When you take this small book out of its maroon slipcase you discover that it is not a book at all but a faithful photographic reproduction of an exercise book, in which a young man barely out of school has carefully written out in a rather childish hand the poems that affected him most.
The charm is in seeing what such a person, educated in an English public school with a strong military tradition and no intellectual pretensions (Haileybury near Hertford), knew and thought interesting in 1923. The answer is that he is essentially still a Romantic. Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and Poe set the tone, with some earlier voices allowed—Herrick, Wotton and Hood—so long as they are in tune with their successors.
You would never guess from this that Eliot’s The Waste Land had come out the year before, but this is not a soul looking to be disturbed. Rupert Brooke is here, not with a war poem, but with Grantchester; the recent horror is allowed entry only in the form of Sassoon’s All Souls’ Day, an elegiac poem that emphasises redemption rather than the reality of the trenches.
What has this to do with visual art? The young man in question is Rex Whistler, a highly talented painter of witty rococo pastiches, who has something of a cult following even now among the English upper classes; his wall paintings in the restaurant of the Tate Britain are as far away from most of the works upstairs as mille-feuille pastry from concrete, and would certainly not be allowed today.
He died in the Normandy landings aged 39, so we cannot know how he might have evolved, but it seems unlikely that he would have changed his artistic nature, for this facsimile, with its charmingly painted marginal illustrations of landscapes, knights, witches and 18th-century lovers, is a tangible insight into the mind of someone who preferred to dream.
The exercise book comes with a helpful separate essay by Whistler’s biographers, Hugh and Mirabel Cecil.
Rex Whistler: An Anthology of Mine, Pimpernel Press, £40
