No More Learning

It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi
broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as ‘robots’, thus unconsciously borrowing a
word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands
on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in
leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely
heard his name. It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:

East is East, and West is West. The white man’s burden. What do they know of England
who only England know? The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez. Paying the Dane-geld.

There are various others, including some that have outlived their context by many years.
The phrase ‘killing Kruger with your mouth’, for instance, was current till very recently.
It is also possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word ‘Huns’ for
Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But what
the phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them phrases which
one utters semi-derisively (as it might be ‘For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m
to be Queen o’ the May’), but which one is bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing
could exceed the contempt of the NEW STATESMAN, for instance, for Kipling, but how
many times during the Munich period did the NEW STATESMAN find itself quoting
that phrase about paying the Dane-geld*? The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-
bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words (‘palm
and pine’ — ‘east of Suez’ — ‘the road to Mandalay’), is generally talking about things that
are of urgent interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent
people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him. ‘White man’s
burden’ instantly conjures up a real problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered




to ‘black man’s burden’. One may disagree to the middle of one’s bones with the political
attitude implied in ‘The Islanders’, but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude.
Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question
of his special status as a poet, or verse- writer.


* On the first page of his recent book, ADAM AND EVE, Mr. Middleton Murry quotes the
well-known lines:


There are nine and sixty ways Of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is
right.

He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known as a ‘Freudian
error. ’ A civilized person would prefer not to quote Kipling — i. e. would prefer not to feel
that it was Kipling who had expressed his thought for him. (Author’s footnote 1945. )

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as ‘verse’ and not ‘poetry’, but adds that it is
‘GREAT verse’, and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as
a ‘great verse-writer’ if there is some of his work ‘of which we cannot say whether it is
verse or poetry’. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in
which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble
is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr.
Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and
what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of
Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from
watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the
purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable of giving
pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in
poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like
the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with
his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet
unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that
no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:


For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say, ‘Come you back, you
British soldier, come you back to Mandalay! ’




and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles
hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by
juggling with the words ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, if one describes him simply as a good bad
poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere
existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be
vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.

There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to
1790. Examples of good bad poems — I am deliberately choosing diverse ones — are ‘The
Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When all the world is young, lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’,
Bret Harte’s ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’,
‘Keith of Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca’. All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet — not
these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true
pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-
sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad
poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine
popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts.
Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can
sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something
else. One can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses,
certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers
make up, including the words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a
civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort
of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at
playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself
an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same
audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance? Good bad
poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right
atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a
great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ in one of his broadcast speeches. I listened
to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and
I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But



not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better
than this.

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and probably still is
popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the
reading public, beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout singsongs, limp-leather
editions, pokerwork and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music halls.
Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worth while to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which
others share but are not always honest enough to mention. The fact that such a thing as
good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and
the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain
sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a
good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in
memorable form — for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things — some emotion
which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the
world is young, lad’ is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’
sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it
expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back
into your mind and seem better than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming
proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious.
One example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein, Slipping the spur from the booted heel; Tenderest
voices cry ‘Turn again! ’ Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel: Down to Gehenna or up to
the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a
thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels
the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting
for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested — his sense
of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it
happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party,



Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call
themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He
identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer
this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving
Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In
such and such circumstances, what would you DO? ’, whereas the opposition is not
obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and
pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.
Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be
justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as
Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not
financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling
class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he
gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and
responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’,
has no wish to EPATER LES BOURGEOIS. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we
live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less
shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as
Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND
SUPERMAN.

MARK TWAIN— THE LICENSED JESTER (1943)

Mark Twain has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library, but only with TOM
SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN, already fairly well known under the guise of
‘children’s books’ (which they are not). His best and most characteristic books,
ROUGHING IT, THE INNOCENTS AT HOME, and even LIFE ON THE
MISSISSIPPI, are little remembered in this country, though no doubt in America the
patriotism which is everywhere mixed up with literary judgement keeps them alive.

Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books, ranging from a namby-
pamby ‘life’ of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so obscene that it has never been publicly
printed, all that is best in his work centres about the Mississippi river and the wild mining



towns of the West. Bom in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough
to own one or perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in the golden
age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and
opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had
never been before and may not be again for centuries. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and
the two other books that I have mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions
and social history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme which could
perhaps be put into these words: ‘This is how human beings behave when they are not
frightened of the sack. ’ In writing these books Mark Twain is not consciously writing a
hymn to liberty. Primarily he is interested in ‘character’, in the fantastic, almost lunatic
variations which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are
both removed from it. The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and bandits whom he
describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are as different from modern men,
and from one another, as the gargoyles of a medieval cathedral. They could develop their
strange and sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure.
The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices, and land
was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye
and moved further west; and moreover, money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in
circulation was worth a shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen, and they
were not especially courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be
terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put down. They were not even
free from class distinctions. The desperado who stalked through the streets of the mining
settlement, with a Derringer pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses to his
credit, was dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat, described himself firmly as a
‘gentleman’ and was meticulous about table manners. But at least it was NOT the case
that a man’s destiny was settled from his birth. The Tog cabin to White House’ myth was
true while the free land lasted. In a way, it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the
Bastille, and when one reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that
their effort was wasted.

However, Mark Twain aimed at being something more than a chronicler of the
Mississippi and the Gold Rush. In his own day he was famous all over the world as a
humorist and comic lecturer. In New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Melbourne and
Calcutta vast audiences rocked with laughter over jokes which have now, almost without



exception, ceased to be funny. (It is worth noticing that Mark Twain’s lectures were only
a success with Anglo-Saxon and German audiences. The relatively grown-up Latin
races — whose own humour, he complained, always centred round sex and politics —
never cared for them. ) But in addition, Mark Twain had some pretensions to being a
social critic, even a species of philosopher. He had in him an iconoclastic, even
revolutionary vein which he obviously wanted to follow up and yet somehow never did
follow up. He might have been a destroyer of humbugs and a prophet of democracy more
valuable than Whitman, because healthier and more humorous. Instead he became that
dubious thing a ‘public figure’, flattered by passport officials and entertained by royalty,
and his career reflects the deterioration in American life that set in after the Civil War.

Mark Twain has sometimes been compared with his contemporary, Anatole France. This
comparison is not so pointless as it may sound. Both men were the spiritual children of
Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by
gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs
mostly delusions. Both were bigoted atheists and convinced (in Mark Twain’s case this
was Darwin’s doing) of the unbearable cruelty of the universe. But there the resemblance
ends. Not only is the Frenchman enormously more learned, more civilized, more alive
aesthetically, but he is also more courageous. He does attack the things he disbelieves in;
he does not, like Mark swain, always take refuge behind the amiable mask of the ‘public
figure’ and the licensed jester. He is ready to risk the anger of the Church and to take the
unpopular side in a controversy — in the Dreyfus case, for example. Mark Twain, except
perhaps in one short essay ‘What is Man? ’, never attacks established beliefs in a way that
is likely to get him into trouble. Nor could he ever wean himself from the notion, which
is perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue are the same thing.

In LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI there is a queer little illustration of the central weakness
of Mark Twain’s character. In the earlier part of this mainly autobiographical book the
dates have been altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as
though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young
man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book describes his
exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain
started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then
changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable



in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough,
however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this
tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to believe that might must be right,
is apparent throughout his career. In ROUGHING IT there is an interesting account of a
bandit named Slade, who, among countless other outrages, had committed twenty-eight
murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting scoundrel. Slade
was successful; therefore he was admirable. This outlook, no less common today, is
summed up in the significant American expression ‘to MAKE GOOD’.

