querable dignity, offset by the grotesque tragedy, of man's life upon earth is something that never grows stale to him. "My illness," he writes in the "Confessions," "had sharpened my wits. At night when I looked at the stars, I understood the background which belonged to our planet, sailing on to extinction either by some catastrophic celestial collision or by slow senseless withering, and each man, each woman and each child destined also sooner or later to wear white stockings and be carried away to the churchyard."

In the sketch entitled "Death" in "Ebony and Ivory," we come upon the following drastic question and emphatic answer: "What if the world does contain no purpose, but only a series of sensations for the elect, the chosen, to experience during an inconsequent transit? . . . For us the dread of death adds a tang and relish to life-to the only life for which we care. We We accept these terms, we delight in them. The very pride of man indeed rests upon his mortality, for so and only so, does he appear an heroic figure under the sun."

His appreciation of Thomas Hardy in "Thirteen Worthies" contains passages that might well apply to his own work. "For Thomas Hardy writes like a countryman, thinks like a countryman, and has the imagination of a countryman. From first to last the essential element of the drama of existence has been for him nothing more than the simple spectacle of mortal man and mortal woman, passionate and bewildered, moving against a background of immemorial nature.

plied him with a tough, idiosyncratic, earth-bound philosophy."

Even in "Black Laughter," in the African jungle, the same note is struck. "Had some over-sagacious negro a thousand moons ago peered up at the night skies and come to the conclusion that the ultimate question could never be answered, and that it was man's wisest course to cease from speculation and enjoy, without asking questions, the delicate flavour of goat's milk, the grateful warmth of a fire, and the sweet delights of love-making?"

The conclusion, in fact, of all Llewelyn Powys's philosophizing amounts to the old Shaksperian acceptance of fate, implicit in Falstaff's "Mortal men! Mortal men!" and more ideally expressed in that "Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all."

I seem to detect four main literary influences in my brother's work, that of Charles Lamb, that of Walter Pater, that of Guy de Maupassant, and that of Lytton Strachey. But it appears to me that it is that of Charles Lamb which has sunk the deepest into his mind. And yet where he is most entirely himself is, I think, in "Confessions" and "Black Laughter," the autobiographical or diaristic portions of his work, where not one of the above influences leaves the faintest trace. In these he appears as the insatiable amateur, the incorrigible adventurer, the life-intoxicated world-child, for whom style and questions of style must all of them fall into a secondary position compared with a certain tough and yet timid curiosity, such as makes use of the tricks of style merely as feelers or antennæ to come in contact with the very skin of reality; a curiosity occupied with the actual ways of

Pocket Series entitled "Honey and Gall," Llewelyn's writings up to date seem to me to resolve themselves into four technical formulas or molds of literary expression. Without undue pedantry these various genres might be arranged thus: first, the diaristic or autobiographical form; second, the imaginative or "pure essay" form; third, the biographical form; fourth, the short-story or narrative-sketch form. "Black Laughter" and the "Confessions" would fall into the first division; "Black Gods" and "Threnody," into the second; "Thirteen Worthies," into the third; and "The Stunner" or "Spheric Laughter," into the fourth.

Among these various forms through which my brother has chosen to express himself, it seems to me that it is the first, the diaristic or autobiographical one, that lends itself most naturally to his peculiar turn of mind and becomes the most fully impregnated with the essence of his personality. It is indeed inevitable that this should be the case, since the most characteristic quality in Llewelyn's temperament is his power of registering an integrated, banked-up, and massively simple response to every actual situation in which he finds himself.

One might say that the characteristic yeast of this writer's "wholewheat" bake-shop, even in the cases where he uses the biographical, discursive, or short-story formula, always springs from the same integral response to the same quite definite and quite special stimulus. For it is only a certain kind of human situation-a kind purged and winnowed of everything not basically rooted in our common earth-life-that really stirs his interest; and his heart-whole, compact

reaction, when his interest is stirred, is as reiterated and undeviating as it is idiosyncratic, exclusive, empiric. It goes very deep, this response of his; it goes as deep as life. But it always remains obstinately unporous to certain overtones and undertones, to certain shadowy intimations, which must be admitted, in a more objective synthesis, to have their place in the world's complicated orchestra.

Llewelyn, in plain words, is a poetical materialist with an unconquerable zest for life for life on any terms. But an ingrained prejudice, amounting to actual hostility, toward anything supernatural, mystical, or metaphysical, narrows the scope of his shrewd and quizzical reactions even more completely than did the skepticism of his master Montaigne. The poetic element, in his materialistic zest for life, is the dominant background to every one of his impressions; and this poetic element takes a very definite form in his mind a form that is repeated again and again, with small enough variation, in all his writings.

