Richard Aldington

A Machine Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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[p.]

Printed in Great Britain
by T. and A. Constable Ltd.
at the University Press
Edinburgh

All Rights Reserved
First Published
1931

For Brigit [p.]

Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.

[p.1]

Was it the first time in history that a British army had to win a victory for the British navy? To one who is not an expert it seems so. What is certain is that the German fleet was sunk, not on the high seas in battle, but in a treaty in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. Had it been sunk before Christmas 1914 it is probable that England would have been out of the war by January 1915, and English newspapers, especially pro-Kaiser Liberal papers, would have taught the plain Englishman to think that really something would have to be done to keep these continental dagoes from their everlasting scrapping. But whether it was that nothing in the world could have got the German ships out of Kiel, or whether it was that the British navy had lost the initiative that could force them out, had lost the Nelson touch, the Drake at Cadiz touch, because of excessive preoccupation with 'spit and polish' — a French naval officer once said to me that the tenue of the British navy was 'trés jolie, míme trop jolie' — in any case the German fleet remained intact all through the war and was not vanquished until millions of Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen, Orangemen, Indians, Canadians, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders and the rest [p.2] had trailed away to be shot up in the mud and dirt and disease of such land wars as they, with the mariners of England guarding their native seas, had never expected to take part in. It was not physically pleasant for them. But it was not the physical unpleasantness that made their position with regard to the war unique — the war was even more physically unpleasant for the French and Russians and Serbs and Turks, whose ideas of military comfort were more spartan than the British, not to speak of the fact that parts of their countries were overrun and thousands of their fellow countrymen with their womenfolk and children left homeless. The position of most of the men who fought in the British imperial forces — and above all of the Englishmen — was unique because they had been brought up to regard war as a thing that could not concern them individually. A Frenchman knows that if things go badly in France he will probably have Germans hopping over the fence to see what they can get out of the scrum; the Germans feel rather similarly about Russia, and the Balkan peoples always knew that there were Austrians and Turks and Italians ready to walk in and plunder on almost any pretext. But except for the Dutch raid on the Medway 250 years ago no stranger had got any distance into England for over 800 years, not even the Corsican. (A legitimist prince like Charles Edward Stuart cannot be counted as a stranger, and his war, which was not waged against England but against its reigning house, did not seriously disturb the ordinary Englishman.) Englishmen had not hopped over many fences (though they had landed on a great many shores [p.3] on which they had no right to land), and it was unthinkable that they themselves should ever see the stranger within their gates, unthinkable that their island privacy should be intruded upon. Before the war the individual Englander had reached such a stage of morbid noli me tangere-ism, that even the habit of shaking hands had almost disappeared from English society. Even between married people the right to greater and greater privacy was being insisted upon. And not to speak of the awe that say we, the conquered Irish, condemned to see human beings literally herded together, had long felt before the spaciousness of English life, one has only to read Prince von Bülow's memoirs to see what an impression the English assumption of the right to immunity from all possible intrusion made on foreigners in pre-war days. The continental critic might and did and does call the Englishman a barbarian, pointing that he has a hundred varieties of religion, all of them primitive, and that there is scarcely any English music or painting or architecture or sculpture worth considering, and yet only the barbarous Muscovite nobleman was as leisured and secure in the frozen depths of Russia as was the barbarian English gentleman behind the wall of battleships that encircled his foggy island. In the years before the war, these two, the Englishman and the Russian, went on as if nothing could ever break in on their privilege. But if we are to believe Prince von Bülow — since he was a politician and a politician writing after the event, we have to be cautious about doing so — those in authority both in England and in Russia knew that the slightest slip would change the [p.4] destinies of the two countries and of the whole world for ever. The English men of affairs, however, thought there was always the navy, and the Russians thought there was always the religious sense of the people, so they lulled the plain man, if they did not lull themselves, into a false sense of security!. And then they made the slip! They went to war! What happened in Russia does not concern us here, though, since in the matter of literature and the arts Russia was at the time the most richly productive country in Europe except France, what happened there will possibly interest posterity more than what happened in England.

What happened in England was, that though Lord Kitchener told the country in just so many words that the war would probably last three years, only the more intelligent of his countrymen realised his meaning, which was that a stream of men would have to be directed from England towards the different seats of war for at least three years, and that those men would include not only professional soldiers and enthusiastic volunteers, but all Englishmen and sundry — sons and lovers, shopkeepers and miners, footballers and aesthetes, peers, parsons, panders and all. The noblest of them said nothing but went immediately they realised what had happened. Some who were not less noble but who were less (or was it more?) intelligent said nothing but waited for authority to say what it wanted them to do. Others who were decidedly intelligent but not so noble talked a great deal and 'wangled' something at home or fled to Ireland (where they were derisively christened 'fly-boys'). And others again who were, like the first, both noble and intelli [p.5] gent but in a different and less sympathetic way, in a more opinionated, egotistical way, went to gaol (at home), or to non-combatant battalions (at home also).

Of those who, at the time, said nothing but went away, hundreds of thousands never came back. Practically all of those who did come back went on saying nothing for a decade and more of years. The less thoughtful ones were drawn into ex-servicemen's clubs. Others played bands in the streets, or sold bootlaces or matches-think what they'd been!.Others again got on with whatever jobs they had to do and reflected!. None of them forgave the pre-war Liberal Government for letting them and their dead in for the war, and they voted the Liberal party out of effective existence, for the time being at any rate, possibly for ever. But the old men of the Socialist and Tory parties failed to realise what that meant. They went on ignoring a generation of men which, if mentally maimed, had at least learned how much more the word 'reality' meant than they (the old men) realised. They talked Pecksniffianly of 'a lost generation.' They would not wait and see. As for the post-war generation, they could not fairly be expected to realise that their young uncles — not very jazzy, not vociferously 'sexy,' not wildly interested in Tallulah, not really very 'amusing,' Above all, not interested in the unreality of flapdoodle metaphysic disguised as literary and philosophic criticism that became more and more fashionable in London and at Cambridge — had anything to say. The young uncles were brooding over 'that old war.' And that old war was a bore. Forget it. The young uncles knew that that old war was a bore too. [p.6] But they did not forget it. They could not forget it. If you have been placed suddenly on the other side of the grave and left there for months and years, you do not forget it. And you do not forget those you left there when you came back. Sometimes you bring back not only a darkened spirit but a maimed body from there, and that reminds you. The war had been won and the German fleet handed over, but the price had been too great. Nearly a million young men of the British Empire had given their lives, and yet not only was life in England more uneasy than ever before, but the United States had taken up where Germany left off, and with their enormous wealth could obviously outstrip the British navy in no time. The war had not been worth while from any point of view. It had been a ghastly mistake. So, though most of the young uncles said nothing, they brooded. And then one day one of them said to himself, 'I'm getting on. We are getting on. They would be getting on. What am I going to do about it? about them? 'Tweedledum Baldwin and Tweedledee MacDonald seemed to be equally remote from his realities. It was true that in politics one member of the war generation had become dramatically an Oswald Mosley, another had become undramatically an Oliver Stanley. But that was less important. The politician is to society to-day what the prince was in the past, so the proverb should run, 'Put not your trust in politicians.' There is only one thing that is certain about politics, and that is that, as a politician, you may not, even if you would, be altogether sincere. These young politicians of the war generation may bring more sincerity to their task, [p.7] but the odds are against them. They will be up against the old gang. In the arts, which are the imaginative expression of fundamental things, sincerity is, on the other hand, not only possible but essential. And literature is the art that is most natural to the always rather solitary Englishman. But what was there in post-war English literature? Though Mr. T.S. Eliot was a genius, his ghosts were not the ghosts of the war generation. And ghosts matter. I remember myself looking round the studio of a French painter one Sunday afternoon not very long since, and though his pictures were anything but representational, something in one of them made me ask, 'Do you think your pictures would be the same if you had not been at the war?' He answered casually, 'Je ne sais pas.' And then after a moment, looking at a picture he had painted shortly before, said, 'Tiens, que c'est curieux! Mort homme.' The Mort homme was a sort of Hill 60 nightmare to Frenchmen in the war, and he had unconsciously painted something extremely like it in shape and colour. And later, going through other pictures he had painted, he found that, without realising it, he had used the skeleton shapes that his visual memory had retained from the war years over and over and over again. Perhaps it is in painting that the French war generation will express itself fully. We do not know yet. France suffered more in the war than England, and we must still wait for the full artistic expression of its war experience. But it is in the social arts that France is most fecund to-day. In England the social arts are never more than seconds to literature.

So in 1929, after more than ten years of almost unbroken [p.8] silence, the English war generation began to write the truth as it saw it. There had been odd war books before, but in 1929 and 1930 there was a sudden torrent of them, some good, some indifferent, few of them wholly bad. The first, the one that broke the silence, that seemed to open the flood-gates, was Death of a Hero. It was utterly sincere, and in its very contrarinesses utterly English. Being a novel, it was more imaginative than the late Ashmead Bartlett's pamphleteering but moving Uncensored Dardanelles, or than Mr. Herbert Read's reticent and beautiful book, In Retreat; it was less personal than Mr. Patrick Miller's fine novel, The Natural Man, or than the war nightmare chapters in Lawrence's Kangaroo; it was less genteel than Mr. Blunden's account of how, whether he liked it or not, he was turned into the good boy of his battalion, or than Mr. Mottram's Spanish Farm — one could not, for instance, see Mr. Galsworthy writing a preface to it. Above all it judged not only the war but the origins of the war. Its appearance coincided with that of Herr Remarque's always appealing but occasionally self-contradictory All Quiet on the Western Front, and its success has been attributed to that coincidence. But I do not think that Herr Remarque's book alone would have loosened the tongue of a single British ex-serviceman or woman. The man who wrote Death of a Hero was the most cultivated and representative Englishman to produce a war novel up to then, and I think it was because a representative Englishman felt that the time had come to speak out, and because he gave the word that the whole war generation did speak out, from the author of Death of a Hero [p.9] himself to Miss Helen Zenna Smith, whose unfortunately named Not so Quiet is one of the very best of all English war novels. 'The mind,' Mr. Herbert Read has said, apropos of this very subject, 'has a faculty for dismissing the débris of its emotional conflicts until it feels strong enough to deal with them.' In 1929, after more than a decade, the English mind, as represented first of all by the author of Death of a Hero, felt strong enough to deal with the emotional conflicts raised by the war. The time was ripe. I doubt whether even a purely military study like General Spears' admirable Liaison, which came out at the end of the season that began with Death of a Hero, could have betrayed so richly humane a temper on the part of its author had it appeared earlier. The time was ripe. It was time for a generation that had fought and thought and felt deeply to say its say.