In the money-grubbing period that followed the Civil War it was hard for anyone of Mark
Twain’s temperament to refuse to be a success. The old, simple, stump-whittling,
tobacco-chewing democracy which Abraham Lincoln typified was perishing: it was now
the age of cheap immigrant labour and the growth of Big Business. Mark Twain mildly
satirized his contemporaries in The GILDED AGE, but he also gave himself up to the
prevailing fever, and made and lost vast sums of money. He even for a period of years
deserted writing for business; and he squandered his time on buffooneries, not merely
lecture tours and public banquets, but, for instance, the writing of a book like A
CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT, which is a deliberate
flattery of all that is worst and most vulgar in American life. The man who might have
been a kind of rustic Voltaire became the world’s leading after-dinner speaker, charming
alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen feel themselves public
benefactors.

It is usual to blame Mark Twain’s wife for his failure to write the books he ought to have
written, and it is evident that she did tyrannize over him pretty thoroughly. Each morning,
Mark Twain would show her what he had written the day before, and Mrs. Clemens
(Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens) would go over it with the blue pencil,
cutting out everything that she thought unsuitable. She seems to have been a drastic blue-
penciller even by nineteenth-century standards. There is an account in W. D. Howells’s
book MY MARK TWAIN of the fuss that occurred over a terrible expletive that had
crept into HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Mark Twain appealed to Howells, who admitted that
it was ‘just what Huck would have said’, but agreed with Mrs. Clemens that the word
could not possibly be printed. The word was ‘hell’. Nevertheless, no writer is really the
intellectual slave of his wife. Mrs. Clemens could not have stopped Mark Twain writing



any book he really wanted to write. She may have made his surrender to society easier,
but the surrender happened because of that flaw in his own nature, his inability to despise
success.

Several of Mark Twain’s books are bound to survive, because they contain invaluable
social history. His life covered the great period of American expansion. When he was a
child it was a normal day’s outing to go with a picnic lunch and watch the hanging of an
Abolitionist, and when he died the aeroplane was ceasing to be a novelty. This period in
America produced relatively little literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture of a
Mississippi paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains, would be much dimmer
than it is. But most people who have studied his work have come away with a feeling that
he might have done something more. He gives all the while a strange impression of being
about to say something and then funking it, so that LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the
rest of them seem to be haunted by the ghost of a greater and much more coherent book.
Significantly, he starts his autobiography by remarking that a man’s inner life is
indescribable. We do not know what he would have said — it is just possible that the
unprocurable pamphlet, 1601 , would supply a clue but we may guess that it would have
wrecked his reputation and reduced his income to reasonable proportions.


POETRY AND THE MICROPHONE (1943)

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary
programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse by
contemporary and near-contemporary English writers — for example, Eliot, Herbert Read,
Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund
Blunden, D. H. Lawrence. Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the
people who wrote them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote out-
flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need to explain here, but I
should add that the fact that we were broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our
technique to some extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed
at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by
anything that could be described as British propaganda. It was known in advance that we



could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an
excuse to be more “highbrow” than is generally possible on the air.

If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language but don’t share your
cultural background, a certain amount of comment and explanation is unavoidable, and
the formula we usually followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary
magazine. The editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their office, discussing what to
put into the next number. Somebody suggested one poem, someone else suggested
another, there was a short discussion and then came the poem itself, read in a different
voice, preferably the author’s own. This poem naturally called up another, and so the
programme continued, usually with at least half a minute of discussion between any two
items. For a half-hour programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A
programme of this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could be given a
certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a single central theme. For
example, one number of our imaginary magazine was devoted to the subject of war. It
included two poems by Edmund Blunden, Auden’s “September 1941 “, extracts from a
long poem by G. S. Fraser (“A Letter to Anne Ridler”), Byron’s “Isles of Greece” and an
extract from T. E. Lawrence’s REVOLT IN THE DESERT. These half-dozen items, with
the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered reasonably well the possible
attitudes towards war. The poems and the prose extract took about twenty minutes to
broadcast, the arguments about eight minutes.