The note I refer to, played upon so constantly, reverberates over the whole field of his experience and keeps up a low, deep monotone, like the humming of a cosmic mill-wheel or the drone of a planetary bumblebee, always just audible out there in the distance, but never teasingly aggressive. It is in fact his constant vision of "the hungry generations" of our human race going forth to their work and to their pleasure upon the surface of this solar satellite, and returning to their various shelters when the sun goes down, that supplies him with his chief philosophical point d'appui. Phrases and sentences full of this particular awareness occur in all his works, and the uncon

querable dignity, offset by the grotesque tragedy, of man's life upon earth is something that never grows stale to him. "My illness," he writes in the "Confessions," "had sharpened my wits. At night when I looked at the stars, I understood the background which belonged to our planet, . . . sailing on to extinction either by some catastrophic celestial collision or by slow senseless withering, and each man, each woman and each child destined also sooner or later to wear white stockings and be carried away to the churchyard."

In the sketch entitled "Death" in "Ebony and Ivory," we come upon the following drastic question and emphatic answer: "What if the world does contain no purpose, but only a series of sensations for the elect, the chosen, to experience during an inconsequent transit? . . . For us the dread of death adds a tang and relish to life to the only life for which we care. We accept these terms, we delight in them. The very pride of man indeed rests upon his mortality, for so and only so, does he appear an heroic figure under the sun."

His appreciation of Thomas Hardy in "Thirteen Worthies" contains passages that might well apply to his own work. "For Thomas Hardy writes like a countryman, thinks like a countryman, and has the imagination of a countryman. From first to last the essential element of the drama of existence has been for him nothing more than the simple spectacle of mortal man and mortal woman, passionate and bewildered, moving against a background of immemorial nature.

.. His is the deep, shrewd outlook of an old shepherd, whose native observations of life and death have sup

plied him with a tough, idiosyncratic, earth-bound philosophy."

Even in "Black Laughter," in the African jungle, the same note is struck. "Had some over-sagacious negro a thousand moons ago peered up at the night skies and come to the conclusion that the ultimate question could never be answered, and that it was man's wisest course to cease from speculation and enjoy, without asking questions, the delicate flavour of goat's milk, the grateful warmth of a fire, and the sweet delights of love-making?"

The conclusion, in fact, of all Llewelyn Powys's philosophizing amounts to the old Shaksperian acceptance of fate, implicit in Falstaff's "Mortal men! Mortal men!" and more ideally expressed in that "Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all."

I seem to detect four main literary influences in my brother's work, that of Charles Lamb, that of Walter Pater, that of Guy de Maupassant, and that of Lytton Strachey. But it appears to me that it is that of Charles Lamb which has sunk the deepest into his mind. And yet where he is most entirely himself is, I think, in "Confessions" and "Black Laughter," the autobiographical or diaristic portions of his work, where not one of the above influences leaves the faintest trace. In these he appears as the insatiable amateur, the incorrigible adventurer, the life-intoxicated world-child, for whom style and questions of style must all of them fall into a secondary position compared with a certain tough and yet timid curiosity, such as makes use of the tricks of style merely as feelers or antennæ to come in contact with the very skin of reality; a curiosity occupied with the actual ways of

to the organic link my brother insists upon between the evolution of society and the forms of its art, nothing less than to display "the body and pressure" of a man's own age, realized as the inevitable outgrowth of an undying past, rarefied and transformed by individual imagination. Behind all A. R. Powys's theories and practice lurks that thrill of direct physical contact, as if he were one of William Blake's heroic naked figures, with the so-called "inanimate" materials of his art, a thrill so deep and stirring that it would almost seem to imply the presence in these "inanimates" of certain responsive "souls" of wood, of stone, of metal, of marble.

§ 3

To pass from the abrupt ex cathedra utterances of A. R. Powys to the supersophisticated, elusive, provocative, provocative, bewildering art of T. F. Powys is to pass from the stern metallic commands of some Roman centurion to the darkly muttered mystical resentments, low-voiced out of supernatural clairvoyance, of some Druidic captive. In the three long short-stories of "The Left Leg," in "Black Bryony," and in "Mark Only," my brother Theodore has already established his position as one of the most arresting and formidable of modern writers of fiction.

