A nest of singing birds

BOOKS

PATRICK ANDERSON

I cannot imagine that anyone today, looking

back across the two world wars for the origins of the modem movement in our literature, would seize upon John Masefield's Everlasting Mercy of 1911 as either a revolutionary land- mark or a seminal influence, although at one time it was both.

Immensely popular, this doggerel account of the reformation of a drunken and lecherous poacher strikes• us as no more than factitiously simple, colloquial and down-to-earth, while its moralism remains as Victorian as its sentiment. But then, who now cares that it was in the year 1907 that Wilfrid Gibson deserted the Tenny-

sonianism of The Nets of Love for the com- parative realism of The Stonefolds? Who can easily understand the shock occasioned by the

'ugly' poems of Rupert Brooke's first volume, such as the sonnets 'Libido' (a title softened from 'Lust') and 'Menelaus and Helen' and 'Channel Passage' (originally The Sea-Sick Lover'), especially when, as so often with Brooke, the boyish gusto and the vibrant, romantic stance quite outweigh any 'toughness' in the subject-matter?

When we think of Yeats and Pound and Eliot—and these surely are the poets we do think about—the realism of Masefield, Gibson and Brooke (for all the latter's 'metaphysical' potentialities) seems parochial and infertile.

They are Georgians. For a time they sold very well. They are now largely forgotten. Yet any- one old enough to have been brought up as a

child on the school anthologies, Poems of Today (1915 and 1922), will know the depress- ing and frustrating effect of a diet of senti-

mental ruralis' m and fake simplicity. Of course there were charming pieces. But one is almost as ashamed at one's seduction by The Listeners' or 'The Old Ships' as one is at one's capitulation to 'The Great Lover' or to lyrics beginning 'I never went to Mamble.' For a would-be poet, Georgianism was, quite simply, a plague.

To be less heated, one can perhaps start by saying that Georgian poetry, as represented in

Edward Marsh's five volumes between 1912 and 1922, was markedly English while the rest of the modern movement is markedly inter- national. Our revolutionary plays have been written by the Irish (Wilde, Shaw, O'Casey and now Beckett). Among our influential novelists have been the American James, the Pole Con- rad, and the Irishman Joyce. Both poetry and its criticism have turned out to be more and more of an Anglo-American affair. Indeed, as a sort of odd illustration of this international quality, it could be argued that Edward Thomas's friend Robert Frost understood Georgian principles far better than the official practitioners. Although Frost never appeared in Marsh's anthology and was only a tern- por,ry visitor to England, his long bucolic Poems are far more rooted in a living Ameri- can soil than Wilfrid Gibson's or Lascelles Abercrombie's are in a living English one, his language rings truer, and he is, of course. a master of the simple lyric which finds signifi- cance in the apparently trivial, and to which he contributes an irony together with a personal

tang and quirkiness almost never found in the Squirearchy or even in W. H. Davies. It is an interesting critical exercise to lay side by side lyrics of general atmosphere such as 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' and Davies' 'In May,' or to contrast Frost's 'Oven Bird' with Drinkwater's 'Blackbird' and Davies' The Kingfisher,' or to test the dramatic quality of `Death of the Hired Man' against Gibson's Hoops.

In their longer poems the British writers seem to be working inorganically, from the outside, with a conscious effort at rough tex- ture and unsentimental attitude. With the lyric the difference is of the opposite variety. In time the Georgian lyric became, in its naivete and prettiness, its nostalgia for Warwickshire or Gloucestershire or some dimly apprehended `Arabia' or parrot-filled jungle, its echoes (kings, princesses, classical legends), its stylistic gestures and gushing climaxes, a kind of reach-me-down pseudo-poem which was passed from one moonstruck writer to another. Frost was entirely different. But, after an unsuccess- ful attempt to get Pound's 'Goodly Fere' for the first volume, Marsh decided against the in- clusion of Americans. And, Frost apart, his dread of obscurity and suspicion of fluid forms rendered him unsympathetic to American members of the Imagist Group then resident over here, such as HD and John Gould Fletcher.

In his new study, The Georgian Revolt (Faber 45s), Professor Robert H. Ross of Wash-

ington State University points out the time-lag between the appearance of the modern novel and play and the poetic revolt. Edwardian poetry, he explains, never recovered from the

Victorians and the languors of the fin de siècle; it. was represented, with ineffable respectability,

by William Watson and Stephen Phillips. And then, somewhere about the year 1910, the fer- ment began. Pound arrived in England in 1908.