This formula may seem slightly ridiculous and also rather patronising, but its advantage
is that the element of mere instruction, the textbook motif, which is quite unavoidable if
one is going to broadcast serious and sometimes “difficult” verse, becomes a lot less
forbidding when it appears as an informal discussion. The various speakers can
ostensibly say to one another what they are in reality saying to the audience. Also, by
such an approach you at least give a poem a context, which is just what poetry lacks from
the average man’s point of view. But of course there are other methods. One which we
frequently used was to set a poem in music. It is announced that in a few minutes’ time
such and such a poem will be broadcast; then the music plays for perhaps a minute, then
fades out into the poem, which follows without any title or announcement, then the music
is faded again and plays up for another minute or two — the whole thing taking perhaps
five minutes. It is necessary to choose appropriate music, but needless to say, the real



purpose of the music is to insulate the poem from the rest of the programme. By this
method you can have, say, a Shakespeare sonnet within three minutes of a news bulletin
without, at any rate to my ear, any gross incongruity.

These programmes that I have been speaking of were of no great value in themselves, but
I have mentioned them because of the ideas they aroused in myself and some others
about the possibilities of the radio as a means of popularising poetry. I was early struck
by the fact that the broadcasting of a poem by the person who wrote it does not merely
produce an effect upon the audience, if any, but also on the poet himself. One must
remember that extremely little in the way of broadcasting poetry has been done in
England, and that many people who write verse have never even considered the idea of
reading it aloud. By being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all
regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise
attainable in our time and country. It is a commonplace that in modem times — the last
two hundred years, say — poetry has come to have less and less connection either with
music or with the spoken word. It needs print in order to exist at all, and it is no more
expected that a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even to declaim than it is expected
that an architect will know how to plaster a ceiling.
Lyrical and rhetorical poetry have
almost ceased to be written, and a hostility towards poetry on the part of the common
man has come to be taken for granted in any country where everyone can read. And
where such a breach exists it is always inclined to widen, because the concept of poetry
as primarily something printed, and something intelligible only to a minority, encourages
obscurity and “cleverness”. How many people do not feel quasi-instinctively that there
must be something wrong with any poem whose meaning can be taken in at a single
glance? It seems unlikely that these tendencies will be checked unless it again becomes
nonnal to read verse aloud, and it is difficult to see how this can be brought about except
by using the radio as a medium. But the special advantage of the radio, its power to select
the right audience, and to do away with stage-fright and embarrassment, ought here to be
noticed.

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of ONE. Millions may
be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or
ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is
reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone



who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably
sympathetic, the audience HAS NO POWER OVER YOU. It is just here that a broadcast
differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking
knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always
obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in
practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the
stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known
as “personality”. If you don’t do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid
embarrassment. That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will
always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who
can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same
difficulty — the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one — that makes it impossible
to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do
not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something,
and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with
a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The
element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the
only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse
aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man:
also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By
that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already
exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

However, what is happening at the other end cannot be disregarded. It will be seen that I
have been speaking as though the whole subject of poetry were embarrassing, almost
indecent, as though popularising poetry were essentially a strategic manoeuvre, like
getting a dose of medicine down a child’s throat or establishing tolerance for a persecuted
sect. But unfortunately that or something like it is the case. There can be no doubt that in
our civilisation poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in
which the average man refuses to discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly
exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word “poetry”
would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. And as I have pointed out, a breach of
this kind tends to widen simply because of its existence, the common man becoming
more and more anti-poetry, the poet more and more arrogant and unintelligible, until the



divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature,
although in fact it belongs only to our own time and to a comparatively small area of the
earth. We live in an age in which the average human being in the highly civilised
countries is aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. This state of affairs is generally
looked upon as being incurable by any CONSCIOUS act, and on the other hand is
expected to right itself of its own accord as soon as society takes a comelier shape. With
slight variations the Marxist, the Anarchist and the religious believer will all tell you this,
and in broad terms it is undoubtedly true. The ugliness amid which we live has spiritual
and economic causes and is not to be explained by the mere going-astray of tradition at
some point or other. But it does not follow that no improvement is possible within our
present framework, nor that an aesthetic improvement is not a necessary part of the
general redemption of society. It is worth stopping to wonder, therefore, whether it would
not be possible even now to rescue poetry from its special position as the most hated of
the arts and win for it at least the same degree of toleration as exists for music. But one
has to start by asking, in what way and to what extent is poetry unpopular?

