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