Why we should read-- — Edition Insights

now; have her he must, he must...."

He goes to Aphrodite to plan the rape

" ... While she, Who was to be their victim, joyously Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill And every fear and all, save only this: That she was young, and it was perfect bliss To be alive where suns so goldenly shine, And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine, And the cicadas sing from morn till night, And rivers run so cool and pure and bright ... Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine As those old images of the gods that shine With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years By the touching lips of countless worshippers, Her body was; and the sun's golden heat Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue, Far hills and the faint fingers of the sky Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily, And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until A listener might wonder if they cried In his own head or in the world outside."

Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness) is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the transformed god.

"Crouched on the flowery ground Young Leda lay, and to her side did press The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ... Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim Austerity of virginal flank and limb His curved and florid beauty, till she felt That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt The bones and marrow of her strength away.... And over her the swan shook slowly free The folded glory of his wings, and made A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade To be her veil and keep her from the shame Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame.

Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky. Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain, Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again."

There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at something very different from the simple, sensuous and passionate and are on a different plane.

He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human passions, he laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on "the convex mound of one vast kidney" of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers' songs he likes to sing of man as "a poor degenerate from the ape" and of God as a fool.

"If, O my Lesbia, I should commit, Not fornication, dear, but suicide, My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it) Would drift face upwards on the oily tide With the other garbage, till it putrefied.

But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown-- Your maiden modesty would float face down, And men would weep upon your hinder parts. 'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan By which this best of worlds is wisely planned. One law he made for woman, one for man: We bow the head and do not understand."

This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary to be blasphemous.

He is happier in his rôle of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true expression of what is happening in the world of modern art.

"Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying."

But _Frascati's_ shows him at his normal level of intellectual irony:

"Bubble-breasted swells the dome Of this my spiritual home, From whose nave the chandelier, Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer. We in the round balcony sit, Lean o'er and look into the pit Where feed the human bears beneath, Champing with their gilded teeth. What negroid holiday makes free With such priapic revelry? What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites? What gods like wooden stalagmites? What stream of blood or kidney pie? What blasts of Bantu melody? Rag-time.... But when the wearied Band Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand. And there we sit in blissful calm, Quietly sweating palm to palm."

This is the vein which he expands in what Middleton Murry regards as his best poem, _Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt_, an attempt to "fish up a single day" from a dead friend's forgotten existence. John Ridley, as he calls him, wakes from a dream among his familiar books and pictures--

"Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine. Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's? Distressing circumstance. But then he was taking Jenny out to dine, Which was some consolation. What a chin! Civilised ten thousand years, and still No better way than rasping a pale mask With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian: Repulsive task! And the more odious for being quotidian. If one should live till eighty-five ... And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they alive?... Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely! He wept to think of all those single beds, Those desperate night-long solitudes, Those mental salons full of nudes. Shelley was great when he was twenty-four. Eight thousand nights alone--minus, perhaps, Six, or no! seven, certainly not more. Five little bits of heaven (Tum-do-rum, de-rum, de-rum), Five little bits of heaven and one that was a lapse, High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine (Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infants' brightness), And he would shut his eyes so as not to see His own hot blushes calling him a swine."

At last he throws the nightmare of his blankets off, gets up and goes into the bathroom--

"Pitiable to be Quite so deplorably naked when one strips. There was his scar, a panel of old rose Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose; Adonis punctured by his amorous boar, Permanent souvenir of the Great War. One of God's jokes, typically good, That wound of his. How perfect that he should Have suffered it for--what?"

He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters and _The Times_: he reads some of his old work ...

"Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it; If he chose to--but it was too much trouble, And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe, Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned In pleasant seas ... to rise again and find One o'clock struck and his unshaven face Still like a record in a musical-box, And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury."

Mr Huxley wastes much satire on avuncular energies in war-time and makes his hero escape from his verbose relatives to walk the streets. Tired of this, he enters the inevitable café of the intellectual young novelist and moralises on the nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. He then sits out in the gardens of Leicester Square and finds comfort in regarding each hair and every pore on his hand. This palls soon enough, as one might expect, and then--

"Action, action! Quickly rise and do The most irreparable things; beget, In one brief consummation of the will, Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret. Action! This was no time for sitting still. He crushed his hat down over his eyes And walked with a stamp to symbolise Action, action--left, right, left; Planting his feet with flabby beat, Taking strange Procrustean steps, Lengthened, shortened to avoid Touching the lines between the stones-- A thing which makes God so annoyed."

Action translates itself into spending three pounds on a book which he didn't want and pulling the bell of a chance house. He turns into a cinema house, goes to sleep, wakes at eight o'clock and so keeps "dear Jenny" waiting.

