Excerpt from The Madness of the Arts

A few months ago I discovered to my horror that I was to deliver a lecture to the To-morrow Club. That very energetic secretary and clever novelist, Mrs. Dawson Scott, had beguiled me into a promise some time before, when I was playing the part of chairman to William Kean Seymour.

Seymour's lecture was on contemporary verse, and he made some hard remarks about the latest schools. I made some harder; and the promise was that I should come again to elaborate my denuncia tion. The next day I forgot all about it.

A reminder came a month or so later in the shape of a programme. But my name was at the very tail of it, against a date still months ahead. Again I forgot. Of course I forgot. When next I was reminded, the event was on top of me. I decided to run away. But a pathetic note from Mrs. Dawson Scott on the eve of battle brought me to the right about. So I sat down to write out my lecture; and somehow it came out in verse form. That's the story. It is not easier to write verse than prose; but when a poet is very much in earnest verse seems the inevitable vehicle of expression. I had no time to be unnatural.

I do not apologise for the verse, which pleases me considerably more than it will please the critics. But I apologise for the criticism. I have said nothing I do not believe to be true; but if I had written the lecture in prose certain parentheses, qualifications, might have made my verdict seem less severe.

The thing must stand as it was written. It represents a genuine mood - the mood which always overtakes me when I read verse produced by any of the hundred movements which have agitated poetry since 1914. But it takes too little account of the great mass of fine, simple stuff which has been turned out of late. If the arts have gone mad, and I believe they have, we have still a number ofquite sane artists; and one or two of them are young men. I speak mainly of verse, because poetry is the first of the arts and the only one with which I am technically familiar. Yet I maintain that, being technically familiar with one art, I am therefore competent to deal critically with the others. More over, I hold that the general public has rights, too - the right to criticise, the right of indignant pro test, the right, if need be, to send the artists to a lunatic asylum.

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