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London Letter: April, 1922
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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London, after three months, appeared to me quite unchanged: the same things one liked, the same things one detested, and the same things to which one was indifferent.
There is certainly, in the atmosphere of literary London, something which may provisionally be called a moral cowardice. It is not simply cowardice, but a caution, a sort of worldly prudence which believes implicitly that English literature is so good as it is that adventure and experiment involve only unjustified risk; lack of ambition, laziness, and refusal to recognize foreign competition; a tolerance which is no better than torpid indifference; not cowardice merely, but still a composition of inertias which is usually to be found in general cowardice. It is facilitated by conditions which are universal as well, by democracy (in the vague habitual sense of the word), by the newspapers, the reviewing of books, the journalistic life; by the actual and by every proposed economic system, which give so high a place to Security – whether in the form of gilt-edged bonds or oldage pensions – and so low a place to adventure and contemplation. But in London these poisons are either more pernicious, or their effects more manifest, than elsewhere. Other cities decay, and extend a rich odour of putrefaction; London merely shrivels, like a little bookkeeper grown old.
This is the principal impression one derives from the consideration of any and every anthology of contemporary verse that appears. As the two last that I have seen are Methuen and Company’s
The instinct for safety it may be – as in the bird the ostrich, not always a safe instinct – or a complexity of causes, which seems to make the English poet take refuge in just those sentiments, images, and thoughts which render a man least distinguishable from the mob, the respectable mob, the decent middle-class mob. An appearance of daring, even a real daring in non-literary respects (for political courage is still respected) may do no harm, and may even please; for it makes the reader feel that he is daring too. But a truly independent way of looking at things, a point of view which cannot be sorted under any known religious or political title; in fact, the having the only thing which gives a work pretending to literary art its justification; the having something which the public have not got: this is always detested. Sometimes it is not recognized, sometimes it can be ignored; and then a man may have a deserved immediate popularity; but when it is recognized and cannot be ignored, it is certainly feared and disliked. The popularity of certain war poems was due, I think, to the fact that they appeared to represent a revolt against something that was very unpleasant, and really paid a tribute to all the nicest feelings of the upper-middle class British public school boy. But if I had to pick out, from the Methuen anthology, some poem which more than the rest contained a dignity of the individual, it would...
