LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20612, 30 July 1932, Page 13

LITERARY GOSSIP.

In the last Warton Lecture on English Poetry, Sir Edmund Chambers declared himself a believer in the pewonal reality of Matthew Arnold's "Marguerite": I have written a» if Marguerite were a. real woman, and I find l 4 that it ia not so. I am aware of tion handed down in Arnolds family that ho had declared her to bej maagonaiy; and no doubt one must give full value statement made by a„middle-aged reply to the questionings of his daughter* about the object of his «arly I°™ And no doubt, too, imagination hae play«d its part. Bat the poems do at least leave the impression of a very definite and vrod personality, with many details which *» not essential to the emotional theme, and give an air of verisimilitude. Marguerite wm j daughter of France. She was literate enough to lend Arnold a volume ,of the Uieners or Ortis," a sentimental romance bythe Italian poet Ugo Foscolo. She dwelt .in a rteep street by the Aar, near the "roof d wifljc that spans the stream" and the twin laKes. It is clearly Thun. She had a housemate, Olivia; the names may of course have been altered. She had a slight figure, an arch, smile, an exquisite voice, a "pale sweetrounded cheek." A kerchief commonly enwound her hair. • Several of theee intimate touches recur again and again. They «• not suggest a figure of drama. The only possible inconsistency is in colouring. ... Between , brown and ash-coloured, however, we need not dispute, and although eye* Bre a point on which lovers ought to be caear, it is not always so. ... can have been no mystery about Marguerite in the Arnold family at the time, although personal references have been rather carefully cut out of such of the poet's letters as have yet been published. "Absence," however, was read to one of his sisters just after it was composed, and Arnold reminds her, a quarter of a century later, how she had been touched by it. . . . . As to the date of the Marguerite episode, we cannot at present be quite certain. . . • If I s.m risrht there was time between 1849 and 1852 for the "shaping-spirit of imagination" to have play. Certainly the parting with a blue-eyed girl became for Matthew Arnold something more than itself, a parting with the whole world of passionate romance which he put behind him. The Marguerite poems are not merely poems of Isolation, but of renunciation, of self-dedication. There has been a catharsis. He turned back to his "sphered course." to the rigorous teachers who had seized his youth, to The dragon-warder'd fountains Where the springs of knowledge are, and incidentally to ,the routine, which he often found irksome, of the Education Office. But these early poems have a lyrio plangency, which ia not quite, the note of those that -followed.

Mr Hugh Walpole thinks that, Mr W. B. Yeats 'a scheme of an Irish Academy is doomed to failure: As to Mr Teats'* Irish academy he will, I fear, have no luck with .it. The history of literary academies ia always the same, even in Prance, where they have a'talent for such things—the aged and palsied invariably get their -skinny hands about the poor thing's throat and throttle H to death. There are, perhaps, no old men in this now young Ireland but, for a start, Mr Bernard Shaw, Yeats himself, Lady Gregory, George Moore,. A. E., would make a fair aggregate of years if yon added a sum of them I As to the young ones, Mr Yeats thought apparently of Seari'O'Casey, Li am O 'Flaherty, Mr Strong, James Stephens. And then there is, of course,, James Joyce. A. pretty strong team and livelier. In thought and action than any literary academy I've ever heard of. TheTe is, I believe, a British .academy, started many years ago by Edmund Gosse and Arthur Benson. But no one knows anything about it. It was dead before it was born. The only way to have a real living academy in England is to have two —-on© of the Blessed and one of the Banned. Then yon would arrange (either on Twelfth Night or St. George's Day) to have a fine gladiatorial show between the academies in the Albert Hall (receipts from tickets to go to the Authors* Pension Fund). You would have real swords—-no nonsense at alt*—ana. only thumbs up from the audience should saveia wounded gladiator. There would be a third academy, female, who would • sit in a - box watching (with a passionate joy) the proceedings, and the fairest <Jf them (I suggest Miss Holtby, Miss Vera Brittan, or Mrs Eadis, of Cambridge) should award the pal® Ito the victor. Each academy-should consist I of twelve persons and the I would have for its member* wdt-thy, J. B. "Priestley, Jphn Drinkwater. A. A. Milne, Sir James Barrio, Francis Brett Young, John Masefield. Alfred Noyes. Budyard Kipling, J. M. Tomlinson. J. C. Squire, and (if I may modestly make,the suggestion) banned acadei&y would consist of Aldous Huxley, Harold Aldington, Theodore Powys, T. S. Bert Read, I. A. Richards, Jphn Powys (unjess it was agreedthat aU™ 6 "' bers of the Powys family should count on* man), Norman J}ongla S W £*merset Maugham, E. Rickward, and the M™? 0 * ■*". Chatto - and Windus's publishing .house. _ The ladies' jury would, for .Virata 8 , sake, have to contain examples of Rebecca West, Lady Rhondda, Stella Benson on the one aide and ClemeneeDane, Douglas Sedgwick, Sheila Kaye-Smith on the ot The Albert Hall, paeked- At la«t literature would rank in the daily Press; with a football cup tie or a really good hffldw match. But the greatest benefit of all wouM be that half at least of the preswit j letters in England would be killed j»ff the most aged and feeble would go toafc which would, of course, be an excellent thine for the younger writers, precise in fact, for which they have air long been praying! • ■

