a figure—not reekingly British—the figure of an uncompromising post-war pessimist with a marvelous faculty for expressing a vision which will encounter quick sympathies in disenchanted people all over the world.
He was born in 1883, eighth of eleven children, at Dorchester, famous town in the domain of the "Wessex" pessimist, whose somber intuitions of long ago we feel as so prescient and so refreshing. He was born in a very English home, apparently fixed in English traditions of what used to be considered the best sort: upper middle class; Church of England; Cambridge University for generations; addiction to country life in the southern countries; William Cowper somewhere in the family tree; the sword of an East India uncle hanging in the library of the rectory; family prayers; maids bringing in cakes and tea.
As for the immediate family, a mother with the gift of sorrow; a white-headed pater, a fine leonine figure of the Victorian divine; a sister with the gift of ecstatically identifying herself with nature; brothers—three or four of them writers, notably. Theodore and John, and the lot of them men of enterprise and talent, unconventional thinkers, talkers, suitable persons to sharpen one's wits upon, suitable fellows to assist one in breaking out of the paternal sheepfold—goatish sharp-horned young pagans in their youth, butting their way out of the "bourgeoisie," butting their way to intellectual freedom.
We got our first sharp impression that Llewelyn Powys was arriving with something of more than parish lane concern when, in 1923, he published an arresting little volume called "Ebony and Ivory," containing sketches and stories of East Africa and southern
