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Title: The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920
Author: Various
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920" ***
THE LONDON
MERCURY
Edited by J. C. Squire
Volume I
1919 November to April 1920
[Illustration]
London The Field Press Ltd
PRINTED AT
THE FIELD PRESS
WINDSOR HOUSE
BREAM'S BUILDINGS
LONDON E·C4
INDEX TO VOLUME I
M·CM·XIX NOVEMBER APRIL M·CM·XX
REGULAR ARTICLES
page
AMERICA, A Letter from 232
Bibliographical Notes 73, 194, 325, 458, 581, 718
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS:
Beerbohm, Max 626
Belloc, Hilaire 366
Bridges, Robert Seymour 753
Brooke, Rupert 123
Chesterton, G. K. 496
Clutton-Brock, Arthur 366
Davies, W. H. 122
De La Mare, Walter 122
Flecker, James Elroy 239
Freeman, John 497
Hardy, Thomas 122
Hewlett, Maurice 625
Meynell, Alice 754
Saintsbury, George 238
Book Production Notes 231, 359, 495, 621, 752
Books of the Month 78, 201, 332, 468, 593, 727
Correspondence 77, 198, 329, 462, 585, 721
DRAMA, The:
Calvinists of the Drama, The 112
_Candida_ 755
Children's Plays 498
Demand and Supply 501
_Duchess of Malfi, The_ 368
_Grierson's Way_ 755
Intellectual Drama, The 241
_John Ferguson_ 755
_Living Corpse, A_ 111
_Marriage à la Mode_ 627
Materialism and Poetry 242
_Medea_ 755
Miniature Ballet 755
Pantomime, The Change in the 499
Poetic Drama, The 240
_Pygmalion_ 755
Theatre, The Influence of the Existing 113
_Three Sisters, The_ 755
_Young Visiters, The_ 755
EDITORIAL NOTES:
American Copyright 131, 389
Art, Ugliness, and Incomprehensibility 385
Auction Room Knock-Out, The 516
Literature of 1919, The, and the
Prospects of Literature 257
Ministry of Fine Arts, A 513
National Theatre, The 641
Objects of the LONDON MERCURY 1, 129
FINE ARTS, The:
Black Country, The 634
Comic Drawing, British 373
Epstein, Recent Sculpture by
Jacob 633
Fine Arts, The 116
Goupil Gallery Salon 375
Grant, Paintings by Duncan 634
Group-making and Group-breaking 245
London Group, The 247
Matisse, M. Henri 374
Meaning of Impressionism, The 759
National Gallery, The 632
Nevinson's Exhibition, Mr. 246
New English Art Club, The 504
Renoir, Auguste 759
War Pictures at Burlington House 503
FRANCE, A LETTER FROM:
The Present State of the French Novel 105
The French Poetry of To-day 360
The Young Reviews 622
Learned Societies, etc. 108, 235, 363, 465, 590, 724
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE:
Andreef, Leonid, Death of 136
Bullen, A. H., Death of 647
Burne-Jones, Lady, Death of 520
Chesterton, G. K. 263
Cummings, Bruce, Death of 135
Dehmel, Dr. Richard, Death of 519
_Dial, The_ 392
Dobson, Austin, Eightieth Birthday of 391
Flecker, James Elroy 263
Gosse, Edmund, Seventieth Birthday of 136
Hardy, Thomas, Presentation to 135
New Edition of his Works 263
James, Henry, Letters of 263
Micro-organisms in Paper 264
Osler, Sir William, Death of 391
Smith, G. D., Death of 648
Thomas, Edward, Memorial to 519
MUSIC:
Audience, The Function of the 764
Beecham Opera, The 248
Concerts 377
Covent Garden 376
Naturalisation of Opera in England, The 763
Promenade Concerts, The 119
Purcell and His Orchestra 637
Purcell and Shakespeare 635
Resurrection of an Opera, The 635
Rubinstein's Recital, Mr. Arthur 506
Scriabin Recital, A 508
Spanish Music, Modern 507
Surrey's Opportunity, The 764
Publications, Select List of 124, 251, 379, 509, 638, 766
OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS IN PROSE
ARCHITECTURE as Form in Civilisation 574
Autographs, A Collection of 320
Barbellion, W. N. P. 543
Blake as a Prophet, On 283
Blind Thamyris 403
Bridges' Lyrical Poems, Robert 708
Butler, Samuel 164
Classic of the Future, A Little (Somerville and Ross) 555
Crane, Stephen: A Note without Dates 192
Creatures, The 275
Crystal Vase, The 176
Donne, John 435
Eighteenth-Century Poetry 155
Eliot, George 34
English, The Teaching of 62
Foreshore of London, The 663
Future Poet and Our Time, The 44
James, Henry--I 673
Jonson, Ben 184
Mackenzie, The Novels of Mr. Compton 448
Misadventures 149
Music, On Interpretation in 694
Particles, An Article on 71
Photography and Art 301
Prose and Mortality 312
Prose, On 671
Psycho-Analysis and the Novel 426
Records, A Case for 685
Rhyme, The Romance of 416
Satirists, Forgotten 565
Servants, On 533
Shelley and His Publishers 291
Smile of the Sphinx, The 16
Walpole, Horace 52
POEMS
Almswomen 525
Beechwood 656
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan! 396
Buzzards, The 138
Coming of Green, The 523
Country Mood, A 272
Draft for "A First and Last Song" 271
Early Chronology 11
Evening Sky in March, The 12
_Fortunatus Nimium_ 393
Gallipoli, Lines Written in 267
Glimpse from the Train, A 265
Going and Staying 7
Hippolytus, The Modern 524
House That Was, The 14
Inglis, Elsie 531
Intimacy 527
Ishak's Song 137
It's Not Going to Happen Again 7
Love's Caution 13
Moon, The 139
Nature's Fruitfulness 524
Night Rapture 529
_Nobis cum Pereant_ 655
November 268
Rock Pool, The 12
Scirocco 273
Search for the Nightingale, The 8
Senses, The 521
Shadow, The 394
Shobeensho 662
"Skindle's" in Poperinghe 649
Soldier Addresses His Body, The 527
Sorrowing for Childhood Departed 532
Storm and Stars 662
Suppose 14
Tarantella 266
To E. G. 394
Weir, By the 395
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Armstrong, Martin:
_The Buzzards_ 138
_The Senses_ 521
_The Coming of Green_ 523
Beerbohm, Max:
On Servants 533
Belloc, H.:
_Tarantella_ 266
Beresford, J. D.:
Psycho-Analysis and the Novel 426
Binyon, Laurence:
_The House That Was_ 14
_Storm and Stars_ 662
Blunden, Edmund:
_Almswomen_ 525
Brett Young, Francis:
_Scirocco_ 273
Bridges, Robert:
_Fortunatus Nimium_ 393
Brooke, Rupert:
_It's Not Going to Happen Again_ 7
Burrows, Francis:
_Nature's Fruitfulness_ 524
Chesterton, G. K.:
The Romance of Rhyme 416
Clutton-Brock, A.:
On Blake as a Prophet 283
Conrad, Joseph:
Stephen Crane: A Note without Dates 192
Davies, W. H.:
_Love's Caution_ 13
De la Mare, Walter:
_Suppose_ 14
The Creatures 275
Dent, Edward J.:
Music 119, 248, 376, 506, 635, 763
Dobson, Austin:
_To E. G._ 394
Flecker, James Elroy:
_Ishak's Song_ 137
Freeman, John:
_The Evening Sky in March_ 12
The Novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie 448
_Beechwood_ 656
Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson:
_By the Weir_ 395
Gosse, Edmund, C.B.:
George Eliot 34
Henry James--I. 673
Graves, A. P.:
_Shobeensho_ 662
Graves, Robert:
_A Country Mood_ 272
Hannay, Howard:
Photography and Art 301
The Fine Arts 503, 632, 759
Hardy, Thomas, O.M.:
_Going and Staying_ 7
_A Glimpse from the Train_ 265
Hastings, Major L. M.:
_"Skindle's" in Poperinghe_ 649
Henschel, Sir George:
On Interpretation in Music 694
Hewlett, Maurice:
The Crystal Vase 176
_Elsie Inglis_ 531
Huxley, Aldous:
Ben Jonson 184
Forgotten Satirists 565
Ingpen, Roger:
Shelley and His Publishers 291
Jenkinson, Hilary: A Case for Records 685
Kennard, Sir Coleridge, Bart.:
_Draft for "A First and Last Song"_ 271
Leigh, The Rev. Canon N. Egerton:
A Collection of Autographs 320
Lethaby, Professor W. R.:
Architecture as Form in Civilisation 574
Lindsay, Nicholas Vachel:
_Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!_ 396
Lynd, Robert:
Horace Walpole 52
John Donne 435
Mason, J. H.:
Book-Production Notes 231, 359, 495, 621, 752
Meynell, Alice:
An Article on Particles 71
Moore, T. Sturge:
Blind Thamyris 403
Nash, John:
The Fine Arts 116, 245, 373
Newbolt, Sir Henry:
_Nobis cum Pereant_ 655
Nichols, Robert:
The Smile of the Sphinx 16
_November_ 268
_Night Rapture_ 529
Rickword, Edgell:
_Intimacy_ 527
_The Soldier Addresses His Body_ 527
Rushby, Kenworth:
_The Modern Hippolytus_ 524
Saintsbury, George:
Eighteenth-Century Poetry 155
Sassoon, Siegfried:
_Early Chronology_ 11
Shanks, Edward:
_The Rock Pool_ 12
Samuel Butler 164
_The Shadow_ 394
W. N. P. Barbellion 543
Shaw-Stewart, Patrick:
_Lines Written in Gallipoli_ 267
Smith, L. Pearsall:
Misadventures 149
Squire, J. C.:
The Future Poet and Our Time 44
_The Moon_ 139
Prose and Mortality 312
Robert Bridges' Lyrical Poems 708
Stobart, J. C.:
The Teaching of English 62
Thibaudet, Albert:
A Letter from France 105, 360, 622
Tomlinson, H. M.:
The Foreshore of London 663
Turner, W. J.:
_The Search for the Nightingale_ 8
_Sorrowing for Childhood Departed_ 532
The Drama 111, 240, 368, 498, 627, 755
Van Deijssel, L.:
Of Prose 671
Williams, Orlo:
A Little Classic of the Future 555
REVIEWS
Accounts Rendered of Work Done and Things Seen, _Buchanan_ 494
Actor, Problems of the, _Calvert_ 502
Addresses in America, _Galsworthy_ 480
Anaphylaxis and Anti-Anaphylaxis, _Besredka_ 228
Appreciations of Poetry, _Hearn_ 93
Archaic England, _Bayley_ 616
Argonaut and Juggernaut, _Sitwell_ 206
Art, Essays on, _Clutton-Brock_ 344
Athenian Days, _Byron_ 83
Athletics, Success in, _Webster, Jenkins_, and _Mostyn_ 224
Balkan Problems and European Peace, _Buxton and Leese_ 351
Banner, The, _Spender_ 733
Battle Line in France, The Romance of the, _Bodley_ 606
Before the War, _Haldane_ 487
Boche and Bolshevik, _Price_ 96
Books in the War, _Koch_ 738
Botany, Applied, _Ellis_ 230
Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Rupert, _De la Mare_ 215
Butler, Samuel: A Memoir, _Festing-Jones_ 164
Carmina Rapta, _Fairfax_ 207
Catalysis in Theory and Practice, _Rideal and Taylor_ 101
Catherine of Siena, St., _Pollard_ 484
Cervantes, _Schevill_ 737
Challenge, A., _Hardyman_ 82
Chemistry and Its Mysteries, _Gibson_ 357
Chemistry from the Industrial Standpoint, _Thorne_ 230
Childhood in Brittany Eighty Years Ago, A, _Sedgwick_ 482
Children of No Man's Land, _Stern_ 337
Chorus-Girl, and Other Stories, The, _Tchehov_ 476
Christian Ideas, First, _Selwyn_ 746
Clintons and Others, The, _Marshall_ 598
Clown of Paradise, The, _Creston_ 207
Coal Mining and the Coal Miner, _Bulman_ 744
Colloid Chemistry, Theoretical and Applied, _Ostwald_ 491
Colloids, The Chemistry of, _Zsigmondy_ 491
Comrades in Captivity, _Harvey_ 743
Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics, _Jeans_ 619
Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay,
_Williams-Ellis_ 354
Country Sentiment, _Graves_ 728
Cousin Philip, _Ward_ 208
Coutts, The Life of Thomas, _Coleridge_ 482
Critic in Pall Mall, A, _Wilde_ 91
Dawn and Night, Poems of the, _Mond_ 82
Dickens, Reade, and Collins, _Phillips_ 606
Discovery 751
Diversions of a Man of Letters, Some, _Gosse_ 89
Dodington, George Bubb:
Patron and Place-Hunter, _Sanders_ 348
Domus Doloris, _Leith_ 481
Donne's Sermons:
Selected Passages with an Essay, _Pearsall Smith_ 213
Douglas, Collected Poems of Lord Alfred 81
Ducks and Other Verses, _Harvey_ 596
Easter Island, The Mystery of, _Routledge_ 355
Economic Consequences of the Peace, The, _Keynes_ 487
Efficiency, Everyday, _Lindsay_ 228
Eli of the Downs, _Peake_ 733
Emerson and His Philosophy, _Hill_ 226
Empire and Commerce in Africa, _Woolf_ 616
Engineering, Foundations of, _Spikes_ 230
Engines of the Human Body, _Keith_ 618
English Course for Schools, An, _Mais_ 62
Europe, The Expansion of, _Abbott_ 93
Europe, Fifty Years of, _Hazen_ 217
Every Man in his Humour, _Jonson_ 243
Far East, The Mastery of the 98
Financial Problems, War-Time, _Withers_ 99
First Plays, _Milne_ 115
Fleurs-de-Lys, _Thorley_ 731
Flora, _Bianco_ and _De la Mare_ 468
Flowers in the Grass, _Hewlett_ 727
Forgotten Places, _Mackenzie_ 81
Fox, Henry:
First Lord Holland, _Ilchester_ 608
Friend to Friend, From, _Ritchie_ 739
Full Circle, _Hamilton_ 473
Galloper at Ypres, A, _Butler_ 606
Garret, In the, _Van Vechten_ 477
General William Booth Enters into Heaven, _Lindsay_ 335
Georgian Poetry, 1918-1919 201
Glory of the Coming, The, _Cobb_ 486
Gold and Iron, _Hergesheimer_ 337
Greek Anthology, Echoes from the, _Legge_ 83
Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities, The, _Taylor_ 100
Gyroscopic and Rotational Motion, A Treatise on, _Gray_ 226
Hamlet, The Problem of, _Robertson_ 92
Handmaiden of the Navy, The, _Doorly_ 223
Heartbreak House, _Shaw_ 114
Herschel, _Macpherson_ 751
How the War Came, _Loreburn_ 97
Hygiene for Training Colleges, A Text Book of, _Avery_ 750
If All These Young Men, _Wilson_ 208
Illustration, _Meynell_ 375
Images of War, _Aldington_ 594
Imperfect Mother, An, _Beresford_ 733
India, The Government of, _Macdonald_ 490
Industry and Trade, _Marshall_ 220
Inflation, _Nicholson_ 222
Interim, _Richardson_ 473
Invisible Kingdom, An, _Lilly_ 225
Invisible Tides, _Seymour_ 473
Ions, Electrons, and Ionising Radiations, _Crowther_ 618
Ireland a Nation, _Lynd_ 353
Irish Impressions, _Chesterton_ 222
Italian Peasants, Among, _Cyriax_ 478
Jacopone Da Todi, _Underhill_ 346
Jeremy, _Walpole_ 84
Jesus Chapel, Cambridge, The Stones and Story of, _Morgan_ 743
Jonson, Ben, _Smith_ 184
Keats' _Endymion_, An Interpretation of, _Notcutt_ 737
Kiel in the _Hercules_, To, _Freeman_ 96
Kossovo, _Rootham_ 730
Kut Prisoner, A, _Bishop_ 606
League of Nations, A Handbook of the, _Butler_ 489
Leagues of Nations, _York_ 615
Legend, _Dane_ 208
Lehmann, The Life of Liza, _Lehmann_ 486
Limbo, _Huxley_ 598
Lincoln, Abraham:
The Practical Mystic, _Grierson_ 218
Lines of Life, _Nevinson_ 729
London Venture, The, _Arlen_ 477
Madeleine, _Mirrlees_ 208
Man: Past and Present, _Keane_, _Quiggin_, and _Haddon_ 747
Manners of My Time, The, _Dempster_ 741
Mansoul or The Riddle of the World, _Doughty_ 593
Mask, The, _Cournos_ 208
Matter, Some Wonders of, _Mercer_ 357
Measures of the Poets, The, _Bayfield_ 601
Middle Life, Thoughts in, _Locker-Lampson_ 481
Miscellany of Poetry, A, _Seymour_ 471
Modern Science and Materialism, _Elliot_ 493
My Kingdom for a Horse! _Allison_ 96
Napoleon, _Trench_ 83
National Finance, A Primer of, _Higgs_ 101
Nationalisation of the Mines, _Hodges_ 744
Nevill, The Life and Letters of Lady Dorothy, _Nevill_ 219
New Decameron, The, _Various Authors_ 88
New Outlook, The, _Cecil_ 615
New Poems, _Williams_ 205
Night and Day, _Woolf_ 337
October and Other Poems, _Bridges_ 708
Over and Above, _Gurdon_ 88
Oxford Scholar, An: Ingram Bywater, 1840-1914, _Jackson_ 349
Pagan and Christian Creeds, _Carpenter_ 747
Paravane Adventure, The, CORNFORD 487
Paths of Glory, The 732
Peace in the Making, The, _Harris_ 615
Pedlar and Other Poems, The, _Manning-Sanders_ 729
Peel, Recollections of Lady Georgiana, _Peel_ 611
Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, _Frankau_ 598
Phillpotts, One Hundred Pictures from Eden, _Brewitt_ 740
Physicists, Ten British, _Macfarlane_ 103
Pilgrim in Palestine, A, _Finley_ 479
Playwright, Problems of the, _Hamilton_ 758
Poems, Collected, _Hardy_ 333
Poems, 1916-1918, _Brett Young_ 332
Poems, Selected, _Sackville_ 596
Poetical Works, Excluding the Eight Dramas, _Bridges_ 708
Poland and the Poles, _Boswell_ 223
Poor Relations, _Mackenzie_ 84
Power of a Lie, The, _Bojer_ 337
Prelude, _Nichols_ 598
Race and Nationality, _Oakesmith_ 99
Realities of Modern Science, The, _Mills_ 357
Reconstructors and Reconstruction, _Oxon_ 100
Records, _Fisher_ 607
Responsibilities of the League, The, _Percy_ 489
Revolt of Youth, The, _Hobson_ 88
Reynard the Fox, _Masefield_ 78
Richard Kurt, _Hudson_ 84
Riddle of the Ruthvens, The, _Roughead_ 347
Roast Beef, Medium, _Ferber_ 733
R. L. S., A Book of, _Brown_ 216
Romantic Roussillon, The, _Savory_ 345
Rousseau and Romanticism, _Babbitt_ 604
Russia in Rule and Misrule, _Ballard_ 615
Sacred and Profane Love, _Bennett_ 244
Saint's Progress, _Galsworthy_ 208
Science and Life, _Soddy_ 750
Seals and Documents, _Poole_ 742
Second Country, My, _Dell_ 614
September, _Swinnerton_ 84
Seven Men, _Beerbohm_ 212
Seventeenth-Century English Verse, _Massingham_ 470
Seventeenth-Century Life in the Country Parish, _Trotter_ 351
Shakespeare, Contemporaries of, _Swinburne_ 92
Shakespeare's Versification, A Study of, _Bayfield_ 601
Side Shows, In the, _Benn_ 353
Sir Limpidus, _Pickthall_ 337
Skilled Labourer, The, _Hammond_ 352
Skylark and Swallow, _Gales_ 729
Smith, William: Potter and Farmer, _Bourne_ 744
Social Theory, _Cole_ 745
Soldier Poets, Some, _Sturge Moore_ 215
Soldier to His Son, Any, _Willis_ 83
Sorley, The Letters of Charles 343
South Sea Foam, _Safroni-Middleton_ 214
Springtime and Other Essays, _Darwin_ 605
Station Platform and Other Poems, The, _Mackenzie_ 83
Story of Purton, The, _Richardson_ 741
Submarines and Sea-Power, _Domville-Fife_ 487
Superhuman Antagonists, The, _Watson_ 79
Supreme Adventure, The, _Macandrew_ 101
Sussex in Bygone Days, _Blaker_ 478
Tank Corps, The, _Williams-Ellis_ 217
Tender Conscience, The, _Lynch_ 84
Thomson of Duddingston, The Life of John, _Napier_ 247
Time and Eternity, _Cannan_ 84
Tolstoy, _Noyes_ 737
Trade Unionism, The History of, _Webb_ 612
Turks in Europe, The, _Allen_ 484
Twenty-fifth Division in France and Flanders, The,
_Kincaid-Smith_ 486
Ulster and Ireland, _Good_ 100
Unhappy Far-Off Things, _Dunsany_ 345
Unmarried, The Great, _Gallichan_ 99
Valmouth, _Firbank_ 473
Vector Algebra, Projective, _Silberstein_ 230
Verse, _Kipling_ 333
Verse-Craft, Lessons in, _Ford_ 601
Verses, _Meynell_ 596
Victorian Recollections, _Bridges_ 485
Village Libraries, _Sayle_ 738
Walpole, Letters of Horace 52
War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, The 206
War Poetry, A Treasury of, _Clarke_ 336
Wheels, 1919 334
Worms and Epitaphs, _Garrod_ 594
Young Physician, The, Brett _Young_ 84
THE LONDON
MERCURY
Vol. I No. 1 November 1919
EDITORIAL NOTES
With these notes we introduce the first number of the LONDON MERCURY.
