his 'message', that makes him liked or disliked.
The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit
in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is
ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in
verse as much as in prose, even if it does no more than determine the
form and the choice of imagery. But poets who attain wide popularity, Uke
Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic writers.
After the war, after Housman and the Nature poets, there appears a group
of writers of completely different tendency--Joyce, Eliot, Pound,
Lawrence, Wyndham, Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey. So far as the
middle and late twenties go, these are 'the movement', as surely as the
Auden-Spender group have been 'the movement' during the past few years.
It is true that not all of the gifted writers of the period can be fitted
into the pattern. E. M. Forster, for instance, though he wrote his best
book in 1923 or thereabouts, was essentially, pre-war, and Yeats does not
seem in either of his phases to belong to the twenties. Others who were
still living, Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells, Norman Douglas, had shot
their bolt before the war ever happened. On the other hand, a writer who
should be added to the group, though in the narrowly literary sense he
hardly 'belongs', is Somerset Maugham. Of course the dates do not fit
exactly; most of these writers had already published books before the
war, but they can be classified as post-war in the same sense that the
younger men now writing are post-slump. Equally, of course, you could
read through most of the literary papers of the time without grasping
that these people are 'the movement'. Even more then than at most times
the big shots of literary journalism were busy pretending that the
age-before-last had not come to an end. Squire ruled the LONDON MERCURY
Gibbs and Walpole were the gods of the lending libraries, there was a
cult of cheeriness and manliness, beer and cricket, briar pipes and
monogamy, and it was at all times possible to earn a few guineas by
writing an article denouncing 'high-brows'. But all the same it was the
despised highbrows who had captured the young. The wind was blowing from
Europe, and long before 1930 it had blown the beer-and-cricket school
naked, except for their knighthoods.
But the first thing one would notice about the group of writers I have
named above is that they do not look like a group. Moreover several of
them would strongly object to being coupled with several of the others.
Lawrence and Eliot were in reality antipathetic, Huxley worshipped
Lawrence but was repelled by Joyce, most of the others would have looked
&n
bsp; down on Huxley, Strachey, and Maugham, and Lewis attacked everyone in
turn; indeed, his reputation as a writer rests largely on these attacks.
And yet there is a certain temperamental similarity, evident enough now,
though it would not have been so a dozen years ago. What it amounts to is
PESSIMISM OF OUTLOOK. But it is necessary to make clear what is meant by
pessimism.
If the keynote of the Georgian poets was 'beauty of Nature', the keynote
of the post-war writers would be 'tragic sense of life'. The spirit
behind Housman's poems for instance, is not tragic, merely querulous; it
is hedonism disappointed. The same is true of Hardy, though one ought to
make an exception of THE DYNASTS. But the Joyce-Eliot group come later in
time, puritanism is not their main adversary, they are able from the
start to 'see through' most of the things that their predecessors had
fought for. All of them are temperamentally hostile to the notion of
'progress'; it is felt that progress not only doesn't happen, but OUGHT
not to happen. Given this general similarity, there are, of course,
differences of approach between the writers I have named as well as
different degrees of talent. Eliot's pessimism is partly the Christian
pessimism, which implies a certain indifference to human misery, partly a
lament over the decadence of Western civilization ('We are the hollow
men, we are the stuffed men', etc., etc.), a sort of twilight-of-the-gods
feeling, which finally leads him, in Sweeney Agonistes for instance, to
achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it
is. With Strachey it is merely a polite eighteenth-century scepticism
mixed up with a taste for debunking. With Maugham it is a kind of stoical
resignation, the stiff upper lip of the pukka sahib somewhere east of
Suez, carrying on with his job without believing in it, like an Antonine
Emperor. Lawrence at first sight does not seem to be a pessimistic
writer, because, like Dickens, he is a 'change-of-heart' man and
constantly insisting that life here and now would be all right if only
you looked at it a little differently. But what he is demanding is a
movement away from our mechanized civilization, which is not going to
happen. Therefore his exasperation with the present turns once more into
idealization of the past, this time a safely mythical past, the Bronze
Age. When Lawrence prefers the Etruscans (his Etruscans) to ourselves it
is difficult not to agree with him, and yet, after all, it is a species
of defeatism, because that is not the direction in which the world is
moving. The kind of life that he is always pointing to, a life centring
round the simple mysteries--sex, earth, fire, water, blood--is merely a
lost cause. All he has been able to produce, therefore, is a wish that
things would happen in a way in which they are manifestly not going to
happen. 'A wave of generosity or a wave of death', he says, but it is
obvious that there are no waves of generosity this side of the horizon.
So he flees to Mexico, and then dies at forty-five, a few years before
the wave of death gets going. It will be seen that once again I am
speaking of these people as though they were not artists, as though they
were merely propagandists putting a 'message' across. And once again it
is obvious that all of them are more than that. It would be absurd, for
instance, to look on ULYSSES as MERELY a show-up of the horror of modern
life, the 'dirty DAILY MAIL era', as Pound put it. Joyce actually is more
of a 'pure artist' than most writers. But ULYSSES could not have been
written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-patterns; it is the
product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has
lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is 'Here is life without God. Just
look at it!' and his technical innovations, important though they are,
are primarily to serve this purpose.
