Herbert Read on Bernard Gilbert

Bernard Gilbert’s extraordinary, experimental, mixed-genre literary portrait of Lincolnshire circa WWI—one of the few genuine cultural expressions of rural modernism, despite the fact that the countryside was perhaps more deeply scarred by the experience of twentieth-century modernity than even the cities—has yet to receive the recognition it deserves.

This isn’t the place to go into Gilbert’s fascinating series, which uses every imaginable form (from folk-play to potboiler, from madrigal to free-verse sequence) to get a multidimensional perspective on the way the countryside was changed in the twentieth century, and on the strains these changes put on working people’s relations with one another.

But while we wait for the degenerate cosmopolitans, out of touch with the changing seasons, to catch up with “the James Joyce of the Fens”, we can at least be thankful that the Modernist Journals Project seems to be back on the web. And the MJP seem to have finally completed their online searchable edition of The New Age, whose progress I’ve been casually following for the last seven-odd years.

I’ve always found The New Age the most fascinating of Britain’s modern magazines: it’s positioned halfway between political organs like The New Statesman and fruitcake art books like The Egoist. It was an important platform for writers including Wells, Bennett, Chesterton, GBS, Belloc, T.E.Hulme, Pound, Lewis, and many more; it had some of the most important British “post impressionist” art criticism, and lots of oddball syndicalist/guild socialist/social credit fringe politics.

Here’s a number from 1921 [warning! PDF! may take ages to open!], when the modernist establishment were waiting to unleash Ulysses and The Waste Land. If you look at pages 91-2, though, you’ll see that Herbert Read’s mind was on more pressing literary concerns: the classification of Bernard Gilbert’s writing. “Documentary”, is how he sees it:

His book is so completely planned and neatly executed that it comes into the category of those works of science that in conception give evidence of a poetic mind. Let us frankly regard “Old England” as a work of science—of social science, of group-psychology. In this light it is an excelling performance: a document of great value and comprehensiveness. As an indictment it will, of course, be fiercely disputed. The “Morning Post” will find it intolerable. The rustic school of sentimentalists will be scandalised. And the professional critics will bring out their well-thumbed dossiers labelled “Contra Realism: de Goncourt, Zola, etc.”, and tediously they will expatiate. But “Old England” will survive these plaintiffs. In our own time it will stand as a diagnosis of the diseased heart of the country. In another age it will mean as much as, and even more than, Piers Plowman means to us.

[Link]