Richard Aldington: reviews for The Egoist 1914 and more
Selected or slightly summarized by Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward. Review inclusion criteria: trying to include everything.
Draft version: version 4, 1 June 2026 (Two Poets added; version 3, 24 May 2026)
PDF at: https://www.academia.edu/165308015/Summaries_of_more_Richard_Aldington_reviews_for_The_Egoist_1914

Books, Drawings, and Papers. The Egoist 1,1. Reviewing "Bertha Garlan" by Arthur Schnitzler: says he writes in accordance with the traditions of Flaubert  and de Maupassant. "No one will be so bold as to say that he has carried these traditions further or even excelled the two French masters who created them. He has simply applied their methods to German life..." A calm writer even when dealing with emotionally intense characters. He regards the 7 lines where Schnitzler allows himself to moralize as a mistake. On Stewart Caven's The Green Enigma: "it is improbable that any man would waste so much energy and imagination upon writing a joke." And: "There can be no doubt that Mr. Caven possesses a  descriptive talent--however derived--quite unlike and superior to that of any other English prose writer that I know of. Wilde tried to do that sort of thing  but failed ; it is possible that there are budding Orientalists whose works are not yet famous, but I do not know anyone else who could prolong such writing through a whole novel without becoming stale or boresome." Aldington likes Wyndham Lewis's drawings and regards him a Picasso-influenced Cubist, but quotes divided opinions from others. One youthful person declares the drawings a "cacophony of sardine-tins"; a distinguished novelist remarked that the cover looked like a child's Christmas mechanical motor-car; and another distinguished novelist" remarked, "Of course, Wyndham Lewis is the most interesting painter going; if I hadn't my wife to consider I should just have him in to decorate the house." Aldington's review briefly refers to: Victor Segalen,  M. Davray, Tagore, Ezra Pound, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Henry Debraye, Lucien Rolmer,  Gasquet, Galzy, Marie Delétang, Jean-Desthieux, Verane.

Violent Hunt. The Egoist 1,2. Aldington says that a woman novelist always chooses herself as the heroine or sermonizes. Adam Bede is a representation of George Eliot's better nature, and Aldington blames Eliot's influence for the trend he identifies. He says Violent Hunt writes like a woman better than any other woman and describes women novelists as "belonging to the great second class, like Rousseau, and not to the small first class, like Flaubert." Hunt has humour and insight into flappers: genius in this latter direction, says Aldington. "If anyone is curious--as I have been--to know exactly what those strange female creatures with long legs and pig-tails are thinking about let him read chapter six of the Maiden's Progress." Compares her to Poe and intellectual horror. Reacts to the lines "I manage him. I manage everybody." Aldington implies Hunt's wit is more valuable than her insight into flappers. There follows an analysis of it: careless, slapdash, womanly, unforced, profuse, unworried about quality, spontaneous, not the quotable kind. Aldington says her plots are the most complicated in existence.

M. de Regnier's last book. The Egoist 1,2. (Accent removed.) It is not the most significant of his works. It contains many curious trifles and a few beautiful little pieces. "Regnier is very imaginative ; he loves the past with an epicurean relish, and tolerates the present with a kind of polished contempt." He loves Venice and his Venetian stories are amongst the best in the book.

Anti-Hellenism. The Egoist 1,2. Difficult to logically process: "Now the  works of art of this age--those, I mean, which have that natural vigour which belongs to the typical  product of any time--are curiously far from any  Hellenic conception. And since this is so, we must  presume that the age is unHellenic ; which is perhaps  obvious enough. But there are two main kinds of  art ; there is the art which is in sympathy with its  time, which seeks to express the whole life of its time--that of Shakespeare, for example--and there  is the art of Ben Jonson or of Theocritus, the art of men who run counter to the spirit of their time, or rather to the accepted artistic notions of their time." Aldington cautiously generalizes that the Greeks "desired for themselves and for the arts the ordinary, normal, uninteresting goods  of life, such as health and beauty, and successful  love and moderate wealth, and so on. There is a Greek epigram extant in which the author wishes for himself first health, and then beauty, then moderate wealth, and then to be young in the midst of friends." The Renaissance never recovered this simplicity. The art of this age is anti-Hellenic and it seems the age does not like health, beauty, simplicity, or youth in the midst of friends, etc. The art is wild and savage (like that of South Sea Islanders and totem pole makers) or nervous and agitated. Aldington worries we have lost the simple and beautiful. "Now it is very good to be fond of Egyptian things, and fond of Indian things, and intrigued with Buddhism, and amorous of China--Chinese art is delightful--though all these things remind me a little of the strange religious cults professed in Rome at the time of Claudius, but I do not see why new fashions in artistic creeds should compel us to say that simple and happy and healthy works of art are entirely bad." In a modernist journal, this sounds like a parody. 


