Now disillusionment may be a source of poetic emotion like another, but it is an infertile source and, in practice, the poetry which issues from it is thin and lacking in heat. As a matter of fact, the modern consciousness is ill represented by modern poetry, but perhaps most narrowly by the poetry of disillusionment. And, it must be remembered, this, being a source of emotion like another, may bring forth only sentimentality like another. Mr Aldous Huxley has gone perilously near this lapse. But then Mr Huxley seems to have deserted verse for prose, which is perhaps a natural development. It remains only to notice the writers who have sought to revivify poetry by the deliberate adoption of a new set of similes and metaphors. Miss Edith Sitwell believes that the senses of 'the modernist poet. . . have become broadened and cosmopolitanised; they are no longer little islands, speaking only their own narrow language, living their sleepy life alone. When the speech of one sense is insufficient to convey his entire meaning, he uses the language of another.' This enables Miss Sitwell to declare that Each dull, blunt, wooden stalactite Of rain creaks, hardened by the light,' and even to justify in prose her use of these words. It introduces a novelty into poetic imagery: one can only regret that what would seem to be so important a revolution in human consciousness should have resulted in poems of so little importance. Miss Sitwell (with whom, less strikingly, her brothers, Mr Osbert Sitwell and Mr Sacheverell Sitwell) has done something mildly novel in purely impressionist notation, but the intellectual and emotional force of the whole family does not appear to be equal to anything more than the occasional production of rather lively and bizarre words, which, however arrayed, do not mean anything in particular. These writers are at all points on a level with the writers of magazine lyrics, but they disguise their status by being meaningless instead of maudlin, and for this they should be given as much credit as the achievement may seem to deserve. So much modernists. for the revolutionaries or conscious To call all the rest traditionalists would be to beg too many questions and to impute a unity much greater than they themselves feel and greater than in fact exists. But there is a distinction, hard as it may be to apply in individual cases, between the poets who have deliberately sought modernism along the path of one theory or another and those who have encountered it, if at all, as led by their own natures and experience. It is among these that we must look for an answer to the question whether the poetic revival has justified itself. It has justified itself in the sense that it has added to the canon of our poetry an amount of new work not yet to be estimated but certainly perceptible. It has been, however, disappointing. Two of the older writers are established. Mr Walter de la Mare, gradually augmenting the body of his lyrics, was suddenly seen to be a writer who, if he had attempted no organised work on a major scale, had nevertheless ended by completely expressing a certain conception of life and a full cycle of experience. His glimpses into paradise and the world of dreams, his fairies and his goblins, attain to unity as the magical embodiment of a philosophy. The poem which ends: 6 When music sounds, all that I was I am Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came ; is a beautiful thing by itself but it means as much in its place in his whole work as does a detachable passage from one of Shakespeare's plays. The same thing, that he has produced a body of work, not an assemblage of separate pieces, may also be said of Mr W. H. Davies. His nature is simpler, his experience less rich and less deep; but all his poetry is one in expressing an innocently sensual appreciation of the delights of the world. The case of the younger men is different, and though some of them early produced work of fine quality, nearly all of them seem to have delayed in redeeming that promise. By delaying they have incurred the just charge of being 'anthology poets,' in the sense that their best work is detachable and makes a deeper impression when found isolated in anthologies than when read in their own collections. They have refrained from larger works, and not one, of them has yet made it plain that the growing bulk of his lyrics can be regarded as a whole. Mr Robert Nichols, in his second, and first noticeable, volume, 'Ardours and Endurances,' had a naïve magnificence, an exuberant imagination and a power of vivid language. But though he has made a fine attempt at a prose play, he has flagged in the writing of verse. Mr W. J. Turner, by combining a power of so approaching common things, as to make them seem newly strange, with a fascinating imagery of distant and imaginary lands, suggested that he might be evolving a universe of his own, as consistent and exciting as Mr de la Mare's. But of his last two books, 'Landscape of Cytherea' (he meant 'Cythera ') is wilfully obscure and tangled and 'The Seven Days of the Sun' is a perverse, though witty, piece of petulant eccentricity. These are only examples of disappointments that have occurred during the post-war years. Mr Blunden, working away with quiet assurance at his two subjects, the war and the English