It might, beyond denial, appear in more tranquil and comfortable days.
We have just been through a crisis which has brought us within sight
of the basic realities of life--food, clothing, housing, security
against violence. As soon as the paper was projected we were forced
to visualise the likelihood of a time in which paper would be almost
unprocurable, printing impossible (save in an amateur way at home),
and the distribution of literature a matter of passing sheets from
hand to hand. We have had a glimpse into the abyss of disorganisation,
and, for the time being at all events, we have managed to keep on the
solid ground. But, having conceived this journal, its conductors would
have been reluctant to abandon their plans whatever confusion might
have supervened. They may fairly claim to have formulated a scheme
which, when it is perfectly executed, will meet all the demands of the
public which reads old or new books, and of that other and smaller
public which is chiefly concerned with the production of new works
of the imagination. The more intense the troubles of society, the
more uncertain and dark the future, the more obvious is the necessity
for periodicals which hand on the torch of culture and creative
activity. Literature is of the spirit; and by the spirit man lives. Our
traditions are never more jealously to be cherished than when they are
threatened; and our literature is the repository of all our traditions.
* * * * *
We think that, with our list of contents before us, we may reasonably
say that there has never been in this country a paper with the scope
of the LONDON MERCURY. We have had periodicals which have exercised a
great critical influence, such as the _Edinburgh Review_ of Jeffrey's
and Macaulay's day. We have had periodicals which have published
an unusual amount of fine "creative work," such as Thackeray's
_Cornhill_. We have at this day the _Times Literary Supplement_, which
reviews, with the utmost possible approximation to completeness, the
literary "output" of the time; we have weekly papers which review the
principal books and publish original verse and prose, and monthly
papers which diversify their tables of contents with articles on
Molière or Chateaubriand, Byron or Mr. Alfred Noyes. But we have had
no paper which has combined as the LONDON MERCURY will do all those
various kinds of matter which are required by the lover of books and
the practising writer. In our pages will be found original verse
and prose in a volume not possible to the weekly paper; full-length
literary essays such as have been found only in the politico-literary
monthlies; a critical survey of books of all kinds recently published;
and other "features," analogues to some of which may be found, one by
one, here and there, but which have never before been brought together
within a single cover. The LONDON MERCURY--save in so far as it will
publish reasoned criticisms of political (as of other) books--will
avoid politics. It will concern itself with none of those issues which
are the field of political controversy, save only such--the teaching
of English, the fostering of the arts, the preservation of ancient
monuments are examples--as impinge directly upon the main sphere of its
interests. But within the field that it has chosen it will endeavour
to be as exhaustive as is humanly possible. The present number is an
earnest of its intentions; in early future numbers other sections will
be added which will steadily bring it nearer to the ideal that it has
set out to reach.
* * * * *
That ideal comprehends the satisfaction of the current needs of all
those who are intelligently interested in literature, in the drama,
in the arts, and in music. We shall attempt to make known the best
that is being done and, so far as literature is concerned, to assist
the process by the publication of original work. But thus far we have
mentioned no more than the LONDON MERCURY'S functions as what may be
called a "news" paper, an organ for the recording and dissemination
of things that have already happened or been done. Its functions, as
its conductors conceive them, will include--and this will be the chief
of them--the examination of those conditions which in the past have
favoured, and in the future are likely to favour, the production of
artistic work of the first order, and the formulation and application
of sound critical standards.
* * * * *
It is not a matter of attempting to make universal the shibboleths
of some coterie or school, or of carrying some technical "stunt"
through the country as though it were a fiery cross. We do not propose
to maintain (to give concrete examples) that literature _should_
be didactic or that it _should_ be a-moral. We are not interested
in urging that the couplet is exhausted, that the sonnet should be
revived, that plays should have four or three acts, that rhyme is
essential or that it is outworn, that lines should or should not be
of regular lengths. We are tied to no system of harmony; we have no
dogmas as to the dominance of representation in painting; we would
make no hard-and-fast rule about the desirability of drawing a vertical
wall as sloping at 45 degrees or of painting a man's face magenta
and sage-green. As convenient descriptions we do not object (save
sometimes on grounds of euphony) to the terms Futurist, Vorticist,
Expressionist, post-Impressionist, Cubist, Unanimist, Imagist: but we
suspect them as banners and battle-cries, for where they are used as
such it is probable that fundamentals are being forgotten. Our aim
will be, as critics, to state and to reiterate what are the motives,
and what must be the dominant elements, of all good art, whatever the
medium and whatever the idiosyncrasies of the artist, even if he find
it convenient to draw on papier-mâché with a red-hot poker, and even
if his natural genius impels him to write in lines of one syllable.
The profoundest truths about art, whether literary or pictorial, are
crystallised in maxims which may have been more often reiterated than
understood, but which have undeniably been so often repeated that
people now find them tiresome. Of such are "fundamental brainwork,"
"emotion recollected in tranquillity," "the rhythmical creation of
beauty," and "the eye on the object." Each of these embodies truths,
and there is indisputable truth also in the statements that a poet
should have an ear and that a painter should paint what he sees. These
things are platitudes; but a thing does not cease to be true merely
because it is trite, and it is disastrous to throw over the obvious
merely because it was obvious to one's grandfather. Yet men--and even
women--do such things. We have had in the last few years art, so
called, which sprang from every sort of impulse but the right one,
and was governed by every sort of conceptions but the right ones. We
have had "styles" which were mere protests and revulsions against
other styles; "styles" which were no more than flamboyant attempts
at advertisement akin to the shifting lights of the electric night
signs; authors who have forgotten their true selves in the desperate
search for remarkable selves; artists who have refused to keep their
eyes upon the object because it has been seen before; musicians who
have made, for novelty's sake, noises, and painters who have made, for
effect's sake, spectacles, which invited the attention of those who
make it their business to suppress public nuisances. We have had also
theories in vogue the effects of which on mind and heart were such, and
were foredoomed to be such, as to wither many talents in the bud. A
single positive trend in English literature we do not ask and it is not
necessarily desirable. We have heard the complaint from critics of the
Gallic school that even in the days of the marvellously fertile English
"Romantic generation" there was no one "movement," no Ten Commandments,
and everybody was at sixes and sevens. That is the national way, and
it probably accounts for our possession of the greatest and most
varied imaginative literature that exists. Nevertheless, anarchy is
not desirable, nor that worthy frame of mind which extends toleration
not merely to the good of all kinds, but to the good and the bad, the
intelligent and the foolish indifferently. And surely this toleration
has been too commonly in evidence in this country in our time.
Is the contention disputed? Is the fact other than self-evident? Is
it necessary to explain and to accentuate the confusion which for the
last ten years has been evident in the creative and in the critical
literature of this country? There have been, as there always are,
writers who have cheerfully continued writing as their predecessors
have written, serious parodists of Milton, of Tennyson, and of George
Eliot. These least of all can be said to be in the tradition of English
letters; for that tradition has been a tradition of constant experiment
and renovation. There has been a central body of writers--from
Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bridges, and Mr. Conrad to the best of the younger
poets--who have gone steadily along the sound path, traditional yet
experimental, personal yet sane. But there has been also a large
number of young writers who have strayed and lost themselves amongst
experiments, many of them foredoomed to sterility. Young men, ignoring
the fundamental truth expressed in the maxim, "Look in thy heart
and write," have attempted to make up poems (and pictures) "out of
their heads." Others, defying the obvious postulate that all good
writing will carry at least a superficial meaning to the intelligent
reader, have invited us to admire strings of disconnected words and
images, meaningless and even verbless. Others, turning their backs
on those natural affections and primary interests the repudiation of
which means, and must always mean, the death of the highest forms of
literature, have concentrated upon the subversion of every belief by
which man lives. They have sapped at the bases of every loyalty, and
sneered at every code, oblivious to both social welfare and social
experience. They have been, such of them as profess the moralistic
preoccupation, very contemptuous of "clean living and no thinking,"
but the dirty living and muddled thinking that they have offered as
a substitute have been no great improvement. They have been, such of
them as have the preoccupation of the artist, so anxious to look at
the abnormal and the recondite that they have forgotten what are and
must be the main elements of man's life and what the most conspicuous
features in man's landscape. We have had an orgy of undirected
abnormality. The old object of art was "what oft was said but ne'er so
well expressed"; the object of many of the new artists has been what
was never said before and could not possibly be expressed worse. The
tricks of abnormality have been learnt. Young simpletons who, twenty
years ago, would have been writing vapid magazine verses about moonrise
and roses have discovered that they have only to become incoherent,
incomprehensible, and unmetrical to be taken seriously. Bad writers
will, without intellectual or æsthetic impulse, pretend to burrow into
psychological (or physical) obscurities which are no more beyond the
artist's purview than anything else, provided he responds to them,
but which have the advantage for an insincere writer that they enable
him to talk nonsense that honest unsophisticated readers are unable
to diagnose as nonsense. Year after year we have new fungoid growths
of feeble pretentious impostors who, after a while, are superseded by
their younger kindred; and year by year we see writers who actually
have some intelligence and capacity for observation and exact statement
led astray into the stony and barren fields of technical anarchism
or the pitiful madhouse of moral antinomianism. At bottom vanity and
pretence are the worst of vices in a young writer, but they may be
encouraged or discouraged, even these; and we have seen times and
places in which black was called white.
* * * * *
Amid this luxuriant confusion the voices of critics at once sane and
informed have been few. For the most part our older critics have tended
to treat the younger generation as a howling menagerie of insensate
young beasts, and have failed to keep sufficiently closely in touch
with production to discriminate between the traditional and the
anarchistic, the sincere and the pretentious, the intelligent and the
stupid, the healthy and the vicious, the promising and the sterile.
We have ourselves been frequently amused and irritated at finding
elderly men of letters alarmed at the "revolutionism of the young," as
manifested in Mr. A. or Mr. B., or asking, bewildered, "why the young
take Miss C. so seriously," when as a fact A. and B. are merely rowdies
of whose foolish books even the young buy only fifty or sixty copies,
and the fair C. is a person taken seriously by no serious person of
her own generation. Those critics, again, who are constantly in touch
with the fruits of the printing press have for the most part got into
a state of puzzlement in which they are not merely afraid to make
mistakes (lest what looks like a frog may turn out to be an angel), but
in which they have almost lost the habit of using their senses for the
purpose for which they were meant to be used. Everything is treated
with respect. Platitudinous rubbish--so welcome perhaps because it
is so easily understood--is treated as though Wordsworth had written
it; hectic gibberish of the silliest kind is honoured, at worst, with
the sort of deferential reprimand that is applicable to great genius
when great genius shows a slight tendency to kick over the traces.
Even those of our reviews which do not ignore the best contemporary
work more often than not allocate just as much space to the humbug
and the _faux bon_. "The public, though dull, has not quite such a
skull," as Swinburne's limerick put it. Many bad authors are much
talked about but very little read, and critics who never write a line
are frequently sound when most of the professionals have gone clean
off the rails. Moreover, it is arguable--though we should not, without
long consideration, accept the argument--that no amount of misleading
criticism or bad example will ruin a man of strong natural genius,
which implies perceptions which will not be denied, and a well-defined
positive character. Nevertheless, even if we do not exaggerate the ill
effects of haphazard and timid or haphazard and reckless criticism,
it is surely obvious that both artists and their publics must gain if
some of the rubbish can be cleared away. The ship moves in spite of
all the barnacles, and it does not lose direction, but its progress
might be less troublesome. We have often met persons who have
distrusted all reviews because they have bought books on the strength
of extravagant reviews and been once bit. We have often met people,
too, who have procured what somebody (undeniably "intellectual") has
told them to be the latest and most vigorous and representative work of
imaginative literature, and, finding it distasteful, have come to the
conclusion that the "poets of the day" or the "novelists of to-morrow"
are not for them: turning back, then, to their Dickens or Browning
or Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the mood of that ghastly pessimist
who said that whenever a new book came out he read an old one. These
readers are typical of many, and the result of their existence is that
the dissemination of the best contemporary literature is (1) less
wide than it might be and (2) less rapid than it might be. There is,
as a rule--in the economists' term--far too great a "time-lag" in the
making of the best reputations. A man often writes for years before he
is heard of by the mass of the cultivated readers who are naturally
predisposed to like his work, and do like it when at last they meet
it. In a nation so large, and with so immense a volume of literary
production, such numerous and diverse news-sheets, and such congested
and ill-arranged bookshops, this phenomenon is bound to exist in some
degree. But it may be minimised, and although we of the LONDON MERCURY
cannot hope, and do not desire, to be judged by our aspirations rather
than by our performances, we may at least be permitted to say that we
shall do our utmost to contribute towards that end.
* * * * *
Even to disclaim an ambition for an infallible pontificate of letters
must savour of impertinence. We can only say that what our journal can
do in the way of affirming and applying principles of criticism, and
giving a conspectus of the best contemporary work, we shall attempt to
do. Our other functions we have already outlined, and a beginning is
made in this number. We have made no endeavour to arrange a dazzling
shop-window of names or "features" for our first number; whatever may
be our readers' views concerning this number we can at least assure
them that the contributors to subsequent numbers will be not less
representative than those here found, and that only a beginning has yet
been made towards the complete scheme that we have in view.
_Going and Staying_
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.
Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.
THOMAS HARDY
_It's Not Going to Happen Again_
I have known the most dear that is granted us here,
More supreme than the gods know above,
Like a star I was hurled through the sweet of the world,
And the height and the light of it, Love.
I have risen to the uttermost Heaven of Joy,
I have sunk to the sheer Hell of Pain--
But--it's not going to happen again, my boy,
It's not going to happen again.
It's the very first word that poor Juliet heard
From her Romeo over the Styx;
And the Roman will tell Cleopatra in hell
When she starts her immortal old tricks;
What Paris was tellin' for good-bye to Helen
When he bundled her into the train--
Oh, it's not going to happen again, old girl,
It's not going to happen again.
RUPERT BROOKE
Château Lake Louise, Canada, 1913.
_The Search for the Nightingale_
(_To S. S._)
1
Beside a stony, shallow stream I sat
In a deep gully underneath a hill.
I watched the water trickle down dark moss
And shake the tiny boughs of maidenhair,
And billow on the bodies of cold stone.
And sculptured clear
Upon the shoulder of that aerial peak
Stood trees, the fragile skeletons of light,
High in a bubble blown
Of visionary stone.
2
Under that azurine transparent arch
The hill, the rocks, the trees
Were still and dreamless as the printed wood
Black on the snowy page.
It was the song of some diviner bird
Than this still country knew,
The words were twigs of burnt and blackened trees
From which there trilled a voice,
Shadowy and faint, as though it were the song
The water carolled as it flowed along.
3
Lifting my head, I gazed upon the world,
Carved in the breathless heat as in a gem,
And watched the parroquets green-feathered fly
Through crystal vacancy, and perch in trees
That glittered in a thin, blue, haze-like dream,
And the voice faded, though the water dinned
Against the stones its dimming memory.
And I ached then
To hear that song burst out upon that scene,
Startling an earth where it had never been.
4
And then I came unto an older world.
The woods were damp, the sun
Shone in a watery mist, and soon was gone;
The trees were thick with leaves, heavy and old,
The sky was grey, and blue, and like the sea
Rolling with mists and shadowy veils of foam.
I heard the roaring of an ancient wind
Among the elms and in the tattered pines;
Lighting pale hollows in the cloud-dark sky,
A ghostly ship, the Moon, flew scudding by.
5
"O is it here," I cried, "that bird that sings
So that the traveller in his frenzy weeps?"
It was the autumn of the year, and leaves
Fell with a dizzying moan, and all the trees
Roared like the sea at my small impotent voice.
And if that bird was there it did not sing,
And I knew not its haunts, or where it went,
But carven stood and raved!
In that old wood that dripped upon my face
Upturned below, pale in its passionate chase.
6
And years went by, and I grew slowly cold:
I had forgotten what I once had sought.
There are no passions that do not grow dim,
And like a fire imagination sinks
Into the ashes of the mind's cold grate.
And if I dreamed, I dreamed of that far land,
That coast of pearl upon a summer sea,
Whose frail trees in unruffled amber sleep,
Gaudy with jewelled birds, whose feathers spray
Bright founts of colour through the tranquil day.
7
The hill, the gully, and the stony stream
I had not thought on when this spring I sat
In a strange room with candles guttering down
Into the flickering silence. From the Moon
Among the trees still-wreathed upon the sky
There came the sudden twittering of a ghost.
And I stept out from darkness, and I saw
The great pale sky immense, transparent, filled
With boughs and mountains and wide-shining lakes
Where stillness, crying in a thin voice, breaks.
8
It was the voice of that imagined bird.
I saw the gully and that ancient hill,
The water trickling down from Paradise
Shaking the tiny boughs of maidenhair.
There sat the dreaming boy.
And O! I wept to see that scene again,
To read the black print on that snowy page,
I wept, and all was still.
No shadow came into that sun-steeped glen,
No sound of earth, no voice of living men.
9
Was it a dream or was it that in me
A God awoke and gazing on his dream
Saw that dream rise and gaze into its soul,
Finding, Narcissus-like, its image there:
A Song, a transitory Shape on water blown,
Descending down the bright cascades of time,
The shadowiest-flowering, ripple-woven bloom
As ghostly as still waters' unseen foam
That lies upon the air, as that song lay
Within my heart on one far summer day?