In the days before the war, Richard Aldington, the author of Death of a Hero, was the youngest member of a group of English-speaking poets (and poetasters) who, to the slight extent that such a thing is possible in London, constituted a 'movement.' They called themselves 'Imagists,' though Mr. Yeats, who had a greater capacity for producing the striking image than any of them, was no more than an unofficially recognised chief. He was their friend because he admired their work (not an admirer of their work because he was their friend). They esteemed him, and he looked on them benevolently because they were the most cultivated and intelligent young men writing poetry at the time, and also, perhaps, because in some ways they recalled the 'nineties movement which had meant so much to his own youth (and the memory of which he still cherishes). They might be regarded as taking up where the 'nineties left off in 1895. They were aesthetes-in a safer, a more virile, way than the young men of the 'nineties, but the American Mr. Pound did know who constituted the avant garde in early twentieth-century French painting and sculpture as the American Mr. Whistler had known who constituted it in the late nineteenth. And they were all in on Italian Futurism and modern French poetry and the beginning of the Russian Ballet. And they despised politics and the civil service and the middle classes with the same easy grace as [p.11] their predecessors. So though things might be none too grand from the material point of view, at any rate they felt they were having a splendid time artistically. It was all very young, and if it was touching in its naïveté it was undoubtedly good for them and for English poetry and criticism, for some of them were serious about their work as poets and the others encouraged them to believe that poetry and poetic experiment were worth being serious about. The war bust it all up but it had been wonderful, and most wonderful probably for the youngest member of the group. To be twenty and to be able to go to Woburn Buildings on Monday evenings and hear Mr. Yeats talking dark wisdom as if he had just had it straight from the oracle at Delphi, and brighter wisdom as if he had just heard it on the lips of a charwoman, and occasionally reading a poem aloud; to be able to study the convolutions of T.E. Hulme's mind at first hand; to be one of the first to hear of 'Ezra's' latest successful effort to be outrageous at an upper-middle-class party ; to be at the private view of the first 'Post-Impressionist' exhibition; to see the first performance of Scheherazade; to be one of Marinetti's personal bodyguard; and to be reading the modern French poets and the Greek poets and the Roman poets and the mediaeval poets and the Renaissance poets and at the same time to be writing poetry that you believed would matter in its own way as all these things mattered — surely it was wonderful.

And yet, wonderful as it was, the young poet must have mown that the tendencies of the time, even within the cènacle, were contrary to his temperament. He might side [p.12] with Marinetti — his sense of reality told him that if Marinetti was extreme to absurdity, at least he was more alive than the representatives of the dreary decadence into which the great tradition had fallen — but it was the great tradition that he loved. A student of history and of civilisation as well as of the arts, he knew that, even in the hundred-odd years since the French Revolution, the tradition, though it had fallen into the hands of the bourgeoisie, had still been alive, that the bourgeoisie had had to master it before it could reject it. And he knew too that that mastery had been achieved and that that rejection had taken place; that already in Henri de Regnier and Anatole France the tradition was threadbare, that revolutionary ideals had, at long last, taken possession of aesthetic, had impregnated it and made it fruitful, and that the greatest art of the future, much more than the art of the nineteenth century, would be the expression of revolutionary humanity, stopping now to reflect on itself, expressing itself fully and completely. And he knew that much of that expression would inevitably be discordant. His grief was that he should have been born into the discord.

At first he took the easiest way out. He wrote only of what he loved: nature which was still living and lovely, civilisation which seemed dead but which was still lovely to dream over. Even a small reminder of civilisation stirred him. A suggestion of art in the laying out of a garden was enough: I have sat here happy in the garden,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds
Which the wind of the upper air
[p.13] Tore like the green leafy boughs
Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flagstones
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.

It is a very slight, unpretending little poem, but even its title, In the Old Garden, is significant. No less significant, however, is the fact that though he writes lyrically he makes no attempt to recapture the cheap virtuosity of the more recent past. Rhymed poetry is part of that past. And he makes no attempt to rhyme. Simplicity of expression and sincerity are the most important things, and rhyme — already as long ago as Tennyson's and Swinburne's time — had become a serious danger to both, had become mere mechanism. The camera abolished mere representation, abolished Winterhalterism in painting, and the piano-player abolished mere mechanical rhythm, abolished Lisztism in music. There was only too much mechanical rhythm in the world. For the future the musician or the poet had to make his own personal, unmechanical music, his own rhythm, in his own personal way, and stand or fall by it. Rhyme was a mere adventitious aid in hypnotising the insensitive reader into continuing. If you wanted to say what you had to say personally and with the perfect economy which is style, you had to shed every borrowed trick. At most you could only allow yourself to rhyme irregularly, or if a particularly old-world subject seemed to demand it, or to prove to yourself [p.14] that you could rhyme if and when you wanted to. Also, of course, Richard Aldington knew that Greek poetry was unrhymed. And Richard Aldington's ideals in literature and in life always were (and are — see the apostrophe to Aphrodite in Death of a Hero) Hellenic. The most famous of his early poems, Choricos, as well as being a lament for what is gone, is full of Greek imagery: The ancient songs
Pass deathward mournfully.

Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths,
Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings —
Symbols of ancient songs,
Mournfully passing
Down to the great white surges,
Watched of none
Save the frail sea-birds
And the lithe pale girls,
Daughters of Oceanus.

And the songs pass from the green land
Which lies upon the waves as a leaf
On the flowers of hyacinths.
And they pass from the waters,
The manifold winds and the dim moon,
And they come
Silently winging through soft Cimmerian dusk,
To the quiet level lands
That she keeps for us all,
That she wrought for us all for sleep
In the silver days of earth's dawning —
Proserpina, daughter of Zeus.
[p.15] And we turn from the Cyprian's breasts,
And we turn from thee,
Phoebus Apollo,
And we turn from the music of old,
And the hills that we loved and the meads,
And we turn from the fiery day,
And the lips that were over-sweet;
For silently
Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,
With purple robe
Searing the grass as with a sudden flame,
Death,
Thou hast come upon us.

* * *
It is scarcely necessary to remark that the poem is not purely Greek in its origins. There is plenty of Swinburnism in it. I should opine that Mr. Aldington had had as bad an attack of Pre-Raphaelitism during adolescence as every other passionately literary English youth of his generation. Death in purple robe and red shoes is a horribly Pre-Raphaelite piece of imagining. And the Pre-Raphaelite pale woman Swinburne's Proserpine), who is only a very small part of e Greek tradition, lingered long in his imagination. The cold lips and regretful eyes and drooping breasts Mr. Aldington probably found on the wind among the reeds, and the soft Cimmerian dusk might well be a Hellenic transformation of the so-called 'Celtic' twilight, which Mr. Yeats, in a moment of aberration, under the influence of the Scottish Fiona Macleod and his Antrim disciple A.E., first troduced into good Irish poetry. (It is nonsense incidentally to talk of twilight poetry being specifically Celtic. [p.16] Mr. Yeats himself has grown steadily out of it as he has grown into the tradition of Gaelic poetry. And what is the Elegy in a Country Churchyard but twilight poetry? And Dante has as much twilight as anybody could — or could not — wish. And one could write a book on the amount of crooning that there is in Shakespeare. Mr. Joyce once told me of an amusing criticism he read in an Italian paper on a performance of Macbeth. The critic, Signor Renato Simoni, being used to plenty of murder on the stage of his own country, and taking it as mere banality, practically ignored the action and advised his readers to go rather to see this extraordinary play about sleep. He pointed out that every one in it seemed to be talking about sleeping or not sleeping, the climax of it was a sleep-walking scene, and when all the principals had been killed off there was still somebody left to speak sleepy epitaphs on them.)

Where, I think, the young author of Choricos gained over Swinburne was in the more natural, less mechanical, rhythm of his verse. Without in the least deserting the genius of his own language, he won something of the subtle Greek harmony that is independent of any such mechanical element as rhyme. By giving no special importance to the last word of each line, by labouring over all the words more carefully, he got a natural, unmechanical grace which is absent from Swinburne, and which is one of the miracles of the Hellenic method in all the arts. And I think it is in the consolidation of his talent in this direction that Richard Aldington, the poet, is in the end most likely to develop. The fact that he has broken away from the material and method of those [p.17] early poems should be, if anything, an advantage. In his later verse and in his prose he is obviously a man of flesh and blood, and it is precisely flesh and blood that are most lacking in the English Hellenism of Swinburne and the Anglo-American Hellenism of that sometimes exquisite but often over-precious poet, H.D. The grafting of flesh and the infusion of blood into the English Hellenising school might produce something in English that could hold its own with the work of André Chénier, who, even if he did rhyme, still remains the most perfect of modern Hellenists. (Chénier is less radiant than La Fontaine, less passionate than Racine, but he is also less inclined to drift up-stage into abstraction than Goethe and, in our own day, Valéry. The Hellenism of Pierre Louys seems to me to be rather tawdry.)Perhaps the most remarkable Hellenist since Chénier is M. Victor Bérard, the translator and commentator. Reading only modern languages with the facility that makes reading a pleasure, and having, owing to one unpropitious circumstance or another — time, place, taste, etc. — renounced the effort to finish Chapman, Pope, Butcher and Lang and Leconte de Lisle, I brought M. Bérard's Odyssée here to my own remote part of Ireland. I found myself reading it like a novel. But what a novel! For a fortnight and more it turned my days to gold. And having finished it, I read it all over again. M. Bérard makes Homer alive. Needless to say, being a great scholar and true poet, he is neither a professor nor a member of the Académie Française. N

But if the Richard Aldington of those days was heir to Swinburne's Hellenism, he showed only very slight traces of Swinburne's hatred of Christianity. The snobbery of Swinburne's sneering reference to Christ's Mother as a [p.18] slave among slaves' could only dare to let itself become articulate in an epoch of class-consciousness and materialism like the second half of the nineteenth century in England. The hatred was fundamental to the tradition if the snobbery was not, but the young Richard Aldington was so much in love with his Greek dream that he had no place for mere hatred. He does, it is true, dismiss Christ in one of his poems, but only because he was so happy that he felt he could afford to dismiss all gods: And Picus of Mirandola is dead;
And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of,
Hermes and Thoth and Christ are rotten now,
Rotten and dank . . .
And through it all I see your pale Greek face;

* * *
And though it is not exactly the way a Catholic would say it, at least the reference to Mary in the simple After Two Years is obviously meant to be the reverse of disrespectful:
* * *
It is God's will
That I shall love her still
As he loves Mary.

* * *
He had the pagan delight of untroubled youth in love for its own sake, and not only in the boyish love of the feminine but also in boyish love of natural things. And though I say pagan, I think of St. Francis in connection with this love of nature. Perhaps it would be more correct to call the Richard Aldington of those far-off days, before the modern Black Death fell upon the world, a child of St. Francis, a [p.19] heretical child, but a Franciscan child none the less. What could be more boyishly, Franciscanly happy than Amalfi ? We will come down to you,
O very deep sea,
And drift upon your pale green waves
Like scattered petals.
We will come down to you from the hills,
From the scented lemon groves,
From the hot sun.
We will come down,
O Thalassa,
And drift upon
Your pale green waves
Like petals.

