(c) 1956, Times NewspapersDoc ref: TLS-1956-1012             Date: October 12, 1956

THE TIMES' LITERARY SUPPLEMENT FRIDAY OCTOBER' 12 '1956 599

FIELDS OF PERCEPTION " ALDous HUXLEY: AdDnJs Q"J the A/p~I. And Othlll" -Essays. Chatto and Wind ... ' ISs.

Mr. Aldous Huxley is, surely. the most variously intelliacnt of all con· temporary writers. His power of absorbing knowledge is remarkable indeed, but even less remarkable than bi~ gift ,fOf making new and revealing conneXlons between the innumer­able. tbings ~e knows. As an essayist he JS always graceful, often witty. sometimes genuinely profound. He is c<;lpious ill illumtnating sidelights on histOry, on teligion~on sociology. on th~ arts; yet he is never ponderous. HlS effect upon us is rather like that of, the " tachystoscope." which he des­Cribes and recommends in the first of these essays as the most modern aid i!, the train ing of immediate per~ep­hon and the recapture of visual inno­cence. The" tacbysloscope" is

idol of modern America to a con- While it has led bim to an attitudo elusion, which not only 'theolo~ians which is generally labelled mystical. would do well to ponder, but wnich is no more mysterious than

Cr~~~ r~t~:t:l~ ~~~:~~eat~;bot~~ the" cleaning of the gates of percep-and what may be called pure spirituality, tion" inculcated by Blake. it has pot We have no reliaious symbols coverini' dulled his acute sense of history. With the other aspects of the cosmic mystery. the same penetrating glance be looks ... Will it ever be possible to revive the before and after, and intet the strange Great Motber, or create SOlllC equivalent and ambiguous present. For the !~~~~~tgf? t&~ =cd~~i~ :~~r~ variety of his perspectives he has no indefinitely, or untH tbe masses lose their rival amona contemporary intellec­minds and run amuck:. on the level of tuals. Wbo else could bring together the Ireetins card ? an exquisite appreciation of

This question of the revjval of a . Mallarmc's poetry, a sympathetic true reJigious awareness is become the analysis oC the madrigals of Gesualdo. deepest of Mr, Huxley's concerns. and an impressive djscussion of the One may trace in it the beneficent in· probably grim consequences of the fluence of D. H. Lawrence. But tlie pressure of over-population On the influence has been gequinely social organizalion of the future, and absorbed by Mr. Huxley's expedenc- leave us with the feeling tbat these iog na ture, and made harmonious are equally natural expressions of a with his intellectual convictions. sin&le centre of awareness ?

a malic lantern fitted with a shuller that permits the project jon of ima&e.s for a period ranlin&, from a tentb to a tbousandtb of a second or less. It gives the pupil no time to conc.p- MEDITERRANEAN . WARMTH :~~~ hi~~rballze the image flashed LAWRENCE DURRELL: Selected invades a style that is infonnal and

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Collins

New English Dictionary'

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In much. the same fashion, by the Poems. Faber and Faber. lOs. 6d. ~~ft:~: t~~f~~le ~u~ae ~~~~~~ swiftness of his aperfus, Mr. Huxley Subtraction is a blessing to the philosophy, news, reading, and the puts arrow after arrow through the ' majority o~ ~t~ it.j) a measureth°f physical pleasures with perfect ease. amlour of our received .ideas. Thus, ~ne's ~gar. or f h' urre~ ~B:t. J is There are five sections in this book. in .. Hyperion to a Satyr." he dis- ,rsfce se eclJon o. IS wer h jltla Jy The first, containing lyrics, includes cusses with much wisdom and out of Thma s one1dconsc,orus 0 t ebe osses. such poems as .. Chanei." .. To . the way knowledge the social and ere cou not, 0 course, room religious effects of Ihe dirt and disease ~~~t~Vf~~~ing~~~ih~~:eI~:a~' ~~~e~ ~~~i~~': Asleep," and •• Wafer

