time: the refbeshing river 



by the poets in the simplest common words. The religious mysticism 

 of a Donne or a Crashaw; the cosmic pantheism of a Wordsworth; 

 have given place to the social emotion of such poets as Auden, 

 Spender, Day Lewis, and such prose writers as Warner and Upward. 

 There is a story by that subtlest of writers, V. S. Pritchett, which 

 well exemplifies this.^ It is a love story and it concerns a commercial 

 traveller and an undertaker's daughter, but the plain ordinariness of 

 the conversation masks the deepest feeling and the most devastatingly 

 subtle irony. This mingling of profound emotion with surface banality 

 strikes an authentic note of what must come to be in future socialist 

 society.^ Auden has supplied a perfect allegory of it in his poem: 



*'To settle in this village of the heart. 

 My darling, can you bear it? True, the hall 

 With its yews and famous dovecots is still there 

 Just as in childhood, but the grand old couple 

 Who loved us all so equally are dead; 

 And now it is a licensed house for tourists, 

 None too particular. One of the new 

 Trunk roads passes the very door already. 

 And the thin cafes spring up overnight. 

 The sham ornamentation, the strident swimming pool, 

 The identical and townee smartness. 

 Will you really see as home, and not depend 

 For comfort on the chance, the sly encounter 

 With the irresponsible beauty of the stranger ? 

 O can you see precisely in our gaucheness 

 The neighbour's strongest wish, to serve and love.^" 



Pritchett and Auden and all our best writers are warning us not to 

 be put off by what we may feel are the vulgar externals of modern 

 life; not to retire into fantasies and escape-holes; the reality of human 

 comradeship is as powerful as ever. The lorry-drivers on those roads 

 have T.U. cards in their pockets and their talk in the thin cafes is 

 far from fantastic. Those young men and women in the strident 

 swimming pool are members, perhaps, of L.L.Y. or Y.C.L. The 



^ "Sense of Humour" in New Writing, 1936, 2, 16, and in You make your own Life 

 (London, 1938). 



^ Was this not the meaning of that great saying of Yeats — "Think the thoughts of a 

 wise man, but speak the common language of the people." 



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