DIFFERING LANDSCAPES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 482, 17 September 1948, Page 18

DIFFERING LANDSCAPES

LITERATURE AND LIFE: ADDRESSES TO THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION. George G. Harrap and Co., London. HIS is the sort of book one expects from the English Association. It is about literature in some form, or its connection with life. It is by persons who know their subjects and can write. Given to small select audiences, these

papers deserved a wider circulation, whic the Association provides — by assembling them here. The book may be likened to a day’s walk through widely differing landscapes. Let us imagine that on this walk there are pleasant water-meadows where one can rest under trees, There are parish (continued on next page)

(continued ‘from previous page) churches where one can trace centuries of history. There are talks with knowledgeable local inhabitants. There are typical winding English roads. But there is also high country, where the landscape challenges muscle and mind. "Westminster Abbey in English Literature" (Lawrence E. Tanner) and "The City of Bath and Its Literary Associations’ (Reginald W. M. Wright) are agreeable strolls) through history touched by letters. In "The Problem of Translation" Sir H. Idris Bell tells us with a scholar’s equipment what a translator can do and what he can't. Prose is comparatively easy. Poetry is the devil; you can’t transfer its inner essence to another tongue. You can, however, give a general idea of what a poet has tried to do, especially if he

writes a narrative. Translation may be mighty difficult, but it is essential to the commerce of thought. Sir Idris illustrates his points with a wealth of example, and it is hard to imagine the problem stated more clearly and subtly. In the tribute to "Q" (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) we meet a very accomplished writer and a great figure in the teaching of English. So persistent was the old tradition of education that Cambridge did not get its School of English. of which "O"

was the first head, until well into the present century. "OQ" best wished to be remembered for "his care for cleanness and grace of writing." q JHAT is light verse? Having been severely criticised in some quarters for his anthology of such verse, Guy Boas answers the question with knowledge and gusto. As illustrating the difference of opinion on the matter, he could have mentioned that in his Oxford Book of Light Verse, W. H. Auden includes Kipling’s "Danny Deever." Magnificent in its strength and depth, English poetry is also brilliant in its lighter moods. A companion address to this is G. Rostrevor Hamilton’s study of verse epigram=in English. Here, too, is riches, more abundant perhaps than many have realised. The art is kept alive to-day, says Mr. Hamilton, but does not flourish. The new trends in poetry work against it. In the title of Osbert Lancaster’s paper "England and Greece: A Study of Exchange in the World of Art,’ the key word is "exchange." What, one may ask, has England given ta Greece in return for all she has received? Running through history with his special knowledge and wit, Mr. Lancaster finds at the end that England repaid Greece with some touches of architecture, so that British tradition is not represented there solely "by those two still flourishing products of British culture-cricket and ginger beer." Then we have Mr. Routh appealing to us to believe that "Authors Lead the Same Lives as Their Readers." Don’t idealise the author. Approach a book not in a spirit of awe, but of fellowship. Authors, he reminds us, including some

of the most inspired, "are profoundly concerned with their incomes." So are their humble readers. The two most controversial papers ate "Live Dogs and Dead Lions: A Defence of Modernist Poetry,’ by .Professor V. de Sola Pinto, and "Kipling’s World," by C. S. Lewis. Professor Pinto packs a deal of argument into his 14 pages. He will annoy and please, and he should be read by all who would understand. His thesis that in poetry, as in other things, "new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth." The modernists decided that the poet could no longer be "a mere craftsman carrying on a dead tradition for the mild delectation of a leisured governing class"; he had to get out of the world of illusion, into a vulgar world. To make "the inward escape" and at the. same

time interpret con‘temporary life, with its pubs, pimples and pie-carts, was "a task of stupendous difficulty." If Professor Pinto is unjust to traditional poetry, he sees weaknesses in the modernists, for example, the clique element in the Auden school. He thinks that the company of poets produced by the second war may overcome the difficulties against which this school has struggled. Poetry is achieving a new simplicity and unification, in keeping . with the disappear-

ance of the. cultural gulf between the "leisured" and "working" classes. Not long ago an American critic, reviewing a new book on Kipling, in effect told. the author he was wasting "his time trying to resurrect the. dead. This was stupid. "Kipling is very much alive. If we had not a string of new studies of him, testifying to his vitality, one could judge this by the frequency with which he is quoted. What is happening is that after years of discreditable judgment by prejudice, he is being revalued in a calmer mood. Mr. Lewis’s acute analysis is concerned mainly with Kipling’s doctrine of work and discipline. He considers there is much justification for this, but points to a moral limitation in Kipling’s preaching, and finds that his preoccupation with the Inner Ring (the men who illustrate these principles) "renders his work in the long run suffocating and. unendurable." But Kipling did the public a great service by introducing it to a whole world of "business" which ‘previous. story-tellers had neglected, and "he was a very great writer." One may query the "very" as applicable only to the giants of literature,, but if we accept "great" we have moved a long way indeed from the outright banishment of ‘Kipling as a mere "Imperialist." A... OA.

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