On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as it could be. But on second
thoughts, this has to be qualified in a rather peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an
appreciable amount of folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc) which is universally known and
quoted and forms part of the background of everyone’s mind. There is also a handful of
ancient songs and ballads which have never gone out of favour. In addition there is the
popularity, or at least the toleration, of “good bad” poetry, generally of a patriotic or
sentimental kind. This might seem beside the point if it were not that “good bad” poetry
has all the characteristics which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike true poetry. It
is in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and unusual language — all this to a very
marked degree, for it is almost axiomatic that bad poetry is more “poetical” than good
poetry. Yet if not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just before writing
this I have been listening to a couple of BBC comedians doing their usual turn before the
9 o’clock news. In the last three minutes one of the two comedians suddenly announces
that he “wants to be serious for a moment” and proceeds to recite a piece of patriotic
balderdash entitled “A Fine Old English Gentleman”, in praise of His Majesty the King.
Now, what is the reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse into the worst sort of
rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently negative, or there would be a sufficient
volume of indignant letters to stop the BBC doing this kind of thing. One must conclude



that though the big public is hostile to POETRY, it is not strongly hostile to VERSE.
After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes, neither songs nor dirty
limericks could be popular. Poetry is disliked because it is associated with untelligibility,
intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name
creates in advance the same sort of bad impression as the word “God”, or a parson’s dog-
collar. To a certain extent, popularising poetry is a question of breaking down an acquired
inhibition. It is a question of getting people to listen instead of uttering a mechanical
raspberry. If true poetry could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it
seem NORMAL, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to presumably seemed
normal, then part of the prejudice against it might be overcome.

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again without some deliberate
effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge.
T. S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back
into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might
have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been
completely explored. “Sweeney Agonistes” was perhaps written with some such idea in
mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a
revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its
technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The reason why
such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is that few people are able to imagine
the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the
stuff that does actually dribble from the loud-speakers of the world, and conclude that it
is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed the very word “wireless” calls
up a picture either of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three
of our aircraft have failed to return. Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped
trousers. Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the
use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is something
inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole apparatus of microphone and
transmitter, but because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under
the control of governments or great monopoly companies which are actively interested in
maintaining the STATUS QUO and therefore in preventing the common man from
becoming too intelligent. Something of the same kind has happened to the cinema, which,
like the radio, made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is



fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is similar. More and more
the channels of production are under the control of bureaucrats, whose aim is to destroy
the artist or at least to castrate him. This would be a bleak outlook if it were not that the
totalitarianisation which is now going on, and must undoubtedly continue to go on, in
every country of the world, is mitigated by another process which it was not easy to
foresee even as short a time as five years ago.

This is, that the huge bureaucratic machines of which we are all part are beginning to
work creakily because of their mere size and their constant growth. The tendency of the
modem state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every
state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an
intelligentsia to do its publicity for it. The modern state needs, for example, pamphlet-
writers, poster artists, illustrators, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song
composers, even painters and sculptors, not to mention psychologists, sociologists, bio-
chemists, mathematicians and what not. The British Government started the present war
with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of
it; yet after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political
history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC and even
those who enter the armed forces tend to find themselves after a while in Public Relations
or some other essentially literary job. The Government has absorbed these people,
unwillingly enough, because it found itself unable to get on without them. The ideal,
from the official point of view, would have been to put all publicity into the hands of
“safe” people like A. P. Herbert or Ian Hay: but since not enough of these were available,
the existing intelligentsia had to be utilised, and the tone and even to some extent the
content of official propaganda have been modified accordingly. No one acquainted with
the Government pamphlets, ABCA (The Army Bureau of Current Affairs. ) lectures,
documentary films and broadcasts to occupied countries which have been issued during
the past two years imagines that our rulers would sponsor this kind of thing if they could
help it. Only, the bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and
forgotten corners there are in it. This is perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a
despicable one. It means that in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition,
bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete. The striped-trousered ones will rule,
but so long as they are forced to maintain an intelligentsia, the intelligentsia will have a
certain amount of autonomy. If the Government needs, for example, documentary films,



it must employ people specially interested in the technique of the film, and it must allow
them the necessary minimum of freedom; consequently, films that are all wrong from the
bureaucratic point of view will always have a tendency to appear. So also with painting,
photography, scriptwriting, reportage, lecturing and all the other arts and half-arts of
which a complex modem state has need.

