LONDON LETTER
IT is now nearly a year since I last wrote a letter from England to The Dial, and in that time a great many things have happened, alarms and excursions, wars and peaces, strikes, and crises, and a reasonable number of new books. I wish I could make a concise summary of the events of 1919: it would be amusing. But I am afraid it is more than I could compass within ordinary limits of space. The most I can do is to set down a few impressions of tendencies as seen against that background of "talk" which is so important, so inescapable an element of the literary life.
"Talk" is a mysterious thing. It rises like the wind, no one knows how, blows here and there gently or gustily, falls without apparent reason and rises again in another quarter. And literary London is, in more senses than one, an exceedingly windy place. There is said to be a certain town at the Antipodes whose inhabitants can be recognized infallibly all over the world by their trick of putting their hands to their hats, even on the calmest day, whenever they approach a street-corner. Gales are swift and sudden in that town. So, in London, people guard their reputations and their susceptibilities. You never know quite what is going to happen to them. A. is furious at B.'s review of his new novel and C. thinks that an allusion in it is aimed at him and is the prelude to a full-dress attack. D. has most deplorably issued yet another volume of verse and the talk turns to whispering: because D., apart from the fact that every one likes him, is a man of genius in any kind of composition but that. E. is shortly going to have his throat cut by F.'s gang, on account of his reckless championship of G., whom F. dislikes. And so on and on. Ninety-nine per cent. of it means nothing, but it monotonously continues.
Just recently there has been an enormous amount of talk about the "boom" and the "slump" in poetry. We have grown so accustomed to rapid movement that, when any one talks about a boom, some one else automatically gets up and begins talking about a slump. A little while ago I read in an American journal, which I