countryside, is producing a body of poetry that never fails in accuracy or sincerity, though his method is a little narrow and inelastic. His motive is perhaps the chronicler's desire to preserve two things which are disappearing from human knowledge. Mr Robert Graves, delving into a subsoil to which he believes psycho-analysis has shown him the way, may have discovered a principle of poetic being for himself. It may be that the revival flags because inspiration, too violently stimulated by events since 1914, is for a little while in need of recuperation. It may be that public encouragement is suffering from fatigue similarly induced. It is possible, as some assert, that the wireless will rejuvenate poetry by restoring to it the direct vocal appeal which it has been gradually losing over a period of some two thousand years. But it is certain that at this moment English poetry is in a depressed and languid, though by no means hopeless, condition. EDWARD SHANKS. Art. 10.-GOOD ESTATE MANAGEMENT. 1. The Land and its People. By Lord Ernle. Hutchinson, 1925. 2. The Tenure of Agricultural Land. By C. S. Orwin and W. R. Peel. Cambridge University Press, 1925. 3. The Land and the Nation: Rural Report of the Liberal Land Committee, 1923-25. SECTION 4, subsection (7) of the Agriculture Act of 1920 enacted that 'Where the Minister is of opinion, after consultation with the agricultural committee, that the owner of any agricultural estate situate wholly or partly in the area of the committee, whether the estate or any part thereof is or is not in the occupation of the tenants, grossly mismanages the estate to such an extent as to prejudice materially the production of food thereon or the welfare of those who are engaged in the cultivation of the estate, the Minister may, if he thinks it necessary or desirable so to do in the national interest, and after holding such public inquiry as he thinks proper and after taking into consideration any representations made to him by the owner, by order appoint such person as he thinks fit to act as receiver and manager of the estate or any part thereof.' In the following year this clause was repealed by the Corn Production Acts (Repeal) Act, and it has not since been re-enacted. But the fact that it remained for a year on the Statute Book is significant of the present tendency to regard agricultural land not solely as private property, but as held in trust by the landowner for the benefit of the community. It has become a matter in which the nation is vitally interested. If the landowner should fail in his duty as a trustee it has been enacted that he should be relieved of his trusteeship. This raises the further question-what are the obligations of the trusteeship, and what is to be done if the landowner, through no fault of his own, is unable to carry them out? Answers have been suggested by successive Ministers of Agriculture. The traditional duty of the landlord is to supply the equipment capital, which enables the farmer to use the land productively. Lord Ernle has stated that, on the evidence available, landowners receive a net revenue of something like 31⁄2 per cent. on their capital outlay on equipment, but nothing is paid to them for the use of the productive powers of the land. Our system of agricultural landowner and tenant operates in fact as a method of cheap agricultural credit, founded, not on State aid, but entirely on private capital. A lease or tenancy agreement is practically a loan of land equipped for cultivation, at a low average rate of interest on the capital expended in equipment. The farmer, who as tenant accepts the loan, is thus free to use his own capital for the cultivation of the soil. Mr Wood, in a speech made on Dec. 9, 1924, recognised that the equipment capital of land, as opposed to the current working capital (supplied by the tenant farmer), has hitherto been supplied by the old landowners at an astonishingly cheap rate of interest. He also asked what was going to happen if that class, by taxation or for one reason or another, should gradually disappear. The new occupying owners would find it exceedingly difficult to supply the equipment capital as well as the working capital. That meant either that farms would become impoverished and production diminished, or that the State would have to take the place of the old landlord by lending capital. In the latter event the State would certainly claim some measure of control in the business which it was financing, so that within thirty or forty years something like nationalisation by a side wind might be expected. The view is developed by two writers, each of whom has a practical experience of agriculture under post-war conditions-Mr C. S. Orwin, Director of the Institute of Agricultural Economics, and Lieut-Colonel Peel, University Lecturer in Agriculture at Oxford. They go further than did Mr Wood. Regretfully, but none the less, convinced, that the old system can no longer stand, and that the break up of estates will proceed at a greater rate, they have thought it better to look for an alternative now, rather than acquiesce in a policy of drift. And their alternative is the acquisition by the State of all agricultural land in England and Wales. They have arrived at this solution by a line of reasoning different from that pursued by earlier |