Broadcast Talks
OF course, they are not " essays " ; they are, irremediably, "talks." _They are very good talks, alive with the unmistakable aliveness of Mr. Grigson in all his familiar roles of poet and pole- mist, of antiquarian, art-critic, country-lover and flower-fancier ; but still, talks. They lack the literary grace, the pleasing complexity, the unabashed pursuit of ideas of the true essay, and they end too breathlessly soon. And yet, considering their origin, they wear sur- prisingly well, and on the whole the greater number deserve preservation within boards. I am not sure about the earlier ones. Jonathan Couch _of Polperro was an amiable enough old gentleman, no doubt, but his "easy, placid, prosperous, uneventful nineteenth- century life" fails to arouse me ; and who wants to read about Mr. Grigson's aeroplane trip from Wiltshire to the Scilly Isles ? Not I. That sort of thing is best left to sift away into the atmosphere, or to become yellow of edge in the back files of The Listener. But Mr. Grigson on Sir Joshua Reynolds, on Ruskin's Modern Painters. on Coleridge at Culbone and Wordsworth's relation to the Lakes, is very well worth reading, or re-reading. And in the concluding five talks on poetry he demonstrates effectively that he is still one of the most sensible, sensitive and serious of contemporary critics of verse.
D. S. SAVAGE.
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