This dinner with Jenny is the most effective part of the poem, as we might expect:

"Food and drink, food and drink: Olives as firm and sleek and green As the breasts of a sea-god's daughter, Swimming far down where the corpses sink Through the dense shadowy water. Silver and black on flank and back, The glossy sardine mourns its head. The red anchovy and the beetroot red, With carrots, build a gorgeous stair-- Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair-- And the green pallor of the salad round Sharpens their clarion sound.... Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive, And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious: Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live.... 'Jenny, adorable--' (what draws the line At the mere word 'love'?) 'has anyone the right To look so lovely as you look to-night, To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?' But candidly, he wondered, do I care?"

The night goes on, comes the time to part--

"'Good-night,' the last kiss, 'and God bless you, my dear.' So, she was gone, she who had been so near, So breathing-warm--soft mouth and hands and hair-- A moment since. Had she been really there, Close at his side and had he kissed her? It seemed Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed And talked about at breakfast, being a bore."

The first thing we feel tempted to say about this poem is that we should vastly prefer to be possessed of an Olympian libido for Leda than to be burdened with John Ridley's "feebly sceptical, inefficient, profoundly unhappy" emotion for Jenny. Jove was, at any rate, healthy in his lusts: there is something terribly anæmic about our modern love-making, with our one eye on the intellect lest we should do anything without a reason. I am fully aware that this is not criticism: it is merely making a note of the feeling that is uppermost in our minds on finishing the poem. But that is one of the reasons why we should read Aldous Huxley: he is not lacking in daring: what he sees and feels he shows: he is very boyish in his desire to shock: in these days one would have thought that there was no one left to shock except the undergraduate, and those who preserve the callowness of the undergraduate through life. He exaggerates the importance of material joys and miseries: he is easily disgusted: his fastidious intellect rebels at many things that most of us accept complacently ... but it is to his credit that he makes us feel that we ought to be more fastidious, that we ought to think more, that we ought to accept less. At present he is engaged in the process of destruction, a joyous, youthful pastime: when he grows up he will give us something constructive. At present we rejoice in his vitality, energy and alertness. The rest will come. Above all, he is generously endowed with the comic spirit: that alone would make him readable in such an age of dullness.

THE POEMS OF ROBERT GRAVES

There are not many reasons why we should read Robert Graves, but one reason is of such outstanding importance that it overshadows the want of many. While Siegfried Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell have vented their vitriol on the old, Mr Graves in _Country Sentiment_ has run away into the land of nursery rhymes as an escape from the haunting horrors of our post-war era. There are strong men of little imagination who have wiped off the memory of the war from their minds like chalk-marks off a slate: there are others who will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives. Robert Graves is one of the latter:

"Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine, Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing And lay ghost hands on everything, But leave the noonday's warm sunshine To living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street, Strangers assume your phantom faces, You grin at me from daylight places, Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet Dead men down the morning street."

That is why he prays that

"[But may] the gift of heavenly peace And glory for all time Keep the boy Tom who tending geese First made the nursery rhyme."

Only in the contemplation of childish toys can he regain repose. But nursery rhymes and childish toys are as flimsy as gossamer, the latter too easily get broken, the former are too often patently absurd.

There is a gnat-like thinness even in this delicious little song:

"Small gnats that fly In hot July And lodge in sleeping ears, Can rouse therein A trumpet's din With Day-of-Judgment fears.

Small mice at night Can wake more fright Than lions at midday. An urchin small Torments us all Who tread his prickly way.

A straw will crack The camel's back, To die we need but sip, So little sand As fills the hand Can stop a steaming ship.

One smile relieves A heart that grieves Though deadly sad it be, And one hard look Can close the book That lovers love to see."

He listens to the pale-bearded Janus, who urges him to

"Sing and laugh and easily run Through the wide waters of my plain, Bathe in my waters, drink my sun, And draw my creatures with soft song; They shall follow you along Graciously with no doubt or pain."

So he extols the simple rhymes that we learnt in childhood's days and seeks to add to them.

"So these same rhymes shall still be told To children yet unborn, While false philosophy growing old Fades and is killed by scorn."

Unfortunately it is not given to any modern to imitate with any degree of success either the ballads our ancestors loved or the nursery rhymes which all children have learnt: this age is too sophisticated and this avenue of escape is denied to Mr Graves: one of the lessons that we find most painful in the learning is that we are the product of our own age and cannot get away from it. Mr Graves anticipates his reviewers in his _L'Envoi_ when he says:

"Everything they took from my new poem book But the fly-leaf and the covers."

But there are one or two other things I should leave inside the singularly attractive covers, and one of them is this:

"Restless and hot two children lay Plagued with uneasy dreams, Each wandered lonely through false day A twilight torn with screams.