~~ga~te::ra~e;iU~~i~~~;rI~iC~o~~ the choice himself, and so presumably ~~g re~~fc~~~~fr=~rnic~fall. pelled to live Until quite recently. : is hahPy a~ut it. ~ut ~~ere must Out of the swing of the. Towards the end ·he makes a reveal- Si~g~Ja~ o~a;:o ~SW:~s. .. IS ~iei~ Swing of the sea. inc quotation from The Instill/tions Regis,"" Blind Homer." .. Rodini," The second group consists of the well il{et;{'te~J:tr~~i~~I~~~I~~~~:~r~!n~:~ "Penelope," .. The Anecdotes," all known imagi na ry or real biographies streets. It was because most of the these have gone from the volume ~~~~~~!, ~.f Fa~~;:n~:'~ .. ~~~~~ citizens were no better dressed than ~;'e S;:;~in:.r 'Jd1:;;::S~/;h~ t~d:::. (" La Rochefoucauld" is missing). slaves and would have been con- .. Style," .. Education of a Cloud," The third, poems of place: .. Delos," sta ntly mistaken for them. .. But "A Water-colour of Venice." •• The .. Sarajevo," .. At Corinth," .. On Athens-a democl'3tic city sta te with Dying Fall," exceptional p'ocDlS. aU Ithaca Standing," .. Ncmea " : a majority of • poor whites '-was of them. But then this bOok is not A song in the va lley of Nemea : ex:ceptional," says Mr. Huxley and for initiates, and Mr. DurreU has Sing quiet, quile quiet here. passes on ; but he has left an indelible sought to lead beginners on by Song for Ihe brides of Argos picture in our minds. How different, acquainting them fairly thoroughly Combing the swanns of colden hair: we reHect, would be Professor Arnold with his earJiest verse. He is m6re Quite qu iet, quiet there. Toynbee's treatment of the same fai thful to his output of 1937 than of There is the .. Ballad of the Good material. 1947 and later. Lord Nelson" and a quite frightening

There was a time when Mr. Huxley Never mind, there is enough here, new" Ballad of Psycho-Analysis": seemed to take a rather perverse of lyrics, biographies. ballads, poems She dreams she's a dog.leam tuaging poor pleasure in shocking us. 1f be shocks of place and people, to entrance aU Sheer to the confines of the Pole Scott

He n::~t~t {~ ~:~~~~st~~ {~r aO~~n~f ~:. ~~r~~tfsS~~~;~~~a~~~ra~~s ~~: Suddenly the Arctic bcco~ a-burning reality, to break through tbe veil a bony. austere writer, nor one much And when they arrive its just all ~tpty which easy and familiar words and preoccupied by diurnal trivialities or hole. the ever-increasing fog of commercial political topics. He has lived most of A geyser whistling in a mountain of coal. propaganda spread over the human his adult }ife in the Mediterranean, FinaH)" two longer poems, .. The situation. And this effort at awaken- and his poetry is fairly centred there, Parthenon" and " Deus Loci." ing our lethargic and custom-ridden as distinctive from English verse as To anyone unfamiliar with Mr. perceptions is made with an easy and are the spiced foods of the Mediter- Durrell's work, this selection cannot delightful originality. The contem- ranean f rom the staple products of . fail to prove a revelation. Its plation of a vast display of insipid these shores. He is a very subjective technical freshness. its intellectual greeting cards for Mother'S Day in writer, witty, romantic, sophisticated perceptiveness, the sensuous and direct .. the World's Largest Drugstore" but not at all worldly. He can bring approach to people and places, are leads him through a consideration of a landscape to Hfe more beautifully in happy contrast to much poetr)' the religious symbol of the Great and economically than any Jiving of the J950s. There is no nonsense Mother-creator and destroyer, the English (or American) poet. He about Mr. ·Durrell. He goes for the

wer of birth and death- which has writes as one who is consciously in essentials and he is generOus in the n the course of ages been trivialized or out of Jove, pra ising or mourning way that he has sbared a rich, marine nto the sentimental and commercial women, and this heightening of feeling and sun-warmed eJ.istence.

POEMS FROM THE WELSH he Buming Tree. Poems from the First Thousand Years of Welsh Verse. Selected and Translated by Gwyn Williams. Faber and Faber. 25,.

t is gratifying to those who have ong been preaching the interest and mport~nce of ea rly Welsh literature, o the English as well as the native eader, that the past eight years have cen so much of it made accessible

English. In prose there have been ew translations of the Mabillogion nd the Chronicles of the Princes; r. Thomas Parry's authoritative is/ory 01 Welsh Lilerature, witb its eal th of illustrative quotation, last ear found a devoted translator in Sir ris Bell; and Professor Gwyn illiams has regaled both Welsh and

nglish palates with an exciting Nl"odllclion 10 Welsh Poetry (1953), d two volumes of verse translations,

he Renl That's Due to Love (1950 : e title is a line of Dafydd ap wilym's), and the larger and more bitious work now before us.