Of the four of us he is undoubtedly the most original. He is indeed so original both in subject matter and in style that it is hard to find any literary analogies or comparisons wherewith to throw his extraordinary work into critical perspective.

Dealing with the same locale as has been so triumphantly exploited by Thomas Hardy, there is nothing even remotely Hardyesque about his man

ner of presentation. He seems to write of Dorset scenery and of Dorset peasants from a point of view that isolates that devoted section of the earth as completely from all others as the Limbo in Dante's "Divine Comedy" is isolated from earth and hell and purgatory and heaven. The stretch of country occupied by these luckless hamlets, overshadowed by the merciless "moods" of God, seems in fact to be lifted up or lowered down beyond the common earth-level; until it is so soaked by fairy rains and so blighted by magic moons as to become rather a projection of one man's creative mind than a reproduction of any actual human province. The country dialect, as T. F. Powys uses it, becomes itself a sort of modifying and transfiguring medium through which the events are seen remotely, at a distance, as if through a filmy mist. But within that mist, within this magic circle, how we become aware of every least gesture of these fantastic and unhappy persons, of every stick and stone in these haunted roads, of every crack and cranny in these persecuted houses!

My brother's humor, wrinkling his tragic mask, is utterly unlike any other humor that I have ever encountered. It has a directness that approaches its object with the tap of a raven's beak. It divides the just from the unjust with the physical assurance of a fork dividing a beard. It brings you into such palpable impact with the reality in question that you start back under the shock of it as if from the laugh of a hobgoblin when you are robbing a henroost, or from the "droppings” of an owl in a high tree when you 're playing Peeping Tom. It is a humor that has a deep, sweet-bitter subterranean malice in it; a malice that moves close up to

the thing it is handling and catches it off-guard and disarrayed; catches it, if it is alive, sneezing, gobbling, scratching, stretching, shivering with fear or with desire, prowling off on some affair "that has no relish of salvation in't."

And always, in these extraordinary books, one is uneasily aware, out there in the dim background, of the furtive hoofs of the great god Pan. The hills may lie lovely and quiet in the noon heat. The valleys may laugh and sing with daisies and children. Over the green bracken, amid the white clover, go those mysterious hoof-thuds, bringing a tremor of the dark underworld into every heart that hears them. For although religion enters profoundly into the texture of these stories, it cannot be said, except in the case of the allegorical and ambiguous Mr. Jar, that it enters with any reassurance or comfort. It "scatters hoarfrost like ashes"; and the good and the bad alike whinny and bleat as it skulks around their threshold.

There is something almost Manichean about T. F. Powys's attitude to life. "Pure Love," as in some Saturnian Pilgrim's Progress, finds herself so absolutely separated from her wicked brother "Profane Love" that a kind of dark Pauline curse falls upon all natural and normal sex impulses. And this vein is further accentuated by the presence of a deep-bitten, uncompromising, inveterate hostility to every form of careless strength or casual well-being.

Theodore Powys's world is indeed a world projected whole and entire out of the shadowy recesses of his own unusual subconsciousness. So original is his vision of things, so saturated with his extraordinary personality is every word he writes, that one feels certain

that these strange tales are assured, if anything is assured, of a lasting hold upon certain troubled minds. The passages that are least affected by this unceasing and remorseless pursuit of the weak by the strong, this dark hunt that we follow with such mingled emotions-for the human heart is a colosseum of contradictions-are the passages in which the rambling choruses of old men and old women exchange their comments upon it all. In the "Left Leg" the women meet in the village shop. In "Hester Dominy" the men meet in the pound, in "Mark Only," in Mark's stable. While in "Black Bryony" the meeting-place of men and women alike is the motor-van of the carrier. In all these scenes, where the gloom of the plot is relieved by a unique and elfish humor, one is aware of something mysteriously simple and yet mysteriously profound in the writer's philosophy-a philosophy to which door-handles and loaves of bread and wooden settles and church-porchbiers and spades and mugs and platters and pitchforks and horse-dung all contribute their quota of mystic intimation. It is a Hans Andersen world rather than a Grimm's fairy-tale world; for over it all hangs the shadow of the projection of man's heart, which remains desperately and stupidly wicked; but it is a world where there are Hester Dominys and where there are Mr. Thomases, and though their days on the earth are few and evil, and though none throw incense on their sacrifices, that they have existed at all redeems a little more perhaps than we know— the pressure of the will to live.

8 4

How indolent, how careless, how occasional, appear my own writings