3 MAY 1930, Page 23

Three Sons of Strife TO-DAY we are privileged to hear,

clearly and indubitably, that eternal miracle, a great word-master, a Merlin, a Lavengro. "In the beginning was the Word." That is the poet's creed. and here is a demonstration of its active significance. Mr. Roy Campbell has, found our English language weary, with intel- lectual age, and drowsing over the close fire of education. Ile has stung it to life, to rebellion, and has made it proud, eloquent, and young again.

. Such is the candour. and naiveté of genius, that sooner or later a man possessing it will coin a phrase which is a sort of synopsis of his whole personality and work. It comes about by that divine insistence—some would call it egotism—arising from the directness of vision which is always a characteristic of genius. That quality marks its distinction from mere talent. Mr. Campbell again and again flashes out such self- revelations, and I quote one which says concisely what this poet is, and where he stands in relation to his fellow-mortals and to the still snore removed compulsion of destiny :-- "There is no sea so wide, no waste so steril But holds a rapture for the sons of strife : There shines upon the topmost peak of peril A throne for spirits that abound in life : There is no joy like theirs who fight alone, Whom lust or gluttony have never tied, Who in their purity have built a throne. And in their solitude a tower of pride."

The line italicized by me is a key to open the way into this poet's world. It is a world of superb extravagance and elemental beings ; monsters, otnnipotencies, and Olympian gestures ; of symbolical happenings in the heavens, the seas, and in the bowels of the earth ; of volcanic irony, and satire that is an earthquake. The diction in which this world is embodied must necessarily be endowed with an abnormal sensuousness and nervous energy. If it is held in for a moment it snorts and quivers like a stallion, impatient to crush beneath its hooves the reptile of respectability and prudence. It. is sometimes even heedless whether or not St. George be safely seated in the saddle. The rider, however, is aware of this characteristic, and of the artistic weaknesses which may result from it. He is striving to whip down his wild images, and to cast off the over-rich caparisons of his harness. In this self-

criticism he says -

"I love to see, when leaves depart, The clear anatomy arrive,

Winter, the paragon of art, That kills all forms of life and feeling Save what is pure and will survive."

Such is the prophecy of his future achievement. It should

indeed be great and immortal Work since it will be the final, expression of a noble, poetic personality, powerful and strangely beautiful. Meanwhile, a modern Carlucci, he ranges in gloomy exultation over the plains of thought and the moun-

tains of action, triumphing in his magnificent exile. -

Mr. Aaronson's work_ discovers a tragic story of pride and isolation that half reveal a itself: by gleam§ bt insight and pitiable sensitiveness. I feel that I am in a midnight Country.; overlooking space which resolves itself momentarily; under lightning flashes, into a wide plain where rivers wind like serpents about the ruined cities of an ancient civilization. These poems give a sense of the burden of history, and Of a racial conscience fruitlessly torturing itself.

There is something Byronic in this, as though he too owes his ancestors a grudge for some inheritance which cripples him., The lack of articulation here, hOwever; not in theheel, but in the mind ; and the cause of it we find in some metaphysical war that is dividing the kingdom of his personality. His " Christ " is the Gnostic spirit of cold, incisive intellect, thrusting like a surgeon's knife through the body of the world, looking -for the secret of life, and destroying that life in the sterile process.

Here, I think, is the cause of his torment. This Gnostic attitude lingers sceptically and -fastidiously between the. Christ of Christianity and the Christ of-the Hellenes, proud Apollo, the spirit of Mind. Both these leaders terrify him, and threaten to rob him of his pride and his self-conscious intellect. He will not surrender his senses to the one or the other, and so his poetry remains incomplete, lacking fusion of passion and thought—which he possesses so abundantly— into the easy and tight image of words.

Mr. Aldington sits in the Luxembourg Gardens---I imagine near the wonderful espalier pear trees—and daydreams. 0, shocking indulgence I His dream is an amatory fantasia on a basis of hexameters. In it he receives a telegram from a charming and clever little "wood-nymph" whom he loves "in a way which would horrify a bishop." He explains that his reason for calling her a wood-nymph is that "When I was younger they Called mea faun,

- Because I have -pointed ears and tell the truth.'

I believe that in Iturton's Anatomy of Melancholy it is stated that when fauns grow older their ears grow longer. And does Mr. Aldington still tell the truth, or is his vitality debilitated by the bitterness of the aftermath of his dream ? Only he can know the cause of his rebellion against life : but

to the onlooker it seems to be a very personal matter, and lacking the quality which might convert him" from (as he

calls himself) "a sort of a poet" into a true poet '

RICHARD CELURCH.