And At Mitylene is a boyish dream, a Shelleyan dream, and desire, of something terrible and dear: O Artemis,
Will you not leave the dark fastness
And. set your steel-white foot upon the foam
And come across the rustling sand,
Setting it adrift with the wind from your raiment?

* * *
O Artemis,
Girdle the gold about you,
Set the silver upon your hair
And remember us —
We, who have grown weary even of music,
We, who would scream behind the wild dogs of Scythia.

If Artemis had answered his call he would probably have hated it. She was only a lovely thing to dream about, as the wild dogs of Scythia were only a delicious nightmare. Pre-war England was much too comfortable to feel any deep [p.20] desire for the disturbing presence of goddess or god, and would probably prefer to have nothing to do with things extra-terrestrial if it really had any choice in the matter. England was probably the most solitary, the most isolated of all great countries, and it had long been happily married to the most solitary of the Muses, Euterpe. It has also carried on a long but rather slight flirtation with the muse of painting, and it would seem that at one time it had a rather serious affair with the lady of music. But its fidelity is to literature. In Chaucer's time it got back its own tongue after three hundred years of Norman-French, and with its own language it got back its own uncontinental solitude and its own comfort. And being comfortably off and artistically lazy, it could buy art and music from abroad and needed to take no trouble except with literature. Good literature cannot be imported. It was a happy state for any country from the point of view of material existence. Self-satisfaction exudes from its literature from the Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare's Henry V . down to Kipling. The Victorian and Edwardian periods were almost comically self-satisfied. One might have individual troubles, and if one is to judge by Gosse's Father and Son, children must have been made hideously unhappy by parental tyranny arrogantly passing itself off as divine love. But Richard Aldington, in the years before the war, was an 'emancipated' as well as a cultivated boy, and though he probably had his own particular botherations, it is doubtful whether there was a happier young poet anywhere in the world in the summer of the year 1914.

It was not only the purely literary cénacles that were happy in England in 1914. The world of ideas was cocksure about the future. Universal peace was secure, and the publicist's sole business was to point the way to the quite definitely located earthly paradise where one was to await the arrival of the superman. (The superman was only Stendhal's Julien Sorel, but that young man's end (on the scaffold) was unknown to most of the self-constituted and often ignorant precursors of the superman in England.) The future was going to be wonderful. Everybody was going to have the same income as everybody else. Nobody would have to think of money. The necessities and luxuries would be guaranteed to everybody. The puritanical and therefore material minded Mr. Shaw showed that way to unlimited wealth. The sensual Mr. Wells showed the way to unlimited 'love,' the business-like Mr. Bennett the way to unlimited will-power. One was going to do an unimaginable amount of living every twenty-four hours. Oh, but they were prophets! And the more naïfs young men took it all seriously, and even the less naïfs were affected by it, and the young women, always quick to get down to brass tacks, did their best to persuade the young men to put at any rate Mr. Wells's lesson into practice. The wealth and the will-power were farther out of reach than the 'love,' but they would come all right. In a few years the world was going to be a wonderful place.

[p.22]

It became a wonderful place all right. Oh, wonderful! But instead of unlimited love there was unlimited selfishness, instead of unlimited will to live there was unlimited decision to destroy, and instead of unlimited wealth there was soldier's pay. I believe Mr. Shaw came back from the war very cheerful from Russia — evidently Mr. Shaw enjoys the spectacle of human beings enslaved), and he afterwards published a play about a degenerate young woman who was so little able to make anything of her own life that she pined for the excitement of an air-raid every night. But of course the authors were not to blame for the war. Only, they had posed as experts on everything, and the innocent young men and innocent young women who found themselves, without warning, in the middle of a war, could never again feel any confidence in their tendencious ideas. After 1914 these were taken with quite large quantities of salt. The amateur politics of Mr. Shaw were seen to be as remote from reality as the amateur biology of Mr. Wells and the amateur philosophy of living of Mr. Bennett. In the war, even Mr. (afterwards Sir) Norman Angell had gone over to the side of official militarism which suddenly revealed itself as everybody's master. It was queer, to say the least of it. But there was nothing to be done about it then except get on with whatever job one was given to do. That was what the innocent young men and women did. What happened to them in the process is what concerns us here. As for what happened to the innocent young women, one has only to read Miss Zenna Smith's book to see. And as to the [p.23] innocent young men — but that brings me back to Richard Aldington. For I take Mr. Aldington rather than any other of the war novelists, because in Death of a Hero he revealed himself as a fighting man who could deal not only with the actual physical conditions of the war, but also with the changes it brought about in English life as a whole.

It is in his poetry, however, that we get the first inkling of the war. Here is something which is not yet personal experience of war, but which shows that a young poet's adolescent dreams of loveliness have been broken in upon by a harsh reality: The electric car jerks;
I stumble on the slats of the floor,
Fall into a leather seat
And look up.

A row of advertisements,
A row of windows,
Set in brown woodwork pitted with brass nails,
A row of hard faces,
Immobile,
In the swaying train,
Rush across the flickering background of fluted dingy tunnel;
A row of eyes,
Eyes of greed, of pitiful blankness, of plethoric complacency,
Immobile,
Gaze, stare at one point,
At my eyes.

Antagonism,
Disgust,
Immediate antipathy,
[p.24] Cut my brain, as a dry sharp reed
Cuts a finger.
I surprise the same thought
In the brass-like eyes:
'What right have you to live?'

It is a far cry from Amalfi and Mitylene to a London tube train and 'What right have you to live'' But what right had any healthy-looking young man to be in the tube and out of khaki in those days? None. The young dreamer of the cénacle came up against a hostile outside public and had to accept the fact that it was now his master. The dream had to go. I cite this poem not so much as poetry as for the fact that it is the first of his poems that shows contact with discordant realities. It foreshadows the quality that was to mark his verse more and more during the years that followed, absolutely direct statement devoid of every kind of poetic 'trimming.' It was furious verse, at times becoming too personal, at times not personal enough — too personal when the emotion was not seen in proportion to the experience of the rest of mankind, not personal enough when a generalised idea on the tragedy of war experience was substituted for a personal unique image which would evoke that tragedy not merely for the brain but also for the imagination of the reader; yet verse that was real and that rose again and again to passages of authentic poetic expression, sustained from beginning to end. And besides, I think that if he left everything in, what was not poetry as well as what was, it only showed that he was finding his way back to the literary tradition of England. 'The great irregular [p.25] genius of Shakespeare' said Pater. Mr. Aldington's pre-war friends would probably have said the 'untidy' genius of Shakespeare and turned to their Mallarmé. But many of them were not English, and Mr. Aldington is as English as White Horse Hill. And the most characteristically English writers have never been slaves to mere verbal felicity. They achieve verbal felicity on the way to something else. It is as though they feared the abstraction, the, to them, inhuman quality of classical perfection. (It is true that their end is often an abstract idea or theory of life, but their idea or theory has always to be worked out personally, even amateurishly, has, at least, to appear to come from private judgment.) So I think that the intermediate, sometimes prosaic, passages in Richard Aldington's more mature verse were, in reality, warnings of the narrative poet, the novelist, who at the time was only latent, not conscious, in him. He went ahead, and for all he was young and only wakening from a boy's dream of poetry to fumble with a reality more dreadful than he could ever have imagined, he succeeded in turning that reality into poetry many, many times. Inarticulate Grief is an early instance: Let the sea beat its thin torn hands
In anguish against the shore,
Let it moan
Between headland and cliff;
Let the sea shriek out its agony
Across waste sands and marshes,
And clutch great ships,
Tearing them plate from steel plate
In reckless anger;
[p.26] Let it break the white bulwarks
Of harbour and city;
Let it sob and scream and laugh
In a sharp fury,
With white salt tears
Wet on its writhen face;
Ah! let the sea still be mad
And crash in madness among the shaking rocks —

For the sea is the cry of our sorrow.

The first definitely 'war' poems of Richard Aldington are the three, Captive, Sunsets, and The Faun Captive, which precede Images of War in the collected edition of his poems. Captive is a good-bye to all the dream loveliness of the young poet, good-bye to the boyish dream of Greek serenity which has never existed in any, except artistic, reality, and which could never be as unreal as on the day that a young man put on a private soldier's uniform for the first time: They have torn the gold tettix
From my hair;
And wrenched the bronze sandals
From my ankles.

They have taken from me my friend
Who knew the holy wisdom of the poets,
Who had drunk at the feast
Where Simonides sang.

No more do I walk the calm gardens
In the white mist of olives;
No more do I take the rose-crown
From the white hands of a maiden.

I, who was free, am a slave;
[p.27] The muses have forgotten me,
The gods do not hear me.

Here there are no flowers to love;
But afar off I dream that I see
Bent poppies and the deathless asphodel.

The second is a poet's reaction, expressed in brutal images, away from the dream and towards the new reality: The white body of the evening
Is torn into scarlet,
Slashed and gouged and seared
Into crimson,
And hung ironically
With garlands of mist.

And the wind
Blowing over London from Flanders
Has a bitter taste.

And then, in the third, comes not only regret for the old dream and recognition of the new reality, but defiance and a threat of revenge on those who had 'snared and bound' the faun as he slept: * * *
Ai! I could bite the brown flesh
Of my arms and hands for shame and grief.
I am weary for the freedom of free things,
The old gay life of the half-god,
Who had no dread of death or sorrow.
I am weary for the open spaces,
The long damp sands acrid with many tides,
And the infinite wistfulness of evening seas.

I am weary for wooded silences,
The nymph-rapt hours of heat,
[p.28] The slow cool lapse of moonlit nights,
The solitude of the mysterious stars
Pearlwise scattered upon the domed breast of the Great Mother,
Oh, weary for my brown clean streams,
And wet petals of woodland flowers,
Scented with dew and delicate as a kiss.

Here they grow careless, thinking me a coward,
But one night I shall break these thongs
And kill, kill, kill in sharp revenge.

* * *
After these comes the series of poems called Images of War, including many passionate statements of the dread realities. Tantignies recalls the dreary landscape that for the thousandth time was degraded by, prostituted to, the blood lust of Western and Central Central Europe: This land is tedious as a worn-out whore;
Faded and shabby
As her once bright face
Grown tarnished with disease,
Loathsome as her grin which shows
The black cubes of the missing teeth;
The very sky is drab and sear
As her lifeless hair,
The earth itself rotten and foul
As her dishonoured flesh.

And here is another slight but powerful statement of the circumstance of war which, because it has the precision of poetry and because it is devoid of all argument, is, if the cerebral, passionless, academic pacifist robots only understood poetry, only had perception — usually they have, if possible, less than the militarist robots — of more value [p.29] as a repudiation of war than all their polite polemical versifying: Four days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.

