of a hospitable disposition, he insisted on his wife housing and feeding the girl while her husband was working in the fields. This wife of his, who was dying of acute dyspepsia, used to bustle about laying the cloth and setting palatable morsels before the girl whose husband only earned twelve and six a week. In former days Mrs. Giles had been a little recalcitrant, but having been beaten into the policy of the Open Door to such an extent that she used to sleep all night in the ditch, rather than face her husband's wrath, she had long been tranquilly resigned to these household duties. Our same hearty Farmer Giles had made it a matter of organized economy never to give his wife one penny of money to feed him, her daughter and herself and to run the house. She steeplechased over her difficulties by eating one potato a day herself and supplying the family out of the produce of the chickens which a married daughter had given her. Our arrival naturally did not please the head of the house, because the wife, having let the rooms, herself received the rent with which we were overcharged. The problem of getting rid of us was solved by the simple expedient of stamping at his most hob-nailed, and shouting at his most raucous, when he got up at five o'clock in the morning to milk the cows. His wife to some extent compensated herself for a premature loss of dividends by stealing the greater part of our imported larder. The girl who had captured the affections of this sturdy farmer was the mother of an epileptic daughter, whose life she had succeeded in insuring for ten pounds. On one occasion when the child was in convulsions the mother had secured the money and bought funeral robes for herself and cerements for the child. The little girl

recovered, and the mother was reconciled to her disimbursements by saving the expense of future clothing, and dressing the former in her shroud. The child used to sleep between her mother and father, whose mutual disesteem was not confined to words. When the husband returned home from the fields, the cottage door was usually locked and the key (a good theme for Boccaccio) on the dresser of his rival's kitchen. Being, according to the verdict of the village, a harmless simpleton, he was prone to soak his cares in bouts of heavy drinking. He had once been cured by the vicar of the parish, but his wife had mercifully goaded him into them again. The rest of the village confined themselves to mutual hatred, scandal, and poisoning each other's dogs.

I agree, my dear X, that I am between the pot and the kettle the neo-primitive theorist and the realistic poet. The one will indict, the other endite my material. But disentangling myself as best I may, I ask you-do you wonder that our cities sprawl?

The reason is not that the country is uninhabited, but uninhabitable. Now, if Government were enlightened and eager to do its people service, what would it do for those useless citizens who are interested in books? Well, I'll tell you. In the early summer months of each year, half a dozen friends would set out for a country pilgrimage in a motor caravan, laden to the chimney with books. All their expenses would be found, and the local authori ties instructed that they were to be treated decently wherever they chose to put up. On the outside of the caravan, well-designed posters would announce the pur

pose of the Argonauts' wayfaring and the contents of their Argo. At each village, a certain supply of the books would be dumped at the smithy or the inn or the most convenient farm or in a strong barn. Printed notices would be inserted in each book giving a simple and judicious summary of its charms, associations, interest, and (where necessary) its contents. The quality of the books would of course be graduated to the power of intelligent receptivity in their readers. But if they were simple books, they would assuredly not be bad ones. Some informal method of distribution and perhaps lecturing would be arranged, and away go our pilgrims to their next port of call. At the end of the summer, a collecting caravan would call at the various dumping grounds, fill up with the books, answer questions, suggest a further supply for the next year, and make a general report to the six weather-beaten ones who had preceded it.

In the winter, a small company of tried and competent artists would visit one or more of these villages with some honest plays in their trunks and enough stage furniture and effects to give them a creditable setting. Not, mark you, a company of high-brows with a supply of sandals for morris-dancing. The villagers would be trained to act these plays. In time-a very short timea professional rustic drama would emerge, not only to act plays, but to write and act its own.* Thus perhaps Boccaccio, moving from the farm-house to the barn, from the board to the boards, might be taught his proper place.

* N.B.-I believe that this experiment has actually been tried with exhilarating success at Hildenborough.

XXXII

MY DEAR X,

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

I suppose you have guessed that I intended to

devote an entire letter to the free verse crusaders.* First it was a Public Health Committee on literary style (the very few people who do not ignore these letters, might so speak of it); then an expeditionary force was despatched against the realists. He (you say), whose epistles are such models of neatness, uniformity, precision, unity, balance and classical finish, will no doubt pursue his fetich of formlessness, his obsession of the sprawl. And there is free verse, positively dashing in its defiance of the laws of prosody, upon the tip of my pedant's lance, hurling itself into the smoke of his arid formalism, leapig into the crater of his dour and acrid regularism. Acknowledge me, my dear X, capable of mixed metaphors, at any rate, even if I ingeniously attribute them to you!

I am not to be deflected by your malice. So hey presto, here goes! As a matter of fact, I am inclined to think

* Since writing the above, free verse has found its proper level. It is now easily seen that while it cannot revolutionize English verse, cadences and rhymes, it fulfils a valuable purpose, as the ramifying channel of light, satiric, humorous, occasional and ad hoc versification. But this letter was written when the claims of free verse were more Jingoistic.

something may come out of free verse-as soon as free verse can forget what a devil of a fellow it is. Considered as a reaction and experiment against a mere adequacy of metrical content, tenuity of idea, neutrality of inspiration, its impulse is reasonable. Whitman is its obvious. parent; there are Arnold and others, and you may even wrench the Authorized Version of the Bible into a rough approximation to the irregular metres of free verse or, to use the narrower and more scientific appellation— "Imagism." Except, of course, that the Authorized Version is prose.

Now, I don't believe that the case for free verse as a self-conscious rebellion against tradition will hold water for a moment, but before discussing that point it will be only fair to look into the Imagists' own apology. This is the programme: "The language of common speech" (like Wordsworth's); the creation of " new rhythms—as the expression of new moods " (as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, as well as Whitman and the French Symbolists did); "absolute freedom in the choice of subject" (a commonplace of every form of art); to present an image" (without relevance to the mood* or thought that suggests it?); and "concentration is of the very essence of poetry" (to which as a definition of lyric poetry a traditional lyrist like W. H. Davies would certainly agree.) So much for the programme which would scarcely seem to cork up the waters of the old Bandusian fount.

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Now take the lady who signs herself H.D., a genuine poet, and with two or three exceptions (hereafter to be

*N.B.-Anyway there is far too much wood in modern letters. So will there be, until literature is reconciled to normal life.