REPORT ON NO. 16

COMPETITORS were invited to state, in not more than 300 words, whom they considered to be either the most overrated, or the most underrated, English writer, living or dead, and to give reasons for their opinions. Rather surprisingly there were as many entries on the underrated as there were on the overrated. In the former category the most frequently cited were Hardy, Kipling, Peacock, and Marryat (with some support for Charlotte Yonge, Mark Rutherford, Seton Merriman, Flecker, Somerset Maugham, William Plomer, and W. W. Jacobs); in the latter, Kipling again, Milton, J. B. Priestley, and Aidous Huxley (with Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Scott, Lamb, and Bernard Shaw following fairly closely). The essays written in dispraise were not unnaturally the more entertaining to read. All those on Kipling were good, with a scintillating set of verses by Mr. Allan M. Laing standing out from the rest. Mr. M. R. Ridley sent in a sound entry on Milton, and Mr. J. J. Curie was good on Shaw. Miss D. N. Daglish and Mr. Kenneth Horne produced the best of the Huxleys. In the other category, Mr. Hugh Gough's entry in praise of W. W. Jacobs was much the most accomplished. It is awarded the second prize, and the

first goes to Mr. Laing for his Kipling. Mr. Ridley's Milton, Mr. Curie's Shaw, and Mr. Home's Huxley are particularly commended.

First Prize. KIPLING.

And now allow

me, before anyone says, Stow it! to attack his reputation as a poet.

Ungrudgingly I admit he made an occasional hit with a song (though it was usually too long), and one serious hymn had sense as well as vim (but they say he wanted to throw this away!).

He expressed nostalgia

—a little like neuralgia—

for bits of Britain with which he had been bitten ; but on the whole he had not the poet's universal soul

and always wanted to sing it and swing it.

In fact, and speaking entirely without tact, his metrical England was little better than Jingle- land.

Catchwords and zippy rhymes for The Times are not enough to sustain for long his poetic bluff.

* * * *

I shall be happily resigned if what I've said

is taken as red, since Kipling himself was so nauseatingly true blue.

ALLAN M. LAING.

Second Prize. W. W. JACOBS.

A rather dingy double-bedroom looks out over the sails and mud of the Thames estuary. Somewhere below a landlady is frying kippers—a determined woman with one eye on the stairs, and in the big brass bed three scrubby middle-aged men lie in their boots, tugging the inadequate blanket this way and that. Perhaps they are the immortal trio, Sam Small, Peter Russet and Ginger Dick : it doesn't matter—it is the Jacobs world, described with the uncompromising uniformity which is one of the marks of a major writer. It is as unmistakable as Hardy's Dorset: a world of heroic liars and incredible simpletons, of sensible acquisitive women and lean cats, a world of three day beards, chipped tooth-mugs and shared beds. Intricate plots are laid without scruple to gain possession of money, a locket, a pint, a woman (in the way of marriage), but the spoil always falls to smooth intruders with a suggeStive manner from the West End. A philosophy could be based on this world of Mr. Jacobs, and why it has never received critical attention is incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as the author's popularity. For this is a hard and heartless world: how squalid it would be if it were not so funny, and the fun is quite pitiless. No need for surprise when the creator of the night watchman creates The Monkey's Paw as well. The desire of the old mother, wanting her dead son back " just as he is," is akin to the simple unscrupulous material desires of Sam Small and Peter Russet—and she is tricked just as they are always tricked. The same Providence, the sly and suggestive intruder, broods over the whole Jacobs scene.

HUGH GOUGH. Proxime accessit.

MILTON.

If one may divide an author's work, the Milton of Paradise Lost is of English writers the most overrated. The Milton of Comus, of Lycidas, of Samson, could hardly be overrated. And the first two books of Paradise Lost are in a class by themselves ia our language, superhuman in their sustained magnificence. But there has been a conspiracy of critics, with the characteristic and courageous exception of Johnson, each afraid of showing himself inferior in taste to the others, to persuade the ordinary reader that the rest of the poem is at the same level. The plain truth is that much of the rest of the poem is frankly very dull, and, as it is by way of being an epic, that is a narrative, dull is the one thing which it has no business to be. There are flashes of the early splendour, and the war in Heaven, so long as Milton restrains his regrettable attempts at humour, 15 tolerable. But the discourses of the affable archangel are poi tolerable at all, and Eden is a Paradise of tedium. No epic which, as the last line is read, leaves the reader with a feeling of the exhausted virtue of accomplishment is a good epic.

RUDYARD Why do I think Kipling over- rated and inadequately hated?

Let me suck up a good red nibful

before I slop a bibful.

Not Peter Pan, but Kipling was the eternal stripling: his failure to grow up has often caused me to throw up.

He believed glory had to be gory, like a boy of eighteen (if you see what I mean).

It might be said he hadn't an idea in his head that wasn't mouldier than a dead Crimean soldier ; but he had the happy knack of disguising this lack with a slick spatter of technical patter.

Nevertheless, even this was largely hit-or-miss, and certainly his geography wasn't nearly as good as his orthography.

God knows he wrote technically sound prose ; but his narrative nuts have more colonels than kernels.

M. R. RIDLEY.