The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
While the shells crashed overhead.
The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where the white clouds moved in silent lines
Across the untroubled blue.
Technically, this poem is one of the most perfect Mr. Aldington has written, and it has none of the superfluous words that in accordance with his new transitional and later, as I have suggested, very English manner he preferred to leave in, rather than seem too self-consciously literary. For he recognised his past as the mere dream that it had been, and now he was trying to see his present as the very real reality that it was. If it were a prosaic reality, then let it be so, unadorned. For instance he writes: * * *
But when you've pondered
Hour upon chilly hour in those damned trenches
You get at the significance of things,
Get to know, clearer than before.
[p.30] What a tree means, what a pool,
Or a black wet field in sunlight.

And I, at least, feel that the word 'damned' is prosaic, breaks in discordantly on the emotional essence as well as on the technical excellence of the passage. It introduces an element of too casual revolt against immediate material circumstance when the main purpose of the lines is to suggest the inner illumination about things that came to the poet precisely from immediate material circumstance. It constitutes an indubitably threadbare epithet placed amongst words that are themselves charged with new meaning by the intensity of the perception behind them. 'Damned,' used conversationally, has ceased to have any serious import. When Mr. Pound tells us that Henri Gaudier dismissed the Greek sculptors with the words, 'Those damned Greeks' we feel, either that Gaudier was not taking the trouble to explain his thought to Mr. Pound, or that Mr. Pound is not taking the trouble to explain it to us. Like patriotism, the word 'damned' is not enough, is not signifying except when used seriously by people who believe in eternal damnation. The poet's answer — I have to remember that Mr. Aldington is one of the finest, as he is one of the most objective, most English, of English critics since Hazlitt — would probably be that the casual revolt was as true and as important as the illumination, and that literature must not be allowed to become too exclusive, too Mallarmean. And since the poet is an Englishman I can only admit that he is within his traditional rights and that I criticise as an outsider. And looking back from Death of a Hero I see why it [p.31] was better for him to use an inadequate word that kept him clear of Byzantinism, kept him out of the Mallarmean ivory tower. No poet who went through the war can go back to that. It is all right for Mr. Eliot to be always remote in his manner of expressing himself, as it is all right for Mr. Joyce and for Picasso in painting to be sometimes remote, but it could not, in the long run, be all right for Richard Aldington, as it could not be all right for, say, Jean Lurçat, the French painter, to be remote. They might, out of their very sensitiveness and even for a long time, follow roads that were wrong roads for them. They might be kept awake at night wrestling with the problems raised by Eliot's manner or by Joyce's or Picasso's many manners, but in the end they had to reject the Eliot method and the Joyce methods and the Picasso methods altogether, because the major experience for which they were trying to find artistic expression had no relation to what Eliot and Joyce and Picasso were trying to express. Eliot was painting verbal natures mortes. Joyce and Picasso were, it goes without saying, men of much greater range than Eliot, but to men haunted by the necessity of expressing the always living realities and consequences of the war, much of what they were expressing could not, however lovely, seem of much more importance than natures mortes. Aldington and Lurçat wanted, in the end, to paint only natures vivantes. I borrow the distinction from my friend, Monsieur Waldemar George. N

This is not for an instant to dispute the significance of Joyce and Picasso. It remains profound and, technically, [p.32] they are the supreme virtuosi of their generation. But the war was outside of their experience, so none of their technical forms could be applied to it. Similarly with Mr. Eliot. He is a master, a little master — his range is very limited indeed — but the war was outside of his experience too.

The effect of the war on Aldington and Lurçat at has been to bring their work closer to objective reality, but I do not think there is any immediate danger of their returning to the undiscriminating realism of the nineteenth century, because in the first place their technical point of departure is not realistic, and in the second place the principal reality that has been impelling them to expression is so vast and so terrible to look back on, that, grasping its full tragic significance as they slowly and sensitively and thoughtfully have done, they cannot, in the nature of things, fall into the mere pathetic of, say, Monet or Zola.

To return from these technical considerations to the actual war experience out of which Richard Aldington was to write for a long time afterwards, we may note that if the greater number of his war poems emphasise the horror that surrounded him, one or two show that he was far from being insensitive to the few inadequate amenities that made it more tolerable, and that if he allows them their place, he allows them no more. Sentimentalists exaggerate their relative importance for the individual man, and I wonder whether it is not a sign of concession to sentimental philistinism in Herr Remarque's book that he leaves the reader with the impression that the friendship between his group of men all but made the war worth while. Actually one wonders [p.33] how deep war friendships went. How many men who were drawn together in the abnormal strain, and who survived, trouble to correspond with each other to-day? The truth of the matter is that abnormal circumstances brought about artificial friendships which, naturally, left kindly feelings, but nothing more. The thinking soldier knew that ninety-nine out of every hundred men about him, whose companionship he was grateful for at the time, were never likely to be more to him than temporary companions in temporary misfortune. The fact that that misfortune was a terrible misfortune binds him to them in spirit still, and in so far as the happiness of those who came back is endangered by the fact that they suffered that misfortune he finds himself drawn to their side. But he was mostly alone, as he knew that they were, every man of them, mostly alone. That solitude in companionship was part of the misfortune. One knew that the others felt it too. Hence the bond that still remains amongst the survivors even though they never take the trouble to see or write to each other. How collectively fundamental and how individually superficial the sense of identity with somebody else could be in war is well conveyed in Machine Guns: Gold flashes in the dark,
And on the road
Each side, behind, in front of us,
Gold sparks
Where the fierce bullets strike the stones.

In a near shell-hole lies a wounded man,
The stretcher-bearers bending over him;
And at our feet
Cower shrinkingly against the ground
Dark shadowy forms of men.
Only we two stand upright;
All differences of life and character smoothed out
And nothing left
Save that one foolish tie of caste
That will not let us shrink.

And again, after a salute to the memory of an officer whom the poet had loved 'from the ranks,' there is another salute: You too are dead,
The coarse and ignorant,
Carping against all that was too high
For your poor spirit to grasp,
Cruel and evil-tongued —
Yet you died without a moan or whimper.

Oh, not I, not I should dare to judge you!
But rather leave with tears your grave
Where the sweet grass will cover all your faults
And all your courage too.

Brother, hail and farewell.
The sergeant might complain that such a man was 'nothing but an agitator,' but one could not let oneself hate the creature except when he was safely away 'on a course' or gone home, on leave, or to get a commission. Common misfortune bound one unnaturally even where there was personal antipathy. Which is not a tribute to war, but evidence of how war reduces one to the barest elementary humanity. From now on it was the barest elementary humanity that Richard Aldington was concerned with. Hence the austerity of his books and hence the resentment against his work felt by those who had never had the social top — dressings stripped off them.

[p.35]

Once, however, Richard Aldington had an almost cheerful poem: In and out of the dreary trenches,
Trudging cheerily under the stars
I make for myself little poems
Delicate as a flock of doves.
They fly away like, white-winged doves.
It is significant as showing how little relatively the famous war camaraderie amounted to, for, inspired by the thought of poetry, not of companionship, it is happy. The chance companion rarely impinged on one's inner consciousness. His function in relation to you, as yours in relation to him, was the negative one of distraction. One's delight in reading, and much more, in writing, poetry was positive, was of the essence of oneself, was something precious that even Armageddon could not touch, could only wipe out with one's life. It is this sense of the fact that there are things, like poetry and the white clouds moving across the untroubled blue, as in Bombardment, that make life worth while, which was to be the salvation of Richard Aldington and which was, after the war, to draw him away from the nature morte school of writers. He had been near to death for a long time, and he did not think much of it. The epitaph on the 'agitator' showed that he did not despair of humanity, even of the most unsympathetic, most trouble-making type of humanity. Life might have its drawbacks, human nature might have its faults, but nature was beautiful, human nature had some virtues — delight in poetry, for instance. So he was for natures vivantes, he was for life — and for quick life, not still life. Vitae non mortis sapientia meditatio est.

When the war ended, Richard Aldington was, like most of the war generation, twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. In the ordinary way it is rather a good age to be. Even in London literary circles life should be providing some novelty and agreeable surprise when one is twenty-five. But for those who came back London did not, except as Paris's neighbour, seem exciting any more. At least it provided nothing itself that could excite young men who had seen the war. The Sitwells tried to put a bit of English high spirits into it, but they were rather too self-consciously high-brow, and besides, their ambitions seemed to be almost as much social as literary, that is to say, they made themselves more provocative of interest than their work. And that, to quote Mr. Eliot, was 'not it at all,' was not what serious people of literary interests were looking for. Then the ballet came back, but in spite of one or two or three superbly beautiful new items in its repertoire, the ballet became steadily less poetic for several years, grew cosmopolitan, psychological, perverse, witty, even frivolous — it actually had failures. (Though, fortunately, before it disappeared it recovered all its old nobility and grace with L'Enfant Prodigue and Le Bal.) Mr. Yeats retreated, first to Oxford, and then for good to Ireland — a changed Ireland that his genius had helped to create. Hulme was dead, killed early in the war. 'Ezra' retreated, first to Paris and then into retire [p.37] ment in Italy. Lawrence shook the dust of an England that had been beastly to him from his feet. Mr. Eliot, who had turned up from America via Paris and Germany during the war, started The Criterion and encouraged poetry to 'go' professorial. The quakerish Mr. Fry tried to make painting go professorial too. Spontaneity had gone. Englishness, too, had gone. And though Paris remained exciting, a somewhat similar state of affairs arose there and became more accentuated after the extinction in 1921 of the sudden, upper-class French blaze that was the genius of Marcel Proust. Paris was no longer as French as it had been. There was even a popular song about it: Ah, qu'il était beau, mon village, Cher Paris, mon Paris On n'y parlait qu'un seul langage. ça suffisait pour être compris. * * *
Now the American invasion began. And Picasso, a Spaniard, attained to such a world-wide celebrity as probably no other painter in history, not even Titian or Raphael, had known in his lifetime. Stravinsky, a Russian, became supreme in music; and even in literature, the least international of the arts, the name of James Joyce became at least as significant for literary young men in Paris as that of Proust or Valéry. It is true that Joyce (following the tradition that cultivated Irish Catholics who leave Ireland always gravitate towards Paris as cultivated Irish Protestants, from the days of Congreve and Swift to the days of Wilde and Shaw, used to gravitate to London and as our unfortunate uneducated are [p.38] swallowed by the pays des barbares beyond the seas) had settled amongst them. But it was not that. It was that France itself was tired out.

However it be about Paris, certainly something had gone out of London for the men who came back to it. They were still young, but instead of going ahead they became almost back numbers. Or it seemed so. And when Ulysses and The Waste Land appeared in 1922, and Lawrence's most mature work, Kangaroo, shortly afterwards, they had such astonishing — and obviously deserved — success that it seemed as if the men who had been in the war must definitely hand over the literary laurels of their generation to colleagues who for one good reason or another had not seen the great tragedy anything like as closely as they themselves had.

