The Age Demanded. . . ?
Whips and Scorpions. Specimens of Modern Satiric Verse.
• Collected by Sherard Vines. (Wishart. (is.)
GREAT satire (at any rate the great satire of English literature) aims at the man but, overreaching for the moment the immediate object of its attack, hits the mind. the directing force which makes the man as • he appears. But it does not miss the man himself, thereby concen- trating its power ; thereby it reveals the principle of economy which is its essence, and emerges as itself a matter of the mind, not of the heart or liver. The present age, an epoch no more pregnant with abuses than any other, can at will be condemned by a relative standard ; less easily by an absolute judgement, whose authority will finally consign it to Ow furnace. The absence of any such common standard is respon- sible for the lack of direction from which this anthology suffer. —of that direction which, unless it is merely to be a casual gleaning from the work of contemporary writers, should be the birthright of a collection of this nature. It is difficult,
for instance, to find a common denominator, other than personal disgust, between the fastidious aloofness of Mr. T. S. Eliot and the sprawling petulance of Mr. Osbert Sitwell. Whereas Mr. Eliot (and with him, Mr. Huxley, Mr. Auden, Mr. Plomer, and Mr. Collier, to name a few) imply by their condemnation consideration of a preferable alternative, much of the work in this book appears to be merely damnation for damnation's sake, the simplest and most unprofitable form of intellectual exercise.
That the poet is justified in asserting the absolute value of individual experience is axiomatic. But within the ranks of an anthology, though there may be divergence over details, there should be no wide disagreement over principles : the poet must be prepared to fall into line with his fellows. Without this, the anthology loses its point, which rests primarily in the 'consistency of its editor. Lacking direction, the path of vengeance leads instead backwards to confusion ; whence, it is feared, motivated less by a passionate conviction in the validity of an idea than by a failure to have any convictions at all, too many of the con- tributors- to this volume originally started. One wonders where this book will find its public. D. II. V.
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