New Winds on Old Hills
VT'OUTH is a relative thing. Nothing more empha•*• sizes its virility, nothing stirs it more swiftly, than contact with antiquity. This is also true, one feels, in the literary life, where...
...Similarly, one might wager that the Shropshire Lad is no contemporary person, but a rugged fellow whom Mr...
...That spirit also explains much that a reader who is acquainted only with contemporary religious literature may find startling or venturesome in her analogies...
...and the inspiration of the mediaeval time is even now the nucleus round which fresh writing is centered...
...To a large extent, the whole flood of Romanticism was brought on by breaking through the dikes which had held back the vigor of the middle-ages...
...Housman brought back from his explorations in Stoicism...
...John Masefield, as all the world knows, learned the glory of being a poet from a random acquaintance with Chaucer...
...This is also true, one feels, in the literary life, where originality is often the spark struck from age-old stones...
...y, never once rising above it and apparently being without even the wish to rise...
...The best of these writers have an admirable technique...
...the number of nicely constructed novels, for instance, is larger than it probably ever was before...
...Certainly when one compares its product with the original forms and materials presented by those who have voluntarily opposed it, some such conclusion seems imposed...
...Does not the sameness, the monotony, the strumming on tired-out strings, which seem to many of us so characteristic of present letters, have its origin in the fact that so many writers bob right along in the contemporary stream...
...Amy Lowell electrified, even though she probably did not vitalize, the essence of American verse-making by a cosmopolitan friendship with the later French symbolists...
...It may be affirmed that rarely has a Catholic poet approached the modern world with a point of view more decidedly personal, or with rhythms having a more delicate newness and subtlety...
...The thought is brought to mind by the recent publication of Penelope, Sister Madeleva's second book of verse, a great deal of which is familiar matter to readers of The Commonweal...
...At all events...
...It would almost seem as if the "spirit of the time," whirling ahead with its headstrong chaotic uniformity, dooms its victims to a level line...
...It seems that the sincere writer, for whom the book is more than a business proposition, cannot afford to neglect the exploration of antiquity and the sight of new horizons...
...None the less, her impulse to write can be traced quite evidently to that immersion in Middle English which is the source of her scholarly and, it must be admitted, relatively humdrum prose...
...Who knows but academic institutions, hopeful of cultivating powers of expression, may yet veer away from that all too lavish concern with the modern point of view which has lately characterized them...
...The most successful of our fiction-makers swim in a current of up-to-date socioloj...
...There seems to exist, for instance, a perfectly amazing conviction that dashes of "new psychology" or "sex motivation" can make worn materials seem brand-new...
...Much indeed might be written about this reflection on origins, but enough has been said to premise an important speculation...
...From the mystics and scribes of the fourteenth century she seems to have caught, almost accidentally, the spirit which flames in her own exquisite verse...
...Half the charm of Joseph Conrad lies in the fact that he moved his Slavic lares into the old rookery of English fiction...
...One may reasonably go on to suppose that such derivations of incentive and vision from a literary world different from the writer's own and therefore invigorating, are almost as frequent as really powerful new names in the domain of books...
...and it is, of course, correct to say that Thomas Hardy's Tess and Eustachia Vye would not have been except for their author's deep and creative reading of Greek tragedy...
...and a definite level of sophisticated intelligence is required by any book which hopes to survive the scrutiny of a critical public...
...But how few have anything to say...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 1
