JOURNEY FROM ROMANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 413, 23 May 1947, Page 12

JOURNEY FROM ROMANCE

Recent Trends in English Literature [/NLESS the complete dominion of Romanticism over the creative part of English letters during the nineteenth century is properly appreciated it is impossible to understand the more recent trends in English literature. Most of these trends are struggles of one kind or another to break clear of this curious influence which penetrated deeply into the literary habits of thought and imagination of the British. Over these tendencies the world war also has had an influence. These aspects are discussed in this article by ROY CAMPBELL, a South African poet who has attained a considerable . reputation in England.

NGLISH literature, like almost every other literature, is only just beginning to emerge from the shadow of the great Romantics of the early 19th Century. It was with them that poets and authors ceased to conceive of themselves as craftsmen and artists, and began to think of themselves as prophets, high-priests, teachers and _ re-formers-a heresy which is. still spoiling much good talent. Incidentally, about the only English author for the last. century-and-a-half whose writings effected any real reforms, was, paradoxically enough, first and foremost a craftsman and an artist-Dickens. Up to the last war Britain was still more or less dominated intellectually by Romantic standards inherited and accepted unquestioningly for nearly 150 years. Though the normal vehicle of expression had changed from poetry to prose and free verse, the difference was only superficial. The centrifugal longing for "otherness," which is the Romantic Spirit, was still there. _The Romantic Spirit is that which sacrifices the rule to the exception, the immediate to the remote, the obvious to the occult, the whole to the part, the direct to the indirect, the native to the foreign, and the present to some idealised past or Utopian future. The writers under whose influence most modern authors were brought up, were nearly all obsessed by this form of escape from the real and the immediate, which drove them to Utopianise politically and socially, like Shaw; or scientifically, like Wells, both of whom subjected the present to a _ hypothetical future. Wells, however, lived to see many of his dreams realised, and the shock of it nearly broke his heart. Let us hope that Shaw will be spared a similar misfortune. The most interesting form of this centrifugality in time is when it faces both ways like Janus, as in the case of William Morris, the great mentor of the Romantics who was the prototype of the modern prophetic Utopianist. Viewed one way, he is a mediaeval knight in cast-iron breeches and a tin-hat, gazing nostalgically into the tapestry of an idealised past. Viewed the other way, he is an ardent, ultramodern demagogue, gazing as rapturously into an equally impossible future. Escape in Time and Space The illusion of a material paradise and the perfectibility of human society at some other time, has claimed by far the greatest number of escapists. But there is a similar phenomenon to the escape in time; and that is the escape

in space, equally dependent upon credulousness, which led to the frantic tourism and globe-trotting of D. H. Lawrence in order to try to identify him‘self with what was most alien to him; to immolate everything he could understand on the shrine of what he could not understand, the mind and the religion of the savage, which those very fine Europeans who do understand, usually treat with greater reserve. There is a far more dignified form of avoiding the evident and the actual which was very gracefully practised by Henry James and Virginia Woolf. It really amounts almost to a compromise with reality rather than a complete escape. Theirs is an oblique approach to the obvious, which is ultimately avoided, sometimes at the very verge of contact -in the former case by lengthy circumlocution, and in the latter by a deviation of the attention to some other impending actuality which has to be glanced at and avoided in its» turn. Henry James and Virginia Woolf are therefore not out-and-out escapists; but they are masters of that indirectness which is one of the main ingredients of Romanticism. All these writers had a considerable effect on the generation of English writers that is now at its zenith and it is not surprising that the escapism that has been inherited should still be rioting in their veins though in such patent and often laughable forms that it promises to extinguish itself in one last blaze of incongruous extravagance. Britain found herself, at the beginning of the war, intellectually at the (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) mercy of any religious or political dogma so long as it had been fabricated elsewhere to suit conditions and peoples to which her own bore no resemblance. In the cult of "otherness" it was almost impossible to go any further than Britain had done. By far the most influential, and one of the most talented of her writers under 50 had gone to Practise Buddhism. Where? In India? In Tibet? No! That would be far too centripetal. He had gone to Hollywood to do it, as one might go to Moscow instead of Rome to study Roman Catholicism! This is the most perfect example of escapism. Huxley had done more than any other writer of his age to create the state of mind that prevailed among modern intellectuals in England; he was more bewildered by the modern world he had helped to create intellectually, than a wild giraffe would be if suddenly dumped in the middle of Piccadilly. He felt the same revulsion for it as Wells did in his last phase. On reading his latest book, and one of his best, one feels that he has been averted by disgust, rather than converted by love, to practise the religion most remote from him in time and space, and to practise it in the place most removed from it in time and space. This typifies for all time the cultivation of "otherness." Nobody can go further in centrifugal gymnastics or in the identification of one-self-with what is alien. Mr. Huxley has broken the record and from now o there can only be a swing back. We should remember. that Huxley was once under the spell of Lawrence and wrote a book about him. Britain should be

