When he had gone I thought of other men over
in the United States who are not Americans. I thought of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood ; I thought of older men who also had retired within the ivory tower. I thought of Aldous Huxley and of Gerald Heard. These men have been my friends. For nearly a quarter of a century I have admired Aldous Huxley as one of the most intelligent of our authors and as a man who possesses a brilliant, inquisi- tive and enfranchised mind. I have looked on Gerald Heard as the most delightful of companions and as one of the most saintly men that I have known. I have seen Wystan Auden playing upon the Malvern Hills, and Christopher Isherwood shyly and slyly observing human behaviour from a retired seat in a Berlin café. Huxley has exercised, and still exercises, a great influence upon my own and the suc- ceeding generation ; Heard has brought the novelties of science within the scope of the ordinary man ; W. H. Auden is rightly' regarded as among the most gifted of our younger poets ; and with Isherwood rests, to my mind, the future of the English novel. Why should these four eminent Georgians have flown? Mr. Stephen Spender remains ; yet I fear that the siren calls which reach him from America may induce even that great bird to wing silently away.
* * * *
Previous page
