Reviews

ENGLISH

NEW POETRY

Shanghai.–By P. R. Kaikini. (Published by The New Book Company, Hornby Road, Bombay. Price One Rupee net.)

Chords and Discords.–By Armando Menezes. (Publishers not given. Price One Rupee only.)

Songs and Lvrics.–By R. Appalaswami, M.A. (Copies can be had from The Secretary, The Society of Oriental Studies, Vizianagaram. Price As. 8.)

Mr. Kaikini is a typical product of the modern civilisation–not, I am afraid, of India but of Europe. It is really strange, but Mr. Kaikini seems to whip himself into a rage with the happenings in Europe which are so remote from the Indian clime. I hope I will not be accused of being chauvinistic, but the raison d'etre for such tortured outlook on the part of an Indian is beyond understanding. It may be that the trend of events is very dismal and the outlook gloomy. But Mr. Kaikini does not seem to have any personal relationship with the events, ‘no personal tears to wash the spectre of doom.’ He has, ipso facto, assumed that his duty is, like that of the prophets of old, to rise and condemn. And what better medium can he employ for this purpose except the hard, glittering technique of the post-War English poets–in a word, the technique of the Auden School?

Auden, Lewis and Spender, however, are genuinely faced with problems for which they can find no answers. They are frustrated and defeated by the circumstances; they are still oppressed with a sense of guilt, and their escapism is through a psychological and social solution. Auden then has become very ‘clinical’; he has outdistanced Eliot to whom the world is a kind of hell not even worth damning. This modern trio makes high-spirited horse-play with everything from brothels and fields to counting-houses and sewage; but underneath all this, like a critic’s fatuous comment about the tragic underlines in a comedy, there is a nervous exhaustion, a cynicism, a deliberate digging up of the Unconscious.

No wonder their style betrays their irritability. Their techinque is a natural corollary of their doubts and misgivings. It is an attempt to correlate their personalities with the environment. Hence the justification for those half-broken lines, those jarring effects. And the circle completes itself.

How far they are right and how far their technique is effective is a matter for the judgment of posterity. We are too near the trees to see the wood as a whole.

Mr. Kaikini, however, tries to join this Marx Circus. But how pitiful is the attempt! He has neither the cause for the rage nor the justification for the sneer. And it is really a matter for condolence when an enthusiastic admirer of Mr. Kaikini goes so far as to talk about the decay of the ‘Crescent Moon’ school in India, and about the existence of imitators of Mr. Kaikini. It is hard to swallow this statement without distaste. Are the new writers in India imitating Mr. Kaikini, or are they imitating those whom Mr. Kaikini himself is imitating?

This new volume, ‘Shanghai,’ contains about twenty-five poems. ‘The Revolt’ is an echo of D. H. Lawrence with its ‘betrayal of the word of the blood.’ ‘The Lightning’ is very good–in fact, the best poem in this group. ‘The Millionaire’ is trite and insincere. It is just likely that Mr. Kaikini is a poet, but he has to unlearn a lot, and then only shall ‘the word of the blood not be betrayed.’

The romantics are not dead, for there is Mr. Armando Menezes! He has given me great pleasure, and almost a hope that Indo-Anglian poetry has a future. Many of his poems are exquisite, chiefly the ‘Ode to Beauty’ and ‘A Vision of War.’ He is sensitive and has a sense of values. His imagery is powerful. For example, in ‘The Mighty Lover,’ he says:

I love to see ice clinking in the glass,
And all bright lovely things that melt and pass
With glad indifference–dew-drops that shake
Their opalescent dreams as they awake
To tremulous nothing; silver seeds of rain
That die in fertilizing; and the grain
That perishes to plant, the plant to bloom,
And bloom to seed again for Nature’s womb.

And there is a single sentence in the same poem:

And million, million happinesses more,

which is so spontaneous and joyous that it touches our heart-strings.

Again in ‘To Silence’:

What are you, Silence? Has no plummet sought
To sound the abysmal darks of your profound?
Are all our gorgeous pomp and circumstance
But tinkling anklets of your endless dance,
But jagged fragments of your perfect round?
Or are you that, a Silence, which is not?

In ‘Prospero Speaks,’ there is a single line which is so mighty, so wonderful that it must be repeated:

Chord on chord, chord on rolling chord.

The only fault in Mr. Menezes is, he is so repetitive. He needs must go on emphasising and re-emphasising in the same mode and tone that it is apt to be irritating. There are many cliches too.

The starry gleaming on the billow-crest
I love, and sunset bleeding in the west;
And dawn, eternal bride who blushes red
With tingling memories of her nuptial bed....

Every line here is a cliche. It is a pity that Mr. Menezes should fall into obvious suggestions like this.

There are also some very unhappy lines. In ‘A Ballade of Builders,’ the lines,

Prince, you must fancy me an arrant sot
To make all styles of ‘architecture’ meet…

are very bad.

The word’ abysm’ is archaic; is it a combination of abyss and chasm? ‘Godded’ is another word which is unwarranted.

There are many poems in ‘Chords and Discords’ that can be made more effective by ruthless pruning. But it is up to Mr. Menezes.

Mr. R. Appalaswamy, the author of ‘Songs and Lyrics’ is a second-hand poet. If familiarity with English literature is a sufficient title for essaying in the ‘Elysian fields of poesy,’ Mr. Appalaswamy is a poet; if, however, the requirements for a place among the dreamers is a genuine, innate, spontaneous appreciation, then, Mr. Appalaswamy is not.