Books and Papers. The Egoist 1, 3. Opens strikingly: "the middle class is always with us. Miss May Sinclair is determined to prove that it is always with us and to prove also that we should admire it. Her Combined Maze is an affectionate  study in minor mediocrity, with nothing golden about  it, the kind of mediocrity which would have shocked Marcus Aurelius into murder and rapine." Contrasts scientific and emotional novel writings: There is no need to abolish the emotional  manner of novel-writing; it is the English method,  and Miss Sinclair is English. It is the method of Dickens, and one has to be marvellously cynical and marvellously calm to write successfully in the other way." Says Mrs Sinclair is earnest to create genuine high art. Aldington implies there is a Protestant interpretation of the Christ story. He doubts high tragedy can be made out of the middle classes. Greek tragedy happens in an ideal world. "When the French give us life  crude and as we know it, we admit their truth." Mr W L George also writes on the middle class, though he leans towards the upper and flashy lower. There is a good quotation from George: Creed of a Middle Class Man. "I believe that I must shave  every evening and take a bath every morning, unless  I have overslept myself, wear dark suits as is seemly  in the City... I  believe that public school-boys, University men (who must not be called Varsity men), and commissioned  officers are snobs... I believe that I must be honest,  that I must not swear in mixed company, that I must  visit the upper classes whom I despise. I believe that I am the backbone of England." Aldington says that George had the power to write a great satire, but mixed satire with a very clever of an ordinary kind. (Aldington, from a later essay on Wyndham Lewis seems to hunger for a great satire, feeling generally disappointed.)


Presentation to Mr W. S. Blunt. The Egoist 1, 3. "W. B. Yeats,  Sturge Moore, John Masefield, Victor Plarr, Frederic Manning, Ezra Pound, F. S. Flint, and  Richard Aldington, presented to Mr. Wilfrid Scawen  Blunt, in token of homage for his poetry, a carved  reliquary of Pentelican marble, the work of the  sculptor Gaudier Brzeska." Blunt, 73,  gives a speech which interestingly includes: "I have really never been a poet. I have  been all sorts of other things. I have never been a  poet. I was not brought up that way at all. I was  never at a public school nor at a college. I never  met a literary man who had so much as written a  letter to a paper or an article for a magazine until I  was twenty-five, I had not written any verse, I never  published a single thing--prose or verse--with my  name till I was past forty. I think it is very difficult  to call a man a poet who has that sort of record behind him. I have written a certain amount of  verse ; but I have only done it when I was rather  down on my luck and made mistakes either in love or politics or some branch of active life."


Two Books. The Egoist 1, 4. Aldington declares he prefers old books to Thomas Hardy and Doctor Bridges (the poet Robert Bridges, I presume) and cannot  bring himself to read Strindberg, Neitzsche (his spelling), and Signor d'Annunzio, Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. He likes Remy de Gourmont's reconstruction of a medieval century affair, or whatever it is. Aldington writes, "M. de Gourmont has a great  knowledge of the modern female character : it is not so easy to know the fourteenth century woman..." Aldington also - interestingly for English readers - reviews Joseph Conrad: "he stands among us as the foremost of that increasing band of foreigners who write English  better than the natives of this island. He has a  reputation which every other prose author in the  British Islands ought to envy considerably. Though  some of his books run the risk of appealing in the  future only to adventurous-minded and semi-literary  youth, he is yet certain of a chapter, a page, a paragraph in every future history of Literature written in  the English Language. Mr. Conrad has produced  that rarest of all things, an individual style." Also: "for Mr. Conrad's works the cinema could only be supererogatory; he is indeed the greatest " filmer " of modern literature..."