The application of this to the radio is obvious. At present the loudspeaker is the enemy of
the creative writer, but this may not necessarily remain true when the volume and scope
of broadcasting increase. As things are, although the BBC does keep up a feeble show of
interest in contemporary literature, it is harder to capture five minutes on the air in which
to broadcast a poem than twelve hours in which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned
music, stale jokes, faked “discussions” or what-have-you. But that state of affairs may
alter in the way I have indicated, and when that time comes serious experiment in the
broadcasting of verse, with complete disregard for the various hostile influences which
prevent any such thing at present, would become possible. I don’t claim it as certain that
such an experiment would have very great results. The radio was bureaucratised so early
in its career that the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been
thought out. It is not certain that the microphone is the instrument by which poetry could
be brought back to the common people and it is not even certain that poetry would gain
by being more of a spoken and less of a written thing. But I do urge that these
possibilities exist, and that those who care for literature might turn their minds more often
to this much-despised medium, whose powers for good have perhaps been obscured by
the voices of Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels.


W B YEATS (1943)

One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace the connection
between “tendency” and literary style. The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be
explained in sociological terms, but its texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such
connection there must be. One knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like
Chesterton or a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though HOW one knows it is not
easy to say. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connection between his
wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister vision of life. Mr Menon is



chiefly concerned with the esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats’s work, but the
quotations which are scattered all through his interesting book serve to remind one how
artificial Yeats’s manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality is accepted as
Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but in
fact one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an
archaism or an affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example:


Grant me an old man’s Frenzy,

My self must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.

The unnecessary “that” imports a feeling of affectation, and the same tendency is present
in all but Yeats’s best passages. One is seldom long away from a suspicion of
“quaintness”, something that links up not only with the ‘nineties, the Ivory Tower and the
“calf covers of pissed-on green”, but also with Rackham’s drawings, Liberty art-fabrics
and the PETER PAN never-never land, of which, after all, “The Happy Townland” is
merely a more appetising example. This does not matter, because, on the whole, Yeats
gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce
phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly
overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen across a room. He is an exception to the rule that
poets do not use poetical language:

How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,

Beyond hearing or seeing,

Or Archimedes’ guess,

To raise into being
That loveliness?

Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like “loveliness” and after all it does
not seriously spoil this wonderful passage. But the same tendencies, together with a sort
of raggedness which is no doubt intentional, weaken his epigrams and polemical poems.



For instance (I am quoting from memory) the epigram against the critics who damned
THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD:


Once when midnight smote the air
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by;

Even like these to rail and sweat,

Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy ready made and
produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but even in this short poem there are six or
seven unnecessary words. It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.

Mr Menon’s book is incidentally a short biography of Yeats, but he is above all interested
in Yeats’s philosophical “system”, which in his opinion supplies the subject-matter of
more of Yeats’s poems than is generally recognised. This system is set forth
fragmentarily in various places, and at full length in A VISION, a privately printed book
which I have never read but which Mr Menon quotes from extensively. Yeats gave
conflicting accounts of its origin, and Mr Menon hints pretty broadly that the
“documents” on which it was ostensibly founded were imaginary. Yeats’s philosophical
system, says Mr Menon, “was at the back of his intellectual life almost from the
beginning. His poetry is full of it. Without it his later poetry becomes almost completely
unintelligible. ” As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the
middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation,
disembodied spirits, astrology and what not. Yeats hedges as to the literalness with which
he believed in all this, but he certainly dabbled in spiritualism and astrology, and in
earlier life had made experiments in alchemy. Although almost buried under
explanations, very difficult to understand, about the phases of the moon, the central idea
of his philosophical system seems to be our old friend, the cyclical universe, in which
everything happens over and over again. One has not, perhaps, the right to laugh at Yeats
for his mystical beliefs — for I believe it could be shown that SOME degree of belief in
magic is almost universal — but neither ought one to write such things off as mere
unimportant eccentricities. It is Mr Menon’s perception of this that gives his book its
deepest interest. “In the first flush of admiration and enthusiasm,” he says, “most people
dismissed the fantastical philosophy as the price we have to pay for a great and curious



