THE YOUNG IDEA

Southland Times, Issue 19540, 2 May 1925, Page 13

THE YOUNG IDEA

“RED WHEELS” (By 'The Observator.”) In these days of greater terrors and evils like movie sub-titles and cheap motor-cars, it is perhaps useless, or even dangerous to hurl another reproach at the Juggernaut of Civilisation. I have .an uneasy remembrance of certain pleaders for Art and the simple life, who waited too long, reviling, in the track of the great machine, and who, themselves, passed howling under its dripping wheels. And then, even if we do agree politely that things are not as they should be. the unfortunate reformer is usually dubbed a “wowser.” It is extremely regrettable. New Art, of course, can have no place in such a “sorry scheme of things,” except such shape of it as comes from the Advanced intellectuals, which is no Art at all. There are the meagre verses of the Chicago poet, Carl Sandburg. Rather I should call them not meagre, but attenuated, distorted, or repulsive. Then there are the Cubist productions, which bear - about as true a relation to real paintings as Sandburg’s stuff does to poetry. But even in our best modem poetry one misses frequently the indefinable essence or fragrance that clings to older work. It is like Von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the Shadowless Man, with a non-vital though indispensible element missing. Other pieces again have the shadow and lack the substance.

But our modern poets succeed only when they ignore the ..ultra-modern aspect of things and choose the sweeter and simpler subjects of the older writers. Otherwise their work is, more often than not, picturesquely repulsive. Sometimes the desired effect is gained and' sometimes the whole thing falls flat. Success however is rare indeed, and I can only think of three examples. One is Gordon Bottomley’s “To Iron-Founders and Others” and in it he says: “The generations of the worm Know not your loads piled on their soil ; Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm Till your strong flagstones heave and toil.” This piece gives a true index as to the way our better poets regard the worse forms of Civilisation. It must be admitted, of course, that there is a kind of dreadful fascination about this Juggernaut of the Red Wheels, and some painters have caught the spirit of it in pictures of furnaces by night, or of red-bellied smoke palls over railway yards, and other views of this sort. But these, masterly as they are, rather unfavourably compare with the elegant work of older painters on more romantic subjects. Poetry, as far as I know, has never attempted to approach this subject in the same way as Painting has. The poet treats it in a generally moral tone, while the artist paints it in its raw literal detail. New subjects for poetry are practically impossible now-a-days, and we can scarcely blame verse-makers for a dearth of them. An astonishing variety of poems on the most ancient of themes is presented to us in their place, however, and we do not lose much. But Art is being pressed back steadily before the advance of “Progress.” At one time, let me give an example, a reliable subject for the poet was the “Simple Life,” particularly in regard to life in the country. Poets could rave about the simple yokels and the guileless cows for pages at a time, and the world never grew tired of it. A modern poet will avoid this subject, not from any fear of being hackneyed—no matter how much used a subject may be, a new point of view will give it a new, strange interest—but because farm life has lost many of its charms. No one can become enthusiastically poetical over anaesthetic turnips fenced in neatly with barbed-wire, or over the dusty tractors that now replace the sleek, strong, clumsy plough-horses. The farmer’s life has become more complex. He rises less early—because the cows are milked by electricity, and not by charmingly simple milkmaids. He comes into town on holidays in an American motor car, and goes to moving pictures. It is a great improvement from his point of view, but of course he is a Philistine. To the selfish, artistic soul it is deplorable. The poet will shortly be able to treat the simple farm life in the reminiscent way, just as he now Writes of the coaching days. In fact I would not be surprised if every subject for poetry were ruined as time goes on.