But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what 'purpose'
they have is very much up in the air. There is no attention to the urgent
problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense. Our
eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to
the Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus--to everywhere
except the places where things are actually happening. When one looks
back at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every
important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English
intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes
from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine
famine--about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy,
Dostoievsky, and exiled counts driving taxi-cabs. Italy means
picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and museums--but not Black-shirts.
Germany means films, nudism, and psychoanalysis--but not Hitler, of whom
hardly anyone had heard till 1931. In 'cultured' circles
art-for-art's-saking extended practically to a worship of the
meaningless. Literature was supposed to consist solely in the
manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject matter was the
unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked
on as a lapse of a taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny
jokes that PUNCH has produced since the Great War, an intolerable youth
is pictured informing his aunt that he intends to 'write'. 'And what are
you going to write about, dear?' asks the aunt. 'My dear aunt,' says the
youth crushingly, 'one doesn't write ABOUT anything, one just WRITES.'
The best writers of the twenties did not subscribe to this doctrine,
their 'purpose' is in most cases fairly overt, but it is usually
'purpose' along moral-religious-cultural lines. Also, when translatable
into political terms, it is in no case 'left'. In one way or another the
tendency of all the writers in this group is conservative. Lewis, for
instance, spent years in frenzied witch-smellings after 'Bolshevism',
which he was able to detect in very unlikely places. Recently he has
changed some of his views, perhaps influenced by Hitler's treatment of
artists, but it is safe to bet that he will not go very far leftward.
Pound seems to have plumped definitely for Fascism, at any rate the
Italian variety. Eliot has remained aloof, but if forced at the pistol's
point to choose between Fascism and some more democratic form of
socialism, would probably choose Fascism. Huxley starts off with the
usual despair-of-life, then, under the influence of Lawrence's 'dark
abdomen', tries something called Life-Worship, and finally arrives at
pacifism--a tenable position, and at this moment an honourable one, but
probably in the long run involving rejection of socialism. It is also
noticeable that most of the writers in this group have a certain
tenderness for the Catholic Church, though not usually of a kind that an
orthodox Catholic would accept.
The mental connexion between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is no
doubt obvious enough. What is perhaps less obvious is just WHY the
lea
ding writers of the twenties were predominantly pessimistic. Why
always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning
after lost faith and impossible civilizations? Was it not, after all,
BECAUSE these people were writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch?
It is just in such times that 'cosmic despair' can flourish. People with
empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the
universe, for that matter. The whole period 1910-30 was a prosperous one,
and even the war years were physically tolerable if one happened to be a
non-combatant in one of the Allied countries. As for the twenties, they
were the golden age of the RENTIER-intellectual, a period of
irresponsibility such as the world had never before seen. The war was
over, the new totalitarian states had not arisen, moral and religious
tabus of all descriptions had vanished, and the cash was rolling in.
'Disillusionment' was all the fashion. Everyone with a safe ?500 a year
turned highbrow and began training himself in TAEDIUM VITAE. It was an
age of eagles and of crumpets, facile despairs, backyard Hamlets, cheap
return tickets to the end of the night. In some of the minor
characteristic novels of the period, books like TOLD BY AN IDIOT, the
despair-of-life reaches a Turkish-bath atmosphere of self-pity. And even
the best writers of the time can be convicted of a too Olympian attitude,
a too great readiness to wash their hands of the immediate practical
problem. They see life very comprehensively, much more so than those who
come immediately before or after them, but they see it through the wrong
end of the telescope. Not that that invalidates their books, as books.
The first test of any work of art is survival, and it is a fact that a
great deal that was written in the period 1910-30 has survived and looks
like continuing to survive. One has only to think of ULYSSES, OF HUMAN
BONDAGE, most of Lawrence's early work, especially his short stories, and
virtually the whole of Eliot's poems up to about 1930, to wonder what is
now being written that will wear so well.
But quite Suddenly, in the years 1930-5, something happens. The literary
climate changes. A new group of writers, Auden and Spender and the rest
of them, has made its appearance, and although technically these writers
owe something to their predecessors, their 'tendency' is entirely
different. Suddenly we have got out of the twilight of the gods into a
sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and community singing. The
typical literary man ceases to be a cultured expatriate with a leaning
towards the Church, and becomes an eager-minded schoolboy with a leaning
towards Communism. If the keynote of the writers of the twenties is
'tragic sense of life', the keynote of the new writers is 'serious
purpose'.
The differences between the two schools are discussed at some length in
Mr Louis MacNeice's book MODERN POETRY. This book is, of course, written
entirely from the angle of the younger group and takes the superiority of
their standards for granted. According to Mr MacNeice:
The poets of NEW SIGNATURES, [Note: Published in 1932.(Author's footnote)]
unlike Yeats and Eliot, are emotionally partisan. Yeats proposed to turn
his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other people's
emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity...The whole poetry, on
the other hand, of Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis implies that they have
desires and hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things
ought to be desired and others hated.
And again:
The poets of NEW SIGNATURES have swung back...to the Greek preference
for information or statement. Then first requirement is to have something
to say, and after that you must say it as well as you can.
In other words, 'purpose' has come back, the younger writers have 'gone
into politics'. As I have pointed out already, Eliot & Co. are not really
so non-partisan as Mr MacNeice seems to suggest. Still, it is broadly