Dramatic Actualities, The Egoist. vol 1, no. 8. Aldington begins amusingly with how little even the best of us knows. He is reviewing a set of essays by W.L. George on the state contemporary drama in English. "Astonishing! I had thought that there was no contemporary drama, or so little that it was hardly  noticeable; I had supposed that one only went to the theatre to escape doing something which requires thought; and I had come to believe that, with the great exception of Mr . Yeats, the drama was a trade and not an art. And all this time Mr . George has  been seeing plays and reading plays and writing about plays. I am seriously impressed by his knowledge." He is not convinced by George, however, and sticks to his judgment. He says that George's essays fail to cohere. He does agree that George identifies 10 technical faults of the drama of ideas and identifies plays with one or more of these faults. Aldington quotes George saying, "The bourgeois is not always wrong ; as a judge of technique it is always right, for it quite clearly imposes upon works that purport to be art that first condition of art--form." Aldington ends his review reasserting his position that contemporary drama is not worth much, except Yeats. He says it is a pity George has wasted his critical talent writing on the topic. Some lesser known names in the review: Father Tyrell, "The Man from Blankley's", Maeterlinck, "Hindle Wakes", Rann Kennedy, H.B. Tree, Gorgon Craig, Synge, Mr. Jerome, Mr. Bennet, Mr. Masefield. (There is much talk of the Common Man, whom George tries to represent, it seems.)


The Prose of W.H. Hudson. vol 1, no. 10. Aldington opens: "Nine people out of ten when asked their opinion of Mr. Hudson's books will reply that they have always understood him to be one of the best of modern prose-writers and that they have always intended to read his books, but somehow there was never time." The rest, it seems, are admirers and Aldington sets out to find out why Hudson is respected by the many and enthusiastically read by the few. The first book he reads is a William Morris-like portrait of utopia, "The Crystal Age." Its Sunday School ethics make Aldington want to thank God for filth, beer, noise, and naturalness. "El Ombú" is the second Hudson book Aldington reads. He finds the language beautiful and wonders whether to count Hudson a poet, as the French would. The writing gives him this feeling: "as if I were sitting by a small stream of silvery water tumbling over brown mossy stones among green reeds on a sunny day, so that in one place the water seemed dark ochre, in another green, in another blue where the sky was reflected, and white where the water splashed over a little rock and gold where the sunlight touched the ripples." There is a long quotation. Aldington then tells us about a short story, "Marta Riquelme": "The tale of  the lonely priest in the remote South American village  combating the old pagan gods who are gathered  there as in their last citadel--this story has so much of the essential stuff of tragedy in it that it stands  out with a certain permanence among one's memories  of books." Later we are informed that Green Mansions and The Purple Land are Hudson's 2 novels. Green Mansions might have been written by Mr. Conrad. (My remark: one suspects this is a Conrad imitator.) The bulk of Hudson's writing is natural history. Aldington says, "There is something about scientific writing which makes it boresome after a  time. It is not literature in the sense that we read it again and again with new emotions." (Interesting definition.) He quotes Ezra Pound's remark that science is necessary, like plumbing, but not in literature. 


Modern Poetry and the Imagists, The Egoist, vol 1, no. 11. "We hear quite a lot every now and again about the revival of interest in poetry, and yet that comparative increase is very  small when one thinks of the amazing number of perfectly futile novels which are widely reviewed and largely read." Aldington quotes 3 lines of a Whitman-like poem by Mr. Holley and says, "Now I firmly believe that this sort of writing accounts for the terrible indifference of many educated people towards poetry." It is unnatural, unemotional, and uninteresting, he says. Aldington then ends up reviewing a book which "I oughtn't  to review because there are some of my own poems in it. I think it very odd that no other competent person can be found to do it…" It is a time when everyone is an "---ist" and the poets in the book call themselves Imagists. He identifies the doctrines of the group. 1. Direct treatment of the subject. 2. As few adjectives as possible. 3. No slop, or sentimentality. 4. Individuality of rhythm. "Mr . Hueffer says that the unit of our rhythms is the unit of conversation." 5. Numerous don'ts, of a technical nature. 6. The exact word. "All the dreariness of nineteenth century poets comes from their not quite knowing what they wanted to say and filling up the gaps with portentous adjectives and idiotic similes." 7. A lot more doctrines, which he cannot remember. He praises an H.D. poem (Hilda Doolittle - his wife).  A poem by Mr. Flint, an impressionist and also an imagist according to Aldington, is finally presented: Hallucination. (By the way, the review, which is also Aldington's first front page material, opens with his saying that readers are probably more interested in other material in the periodical, such as James Joyce, and he feels discouraged. I suspect he was read a lot back then, though people may not have said so!)