Imost at a bound, it seems, ignor-c:e has passed from the compulsive the purely voluntary.

The earliest poets in this new lection are Aneirin aDd TaJiesin, so e beginnin&!i of the record may be ntatively placed in the sixth nlUry. The latest are Thomas Prys

Plas lolyn, soldier; sailor, pirate d poet, and Archdeacon Edmwnd ys, one of the translators of the ble into Welsh, both of wbom lived II into th~ first third of the seven­nth century._ Altogether twenty­e named poets and eleven aoony­us. are represented by forty-seven

Others amona the Darned are

Cyndde lw, Hywel ab Owain Gwyn­edd. Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch, Da[ydd ap Gwilym, Sian Cent, Lewis Glyn Cothi, Tudur Aled and .William Cynwal. Among tbe anonymous are the unknown masterS associated with the names and tbemes of Heledd and Llywarcb Hen, tbe Stanzas of the Graves, Gereint filius Erbin, and the Welsh verse play (c. 16()() of Troe/us a Cluesyd. The extract from this last may well prove for many readers the .. find" of the book, and the publica­ti on of the whole play in Welsh and English is to be desired. In every case the Welsh original is printed on the left-hand page with the English translation facing it on the right.

The .. Burning Tree" of the title is the one beheld by Peredur ab Efrawg on his way to fight with the Addanc. "And he could see a tall tree on the river bank, and the one ha lf of it was burning from its roots to its tip, and the other half with green leaves on it."

I have entitled this book The Bl4r11ing T ret to suUa;t an outstandin& mood of tbe Welsh poet, the awareness al the same time of eoptrary seasons and passions, a mood in wbich tbe poet brines into one pbra$C tbe force of love and war, of summer and winter, of boly sacrament and adulterous love.

This is fair enough, for it gives the anthology a .unity which makes it decidedly more tban a supplement to Professor Williams's l" troduction 10 Welsh Poetry . . On the other hand it means that many kinds of poetry, political prophecy, for example, reli­gious and theological poems, and &nomic verse, have been excluded.

But there arc poems here of exulta­tion in battle and -desire for bright

girls, threnodies for cbieftains and laments for.a dead son or feUow­bard. Dafydd ap Gwilym celebrates a woodland mass and Dafy~d ap Edmwnd a girl's golden hair. There is bardly a poet present who could not have said with the princely Hywei: Uyn dewisy ricin uirein ueindec:. My choice, a slim, fair. comely airl. Or: Karafy amsscr haf amssalhyr gorwyl . I love ..fiummer time and Ibe tbronlina:

of horses. Unless maybe Thomas Prys would prefer a porpoise: YSlod alew yw'r esg:ud I~n, ys&wl mor, YSlil marian ~ gwiber dwfr ymgeibia'r don, aolw& a oroa galon. Torwyn wyd, ti rion odiaeth, Iramwywr )' cefnddwr caetb; twrch heli, taer ucbelwaith, treilla or mOr, Iro ellur maith. Swift, lovelY one, brave sbadow. Skull of the sea, pillion to the strand. A water· viper hoeina: the wave, With a look tbat frjib tens tbe heart.

. White-belljed an wanderer wild boar be crosses sweep.

The standard of translation is the high one we are accustomed to from tbis author. All tran'sla tion is from the point of view · of the original poem a loss, and e.very tnnslalor must cut his losses. Professor Williams has generally done this by abandoning cyngholledd and other' exigencies of Welsh metre, and normally he avoids rhyme too. His justificafion is a delightful and exciting volume, wl)ile for those with eveD a little Welsh a hundred versos display the virtuosily and technical mastery of tbe Welsh orilinals.

and 32-page 'world atlas

'The editor is to be congratulated on a fine piece of work which wiD take its place along with the old standard friends as a household companion.'

-MANCHESTER GUARDIAN

21._

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A TEN-YEARS' ANTHOLOGY

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