“SUNDAY MORNINGS”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18617, 12 July 1930, Page 15

“SUNDAY MORNINGS”

A J. C. SQUIRE BOOK. Mr J. C. Squire is one of those literary enigmas, of whom the outstanding example is Dr. Johnson, whose reputation is by no means consistent with their literary output. Mr Squire has writen some good but uninspired poetry, some excellent parodies, but he owes his great reputation to his position as editor of the London Mercury, and as leader of a school of poets sometimes referred to as a “Squirearchy,” which school, having too spartan a regard for sentiment and warm humanity, is happily on the wane. There is no sounder literary journal in England than the London Mercury, and it owes much to Mr Squire’s guiding hand.

“Sunday Mornings” is aptly named, for it contains leisurely reflections, after the hurly burly of the week’s work, on such pleasant things as country inns, pirates, cricket, clowns, dramatists, as well as literary estimates of many of the modern —Conrad, Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Sassoon—and some lesser-known books. An impression of his keen constructive method may be gathered by quoting from a boisterous appreciation of Chesterton’s poetry. “Years ago he wrote an essay in which he described his notion of bliss. It was to lie on his back in bed and paint large sweeping fantasies on the ceiling with a brush ten feet long in the handle. For all I know he may now actually do this every morning. But he has always done the equivalent thing in print. He chucks it about in chunks. He is intoxicated with words, wof*ds that blare like trumpets or re-

verberate like, thunder; the more of them there are together the merrier he will be.”

One is tempted to go on quoting. A squadron of Polish cavalry recently accompanied him to a Warsaw railway station, “a pleasing attention, and one that I am sure he heartily appreciated. But a thoroughly adequate escort for him would include not merely armed horsemen, but cohorts of magicians, clowns, princesses, priests, kings, vegetarians, Puritans, drunkards, landlords, politicians, millionaires, minstrels and dragons: all 5T whom are among the materials out of which has has made the fairy tale world of his poems.” And now it is impossible to resist quoting a little verse of Chesterton himself, from the “New Omar”:—

A book of verses underneath the bough, Provided that the verses do not scan, A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou Short-haired, all angles, looking like a man.

That is what Mr Squire’s criticism does, it drives one to the author himself, which is what good criticism ought to do.

“Sunday Mornings,” by J. C. Squire (Heinemann).