10
Carved in the azure air white peacocks fly,
Their fanning wings stir not the crystal trees,
Bright parrots fade through dimming turquoise days,
And music scrolls its lightning calm and bright
On the pale sky where thunder cannot come.
Into that world no ship has ever sailed,
No seaman gazing with hand-shaded eyes
Has ever seen its shore whiten the waves.
But to that land the Nightingale has flown,
Leaving bright treasure on this calm air blown.
W. J. TURNER
_Early Chronology_
Slowly the daylight left our listening faces.
* * * * *
Professor Brown with level baritone
Discoursed into the dusk.
Five thousand years
He guided us through scientific spaces
Of excavated History; till the lone
Roads of research grew blurred; and in our ears
Time was the rumoured tongues of vanished races,
And Thought a chartless Age of Ice and Stone.
* * * * *
The story ended. Then the darkened air
Flowered as he lit his pipe; an aureole glowed
Enwreathed with smoke; the moment's match-light showed
His rosy face, broad brow, and smooth grey hair,
Backed by the crowded book-shelves.
In his wake
An archæologist began to make
Assumptions about aqueducts (he quoted
Professor Sandstorm's book); and soon they floated
Through desiccated forests; mangled myths;
And argued easily round megaliths.
* * * * *
Beyond the college garden something glinted;
A copper moon climbed clear above the trees.
Some Lydian coin?... Professor Brown agrees
That copper coins _were_ in that culture minted;
But, as her whitening way aloft she took,
I thought she had a pre-dynastic look.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
_The Rock Pool_
(_To Miss Alice Warrender_)
This is the sea. In these uneven walls
A wave lies prisoned. Far and far away,
Outward to ocean as the slow tide falls,
Her sisters, through the capes that hold the bay,
Dancing in lovely liberty recede.
Yet lovely in captivity she lies,
Filled with soft colours, where the waving weed
Moves gently and discloses to our eyes
Blurred shining veins of rock and lucent shells
Under the light-shot water; and here repose
Small quiet fish and the dimly glowing bells
Of sleeping sea-anemones that close
Their tender fronds and will not now awake
Till on these rocks the waves returning break.
EDWARD SHANKS
_The Evening Sky in March_
Rose-bosom'd and rose-limb'd,
With eyes of dazzling bright,
Shakes Venus mid the twined boughs of the night;
Rose-limb'd, soft-stepping
From low bough to bough,
Shaking the wide-hung starry fruitage--dimmed
Its bloom of snow
By that sole planetary glow.
Venus, avers the astronomer
Not thus idly dancing goes
Flushing the eternal orchard with wild rose.
She through ether burns
Outpacing planetary earth,
And ere two years triumphantly returns
And again wave-like swelling flows;
And again her flashing apparition comes and goes.
This we have not seen,
No heavenly courses set,
No flight unpausing through a void serene:
But when eve clears,
Arises Venus as she first uprose
Stepping the shaken boughs among,
And in her bosom glows
The warm light hidden in sunny snows.
She shakes the clustered stars
Lightly, as she goes
Amid the unseen branches of the night,
Rose-limb'd, rose-bosom'd bright.
She leaps: they shake and pale; she glows--
And who but knows
How the rejoiced heart aches
When Venus all his starry vision shakes:
When through his mind
Tossing with random airs of an unearthly wind,
Rose-bosom'd, rose-limb'd,
The mistress of his starry vision arises,
And the boughs glittering sway
And the stars pale away,
And the enlarging heaven glows
As Venus light-foot mid the twined branches goes.
JOHN FREEMAN
_Love's Caution_
Tell them, when you are home again,
How warm the air was now;
How silent were the birds and leaves,
And of the moon's full glow;
And how we saw afar
A falling star:
It was a tear of pure delight
Ran down the face of Heaven this happy night.
Our kisses are but love in flower,
Until that greater time
When, gathering strength, those flowers take wing,
And Love can reach his prime.
And now, my heart's delight,
Good night, good night;
Give me the last sweet kiss--
But do not breathe at home one word of this!
W. H. DAVIES
_The House That Was_
Of the old house, only a few crumbled
Courses of brick, smothered in nettle and dock,
Or a squared stone, lying mossy where it tumbled!
Sprawling bramble and saucy thistle mock
What once was firelit floor and private charm
Where, seen in a windowed picture, hills were fading
At dusk, and all was memory-coloured and warm,
And voices talked, secure from the wind's invading.
Of the old garden, only a stray shining
Of daffodil flames amid April's cuckoo-flowers,
Or a cluster of aconite mixt with weeds entwining!
But, dark and lofty, a royal cedar towers
By homely thorns: whether the white rain drifts
Or sun scorches, he holds the downs in ken,
The western vale; his branchy tiers he lifts,
Older than many a generation of men.
LAURENCE BINYON
_Suppose ..._
Suppose ... and suppose that a wild little Horse of Magic
Came cantering out of the sky,
With bridle of silver, and into the saddle I mounted
To fly--and to fly;
And we stretched up into the air, fleeting on in the sunshine,
A speck in the gleam
On galloping hoofs, his mane in the wind out-flowing,
In a shadowy stream;
And, oh, when, all lone, the gentle star of evening
Came crinkling into the blue,
A magical castle we saw in the air, like a cloud of moonlight,
As onward we flew;
And across the green moat on the drawbridge we foamed and we
snorted;
And there was a beautiful Queen
Who smiled at me strangely, and spoke to my wild little Horse,
too--
A lovely and beautiful Queen;
Suppose with delight she cried to her delicate maidens:
"Behold my daughter--my dear!"
And they crowned me with flowers, and then to their harps sate
playing,
Solemn and clear;
And magical cakes and goblets were spread on the table;
And at window the birds came in;
Hopping along with bright eyes, pecking crumbs from the platters,
And sipped of the wine;
And splashing up--up to the roof tossed fountains of crystal;
And Princes in scarlet and green
Shot with their bows and arrows, and kneeled with their dishes
Of fruits for the Queen;
And we walked in a magical garden, with rivers and bowers,
And my bed was of ivory and gold;
And the Queen breathed soft in my ear a song of enchantment--
And I never grew old....
And I never, never came back to the earth, oh, never and never;
How mother would cry and cry!
There'd be snow on the fields then, and all these sweet flowers in
the winter
Would wither and die....
Suppose ... and suppose....
WALTER DE LA MARE
THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX
By ROBERT NICHOLS
I.
Long, long ago there dwelt in the pleasant City-of-Towers a young
princess of immense riches and of such exceeding beauty that none
other could be compared to her. So famous, indeed, became the riches
of her beauty and her possessions, that were only less than her
beauty, that she was sought in marriage by every kind of personage. In
three moons the train of her suitors, or mounted upon gold-stencilled
elephants, tassel-fringed camels, palfries of Arabia, ponies of
Astrakhan, mules of Nubia, or faring but upon the Sandals-of-Nature
along the Road-of-Advantage, became so huge that the citizens of the
City-of-Towers being eaten (albeit at no small price) out of hearth
and home, petitioned the princely father of the damsel to mitigate,
in whatever sort he should think fit, the good fortune of their
city, which, possessing such a treasure as the princess Sa-adeh,
the Bestower-of-Felicity, admitted to finding its pleasure rather
in reflecting upon the value of their jewel than in entertaining
those who came to steal it. The ever-benevolent Prince accordingly
issued a decree that no suitor was to approach the Princess save
on the understanding that if he failed to win her affections his
head should pay the forfeit. Forthwith ensued so remarkable a
diminution in the number of her suitors that, in a short while, only
those whom the Light-of-Love's-Eyes had guided or those whom the
Three-thonged-Scourge-of-Need had driven remained mounted or standing
before the palace gates. Nor did these linger overlong, for the heart
of the Princess was less easily softened than that of the Executioner,
who with one sweep of the scimitar relieved the Lover of the
Burden-of-Love or severed the Needy from the Vessel-of-Need. Then the
beautiful Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity, not unfatigued by such a
succession of maidenly preoccupations, determined that for a little she
would forget the Bonds-of-Necessity and atone somewhat to the citizens
of the City-of-Towers for the inconveniences she had brought them. To
this end she caused a special litter of cedar wood to be constructed,
and, mounting therein, sallied forth to bestow upon the citizens of the
City-of-Towers the hitherto-unseen and almost-unendurable beauty of her
face.
Now it happened that in this city there was then dwelling a young
scribe by name Es-siddeeh, that is the Very Veracious. This youth, the
height of whose beauty was almost as remarkable as the depth of his
wisdom, had spent the greater number of his days in study; so much so,
in fact, that he had never cast his eyes upon a woman to love her, and
this in spite of the possession of an enchanting smile, Nature's gift
to him, of the power of which he was hardly conscious. Surrounded by
parchments, having hung about his neck many little scrolls, with his
tablet laid across his knees, daily he sat in his window and, while
the traffic flowed by and the crowd shrilled more loudly than a flock
of parokeets, raised not his eyes from his papyrus nor regarded any
sound but the squeaking of his stylus-reed.
Thus, then, was he sitting when the troating of horns and the
bombilation of gongs proclaimed the nearing of the Princess in her
progress. But Es-siddeeh paid this din no attention and, though
the fantastic shadows of many majestically-apparelled persons fell
across his page, lifted not the Gatherers-of-Knowledge from the
Leaves-of-Enlightenment. Meanwhile Sa-adeh, lying in her litter,
enjoyed a certain satisfaction in the pleasurable recognition the
gracious bestowal of the sight of her countenance procured the
citizens. This satisfaction she told herself, as the procession
advanced, was increased rather than diminished by the spectacle of
certain bleared scribes, who, with ears already attached by cobwebs to
the lintels of their doors, never lifted eyes as she passed. "For," she
reflected, "such insensibility affords me a scale by which to gauge the
pleasure I bestow elsewhere."
At this moment she arrived opposite Es-siddeeh's window.
Then the young scribe, feeling the gaze of another fixed upon him,
looked up. And the eyes of Es-siddeeh exchanged thoughts with the eyes
of Sa-adeh. When he bent to the tablet again, behold the words were to
him but foolishness. All the afternoon he sat there wondering why he
had spent his youth upon such things as now appeared to him the very
vanity of vanities, colourless and the occupation of the myopic. At
evenfall, driven abroad by a terrible restlessness, he wandered outside
the walls of the city, but the murmuring of the breeze through the
groves did but increase his distraction. Toward midnight he returned
and, after spending the remainder of the night without sleep, informed
his parents of his intention to turn suitor. Greatly perturbed, they
besought him to relinquish so hopeless a project. In vain! at the
third hour he proceeded to the palace. The gates were shut. When they
did at last open he found himself face to face with the Executioner.
Involuntarily he recoiled.
"No alms will be given to-day," said the Reliever-of-Headaches.
"I have not come for alms. I wish to see the porter."
"I am the porter."
"I thought you were----"
"So I was. But now that job is at an end. The capacity to love as
our forefathers loved is passing away. Even a spirit of commercial
enterprise is lacking. The world goes from bad to worse. Yesterday I
cut off the heads of princes; to-day I open the door to mendicants. On
no one is Fortune harder than I."
"I find that last reflection," returned the scribe, "so general that
I grow convinced it must be true. But be of good cheer. Strange as it
may seem, I am the bearer of good tidings. There is every likelihood
of your shortly resuming your distinguished office--I have come as a
suitor to the Princess."
"Have you, indeed? Ha, ha, ha! The coin is as good as earned....
However ... excuse my entertainment. I should not laugh; for
understand my heart goes out to you in your public-spirited endeavour
not to permit my office to lapse. Ah, if there were only more men of
your kidney, and yet ... I regret to have to add that you will not
profit me much. For make no mistake, I am a Republican; I believe that
handsome is as handsome does. It is therefore my custom to request a
little honorarium, in ratio to the means of my customer, in return for
the service I render him. For this is a service which is unique, in
that he probably has no servant in his suite trained to perform this
duty for him, and it is besides a service for which the requirement of
one small fee cannot be described as extortionate since the duty is
one which being once satisfactorily performed does not require to be
repeated."
"But I have not yet incurred the penalty."
"You will. Be reassured and, having no troublesome misgivings on this
count, hand me that which in a few hours it will be too late for me to
ask."
Es-siddeeh smiled. "Are you not paid by the Court?" he asked.
"I am," replied the other, softening, "and a beggarly wage it is, too,
which compels me to make these requisitions. However, since you seem,
for all your queer dress, a pleasant fellow, I will reduce my charge."
"Good. I feared I should never be able to pay--my means are so scanty."
"I should inform you that it is as well to pay because, if you do
not, my arm, unstrengthened by the sinews of charity, may not perform
its office with quite that address which is at once a delight to the
spectators and a matter of self-gratification to my customer."
"Your magnanimity," replied the scribe, giving the man a coin, "does
indeed bear witness to the superiority of your mind to its present
situation and deserves a reward. I hope you will see that I am not
disappointed of an interview."
Thereupon the Executioner conducted him into the palace and, leaving
him in an inner apartment, acquainted one of the attendant damsels with
the object of the scribe's visit.
For some time the maid regarded his dress dubiously.
"I should be grateful if you would inform the Princess of my arrival,
for I cannot say that I find the sound of the Executioner in the
courtyard below sharpening his scimitar on a wheel affords me as much
pleasure as by his expression it affords him."
She vanished through the curtains, and the following conversation was
borne to Es-siddeeh's ears:
"A young man calling himself the Very Veracious has arrived and sues
for an interview on the same subject as his forerunners."
"I cannot see him." The maid returned.
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that she is as beautiful as one red rose
in a garden of lilies."
"The compliment," he heard the Princess remark, "is a new one and is
graceful. Nevertheless dismiss him."
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that her wisdom has the wings of the
rukh, the eye of the falcon, the talons of the osprey, and the voice of
the dove."
"It is very remarkable," he heard the Princess remark, "that he should
so accurately describe my characteristics. He must be a diviner; since,
as far as I know, he has never seen me nor spoken to me. Nevertheless
dismiss him."
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh--but he could not think of anything to
tell her and was sadly cast down. For his love, continuing to pain
him, tortured him as a sweet fire in his bosom. At length, bethinking
himself of his wisdom, he said in as brusque a tone as he could summon,
"Tell her that I know the answer to all secrets and that she will
regret it if she dismiss me."
"How now?" cried the Princess, "is he so clever, and has such courage?
He will indeed be the Very Veracious if, possessing these answers,
he depart immediately, for then my womanish regret will indeed be
sharp; since of all humours, he has had the wit to see, this humour of
curiosity is the one most deeply implanted in us. Of what complexion is
he?"
"He is of spare build; his hair is black and glossy as that of a black
panther; in his eyes there is a dark fire. His clothes are by no means
new, his fingers are stained with ink, and about his neck there is a
necklace of little scrolls."
"A necklace of little scrolls, did you say? Send him in."
Then Es-siddeeh stepped into her presence, and it was to him as if he
were a little planet drawn for the first time into the orbit of the sun.
She commanded him to be seated and plied him with various questions
concerning the value as an amulet of this or that precious stone,
of the pedigree of famous horses, music as Emotional Sound or as an
Architecture, and many other matters of a similar nature.
All these questions he answered not only discreetly, but with wit.
For some time she rested her eyes upon his face in a musing fashion.
Then, with a strange inflection, she asked, "What is love?"
"I have but just beheld the cause," he returned; "give me a little
space and I infer its properties as a consequence. At present I am
troubled to know whether the same vessel can contain both cause and
consequence."
Not without haste, she assured him that she would consider her question
answered, and enquired, "Does it become thee to risk so wise a head at
the bidding of so foolish a heart?"
"It lay not, and does not lie, with me to make it becoming."
This answer did not appear to please her, for, moving her head, she
proceeded with an instant change of tone, "One thing I have ever
desired to know. What is the secret of the smile of the Sphinx?"
He was taken aback.
"What? Canst thou not answer, thou who didst assert that thou hadst in
thy bosom the answer to all secrets, O Very Veracious one?"
Seeing her smiling, he replied, "I have not seen the Sphinx unless I
see her now."
"I perceive that thou canst not answer. Yet because of thy youth and
thy beauty I will spare thee."
"Spare me not, since before thou hast not spared me."
"Upon one condition:--that shouldst thou wish again to see me thou
shalt bring with thee the secret of the Sphinx's smile. And now, before
thou leavest me, because thou wert not as insensible as most scribes
are wont to be, but wast willing to assay to gain some knowledge of
perfection from life as well as from thy scrolls, I will give thee a
token to take with thee."
At these words, as if some beneficent and invisible djinn had escaped
from his bottle, a spirit of strange sweetness seemed to fill the room.
Strength forsook the body of Es-siddeeh.
"Come hither," she murmured.
So Es-siddeeh went to her and bowed down with his face to the floor.
Then the Princess took him very gently in her arms and, raising his
head, placed one hand beneath his locks and the other over his eyes,
and so kissed him.
Now when Es-siddeeh felt the touch of her hands, cool as water lilies
upon him; smelled the delicate smell of her bosom, more mysterious than
any perfume of the mages; tasted her mouth's nectar, more precious than
the combed honey of the blessed in Paradise, then indeed he knew there
to be such a seal coldly pressed upon his heart that the stamp of it
would not be erased all the days of his life.
"Ah, merciless," said he, "thou hast indeed not spared me. Now must I
inevitably return."
"It was for that reason I gave it thee," she said.
II.
He hurried home. He sold all his belongings.
His father, seeing him about to depart, cried, "Thou wilt break thy
mother's heart."
He could not reply.
His mother, watching him set out upon his mule with a slender bag of
coin in his hands, cursed him and the Princess.
He did not look back.
III.
After a journey of three moons he arrived before the Sphinx.
His first impression was that her countenance contained no such
difficult riddle as he had been led to suppose. The body of the Sphinx
was huge, her paws stretched in front formidable, her shoulders heavy.
Her bandeletted head sustained a wedge-fronted tiara. All this he took
in at a glance. Then he turned to the face. He had not expected it to
be so close to the ground and so open to inspection. The forehead he
could see was ample. The eyebrows, albeit contracted in a slight frown,
were high, arched, and wide, which lent the upper part of the face a
frank expression; but the reverie of the eyes, fixed on space, seemed
somewhat dimmed--as if an impalpable hand had interposed itself between
the gazing orbs and the sun. The smoothness and delicate moulding
of the cheeks and chin were remarkable. The nose astonished by the
firm subtlety of its outline, which gave to the face a simultaneous
expression of suavity and undeviating determination. If the nose had
provoked wonder the mouth was yet more amazing. The lips, which might
have been gracious and full when parted, were so closely compressed in
their smile as to modify the whole effect of the other features.
"I must go nearer," said Es-siddeeh.
He established himself almost between the paws of the monster, for
monster she had become to him who now beheld her mien more clearly--a
mien disfigured, yet seeming uncaring for its own disfigurement,
and--greatest horror of all--a mien in which the eyes possessed irises
but seemingly no pupils. For a little he considered returning. Then he
said to himself, "No; to see her afar off gives a false impression. One
should see her as she is, and earnestly scanning the visage wrestle
in thought till one discovers the secret of the smile." In this he
instinctively knew himself to be right.
But he was not long in finding that the more and the closer he stared
the more difficult the problem became. To begin with the blemishes
distracted him overmuch. The main cast of the face appeared, though
subtle, simple and grand enough, but the fissures between the blocks
that composed it, the discolorations, and the crevices that ran from
side to side confused his eye. "If it were only perfect, all would be
much easier to discover," he murmured. Then, too, the expression of the
Sphinx and the import of the smile seemed to vary with the changes of
the weather. On fresh-blowing sunny days the image beamed on him with a
shadow-dappled, bleached cheerfulness of resignation. But when the sun
raged the face, too, raged as with an inward fury; its lineaments shook
in the heat-eddies that arose from the sand, and every grain glowed
like a particle of fire. Nor did its rage abate during the succeeding
night. The rising of the tropic moon gave to its complexion, streaked
with violet shadows, an ashen hue: the pallidity of an unappeasable
and frustrated anger. On lowering days it blackly scowled, and the
swollen nostrils and imperious mouth assumed the similitude of being
endowed only with the bitterest irony, a constancy of cruelty and an
unquestionable scorn. Then he hated it....
