The New English Weekly, 18 (5 Dec 1940) 75-76
There was a period – from 1926 or so, and roughly lasting for about ten years – when all the interesting new writers who appeared were associated with the Marxist faith. (This generalisation is not quite valid in retrospect, but so it seemed, and so it was generally believed, at the time). This direction of change of thinking and feeling was, as Mr. Spender correctly put it, “forward from Liberalism”; and if it should have been disturbing to any people, those people should have been the elder generation of Fabian intellectuals who were its spiritual parents. 1 To those who were not Fabian-Liberals, this movement could not cause much dislocation: it ran on rails which did not intersect our own; it ignored so much that we felt to be of capital importance, that in never causing us to quarrel with ourselves, it never really ruffled our good humour with its upholders. I think that I now discern the beginning of a new state of mind in a rather younger generation, which does not leave me so impassive. The parent, when he first recognises in the features of his infant a sudden parody of his own, may contemplate this strange little comedian with a mixture of horror and fascination. That a younger generation should have grown up familiar with the doctrines of The New English Weekly, and The New Age, is in principle delightful, but the results may cause surprise: just as it is perpetually disconcerting to parents, that their children are not in every respect duplicates of themselves – the sons of the fathers, and the daughters of the mothers. 2
Some of this alarm comes to me when I look at Mr. Ronald Duncan’s enterprise, The Townsman(or just Townsman). 3 Ideas with which I am familiar and at ease (though I can claim no part in originating them) turn up with some slight difference in their features. Even Christianity, even the Church, is not ignored – not at all: I find my immediate fear to be rather lest it be compromised. Communism is contemned; monetary reform, decentralisation, the revival of agriculture and the agricultural life are demanded, mob rule is denounced – yet I feel like a Tory who becomes aware that he is also (having been born when he was, and not several generations earlier) something of a Liberal; or a requetewho has strayed in to a meeting of phalangists, 4 or a Frenchman attached to the ancien régime, who, having come to 150accept the Marseillaise as the national anthem, might find himself gaoled for singing it. I did not much like Canon Smyth’s point of view in some recent N.E.W.correspondence (though it was more the nasty way he said it) but there was a feeling behind it which I – and I believe Major Dobreé, whose letter was the best contribution to the controversy – share. 5 I can only indicate it by saying that to me the phrase “King and Country” is one to be taken seriously; that when Mr. Duncan writes in his magazine “I would defend England if I knew where England was,” I want to know what about it; and that among my mixed feelings about Townsmansome are expressed by Lord Lymington in a letter in the same number. 6
The air may clear a bit after Townsmanhas fully assimilated the influence of Mr. Pound, whose powerful personality inspires its pages, and some of whose sillier sallies have decorated them. I believe that this influence is all to the good, so long as it takes the proper course of an influence and does not become a possession (there is an essay on the Earl of Rochester by the editor which is excellent, and which might be a ringer for one of Pound’s 7 ): I only fear the apparition of Mr. Pound’s imaginary hero, the Strong Man. I did not set out, however, to write about Townsman(which I recommend to all readers who have the imperturbability to be irritated by...