Miss Rebecca West, writing ; in the "Daily Telegraph," protests against the too frequent disparagement of popular .taste in literature. The offender whom she rebukes is Mrs Q. I>. Leavis, ttoo in her recent book on "Kctaon and the Beading Public " refers to the autobiographies of many men who, thongii born before 1860 in poverty and withont' any formal education or opportunity « mixing with cultured people, acquired a perfectly genuine feeling for literature. Mrs Leavis goes on to _say that a comparable * feeling for literature would be looked for in vain among their twentieth-century equals in status, in spite of the advantage of compulsory free schooling, public libraries, cheap books and periodicals, and a 48-hour week. Now this, says Miss West, » "sirnpSy not true." It is extremely difficult, she says, to be' remotely connected with letters without being aware of the existence of precisely the same vast, eager, and thoughtful reading public drawn -from the working classesThey . have, an impressive corporate existence- in adult schools and societies, and no publisher would like to be without their support for his libraries of cheap reprints of the classics. Mr E. F. Carritt in a new Oxford •work entitled "What is Beauty?" discusses the old question of the relation n between beauty, and truth:

"We have often been told that beauty is truth and truth and we haveiu« seen in the last chapter how such sayings get plausibility "from the fact that xn soma vorto of.art, such as novels, dxamasf, and even pictures or statues, we are apt to wok for something we call truth to _ nature. It may be worth remembering that Keats Bald "Beauty is truth, truth beauty' in a poem, and perhaps one need not tell the trutb in a poem. In his letters he does not seem nearly so clear about it. Butwemar make two preliminary objections. First, if beauty simply meant truth, we shouid not need two words; we could, always substitute one for the other and say, for instance, that a description of peace on earth and goodwill among men was a true description w the earth, if it were beautiful; an<T also that it would be beautiful, if true, to Bay that there is an epidemic of, smallpox, or that the square root of nine is three . . . not all beautiful things can be also true, a flower, f. sunset, a waterfall. ... I remember a vounc scientific man without much literary . * training once remarking that, though ■Wordsworth says: And then my heart with pleasure fills And .dances with those daffodils, it was scientifically impossible for hi® ha«t to have done anything* of the kind, without making him ill. Just bo far as there is any meaning in sayiuff that the Venus from Meloe reveals the truth about love or women, just so far the Veins of Botticelli reveals a quite different and indeed incompatible truth. The Paradise of Fra Angelico, if it tells us anything that olaime to he religious truth, tails us something incompatible with what is told ua by El Gwco. Surely, in fact, the most stupid question that can possibly be asked about a work of art is "Is it true?'—it seems almost a? stupid to check oneself in enjoying a real •unset by remembering thai in truth it is the earth whkh moves.