At last, perceiving that the secret was not to be gained in a few days
or even in a few moons, he resolved to settle in the desert opposite
the Sphinx.
Three years passed.
Day by day and night by night Es-siddeeh watched the Sphinx. Daily
the sun, shining upon the surface of the mask, seemed to make it more
impenetrable, and nightly the moon, deepening the shadows in the
crevices, increased its mystery. Round about the knoll, which the
pilgrim had selected for his station, the sand gave off a glare more
deadly than the bed of a furnace or, rising in whirlwind-spouts whose
tops spattered ashes upon him, circled his island like monstrous and
infuriate djinns. Toward sunset the clouds, gathered in an awful and
silent grandeur, discharged, with stunning clap and reverberations as
of mountains overthrown, their lightnings, a shower of blue arrows, to
all quarters of the fluttering horizon. Once indeed Es-siddeeh awoke
to behold a body of dense vapour launch itself wrathfully downward
against the head of the brooding Sphinx and wreath it with a crown of
crackling fire. The scribe leaped up, and, despite the pressure of the
blast, succeeded in gaining, not without considerable risk to himself,
a position before the base of the monster. His courage was unrewarded.
Upon that obstinate mien, livid in the tawny light, the rain glistened
as if there had indeed started from the stony pores a ghastly dew; but
the thin lips were as tightly compressed as ever. "Hideous Sphinx!"
exclaimed the youth, "thou cruelty incarnate, cannot even the ire of
the gods subdue thee? Shall I never, from some motion of thy visage,
learn what secret thou hidest?"
As the winter approached the wilderness, utterly denuded of weed or
moss, grew vaster and more bleak. The nights turned frosty. Overhead
the constellations increased in splendour and number until every
quarter of the empyrean shone encrusted with stars. Against these
brilliant galaxies and the diffused, pervasive effulgence of countless
further bodies the forehead of the Sphinx outlined itself in desolate
and stubborn majesty.
Then was it that, alone amid the desert, under the gaze of those myriad
and so distant lights, facing the figure of the Sphinx, now blacker and
more impenetrable than ever, Es-siddeeh reached the climacteric which
is despair. Baffled, without any sensation but an exasperation that
gnawed his very reins and made giddy his temples, he spent his days
and nights in complete dejection. At length, wishing, to terminate his
sufferings once and for all he approached the Sphinx and, vehemently
hammering its breast with his fists, cried in a terrible voice, "_What
is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?_"
But the Sphinx did not answer.
At dawn, impotent before the titan, he perceived upon the surface of
her bosom bloodmarks hitherto unobserved. Other hands beside his own,
then, had knocked upon that stony breast. He returned to his hovel and
stretched himself down in a sleep that was like a stupor. On waking he
determined to climb the bandelettes of the Sphinx and to cast himself
from its forehead. He had scarcely taken a step when, exhausted by
privation and prolonged anguish of mind, he fell, and lying helpless
found himself fronting a face mirrored in a pool, the product of a
shower which had fallen while he slept. The face was the face of one
whose visage was slowly approximating to that of the Sphinx, but it
lacked the smile, and in its eyes there was the light of imminent
insanity. For a space he gazed without realising the apparition to
be but his own reflection. Then--stiffening his arms that he might
raise his head and shoulders, extended, as he was, upon the desert
like a Syrian puma whose bowels are transfixed by an arrow and who is
about to die--he rallied his strength for a last effort. Before him,
a quivering tigress in the meridian sunshine, crouched the colossal
Sphinx. The frustrated eyes of the scribe, nigh starting from their
sockets, bent upon it such a glare as sought to penetrate its very
soul. Yet at the last, heaving himself forward, with nostrils wrinkled
and teeth bared as if in the very coughing frenzy of a fighting death,
he could but ejaculate "Sphinx, now had I entreated thine aid!--hadst
thou not rendered me too proud, who have discovered thee to be but
stone."
Then the Sphinx answered in a voice of thunder:
"O man, aid thyself!"
IV.
A company of Bedawi, journeying across the desert, discovered him lying
senseless. Him they succoured as a madman, and therefore sacred to the
gods.
For a while he rested in a pleasant city, enjoying the support of a
good man, who did not understand the cause of his afflictions, but at
once realised their intensity and the deep importance to Es-siddeeh of
the search on which he was engaged. His health mended at length and
undeterred by the solicitations of his host, troubled to see him in
such haste, he resumed his investigations. This time he did not attempt
to wrestle the secret from the Sphinx herself, but determined to
prosecute his enquiries among the learned.
With this end in view he interrogated the chief scholars of that
district, but, coming to the conclusion that they were too provincial,
he made his way to Jerusalem. Here no answer at all was given him--save
that by the study of the particular law made for a particular tribe
and containing, as he himself was obliged to admit, the most admirable
rules for the preservation of an individual or a clan, he would attain
to a knowledge of all things.
He determined to go to Greece, the fountain-head of knowledge. But in
Athens he fared not much better. The majority of the inhabitants, the
fascination of whose minds he had nevertheless to admit, seemed given
up to the fervour of local politics, money-making, the quarrels of
the law-courts, the consideration of athletics, the technique of the
chase, and the refinement of trivial or voluptuous delights: pursuits
which he told himself could scarcely further true knowledge. There
were, however, a number of persons, given to the study of natural law
as revealed in nature, who enquired whether he had weighed the Sphinx
or examined her molecules beneath the magnifying crystal. He was
compelled to reply that he had done neither of these things. Whereat
they retorted that it was therefore impossible for them to build a
theory as to the constituents of her smile and verify it in experiment.
"Moreover," they continued, "even the data you have given us appear not
only insufficient but contradictory, since you state that the smile
is at once sweet and sour. Direct opposites cannot be reconciled in
science. We think it therefore best to direct you to the school of
metaphysics opposite, where, if we are to judge from the uproar which
occasionally disturbs our precincts, we believe this feat to be daily
accomplished." ... Es-siddeeh accordingly lost no time in entering the
school opposite. After a lengthy session, the clamour of which somewhat
bewildered him, a young man with a high complexion and a shrill voice
approached him and said, "As far as can be ascertained (for there are
the usual number of qualifications and reservations of opinion amongst
us) we are of a mind that the secret of the Sphinx is that she has no
secret--at least no secrets from us."
Es-siddeeh did not stop to enquire further, for it appeared to him
that he could not gain by it and, moreover, he was much fatigued. So,
taking boat, he sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and, turning
north, descried, after an arduous voyage, the extreme Western Isles
enshrouded in a perpetual prismatic fog. On these coasts he landed and,
penetrating inland, in a short while discovered a university situated
on the chief river of the main island. Having struck up an acquaintance
with the courteous master of the chief college, he poured out his tale.
The Disseminator-of-Truth, after prolonged thought, replied, "Without
wishing in any way to influence your conduct, I should, since you seem
to be enamoured of the lady, inform her that the secret is anything you
happen to have in your head at the moment (as well it may be), provided
the matter be of such obscurity that that instinct which is peculiar
to females, and which on the best authority (namely, their own) I am
given to understand is infallible, will instantly assure her that she
understands it even better than you do."
"But you would not have me deceive her?"
"Indeed, no. For recollect--what she believes to be true will _per
contra_ be true to her."
"It seems to me, then, that you are asking her to deceive herself."
"Not at all," answered the Sage somewhat impatiently; "all is, you must
know, relative, and any conclusion is as relative to enquiry as any
other."
"But not to truth!" returned Es-siddeeh with heat.
The great man smiled. "An irritating preoccupation this, when the
search itself is so intriguing."
Es-siddeeh, the Very Veracious, experienced a curious sensation in
which pleasure certainly played a part. "That is perfectly true," he
remarked; "I am finding more interest in the search than I expected.
Nevertheless I wish to return to Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity"
(and at her name he was conscious of an inexplicable spasm of
contrition), "and to present her with my conclusion--the Truth."
"Here I think we part," said the other suddenly. "Farewell."
Then, as he turned away, the elder flung over his shoulder, "For
myself, old-fashioned being that I am, I am inclined to think the truth
is that the secret of the smile of the Sphinx is not one that should be
repeated to a lady."
It was some time before Es-siddeeh recovered from the shock of this
interview. When he had done so, he hastened to leave the country and
to betake himself to the Furthest East. The voyage lasted three years.
But, when he posed his question to the head of a Manchu university,
what was his surprise to be countered with just such a suggestion as
had been put to him in the extreme Isles of the Western Hemisphere!
"But you forget my name," he exclaimed.
"No; for indeed so eager have you been to enquire of me the secret of
the Sphinx and to narrate to me the story of your quest that you have
forgotten to acquaint me with your name."
"I am named Es-siddeeh, which, being translated, is the Very Veracious."
"Then, my middle-aged young man of redoubtable veracity, I advise you
to abandon your quest and to despair at once. It is much quicker. In
such a mood you will discover yourself becoming most pleasantly the
prey of one of the unmarried maidens who abound hereabout and who, I
assure you, are not less beautiful and certainly less exacting than
your friend. For women, according to the sage's experience, are much
the same the whole world over--a morsel of honey in which the bee has
left his sting: without the sting no honey, and no honey no sting."
"Sir," replied the scribe, "I am much indebted to you, but you know
neither Sa-adeh nor the secret of the Sphinx."
"I do not indeed, but I venture to think that to propose to oneself
a question that cannot immediately be answered is not the conduct of
a wise man and may very well give offence to Powers of which we are
becomingly ignorant."
Utterly wearied by the enquiries he had prosecuted among the learned,
Es-siddeeh turned over in his mind the many types he had encountered
in his wanderings and, recollecting the lively intelligence of those
Athenians who were not of the learned professions, he determined
to live after their manner that perchance he might hap upon the
secret. Several years were spent in acquiring sufficient money. The
subsequent spending taught him that his mind was apt to wander from
the problem in the mere enjoyment of the moment. Before, however, he
could make finally sure whether he was any nearer gaining a solution
he found himself ruined. Turned soldier, he took part in many notable
engagements and distinguished himself not a little. The itch of the
excitement of the search was for the time being eclipsed by the perils
and responsibilities of war. There were, too, other distractions, nor
were these invariably the bodiless preoccupations of the mind.... It
was the somewhat unpleasant termination of one of these episodes which
plunged him into reverie upon the past. At midnight, silently rising
from his rose-strewn couch, he determined there and then to bring to
the contemplation of the Sphinx that store of varied knowledge which he
had gathered in the course of his wanderings. Arrayed, then, in a dress
similar to that which he had worn as a youth and encircling his neck
with a necklace of scrolls he set out alone for the desert.
Since the way was long and he no longer young, a year passed ere he
approached his goal.
Then once again Es-siddeeh stood before the Sphinx.
V.
In the moonlight it seemed to him that during his thirty years of
absence the image had grown larger. That his eyes, accustomed to watch
for unexpected perils, played him no tricks he was certain, yet he
now observed the brow of the Sphinx to be wreathed in a faint vapour
as if its crest had attained the altitude of no inconsiderable hill.
The fissures between the stones seemed slightly to have filled, but
the crevices across the face were both more numerous and more deeply
scored. The pits of the eyes, too, had become immensely more cavernous.
And--could he be mistaken?--was not the smile less ambiguous? Surely
he did not remember the visage as so noble, or had it grown nobler in
his absence? How was it that, though the aspect remained as unflinching
as ever, the expression now seemed less hard and more magnanimously
stern? The cheeks had undoubtedly sunk further, but did not the muscles
appear tightened less in impatience than in endurance of suffering? The
nostrils no longer breathed scorn; they laboured with the indrawing of
breath that, like fire, was at once painful and inspiriting. To the
brow there had been added, he thought, a faint line, and its coming had
softened the contraction of the brows so that the creature appeared
even more majestic and wiser than of yore. And lastly--he took long to
discover this--in the shadow under the brows the orbs seemed to stir
with a mysterious and darkling life. "O mighty Sphinx," he murmured,
leaning his head upon her bosom, "what has come to thee? How art thou
changed! Much I fear thou hast passed beyond so small, feeble, and
ignoble an intelligence as I and that now I shall never learn the
secret that, behind thy lips, lies locked in thy heart. O Sphinx, if I
speak wilt thou answer? Time was when I came to thee and, impatiently
stamping my foot upon the mound of thy illimitable desert, beating with
my fists thine unanswering flesh, conjured thee in a voice of thunder
to yield up thy secret. But to-night, nestling against thy bosom, how
shall I speak to thee?--I, of less account among men than one of the
myriad morsels of dust out of which thou art compounded; I, whose voice
is to thine ears hardly louder than the scratch of the beetles that
crawl about thy base; I, lost in the shadowy cleft between thy breasts?
O Sphinx, I will not cry out to thine unregarding face, lost in such a
reverie as transcends the thought of such as myself, but leaning here
my fevered forehead against thy cool stones, as in a dream and scarcely
expecting an answer, let me whisper to thy heart, '_What is the secret
of thy smile, O Sphinx?_'"
Then from within the Sphinx arose a deep murmuring as of a multitude
of nigh-forgotten voices; a handful of vapour parted from the lips to
wither in the glacial moonshine.
"Scarcely am I changed," said the Sphinx. "'Tis thou art changed. Look
in thy heart: there is my secret."
So low had been the sound, so immense was the night, so lonely the
desert, that Es-siddeeh doubted whether it was not his own heart
that had spoken. Then, placing both hands against the breast of the
colossus, he cried in a despairing voice, "Is that thy all, O Sphinx?"
But there was no answer.
With spirit heavy as death, Es-siddeeh wrapped him in his cloak and
laid him down to sleep between the paws.
"Alas," said he to himself, "how brief, how obscure, and how profitless
seem all the answers given to man!" Yet, when the morning came, it
occurred to him that, if the Sphinx had indeed spoken, he would do well
to ponder the words.
So for three moons he sat pondering: "_Scarcely am I changed. 'Tis thou
art changed. Look in thy heart: there is my secret._"
Those who crossed the desert marked him, sunk in the deepest travail of
thought.
"Why do you not look at the Sphinx?" they asked.
"I begin to know something about it: that is why," he replied. "If I
gazed at it always in the present and never in memory I should learn
nothing."
One day a young scribe of great beauty approached the Sphinx and in a
low tone enquired: "_What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?_"
"Speak louder. She will not hear you," called his companion.
Es-siddeeh leaped to his feet.
"Who sent thee hither?" he cried.
"Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity," answered the youth; and turning
to his comrade, "If you wish to know why I do not shout, know that it
is because I have read the early work of a certain scribe Es-siddeeh.
It is very evident that, as with many persons of original mind, he
scarcely recognised the full import of what he was at the time writing.
Had he been acquainted with more scholars and had more experience of
life he would have spoken with greater certainty. He would have also
realised, too, I do not doubt, that his work was not so vain as it
then appeared to him. But he disappeared and none knows whither, since
his parents never spoke of him again. I, taking up his work, have
already carried it further, I think, than he had when he abandoned it.
Nevertheless I, too, have ceased to labour at it and am come hither for
the purpose thou knowest."
"Sa-adeh," echoed Es-siddeeh, waking as if from a dream; "I seem to
remember that name. Tell me now, how did you----"
But the stranger, receiving no reply from the Sphinx, had departed.
Es-siddeeh sat him down again in dejection.
That night he did not sleep. The memory of Sa-adeh overcame him with
tears. All his life passed in review. Never had his reverie seemed so
bitter, his questioning so futile as on that midnight, yet toward dawn
he suddenly stood up with a shout. An immeasurable serenity flooded his
being.
"I have it," he cried; "I have solved the secret of thy smile, O
Sphinx!"
At that moment the tropic sun arose, and in its rays he beheld the
face of the tormentor shine with an equable and golden splendour. The
eyes, no longer lacking pupils, possessed sight, and from the smile had
vanished all that he detested.
VI.
A new porter, a garrulous and slipshod wastrel, had taken the place of
the old. It appeared that nowadays the Princess had but few visitors
despite the fact that she was acknowledged almost as beautiful as
ever, albeit in a different style. Her temperament, he learned, was
difficult, her wealth greater than ever.
After but short delay he found himself in the antechamber. He
acquainted the damsel with his mission. She vanished through the
curtains, and the following conversation was borne to Es-siddeeh's ears:
"An old man, calling himself the Very Veracious, has arrived and sues
for an interview on the same subject as his forerunners."
"I cannot see him." The maid returned.
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that she is as beautiful as one red rose
in a garden of lilies."
"The compliment," he heard the Princess remark, "though graceful, is
not new; in fact so old that I scarcely distinctly recollect when I
made a fashion for it. Dismiss him."
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that her wisdom has the wings of the
rukh, the eye of the falcon, the talons of the osprey, and the voice of
the dove."
"The Very Veracious," he heard the Princess remark, "is there very much
in the wrong. If I have learned nothing else in my life I have at least
learned that my wisdom has no such enviable characteristics. Dismiss
him."
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, suddenly overcome with a novel misgiving,
"that I know the answer to all secrets, including the secret of the
smile of the Sphinx."
"How original!" cried the Princess. "Does he really know the secret of
the Sphinx's smile? Send him in."
Es-siddeeh went in and bowed down.
"Though changed," he said, "O Sa-adeh, you are as beautiful as ever."
"Your beard has grown so long and so white," she answered,
"that--surely thou _art_ the (what is the name?) the Es-siddeeh I once
knew, are you not?"
"I am."
"And you know all secrets?"
"I do."
Then she plied him with various questions concerning the value as
an amulet of this or that precious stone, of the pedigree of famous
horses, of music as an Emotional Sound or as an Architecture, and many
other matters of a similar nature.
All these questions he answered with such a considerable wealth of
detail that Sa-adeh appeared confused. Both fell silent.
After her eyes had rested for some time upon his face in a musing
fashion, she asked with a strange inflection, "What is love?"
He was dumbfounded.
"I believe you have forgotten," she said, and in the intonation of her
voice there was a hint of the equivocal.
His eyes filled with tears. "I have not forgotten," he said; "perhaps I
am only just beginning to learn."
She gave him a curious look; then, moving her head, proceeded with an
instant change of tone, "Well, what is the secret of the smile of the
Sphinx?"
A wave of emotion swept over him. He smiled and arose.
"With the details of my enquiry I will not trouble you. Suffice it to
say that for nearly forty years I have been searching."
"So long as that?"
"Many hard early days I spent in the desert and endured great
privations."
"Indeed? I am sorry. Forget them."
"I would not if I could--they were the price of knowledge. At one time
I came near losing my wits."
"So? I am sorry."
"Then I spent some years interrogating the wisest of earth."
"Oh?"
"But met with no answer."
"Ah."
"Then I spent further years in acquiring money--years of misery they
were and years of degradation--that I might discover the secret. I was
ruined. I repeat, I was ruined."
"Pardon me. Yes, you were ruined. I am sorry."
"I served as a soldier. I received wounds. I was captive. I was beaten.
I escaped. I rose to power. I exploited all modes of living and
fulfilling myself, but my experiments brought me no nearer the secret."
"No nearer...."
"Then I set forth on a dreary journey to renew my memory of the
Sphinx's face. I sat down beside her. For a long time I learned
nothing--the smile seemed hardly less mysterious than it had ever been.
Then--but you are not listening...."
