Chapter 10Appendix I: New Ways in English Literature

APPENDIX I New Ways in English Literature (Review) Amid the commonplace, vapid and undiscriminating stuff which mostly does duty for literary criticism in India, here is at last a work of the first order, something in which the soul can take pleasure for the beauty of its style, its perfect measure, its insight, its subtle observation and just appreciation. Such a book would be a miracle in its environment, but the miracle disappears when we know the name of the author; Mr. James Cousins is one of the leading spirits of the Irish movement which has given contemporary English literature its two greatest poets. This book therefore comes to us from Ireland, although it is published in India. One would like to see a significant link in this circumstance of Mr. Cousins’ presence and activities among us. For Ireland is a predestined home of the new spiritual illumi- nation rising in Europe from the ashes of the age of rationalism and she has already, in literature at least, found the path of her salvation: India, that ancient home of an imperishable spiritu- ality, has still, Rabindranath and the Bengal school of painting notwithstanding, to find hers, has yet to create the favourable imaginative, intellectual and aesthetic conditions for her voice to be heard again with the old power, but a renewed message. The atmosphere is at present raw and chill, thick with the crude mists of a false education and a meagre and imitative culture. Mr. Cousins’ work is avowedly part of a movement intended to make a salutary change and bring in the large air and light of a living culture and education. Mr. Cousins deals here with the contemporary and recent English poets, a subject for the most part quite unfamiliar to the Indian mind. He treats it with an admirable sympathy, an illuminating power of phrase and a fine certainty of touch; but

for the purpose for which these essays were put together, his criticism has one great fault, — there is too little of it. The first part deals with four contemporary poets, three of them of the first importance, and a group; the second deals with five recent poets and a dramatist and of these writers three again are of the first importance; but this slender volume of 135 pages is a small pedestal for so many figures. To catch the eye of the Indian reader [he tries] to give the greater of these something like life size, while putting the rest in smaller proportions — after a convention familiar to Indian art. Each essay is indeed excellent in itself; that on Emerson is a masterpiece of fullness in brevity, for it says perfectly in a few pages all that need be said about Emerson the poet and nothing that need not be said; others are quite full and conclusive enough for their purpose, for instance the admirable “defence” of Alfred Austin; and in all the essential things are said and said finely and tellingly. There is quite enough for the experienced reader of English poetry who can seize on implications and follow out suggestions; but the Indian reader is inexperienced and has not ordinarily a well- cultivated critical faculty or receptiveness; he needs an ampler treatment to familiarise him with the subject and secure his permanent interest. The essays do act admirably as finger-posts; but finger-posts are not enough for him, he needs to be carried some miles along the road before he will consent to follow it.