Reviews.  The Egoist. vol 1, no. 13. He says the majority of poems of the last century are not to do with life and little to do with literature: a plague of prettiness, then a plague of pomposity, then oversuavity, then a decorated adjective cult (all minor diseases). Except for Browning and a little on Swinburne, there was no energy except bombast, which he blames on worship of the great figures of Elizabethan and Victorian times. The Egoist is about those trying to put new force into tired old English language. Futurism is the most powerful artistic force of his day and it means more than a cult of motorcycle and aeroplane, as Wyndham Lewis says, rather an acceptance that one lives at the centre of Anglo-Saxony. We don't try to write of a tramcar in the language and metre of a Tennyson or Congreve. Ford Maddox Hueffer's poem "On Heaven" is the best of this century, continues Aldington and an elder, Caesar, writes better poetry than us. Aldington quotes from the Heuffer poem and praises "the gradual working up of the emotion from the conversational". (My remark: Hemingway does this?) And praises "how the mind of the artist was absolutely calm, so that these almost frenzied emotions came through quite clear and unconfused." We learn that the poem was published in an American periodical and that "We are rather apt to be scornful of American poetry--and rightly so, for there is nothing so appallingly boring as the average American cosmic poem." Robert Frost, a New England poet published in England, is also reviewed and we interestingly learn that Aldington knows nothing of New England farms or people. He says the whole of life of a New England people is presented in verse, directly and in simple words. Frost avoids the faults of contemporary poetry but has his own faults, Aldington unable to resist concerns about rhythm. Apart from Hueffer and Frost, much of the rest of contemporary poetry is feeble and we lack the courage to kill it. The review ends with a description of Blast, edited by Wyndham Lewis. It is energized! (My remark: I have read that lowbrow works have more energy about them, but are there tricks to appear energetic?) 


Reviews, The Egoist. vol 1, no. 14. Blast. Aldington opens with a nationalist perspective, which it is unclear he endorses: "We are the children of our soil and climate, and  however much we may detest them, however much we may feel that we really belong to other latitudes, something in this island--its soil and climate, as I say--still  compels us to prefer those who are like us to any other people." He says we want to think Shakespeare the best poet and Turner the best landscape painter, but then find that American artists are better and no Englishman has written a novel!!! Blast is the organ of vigorous new English art, though Wyndham Lewis is half-Welsh (does Aldington anticipate Lewis going pro-fascist?) and Wadsworth half-Scotch. Lewis's manifestos take aim at the cow-like qualities of the nation! The protests of reviewers of Blast are said to be the protests of the slavish against the free and Aldington has observed crowds of ordinary people buying up the stuff. (Can we imagine this today, for modern art?) Lewis is judged to solve the problem of novels being a bore, "a whole lot of extraneous matter which somehow deadens the emotion received as a thick cotton pad deadens a blow", and poetry being a bore, with its poetic diction. There is a religious aspect to this modernist movement, but Aldington thinks Lewis has too much common sense for religious rival. He is not sure about Ezra Pound though. Pound is gentle and modest but in writing arrogant, petulant and fierce: this is a tiresome pose. "Mr. Gaudier Brzeska is really a wild, unkempt barbarian, with a love of form and a very clear knowledge of the comparative history of sculpture. He is the sort of person who would dye his statues in the gore of goats if he thought it would give them a more virile appearance." Mentions Rebecca West and Ford Madox Hueffer. Says Vorticism kills a taste for art which imitates the art of an earlier period.


