DEGREES OF FIRE

A Fool i' the Forest. A Phantasmagoria. By Richard Aiding- ton. (Allen and Unwin. 5s.)

To judge Mr. Bottomley by his work, he is a man of such nobility that he would ask no greater honour than to be called an English poet. Having brooded over his collected poems, and so built up a roughcast conception of him, we are forced " to number him with the English poets." Such decisions as this are made reluctantly, for so many swans prove to be geese ; but Mr. Bottomley, to our mind, stands four-square, in his own territory, with imagination's splendours for his sky, and his soil fruitful with the flowers of human grace, and the massy-limbed trees of human dignity and vigour. He is a poet about whom one would willingly write a book ; for it is absurd to try to convey one's ideas about such a man in the tiny space afforded by a review. His technique is a study in itself—a rich growth, tortuous, often tangled and strangling to the slow-maturing mind behind it. We can trace in it certain familiar stems, mainly from Browning and Meredith ; but it is none the less unique. It might be compared with that of Frank Bran,gwyn in painting. Cousinship of temperament could be found to predecessors, and not least among these to Fergusson, the Irish poet.

There is such candour in his work, such dewy freshness.

The qualities of the four English seasons are to be found there ; the harvest night, the April -morning, the blowsy summer noon, and the shrunken, ominously still winter moonlight on snow. Added to all this, there come and go his English people, vivid and full-blooded, burdened with the dignity of their traditions, and forced to action by unconquerable passion and mystical zeal. There has surely been. no such poet-dramatist since Shelley wrote " The Cenci." But with all this force and wilful ruggedness, the chief impression Mr. Bottomley leaves on our mind is one which can best be described by a quotation from him. That impression is of a character :-

" Shyly kind, and primly wise,

Sweet with learning's innocencies."

. It is always a pleasure to receive a book by Mr. Aldington, for the critic is assured that here will be something solid to bite on, something either to enjoy or to disagree with most vehemently. This little book, however, can hardly be savoured in the same way that one can enjoy the author's other scholarly and somewhat impersonal and leisurely work. This Phantas- magoria, as it is called, a free-verse poem written in somewhat the same form as Mr. Eliot's " Waste Land," is a personal outcry, savage and agonized, against the treachery of division within our human soul, and of the consequent anarchy and

incoherence which lurk in all our forms of self-expression ; our religion, our art, our science, and our social organism.

The directness with which this outcry is expressed is charac- teristic of Mr. Aldington, who carries with dignity his share of our modern birthright of knowledge ; a birthright which is by now so huge and unshapely as to make its bearers ludi- crous rather than dignified as they stagger about the roadways of life beneath their overwhelming pack. We have not space to discuss Mr. Aldington's scholarship, which is apt to be mediaeval in its love of learning for learning's sake. He has a gusto for old French theologians, and for the more recondite aesthetics of the Greeks and Latins. He pours this large

miscellany, together with his very shrewd first-hand observa- tion of life, into his poem in such-generous measure that the reader is bewildered. In this our author is the true satirist, working on emotion by mind, rather than the tragedian work- ing on mind by emotion. Again, unlike the tragedian, his

detachtnent is intellectual, and not moral ; and in that con- nexion it is interesting to compare his poem with Shelley's satirical work. Shelley's venom is more self-engendered, and so he seems to throw less material into his verse. Mr.

Aldington squeezes his venom from his evidence, and throws both his anger and his reasons for it into his poem. In conse- quence we get a multiplicity of ideas, a varied and darting attack, with which we arc familiar in- modern Expressionist drama. Mr. Aldington has carried Expressionism into the technique of the long poem, though it is arguable that Clough paved the way for him in the long hexameter poem, " Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolieh."

Mr. Aldington's technique suits his method of attack. We find hexameters—and good ones--jostling free verse on the one hand and jazz-verse and parody on the other.

Now, with all this versatile technique and this deep erudition, what is it that he attacks ? He attacks what--if we are courageous and reckless of consequences, if we look honestly into our minds—we all would attack. He attacks the creeping

comfort, the hypocritical smugness, the pious materialism, which we find poisoning our life, both personal and national. The pedant, the jingo, the fool, suffer mercilessly in this poem. And the author suffers too, for he finds the accursed virus in his own blood. So the drama is played between the characters; I, the protagonist ; Mezzetin, who is the vivid and nervous Imagination'; and the Conjuror, who symbolizes the matter- of-fact, pseudo-scientific intellect, with its dogmatism and Obtuseness. In the satirical tragedy these two other selves perish, and " I " remains, bereft of mind and soul, and settles down to a suburban existence. Mr. Aldington may be quoted iii "description of the spirit of his own poem .:--- ".Mezzetin sang- scraps of foolish. verse, But their core, their core was bitter, Plingent to the mouth like pepper."

Mr. Freeman has an admirable skill, and an almost Chopin-. esinte control over rhythmic - tricks by which he can make sudden sallies, or pauses, onomatopoetic in effect. But we ask ourselves, is all his cold perfection worth while ? We suspect that this careful desiccation of feeling is very different from the emotional equilibrium of the great artist, who, moving in an apparent passive tenseness, can at will, by a relaxation here or there, work havoc in the soul, so much being balanced in his right and normal inertness. We wonder if Mr. Freeman has the power to break suddenly into one of those divine paroxysms ?

Mr. Freeman has borrowed and added to Mr. de la Mare's technical devices, but the latter poet's Cervantean agony is refined and thinned away, so that all we have in Mr. Freeman is a simulacrum of emotion ; and we are forced, it may be unjustly, to dismiss this brilliant craftsman as unimportant because he lacks that spiritual certainty and sincerity, that sterling ring, which we demand from the man whom we call poet.

llietrAnD ('uuncn.