‘Songs and Lyrics’ seems to be his first attempt. He never rises to the dignity of a poet in any one poem. They are not even poems–they are just arrangements and sequences of words without any rhythm but with laboriously-contrived rhymes. And he has a model before him for every such word-sequence. One is modelled after Shakespeare, one after Shelley and so on–but without even the graceful philandering of a Chatterton.

He seems to place great faith in such words as ‘bed and board,’ as in the lines:

Denying me thy bed and board,
Denying me thy love….

and again:

She graces my bed and she graces my board.

There are other things too. For example,

His ways need I them mention

and

In the sweat of his bonny brow, Sir,

are two lines in the poem ‘Zamindar’ which require no comment.

‘The Sanguine Sun’ in the evening is an appalling blunder. ‘I possess her so whole’is another little line that betrays the author’s immaturity.

There is, among the hundreds here, only one poem which can be mentioned with approbation. It is the ‘Plough Man.’ I do not claim for it any special virtues. But in the welter of vexatious mediocrity, it stands out–for the feeling which has animated it seems to be genuine and simple.

K. J. MAHADEVAN

Professional Conduct and Advocacy.–By Rao Bahadur K. V. Krishnaswami Aiyer. B.A., B.L. (Madras Bar Council. Price Rs. 3.)

"Life, experience, personal thinking, feeling and acting are alone the original and proper sources of education," are the words which occur in this volume, in the relevant context of the inefficacy of merely reading books on the examination of witnesses. One may push the significance of these words to their ultimate end and say, "Why need listening to lectures of this kind which after all contain maxims so ideal that it would be impossible to follow them?" A statement like this can at best be only cynical like that of Bacon who said, "Philosophers are like stars who give little light because they are so high."

Perhaps such lectures on Professional Conduct and Advocacy in book-form are much more necessary now, when, in their great diffidence of success, aspirants to fortune in the legal profession resort to methods which lower the standard. Moreover, the times we are living in have begun to witness a great change in our view of the law; for the law is fast becoming ‘the instrument through the Legislature of vast social and economic changes.’ The fact of life being an organic whole can no longer be ignored, and we can never feel comfortable unless we learn to relate institutions to wider conceptions and seek to justify them by their contribution to the progress of the human race. Therefore, while agreeing with the nice distinction made in the ‘Introduction’ between ‘Conduct’ and ‘Ethics,’ we feel the distinction between law and ethics to be broad, only because the contacts between them are always so close and constant. Thus we may even say the lawyer and the moralist are both intimately concerned with human conduct. Once the lawyer is placed on a level with the moralist, natural then that his primary duty will be to conform to certain ethical standards, whether prescribed by professional bodies like the Bar Council or as a result of long tradition.

Rao Bahadur K. V. Krishnaswami Aiyer, no mean representative of an order of society which by its very brilliant record of achievements claims recognition on all hands, has chosen well to begin his lectures with a discussion upon the lawyer’s place in society and his worth as a human being. He rightly points out that "if the profession is a great calling, it is a calling in which we have great responsibility."

The chapter on the "Equipment of a Lawyer" brings within our ken the many instances of great successes that bear evidence to an early good equipment. His ‘Hints for Legal Studies,’ ‘Training Grounds,’ ‘Meeting of Clients,’ ‘Preparation of the Case,’ ‘Drafting of Pleadings’ and ‘Examination of Witnesses’ follow each other in a regular order of sequence in interest. The recruit to the profession will find in them really rich experience collected and analysed with the sole objective of making it useful to the younger members of the Bar.

In the chapter on ‘Conduct in Court’ a general survey of the practitioner’s demeanour and accessory aids to a correct manner of presentation of cases is given. Very many minute details of conduct, which the lecturer so very exhaustively provides us, compel us quite to marvel at his genius for detail and his thorough understanding of difficulties. Again in the chapter on ‘Professional Conduct’ there is much food for thought, especially when he discusses matters pertaining to ‘contingent fees.’ The succeeding chapters of the lawyer’s ‘Duty to Court,’ ‘Duty to the Profession,’ ‘Duty to the Opponent,’ ‘Duty to the Client,’ ‘Duty to Yourself’ and ‘Duty to the Public and the State’ contain all the possible views upon them, with a precision and a passion for clarity that leave little room to complain.

In the last two chapters on ‘Has the lawyer any privileges?’ and ‘The Problem of the Future,’ there are the frequently mooted points of discussion, like the overcrowding of the profession, examined in view of the recent pronouncements of many of the eminent members of the legal profession itself.

We cannot close a book of such interesting material and practical value without feeling how wholesome the advice given here is when much of it has been conceived in a spirit of optimism and of generous appreciation of the legal luminaries who have made the Madras Bar what it is today. Himself a votary at the shrine of professional probity, his lectures are all the more valuable; for, who can otherwise bear hearing another who preaches what he does not practise?

K. CHANDRASEKHARAN

Manikyam and other stories–By Kappagantula Satyanarayana. (Katha-mala Publications, Royapettah, Madras. Price 4 as.)

The author of "Manikyam and other stories" is a young aspirant to literary fame. This is his first collection of short stories, six altogether in number. The title story "Manikyam" is named after the heroine who sacrifices her child to save her chastity. The other stories are keyed to the same tune, but the variations are spicy.

Like a promising tennis player, Mr. Satyanarayana tries a variety of strokes. Still unable to find his length, he indulges in vigorous drives. His style, wanting though in the finer Subtleties that distinguish the master’s touch, yet flows with unobtrusive ease. He commits faults sometimes and sometimes scores aces. Now he confines himself to the base-line, and anon he runs to the net. But he lacks consistency and judgment. So he loses to his superiors, always playing the game.

SRI. SRI.