GUEST REVIEWER

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25549, 17 July 1948, Page 3

GUEST REVIEWER

Literary Views And Reviews

caSr Tt r? two aspects to this publimatoial Io?tK ndant . ®‘ ne of raw It k ai J the btstory, of the late war. °- a , monstrous literary and ® OI X al diaryMo ne Pcesent volume . . is a Pparer,t,y less than onebelsVwar tT™^ 1 t ract ‘°n of G°“Buke . dlanes that was, by of destrunU^ ed K^ r< +u 1 a ftilarious orgy fa Berlin . by he Russian soldiery Derf'nrma?, tiOn . bog ?. les at the literary testifj , wh i ch these remains Sid bear'd wha ‘ he & dmTwßh 3?’ dI A and thought day “ w ith the obvious intention of leaving out nothing. He annarentH, never missed a day. 8 . . . NaUiraHs“the the n&M Because the very aim of comnartlv hJ S mcon JP a tible with artist™; partly because Goebbels never had

time to stop and think while writing re-r . ea d what he had written. I?S cle S’ repetitions, contradictions abound. The whole thing gives an impression of having been written HL a .“ ld of mechanically induced r4^ e;^ lt 4. r ?i Calls the irresponsible, unc*?, ec £ ed talking of a patient on a psycho-analyst’s sofa. folP overhearing it—for one always while readin g one is overhearing gets a great deal of incidental information, some of it of great historical interest, much of a questionable, Gossipy character; one nas the guilty fascination of watching a ihdecent.act; one is somewhat put off by inevitable constant overintimacy with an unattractive person; Pi? g H. es on and on reading, fascinated by the ever more insistent question: Why does he tell all this? cSFu i. s j? ?k e real mystery of Uroebbels s diaries, and it is not a mystery with an obvious solution, uoebbels himself seems to have been by the enormous, never-checked sediment which he daily secreted. ... And indeed some or his revelations are most damaging to the cause he served. J But. obviously, he did not intend to do damage. Nor did he intend, like ujano, to be for a few minutes a day crisply and cynically frank with hiinthe wonder is how. much of the nonsense he said in his speeches and articles he really believed—or is it rather that even in talking to himself he could not stop lying? Nor can he have waited to leave a literary or political testament—he would have had to go about that quite differently. The more one reads on, the more one gets a sense of being closeted with an obsessed person, a man talking incessantly, restlessly, indiscriminately, under some insane compulsion. Since this man m so talking tells, mixed up stale °ld news and nasty gossip, all the State secrets of a recent Great Power, it is not uninstructive to listen to him; but it is slightly horrifying all same, an( l„ one f ee ls that after another 20 or 30 volumes of this kind ™ b i? a llttle out of one’s mind oneseif. Perhaps the Russians did. after a .“’^h urn just about the right propor-

Long year, ago Lady Strachey collected into a useful little book the verses our poets had written about other poets. A companion volume of their comments in prose would be enlightening—Tennyson and Hopkins, tor instance, were consummate critics of versecraft. One applauds, therefore, the notion of persuading living poets to introduce and anthologise their predecessors in the series “Poets on the Poets,’’ inauspiciously though this began with Mr Auden’s ragamuffin stuff about Tennyson. In the hew volume Mr Dyment is reasonxJ>l^u enou ? h ’ ® x , ce Pt when he makes Matthew Arnold a champion of the authoritarian state. It is true that, hke Carlyle and Ruskin, he was appalled by thfe “Devil hindmost” creed of the Victorian economists but he can fairly be described as a Liberal who devoted himself to rebuking the faults of his fellowLiberals. ft is a pity, since Mr Dyment is a poet, that he devotes so little of his introduction to Arnold’s craftsmanship, so much to his thought and character, about which Mr Lionel Trilling has already said almost everything worth saying. So far as I know there has never been a careful analysis of what Arnold owed in his style respectively to Homer.. Sophocles, Milton, Gray and Wordsworth. . . . Faj surpassed by Tennyson in the art of writing verse, by Browning in largeness of sympathy and vivacity of feeling, far surpassed by both of these in spontaneity of image-making. Arnold endears himself above all by a melancholy ranging from the elegiac

