Warring Critics
Focus FOUR is a miscellany which, like others of its kind, contains poetry, criticism and a short story. But the greater part is given over to what the editor calls a symposium, essays on the novelists Huxley, Waugh, Isherwood, L. H. Myers, Sartre and Mauriac ; from these it gets its title. The Novelist as Thinker is perhaps a misleading one. The reader who remembers that Sartre is a teacher of philosophy, and that Huxley has written a book about it, wonder- ing whether he will find them compared to Whitehead and Bergson, may expect an assessment of what these six novelists have con- tributed to modern philosophy ; for though all sensitive men, and particularly writers, may be expected to think intelligently, it is usually only philosophers who are called thinkers. But he will soon see that the authors of these essays are writing about something different, something more reasonable, the world of private beliefs and ideas that each novelist has spun about himself like a cocoon.
It is certainly legitimate to ask the question: What does my author believe ? The answer can make an entertaining subject for discussion. In looking for such an answer, Mr. Good criticises Sartre severely, though with respect ; he thinks that in Sartre the philosophical ideas are not yet reconciled with the acute observa- tions of the novelist. Mr. Fowlie writes generously about Mauriac. But the English novelists, with the exception of L. H. Myers, get rougher treatment. Now this turning against Huxley, Isherwood and Waugh is interesting because indicative of a certain post-war righteousness towards the 'twenties and 'thirties in literary criticism as elsewhere. Elsewhere it may not matter. But in literature it matters enormously because moral indignation is a hopeless con- dition for a critic. If we examine these attacks we find that they resemble the burning of Indiscreet letters written in youth, before making a proper marriage. Isherwood, Huxley and Waugh are made to play Mrs. Cheveley to the Lady Chiltern of, let us say, Mr. Charles Morgan. " Yes, we knew them once. But it was a long time ago, and abroad. I am afraid that we just aren't in the same set now."
It would be no service to these three novelists to pretend that they are above criticism, and to study the beliefs of a writer is always instructive. But the novel is not synonymous with the beliefs, and to value the one by the other is unfortunate, as consideration of any great novelist in the past will show. Jane Austen—clearly she thought that every girl.can be made happy by Ero,000 a year and a handsome equipage. But—does the novel entertain ? Does it apply artificial respiration to our atrophied emotions and imagina- tion ? Does it tell its own truth ?—these are the questions for a critic. If before the war there were a great many shallow and " unworthy " people announcing wrong messages, there can be more wit and truth in describing them, as Huxley, Waugh and Isherwood used to do, than in skirmishing on the borders of theology.
Mr. Derek Stamford introduces The Freedom of Poetry with a well-argued and feeling plea against the critics who analyse poetic inspiration as if it were a science. He is a critic at the other end of the scale. Poetry, he says, does what it wants to do ; afterwards the critics make rules. And so his studies of ten modem poets are, as might be expected, sympathetic. The names include those of Sidney Keyes, David Gascoyne, Laurence Durrell and Kathleen Raine, and the reader can here learn, if not about their lives, some- thing about their aims.
Mr. Bethell gives his theory of, the foundations of good criticism in Literary Criticism and tly English Tradition, a series of ten essays which originally appeared in The New English Weekly. He is, he says, a " Christian critic," and claims that we are at the beginning of an age when, with all cultures assembled for inspection and art in decline, the critic will reach his zenith. The original mode of publication gives the book a certain abruptness. But that is also a quality of Mr. Bethell's style. There is no disagreeing with him. However, the courage to commit oneself is a respectable quality—perhaps, the reader may think, because it lays the author so pleasingly open to his superior wisdom.
Literature and Life is also a collection, this time of addresses given to the English Association, but by so many different authors that there is no space to list their names and subjects. The book is to
be recommended, if only for the erudition of the authors and the variety of quotations, which make it an eclectic and unusual anthology.
PHILIP TROWEL
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