intellect. One did not quite realise where he was heading. And those who did, like Pound
and perhaps Eliot, approved the stand that he finally took. The first reaction to this did
not come, as one might have expected, from the politically-minded young English poets.
They were puzzled because a less rigid or artificial system than that of A VISION might
not have produced the great poetry of Yeats’s last days. ” It might not, and yet Yeats’s
philosophy has some very sinister implications, as Mr Menon points out.

Translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist. Throughout most of his life,
and long before Fascism was ever heard of, he had had the outlook of those who reach
Fascism by the aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the modern world,
science, machinery, the concept of progress — above all, of the idea of human equality.
Much of the imagery of his work is feudal, and it is clear that he was not altogether free
from ordinary snobbishness. Eater these tendencies took clearer shape and led him to “the
exultant acceptance of authoritarianism as the only solution. Even violence and tyranny
are not necessarily evil because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become
perfectly acquiescent to tyranny. . . . Everything must come from the top. Nothing can
come from the masses. ” Not much interested in politics, and no doubt disgusted by his
brief incursions into public life, Yeats nevertheless makes political pronouncements. He
is too big a man to share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early as 1920 he foretells in a
justly famous passage (“The Second Coming”) the kind of world that we have actually
moved into. But he appears to welcome the coming age, which is to be “hierarchical,
masculine, harsh, surgical”, and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by various Italian
Fascist writers. He describes the new civilisation which he hopes and believes will arrive:
“an aristocratic civilisation in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical,
every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few
men’s hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God
dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality made
law. ” The innocence of this statement is as interesting as its snobbishness. To begin with,
in a single phrase, “great wealth in a few men’s hands”, Yeats lays bare the central reality
of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is designed to cover up. The merely
political Fascist claims always to be fighting for justice: Yeats, the poet, sees at a glance
that Fascism means injustice, and acclaims it for that very reason. But at the same time he
fails to see that the new authoritarian civilisation, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or
what he means by aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck faces, but



by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters. Others
who have made the same mistake have afterwards changed their views and one ought not
to assume that Yeats, if he had lived longer, would necessarily have followed his friend
Pound, even in sympathy. But the tendency of the passage I have quoted above is
obvious, and its complete throwing overboard of whatever good the past two thousand
years have achieved is a disquieting symptom.

How do Yeat’s political ideas link up with his leaning towards occultism? It is not clear
at first glance why hatred of democracy and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing
should go together. Mr Menon only discusses this rather shortly, but it is possible to
make two guesses. To begin with, the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is
one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that “all this”,
or something like it, “has happened before”, then science and the modem world are
debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever impossible. It does not much
matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be
returning to an age of tyranny. Yeats is by no means alone in this outlook. If the universe
is moving round on a wheel, the future must be foreseeable, perhaps even in some detail.
It is merely a question of discovering the laws of its motion, as the early astronomers
discovered the solar year. Believe that, and it becomes difficult not to believe in astrology
or some similar system. A year before the war, examining a copy of GRINGOIRE, the
French Fascist weekly, much read by anny officers, I found in it no less than thirty-eight
advertisements of clairvoyants. Secondly, the very concept of occultism carries with it the
idea that knowledge must be a secret thing, limited to a small circle of initiates. But the
same idea is integral to Fascism. Those who dread the prospect of universal suffrage,
popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a
predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the
profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.