During the ten years during which the war generation, with a few exceptions, remained in virtual retirement, Richard Aldington wrote an odd poem — Exile and Other Poems appeared in 1923, the more ambitious A Fool i' the Forest, which is in reality a less extensive statement of the main theme of Death of a Hero, in 1925 — but it would seem that he gave relatively little time to poetry. Possibly without realising it he was waiting till the time should be ripe to give full utterance to all he felt about what he had seen and experienced. He occupied himself mostly with translation and with literary criticism, doing really what was, to a man of his range and capacity, no more than hack work, 'carrying on' in fact, little more. His life of Voltaire, however, is a work of rare value, and now that the craze for stylish biography, introduced by Mr. Strachey and vulgarised by [p.39] Messrs. Guedalla, Maurois and Ludwig, has died down, its virtue should be more apparent to the interested reader. Mr. Strachey has written about Voltaire, but though he owes much to Voltaire as a stylist, he treated him as he treats most of his subjects, as little more than a comic figure in the history of a world that is at best no more than a mild diversion for very specially cultivated, slightly bored, dilettantes. Being passionless himself, he could scarcely understand the intense passion that animates so much of Voltaire's work. For Mr. Strachey the comedy of intrigue at Sans Souci is most of the story. For Richard Aldington that is an immortal comedy too — he burkes neither Voltaire's trickeries nor his avariciousness — but he appreciates not less the nobility and the passion and the humane feeling that even his bitterest enemies admitted and admit in the curious, furious little product of Jesuit training and the eighteenth-century French social system who became the sage of Ferney. In Richard Aldington's study the whole story is told with a lack of affectation and at the same time a natural grace of style that are all the more surprising and refreshing for coming at a period when the only alternative to the excessive brightness of Stracheyism seemed to be the excessive dullness of Morleyism.

It is obvious why Richard Aldington should have been drawn to the study of Voltaire at the time. Voltaire's scepticism, his distrust of the vested interests, his humanity, and his often malicious fancy were bound to appeal to the disillusionment and sense of pity of the returned soldier. Richard Aldington's choice of works for translation is equally [p.40] characteristic. They were mostly from the French, and they were all of valuable works, valuable particularly for the post-war English mentality and that had been untranslated or inadequately translated previously. Many of them must be recognised as genuine contributions to the store of English literature derived from foreign sources. From this point of view, the most precious is perhaps the medieval satire on domesticity, The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, which is warm-hearted, disillusioned, rueful, and gay all at once. The translation of these sketches is a remarkable and felicitous tour de force, for it is in an English that is not pure fifteenth century, but that is, in spirit, a well-nigh perfect rendering of the pre-Renaissance naîveté and gay charm. A professor would have given a literal rendering that nobody who delights in good writing would want to read to the end. Mr. Aldington knew how to do better than that. He produced a version that without for an instant suggesting modern society, holds the modern reader under the spell of its naturalness from the first page to the last. It is an achievement that many translators might envy.

But if The Fifteen Joys of Marriage is gay, in most cases his choice of books for translation showed the tendency to dwell on the disillusionment and bitterness of existence, and on the necessity for England to face hard facts about matters in which it had drifted into sentimentality and false Utopianism. The war and all it meant had affected the translator's spirit, and he wanted to express that change in everything he did. The heretical child of St. Francis was becoming a heretical child of Catherine of Siena now that the Black [p.41] Death was over and its consequences becoming more evident every day. Harsh realities had to be faced, and drifting authority had to be made to listen to the truth, to be forcefully brought back to its primary functions. Authority might be the high financier who nowadays buys newspapers, and to divert attention from his own nefarious doings focuses it on the movements of an infant princess who might with decency be left to enjoy her babyhood undisturbed by press photographers and the ignoble writers of ignoble gossip. So Richard Aldington translated Le Sage's terrible Turcaret. Or authority might be pre-war prejudice in favour of being 'modern' in love. So he translated Les Liaisons dangereuses, in some ways the most terrible of all French novels, a book that as much as anything in Juvenal or Shakespeare or Swift or Balzac warns too trusting youth against the selfishness and perfidy of the specious and sophisticated seducers who are as common amongst the high-souled bourgeoisie of post-war Bloomsbury as they were in the cynical aristocracy of eighteenth-century Paris. His translating sceptics like Cyrano de Bergerac was another sign that the calamity of the war had shocked him mentally as much as it had hurt him physically.

During these years also he published one long poem called A Fool i' the Forest, but as it is a statement in ideal terms of the theme of post-war disillusionment that was treated more realistically and elaborately in Death of a Hero, it does not call for detailed analysis here. One may, however, note the Shakespearean influence in some of the outstanding passages (remembering that, when it was being [p.42] written, Mr. Eliot, the most influential poet of the post-war period in London, was developing the puritanical fashion inaugurated by Mr. Bernard Shaw of insisting on an extremely critical attitude to the unShavian and unEliotish genius of England's greatest literary figure). There is Lear-like bitterness, for instance, in the dismissal of Scaramouche, the professional jester: I want a fool,
A true, a bitter fool who's looked at life
And sees it's naught.
and there are obvious echoes from Ophelia's song in the beautiful lament for Byron: Penelope has spun a purple shroud
And scattered cypress on her marriage bed.

Take up his bones, O lift them tenderly,
For they are brittle from the flame,
And brittle was his heart.

O wrap his bones in purple,
For a king lies dead
And will not come again.

O tread upon the violet and the rose,
Lay waste the hyacinths among the rocks;
He will not come again.

O break the silver trumpet and the lyre,
Sully the marble, cut the crisped bronze,
Byron is dead.

But as Mr. Eliot, in spite of his critic evangel, has often shown that he is steeped in Shakespeare, so Mr. Aldington, [p.43] though as a literary temperament he is almost the complete opposite of Mr. Eliot, shows in at least one short passage in A Fool i' the Forest that he had been reading The Waste Land and Cousin Harriet as well as Sappho and Byron: O Evening Star,
You bring the Evening News,
You bring the tired business man
Back to his tired spouse;
Sappho and Shelley you no longer bring.
The contrast between Athenian and modern scientific civilisation, however, is particularly significant because of the critical attitude it indicates on the part of Richard Aldington to Baudelairism and its post-war echoes in the more superficial (and nowadays, alas! most generally imitated) expressions of Mr. Eliot's talent: Yet this Parthenon is harmony,
Science and beauty reconciled with health.
We have beauty that's diseased and wanton,
Art that plays with ugliness and fantasy,
* * *
Our Parthenon's a Jew hotel.

When Richard Aldington discovered that he could write an English novel, he at the same time discovered the ideal form for so varied-minded a writer as himself. The English novel at its richest is a kind of hold-all. It is observation, satire, comedy, tragedy, lyricism and drama, poetry and prose by turns. Mr. Strachey has pointed out that it is the true heir to Elizabethan drama which was all these things. They are often unified only by the Englishness of the very loose form. We may like it or we may not, but whether we like or not we have to admit that a vast quantity of fine literature has come to birth in that form. When all the numerous exceptions are made, it does seem to be true that the most richly English genius is never happy, as the greater Latin genius is happy, within the strict limits of literary form. A formal English genius seems almost as unnatural as an informal French genius. Romain Rolland would probably be a more tolerable writer if he were an Englishman. As it is, he is often merely faux anglais. Similarly Austin Dobson would probably have written something worth while had he been a Frenchman. He remains merely fake French. The explanation lies not altogether where Matthew Arnold would find it, in the different geniuses of the two languages, but also in the different ideas as to what is considered suitable material for literary expression in the two traditions. [p.45]

Actually, however, if there is a fault to find with Death of a Hero from the point of view of purely literary criticism, it is that, for an English novel, it is too formal. Its theme is stated at the beginning as in Greek tragedy (note, too, how the author constitutes himself Chorus), and from there on everything is closely related to it. The personal theme is the driving of the central character to suicide by the society that moulded him, society as it was in pre-war England. In A Fool i' the Forest, the murder was spiritual; the end of its hero's adventures was work in an office by day and a suburban golf links in the evening. In Death of a Hero the end is suicide on the battlefield because of the intolerable strain of society as represented on the one hand by two very 'modern' women, and on the other by the war into which that society suicidally plunged its younger members as the easiest way out of the impasse to which its own selfishness had brought it. The hero's suicide being a symbol of the suicide of society, when there are digressions from the personal element it is in reality because the personal history is the underplot to the other. At the very beginning of the book the mother represents the background of the disorderly society, as the telegram announcing her son's death on the battlefield represents its inevitable end. With the possible exception of the apostrophe to Aphrodite there is no departure from the unified themes of the individual man and the society of which he formed part. And even that apostrophe is significant for the purpose of the book, the moral purpose of pleading for life, but life on a different basis to that on which pre-war English society was set up. That basis is examined [p.46] from many points of view, religious, artistic, moral, and political. The double plot allowed the author to write imaginatively of human experience when he was dealing with his characters, and objectively, as a critic, when he was considering the society about them. Both methods fit into the scheme of the book as outlined from the beginning.

As a piece of drama between human beings, one of the most concentrated and significant passages in the story is not, I think, any in the now famous war part, but the scene at Waterloo Station between the hero and his wife and mistress who have come to see him off to France and the front. They have, all three, with the best possible intentions been admittedly unfaithful to each other, but only the man senses that the world has changed for them for ever, senses the idiocy of the pre-war 'modern' Revolutionist's Handbook ideas of intellectualised selfishness on which they had tried to base their relationship:

...To Winterbourne's surprise and delight, Elizabeth and Fanny were there. Elizabeth had received his telegram although it was after hours. She had rung up Fanny and they had gone to Waterloo together, only to find that the train with the Upshires draft was not there. Fanny had used her charms upon a susceptible R.T.O. and he had told them where to go, so there they were. All this Elizabeth poured out in a rapid, nervous, jerky way. While Fanny just clutched Winterbourne's left hand and pressed it hard, saying nothing. They had about ten minutes before the train left. The draft-conducting officer noticed that Winterbourne was speaking to two women, obviously ladies, and came up.

'Get in anywhere you like, Winterbourne, only don't miss the train.'

'Very good, sir, thank you,' and saluted smartly.

'D'you always have to do that?' asked Elizabeth with a little giggle.

'Yes, it's the custom. They seem to attach great importance to it.'

'How absurd!'

'Why absurd? said Fanny, feeling that Winterbourne was somehow hurt by the contempt in her voice. 'It's only a convention.'

[p.47]

Winterbourne simply felt dull and uneasy, tongue-tied. He was saying farewell, perhaps for the last time, to the only two human beings he had really loved, and found he had nothing to say. He just felt dull and uneasy, dully remote from them.

They were silent for seconds which dragged like minutes. Then they all began to say something together, interrupted themselves. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.!' 'What were you going to say?' 'Oh, nothing, I forget.' And then relapsed into silence again.

'All aboard!' shouted the R.T.O.

Winterboume hastily kissed Fanny and Elizabeth.

'Good-bye, good-bye; don't forget to write. We'll send you parcels!'

'Thanks, ever so. Good-bye.'

He made for the compartment where a door had been left open for him, but found it full. The luggage van, piled with the men's rations, was next door. Winterbourne jumped in.