"My friend, I am indeed; you were on a dreary journey and----"
"At length one day a youth--but I will not burden you with that, though
it was strange...."
"Why do you look so at me? I am listening."
"That night I learned the secret of the Sphinx."
"At last!"
"I learned it indeed."
"Yes. Well, what is it?"
"A difficult matter. You must listen most carefully, so subtle is its
sense; yet in its comprehension lies hid the whole secret of man's
possible happiness."
"I am listening."
There was a great stillness in the chamber. Es-siddeeh closed his eyes
to concentrate his thought. Then, opening them, he began:
"I learned the secret--that smile is the secret."
"So I supposed."
"Hush, or I shall begin to think that you do not know how to value this
gift of my whole life, which I am making you. It is very difficult, but
if all men would listen to me their lives would be easier."
"I thought the secret was for me--yet no matter. Proceed. You see how
serious I am."
"I learned its secret."
His lips trembled. He could hardly speak; at last with a great effort
he said, "Now it comes--_upon maintaining that smile, which is the sign
of the power of her existence, all her energy is bent_. She did not
tell me, but I found it written in my heart. For what is she? _In the
Sphinx, with her ravaged countenance and mutilated smile, I behold Life
itself--Life in mysterious might, ignorant of its own origin, conscious
only of its own beauty, couchant amid the wilderness of space and
eternity._"
"Is the smile of the Sphinx all that indeed? I somehow thought it was
something more intimate. But how serious you look! Do not frown--I
would not offend you for the world."
"Should I not smile?" he said bitterly.
"Yes, like the Sphinx."
"Quick! How, did you know that?"
"Don't frighten me. I was but speaking idly."
"Idly?"
"Seriously then, if you like--since you attach such importance to it.
Women always work by miracles and never know when they have performed
one.... Excellent, you are smiling, though your smile is ambiguous."
"I do but obey her."
"Not me?"
"That smile which we behold on her face is the smile we see everywhere
about us; only in her it has become more august--first by reason of her
greater consciousness of isolation in the Desert and beneath the Stars,
and, secondly, by consciousness of her strength."
"Will you hand me my fan? Thank you."
"For what are not the properties of the smile--the sovereign beauty,
the witness of power--in Nature? Wise indeed the man who knows the
bounds of what it is capable. When we are born the first thing we
behold is a smile: the Nurse smiles at us, and in that smile we
should read--were we then capable--the self-satisfaction of Nature,
proud of her reproductive powers, who dandles us in her hands with
the assurance that she knows what is best for us. Ah, how universal
is the smile! Think of the variety of smiles that exist. 'Tis all
for smiles this life! And that is at once its apparent cruelty and
its final justification. On the blackness of Eternity it expands in a
smile like a rainbow--a rainbow whose arch begins and ends, as rainbow
arches do, uncertain where. And this blossoming in Infinity justifies
itself.... How? By the beauty of its smile. Therefore smile. Smile
and be in harmony with--if not the spirit of the Universe (for the
unknown looking down from the Hill of Heaven upon the Rainbow may for
all we know smile also, and on the import of that smile opinion may be
divided), and be in harmony at least with the beauty of that fragment
of the Universe which, if we do not wholly comprehend, we can at least
worship and imitate.... But you are yawning."
"No, obedient to you, I was--smiling."
"And for how long? Until we are resolved--as the drops of the rainbow
are resolved after refracting supernal colours. Yet as a raindrop
glitters, ere it evaporate upon the flower and be again (who knows?)
drawn up in the immense cycle, with some reflection of the glory which
its passage served to make, so should we maintain that smile to the
moment of our dissolution. As indeed I, whose stormy aerial passage
is nearly over, shall do till I attain to mine. For what commoner
solace do we hear than that '_he died with a smile upon his face_'?
Such a smile may each have at his passing! How happy our friends will
be to see it, how confounded our enemies! How comforted, too, the
philosophers, who will not fail to perceive in it the reflection of
whatever faith they hold: the ineffable joy of one whose beatified
wings even now mingle with the wings of other spirits in divine
assumption; the satisfaction of the racked, whom never again the
torturers Joy and Sorrow will wake from endless sleep; the profound
irony of one who never expected his pleasures to last for ever; and the
disdain, too proud to curve itself in a full sneer, of one who opposes
to the silent smile of the unknown a smile yet more silent!"
He paused.
"I have been thinking," said the Princess.
"You wish to know more? Shall I explain?"
"No. It is unnecessary; all this amounts to that you wish to marry me,
and the announcement that you have earned the right to do so, but I
should inform you that since you were last here a gentleman, who as a
matter of fact once occupied a position menial enough but of importance
in this household, has by signal honesty and perseverance arrived at a
position where--well, in fact, to put it shortly, I have formed another
attachment."
"Madam, am I reft of my senses? You astonish me! Who?"
"The Executioner."
"Ah, heavens! Well, let me inform you, madam, that I, too, have formed
another attachment."
"You say that to my face! How dare you? But I saw directly you entered
this room that you had long ago forgotten what true love is. Your long
absence from me bears it witness. Who, may I ask, is now the object of
your affections?"
"Do not smile--or smile, madam, if you can; I love the Sphinx."
He had but that moment discovered it.
The Princess shrieked and at the sound he bent upon her such a smile as
in memory effectually prevented her ever mentioning the Sphinx and its
secrets again to anyone.
Then he walked out.
VII.
He returned to the Sphinx.
While yet afar off he was puzzled beholding a mountain range arisen in
the wilderness. As he drew nearer he recognised it for the Sphinx. If
during his thirty years' wanderings she had appeared to increase in
size, to what dimensions had she not attained during his brief absence!
The vapours of the desert, rising about her, had collected upon her
shoulders in a strata of billowy cloud, and her head, unimaginably
exalted, had now reached such an altitude that the features were almost
indistinguishable in the blaze of the sun.
Night had fallen by the time that he stood within the canyon of her
breasts. For a little he rested his head upon the rock. A great
weariness descended upon him. Physical infirmity, the inevitable sequel
of all he had suffered in body and in soul, now made him its prey. His
mind and spirit, however, remained keen and unquenchable as ever. He
wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down. At midnight he awoke. For
the first time the Sphinx, speaking in a voice of more than mortal
tenderness, had made utterance without being addressed, "Art thou
returned, my lover?"
"Thou seest me. All I love I have given thee."
"Few have bestowed upon me so much as thou. Fewer still have arrived
where thou hast arrived, while yet possessing the eye not wholly dimmed
and the tongue not altogether palsied. One thing, however, thou hast
kept from me--the seal that is on thy heart."
"Ah, Sphinx," replied Es-siddeeh, "that I cannot give; it is part of
myself. Nor would I--for it was that which first brought me hither to
scan thy face and to read thy riddle."
"I am a jealous lover."
"I know it. Yet what care I? Thy jealousy is a measure of my reward;
for though I have discovered thy secret in general, yet it is a secret
which no man perhaps will ever fathom in all particulars. Happy the
hero who attains as far as I, happier yet he who can gaze unwinkingly
upon thee as I do now, and hourly fathom something further!"
"I am a jealous lover. Thou hast not much longer to gaze."
"No matter. Eyes do not perish with me, and for myself I am rewarded."
Then was it that for Es-siddeeh the body and the face of the Sphinx
achieved a final apotheosis. Her limbs throbbed with a deep and
terrible energy. From her breast issued an all embracing warmth
similar to that of the earth. Her breathing became distinct as an
august and stupendous rhythm resembling the ascent and descent of
waters from firmament to firmament. Her cheeks flushed with a youthful
elation. Into her eyes arose an immense light fixed upon unforetold
futurities, and all her face, so worn and beautiful, became more
ravaged and even more beautiful--for the very deepening scars, wasting
and remoulding the features, gradually resolved the visage into an
ethereal harmony hitherto unknown. Around her head, entangling in
its mesh the nearer planets, there wreathed itself an enormous halo,
iridescent as that which encircles the frosty moon. Her whole being
exuded a supreme lustre until she became one living and colossal
crystal which distributed in refraction all the colours of the rainbow
and which palpitated with powers unguessed.
And to Es-siddeeh, who beheld her through the tears of one who
momentarily expects to be parted, the spectra and the palpitance
appeared in triple.
"O Sphinx, O Life the Enchantress," he cried, "my true and only love,
take if thou wilt my heart and the seal upon it, for thine am I only,
thee only would I aid, thee only do I love, thee only would I worship!"
* * * * *
A band of Arabs, journeying across the desert, found him, when dawn
came, lying between the paws of the giant--dead, more cold than the
stone which surrounded him and which now began to kindle in the morning
rays. Though there had been no dew, his garments were deluged as with
the falling of an immense tear. Upon his face there lingered a fixed
smile, and, gazing upward, they beheld its double in the sunlit face of
the familiar Sphinx.
HERE ENDS THE STORY OF THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX.
MAYEST THOU ALSO LEARN ITS SECRET.
GEORGE ELIOT
By EDMUND GOSSE
In and after 1876, when I was in the habit of walking from the
northwest of London towards Whitehall, I met several times, driven
slowly homewards, a victoria which contained a strange pair in whose
appearance I took a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was
hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this
was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thick-set sybil,
dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen
in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height
of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense
ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the
solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the head-gear had something
pathetic and provincial about it.
All this I mention, for what trifling value it may have, as a purely
external impression, since I never had the honour of speaking to the
lady or to Lewes. We had, my wife and I, common friends in the gifted
family of Simcox--Edith Simcox (who wrote ingeniously and learnedly
under the pen-name of H. Lawrenny) being an intimate in the household
at the Priory. Thither, indeed, I was vaguely invited, by word of
mouth, to make my appearance one Sunday, George Eliot having read some
pages of mine with indulgence. But I was shy, and yet should probably
have obeyed the summons but for an event which nobody foresaw. On the
18th of December, 1880, I was present at a concert given, I think, in
the Langham Hall, where I sat just behind Mrs. Cross, as she had then
become. It was chilly in the concert-room, and I watched George Eliot,
in manifest discomfort, drawing up and tightening round her shoulders a
white wool shawl. Four days later she was dead, and I was sorry that I
had never made my bow to her.
Her death caused a great sensation, for she had ruled the wide and
flourishing province of English prose fiction for ten years, since
the death of Dickens. Though she had a vast company of competitors,
she did not suffer through that period from the rivalry of one writer
of her own class. If the Brontës had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell, the case
might have been different, for George Eliot had neither the passion of
_Jane Eyre_ nor the perfection of _Cranford_, but they were gone before
we lost Dickens, and so was Thackeray, who died while _Romola_ was
appearing. Charles Kingsley, whose WESTWARD HO! had just preceded her
first appearance, had unluckily turned into other and less congenial
paths. Charles Reade, whose IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND (1856) had
been her harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival.
Anthony Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained persistently
and sensibly at a lower intellectual level. Hence the field was free
for George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation, built up slowly
such a reputation as no one in her own time could approach.
The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten what a solemn,
what a portentous thing was the contemporary fame of George Eliot.
It was supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people
who despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions
to philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when I sat in
company with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he
expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished
that for the London Library no novels should be bought, "except, of
course, those of George Eliot." While she lived, critics compared
her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar.
People who started controversies about "evolutionism,"--a favourite
Victorian pastime,--bowed low at the mention of her name, and her own
sound good sense alone prevented her from being made the object of a
sort of priggish idolatry. A big-wig of that day remarked that "in
problems of life and thought which baffled Shakespeare her touch was
unfailing." For Lord Acton at her death "the sun had gone out," and
that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed, _ex cathedrâ_, that no
writer had "ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold
but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes
had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like
Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival." It is very dangerous
to write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the case of
this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but so ridiculously
overpraised by her friends, it came with remarkable celerity.
The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, reverberating upon a
dazzled and genuinely interested public, was not, however, even in its
palmiest days, quite unanimous. There were other strains of thought and
feeling making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert Browning,
though an optimist, and too polite a man to oppose George Eliot
publicly, was impatient of her oracular manner. There was a struggle,
not much perceived on the surface of the reviews, between her faithful
worshippers and the new school of writers vaguely called preraphaelite.
She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so much else, she
was wiser and more clairvoyant than most of the people who surrounded
her, but Arnold presented an attitude of reserve with regard to her
later novels. She found nothing to praise or to attract her interest
in the books of George Meredith; on the other hand, Coventry Patmore,
with his customary amusing violence, voted her novels "sensational and
improper." To D. G. Rossetti they were "vulgarity personified," and his
brother defined them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swinburne
repudiated _Romola_ with vigour as "absolutely false." I daresay that
from several of these her great contemporaries estimates of her work
less harsh than these might be culled, but I quote these to show that
even at the height of her fame she was not quite unchallenged.
She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible for a good
deal of the tarnish which spread over the gold of her reputation.
Her early imaginative writings--in particular _Janet's Repentance_,
_Adam Bede_, the first two-thirds of _The Mill on the Floss_, and
much of _Silas Marner_--had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if
she could have kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all
effects of contemporary want of sympathy. When we analyse the charm of
the stories just mentioned, we find that it consists very largely in
their felicity of expressed reminiscence. There is little evidence in
them of the inventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive.
Now, we have to remember that contemporaries are quite in the dark
as to matters about which, after the publication of memoirs and
correspondence and recollections, later readers are exactly informed.
We may now know that Sir Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the
features of a real Sir Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs.
Samuel Evans photographed, but readers of 1860 did not know that, and
were at liberty to conceive the unknown magician in the act of calling
up a noble English gentleman and a saintly Methodist preacher from the
depths of her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not would
not matter to anyone, if George Eliot could have continued the act of
pictorial reproduction without flagging. The world would have long
gazed with pleasure into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she
reeled off one dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not
contented with her success, and she aimed at things beyond her reach.
Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate), the partial
and accidental failure of a great genius, began when she turned from
passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect. If we had
time and space, it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's
attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed caryatid of
romantic literature, who had by a few years preceded her. When George
Eliot was at the outset of her own literary career, which as we know
was much belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled and
scandalised Europe for a generation. The impact of the Frenchwoman's
mind on that of her English contemporary produced sparks or flashes of
starry enthusiasm. George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George
Sand in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested in
her," and her praise of the French peasant-idyls was unbounded. But
when she herself began to write novels she grew to be less and less in
sympathy with the French romantic school. A French critic of her own
day laid down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se rapproche
de la poésie ou de la science." George Sand had thrown herself
unreservedly into the poetic camp. She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eût
poussée vers les abîmes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good
sense which carried her genius over so many marshy places, that her
temperament had often driven her, "au mépris de la raison ou de la
vérité morale," into pure romantic extravagance.
But George Eliot, whatever may have been her preliminary enthusiasms,
was radically and permanently anti-romantic. This was the source of
her strength and of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains
the soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George Sand, she kept
to the facts; she found that all her power quitted her at once if she
dealt with imaginary events and the clash of ideal passions. She had
been drawn in her youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and
Lelias of her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that in
the humdrum years at Coventry, when the surroundings of her own life
were arduous and dusty, she felt a longing to spread her wings and
fly up and out to some dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which
were utterly vague to her. The romantic method of Dumas, for instance,
and even of Walter Scott, appealed to her as a mode of escaping to
dreamland from the flatness and vulgarity of life under the "miserable
reign of Mammon." But she could not achieve such flights; her literary
character was of a totally different formation. What was fabulous,
what was artificial, did not so much strike her with disgust as render
her paralysed. Her only escape from mediocrity, she found, was to
give a philosophical interest to common themes. In consequence, as
she advanced in life, and came more under the influence of George
Henry Lewes, she became less and less well disposed towards the French
fiction of her day, rejecting even Balzac, to whom she seems, strangely
enough, to have preferred Lessing. That Lessing and Balzac should be
names pronounced in relation itself throws a light on the temper of the
speaker.
Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost as early
as musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The child keeps other
children awake, after nurse has gone about her business, by reeling
off inventions in the dark. But George Eliot showed, so far as records
inform us, no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The
history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study. It appears
that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that she, "in a dreamy mood,"
fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on
her return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes,
with whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her,
"You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards
the production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the
virtues and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and
at Coventry. _Amos Barton_ was the immediate result, and the stately
line of stories which was to close in _Daniel Deronda_ twenty years
later was started on its brilliant career. But what of the author?
She was a storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the
_Westminster Review_, who had spent years in translating Strauss's
_Life of Jesus_ and had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous
wrestling with the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ of Spinoza, who had
worked with Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had
censured, as superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell's
_Moral Philosophy_. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously
known as Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by
the admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in
training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of
the creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in
the world rather than a writer of idle tales.
But the tales proved to be a hundred-fold more attractive to the
general public than articles upon taxation or translations from
German sceptics. We all must allow that at last, however tardily and
surprisingly, George Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us
consider in what capacity she entered this field of fiction. She
entered it as an observer of life more diligent and more meticulous
perhaps than any other living person. She entered it also with a store
of emotional experience and with a richness of moral sensibility which
were almost as unique. She had strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth
of recollected examples by which she could justify them. Her memory
was accurate, minute, and well-arranged, and she had always enjoyed
retrospection and encouraged herself in the cultivation of it. She was
very sympathetic, very tolerant, and although she had lived in the
very Temple of Priggishness with her Brays and her Hennells and her
Sibrees, she remained singularly simple and unaffected. Rather sad,
one pictures her in 1856, rather dreamy, burdened with an excess of
purely intellectual preoccupation, wandering over Europe consumed by
a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia for her own country, coming
back to it with a sense that the Avon was lovelier than the Arno.
Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes over her a desire to build
up again the homes of her childhood, to forget all about Rousseau and
experimental physics, and to reconstruct the "dear old quaintnesses" of
the Arbury of twenty-five years before.
If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest
critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we
may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne in _Adam Bede_.
The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a
packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine
gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a
texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome
or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory
at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of
memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her
honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages
with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her
intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered
in a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment
she offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has,
of their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of
_Adam Bede_ or than the beginning of _The Mill on the Floss_.
But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there
was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was
pedantry, the result doubtless of too much erudition encouraging a
natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive
rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after
her early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and
became, in measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation,
Teutonised. This fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable
to eradicate. One can but speculate what would have been the result on
her genius of a little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most
successful immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; the _Scenes
of Clerical Life_ answer in time to _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_,
and _Monsieur de Camors_ to _Felix Holt_. There could not be a stronger
or more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairy-land of the
one and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral
writer, whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of
Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past.
She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her
brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and
more her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the
scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the
analysis of individual character.
The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this,
and that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to
be said in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an
undeniable fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the
inevitable progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to
see the peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore in
_Middlemarch_, but there is much to be said for the view that George
Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like
them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot
in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller,
who is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her
by surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and
recognises it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is
ever in her mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property
around her to be ready when the train shall stop. This psychological
clairvoyance gives her a great power when she does not abuse it, but
unfortunately from the very first there was in her a tendency, partly
consequent on her mental training, but also not a little on her natural
constitution, to dwell in a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was
not content to please, she must explain and teach as well.
Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first
in the laboured and overcharged romance of _Romola_. But a careful
reader will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early in _Amos
Barton_, for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers
that they "passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and
smoking, like the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils
this delightful remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs.
Hackit was "speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical
sense." The laughter dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind
spoils many a happy touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having
wholly escaped from it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George
Eliot, at all events until near the end of her life, of intellectual
pride. She was, on the contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and
susceptible of discouragement. But her humility made her work all the
harder at her task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have
been far better for her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of
Herbert Spencer and more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing
but painful example of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone
uphill with groans and sweat, is to be found in her own account of the
way she "crammed up" for the composition of _Romola_. She tells us
of the wasting toil with which she worked up innumerable facts about
Florence, and in particular how she laboured long over the terrible
question whether Easter could have been "retarded" in the year 1492. On
this, Sir Leslie Stephen--one of her best critics, and one of the most
indulgent--aptly queries, "What would have become of _Ivanhoe_ if Scott
had bothered himself about the possible retardation of Easter? The
answer, indeed, is obvious, that _Ivanhoe_ would not have been written."
