THE THATCHED COTTAG_ERS
The Cotswolds. By John Moore. (Chapman and Hall. 5s.) A Cotswold Year. By C. Henry Warren. (Geoffreyilles. 7s. 61)
TBE title of Mr. Moore's book is mislearlinv : there is very little about the Cotswolds in it and a great deal about Mr. Moore himself; .."` a _tall yqung man wit a rucksick,7 and readers, I -flint, May jusiffiably complain that the- price is too high to pay for the self-dramatisation of an unimportant and sentimental personality. Mr. MoDre belongs to the camecf'Etet.:f Mr:" '11-EVer10 Niches and 'M : raft ittil3erts,
with Mr. H. J. Massingham in the top place. Full of self-- pity he goes for a walking tour in the Cotswolds to cure a, depression caused by "a love affair that wouldn't go right" (this is in the tradition of Mr. Massingham) and (the Bevetiey note) "the growing conviction that the world was stark mad and that within a few years I _would probably be blown to bits for some cause in which I did not believe." Before the reader has finished this whimsical little essay his own depression may be lightened by the thought of what the English country- side stands to gain by that particular bomb, if only the thatched- cottage boys hang together in life as they do in what, for want of a better term, we must call letters.
A countryside to this type of writer never consists of a physical formation, a style of agriculture, a continuous history : it is simply a collection of inns and beauty spots "where the unquiet heart" of the sentimental writer may "be at peace again." We have to go to the 'archaeologists (from Thoresby- to Torr), to the politicians like Cobbett and Defoe, or to the geologists if we are to gain any dear idea of the English country. These men were trained to be objective : so should a novelist be trained, though not a novelist of Mr. Moore's shallow introspection. But Mr. Moore is even incapable of picturing himself with any conviction (he compares himself in one passage to a swallow and a butterfly) and we feel some surprise when he condemns Broadway for the very quality which should make him feel at home there. "The place is a haven and headquarters for all manner of arty-and-crafty people." Mr. Moore's own writing indeed is very much what we might expect to find on a mug or a poker-work bracket : 'dreaming spires of Oxford," "as in a glass darkly." When he is not writing of himself and referring darkly' to his love affairs (he is too coy and breezy and conventional, surely, for a great lover), when he makes some effort actually to describe what is beyond his own rucksacked shadow, it is always the picturesque, the quaint epitaphs in "beauty spot" churches, and we suspect a real blindness to colour when he writes of "the red-brown tower" of Campden Church. On one occasion he appears to have more learning than his style suggests, when he discusses the history of Dover's Hill and in two pages quotes Anthony Wood (twice), Ben Jonson
and Drayton (with particular reference to a plate in the 1613 edition of PolyAion) and refers to the fn:ontispicce of a .rare collection of poems called Aimalia Darensid. His only footnotes refer us rather vaguely to Anthony Wood, and one cannot help noting the coincidence that all these quotations and references (even to the description of the plates) can be found in the parallel pages on Dover's Hill written , by Mr. H. A. Evans in the Highways and Byways Series.
Mr. Warren in his diary of a year in the Cotswolds has successfully risen out of Mr. Moore's class, though not infre- quently he remembers the bad tricks of the lower form : " Look ! Spring is coming. Next to the shy spurge-laurel —some call it daphne_.. ." A little too idyllic to be quite true when he treats of nature, a little too tender when he writes of the human inhabitants of the village, he can. yet describe a town or a landscape in terms of stone and turf and not in those of his own emotions. But even in his book the vice of self-expression lifts its ugly head. The writer takes first place : unlike Cecil Torr (that fine model for thatched cottagers) he is not really at heart so concerned with observing facts as in making a book. GRAHAM GREENE.
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