'You'll have to stand!' exclaimed Fanny.

'Why, no. There's plenty of room on the floor.'

The train moved.

[p.48]

'Good-bye.'

Winterbourne waved his hand. He felt no particular emotion, merely an intensifying of the general depressingness of things. He watched them receding, as they waved their hands. Beautiful girls, both of them, and so smartly dressed.

'Be happy!' he shouted as a valediction, in a sudden gust of disinterested affection for them. And then lost sight of them.

Fanny and Elizabeth were both crying.

'What did he shout?' asked Elizabeth through her sobs.

'"Be happy"'

'How curious of him! And how like him! Oh, I know I shall never see him again!'

Fanny tried to comfort her. But Elizabeth somehow felt it was all Fanny's fault.

Winterbourne sat on his pack in the joggling van for about ten minutes. It was almost dark. The guard was trying to read a newspaper by the light of a dim oil-lamp. The soldiers who had to see that the rations weren't stolen were already lying on the floor. Winterbourne buttoned up his coat, turned up the collar, arranged a woollen scarf on his pack to make a pillow, and lay down on the dirty floor beside them. In five minutes he was asleep.

It is all so clear, the over-nervous and jealous Elizabeth, the over-gallant and selfish Fanny, the dulled, indifferent, war-time gentleman-ranker. And they are all so English, in what they leave out as well as in what they say. The draft officer, had he been a Frenchman or an Austrian, would have the courteous thought too, but he would have made an elaborate salutation to the ladies, and a French or Austrian author would not fail to describe it. The kind of [p.49] reticence that does not do or refer to such things is English. There is, on the other hand, a very English unreticence in the tenderly comic vignette of a more modest and unchanging stratum of English society in the break-up of the parade after the (Home Service) Colonel has lectured the men leaving for France, in the clumsy way that Home Service Dug-Outs did lecture, and, he having departed, the Adjutant has said the more sympathetic few words that made the idea of authority more tolerable to the men. The parade is dismissed:

The draft confusedly moved over the darkened ground to the barrack-room, chattering excitedly:

'What's the next thing?'

'P'rade at eight-thirty to move off at nine.'

'Who said so?'

'It's in B'tallion orders.'

'Silly old mucker old Brandon is, give me the fair pip he did with 'is" walk about soldierly "—yes! up to yer arse in mud.'

'Bloody old . . .'

'Yes, but the Adjutant was all right.' 'Oh, 'e 's a gentleman, 'e is.'

'Makes all the difference when they've bin in the ranks theirselves.'

Surely these men are, in character as in language, the very men that Falstaff commanded, that Doll Tearsheet met at the Boar's Head. For anyone who served with Englishmen in the war they are, beyond question, touchingly true to the English amateur soldier type. One thinks of the numbers of such natural, kindly, and peaceable men who were murdered — [p.50] it is the only word to use — in the war and wonders whether such murder cannot at least be minimised, if not actually prevented, in the future. When I was a boy, Irish history was not allowed in Irish schools, so I read English history, and one of the stories I particularly remember is that — it should be known in all countries — of Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who refused to take his men to war overseas when the king, Edward I., was not going himself: Bigod, said the King, you will go or hang. By God, answered the Earl, I will neither go nor hang. And he did not go. In modern England, it is not the king who wields the power that Edward I. wielded in the thirteenth century. It is his ministers. And the privileges of the nobles of mediaeval times are the rights of the ordinary elector to-day. It seems to me, as an outsider, therefore, that the simple cry raised by so many soldiers during the war, `Why don't Lloyd George and the Kaiser fight it out themselves?' was based on the soundest tradition of English liberty. Certainly if anybody has to be killed it would be better that it should be the elderly political play-actors rather than simple men, sinful men, if you like, but peaceable, who ask nothing from politicians but to be let live their lives without excessive interference. They had no quarrel with their 'enemies' — did they not come out of their trenches and fraternise with them at Christmas, 1914? Now they are dead, uselessly. In mediaeval Siena the out-going governors of the city were held strictly accountable for their actions while in office. And there used to be such [p.51] a thing as impeachment in England until prime ministers adopted the practice of hushing enquiries by making charges of corruption a question of a vote of confidence and threatening a general election. If Mr. Wyndham Lewis would use his powers as a pamphleteer who has some sense of language, in agitating for some such examination of the doings and misdoings of powerful politicians — especially war politicians, politicians who prolonged the war unnecessarily for months and years — one would be more prepared to consider him seriously than one is when he wastes the abilities he has on unsignifying aesthetes of Bloomsbury and Montparnasse, mere whipping of dead asses, and defending the neo-Kaiserism of Adolf Hitler.

On the subject of stay-at-home society's general behaviour during the war, one part of the passage on Cant in Death of a Hero is particularly worth quoting:

It was the regime of Cant before the War which made the Cant during the War so damnably possible and easy. On our coming of age the Victorians generously handed us a charming little cheque for fifty guineas — fifty-one months of hell, and the results. Charming people, weren't they? Virtuous and far-sighted. But it wasn't their fault? They didn't make the War? It was Prussia, and Prussian militarism? Right you are, right ho! Who made Prussia a great power and subsidised Frederick the Second to do it, thereby snatching an empire from France? England. Who backed up Prussia against Austria, and Bismarck against Napoleon III.? England. And whose Cant governed England in the nineteenth centur? But never mind this domestic squabble of mine — put it that I mean the 'Victorians' of all nations...for after all the Victorians [p.52] were still in full blast in 1914, and had pretty much the control of everything. Did they appeal to us honestly, and say: 'We have made a colossal and tragic error, we have involved you and all of us in a huge war; it's too late to stop it; you must come and help us, and we promise to take the first opportunity of making peace and making 'it thoroughly'? They did not.

This is, of course, journalism, but it is journalism that has permanent value as Swift's journalism has permanent value, because it has passion in it, nothing of Mr. Pound's armchair complaining about the war that 'killed a good deal of sculpture' (meaning not Gaudier himself but the work he might have done had he survived). It is written at white heat, and in addition it is the only kind of political criticism that is worth anything to any people, whether they be English or American, Negro or Chinese, imperial or parochial, Russian or Irish. It is honest self-criticism. A capacity for self-criticism in any country is a sign of strength, and when I see England growing intelligently self-critical in such a passage as that, I, as an Irishman, wonder whether my own country has even yet seen the worst of its misadventures with its more powerful neighbour.

In this connection I may remark that though I may, myself, criticise my own countrymen (and I am only too well aware that we have even more than our share of a conquered people's vices — excessive hatred in political matters, for instance, and some of our cheaper Catholic papers are a loathsome denial of everything that is represented by the words 'Christian charity'), when an Englishman like Richard Aldington takes it on himself to criticise [p.53] us for our excessive nationalism (as he has done), he must be told that, until his own countrymen have got rid of their excessive imperialism we simply are not free to consider what any Englishman has to say of us. Until then he must weed his own garden. There are quantities of imperialist weeds there still. If he cannot identify them about himself he has only to lift his eyes any Sunday morning in the year and he will not be able to help seeing Mr. J.L. Garvin loud-speaking from some unmistakably British imperialist Pisgah height or other. The fact that Mr. Garvin is an Irishman (Tyneside, isn't it?) does not alter the fact that it is the British demand for such stuff that created him. British imperialism has to leave us Irish alone before we can let England alone, before we can cease to be, at least defensively, nationalist.

One must not, I think, see a continuation of Lawrence's utopian belief in a sexual earthly paradise in the apostrophes to Aphrodite in Death of a Hero. For they show a wider knowledge and understanding of human experience in the matter than Lawrence. And as Mr. Aldington is, at the same time, priest of Aphrodite and moralist, they lead him, in the end, to a question rather than a conclusion: 'Does the free play of the passions and intelligence make for more erotic happiness than the taboo-system? 'Again, in the story, the free play of the passions in the hero's relations with the two women leads to such complications that the resulting worry was almost as responsible as the strain of the war for his suicide. Still, he calls the Cyprian 'beneficent.' Of course she is beneficent for those who become her [p.54] adherents with the right dispositions. But may we assume that she reasons to the point of knowing that 'there are only too many people ready to propagate,' and is not, therefore, anxious 'to create too many victims for Hunger,' and that that is why she 'patronises even the heretics of Sparta and Lesbos...' I doubt it. There are too many victims for Hunger apart altogether from Sparta and Lesbos. I doubt that we shall ever find any reason in these matters. In a world of self-appointed judges it would be more than sufficient if the countries that use the Protestant languages (and which seem, if one is to judge by English Sunday papers and American daily papers and some passages in Prince von Bülow's memoirs, to glory in scandal) could learn to renounce the attempt to explain the inexplicable and, without condescension — who or what is any of us to condescend where Christ Himself did not condescend? — to practise the charity of the New Testament towards the woman taken in adultery, 'Neither will I condemn thee!' and implied again in the statement that it will be better with Sodom and Gomorrah at the last day than with those who hear the Gospel of charity and do not keep it. I do not know whether Richard Aldington reads the New Testament, but it is evident that if he did read it he would find his own will to tolerance in these things as nobly expressed as he can ever hope to see it expressed anywhere.

Though Death of a Hero is unquestionably a very Protestant book, I am set wondering by the extraordinary historical defence of Protestantism that so enlightened a writer as Mr. Aldington puts in the mouth of his young man:

[p.55]

There are lots of things I detest in Protestantism — its smugness and aridity, for instance — but I like its honesty. And we owe it a great deal. It was because of the political inconveniences resulting from a multitude of sects that Holland and England reintroduced religious tolerance, which had disappeared with the triumph of the Christians. Of course the tolerance is not complete, because the Christians are still persecutors at heart...

As a Catholic it would interest me to know in what the special, unshared, honesty of Protestantism consists. Surely, again, Protestant worship was tolerated in Catholic France from the time of Henri IV. (with an interlude from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 until the Regency), and the principle of religious liberty established there once and for all at the Revolution — which, late as it was, was forty years before the English Catholic Emancipation Act. And does not the beginning of religious tolerance in Catholic Germany date from the Confession of Augsburg, which was earlier even than the Edict of Nantes? And I think I am right in saying that even before the Reformation the Jews of Rome were protected by the Papacy when Jews were denied the right to live in England. There was flagrant intolerance in one Catholic country, Spain, but was not that due to local circumstances, a reaction against the fanaticism of the Moors? I can understand Albert Sorel's point when he says, 'La Réforme a engendré la tolérance par une conséquence nécessaire de son principe,' but beyond that I do not see that Holland and England come into the question of religious toleration until long after it had been introduced elsewhere.

[p.56]

Again, the author of Death of a Hero refers to Saint Teresa of Lisieux in terms which, since he does not even attempt to justify them, seem particularly gratuitous.