to the icily bleak. The badinage that twinkled so indefatigably in his talk and his prose was seldom admitted into his poetry, which he wrote to express, and doubtless to relieve, underlying low spirits. Though he earned his living as an inspector of schools, his life was not disagreeable, as lives go. Not to marry one’s mistress is an experience that does not usually lead to permanent despondency—so at least a cynic would declare; and, oppressive as was the fog of Philistinism, it was easier to escape from than our present \ discontents. Arnold was .dismayed by the “melancholy, long withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith: the advancing roar made to-day by the sea of a new faith from the East he would have found quite otherwise alarming. But if sometimes Arnold, like almost all the great men of his time, exasperates us by his querulity, if he never grasped how lucky he was to be born into the most tranquil and prosperous age known to history, his sadness was in the main nobly impersonal, the olive-bit-ter fruit of a Greek sense that the human condition is. inescapably tragic.

English literature and civilisation are inevitably flowers of the European or “Hellenic” tree, the literature even more so than the civilisation. The tradition is not Anglo-Saxon; it is Graeco-Roman. It goes back to such authors as Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid, to Homer and Plato and Plutarch, and the various intermediaries who at different times with different degrees of perversity or inefficiency represented them. Different ages have their own fashions of taste: they can react in different ways towards the tradition, choose out of it what they

like accept it, enrich it, rebel against it, misinterpret it, but can never quite escape from it until the whole civilisation is swept away. Professor Thomson treats of this classical background in a most fascinating book . . . meant primarily for that oppressed and misguided class of student who, at universities or elsewhere seeks Honours in English language and literature without any knowledge of Latin or Greek. ... Perhaps to the entirely unclassical student the most valuable part of the book will be the brief but vivid and sensitive introductory sketch of the main Greek and Latin authors who have specially influenced English literature at various periods. It will -give the student who is in the habit of referring to Ovid or Seneca or Plutarch in his examination papers -ome real notion of what those authors were like. One wishes that more actual quotation could have been given illustrating the different /styles: but that would need a book at least double

the size. Besides, one may hope that these sketches may induce students to read further for themselves. * “F” Squadron, known to the British as “F Recce,” was a small Italian parachutist unit which served with XIII Corps in the Eighth Army throughout the Italian campaign. It was the first, and by far the most efficient and best respected, of all the Italian units to fight alongside the Allies. Tough and courageous, and very proud, its members carried out hundreds of spectacular and most effective patrols. . . . How could a desire to, do something tough and glorious for the sake of Italy’s reputation lead men without any firm political ideas or principles to oppose the German entry info Rome, to form partisan bands, to join the Allies, whom a moment before they had so heartily disliked? Where will this same desire lead them now that the war is over? The merit of this vividly, if superficially, written book lies in the light it throws on such questions. . . . Disgusted with the pretentious inefficiency of Mussolini’s army, the

author joined the Arditi [the para-chutist-cum-commando unit in Mussolini’s forces]. . . . After the liberation he tried to join the new Italian army fighting alongside the Allies, but it was only too like the old one. Jealousies and red tape impeded him, and, as his uniform was put in moth-balls, “for the second time in the last two years I found myself confronted with ihe tragic question—for what purpose was all this suffering?” He heard of the existence of “F” Squadron, borrowed a motor-cycle, and set off to join this unit. The parachutists he found thoroughly congenial. They, like D’Annunzio and Marinetti, believed in self-justification through violent action. They had few political ideas. . . . Though their thoughts were haphazard. their beliefs were strong and effective, and created an aggressive spirit which was of great value in war-time, as many tributes from British commanders make plain. But a belief in action alone is of little value in a normal world. They hated returning to civilian life. . . . The danger is that some other party of violence will capitalise this desire, as did Fascism after the first war. The author fails to go deeply into this, but his book makes the problem plain. He and “F” Squadron represent a not unimportant minority in Italian society: how is their violent patriotism going io be used in a peaceful world?