Marinetti lectured and read his explosive poems and manifestoes between 1912 and 1914. Eliot, after a spell at Merton College, settled down in London in 1914. Poets opened their eyes to find a world full of new ideas and new possi- bilities. As the TLS put it, 'Public taste decreed that you should attend Fabian summer schools with vegetarians and suffragettes, and sit at the feet of Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Mr Bernard Shaw.' Iliddleton Murry spoke of 'a fresh breeze the air,' Abercrombie of 'exciting but fear- fully exacting times for the poet,' D. H. Law- rence declared, 'we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning . . Thus, Rupert Brooke's plan for a spoof volume in which he would provoke the public by writ- ing experimental poems under a variety of noms de plume having been modified into an anthology of real writers, Edward Marsh was able to anounce, 'this volume is issued in the belief that English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty.'

This was on the whole a wonderful if a terribly brief period, and I could have wished that Professor Ross had dealt with it more sensitively and compellingly. Once again inter- national influences were important. There was

the impact of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet with its composers and designers, of the ideas of Bergson and Freud, of Roger Fry's presen-

tation of Les Fattves, of Constance Garnett's translations from the Russian, and so on. But

Professor Ross is concerned, after all, with what was most insular and parochial in this excitement.

He is forced, in fact, to back the wrong horses. And though he plods busily and

genially, very much the literary tourist, amongst the rival coteries, indicating something of Vor- ticism and Imagism, quoting briefly from little

magazines like the Egoist and Rhythm and the later, Sitwellian Wheels, he seems to wince at the shrillness of the literary left, to have less

time for ideas and achievement than he has,

say, for facts about dates and editorships, and only to relax when he encounters the quiet

gentlemanliness, suffused with mutual admira- tion, of his Georgians. Since he eschews criticism, it is difficult to know where he stands.

But I am suspicious of a scholar who has only three brief references to Yeats, whom the Green Helmer of 1910 and the the Responsibilities of 1914 established as the leading modern poet.

Professor Ross's thesis is that there were two Georgian movements, both sharing 'a predilec- tion for pastoral verse.' The first dominated Georgian Poetry I and II, volumes which con- tained a number of longer poems and plays and which were perhaps characterised by Brooke's `Granchester,' de la Mare's 'The Listeners,' Lawrence's 'The Snapdragon' and James Stephens' The Lonely God' in the first, and by no fewer than three plays—Bottomley's King Lear's Wife, Gibson's Hoops and Abercrom- bie's The End of the World—together with Ralph Hodgson's 'Bull,' Harold Monro's 'Milk for the Cat' and Flecker's 'The Old Ships' in the second. Readers will perhaps be as sur- prised as I was to notice the preponderance of blank.. verse, the weight given to Bottomley, Abercrombie and Gibson, and the high propor- tion of anthology pieces. All this is Professor Ross's idea of the better side of Georgian poetry: ejle product, as he puts it, of 'spiritual euphoria.' From the point of view of his thesis, though, it is a sobering thought that Mr James Reeves, in his Penguin rehabilitation, has en- tirely omitted Bottomley, Abercrombie and Gibson, as well as the ever-present Drinkwater, while very rightly featuring the excluded Edward Thomas and giving greater emphasis to Edmund Blunden.

The third volume (1917) Professor Ross con- siders to be a watershed. It introduced war poets (Sassoon, Nichols, Rosenberg, Graves, but not Owen) and it marked the first appearance of Squire, Freeman and Turner. He points the finger of suspicion at Monro's 'Weekend,' since so much weekending was to come, and also at Turner's 'Romance,' not for faults in itself —I think it.is a beautiful poem—but as an indi- cation of future escape into the exotic. The last two volumes he finds the romping-ground of the second, or Neo-Georgian, group. (The final volume introduced Blunden.) By 1922 the movement had exhausted itself.

Professor Ross's conclusion is neither par- ticularly decisive nor particularly enthusiastic. He claims that the first two volumes 'contained some excellent verse.' Over the range of the five he selects as especially noteworthy some six poems, of which two are by Lawrence and three are well-known anthology pieces, together with 'much' of Blunden (only six of whose poems appeared). For my part, I can only repeat that Georgianism, whether Early or Late, lacked ideas, lacked vital modes of expression, ignored the modem city and the tension of everyday living, contained too much dream and moonlight, and escaped to a countryside often both imprecise and ill-understood.