Welsh Journals

"The foils are poisoned that the good may die" By GEORGE EWART EVANS SHORTLY after the beginning of the war Alun Lewis stated in a verse magazine that he had not written half of what he had intended to write for humanity. This statement of purpose stood out among the usual Notes on Contributors." It needed courage to be unequi- vocal at a time when writers were giving their allegiance to sophisticated abstractions, or were denying that it was necessary for them to express any intention at all. His concern for humanity is the central thread of all his work. Growing up in an environment where it would have been easy for him to take the first-to-hand solution of his problem as a writer-to write of man directly out of a political thesis-he instinctively rejected this fashionable and sterile doctrine of the Thirties and wrote of man in his entirety. His work has that universal touch which makes great literature. One of his earlier stories with its theme of a child's ignorance of death comes particularly to mind. We can only surmise now how far this quality would have taken him. He was a writer who belonged to a broad country and when he went to India it did not mean that he was cut off from his roots as many of our writers would have been; it was not difficult for him to project himself into the oppressed Indian peasant. His feeling for him was as strong as for the miner, trapped for long years in the Welsh valleys. Both had been given Stones for Bread." This universality placed him in the front rank of young contemporary writers and is (paradoxically) Wales' greatest loss, since he would have done much by its emphasis to correct the development of a literature tending to inbreeding. Someone has said that Alun Lewis was a realist with the poetic touch. This is a statement which falsely separates aspects of his work that are organic and arise directly our of his vision as a humanist. Manuel," one of his later Indian stories, illustrates this. The predominance of death as a theme is another aspect of his work. Death the wild beast, uncaught and untamed stalks through the poems and hovers over two of his last stories from India, The Orange