Welsh Journals

as one would look at a flower, in order to catch the true beauty and the true scent. Break up the sun in the spectroscope and we have spectra corre- sponding to different elements. But in the process we lose the individuality of the sun. Break up the flower, and we get chorophyll and other subs- tances. The personality, however, vanishes, and we are no nearer a solution of the ultimate mystery. To change the metaphor it would be much like taking the old clock to pieces in order to see how it works. One may explain the pecu- liarity of each separate piece, but the whole combination must be left untouched if we are to hear it strike twelve o'clock. Where these com- petitors are concerned, however, only too easy it is to explain the workings. Not one of them has the strength to intimidate, to cast a spell, to over- awe. Not one among them seems to be able to speak authoritatively Look at me; I have the authentic voice, and the art for its presentation. My poems speak for themselves, and they are linked by a personality which conveys its own explanation. If incapable of such striking lines as Keats' The Journey homeward to habitual self,' The owl for all its feathers was a-cold,' or of Shelley's blown Autumnal leaves, Ghosts from an enchanter THESE MODERNS AT LLANELLY— A RETROSPECT THE loan exhibition of pictures and sculpture at this year's National Eistedd- fod was probably the most stimulating that has yet been held in Wales. The small but admirable series of Old Masters needs no com- ment, but the discussion, and even invective, aroused by the large range of contemporary British paintings suggests that a few remarks on this subject might not be out of place In that fascinating book, Practical Criticism," Mr. I. A. Richards quotes some hundreds of commentaries written by undergraduates on poems, good and bad, submitted to them with no author's name attached. The outstanding fact revealed by this experiment was the blinding- power of preconceived notions about poetic technique. In cases where a student presupposed that A sonnet should set out to and was faced with a sonnet which triumphantly succeeded along slightly different lines, he was usually completely incapacitated from taking in this new sonnet. It is the same with art. By prejudices and preconceived notions about artistic technique, thousands of sensitive people fleeing,' I am, at any rate, on the edge of the divine utterance." On the contrary we have been doomed to disappointment. When the forty vol- umes came to hand we thought surely that we would have been able to discover at least one new poet, an unmistakably authentic voice, one whom it would have been both a pleasure and a privilege to praise without stint, and so help, in our small way, in the task of creating favourable conditions for future development. But it was not to be. The rarity is not among the batch, the creature with the sixth sense who is not made but born the one afflicted with the madness, or better, perhaps, blessed with the ecstacy, which lifts a man above the slumber of his blood into the heights; the one capable of saturating the great commonplace of existence with the petrol of emotion, which ignited by the imagination becomes a flame powerful enough to burn a way through black Night to Heaven itself. So after much thought we have been reluctantly obliged to come to the conclusion that even the best in the batch does not conform to the standard we have set for this competition, and that, in consequence, there is nothing else for it, but to recommend a witholding of the prize for a lack of sufficient merit. July, 1930. Huw MENAI. by D. Kighley Baxandall, B.A. cut themselves off from the intense pleasure which the best contemporary art can give. It is just possible that a short account of the growth of the modern British painting represented at Llanelly may help to remove some of these inhibiting prejudices. Modern British art may be said to date from igio. In the autumn of that year Mr. Roger Fry organized at the Grafton Galleries an exhibition of the work of certain contemporary and recently deceased French painters whose pictures had not previously been shown in England. It was to describe these artists who, in chronological sequence, come after the Impressionists, that Mr. Fry invented the term Post-Impressionists. The exhibition was received with general execration. Critics who have since learnt to understand and reverence the art of Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh; of Matisse, Derain, and Picasso, were upset by a technique which did not suit their set of preconceived notions. They therefore dismissed some of the greatest artists of the last hundred years as "deluded egoists", "butchers", "morally lost", and