grateful to both these acrobats in escapism that they have rounded off one of the most fantastic periods of literary aberration in history-at least as far as English-speaking people are concerned: for one laid the track to, and the other discovered, the pole of "otherness." She can’t go further. Commonsense Tradition At the same time as this brilliant alienation of talent from reality was being carried out, in many~cases by immortal artists, a small minority of writers and thinkers managed to hand on the English tradition which has always been based on commonsense and a sense of humour. This latter sense has

, traditionally served the English for an artistic and a moral conscience-from Chaucer right down to the present time, even though sometimes it had to take the form of an underground movement. During the last 150 years it has been dangerous to profess it. It has landed more than one great English humorist in prison: Cobbett was an outstanding example. But more recently it earned them opprobrium or neglect, as in the case of Lewis, and, for some time, Joyce. When the war came, however, many English writers had to serve in the ranks: even those who remained civilians were familiarised with reality in "its grimmest and most forbidding forms and they began to discover with a certain sense of relief that the grim substance of reality contained more interest from a human point of view and was less grotesque and less boring than the faked escapist worlds which they had been forced to substitute for it previously. They became acclimatised to experience. They sought for clarity in their expression and began to avoid the obscurity which is the cheapest outlet of escapism. The reason why the former world war did not bring a similar sense of relief was that it was simply a case of waiting in the mud and being eaten by licé-it was worse than any fictitious world. But now there is found a new sort of literature which is not afraid to particularise and to narrate, tather than to generalise. Writers became less, pedantic. Novelists like Evelyn Waugh (in satirical comedy), and Graham Greene (in tragic vein) began to rely on sheer narration for their psychological. effects and abandoned the laboured analysis of their immediate predecessors. : In some cases, where pedantry had previously taken the form of devout xenolatry, it is found that many British authors have become patriotic and turned to their own soil and to their own flesh and blood for inspiration. Theré is less introspection and disillusionment in the vast crop of literature produced in Britain as a result of the last war than in the corresponding crop which ‘resulted from the 1914 war. If Britain has produced no poet to equal Wilfrid Owen, the collective output of poetry which has come out of this war is more intelligent and sane than \the bulk ofthat which came out of the other. M. Mauriac noticed a similar simplification, a development in directness on the part of such poets as Aragon and others who took part in the French Resistance. There is a return to the National tradition which is very pronounced. If English poets seek religion they now find it in the European forms of Christian religion and do not have to seek for it in the Far West or the Far East among the Hopis or \the Hindoos, whose systems were evolved to suit different states of civilisation and mentality from their own. Similarly Britain is becoming less helplessly pervious to imported political ideas and more conscious of her own history, institutions, and way of life. : Such a consciousness is the only soil upon which a vital literature can grow for long, since every literature has to be national and belong t@ its own people first, before it can ever become universal, to be cherished by other people. Literature, like Charity, begins at home,