Literature in our Time By I3ONAMY DOBidE ONE can never
tell, of course, but it must seem to the observer of today that the historian of the future will find much of peculiar interest in the literature of the Georgian period. It would be exceedingly curious• if he did not, for without a marked change in the writing of this period, or at least some particular note, it would mean that authors had lost touch with common feeling. There was, for one thing, the universal experience of the War, but this perhaps will prove to be of less account than the change in social sense that followed the War. Beside this, and interacting with it, there is what we might without arrogance describe as " the new learning," the flood of light thrown upon the nature of the human being by discoveries in psychology and ethnology ; there is also the new conception of the universe, gradually filtering down from the learned to the mass, by way of Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans.
It seems possible that our future historian will note as great a change to have occurred in our literature as that which came over it between 1580 and 1610, or between 1650 and 1670, or between 1790 and 1820. He will find, perhaps, that the Russian Revolution had the same sort of influence upon our poets as the French Revolution had upon the poets of an earlier day. He will notice, we think, an idea creeping into, and finally, it may be dominating, our literature, the idea that the people of these days had—he will be able to say whether it was right or wrong—that they were entering upon a new era. He will note the emergence of interweaving ideas, such as those of group-consciousness, and of the class war, and he will find, perhaps, that the works of art born of these ideas were different in form from those of the previous age. One can never tell, of course, but one likes to suppose this, for, living in an inconvenient time, we are impelled to think that it is at least significant, and that our discomfort will not go for nothing.
It may not be the business of the historian of his own times to try to view things from the angle of the future, though it might be his delight. Mr. Swinnerton, however, has preferred to regard it from the point of view of about 1918, and in so doing has produced a useful journalistic survey of Georgian literature for those who want to know who the popular authors of the time were, the sort of thing they wrote about, and what their personal appearance was. The title of the book* is perhaps a misnomer, for its subject begins at about 1895, and ends, except for a few tentative stragglings, at about 1923. It is not a book of criticism, for such a horrid thing Mr. Swinnerton virtuously eschews. Critics, indeed, are his bugbear, a blight upon the fair fields of literature. " To me, as to Sainte-Beuve," he tells us,
• • . all experience is a single great book ; and every form of knowledge, the domestic as well as the biological and astronomical and psycho-analytical, is capable of enriching the mind and imagination and increasing the interest of life." The critic, we are given to understand, is a poor, bloodless creature, who cares only about a mysterious thing called " literature " which has no connexion whatever with life. He knows too much, in fact,' and this excludes him from living. A lot of learning is a dangerous thing, and often prevents people from being poets, Poor Bridges, for instance, was " a scholar and experimentalist in technique, a gram- marian and exponent of something called 'Pure English,' " all of which qualifications Mr. Swinnerton believes to be handl-
• The Georgian Literary Scene. By Frank Swinnerton. (Heinemann. 12s. 6d.)
caps to the poet. One wonders what such scholars and grammarians, experimentalists in technique and seekers after pure • English as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden and Wordsworth, to go no further, would have thought of such a• statement. Might • they have regretted their errors, and with a shout of delight turned to writing poetry that really was, poetry ?
We sigh when we think of what English literature might have been were it not for this cursed element of thought, of seeking after knowledge, of striving after that " scrupulous exactitude " which, for instance, prevents Mr. Eliot from writing bigger,: better, and brighter poems. But thought has not been the only canker : there is the blight of wishing to be contemporaneous, of wanting their subject-matter to represent their own time, the hopes, thoughts, desires, and aspirations of the people among whom they move. In our age it has produced a repellent attitude of mind which Mr. Swinnerton stigmatizes as modn," and for which he has the greatest contempt. In every age there are naturally a number of sedulous apes running after a fashion, and those of our day very properly, irritate Mr. Swinnerton ; but one wishes he could have dis- tinguished between moderns and " modns." The business of the critic, one would think, is to sift the chaff from the grain for the benefit of the common reader.
But then Mr. Swinnerton disowns the critic. " I represent • the ordinary unlearned reader," he declares. One might ask what value there could be in one unlearned man writing for _ another, why a blind man should take upon himself the task of leading the blind. If Mr. Swinnerton is determined to discover no more in literature than the unlearned do, one wonders why the latter cannot perform this task for them- selves. But as a matter of fact, as we might suspect, this " unlearned attitude is only an elaborate camouflage to conceal his own determined taste, based, we gather, on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and on his very considerable reading which has left him with clear-cut prejudices. It also conceals a stern critical attitude towards at least one aspect, that of the craftsman. Why else a long chapter on Henry James ? Mr. Swinnerton betrays the fact that he believes art to be " something different " when he damns the amateur. It is curious that, with his expressed disdain for those who take art " seriously, he should state his opinion that Conrad is the most likely of all the writers of our period to survive, since Conrad went on thinking about " art " to the very end. Perhaps it is the failure to do so continuously that accounts for a certain phenomenon of our time. Why, we ask, have not the authors of Sinister Street, of Mr. Perrin and Mr. Trail and above all, perhaps, of Nocturne, fulfilled the brilliant promise, not to say achievement, of those books ?
But if there is nothing in The Georgian Literary Scene to help the enquirer into literature, if in dealing with so many authors Mr. Swinnerton never tells us what they were really at, what was the philosophy behind their writings, there is, apart from his irritations, a very valuable common sense running through the book. Mr. Swinnerton is never carried away by his admirations, and develops what is really a highly trained critical attitude in dealing with the falsities and senti- mentalities of many popular favourites. He will go much of the way with common taste, but then his fastidiousness rebels, his sense of proportion intervenes, and he pulls up sharp. Thus the book is something more than a mere record of publishing activity, and, except that it leaves out Mr. Kipling, adequately covers the ground.
Previous page