But his remarks on the subject are not as deplorable as Shakespeare's treatment of Sainte Jeanne in Henry VI . No man can be absolutely impartial, and in spite of these two blemishes I do see on every page of the book an effort on the part of the author to shed national and religious prejudice and to set up human values in place of merely social values. Even his Protestantism is not the Protestantism that, for four centuries, has hated art and the life of the senses everywhere it found them. Richard Aldington's Protestantism is, like Renaissance Catholicism in Italy, somehow mixed up with Hellenism. But with him it is not Platonic. It is a reversion to the Aegean civilisation that came before Plato and Aristotle tried to rationalise the instinctive and beautiful religious sense of the people which had expressed itself riot intellectually but imaginatively, artistically, sensuously. At all events, Death of a Hero is devoid of snobbery and worldliness, and if its first part is filled with passionate indignation against the culpable indifference and selfishness of the pre-war generation, it is, in its second part, not less saturated with pity for the helpless victims of their elders' guilt.

I have not dwelt on the author's qualities of observation and characterisation, or on his narrative sense. This last is a technical matter, and technique is only a question of saying whatever you have to say as effectively as possible in the literary category you choose, epic, lyric, dramatic, narrative [p.57] prose, narrative poetry, etc. The author of Death of a Hero, acting as Chorus, may at times seem a little over-intrusive with his comment, but when it is remembered that it was a first novel it seems an astonishing achievement. He never, whether he is writing imaginatively or journalistically, loses sight of his theme. The portraits of George Winterbourne's weak and kindly father and masterful and selfish mother are unforgettable; the contrast between the characters of the two younger women is as admirably suggested throughout as in the scene at Waterloo that I have already cited; in the war part there is the perfectly realised relationship between the hero and his officer, so reticent, expressed on both sides by indications of intellectual disapproval but instinctive kindliness; and there are innumerable little human scenes that are like pictures by Adrian Brouwers put into words — the following, for instance:

...He could not help glancing rather wolfishly at their meal. One of them noticed it, and pointing to his steak, said with his mouth full:

'Ah reckon tha doesn't get groob the likes o' this in thy lot, lad.'

'No, but the stew's very good-only, you get tired of it every day.'

'Ay, that tha does. But we 're skilled men, we are, traade union. They've got to feed oos well, they 'ave.' Half-kindly, half-contemptuously, the miner cut off a hunk of his steak and held it out to Winterbourne in his large dirty hand.

'Here tha art, lad, tak a bite at that.'

'Oh no, thanks, it's very kind of you, but...'

'Nay, lad, tha's welcome; tak it, tak it. Tha looks fair [p.58] fammelled and wore out. Tha's na workin' chap, ah knows.?

Torn between his feeling of humiliation, his desire not to reject the man's kindly-meant offer, and his hungry belly, Winterbourne hesitated. He finally took it, with a rather ghastly feeling of animal humiliation. The cold, tender meat tasted delicious. It was the first unsodden meat he had eaten for weeks. He gave them his last cigarettes, and returned to his winch.

There is fun too, sometimes malicious fun, as in the macabre comedy of the telephone call in the prologue and in the description of Fanny's 'gem-like' eyes: 'He looked at them and wondered what it felt like to possess natural organs which were such superb objets d'art.' But most frequently the fun is merely a tender undercurrent to horror in such scenes as the return from the draft parade which I cited earlier. If this modern version of the story of Orestes seems at times almost inhumanly cruel, it is because the humane sense of its author was outraged beyond endurance by the inhuman cruelty of the Europe that let the war happen and of the war itself.

That inhuman cruelty still exists however, and these protests against the war, the enduring protests uttered imaginatively by artists, are those that it most fears. One would have thought that the lie about the war was told during the war by the ignoble journalists who sacrificed, not their bodies, as the fighting soldiers did, but the truth as they saw it, and such literary talent as God gave them in the interest of militarist politicians and for money. We all know of the elderly provincial newspaper potentate who [p.59] spent four years threatening to say what he thought, but got invited to breakfast in Westminster every time he showed signs of getting restive, and so naturally never said anything worth saying in the end. And what are we to think of some war correspondents who, from a safe distance behind the line, told lies — not merely the lies about military operations which might be necessary in the interests of secrecy and surprise in dealing with the enemy, but the unnecessary, degrading lies that officialdom considered suitable for consumption by the people, its fellow-countrymen, whom it pretended to regard as civilized — and then, when the war was all over, turned round and made still more money by telling the little more of the truth that their infinite discretion told them would, in the different circumstances, be acceptable?

But, a year ago, in the middle of the 'war-book' season in London, a pamphlet on the subject appeared which left the reader to understand that it was the authors of the war-novels who were telling lies, as if authority — poor dear war-time authority that 'fought' for small nations and then sent Black and Tans to Ireland — had never invented angels of Mons, or deliberately planned atrocities or cadaver factories or any of the hundreds of other lies by which authority and journalism, both, degraded not their enemies but themselves during the war. The author of the pamphlet included Death of a Hero in his list of 'lying' books, but he did not discuss it in his text. One wondered why. He selected for particular odium that moving and beautiful story, A Farewell to Arms, by Mr. Ernest Hemingway, the [p.60] most naturally lyrical of all the American writers who draw their material from European life. Here is what the pamphleteer says:

As to Mr. Hemingway's hero, it is impossible to write of him with reasonable restraint. A man who breaks his engagements, deserts at the height of the battle, and aids and abets the desertion with him of a nurse whom he has seduced, would on any reading not be a man I should care to meet except in circumstances which allowed me to say what I thought about him. When we add that this unspeakable cad is not a combatant officer but an ambulance officer whose sole duty is to relieve suffering there is no more to say. The picture of such a man drawn by an artist like Mr. Hemingway might have been a powerful if cruel performance. To write his story without conveying or even hinting at any trace of weakness in his character, or any trace of wrong thinking in his philosophy, is, however, to write a lie, to sin against the Holy Ghost, and between those who cannot realise it and those who cannot do anything else there is a gulf not to be bridged.

It sounds grand. Only there was no battle to have a `height,' there was a panic-stricken retreat, and considering that Mr. Hemingway indicated as plain as the nose on one's face that his hero's only alternative to desertion was gratuitous execution at the hands of badly' rattled 'senior officers, I should be inclined to 'hint' either that the author of the pamphlet did not know how to read intelligently or else could not write honestly. Mr. Hemingway's hero is as courageous and sympathetic as any figure in any romantic modern story that I have read. He rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's and more, but Caesar abused [p.61] his authority outrageously, and when that happened he very properly got out of the way. Personally, as a Catholic I was brought up to believe that it is not merely one's right but one's duty to offer resistance to the flagrant abuse of authority. And I do not at all feel that it is a sin against the Holy Ghost to approve of a man for doing so, whatever his personal weaknesses may be. So I must survive as best I may being separated by a gulf from one who as good as condones war-time authority's lies — that is what it amounts to — and attacks men who have the courage to speak the truth as they see it. Like M. Paul Claudel, 'Je ne suis pas complètement idiot.' But an idiot apparently is what one should — according to apologists for war-time authority — behave like if one is up against a homicidal maniac disguised as a responsible superior officer.

So much for the general tendency to criticise the attitude to the authors and directors of the war expressed in such books as Death of a Hero. Returning to more purely literary considerations, the book, with its plot and underplot, its mixture of exalted, imaginative tragedy and furious misanthropical pamphleteering, so much in the tradition of Timon, makes me wonder where, as an artist, Richard Aldington will end. Will he, when he ceases to write about the war, write about modern forests of Arden? Did the war make it impossible for him to express something of the mood of Twelfth Night? Is his boyish Franciscanism gone for good? Will he write a Tempest at the end? And will he have to go on writing novels, or will the widespread dissatisfaction with modern conditions in the English theatre [p.62] bring about the change that would make it possible for him worthily to achieve Englishness in the theatre again, that Englishness which is a rambling, charming, mixum-gatherum of everything, poetry and banality, the sublime and the ridiculous, witty comedy and sublime tragedy, bloody melodrama and outrageous farce all in one? John Oliver Hobbes used to maintain that the pre-war Gaiety Theatre musical comedy was the most thoroughly English entertainment to be found in the London of her day. In a sense she was right, but Our Miss Gibbs, for all its merits, was not exactly a worthy descendant of A Midsummer Night's Dream. If it were written in language of adequate expressiveness there is no real objection to such go-as-you-please entertainment. It was no romantic who wrote, Parfois un beau désordre est un effet de l'art. And I shall be surprised if Richard Aldington allows himself to be bound by any fake `classicism.' He is cultivated enough to know better. Death of a Hero is, if anything, too formal, too unified for an English novel, but I think it is due more to the fact of its being a first novel than to any unnatural pretension on the part of the author to being 'classicist.' You can be Hellenic and English at once, but for an English novelist to be classicist is for him to be a negation of both the Englishness and the Hellenism that may be in him. Pope was classicist, and except, perhaps, Miss Sitwell, who cares for anything except a few betrayals of his classicism? The Keats of the Odes was Hellenic and yet utterly English at the same time. Outside of the theatre literary architecture is of slight consequence. And even in the theatre what person [p.63] of feeling would not rather see the ramshackle loveliness of, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream, than, say, the bleak architectures of Henrik Ibsen — not to speak of the architectural scaffoldings of Bernstein and Pinero. However, the theatre is, for the moment, beside the point. Novels are written for 'the individual reader sitting at home. Richard Aldington as a novelist shows that he has the sap of English life in him, and he has at the same time literary distinction. As long as he continues to combine the two, nobody in England except literary snobs will bother his head about 'form.' Richard Aldington has 'form,' as I have tried to show, but even if he hadn't it would not matter very much, especially while he is writing novels and poems for people who read in solitude. In a country that cares relatively little for the social arts (in which form is undeniably important), 'form' in the novel may well go on to the utopian scrap-heap with the unlimited 'love' and unlimited 'will-power' and 'equal incomes' of pre-war days.

A book of short stories, called Roads to Glory, really a series of postscripts to Death of a Hero, appeared in 1930. The mood is the same as in the longer book, though some of the stories are of men who returned from the war and got what the returned soldier always has to be prepared for — the cold shoulder and the information that he belongs to 'a lost generation.' One of the stories, however, called The Lads of the Village, was an extraordinarily touching little sketch of an English village which had no young men left after the war. Atmospherically it was perfect, and humanly it was as tender as any piece of English written in our time. It had nothing tendencious, there was no propaganda — which made it all the better as propaganda; there was not a word wrong, or a word misplaced, or a word too many. And if this was specially true of The Lads of the Village, it was more or less true of all the stories. Richard Aldington was not a student of French literature for nothing, and especially in the short story he seemed to master the form from the start. These roads were not roads but racing tracks. The opening story, Meditation on a German Grave, and the final récit, Good-bye to Memories, were a shade more tendencious, but they had a special lyrical quality that was absent from the clear-cut drama of most of the others. They were also less bare, less formal. So was a short narrative poem, A Dream in the Luxembourg, which he pub [p.65] lished since Death of a Hero, a poem that in spirit if not in form recalled Theocritus, a gracious, wanton idyll, in which there was little or no bitterness, in which the author again indicated, in his own 'British heretic' way, his conviction that nature vivante is of more importance than nature morte, if only men, and especially post-war men of genius, were honest enough and courageous to face the problems involved. But of all his more recent poetry I think nothing of Richard Aldington's is so simply beautiful as the fourth section of Passages Toward a Long Poem, published in the Imagist Anthology last year: Be not too eager
impetuously to intervene,
for these are subtle growths
hard to control.

