A PARABLE FOR WRITERS
47
Graves had both a warning of misused talent and an example of
singular resources and ability; whatever might be said of the elder
Graves's scholarship it was not cursed by dullness.
When Robert Graves left Charterhouse, he became Captain
Graves of the Royal Welch Fusiliers-and one may reasonably ask
what bearing has carrying a light musket got on the character of
his prose and verse? Yet there is both internal and external relevance
to Graves's writing in the experience that he shared with so many
young British poets who marched into the first of two world wars.
The 1914 war was Graves's true university career; his stay at St.
John's College, Oxford, after the war was an anti-climax.
It
was in
the Royal Welch Fusiliers that he met Siegfried Sassoon, who en–
couraged him to write poems; the poems caused a stir in Edward
Marsh's
Georgian Poetry,
1916-1917,
the small and carefully chosen
anthology of poems that had already furthered the reputations of
Rupert Brooke, James Elroy Flecker, Ralph Hodgson and D. H.
Lawrence ; at twenty-one, Graves was known to those who, for
reasons of patriotic fervor or perverse affection, sentimentally greet
succeeding generations of "war poets." So much for the external
value of Robert Graves's writing his early poems in the trenches–
the internal results in evidence today are, if anything, more pertinent
and of deeper interest.
The Anglo-Celtic, Anglo-Irish line has produced its seemingly
endless regiments for the building of the British Empire; the fighting
Celt, Scotch, Irish or Welsh, propertyless, homeless as he may be at
home, attached fierce loyalty to his regiment as well as the right to
criticize the government; even the mounted police of the city of
New York, many of whose grandfathers or great-grandfathers were
Irish immigrants, are survivors of that tradition. Both insight and
historical logic gave Kipling authority to make the hero of his
Soldiers Three
a noncom. Irish officer. The authority of Robert
Graves's prose in /,
Claudius,
and
Claudius the God,
and in his two,
novels drawn from the Diary of Sergeant Lamb who saw active ser–
vice in the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the American War of In–
dependence, is the authority of one who never left his regiment, who
is ill-at-ease in the presence of and among the disorders of civilian
life. Graves's scholarship is pursued not with the accuracy of a
