An Aesthetic Visionary
Annals of Innocence and Experience. By Herbert Read. (Faber and Faber. ios. 6d.)
Too many autobiographies nowadays are written by uninterest- ing people for uninteresting people. Mr. Herbert Read's Annals of Innocence and Experience is not of this sort. It tells the story of the development of a very distinct personality. That person- ality never needs to make an effort to preserve its independence and integrity, and is consequently never aggressive nor unduly self-conscious. It is characteristic of Mr. Read that, although he was a great admirer of Henry James's style at a time when his own style was taking shape, he yet " never had the least tempta- tion to imitate it." Not that he was in the least careless of what Henry James calls " the dear, little, deadly question of how to do it," but that question solved itself for him as he pursued his visions and ideas. That he acquired a distinctive style of his own the reader of this book will soon see. He will also see that Mr. Read has never had any temptation—or even an unconscious disposition—to imitate anyone in anything. He tells us that he never had any disciplined education, and that " Character is the product of a disciplined education: discipline inculcates habits of mind as well as of body, and the result is a firm, depend- able set of ideas and reactions.. . . A character is not necessarily conservative : rather it is constructive. . . . It is moral, although its morality is not necessarily conventional." This is a handsome testimonial to " character " on the part of one who half dis- claims possessing it. " A personality," he goes on, " is, on the other hand, distinguished by immediacy and by what I would call lability, or the capacity to change without loss of integrity. . . . The senses are open to every impression which falls upon them, and the mind surrenders to its environment. Admittedly, from a moral and social point of view, there is a danger that such a passive attitude will lead to instability and disintegration." Now this dichotomy has no doubt some validity, but the joke of it is that Mr. Read himself completely falsifies it. The man revealed to us in this book has character and personality, and each re- inforces the other. This is proved beyond all question in what he has written of his war experiences. The passage which he quotes from an earlier book of his is superb—superb in its triumphant illustration that a man can be a fine artist and have plenty of character as well.
The chapters in which Mr. Read describes his post-war years are full of interest. For a time he was in the Civil Service, but after many heart-searchings he gave up his post in the Treasury in order to devote himself entirely to writing. But to what kind of writing? The advice he sought, and the little use it was to him, do, I confess, make me smile; but in the end he wisely took
counsel with himself and decided that " the man, the individual, came first; and that it was immaterial in what particular form he expresSed himself—poem, novel, essay, metaphysics or criticism." Strong in this spirit of individualism, he took no harm from his later connexions with Art and Letters and The Criterion, and even filled the office of assistant-keeper in a museum without losing the innocence of his eye. The dangers he went through were escaped largely by virtue of not being seen.
Nevertheless, here and there Mr. Read uses language which, used by anyone else, would arouse suspicions of preciosity. For instance, "My profoundest experience has been, not religious, nor moral, but aesthetic." His frequent use, too, of the word " sensibility " reminds me of the years after the last war when Proustian fans were flinging their exiguous weight about in a morally exhausted world. But in this book the personality of the writer reveals itself as unmistakably untrivial from beginning to end. Early in it he says : " That there are Truths we love must be the experience of everyone who finds that his actions are guided by a principle which finds no expression in his declared philosophy of life." And towards the end we come across these words : " But it gradually occurred to me that the principles I was working out in the aesthetic sphere could be carried over into the ethical sphere, and that a valid analogy existed between the order of the universe, the order of art, and the order of conduct. . . . Vulgarity is the only sin in life as in art."
This use of the word vulgarity is the key to the matter. In our politics, in our social life, everywhere, vulgarity is the rule. Moreover, I greatly fear that the only way to avoid vulgarity is to possess a personality and be faithful to it. In art of course " the dear, little, deadly question of how to do it " has import- ance, but autobiography at least gains quite a little when the author has a personality worth writing about.
L. H. MYERS.
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