The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must
always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and
distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to
imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savanarola's
sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built
up almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch
by touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes
in a sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language
of her own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari.
The most conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain,
is incapable of producing an illusion of life by these means. George
Eliot may even possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks
again and again, not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as
Dickens did, but of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in
attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel"
that nothing but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried
her on at all. In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous
elements she wore out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending
to watch so noble a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted
in the whirlpool. One fears that a sense of obscure failure added to
her tortures, and one is tempted to see a touch of autobiography in
the melancholy of Mrs. Transome (in _Felix Holt_), of whom we are
told that "her knowledge and accomplishments had become as valueless
as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never
worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living
mortal."
The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation
showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential
for her success is supported by the very curious fact that from
1864 to 1869, that is to say through nearly one quarter of her whole
literary career, she devoted herself entirely to various experiments
in verse. She was so preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing
unlikely in the supposition that she realised what was her chief want
as a writer of imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always
be justified in claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent
English writers. But she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which
forbids her from ever appearing in the front rank as a great writer.
Her prose has fine qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and
persuasive, but it misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never
sings. The masters of the finest English are those who have received
the admonition _Cantate Domino!_ They sing a new song unto the Lord.
Among George Eliot's prose contemporaries there were several who
obeyed this command. Ruskin, for instance, above all the Victorian
prose-writers, shouts like the morning-star. It is the peculiar
gift of all great prosaists. Take so rough an executant as Hazlitt:
"Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he
passed!" That is the chanting faculty in prose, which all the greatest
men possess; but George Eliot has no trace of it, except sometimes,
faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants' conversation. I do not
question that she felt the lack herself, and that it was this which,
subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of the art of verse.
She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by
dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and
she analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told
Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been
useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no
wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach
the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away
at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful,"
and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a
bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism--what a picture
it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness
of application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of
various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy, _The Spanish Gypsy_, of
which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been
able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets
and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read.
She actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands,
_Agatha_ (1868) and _Brother and Sister_ (1869), which are the only
"rare issues" of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given
to bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished
and re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a
substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the
intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible--the root
of the matter is not in them. There is an _Arion_, which is stately in
the manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive,
but there is the radical absence of song. In the long piece called
_A College Breakfast Party_, which she wrote in 1874, almost all
Tennyson's faults are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor
who carefully imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy.
There is a Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called _Self and Life_,
stuffed with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts.
And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much
credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the
conclusion that the following sonnet, from _Brother and Sister_, is the
best piece of sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals
with the pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her and
her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of _The Mill on the Floss_:
His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy
Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;
My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy
Had any reason when my brother came.
I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling
Cut the ringed stem and make the apple drop,
Or watched him winding close the spiral string
That looped the orbits of the humming-top.
Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought
Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil;
Myaëry-picturing fantasy was taught
Subjection to the harder, truer skill
That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line,
And by "What is" "What will be" to define.
How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away!
At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with
all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes
on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own
strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote
_Middlemarch_, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a
book early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm,
as marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for
several years. _Middlemarch_ is the history of three parallel lives
of women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to
shape their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common
eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The
three ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were
Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed"
of Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. _Middlemarch_ is constructed
with unfaltering power, and the picture of commonplace English
country life which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion,
but all the charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left
behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a
very remarkable instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied,
and genius revolving, with tremendous machinery, like some great
water-wheel, while no water is flowing underneath it.
When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I for one can
find not a word to say in favour of _Daniel Deronda_, her next and last
novel, which came out, with popularity at first more wonderful than
ever, in 1876. But her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask
one another uneasily whether her method was not now too calculated,
her effects too plainly premeditated. The intensity of her early works
was gone. Readers began to resent her pedantry, her elaboration of
allusions, her loss of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes
and the flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious
pages of _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill_ like the lemon-yellow pansies
and potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. Then came _Theophrastus Such_,
a collection of cumbrous and didactic essays which defy perusal;
and finally, soon after her death, her _Correspondence_, a terrible
disappointment to all her admirers, and a blow from which even the
worship of Lord Acton never recovered. Of George Eliot might have been
repeated Swift's epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.
It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so elevated, so
disinterested, that for the last ten years of her brief literary life
she did practically nothing but lay heavy loads on literature.
On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place which
George Eliot holds in English literature as so prominent a one as
was rather rashly awarded her by her infatuated contemporaries. It
is the inevitable result of "tall talk" about Dante and Goethe that
the figure so unduly magnified fails to support such comparisons when
the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is unduly neglected now,
but it is the revenge of time on her for the praise expended upon her
works in her life-time. Another matter which militates against her
fame to-day is her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who
knelt at the footsteps of her throne said that she was "the emblem
of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and
the difficulty of belief." Well, we happen to live, fortunately or
unfortunately for ourselves, in a generation which is "distracted" by
quite other problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot
and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical
influence. Perhaps another generation will follow us which will be more
patient, and students yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never
forget, however, that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of
perfect honesty, that she brought a vast intelligence to the service of
literature, and that she aimed from first to last at the loftiest goal
of intellectual ambition. Where she failed, it was principally from an
inborn lack of charm, not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental
disposition. After all, to have added to the slender body of English
fiction seven novels the names of which are known to every cultivated
person is not to have failed, but to have signally, if only relatively,
succeeded.
THE FUTURE POET AND OUR TIME
By J. C. SQUIRE
Here is our world in motion.
We see a corner of it through our eyes. A man will march down a street
with a crowd, or watch the politicians' cabs turning into Palace Yard,
or make speeches, or stand on the deck of a scurrying destroyer in the
North Sea, or mount guard in a Mesopotamian desert. A minute section of
the greater panorama passes before him.
In imagination he will, according to his information and his habit of
mind, visualise what he sees as a part of what he does not see: the
human conflict over five continents, climates and clothes, multitudes,
passions, voices, states, soldiers, negotiations. Each newspaper that
he opens swarms with a confusion of events and argument, of names
familiar and unfamiliar--Wilson, Geddes, Czecho-Slovakia, Yudenitch,
Shantung, and ten thousand more. For the eye there is a medley, for
the ear a great din. As far as he can, busy with his daily pursuits, a
man usually ignores it when it does not intrude to disturb him. When
most unsettled, the life of the world is most fatiguing. The spectacle
is formless and without a centre; the characters rise and fall,
conspicuous one day, forgotten the next. The newspapers mechanically
repeat that we are at the greatest crisis of history, and that "a
great drama is being unrolled." We are aware that the fortunes of our
civilisation have been and are in the balance. But we are in the wood
and cannot see it as we see the French Revolution. It is difficult,
even with the strongest effort of imagination, to visualise the process
as history will record it. To pick out those episodes and those persons
that will haunt the imagination of posterity by their colour and force
is more difficult still. An event, contemporaneously, is an event; a
man is a man who eats, drinks, wears collars, makes speeches, bandies
words with others, and is photographed for the newspapers.
Yet we know that a time will come when these years will be seen in far
retrospect as the years of Elizabeth or of Robespierre are now. The
judgments of the political scientist and the historian will be made:
these men will arrange their sequences and their scales of importance.
They will deduce effects and measure out praise and blame. With them
we are not concerned. But others beyond them will look at our time.
We shall have left our legacy for the imagination. What will it be?
Who of contemporary figures may we guess as likely to be the heroes
of plays and the subjects of poems? Which of the multitudinous events
of these years will give a stock subject to Tragedy? Which of the men
whom we praise or abuse will seem to posterity larger than human, and
go with gestures across their stages, clad in an antique fashion? For
to that age we shall be strange; whether our mechanical arts have died
and left us to haunt the memory of our posterity as a race of unquiet
demons, or whether "progress" along our lines shall have continued,
none of our trappings will have remained the same.
But the soul of man will have remained the same. Those elements in
events and persons which fascinate and stimulate us when we are looking
at our past will stir them when they brood on their past, which is our
to-day. And neither contemporary reputation, nor worldly position, nor
conquests in themselves, nor saintliness in itself, can secure for a
man a continued life in the imagination of the race.
* * * * *
Contemplate our own past in the light of this conception. Who are the
men of whom poets and playwrights and story-tellers have made fictions
and songs? Augustus Cæsar when he lived was the greatest man in the
world: but who since Virgil has panegyrised him and who--unless some
ingenious psychologist of the second-rate like Browning--would make
a dramatic poem out of him? William Wilberforce was a very good man,
but his deeds and his name have survived his personality, and he will
not be the hero of an epic. The Thirty Years' War was a long and very
devastating war; Gustavus and Wallenstein, in their degree, survive
the purposeless series of its disasters; and of all its events that
which most vividly lives in the memory is the small thing with which
it began: the flinging of two noblemen from a tower. What is it in
things and men that gives them permanently the power of stirring the
imagination and the curiosity of the artist? A quality of splendour and
of power that grows more certain when the dust that was its receptacle
has gone to dust. The artist who shall succeed with a historical
personage may make whatever implicit or even explicit commentary he
likes, but in choosing his subject--or being chosen by it--moral
judgment or scientific estimate will not influence him. He will be the
victim of an attraction beyond the will and beyond the reason. Consider
who are the figures that truly, imperatively, live in the political
story of the past. Not only and not all the Cæsars who fought over the
known world; not only such chivalric souls as saw, and obeyed, the
visions of Domrémy, and died when the echoes of the last horn faded
over Roncesvalles. The Crusades, as a whole, were a great poem, but few
of the Crusaders won more than an ephemeral name in art. Cœur de Lion
has been in our own time the hero of a romance, but no man is likely
again to write of even a Godfrey of Boulogne. The great age of historic
Greece passed and left imperishable monuments, "one nation making worth
a nation's pain," but how few of her soldiers and philosophers recur
to the creative imagination! Those stories and figures from history
and pre-history which do so recur are a strangely assorted collection.
The Trojan War and its leading personages are a fascination and an
inspiration perennially, and among those personages Helen, Hector,
Achilles, Ulysses; but not Paris or the sons of Atreus, who live but as
appendages. Coldly arguing, men may ask now as they asked then, why
the Greeks should take so much trouble to recover a worthless woman,
why a Hector should die to keep her, why ten thousand should perish
in such a cause. But to the imagination Hector, Achilles, Helen, the
divine unreason of that ten years' war, make an appeal that never comes
from worthier struggles and wiser people. That is true also of Antony
and Cleopatra: their story to the historian and the moralist is one of
ruinous folly, to the poet a
Portentous melody of what giants wasting
Near death, on what a mountainous eminence
Still, in the proud contempt of consequence,
The wine of life with jubilation tasting.
The figure of St. Francis has been created and recreated in art; like
those of Nero, Philip II., and Mary Stuart. With the mythical who
are but names we can do what we will; Lear and Hamlet Shakespeare
could cast in the sublimest mould; with the historical we are tied by
the historical, and few are great enough to come through the sieve.
Poets have attempted and failed to make great characters of Becket,
of Wolsey, of Strafford, and Charles I.; their degree of failure has
varied, but they have failed as certainly as Keats would have failed
with King Stephen. The material was not there. Cromwell and Frederick
the Great at least equalled Philip II. in achievement, and excelled him
in intelligence. But Carlyle's two heroes were no true heroes for an
artist; we are too uncertain about Cromwell's inner man, his direction;
for all his battles he could cast no colour over his surroundings; and
as for Frederick there was no tragedy about him--that was left for
his neighbours. A great Cromwell, in one sense, would be an invented
Cromwell; and we cannot invent a Cromwell because of the documents. But
Philip II., the intense, narrow, laborious, dyspeptic bigot, sitting
in a cell of his great bleak prison on the plateau, trying to watch
every corner of the world, and contriving how to scourge most of it; he
was contemptible, full of vices, a failure, but there was that in him
which has compelled the gaze of poets in seclusion from the seventeenth
century down to Verhaeren and Verlaine. He had a virtue in excess.
There was a touch of sublimity about him. The setting counts for much;
monarchs are on pinnacles. But where is Philip IV., except for his
horse-face on the canvases of Velasquez? Where even, as against the
man he beat, is William the Silent, who waged a great fight against
odds and died by the dagger; but was a cool Whig, excessive in nothing
but self-control? He is scarcely alive; but Satan, as Milton saw him,
reigns in hell. We must have splendour of a sort. The normal man loves
a conflagration, though he will lend a hand in putting it out; and if
he is putting it out the inmost heart of him will rejoice if it be
a large fire and there are very few firemen. Vivid force, moral or
non-moral, must be there; a Borgia, though he be as wicked as a Nero,
cannot compete with him before the imagination; he was commonplace and
sordid and there is no response to him.
Such passages and such people kindle us in the records of the past.
How, from this point of view, will the last five years, crowded and
full of strife, look when we are the materials for art?
* * * * *
Will the decline of Turkey command interest? To the historian, not to
the poet, so not, ultimately, to the generality of mankind. There is no
emergence there of the human spirit at an exalted pitch; very new and
surprising things must come out about Enver if he is to rank with the
great adventurers of the stage. Men may try it--they have tried most
things--but Constantinople has failed the artist before and will again.
There is something pathetic, there might be something tragic, in the
collapse of the House of Hapsburg after so many centuries, but so far
as we know at present (and our statements are avowedly conjectures)
there was no incident of that fall, compassed and witnessed by small
intriguing men, which can redeem it from squalor and insignificance;
and not all our reiterated assurances that this is a tremendous and
tragic catastrophe can invest it with the high romantic quality which
comes from passion in many men or in one man, strength and a heroic
struggle. The League of Nations may be the salvation of mankind, but
it has come in such a way, so slowly, so reluctantly, so haphazardly,
so sensibly, that (unless comedy) nothing vital will be written of
its birth. Can we see a subject for a Shakespeare or a Milton in the
domestic struggle here, or the fluctuations of the Balkans, or the
entry of the East into the war? These things made their differences,
but will they to the artist be more than facts? And the men. There
have arisen from the populations of all countries men, many of them
"great" by virtue of position, influence, achievement; many of them
disinterested and ethically admirable. The mind passes from one to
another; over some it flits, over others it hesitates and hovers. There
is something of the sublime about M. Clemenceau, the old fighter,
symbolising France at the last barrier: a man who, in early novels
now forgotten, formulated, or refused to formulate, a philosophy of
despair, and depicted a universe without principle, order, or hope,
in which the stronger beast, to no end, preyed on the weaker; a man,
nevertheless, so full of vital energy, and so certain of the one thing
he loved, that he desired nothing better than to continue furiously
struggling under the impending cope of darkness. There are, to some of
us, disagreeable things about him; stripped of the non-essential there
is something central, that is, elemental and fine. But were he of the
kind that becomes legendary, should we feel that central something
as still uncertain, and would it have needed a war at the age of
nearly eighty to have revealed something of grandeur in him? Is he, at
bottom, clear and forcible enough; or, alternatively, does he feel with
sufficient strength, does he want anything, plan or place or spectacle,
with sufficient passion? We cannot be certain: he may be forgotten.
Something of doubt colours also one's view of America's entry and the
career of President Wilson, in some regards a close analogue to that
of Lincoln. The lines of that story are simple--the watching pose,
the gradual approximation to war, the President's mental struggle,
his decision to throw America's weight into the scale, his manifestos
to the world in the names of liberty, honesty, and kindness, his
determination that the war, if possible, should be the last. But
the man at the centre of this tremendous revolution of events, the
mouthpiece of these great sentiments, has he that last abandonment of
feeling which alone captivates the imagination of those who hold the
mirror up to certain aspects of Nature? Without denying that it may be
a great blessing that he lacks that force, without presuming to know
all about him that may later be revealed, I feel doubtful. Death, more
particularly violent death, before the end, might have enabled artists
to impute to him something that perhaps was not there, to give him the
benefit of the doubt. But very likely for our good, possibly with the
greatest wisdom, he compromised at Paris. A more spontaneous man might
have ruined us all; but if compromise is excellent in politics, it is
of small use to poets. I doubt if the President will take his place
with St. Francis, Philip II., and Nero.
* * * * *
There will survive from the war, and from the other events of our
day, certain episodes which will, as by accident, draw the notice of
artists and be, as we speak, immortalised. A few of the countless
heroic and self-sacrificing actions which men have performed in every
country and by every sea will be snatched from oblivion. Tragedians,
in all probability, will brood on the story of Miss Cavell. The names
of a subaltern and an airman, fortuitously selected, will live as live
those of Hervé Riel and Pheidipiddes. But this is not what we call
history. I think that the Rupert Brooke legend will develop. He was
beautiful and a poet, and he died in arms, young. He had wandered to
the islands of the Pacific, and his comrades buried him in an island
of the Ægean. About him they will write poems, plays even, in which,
their colour given by actions and sayings which are recorded, he will
pass through experiences which were never his, and thoughts will be
imputed to him which possibly he never had. Two older artists have
taken a more prominent part in the war and its politics, a part that
may indisputably be called political. Of Paderewski I know nothing,
except that a man's progress could not easily have a setting more
superficially romantic; the strength of the man may be guessed at
by stray tokens. A person of whom fame in art may more certainly be
predicted is d'Annunzio, a man not in every way admirable, but of
a demoniacal courage, who has crowned a career full of flamboyant
passages with actions that, as a spectacle, are magnificent: orations
pulsating with ardour for the glory and power of the Latin genius,
words that were pregnant of acts, and following these, after years
of reckless flying, the sudden theatrical stroke at Fiume. As a
"character" he justified himself by that lawless blow; his rhetoric
finally proved itself the rhetoric of real passion, a lust for violent
life, self-assertion at the risk of death, the flaunting of the Italian
name; and, felt as such, it has moved a whole army and a whole people.
Whatever the results of analysis applied to his character or the
ultimate outcome of his splendid panache, he cannot but become, to the
artists of one nation at least, a hero, the material for romance.
There may be others. But, projecting myself as well as I am able, I
cannot see on the larger stage, amid the great fortunes of peoples
and their rulers, more than two subjects on which I think we may be
positive that they will pass into the company of material to which
artists return and return, subjects which already outline themselves
with some clarity to the imagination and have the air of greatness.
One is the fall of the German Empire. Were it shortly to be restored,
the force with which its calamities will appeal to us would be
diminished: for an end must be an end. But if what seemed to happen
really has happened there is a spectacle there which will appear
more prodigious and more moving as time goes on--that triply-armed
vainglorious kingdom pulling the world down on itself; the long,
desperate, ruthless fight against enemies ultimately superior; the
"siege"; the quality, proud and assured if barbaric, of the Prussian
spirit which filled the ruling caste and determined at once its fight
and its fall. The tale is tragic, and almost epic; the persons are
not yet revealed who shall be capable of being made, on the stage
or in books, the instruments for telling it. Certainly, though men,
misguidedly, will attempt to make Wilhelm II. sustain an artistic
load to which he is not equal, the Kaiser will make no great hero or
hero-villain. Possibly in some Hindenburg or other general will be
found the strength, the simplicity of belief or resolve, which make
a great figure; or possibly this will be of the tragedies in which
the individual humans are all pigmies subordinate to the main theme.
Elsewhere, I think, is to be found a man who has about him the certain
atmosphere of imaginative life. He is Vladimir Ulianoff, Lenin.