In The Arena. The Egoist. vol 1, no. 15. "Artists of to-day are its true religious. There is more acrimonious feeling between two artists  of opposing theories than there is between a Catholic Nationalist and a Protestant Orangeman… As it is, the unfortunate critic lives in hourly dread.  Woe to the tolerant, woe to him who sees the two sides to every question, woe to him whose intellectual curiosity leads him to investigate all schools but to belong to none." Some egg boiling occurs, as I call it: you can tell a lot about chef by getting them to carry out the common task of boiling an egg. "I refuse to be bullied out of liking the works of Mr. Conrad by one party, and I refuse to be bullied into hailing him as the all-powerful Buddha of letters by another." He's for: Heart of Darkness, Falk, and Typhoon. Against: Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes. We learn that the real object of this review is Mr Curle's book on Mr Conrad!!!  Curle's book is struck between two stools: a textbook for the mob, a book for literature lovers. Aldington moves on to reviewing Joseph Campbell. He amusingly tells us, "A man may be absolutely modern and never mention a machine, a city or a street." A young French poet, M . Georges Turpin, has sent Aldington a book of his poems, called "La Chanson de la Vie." We are told "M . Turpin seems to have evolved from the state of an impressionist to that of a paroxyste." I don't know what that is, but they take Verhaeren and Whitman as masters and Aldington disagrees with that for the latter. "Had he written in French these clever young men would undoubtedly have called him what he was-- a casseur d'assiettes." Why can't they take Browning, our original poet since Shakespeare? Aldington ends with some fallacies for unwary amateurs: "There is the rhodomontade fallacy and the pseudo-philosophic fallacy, and the facetious fallacy, and the imitative fallacy."


Notes on The Present Situation. The Egoist vol 1, no. 17. The war preoccupies mental and physical energies. A month ago Englishmen hated each other as individuals. Now they are all united in hatred of Germans, whom they have never seen. This impulse does not produce art - it is not produced from vague impulses, rather the clear and particular. We, says Aldington, are too much engulfed in group psychology to be artists. The war will produce some good results though for the arts: getting rid of hangers-on - dirty little vultures! - and in a little while we shall begin to do work again and it will be sincere. Modern art is insincere, mostly charlatans, posers, or vaniteux. If anything written this century before the war is remembered 10 years after, the author may consider themselves a great man. An appalling number of tedious periodicals and books will be devoted to the war, Aldington complains. Interesting: "a poet or painter of to-day would feel more at home in the presence of one of his kind belonging to  another century than with a bargeman or with a cavalry  colonel of to-day." Amusing: "One must be at all costs heterodox and the difficulty is to know what is orthodox." Also amusing: " "After the war " we will pay our bills, enjoy universal peace, see the beginning of a new era, accomplish our dreams, be faithful to our wives." "In these days there is one place which is free from the almost universal war scare. That is the British Museum Library." He says he has read highbrow books: "Things like "Les cents Nouvelles " du Roy Louys and Marguerite of  Navarre's " Heptameron," Godeschalcus the mediaeval  séquaire writer, Firenzuola, who wrote of the beauty of  women, and French translations of Greek novelists like Achilles Tatius, Longus and Xenophon the Ephesian." Aldington quotes Arnold Palmer's remark that "though you  can read Cervantes or Stendhal with guns booming under your nose, you can't read a "merely graceful, agreeable  writer like Henri de Régnier." [I suspect this list for quite a few highbrows is not in line with Palmer but not totally open to all highbrow work either.] " Aldington says he is enjoying Régnier's last novel,  Romaine Mirmault. Regnier is said to be the greatest stylist living but lack "significance," which Aldington describes as a villain word! "Notice that this is a war of the bourgeois, rather rare  in history. The aristocracy of all the nations engaged have no real hostility towards each other politanism of practically all artists and scientists rules  them out ; the people--except in France--have no particular feeling against the other races. I mean they  don't hate them as our peasants hated the French in 1814 or as the French have hated the Prussians since Sedan." "What the ha'pennies call "Lord Kitchener's iron censorship" is a great joy to me. Think of the sensation mongers waiting with flaring headlines for the word of command and not daring to publish beforehand."  "I have just glanced through the Poètes d'Aujourd'hui and I find that in the first volume thirteen of the poets are liable for service–this includes Jammes, Paul Fort and Pierre Louys. Camille Mauclair and Vielé-Griffin are also liable ; so is Henri de Régnier, unless members of the Academy are excused." "While France sends poets, painters and probably philosophers to fight, England cannot even call up her cricket and football teams. I'm damned if I'll be killed while there are five hundred professional football teams, with their attendant ministers, unslain."


