Horizon
By JOHN WAIN 0 write a review of a Horizon anthology* is like being asked to look through the family album and judge the portraits solely on their merit as photography. It cannot be done. For this is not just Mr. Connolly's Horizon; it is our Horizon, the monthly message of encouragement that dropped through the letter-box during those ten terrible years, to soothe, ittniulate, enrage, but always to engage an immediate interest. 'Now that there has grown up a new generation of literary Intelligentsia who do not (in any real sense) remember the war, we shall probably soon begin to be asked what all the fuss over Horizon was about, and why it is remembered with such affection. " I remember 1940 as the year I learnt to. Pam," a young scholar said to me recently; it would be interest- ing to have his comments on this book. Mine must be different, for anyone who came mentally of age during the years when he enemy's name was Hitler will be led to re-live moments ne thought he had forgotten—to indulge, in fact, in the pro- hibited emotion of nostalgia. Indeed, it has evidently been one of Mr. Connolly's motives in making his choice that we should be encouraged in this dreadful vice. He has excluded prose contributions that are " already well known through being reprinted," but in the case of poetry, which takes up less space, he has wisely jettisoned the principle, so that any reader of poetry who turns these pages will find himself shaken by a series of left hooks to the heart; in my own case (for one can only be personal about these things) the Dylan Thomas Poems that dizzied me much as Swinburne dizzied the under- graduates of the Eighties, the Auden poems which sadly marked the quiet strangulation of a major talent, and—suddenly stumbled upon—one of the poems that forthed my notion of What poetry should be, William Empson's marvellous "Success." Yes, this is our Horizon, but also—to turn the point the other waY—Mr. Connolly's, and a review of it is in some sense a review of his work as a critic. A literary critic is at the best of times rara avis: most of those who write on literary topics are either popularisers, who simply make propaganda for the conventional judgement, or academics, who collect and store information about literature, which may come in useful or it may not. Mr. Connolly is a real critic, and it is a feature 0f his work that he has operated in three ways : by direct discussion, by editing, and by parody. These last two 'are (Pace Dr. Richards) the only " practical " criticism; they show a critical spirit in motion towards a concrete end. Mr. Connolly 1,s our best living parodist; so much is conventionally admitted; but why is he? Because he is a good critic, and this step in the argument is usually neglected. His take-off of Aldous Huxley, or his handling of middlebrow satire in " Mr. Moss- bl toss Takes the Class," for instance, are criticism just as Lewis Patron's parodies of Wordsworth and Watts, in the Alice nooks, were criticism. They reveal a deep understanding of, and a considered judgement on, the work parodied., procedure was not governed by " standards "; the one duty it recognised was that of intellectual hospitality, a willingness to print and discuss any new idea or wave of opinion anywhere in the world, provided only that its context was in one way or another artistic. And it is in fact true that Horizon tended to be a shop-window in which goods from England and abroad were exhibited in eye-catching displays but without much attempt to group them in order of value. It is further true that the biggest fish tend to break the net; the really important issues, on which everyone interested in contemporary English literature and civilisation has sooner or later to make up his mind, are not discussed. No one would be able to tell, for instance, from reading through every extant number of Horizon, let alone this anthology, that the Romantic method of assessing a work of art (i.e. by its effect on the individual critic) has, in our time, been brushed side; that we have returned to a general recognition that objective standards do exist and can often be stated; and that the architect of this change was T. S. Eliot. That is the single event of most importance in the literature of this century so far, and in all this book, from beginning to end, there is no hint of it, no hint that any of the contributors are aware of it. Mr. Eliot, to be sure, is repre- sented 'here, by his famous unposted letter to The Times; but this is no more than a splendid fragment. And in the critical essays republished here, we can read appraisals of Horace, Leopardi, Peacock, T. L. Beddoes, but not of anything central for us, not of anything which, for an English reader, brings up directly the major questions of quality. It is the enervating spirit we know as " Bloomsbury "—the bland assumption that Culture is Culture No Matter What. That stable has never produced a genuine critic because its trainers and jockeys saw no reason for the existence of criticism, preferring to substitute a concept of " Taste " which boils down to Fats Waller's answer to the question " What is rhythm ? " " Lady, if ya has to ask,'ya ain't got it." This, as applied to literature, will flatly not do, and it is something of a tragedy that Mr. Connolly's affiliations should be with this group when his powers are so enormously beyond theirs. As the Canadian critic, H. M. McLuhan, put it, " Caring dreadfully, about art is something Mr. Connolly does much better than the old ladies of Blooms- bury." That is the attack; but the defence is so strong that there can be little doubt of the final outcome. It is not merely a question of saying, " Horizon did more good than harm "; it is that the good was obvious, immediate and lasting, while the harm is less real than apparent. It is not merely a question of saying, " Horizon kept the flag aloft, obstinately talking about the wrong things like a deaf uncle, persisting in bringing up the things of the mind at a time when they were unpopular ' ; a similar claim could be made for half-a-dozen trashy Little Magazines that were simply a nuisance. No, it'is the name of Matthew Arnold that is always invoked sooner or later in these discussions, and Arnold's chief message was the need for light and air in the tightly-laced wigwam of English life. the need to keep up standards of comparison by continual importations from countries where the same recurrent problems are seen differently. If the charge is one of lack of concern with the " central," it can be answered, in no spirit of flippant exaggeration, that everything is "central " as long as it has quality.
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