I talked a few weeks ago with a Russian in exile, a Conservative, an
official of the old regime, and (I think) a Baltic Baron. He was not,
therefore, sympathetic to the Bolsheviks or to Lenin; he hated, though
he understood, them and he loathed him. "Lenin has ruined Russia," he
said, taking no pains to conceal his desire that Lenin should die.
Then the imaginative man in him awoke, as it has a way of doing in
intelligent Russians of all kinds, and he suddenly added vehemently:
"But a hundred years hence a Hero of Legend, like Peter the Great and
the Prince who first introduced Christianity into Russia."
I felt immediately that he had spoken not merely a truth, but an
obvious one. Englishmen may have all sorts of opinions about Lenin;
few have heard much beyond rumour of him, but even those who are most
avowedly ignorant of him or most leniently inclined to him would
scarcely like to find him in their midst. Yet there is that flavour of
vitality, of greatness, about him that is lacking in many who have
caused misery to none and even in some of the most potent benefactors
of mankind. We feel it almost unconsciously; the recognition of it is,
as it were, instinctive; a picture of him, growing from stray scraps
of news and rumour, has been forming in our minds, a picture almost
from the first differentiated from that, say, of his equally active
colleague, Trotsky. Trotsky, one feels, might disappear to-morrow and
leave but a name and some wreckage. But the other man, if he be not in
the line of Tolstoi (as some of his adherents seem to suppose him to
be), is in the line of the great oriental despots, of Tamerlane and
Genghiz Khan.
And we shall know more of him, far more, than we shall ever know of
Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan: as much very likely as we know of Napoleon.
He has no physical attributes and no material accoutrements which
might lend him adventitious aid as the centre of a pageant of power,
struggle, or woe: a short, bowed man in a black coat, vivacious, hedged
by no formalities of ceremonial. Yet to the imagination--and it must
surely be so when he is seen backward--this little fanatic, who for
twenty years was hunted from exile to exile, and returned to overthrow
a government and enthrone himself on the ruins of a great Empire, is
the centre of Russia, seated in the middle of that enormous web of
conflict and suffering like an impassive and implacable spider. We
hear this and that of him. He is genial in conversation. He is not
personally cruel. He is willing to slaughter thousands at a blow to
realise his ideas, for he looks at human affairs historically, if with
but one eye. He is a poor speaker, but his words whip audiences into
enthusiasm. He thought he would be overturned in three weeks, but
adapted himself with instant decision when a longer lease was offered.
This man and that is jealous of him and has tried to upset him; he has
said this or that about his success and his failure; he will fly; or
he knows he will be executed. The reports contradict each other, but
the picture remains and strengthens, the picture of a man in the grip
of an idea, with one of the strongest wills in the world, indifferent
to the pains and pleasures of ordinary people. That ugly little face,
with its swollen bald forehead, its slanting lids closing on straight
penetrating eyes, its squat nose, its fleshy mouth between moustache
and goatee, its smile mechanical as a mask's, will be more familiar to
our descendants than to us. They will see in reverie the revolution,
with vast ancient Russia as its background, and this doctrinaire tyrant
as its centre, with his ragged armies, his spies and Chinamen, his
motley gang of clever Jews, brigands, and mild, bearded, spectacled
professors around him. They will feel his magnetism, and, whether as
"hero of legend" or devil of legend, they will celebrate him.
Of these things perhaps men will write two hundred or two thousand
years hence. But the duration of human life on our planet is measured,
as we suppose, in tens of thousands of years.
We go to the grave. The sunlight comes into this room; it shines on
the table and the books and the papers. I listen to the twittering of
the birds, shorter lived than ourselves, and the intermittent rushing
of the wind, which, while life lasts, goes on always the same. A car
moans past; its noise begins, swells, and dies away. The trees wave
about; a horse's feet plod by; the sunlight sparkles on the river
and glorifies the mud. Clouds come over. The sun, unseen, sets; the
evening grows bluer and lamps twinkle out over the misty river. So,
noiselessly, proceeds time, and the earth revolves and revolves through
its alternations of sun and shade. These airs, these lights and sounds,
will be the same; but we, alive and immortal as we feel, shall have
gone and the clamour that we made will recede. To an epoch we shall
be the coloured strutters of history and of legend; to a later age,
however remote and whatever the accumulation of our records, we must
become august shadows like the dim kings and fabulous empires that
passed before Babylon and Egypt. "Truly ye are the people, and wisdom
shall die with you." The sentence was written more than two thousand
years ago; the author is unknown and receding. Yet, obliterated in the
end though all remembrance of us may be, we shall not even on this
earth die with our bodies, and for some interval, not to be computed,
certain actions at this moment in progress will endure in a sublimated
state, and certain men with whom we may even have spoken will enlarge
to a more than human stature and communicate, as they could never do in
life, their essence to the enduring tradition of men. Are they those
whom we have mentioned; or are they, as they may be, others who to us
are insignificant and obscured?
HORACE WALPOLE[1]
[1] _Letters of Horace Walpole; Oxford University Press,
16 vols., 96s. Supplementary Letters, 1919; Oxford
University Press, 2 vols., 17s._
By ROBERT LYND
Horace Walpole was a dainty rogue in porcelain who walked badly. In
his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of
him that he "tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he
wrote when he was just under sixty, "my march at present is more like
a dabchick's." A lady has left a description of him entering a room,
"knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his
feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said,
that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." He was ridiculously
lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An
invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed
in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has
nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost
perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected
coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of
insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that
happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped.
He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the
house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more
likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an Empire. His
most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime
ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George
II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love
laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That
represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh
all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had
written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended
knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's
hand. His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as
"mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." His politeness,
like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world.
"I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed Montagu; "thrust in all the
_unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc._, that I could
amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible."
He frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court
and act out the extravagant compliments he had written. "Was ever so
agreeable a man as King George the Second," he wrote, "to die the very
day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" "For my part," he adds
later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always be a favourite; he
tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince of
Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that Walpole was
a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy republican
who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their
backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of Beau
Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public
display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest
private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the
great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the
thoughts of the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway,
"and even laugh to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill
will on the subjects I mention." His letters are for the most part
those of a good-natured man.
It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than
that--of hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own,
but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His
ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the
baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling
out," and whose mouth was "tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of
the dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to
Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754:
On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the
first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the
yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When
the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King's
feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty God preserve your
Majesty!" and lay there howling and embracing the King's knees, with
one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was _luckily_ in
waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, "For God's sake,
gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" endeavouring to
shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar with pain.
The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of
George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is
introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture:
He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and
flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with
a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of
his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who
was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with
the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of
Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and
turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his
train to avoid the chill of the marble.
Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his
persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball
at Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful
old creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and
spied" his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense
carried on in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than
Horace Walpole. He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at
Sir Robert's tomb.
At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a
family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and
women outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct
to disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at
the first time of meeting her, as "an old blind debauchée of wit." His
comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a
vein of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson,
of Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he
found "silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts."
Boswell's _Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and
his zany." Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing
to the criticism of Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not
even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter
asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell,
and Reynolds. "I would not deign to write an answer," Walpole told the
Miss Berrys, "but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done
to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe." Walpole
does not appear in this incident the "sweet-tempered creature" he had
earlier claimed to be. His pose is that of a school-girl in a cutting
mood. At the same time his judgment of Johnson has an element of truth
in it. "Though he was good-natured at bottom," he said of him, "he was
very ill-natured at top." It has often been said of Walpole that, in
his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly
by their position in society--that he regarded an author who was not a
gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. This is hardly fair.
The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was Gray, the son of a
money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley Montagu any more than
Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was more likely to be
owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an aristocratic
distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest of low
life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him. He
relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found
him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some
cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest
cloth." Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an
author who did not know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's
_Johnson_ tedious, it was no doubt partly due to his inability to
reconcile himself to Johnson's table manners. It can hardly be denied
that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions. He was a
great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character. He
knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives--even
their absurd motives. He never admits us into the springs of action in
his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in
the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous. And
unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his
love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history
he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with
an egoistic author as with a trout.
"So much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." The comic
spirit leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of
human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only
a breach of his code, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know,"
he once wrote, "I shun authors, and would never have been one myself
if it obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest
and think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and
reverence learning. I laugh at all these things, and write only
to laugh at them and divert myself. None of us are authors of any
consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be vain
of being _mediocre_." He followed the Chinese school of manners and
made light of his own writings. "What have I written," he asks, "that
was worth remembering, even by myself?" "It would be affected," he
tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I certainly am not, but
I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to acquire it. The
greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as you say,
incorrect when they were commonly written with people in the room."
It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole
was merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He
had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence
of Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his
own writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the
poets. He felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was
diffident both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some
writers find it to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him
that they ask us to regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as
a pretence. They do not realise that the secret of his attraction for
us is that he was an enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man
of fashion. His airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of
his pleasure in wearing a mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable,
and only withdrew into the similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes
into his tub, through philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who
are tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our
interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of
this kind. The beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our
curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the
Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage of
violence. The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula,
or seems to live the life of a formula. That is why we find him dull.
The characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other
hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulæ we invent, and are
bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us,
but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's
air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question
his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to
his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see
him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations,
whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an
æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire as
George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings of kings
and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the
fireworks and illuminations.
He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared,
were "one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man
dressing out "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an
entertainment of the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them
pleased than when I formerly delighted in that diversion myself." He
was equally an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced
to get back in May to Strawberry Hill, "where my two passions,
lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom." He could not have made his
collections or built his battlements in a mood of indifference. In
his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a Goth-intoxicated man.
As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have been a ridiculous
mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it. Walpole's
own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite
charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a little
plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's
shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled
meadows, with filigree hedges:
A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd,
And little finches wave their wings in gold."
He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties:
Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually
with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer
move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks bound my prospect;
but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the Duchess of
Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and
Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical
moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's
when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind.
It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into
playing with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is
in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled
with cows, horses, and sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals.
Walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom
has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second
childhood." That explains why one almost loves the creature. Macaulay
has severely censured him for devoting himself to the collection of
knick-knacks, such as King William III.'s spurs, and it is apparently
impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously.
Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as
of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was
fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside
his bed and, opposite it, the Warrant for the execution of King
Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question
the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember,
neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine
closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of Pembroke
and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and ended: "I
never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old wardrobe there
still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and
Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good night." He
laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends.
"As to snuff-boxes and tooth-pick cases," he wrote to the Countess of
Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year."
Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded
in the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a
spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself
as a master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and
the goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley
fishing in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin
and a tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese
method." This was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who
"carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter."
Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself,
it is impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that
the wolf carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels,
or the more imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to
prevent from biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with
Madame du Deffand herself "grows the greater favourite the more people
he devours." "T'other night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand
afterwards bequeathed the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's
face, and I thought would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting
her finger. She was terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand,
who has too much parts not to see everything in its true light,
perceiving that she had not beaten Tonton half enough, immediately
told us a story of a lady whose dog having bitten a piece out of a
gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried out, 'Won't
it make him sick?'" In the most attractive accounts we possess of
Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the breakfast-table,
drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient porcelain of
Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now grown almost
too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and afterwards going
to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to the squirrels
in the garden.
Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an
excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet
or the prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de
l'Enclos at Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of
Anne Boleyn, or Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes."
What is not generally realised is that he was also a high-strung and
eager spectator of the greater things. I have already spoken of his
enthusiasm for wild nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is
true he grew weary of them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such
uncomely inhabitants." "I am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if
I had eat them," he groaned in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was
at least as genuine as the fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves
only that there were two Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic
enthusiasms was insincere. He was a devotee of romance, but it was
romance under the control of the comic spirit. He was always amused to
have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of
Scots, he said: "I believe I have told you that, in a very old trial of
her, which I bought for Lord Oxford's collection, it is said that she
was a large lame woman. Take sentiments out of their _pantoufles_, and
reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there
is!" But see him in the picture-gallery in his father's old house at
Houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood is
uppermost. "In one respect," he writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am
very young; I cannot satiate myself with looking," and he adds, "Not
a picture here but calls a history; not one but I remember in Downing
Street or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them." And, if he
could not "satiate himself with looking" at the Italian and Flemish
masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his enthusiasm
for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during his dispute with Voltaire on
the point, "I think over all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans,
Italians, French, and English (and I know no other languages), I set
Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew."
Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything
Dionysiac in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say
that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves.
Capricious in little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of
nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in
tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is curious it should
ever have been brought in question by any reader of the letters. His
quarrels are negligible when put beside his ceaseless extravagance of
good humour to his friends. His letters alone were golden gifts, but
we also find him offering his fortune to Conway when the latter was in
difficulties. "I have sense enough," he wrote, "to have real pleasure
in denying myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a
man happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere friendship."
"Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he wrote to Conway
seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect with regard
to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?" "I am,"
he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere to
friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to
give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making
him her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit
her again. Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving
pleasure and for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The
earliest of his published letters was until recently one written at the
age of fourteen. But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of
Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to Lady
Walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a
delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend,
or a pet:
Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa is
wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like there
pla things vary wall and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray give my
Duty to papa.
HORACE WALPOLE.
and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all wall.
and Mrs. Selwen has sprand her Fot and gvis her Sarves to you and I
dind ther yester Day.
At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the
"Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and
the "Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The
truth is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being
loved. "One loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway,
"when they can have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for
the Miss Berrys--his "twin wives," his "dear Both"--to each of whom he
left an annuity of £4000, was but a continuation of that kindliness
which ran like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt)
through his long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends,
but was at the call of children and, as we have seen, of animals.
"You know," he explains to Conway, apologising for not being able to
visit him on account of the presence of a "poor little sick girl" at
Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a knight I am to distrest virgins of
five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to them."
One does not think of Walpole primarily as a squire of children, and
certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with the young, there
was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was what is called
"sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to wish to see
an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, chimney-sweepers."
So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at times
portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist.
This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a
great terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all
dogs found in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of
Strafford:
In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the
Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the
innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear,
good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody
hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire
no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the next
Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs!
As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after
writer that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them
mainly for gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great
fight for good causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he
the temper of a ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics, and a
spreader of opinion in private, he showed himself to be a politician
at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events.
His detestation of the arbitrary use of power had almost the heat
of a passion. He detested it alike in a government and in a mob. He
loathed the violence that compassed the death of Admiral Byng and the
violence that made war on America. He raged against a public world that
he believed was going to the devil. "I am not surprised," he wrote in
1776, "at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows. They who
invented him no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious
to one another, without the intervention of a fiend. Don't you think,
if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented
on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has a poor chance with
me," he wrote a little later in regard to America, "when my warmth
is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of Parliament,
and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." The
war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed
over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all
but the unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened
into contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but
it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to
petty larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his
comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:
I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the
destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that
terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as
protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.
Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them
with an aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance
was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It
was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory:
"They were, as George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you
might have stroked them_." When near the end of his life the September
massacres broke out in Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he
denounced the French with the hysterical violence with which many
people to-day denounce the Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_
beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that
"France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the
subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are
not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the
same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had
broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre,
had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his
box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never got beyond an
angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of him:
The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my
being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow
of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the
chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, and
pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please to
have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the confusion
into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the box, and
have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse.
There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank
down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might
save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and
his friends.
This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist.
He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practiser of them. At
Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health
with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out-of-doors
to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared
in English. Had he written his letters for money we should have praised
him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have
thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from
wine. Possibly he had the constitution for neither. His genius was a
genius, not of Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry
Hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily
likeable, charming, and whimsical figure.
Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among
correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men
of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he
is as an acquaintance! How exquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the
collector of the choice creatures of the human race!
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
By J. C. STOBART
There is no doubt whatever about the need for it. Search high or low in
our social world, you will find it full of laments and dissatisfaction.
In the Services Commanding Officers complain that their subalterns,
even though they have been through the Classical course at Public
Schools and Universities, cannot write a clear report. Headquarters
themselves issue their orders and regulations in barbarous,
unintelligible jargon. Government Departments, manned by Greatsmen,
wrap themselves in phrases of pompous obscurity, and Cabinet Ministers
couch their decisions or agreements in terms of such ambiguity as to
leave nobody certain of their meaning. It would, however, be unjust to
attribute bad English entirely to upper-class education, classical or
modern. The business man in his "esteemed favours," though he may be
more terse and polite, is not always able to convey what he intends.
He lays the blame, when he fails to do so, upon the faulty education
of his clerks and stenographers. The masses of the public too often
show in practice that they simply cannot understand printed rules and
directions. It is naturally too much to expect a universal diffusion of
taste or elegance in the use of our language; but even when we feel the
need of fine words to express deep feeling we choose for an obituary
lines like these:
There's a lonely grave somewhere,
Where our dear and brave boy sleeps;
There's a little home in England,
Where mother and all of us weep.
or these:
Who knew that when he went away,
Departing from his door,
How or when he would come back,
Or whether never more?
For he who went away in health,
In battle soon waylaid,
Which took him in the prime of life,
To lie in a distant grave.
No, there is little doubt of the need for teaching clearness and
improving taste. As for correct and grammatical writing, one week's
study of a popular daily newspaper yielded the following excerpts from
a collection of two-score:
In the last resort we have to depend upon a jury drawn from the
people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life, and
unless that jury does not do its duty, unless it is backed by the
public sentiment of the people....
The accused was ordered to pay £3, or a month's imprisonment in
default. At Paignton, in Devon, a gigantic plum-pudding is made and
distributed to the poor, which in 1897 weighed 250 lb.
... the officers closed on him. In throwing him to the ground the
revolver dropped from his hand.
The charge is 50 per cent. higher than the same sheet may be bought
in the street just outside. But what is a penny to an American?
---- ---- had an unfortunate experience. While seated in his
greenhouse it was wrecked by the wind, and on being extricated it
was ascertained that both his legs were broken above the knee,
necessitating his removal to the infirmary.
Provocation has been given by the hostile and shifty conduct of the
Tibetan authorities, since the signing of the Treaty of 1800, which
would have justified earlier punishment.
While riding in a hansom at Southport a runaway horse dashed into the
conveyance, and the shaft of the trap penetrated her body, pinning
her to the hansom, and causing almost instantaneous death.
But if you come to estimate a day's work--even in foot-pounds--the
woman who cleans, bakes, washes, and takes to school six children,
carries water and tramps upstairs and down for sixteen hours a day,
need not fear comparison as to kinetic energy even with a miner
working eight hours.
What is the schoolmaster doing about it? He is teaching a great variety
of languages ancient and foreign, sciences, arts and crafts, and among
other things he is believed to teach "English." He has found out that
it does not come by nature, and that a mastery of the English language
cannot be assured by teaching something quite different. But as to the
best method of teaching boys and girls to write, read, and appreciate
good English there is a controversy. Just as in most other branches of
education there is a traditional method and a reformed method. Upon the
latter some of us build hopes of extraordinarily great achievements,
and if these hopes lead us into impatience we must ask for pardon.
Though Mr. Mais[2] justly claims credit for originality
in departing occasionally from the fixed lines of English
teaching as it is practised in the Public Schools, his "Course"
mainly follows the traditional modes and is directed to the
preparation of pupils for the orthodox type of examination.
The nature of the course is indicated by the chapter-headings;
for example: "Grammar and Syntax--Analysis, Parsing and Synthesis--
Punctuation--Vocabulary--Letter-writing--Reproduction--Paraphrase--
Dictation--Précis--Prosody--Figures of Speech--Indirect Speech--
Essay-writing--Examination Papers." There are, beside these
thoroughly normal chapters, six pages on Elocution, Debating,
Lecturing, Acting, etc., a useful list of cheap books for a home
library, more than fifty critical pages on Shakespeare, and a
regrettable[3] twenty-page chapter entitled "Short History of English
Literature." I think the author is trying to shake off a yoke which is
not entirely congenial to him. But if he will make boys write essays
on Scandinavia, explain Synecdoche, paraphrase Keats, "condense the
_Vision of Mirzah_ to 300 words," he cannot complain if he is mistaken
for one of the old regime and guillotined in distinguished company.
