LITERARY GOSSIP.

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21086, 10 February 1934, Page 15

LITERARY GOSSIP.

Mr Charles Williams, in "Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind," an essay recently issued from the Clarendon Press, has some interesting reflections on the non-appear-ance of Annette in "The Prelude," Wordsworth's account of his own development, and speculates on the personal independence of genius: Sublimity nowadays is, like Wordsworth, under a cloud. It has (so we seem to feel) too often run away from its Annette of disturbing physical and mental facts and lost itself in clouds and vapours of unreal idealism. But neither Wordsworth nor William was ashamed of sublimity, as (for all we know) Wordsworth was not ashamed of Annette. He made no particular secret of her. Certainly he did not put her in the " Prelude"; I have sometimes wondered whether he omitted her because he knew she was not really important to him. Perhaps he did not cease to be a great poet (it he did) because he was too capable of detachment from Annette; perhaps he never could have been attached to Annette because he was a great poet. We have turned him lately into an example of cause and effect. But Annette, perhaps, was never important enough to be a cause of anything, nor "Vaudracour and Julia" any more autobiographical than " Paradise Lost" or " Hamlet." • It is by no means certain that great genius is so romantically attached to persons as our romantic and faithful hearts like to believe. Genius seems often to need a nodal point for its convenience, perhaps for its existence in its achievements.

Never dare poet touch a pen to write Unless his ink were tempered with love's sighs. Annette may have been a nodal point. And the reason Wordsworth said nothing more about her may have been that there was nothing more to say.

In " The Defence of Poetry : Variations on the Theme of Shelley," translated from the Italian of Benedetto Croce by E. F. Carrit, there is an amusing (and more than amusing) paragraph on the stomachic theory of poetry :

Many years ago a man with one oi. the most purely poetic talents that I have ever intimately known—a poet of the Neapolitan dialect named Salvatore di Giacomo—told me that poetry always came to him in the shape or an overmastering stomach-acha; anu, while he made the confession, his face exhibited every mark of agony and nausea. And lately, in a lecture given by an English poet this year at Cambridge, I met with a mention of the same part of his anatomy. For there I read that poetry is a "secretion, like the resin which exudes from a pine-tree, or the pearl formed in a diseased oyster, and that its birth-place is in "the pit of the stomach." And this reminded me that- Goethe, too, in a like context, talked about the stomach - but his experience, on the contrary, was that if he were to conceive and bring forth good poetry this digestive organ must be in sound condition, and he concluded that, to judge from his extraordinary powers of creation, nobody ever had so fine a stomach as William Shakespeare. But whatever action poetic travail may have upon the stomach, or whatever the stomachic condition favourable for its expectation, we are, none the less, entitled to reject the conclusion drawn in the Cambridge lecture quoted above, that poetry "is rather physical than intellectual," or only to accept it, in the sense perhaps intended, as a curiosity of whimsical paradox . . .

A review of Mr F. L. Lucas's Warton Lecture, "The Criticism of Poetry," appeared in "New Verse" under the title " Lucastration " :

Though lions roar, please let a mouse in velvet squeak: Ezra may be sweet and Eliot strong:. No matter; they are damned. They quoted Greek And got their accents wrong!

It is explained in a footnote that, "In this sciolistic pamphlet, bred of fear, presumption, and petulance, the pathetic Mr Lucas denies merit to all contemporary criticism and poetry. Messrs Eliot and Pound are dismissed in a footnote on p. 7 for classical howlers and (deliberately) wrong accents." The "Observer," on the other hand, in a review of over two columns, described the pamphlet as "Admirably salutary, yet deeply sophisticated, the lecture is everywhere delicately worded, sometimes quite deliciously so; and how difficult it is to be both salutary and delicious!" "A first-class headline is a work of literary art," says a reviewer of a recent handbook of journalists. "Who but an artist could have written, for instance, that headline in the old World over a story of the Negro pugilist's repentant address before a Harlem church meeting, and his calling upon all fellow-transgressors to rise ? It read:

Jack Johnson Finds 300 Sinners, And Choir Sings "down Him."

Mr Francis lies notes a curious sameness about American short stories. Nearly all of them seem to have been cut to the sama pattern, so that it is almost impossible to tell whether two given ones are by the same author or not. They give an impression of deliberate workmanship rather than of inspiration. They are alive, but they have no fire. Nevertheless, he believes the level of the short story in America is higher than that of the novel.

For the literary artist, declares Mr L. A. G. Strong, there is no distinction between what he experiences factually, in his person, and what he experiences in imagination. Readers, when they try to separate the two, almost invariably make mistakes. "That yon certainly saw," many people have said to him of the motor accident in "The Garden"; to which he can only reply that he certainly didn't.

A conspicuous feature of presentday publishing, remarks Mr Compton Mackenzie, is the number of travel books by young men, many of whom write ivith a directress a sincerity, and a freshness that'more than atone for a certain amount of superficiality and an occasionally tiresome ingenuousness.

There haj been discovered in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, a bundle of fifty letters written by Charles Dickens, together with a note-book belonging to the period when he was a newspaper reporter.