No doubt Yeats wavered in his beliefs and held at different times many different
opinions, some enlightened, some not. Mr Menon repeats for him Eliot’s claim that he
had the longest period of development of any poet who has ever lived. But there is one
thing that seems constant, at least in all of his work that I can remember, and that is his
hatred of modern western civilisation and desire to return to the Bronze Age, or perhaps
to the Middle Ages. Like all such thinkers, he tends to write in praise of ignorance. The



Fool in his remarkable play, THE HOUR-GLASS, is a Chestertonian figure, “God’s
fool”, the “natural born innocent”, who is always wiser than the wise man. The
philosopher in the play dies on the knowledge that all his lifetime of thought has been
wasted (I am quoting from memory again):

The stream of the world has changed its course, And with the stream my thoughts have
run Into some cloudly, thunderous spring That is its mountain-source; Ay, to a frenzy of
the mind, That all that we have done’s undone Our speculation but as the wind.

Beautiful words, but by implication profoundly obscurantist and reactionary; for if it is
really true that a village idiot, as such, is wiser than a philosopher, then it would be better
if the alphabet had never been invented. Of course, all praise of the past is partly
sentimental, because we do not live in the past. The poor do not praise poverty. Before
you can despise the machine, the machine must set you free from brute labour. But that is
not to say that Yeats’s yearning for a more primitive and more hierarchical age was not
sincere. How much of all this is traceable to mere snobbishness, product of Yeats’s own
position as an impoverished offshoot of the aristocracy, is a different question. And the
connection between his obscurantist opinions and his tendency towards “quaintness” of
language remains to be worked out; Mr Menon hardly touches upon it.

This is a very short book, and I would greatly like to see Mr Menon go ahead and write
another book on Yeats, starting where this one leaves off. “If the greatest poet of our
times is exultantly ringing in an era of Fascism, it seems a somewhat disturbing
symptom,” he says on the last page, and leaves it at that. It is a disturbing symptom,
because it is not an isolated one. By and large the best writers of our time have been
reactionary in tendency, and though Fascism does not offer any real return to the past,
those who yearn for the past will accept Fascism sooner than its probable alternatives.
But there are other lines of approach, as we have seen during the past two or three years.
The relationship between Fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs
investigating, and Yeats might well be the starting-point. He is best studied by someone
like Mr Menon, who can approach a poet primarily as a poet, but who also knows that a
writer’s political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away, but
something that will leave their mark even on the smallest detail of his work.



ARTHUR KOESTLER (1944)


One striking fact about English literature during the present century is the extent to which
it has been dominated by foreigners — for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce,
Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Still, if you chose to make this a matter of national prestige and
examine our achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that
England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as
political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special class of literature that has
arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading
novels, autobiographies, books of “reportage”, sociological treatises and plain pamphlets
can ah be lumped together, all of them having a common origin and to a great extent the
same emotional atmosphere.

Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux,
Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself. Some of these are imaginative
writers, some not, but they are ah alike in that they are trying to write contemporary
history, but UNOFFICIAL history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied
about in the newspapers. Also they are all alike in being continental Europeans. It may be
an exaggeration, but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book dealing
with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still seems worth reading six months
after publication, it is a book translated from some foreign language. English writers,
over the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political literature, but
they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic value, and very little of historical value
either. The Left Book Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of
its chosen volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi Gennany, Soviet Russia,
Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia — all that these and kindred subjects have
produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which
propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up again, half digested, and a very few
reliable guide books and text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for instance,
FONTAMARA or DARKNESS AT NOON, because there is almost no English writer to
whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside. In Europe, during the past
decade and more, things have been happening to middle-class people which in England
do not even happen to the working class. Most of the European writers I mentioned
above, and scores of others like them, have been obliged to break the law in order to



engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in street battles,
many have been in prison or the concentration camp, or fled across frontiers with false
names and forged passports. One cannot imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in
activities of that kind. England is lacking, therefore, in what one might call concentration-
camp literature.