BOOKS OF THE DAY

Twilight on Parnassus (William Gerhardi) 225 A Policy for British Agriculture (Prof. J. A. Scott Watson) 226 Diplomacy (Alwyn Parker) . . .. 228 The Brighton Pavilion (Christopher Hobhouse) ... 228 English Folk (John Sparrow) ... . 230 Die Revolution des Nihilismus (Elizabeth Wiskemann)

Captain Marryat (E. E. Kellett) .. ... The Holy Terror (Evelyn Waugh) . . Fiction (Forrest Reid'

232 232 234 . 236

THE NOVEL

By WILLIAM GERHARDI

TFIE novel, to me, is a diamond-shaped jewel which throws back the light it has absorbed from life. It is something precious and personal, secreting and reflecting in a ceaseless interplay of rays the love of a vocation and the love of life. As Wahrheit made fragrant by Dichtung, the novel is a distillation of experience. It is a sifting out of gravel from gold dust : the passing of personal memories through the filter of time. As an art-form the novel is unmatched in scope for revealing, while concealing in the anonymity of the third person singular, humiliating experiences which writers would shrink from confessing openly in their autobiographies. To the extent to which the texture of the novel is composed of "emotion recollected in tranquillity," the novel is poetic and on a higher plane of seriousness than the biography, in which the writer is debarred from recollecting his hero's emotion—in tranquillity or otherwise. Should he, in a desperate attempt to raise his biography to the imaginative level of the novel, fall back on the recollection of his own emotion, he would present the reader with emotions which, while being com- mendably imaginative, wete also scandalously imaginary. A novel, by penetrating through the congealed falsehoods of habit to the origins of a sensation, will increase the depth of the work. The soft penumbra, clinging around the sharp discovery, will give a poetic quality to a purely intellectual penetration. The " aura " surrounding the outward form in which the novel is cast will soften its framework and blend form and content in a fragrance which will linger in the mind. This only means that the novel should be poetic as a whole and as much as possible poetic in texture. But, to me, there is a poetry in literature even more rare, and for which prose-fiction offers better opportunities than verse. It is a kind of magic, best indicated by Hugh Kingsmill in The Dawn's Delay: "The world is real, houses and trees, men and women, motor-'buses and the moaning sea. But we have fallen asleep, and all these things, these simple and reasonable things, have been confused for us." It is probably a gift of focusing a moment of Time perpetuated in eternity, when, clear of the confusion which sleep has shed upon our world, we suddenly see "these simple and reasonable things" existing with an almost ecstatic intensity of their own. If a whole novel could be written on that level it would, to me, transcend anything so far achieved by human genius.

I say "to me" because a comprehensive attitude is as debilitating in the novelist as it is desirable in the critic. A novelist must really want to eat the dinner he is about to cook. It cannot stimulate his palate to review in his mind a wide ariety of menus while he is concentrating on perfecting one. A novelist's criticism must always be more of a confession than a review of other men's performances. And, from this point of view, my comments on Mr. G. U. Ellis's brilliant and comprehensive survey of the novel which I haw been reading must take the form, egocentric though it seems, of " Myself as Affected by the Reading of Twilight on Parnassus, by G. U. Ellis."

This is another way, of saying that all novelists will be affected in their own way by reading this witty work by a critic of mellowed and luminous intelligence. But I can speak only for myself. I do not feel disposed to offer criticism on a work which itself offers criticism any more than I would be disposed to review a novel by writing a short story around it. Writers, and even such few readers in these isles as are not yet writers, will welcome this understanding and penetrating survey of the whole cultural field of letters in England, from the eighteenth century to our own days, which devotes the 'Vic of its space to the novel and most of its pages to the

Twilight on Parnassus. By G. U. Ellis. (Michael Joseph. iss.) novel in our time. Mr. Ellis' makes fun of Carlyle's dictum that the hour produces the Hero—a Victorian conceit whereby some of the Hero's glory reflected on the hour. The principle might be reversed to suggest that it is the present plight of criticism which, m the darkest hour of its need, has thrown up this bright Hero of literary discernment who has emerged to set the world of books to rights.

As a title, Twilight on Parnassus is a little misleading. For it suggests "that recurrent Germanic malady, Spenglerism."

The Germans are not susceptible to the natural flux and reflux in cultural phases, but take a heavy-footed apocalyptic view of things, which reminds me of Tchehov's ironic entry in his notebook : "In the daytime conversations about the loose manners of the girls in secondary schools; in the evening a lecture on degeneration and the decline of everything; and at night, after all this, one longs to shoot oneself." Mr. Ellis

points out that it was indeed symptomatic of Spenglerism that the Decline of the West coincided in the period of its popu-

larity with a fresh and very vigorous efflorescence in English letters in the nineteen-twenties. Mr. Ellis's title is not in- tended to forecast darkness on Parnassus, which one might naturally assume to follow on twilight. His explanation is that in the period which followed the war "the reviewers and publicists regarded the new authors as the harbingers of the twilight of literature, while the authors regarded such opinions as foreshadowing the twilight of taste. The result of this joint but antithetical complaint was to give to the early years of the phase a doubly apocalyptic atmosphere, in which Parnassus seemed hidden in the darkness which was descending upon what some regarded as a world of 'men without art,' and others as a world of 'art without men."

Mr. Ellis, in examining the relationship between genius and popularity, dwells on the change in literary patronage from an aristocratic minority in the days of Fielding and Richardson to a middle-class majority in the time of Dickens and Thackeray. I think he over-estimates the artistic capacity of any aristocracy. What has always distinguished a settled from a newly-settled society—whether pioneer, bourgeois, revolu- tionary or totalitarian—is a desire to appear to themselves and others as imbued with a fastidious artistic taste, far in excess of any real artistic perception. The artist makes shift with whatever society favours him at the moment, knowing that it is not really a question of aristocracy or democracy, a pessi- mistic or optimistic public outlook, a Press controlled by State or vested interests, a preoccupation with politics or art for art's sake, but of the invariable if melancholy fact that ninety- nine people out of a hundred are devoid of any artistic intelligence.

Mr. Ellis is perhaps over-indulgent in his anxiety to do justice to a writer's intentions. He insists that a critic must first find out what the writer has set out to do, then judge his performance strictly within the limits the writer has set him- self. An excellent rule (provided he has not set out to do all the wrong things) far too little observed by hasty reviewers, who too often chide an author who has set out to do one thing for not having accomplished another. Critical sympathy might, of course, be carried too far. When D. H. Lawrence sets out on a novel merely to get rid of his bile, Mr: Ellis, always careful to confine judgement to a comparison of performance with intention, inquires sympathetically whether, and to what extent, he feels better after it.

But this is not a grave fault. The critic, by virtue of his position in relation to the work criticised, has been placed into an unnaturally elevated situation. He must not reveal himself the parvenu and crow from his elevation like a cock from a dunghill. Mr. Ellis's bedside manner is beyond reproach.