How easily the spring may swerve
to an empty wind.
Cold irony, to grasp so soon
the fleshless hand.

This was a delicate thing
lies broken here,
as if a shaft of night
should kill the dawn.

There can be no appeal
from waste and death,
nothing for us to act
or hope or speak.

All speech, all movement vain,
all hope defeat;
useless to say farewell,
useless to weep.
[p.66] Drink, since you must, this strange
foretaste of death,
and suffer that despair
to share your bed.

There is unforgotten bitterness in it, but no indignation, only tenderness and pity in love. A stanza in the section that follows throws further light in the direction of the poem: Think well of me, but not too well.
I would not seem to fail you,
As I must,
If you esteem me overmuch;
But love me more than well,
For too much love
Was never known beneath the sun,
And only your great love
Can soothe that shame
Of knowing me unworthy of your love.

It is this quality of humility before the benedictions of existence, love, art, the beauty of nature, evident all through his work but not so clearly since the boyish poems of the pre-war years, that made me say earlier that at the end of the war Richard Aldington chose life instead of death and quick life rather than still life. Without being at all worldly he is interested in the world, eagerly interested.

And it is this eager interest that gives value to his criticism. He has an Englishman's limitations, a distrust of religious exaltations, for instance. I know nothing in major English poetry comparable to Corneille's `Eternelle clarté' unless it be Marlowe's 'See where the Blood of [p.67] Christ streams in the firmament.' But I know nor present-day criticism that is at the same time so cultivated, so honest, and so little faddy as Aldington's. At one time he was perhaps over-influenced by the excessively naturalistic outlook of Remy de Gourmont, but being a poet, he inevitably readjusted the Gourmont scale of values so as not to exclude imagination, the lack of which in Gourmont himself is responsible for the fact that he is to-day rather underrated in France. Reading and translating the Jesuit-trained Frenchman encouraged Richard Aldington to distrust all cheaper mysticisms; Gourmont's influence did not wipe out the prejudices of his English Protestant training altogether, but it certainly made him aware of them, and that is one of the things that makes his criticism of his own country so valuable, if his own country would take the trouble to listen to it. The last article of his that I read in The Sunday Referee was one that threw an interesting — and amusing — light on his preoccupation with life and hatred of war. His knowledge of history is always astounding, and apparently he has been studying Etruria. In the article I refer to he brought out a contrast between the agricultural-life-cultivating-Etruscans and the militarist, death-dealing Romans who destroyed Etruscan civilisation and by their neglect of agriculture turned the Campagna and the Pontine Marshes into the agriculturally sterile, malarial grounds that we know to-day. And all this was in a newspaper article on Virgil! One may, at any rate, hope that so much belief in life, and in the peaceable, beautiful things in life more especially, will have its reward, and that life will give [p.68] to Richard Aldington the power and the time to create the many beautiful things that he obviously has it in himself to create.

Occasionally in spite of Gourmont he still allows himself a flourish. Writing on D. H. Lawrence in a little booklet published some time ago, and after referring to Lawrence as an English heretic, he observed that the English heretic is the salt of the earth. If we are not to prepare the way for more wars, we have all, Irish and English and Junkers and Chauvinists, got to give up thinking that we are the salt of the earth, and it is particularly absurd to pretend that Lawrence was anything more than the salt of very real genius amidst so much that is banal in modern English prose. Personally I would give the whole of Lawrence for, say, the fourteenth quartet of Beethoven, and Beethoven was neither an Englishman nor a heretic. Lawrence was hysterical and often absurd, but he had genius. There is not one of his novels that has not many passages of rich, darkly glowing prose. And he was murdered by English philistinism. A coal-miner's son, he might have expected that a Labour Government would have, at least, let him alone. Had he been let alone to begin with, his hysteria and absurdity would surely have lessened rather than increased. Instead of that, an exhibition of rather indifferently painted pictures which could not have shocked anyone who had even an elementary knowledge of French. or Italian or Dutch painting, was suppressed by the Home Secretary of the Labour Government. Lawrence set store by his painting (he had the right to his little vanity), and he lost heart [p.69] and died. He had consumption, but he would not bother to get cured. He remained by the sea instead of going to Switzerland or Pau. He had been persecuted for years with that persecution to which England above all countries seems to delight in subjecting its men of genius — how many French men of genius have died outside of France? — and he, quite simply, refused to struggle any longer. I do not wonder at any literary Englishman's indignation, but I do object to Richard Aldington of all people indulging in a nationalist flourish, even in discussing Lawrence.

Following the appearance of Medallions and Fifty Romance Poems, translations from different languages, Greek, Latin, Provençal, Italian, and French, which include, particularly in Medallions but often also in the Fifty Romance Poems, some exquisite renderings of exquisite originals, I have, just as I was finishing this essay, read Richard Aldington's new novel, The Colonel's Daughter. I suppose it is heretical to make fun of the English passion for sport, but apart from that I should think that this rich, beautifully told, tragi-comic history of a plain English girl's vain quest for a husband amongst the jazzy young men of post-war society that bishops and politicians have united with Mr. Aldington in denouncing almost invalidates Mr. Aldington's pretension to being an English heretic. Surely its values are quite orthodox? It makes hateful what is hateful, that is to say, uncharity, and lovable what is lovable. Georgie Smithers, in spite of her plain looks and lack of both elegance and education, preserves her virtue so [p.70] simply and yet sheds her worst prejudices so easily that one's heart goes out to her from the first page to the last. It is a wicked and adulterous generation that will not feel sorry for her or that will call her futile. And her kindly, well-bred fool of a father, with his decorously hidden Victorian gallantries, and her stupidly class-conscious Edwardian mother are so admirably contrasted with the sinister profiteer, Sir Horaces - first cousin to Hornblower in Mr. Galsworthy's play, The Skin Game — and the wild-blooded, cunning gypsy, Mrs. Wrigley! And contrasted with the frightful Mrs. Eastcourt — a real Brocken figure, not unrelated also to Proust's Madame Verdurin and to Madame de Merteuil in the Liaisons dangereuses — there is Mr. Judd. Dear Mr. Judd and his four beautiful elm trees that the wicked modern world cut down on him one fine Sunday morning! Mr. Judd is. a jewel. And the lush English countryside in which he is set is worthy of him. An Arden land. Not, I think, since Lawrence painted the landscape of industrial England in Sons and Lovers has there been so richly evocative a picture of the English scene in a book.

There is, I imagine, a problem posed in The Colonel's Daughter, a national problem, indicated more plainly in the epilogue. What is going to happen to the honest Georgie Smitherses of England between the stupidity of their elders and the mocking indifference of their contemporaries as represented not only by the post-war arrivisme of Sir Horace, but also by the inadequate if well-meaning Purfleet and the equally inadequate and well [p.71] -meaning, hectic Margy Stuart? If there is a solution, it is in the tradition of unaffected kindliness, tolerance, and profound knowledge of human nature that is represented by Mr. Judd. Mr. Judd is the England that Englishmen fought for in the war. Their England is neither the Colonel's empire nor Mr. Purfleet's Bloomsbury. It is Chaucer's England, Shakespeare's England, Fielding's England, the England that had worth centuries before an Irish peer invented Empire Day. In The Colonel's Daughter, Mr. Aldington has not only come home from the war. He has also brought the English novel home from the smart cosmopolitan malice of Somerset Maughamism and the arid puritanical hatred of Aldous Huxleyism. He gives one characters whose memory one cherishes as one remembers some sympathetic figure in a picture. The character that is lovable as well as intelligent had practically disappeared from well-written fiction in the ugly cynicism of the post-war period. Now the intelligent and lovable character has come back.

But in what circumstances! Mr. Judd is kept 'in his place' by Smaleism and Eastcourtism and Stimmsism, by social prejudice and hatred and arrivisme. The Colonel senses his worth, but is not intelligent enough to be more than condescending to him. Mr. Purfleet realises it fully, but has not enough interest in life to become the enlightened and influential equivalent of Mr. Judd that he might be. For Mr. Purfleet is the product of nineteenth-century English public school education (and perhaps of war tiredness also), as Colonel Smithers is of nineteenth-century [p.72] English military academy education. They are potentially good men, but they were, to put it simply, badly brought up, brought up to think first of the privilege and dignity that not nature but inheritance gave them. Mr. Judd's dignity is natural and in character, but he is powerless against the circumstances of class prejudice. He can no more help the Georgie Smitherses of England than the Colonels or the Purfleets. And, for all of them, the future is Stimmsism, which means a more brutal if a less hypocritical set of values than those of the public school and the military academy, which means frustration of everybody except the go-getter and the bully who were put in power by the war.

Georgie Smithers represents the frustration of unpretentiousness and honesty trying as well as it knows how to achieve a life of its own in post-war English society, as George Winterbourne in Death of a Hero represents the frustration of an effort of the same kind made in the society of pre-war and war-time England. The similarity of the two names suggests a continuity of purpose on the part of the author. And I wonder whether these two novels are not the first two chapters in some kind of English equivalent to the Comédie Humaine. Certainly The Colonel's Daughter reminds one irresistibly of Eugénie Grandet , and I dare to say that it is a better story then Eugénie Grandet .Since writing the above I learn that Mr. Harold Nicholson has also noticed this resemblance. But he prefers to give the honours to the consecrate genius. I don't. N For if Mr. Aldington's pessimism with regard to organised [p.73] society seems as deep as that of the author of Le Colonel Chabert and Le Curé de Tours, he does remember that there are other things besides organised society in life. Balzac is a poet only rarely, and almost, it would seem, by accident — as in Une passion dans le désert and, Jésus Christ en Flandres. Richard Aldington, on the contrary, is a poet very frequently, and for all his tragic power he has gay fancy — Mrs. Eastcourt is almost as comic as she is terrible — and tenderness. The scene between Georgie and the doctor the night before her father's death has a simple nobility that is as moving as anything I know in the modern novel. And not less touching is the humiliating scene in which she goes through her father's belongings after his death.

But Richard Aldington, being an Englishman, must not expect to be recognised as belonging to the great tradition by his own countrymen, least of all by English admirers of Balzac. It is chic to admire Balzac because he is a French man and because he is dead. It is not chic to admire live English genius in England. Or at least it has not been-look at Lawrence's fate — and it will not be until Stimmsism and Eastcourtism both are overthrown. When that time comes England will be a new England? and perhaps also a very old, beautiful England, an England with which even Irishmen may be friends.