The Prose of Frederic Manning. The Egoist, vol 1, no. 19. Says, "there are now two Critical attitudes. One is the "sound " attitude; it believes what the Universities believe; if it ventures to praise any author not approved by the Universities it  does so for two reasons. First, because this person is probably the sort of person the Universities will approve, and secondly, from motives of personal friendship. Sir K. L.'s book must be praised because he is a Balliol  man, because the book is "sound"--i.e., stodgy--and  because he is a friend of the critic. The other critical  attitude is perhaps a little more stimulating and  amusing. It condemns ferociously all works of whatever eminence, genius or beauty whatsoever, if they  deviate from its strict and original rules; it abuses the  critic's enemies, all the enemies of his family unto the  third and fourth generation; en revanche, it praises all the critic's friends, all the friends of his family, of his  wife and of his wife's friends. Thus, if we suppose that one of the critic's rules is that the word " cow " shall never be used on the same page as the word "cough," and that an author should violate this rule, it then follows that such a book is bad no matter what its merit may be." [Peculiar word rules like these described by Elizabeth Gaskell, by the way.] The ordinary reader is frustrated by both, so prefers any book that makes them think or feel, but this is too permissive, and searches for a real criticism "not blinded by charlatanism or personal feeling!" Ruskin and Pater, by meeting the demand for sincere criticism, managed to determine literary taste for 20 years. We struggle to copy these, but three plausible successors have emerged: Ford Madox Hueffer, Sturge Moore and Frederic Manning. Declares Manning fertile in ideas and not a repetition of the 90s [1890s presumably]. Says Manning is "like all Epicureans who seem to derive the vicarious happiness promised by their philosophy through the contemplation of literature rather than through the contemplation of life." Pater was also, but a satisfied one unlike Manning. Earlier focuses on a Manning dialogue between Cromwell and Machiavelli!  "Merodach, Protagoras, Serenus --the friend of Paul--Cromwell, Machiavelli, Francis of  Assisi, Innocent III., Renan, and Leo XIII.--through  what Gourmont-like irony is it that Mr. Manning makes all these great men and their works seem vain and foolish?" "A book remains to be written on the influence of Lucretius on our time." "Few people have loved more than Mr. Manning the poetry, the charm, the beauty of the life of Francesco Bernadone." His prose is described as too ornate for some tastes. [Who is this review for? Manning wrote an admired book on a war, by the way. And some fairytales?] 


Charles Péguy and his work. Egoist 1, 20. Aldington had never read him until his death: "the kind of writer one always means to read and somehow always misses." "if one has three books of poetry, four books of essays and a book on social reform, one reads the book on social reform last and usually not at all." [And they told me to write on Rawls!] From a hasty glance, his socialist ideas were largely due to kindness and pity for suffering. He was poor himself, sensitive, and impetuous. Poetry: "Péguy got his effects by a sort of Biblical repetition." "Péguy's chief glory is neither as a poet nor prosewriter nor even as a Socialist, but as an editor. He must have had a flair for finding work by clever unknown young men." Names appear: Jaurès, Louis Gillet, Jean d'Orleans, Maître Jean Malonel, Maître Nicholas Froment, André Spire, Antonin Lavergne. Spire is praised as a poet; he publishes little but it is of high quality. Lavergne's novel is an impersonal depiction of a lower class life: "a village schoolmaster in France who, with his wife and three children, is slowly starved to the verge of suicide by the extreme poverty…" No English writer has learnt this impersonal method. Lavergne, from his other books, must have endured something like this. Péguy's death will not be subject to academic orations; some poor people will remember him; he died fighting for France though.


Two Poets.  Egoist 1, 22. Opens by saying that reading Prussian history is even more dangerous - damaging the mind - than Prussian artillery. The history is confusing, being the history of 14 kingdoms, 37 princedoms, and 5 million duchies. Doubts politicians of Europe understand this country. Says "the policy of Prussia has been always brutal, militarist and singularly mendacious". "Prussia bullied the other German States into unwilling submission to its hegemony, stole  Schleswig-Holstein, crushed Austria and, as Swinburne politely put it, "whored France"". Reading the history and also the nearby battles make Aldington struggle to write on the latest Anglo-American literary productions. Miss Amy Lowell "has not been content to observe merely the rusty tin cans and corner-lots of life, but has tried to put down what she found to be "beautiful." " Lowell chiefly cares for beauty, Rodker for rebellion in the arts. Says "Criticism in the end is merely an expression of personal sympathy," briefly explaining why. And "the  effect of the present war--the effect, I mean, on my taste in general--has been to confirm and stimulate my natural feeling for the Latin nations, for Latin art and for Latin literature. And–at least in European art–I have a corresponding dislike for non-Latin productions." Says he detests Rodker but thinks he should have money for his experiments. "Like all beginners in vers libre, he tends to write his lines too short". Recommends imitating Paul Fort, as Lowell (we are later told) does. Despite being opposites, "I have no doubt that–so uncritical  are the times–if her work and Mr. Rodker's fall into the hands of the same reviewer they will be treated as belonging to the same school." Lowell's tradition is Latin. "Both she and Mr. Rodker permit themselves to publish poems over which they will presently gnash their teeth at the thought of there being published." [Deliberate error?] Of Lowell, the plots of her narrative poems are excellent and she has a future in writing them. But "the cadence–that infallible key to the value of poetry–the cadence is very often neither original nor beautiful." Says, like any good poet, Lowell is teeming with new forms and ideas. Identifies these poems as especially beautiful: Miscast I., Miscast II, Music in a Garden, The Taxi, Th e Tree of Scarlet Berries. For irony, The Epitaph of a Young Poet. Quotes lines from Rodker which impressed him: "And down go the dead things ever / Down to the sea." Writes of Miss Lowell's essays, in the form of poetry employed by Paul Fort, followed by much quotation.