True to the bed-time story, Ben Pursued his wounded bear, Ann dreamed of chattering monkey men, Of snakes twined in her hair ...

Now high aloft above the town The thick clouds gather and break, A flash, a roar, and rain drives down: Aghast the young things wake.

Trembling for what their terror was, Surprised by instant doom, With lightning in the looking-glass, Thunder that rocks the room.

The monkey's paws patter again, Snakes hiss and flash their eyes: The bear roars out in hideous pain: Ann prays and her brother cries.

They cannot guess, could not be told How soon comes careless day, With birds and dandelion gold, Wet grass, cool scents of May."

This is no nursery rhyme, but it is a very important parable. Mr Robert Graves is by nature a poet, but his vision has become blurred, his senses distorted, his nerves jangled by the war. Can no one tell him of the approach of careless day, of birds and dandelion gold, wet grass, cool scents of May? Surely the nightmare of his soul is nearly over, and he can creep out from under the soft quilt of nursery rhymes to the clear light of day and sing us the golden songs that we know are in him, as yet unexpressed.

A common criticism levelled against novelists is that when they depict failures we find it unnecessary to turn to the last page to prove these failures successes. No novelist except Gissing has dared to write the story of a failure who remained a failure till the end. Mr J. D. Beresford's art is frankly autobiographical, and the very fact of his having a novel published proves that he at any rate has ceased to be a failure, and yet the fact is that Jacob Stahl at each stage of his life looks upon himself as a failure; the truth of the matter is that Mr Beresford, like his hero, fully realises that "virtue lies only in the continual renewal of effort; the boast of success is an admission of failure." Jacob never boasts of success.

In _W. E. Ford_ Mr Beresford talks of his architectural experiences, his unfortunate first marriage, his temporary inhibitions and his ultimate literary success; his hero in the trilogy is just such a man as Mr Beresford declares himself to be. Jacob Stahl was lame, Mr Beresford suffers from a like physical disability. At every point in these three books we feel convinced that he is setting down the facts of his own struggle, and if it needed proof that genius does not necessarily manifest itself through the imagination, but through a careful selection of actual autobiographical experiences, we should get that proof in these remarkable novels. He even goes so far as to interpolate into the body of his novels the actual eulogistic criticism that his own early works received from the reviewers. We know that he was actually employed by W. H. Smith & Son to do much the same work as Jacob Stahl is called upon to do for Price & Mallinson.

A conversation with Meredith that Jacob has on the subject of literary art is equally illuminating as descriptive of Beresford's own theories. "Why shouldn't a novelist describe life as he sees it?... I simply don't understand all that stuff about art," replied Jacob. "Method, technique, yes. You have got to find words to express what you've seen." He agreed that the essential thing was the accurate representation of the commonplace, and realised when it was put to him that he had put a piece of life under the microscope and not related it to the whole; we feel, furthermore, that Mr Beresford was thinking solely of himself when he impressed upon us the importance of realising that at the end of his struggle Jacob Stahl "could never rest content with any such attainment as was provided by the comfort of his wife's love ... in the care of his three children, or, least of all, by such satisfactions as come to him from his modest achievements in the world of letters; he is ever at the beginning of life reaching out towards those eternal values that are ever beyond his grasp ... and that earnest search of his for some aspect of permanent truth keeps his spirit young." Mr Beresford is pre-eminently among the novelists of to-day a candidate for truth. Surely no one has been so completely honest over his relations with the other sex; it is true that in _God's Counterpoint_ Philip is so puritanically distorted in his attitude towards sex as to become as vile and disgusting as the most degenerate physical profligate, and we feel that a more normal man than Mr Beresford's hero (the shadow of himself) in the trilogy would not have taken Madeline so seriously or have believed in, much less have married, such a woman as Lola so casually, or have caused such a perfect type of womanhood as Betty so many heart-burnings. Anyone but Jacob would have seen through Mrs Latimer in half-an-hour. It would have served Jacob right if she had made him marry her. At the same time a more normal man than Mr Beresford would have been quite unable to make such people not only live but actually interesting, not so much for what they do as for what they are as betrayed in their conversations; an underbred clerk, a temporarily reclaimed drunkard of a curate, a courtesan countess, a saviour of souls, a self-sacrificing aunt, a pedantic successful brother, a woman of the streets, whist-playing inhabitants of a boarding-house, literary giants, omniscient commercial travellers, pretty typists, truculent compositors, Cornish villagers, flit in and out of the pages of the trilogy, who, once met, can never be forgotten. They are all flesh and blood. These two perfect cameos of psychological analysis may be taken as typical: