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New Zealand Tablet, 13 June 1918, Page 26

NOTES

Kipling t Once upon a time even decent people used to appreciate Kipling, but gradually his coarseness became appalling, and when the glare of novelty grew dimmer one could see him in all his essential unloveliness for the brutal writer he really is. A great many hard things have been said about this half-caste business man, but nothing more biting than Mr. Dooley’s allusion to Rudyard coming along with his ready pen to write a poem when the man fell into a sewer. That hits him off: it fixes him. lie is only a yellow-jour-nalist at the root. W. L. Courtney says he is modern journalism incarnate “with all its sensationalism, its terrific headlines, its glaring exhibitions of vehemence, its extravagance of superlatives, its incapacity for argument.’’ That just endorses Mr. Dooley. And how true! We can hear Kipling taking up the silly tag of a Dunedin daily which lately described the sane statement that to continue the war when there was a chance of stopping it by negotiations was dark ignorance and moral obliquity! And were not Kipling’s calumnies about Parnell, and his readiness to accept forgeries as evidence against a gentleman, quite in keeping with journalism as we know it ? If George Russell never wrote another line beyond his terrible exposure of the dirty half-caste who was paid for voiding his rheum on Irishmen he would have our undying gratitude.

The Roughness of Moderns Kipling is the greatest sinner but by no means the only one. In too many books of our time the coarse note is heard, and there is a something that jars on ears accustomed to the good taste and restraint of older writers of English. The poets have no longer the delicacy of Tennyson or Wordsworth, although there are noble exceptions such as Mrs. Meynell. The novelists, as a class, have lost the touch of Dickens and the nobility of Scott, and they have found nothing worth half of what they have lost. Here is a good description of them; “They are rough and passionate; they strike masterful blows ; they exhibit unrestrained emotion; they paint with a big brush. I cannot imagine any of them writing with a quill pen; they probably use typewriters and fountain pensall the modern appliances for urging a mad career without stint or pause. The French adjective criard represents the effect they produce—gaudy, melodramatic, showy, creating conviction by their unblushing intensity, never winning their way by sweet reasonableness, but forcing •us to agree with them at the point of their literary pistols. That is what I mean -by the note of violence. At its best it is ‘smart’ and ‘ spirited.’ At its lowest and worst it belongs to :that region of twopence colored ’ which everywhere contrasts with the modesty

of ‘ penny plain.’ ” The classical serenity, the dignitv of restraint are gone. And instead of works of art we have the blood and thunder of melodrama and the glare of the music hall. The Comic Spirit George Meredith defines the comic spirit for us in his Essays on Comedy; but for most people it needs no definition, and for others no definition will make it clear. It is a terrible misfortune to be deprived of a sense of humor. In many spheres of life it is equivalent to being without sight, hearing, and feeling. It means that the man who is thus afflicted is always knocking his head against things and people and hurting himself—or oftener hurting them, for as a rule his head is the harder. The lack of a sense of humor is by no means uncommon. We have now and then proof of its absence in our neighborhood. A little while ago we attempted a joke in this column, and although five thousand nine hundred' and ninety-seven of our readers saw it, the others did not. Some of them wrote to us good-humoredly enough if querulously. But one chiel went for us in all his war paint and not only arraigned us for our own sins but also for some of those of our forebears, about which we knew nothing. In future if we ever make a joke we shall be careful to announce four weeks before that it is coming, just .as the circuses used to be announced in the days of our youth.

A.E. Collected Poems, In/ A.E. (Macmillan, London). No book we have come upon for a long time has been such a genuine pleasure as this volume which gives us the best of George Russell’s poetry. George Russell, or as he is known to the reading public or to a select part of it, A.E., has been before the Irish literary world for a number of years now, and in a number of very various 'attitudes. At one time he was known in Dublin as a dreamy theosophist, as a student and expounder of Eastern lore, as a mystic. lie has also attained eminence by the publication of essays of real distinction and almost perfect literary grace. He has published short stories that were welcomed by competent critics as works of art. He has written one of the best plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. He has been a power in Ireland for good by his active interest in agricultural organisation. lie has edited, for a longtime now, the Irish tlnmestead , wherein he writes of turnips and potatoes with the pen of a poet.

The Poems . But, re-vennns a nos montons: let us come back to our subject, the poems of A.E. They are now before us in definite form, some of the older ones omitted, but very little change in what is left. The key to them is only held by one who remembers always that George Russell was a mystic and that he loved nature even in a more personal and intense way than did Wordsworth. With these things in mind one may open the book and be ready to appreciate real poetry, Celtic poetry, poetry that makes a notable contribution to the treasury of Anglo-Irish literature. Most of the poems are short ; for restraint is one ox the admirable qualities of A.E. Restraint, indeed, in words, in imagery, in thought, mark his work right through, and .is a sign of its excellence and classical finish. We must not look for passionate patriotism • because George Russell was not a patriot of the militant type, though we hold him a patriot none the less. He was an advocate of a middle way, and did his best to go on working for Ireland while his brethren from the north and his friends from the south were tearing each other’s hair. But if we love Irish landscape, and if we have ever revelled in the sunsets of Irish autumns, or the afterglows of Irish November skies, or the beauty of spring mornings on Irish hills, we shall find all we want in this book. Here is a picture of a peasant girl in Connemara:

With eyes all untroubled she laughs as she passes, Bending beneath the creel with the seaweed brown, Till evening with pearl dew dims the shining grasses And night lit with drearnlight enfolds the sleepy town • , Then she will wander,' her heart all a laughter, Tracking the dream star that lights the purple gloom. She follows the proud and golden races after, t As high as theirs her spirit, as high as theirs will be her doom. Dusk. Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress ; Each chimney’s vapor, like a thin grey rod, Mounting aloft through miles of quietness, Pillars the skies of God. Far up they break or seem to break their line, Mingling their nebulous crests that bow and nod Under the light of those fierce stars that shine Out of the calm of God. Only in clouds and dreams I felt those souls In the abyss, each fire hid in its clod : From which in clouds and dreams the spirit rolls Into the vast of God.

The P.P.A. Literature We must congratulate the Minister of Customs, (he Hon. Mr. Myers, and Sir Francis Bell on their answer to the persistent requests of the P.P.A. for permission to have their evil-smelling literature brought into New Zealand. The law of the land claims the right to exclude from the shores and homes of the Dominion large classes of objectionable literature, and the Ministers of the Government were only doing their duty when they stood firm in the matter. ■ For the literature—why "literature”?—is objectionable to a degree. It is dangerously provocative, it is highly insulting to a large body of citizens who have been practising patriotism while many of their critics were talking about it, and it is shameless and shameful. Much of it always reminds us of a vast modern Morgue where dead creatures lie exposed, the mire of their suicide clinging to them. Once they were clean and wholesome ; now they have become portion and parcel of the putrescence on which they fed. There is nothing Divine about it, for God demands of us cleanness and chastity: there is nothing human. It is only “the human beast unchained. It would need some adjectives from Billingsgate, vigorously pronounced, to express the true character of this Yahoo literature, both the stuff that is banned and a fair amount of what is not banned. Pity ’tis, but ’tis true that among a certain class there is perfect equivalence between the degree of outrage on charity and decency and the number of copies sold.