From  Selected Critical Writings, 1928-1960


Wyndham Lewis. Aldington reviews Lewis's The Apes of God and finds that Lewis hates the society he satirizes. One of Aldington's main criticisms is that Lewis's targets are not worthy of the talents and force of satire used against them: it is like "the god Thor using his invincible hammer to crack monkey nuts." And "our St George came home with a bag of lizards and worms, instead of one or more of the numerous dragons which infest the landscape." Lewis is disposed to compare his target to the Russian communist party but "Mr. Lewis cannot expect us to believe that the puny, spiritless, unorganized, undisciplined Apes of Chelsea and Bloomsbury have any such power". As well as big game, Mr Lewis spares the people who are the main focus of gossip columns, such as polo and tennis players, motorists and aviators, and London hostesses. Aldington describes Lewis as wholly distrustful of feelings and emotions but also an example of the limits of pure intelligence. This claim is not elaborated. Aldington claims the famous satirists of the past used muzzle-loaders, whereas Lewis uses every device of modern warfare. Some less famous names from the essay: Rouault, Betrachomiomachia,  Régnier, Samain, Pierre Louys, Sully-Prudhomme, Georges Ohnet, Nordau, Betty Binks, Lolly Girls, Bougereau, Edgar Wallace, M Benda.


Somerset Maugham. Aldington characterizes Somerset Maugham as an honest writer and truth-seeker, but this gives rise to a paradox for critics. "How do they explain the persistent popular success of a writer who never flatters his audience, never compromises with the truth as he sees it, never plays stylistic tricks and remains quite indifferent to the ins and outs of literary fashion?" Aldington's answer is that Somerset Maugham not only has a profound knowledge of people as they actually are and an ability to put it into words; he is also a master of story, of plot: Aldington implicitly rejects the E.M. Foster position which devalues plot in comparison to presentation of character. Aldington opposes Marxist positions in literature too. He argues against a highbrow who complains that Somerset Maugham writes about the bourgeoisie, saying that if you are going to write about living human beings, how can you ignore one of the largest and most important groups? Aldington also rejects the view that art consists of falsification of truth for political purposes.


Jane Austen. Aldington thinks every author has bunkers and debunkers, but the supporters of Jane Austen go too far. T.B. Macaulay places her second after Shakespeare, claiming she has a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together - presumably including novelists, Aldington observes. George Saintsbury, a generally more careful commentator, says that we shall have another Homer before another Jane Austen. Aldington's measured assessment is this: "It is an art domestic, provincial, feminine, and prosaic, placidly realist, strictly held within the author's very limited experience. Her triumph is that… within those narrow limits she created novels which are enduring works of art." Aldington finds that Lord David Cecil's biography of Cowper provides a good description of Jane Austen's society: rigid conventions, easy labours, mild amusements, regular habits, where all the men were clergymen or squires. Aldington adds that it was dominated by 2 passions: snobbery of rank and snobbery of money. Austen "never fails to tell us how much money her chief characters possess". Aldington characterizes the commercial view of matrimony as accompanied by extreme prudery about sex. He suggests Austen was probably too poor to marry the kind of man she wanted, and quotes the widow of a great painter: "After one has lived with an artist other men are so boring." He says all Jane Austen novels have a Cinderella who marries the rich handsome man. He puzzles over why novels about the virtually extinct society she portrayed are still so captivating.