Mr. Blunden's Essays

The Mind's Eye. By Edmund Blunden. (Cape. 7s. (3d.)

TAKING up a book called The Letters of Rusticus on the Natural History of Godalming, written by Edward Newman and printed in 1849, Mr. Blunden writes, "I can only say 'Well

done ! ' when I see human achievement so clear within its particular and well-understood limits, and I feel happy and encouraged." Taking up The Mind's Eye, we might say the same, and to imply that its author has limits is not to imply that those limits are narrow. He defines them by his choice of subject and by indicating what haunts or moves or amuses him, and working within them is exact and resourceful. That the essayist should be a scholar, and the scholar a poet,

that the poet should haiiie, been a soldier, and that all of them should have remained a countryman at heart is a circumstance that lends richness and variety to Mr. Blunden's view of the world. If any fashionable culture-snobs should be inclined to suppose that this author is old-fashioned because he is aware of the past let us ask if they can match their exr crimes of the contemporary world with his, or if they enjoy half his learning or can show a quarter of his humanity. These essays of his are the work of a man who seeks to realize (as he says of somebody else) "in his particular universe, the practical meaning, the ideal beauty, the traditional fascination, the

intellectual importance, the emotional chances Combined in one instant."

The book is in four parts, headed "Flanders," "Japan," "England," "The World of Books."

"How mysterious that after so many years, not inactive, not undramatic, nor passed without much delight and discovery in man and nature, I find myself frequently living over again moments of experience on the Western Front."

Not so mysterious, perhaps, that one should ceaselessly revisit in spirit those unforgettable battlefields, and that the

undertones of war should go on chiming, quietly but very clearly, through the confused clamour of the peace.

Since the War, a number of young Englishmen of talent have sojourned in Japan, and I doubt if any of them has been more appreciated than Mr. Blunden. The Japanese are not wanting in judgement (" it will be favourable, in a way that hardly exists in England, if patience and endeavour are seen ") and as a race skilled in imitation they are well able to recognize the genuine. In return, Mr. Blunden, with an Oe and ear attuned to the simplicities and subtleties of behaviour and landscape that reveal so much and hint at so much more, is able to catch on paper certain effects that communicate something of the finer essentials of the atmosphere of Japan. It is good to see him guiding a firm pen in praise of a much abused race.

"It is only from those who are offended with Japanese pride that the notion of untrustworthy Nippon is circulated. These people are not the 'good servants' that may be found among the Orientals. The Japanese are not Orientals. They are as distinct from the Asiatics, if I may be bold in a generalization, as Saxons from Portuguese."

And how well said this is :

"Japan does not disappoint the stranger : she corrects his fancies, perhaps a little grimly, and then begins to enrich him with her truths."

The stranger, of course, must be capable of enrichment. Writing of England, Mr. Blunden often reveals a fresher and surer touch than many of our novelists. Writing of people or aspects of English life that he knows and loves, he makes them vivid in a small space, and one can imagine him

composing an excellent book of "characters," which should include that village prodigy, the "Lost Leader," with his

goat and his chequered 'career, and also the eccentric Miss Warble, a somewhat Sitwellian subject with her miniature china piano, her family of assorted pets, and her "raucous impersonations of the extinct figurantes of Victorian music halls." The essayist is versatile—he may be at Lord=s, finding hidden meanings in a cricket match, or on the other side of the world going ashore with the seamen,

"hard up but clubbing together eriOugh for an evening proivl through some unlovely dockland, where the ceaseless insects hiss among the dusty, wiry weeds by -the -long cracked pavements, and around the myriad street lamps-Which are sat between tramp Ships and the theatres and restaurants of graced citizens."

The literary essays here, containing's paper on" Shakespeare's Significances," and appreciations of Robert Bridges and

Siegfried Sassoon, bring again upon the reviewer the tempta- tion to quote, but h,.! resists it, except to draw attention to:a misprint on p. 231, where " escritoires " figure as "escri- toires "—a term that might lower respect for the art of writing.

WILLIAM PLOMER."