[2] _An English Course for Schools_. By S. B. P. Mais,
Assistant Master at Tonbridge School and Examiner in
English to the University of London. Grant Richards
Ltd.; 6s. net.
[3] _e.g._ "R. L. Stevenson represents the incurably
romantic and is followed by Kipling and Conrad."
The traditional method begins with the copy-book and proceeds by
way of dictation and formal exercises to its goal in the essay.
Dictation is the core and kernel of it, for even when the exercise is
called "composition" the subjects are so chosen that the pupil needs
detailed guidance throughout and the results are practically uniform.
The writing is accompanied by reading and grammar, but the reading
is severely limited and the text is obscured by comment and minute
explanation. Poetry is not only studied with notes: it is analysed
and paraphrased and parsed. The grammar, which is also traditional,
is alien both in its method and terminology. The people who invented
"English" in the middle of the nineteenth century were the classical
grammarians who knew only one way of teaching a language, and had
been forced under pressure from indignant parents to put "English"
on the syllabus. They gave it an hour a week: they spent that hour
in parsing, in declining uninflected nouns, in conjugating, in
insisting that because the complement of a Latin or Greek copulative
verb is in concord with its subject therefore "It's _me_" must be
wrong in English. They did violence to our tongue in other ways to
make a Teutonic language fit a Latin system, introducing all sorts
of unnecessary complications of gender, mood and case, which do not
exist. They transferred to English the whole cumbrous system of Latin
grammatical terminology and then set harmless English children to
explain their hideous technicalities. All because they had an hour
to waste and were determined to waste it in the manner to which they
were accustomed. They were assisted in this ambition by the Scotch
professors of rhetoric who were especially strong in figures of speech.
And then they remarked with pain and surprise that their method did not
succeed. Their scholars did not appreciate good literature when it was
taught to them. They lacked originality in their composition. They were
tongue-tied in their speaking and muddled in their writing. There was
once a man who determined to teach his monkey to sing "Voi che sapete,"
an air of which he was inordinately fond. So he took an old stocking
with a hole in the toe and two holes in the heel and turned it inside
out in order to conceal the holes, and crammed it full with shavings
and breadcrumbs and fried it carefully and fed the monkey on it. When
he complained that the monkey's voice was no better at the end of the
course, his friends used to explain that it was because he was an old
man and had lived in the reign of Queen Victoria.
Remember that this "English" teaching has been well tried for more
than fifty years. Substantially, the course we are considering now
does not differ in its methods from books like Dalgleish's _English
Composition in Prose and Verse based on Grammatical Synthesis_ of
1864 or Dr. William Smith's _English Course_. The subject subsists as
a shuttlecock in a perpetual game of Badminton between examiners and
teachers. If you ask the examiner of English why he continues to set
such stupid questions, he replies quite rightly that he is forced to
do so by the stupidity of the schoolmasters who teach it. If you ask
the schoolmaster why he makes his "English" the dullest subject in the
syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing for the London
Matriculation. If you look for an explanation of the method, you might
surmise that the aim is to secure accuracy in grammar at all costs.
But that is not the aim. Mr. Mais explains it in a paragraph which he
might well set for analysis of pronouns: "Of all our failings as a
nation, this is the most marked. In our talk we are reticent; in our
writing we are incoherent and slipshod. Every schoolmaster knows from
sad experience that the average boy cannot produce a readable essay on
any subject, however hard he may try. He strives by every means in his
power to instil a sense of originality in his classes, to teach his
boys and girls to observe...." Originality and observation!
To take the second first, every scoutmaster knows that observation can
be taught, but not by dictation. Probably there is no faculty of the
mind which responds so readily to training and practice. By systematic
questioning a young child can be taught to notice the common objects
by the wayside on his morning walk, the goods in the shop windows, the
flowers in the garden, to remember them and describe them afterwards
with great fidelity. A good teacher of infants can easily teach a
child of six or seven to observe minute differences, to compare and
contrast similar objects, such as the bulb of the iris and the corn
of the crocus. This kind of observation is commonly appropriated by
science, and it is indeed the same faculty which the physicist employs
afterwards with his fine balances and test-tubes. But it is also, when
reproduced in language, the beginning of good English. Words are the
balances. Careful description in words, written and spoken, of things
actually seen is, when developed fully, more than half of the business
of poets, journalists, and novelists. A few gifted mortals like Balzac,
Gissing, or Hardy may possess the faculty by nature, but any one may
acquire it through early training and continuous practice. It can be
lost almost as easily as it is won.
Can originality be taught? Less easily perhaps than observation. Real
originality, in the sense of creative power, or what in its highest
form we call "Inspiration," cannot be taught in school. Who taught
Blake to see the tiger burning bright in midmost eighteenth-century
London? There are some men born, apparently, to be our masters. Ideas
flow not into them but out of them. They are the mainsprings of our
mechanism. We attribute their origin to the wandering breath of some
holy spirit. But in a humbler sense children can certainly be trained
to be original, just as they can be trained by opposite methods to
be commonplace, slavish, imitative, genteel, conventional, correct,
and accommodating. These virtues are taught with great diligence and
success in many schools, public and private. In the earliest stage
you copy in a beautiful copperplate handwriting words like "England
Expects Every," and you read aloud very slowly from a little book
which contains these words in immense type: SHUN THAT OX HE IS SHY. You
recite in chorus after teacher, you correct your speech by mimicking
her accents and gestures. You sit, stand, or march to numbers at the
word of command. In the next stage you are promoted to dictation, and
once a fortnight you write a composition. But as the theme is Duty or
The Elephant or something about which you can hardly be expected to
have connected notions, you are given the headings, told what to say,
have your mistakes carefully underlined, and are then presented with a
model or fair copy. Any departure from the normal, whether in spelling
or in ideas, is heavily penalised, and no credit is given for positive
merit. In the next stage you learn the art of letter-writing by
studying celebrated models, you paraphrase good poetry into bad prose,
you analyse and parse and explain grammatical terms, you summarise and
expand, you turn direct into indirect speech and generally feed your
mind with a generous diet of cold minced hash.
If I were a little boy trained for years and years according to this
plan, I hope I should be grateful to my teachers for all the trouble
they had taken with me. But, if they then turned round upon me and
reproached me with not being _original_, I should be sorely tempted to
commit a breach of good English and say "That is the limit!"
In the pedagogical and psychological sense these methods are twenty
years behind the times. They have been exploded in theory and disproved
in practice. Each subject in its turn has fought its battle with
the Dictation Method, and everywhere, except perhaps in religious
instruction, the principle has been decided. In drawing, the freehand
copy has given place to direct observation; in mathematics, mechanical
working of rules and examples has been replaced by intelligence and
problems. Even physical exercises are no longer mere drill.
Perhaps it is in the primary school that we shall find the right
principles most clearly marked, if only because with the younger
children the teacher is nearer to Nature and mistakes punish themselves
more visibly. There also the dead weight of tradition has been less
oppressive. Before Madame Montessori's star had risen above the
firmament the best teachers in English infant schools had solved the
fundamental problems of how to teach good English. The principle
is that what the child speaks or writes shall come from its own
brain. The first medium of expression is, of course, the tongue. No
children, not even English children, are tongue-tied by nature, but
they are generally timid and sensitive. If they find their adult world
discouraging communicativeness with anger, or sarcasm, or pedantry,
they will close down upon the rock of silence like the limpet which
you must smash before you move. Probably before he comes to school the
child has already been silenced by a mother or father whose love will
bear anything for the child except to listen to him. It is wonderful
to watch the skilled teacher of infants repairing this mischief,
re-establishing confidence between innocence and wisdom, unlocking
hearts and tongues, creating an atmosphere of freedom in which she
possesses, in reality, absolute control. Instead of limpets you
behold sea-anemones full open. The children talk at great length in
co-ordinate construction about their mother and the baby's tooth, and
when they have finished they sit quiet listening to others. Sometimes
the teacher takes up her parable and tells them about Cinderella or the
King of the Golden River. In other lessons other mediums of expression
appear--pencils, chalk, plastic clay, music, dance, drama. The teacher
continues unobtrusively feeding the children with beautiful things, she
sings and plays to them, shows them pictures and exhibits gentleness,
calm, and love.
Amid all the fog of controversy and all the noise of disputing
cheap-jacks that surrounds the art and practice of education I
see some of these infants' class-rooms as clear beacons showing
the incontestably true course. I cannot see any limit of years to
its progress. Many boys' and girls' schools have grasped the same
principles and extended them to the age of fourteen with the same
undeniable success in the results. Naturally, as the child grows the
method has to be adapted, but the principle remains steadfast. I would
not describe it as "freedom," because the child is not free, though he
feels free. One never doubts the existence of a controlling will. But
what is encouraged is authentic expression. In writing, topics are set
which draw out of the child's own world the child's own thoughts. He is
guided to think for himself and to speak his thoughts fearlessly. The
skill of the teacher is shown mainly in the choice of subjects and the
discretion with which corrections are made. Observation is translated
into description, first in speech and then, when the pencil has been
mastered, in writing. A child of nine may be asked to describe a corner
of the class-room so that a blind man could understand exactly what
is there and what it looks like. A child of twelve may be asked to
describe the prettiest room she ever saw. A child of fourteen may be
asked to describe the Harrow Road (_a_) on a Saturday night, (_b_) on a
Sunday morning. Why stop at fourteen?
As well as observation and description, the infant school trains the
elements of imagination and invention. Cannot the child who at eight
years old wrote on "If I were the King...." profitably be asked to
write on "If I had been Oliver Cromwell...." at eighteen? In one girls'
school the teacher merely wrote on the blackboard "When the Moon went
out" and left the rest to the class. In the same way children can
be trained to argue _pro_ and _contra_ about problems of their own
lives which clearly admit of argument, like "Would you rather be six
or sixteen?" "Would you rather be a boy or a girl?" People new to
the method might suppose that, although the brighter children could
possibly attack such themes with success, the ordinary or dull child
would be left staring. It is not so. Whole classes of children trained
in this way produce work which is pleasant to read. The essentials seem
to be stimulating topics, authentic expression without dictation, and
constant practice. To one who has seen the elementary steps there is no
magic in the Perse Plays or the Draconian Poems. They are natural. It
is dullness that is artificial. Real dullness, such as one finds in
Common Rooms, Mess Rooms, Pulpits, and Government Offices is the fruit
of a long, careful, and generally expensive education in that quality.
In teaching a young person to speak and write you are also teaching
him to think, because words represent thoughts. The adult may be able
to think connectedly in silence, but the child generally cannot.
The child's world is, however, at the largest a little one, and it
is necessary to enlarge it by various means, including stories and
pictures, songs and books. The book gradually becomes more prominent
as the art of reading is mastered. A child constantly encouraged to
express himself freely, always giving out and seldom taking in, would
develop a number of unpleasant qualities. Therefore reading is only
second to writing in its importance. A generous supply of good books is
the second fundamental necessity of sound English teaching. So far as
I know, no school has ever reached the limit in this direction. There
is an excellent society which bases its method of teaching mainly on
copious reading and has been able to multiply seven-fold the usual
reading programme of primary schools. But they seem to put the book a
little too much into the foreground. It is citizens that we seek to
educate. For them books should be the background of real life. We do
not all possess those opulent libraries into which Ruskin would turn
his princesses to browse at will; but I subscribe to his doctrine in
principle. Mere quantity of reading is a great thing. The more children
read, the better they will choose their books.
Now these two things alone, authentic expression and copious reading,
are capable of producing good English. Children taught well in these
methods can, without any formal instruction in spelling or grammar,
write correctly as well as pleasantly. Something more is needed for
those who seek to become scholars in English, and still more if they
aim at the study of language. For such as these the teaching may
gradually and progressively develop a scientific character. In the
earliest stages fluency was itself a chief aim, and the teacher was
compelled to be very sparing of interruptions and corrections. She
had to use discretion and to judge for herself what mistakes were
dangerous. She might not interpose though twenty successive clauses
were joined together by "and," because she knew that it is natural
for language to begin with co-ordinates and that mere mental growth
combined with practice in reading and writing will cure the fault.
She corrected vulgarisms, like "he done it," not with any grammatical
disquisition but dogmatically. Even where the children come from homes
where the King's English is never spoken, systematic speech-training
in the infants' school can correct and refine language before pen is
put to paper. These infant years seem to be intended by Nature for
the learning of language. Ears are sharp and memories retentive. But
habits once formed at that age, whether good or bad, are very difficult
to eradicate later on. Perhaps pronunciation is best taught through
disguised phonetics in the singing lesson and elocution in the poetry
lesson.
In the first written work it may be found that the spelling is all
wrong. Great controversies rage on this subject. But it seems right
to regard bad spelling as a disease which needs careful individual
diagnosis in the earliest stages, when it can be cured so as to give no
more trouble. Most often it springs from some fault in the method by
which the child has learnt to read. Some people are allowed to grow up
incapable of spelling because they make out the printed word by some
process of guesswork and never fix the letters upon their memory. Good
or bad spelling very rapidly becomes automatic.
Much the same is true of grammar. As I have said before, accurate
use of language can be attained by purely empirical and dogmatic
methods. Grammar is no essential preliminary to good English, but
nevertheless there may be a good case for teaching it later on to
those who can afford the time. It is well that English boys and girls
should know something of the history and structure of their language
as well as their constitution. It may be necessary for the linguist to
understand the common grammatical technique of all languages. Moreover,
teachers naturally seek to limit the domain of mere dogma and to give
explanations where they can. Thus a child can easily be cured of saying
"Between you and I" merely through the teacher's command, "Say _me_."
He can be cured of saying "Like I did" in the same way. He will of
course be on surer ground if he understands the reason. Only let it be
English grammar and not Latin grammar that is used. The reason why the
child should say "I am taller than he" is, if a reason must be given,
that _than_ is historically identical with _then_, not that "_quam_
takes the same case after it as before it."
If we could only keep our eyes steadily fixed on the goal and discard
formalism, tradition, and antiquated examinations, there is in the work
of the best infants' and elementary schools a broad enough base for us
to build a sound structure of English up to the University and beyond.
Perhaps some day a progressive University may try the experiment of an
English Arts Course in which the first part would consist solely of
Advanced Reading and Writing, and the second part of options between
English Philosophy, English Philology, English Poetics, or English
Criticism. It need not be any lower in standard than an Oxford Greats
course.
We could not well spare the scholars. On the contrary, those who
believe with me that English contains all things necessary to culture
will be most anxious to enlist for its service the finest scholarship
of the day. Some will think the fare provided in such a course as I
have outlined too rich in sugar or fat and wanting in the tougher
constituents which produce bone and muscle. It is essential to require
more and more precision and accuracy as the child passes through the
phases of adolescence. This was the real virtue of the old classical
training, and it is too often wanting on Modern Sides. We must
contemplate something very like the best of classical teaching applied
to English Classics for big boys and girls.
I write as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, brought up at the feet of
Gamaliel. A man like Robert Whitelaw loved the literature of Greece
and Rome with such devotion that its very forms were sacred to him.
A false quantity or a false concord was to him a personal affront:
it caused him physical pain. Accents and particles mattered to him
and so they mattered to us. There was a right and a wrong. We did not
understand why, but we knew and felt his scorn of anything careless or
superficial. He read Sophocles aloud with an intensity that at first
puzzled and then infected us. Occasionally, but all too rarely, it was
his task to do the same with Chaucer or Browning. Why not?
But at this point I labour with a sense of unreality. Is it possible
to capture for our language a tithe of that old classical fervour? We
have buried our Grammarian upon his peak, fronting the sunrise. He
settled _hoti's_ business. I have heard him lecture for an hour upon
the future sense of the optative with an enthusiasm that was drawn from
some pure source in the depths. Doubtless he survives in disciples. Is
it the mere mystery and power of the Word that inspires them? I will
not believe that it is any inherent virtue possessed by Propertius but
denied to Shelley that inspires the classical scholar. But where are
our inspired teachers of English? I have an impression of critical,
quizzical gentlemen, deeply learned in Elizabethan drama or Saxon
dialect, but all the same terribly mild. I cannot picture one of their
disciples seriously moved by a misplaced "and which" or an unrelated
participle in English. Something is missing.
There are thousands of genuine lovers of English literature scattered
up and down the country, people who feel the thrill of delight in
verbal beauty quite as keenly as any classical scholar. But they
want leaders and a voice. We suffer our fools too gladly in English
studies. Any lunatic is allowed to criticise, traduce, misinterpret
Dryden, Carlyle, Addison, even Shakespeare, as if they were our private
playthings. They are not. They are worthy of their pedestals of worship
just as much as Homer and Aristotle.
The issue of the War has established more firmly than ever the
predominance of the English language in the world. If our schools
would rise to their opportunity and raise English into a culture
worthy of its qualities there seems no reason why it should not become
the universal medium of civilisation for the world. The richness and
variety of its literature and the simplicity and flexibility of its
structure render it, as a language, amply sufficient. Whether this
is visionary or not, it is no longer safe for those who cherish the
humanities in education to rely upon the old impregnable position of
Latin and Greek. The world has received one of those secular shocks in
which tradition crumbles to dust.
AN ARTICLE ON PARTICLES
By ALICE MEYNELL
"_Inconquerable_"--BACON
A general good habit might long ago have been ruled for our national
literature in the use of two negatives--"un" or "in," and "less."
A good rule once made known, long ago, would surely have lasted.
We might set about it even yet, though with much to chastise. Let
us try. The fault of "un" and "in" is of long standing. That of a
misapplied "less" is probably quite modern. What I have to suggest is
an obvious enough correction, but the offence is broadcast, therefore
correction cannot surely be inopportune or importunate. For who is
there who does not give the teutonic "un" to the Latin or Romance word,
writing "unfortunate" or "ungracious"? Or who now is careful to write
"inconquerable"? Any man to-day would certainly write "unconquerable."
It may not be that Bacon is always consistent; nor is Landor, who had
something--but that something has proved altogether ineffectual--to
say on this question of good English. We must own the incorrect use of
the German particle to be the commonest thing in the world, but the
incorrect use of the Latin or Romantic derivative, on the other hand,
does not occur.
The Teutonic "un" comes more readily to the English pen than the Latin
"in," and thus is joined habitually to the wrong kind of adjective
and verb and adverb. Not only, moreover, to the Romantic word, but
also to the Greek. We have learnt to write "asymmetry," but not to
avoid "unsymmetrical." There is also a very frequent jumble, so that
"uncivil" appears in the same phrase with "incivility," and "unable"
with "inability," "undigested" with "indigestible," "ungrateful" with
"ingratitude"--but I need cite no more. It is worth noting that these
confusions are not due to a kind of reluctance in the use of "un" for
nouns. We have many nouns with the "un" (not otherwise to my purpose):
"unrest," "unbelief," "unfaith," "unhappiness," "untruth," "unthrift,"
"unskilfulness," and so forth.
Now I know well that the reader has been courteously waiting until I
should draw breath for a paragraph in order to say "_Undiscovered_:
Shakespeare." It is all too true. I can only repeat, murmuring,
"_Inconquerable_: Bacon."
There is nothing in English that we should prize more dearly than
our right negative particles of both derivations, and especially
our particle of German derivation in its right Teutonic place. That
"un" implies, encloses so much, denies so much, refuses so much,
point-blank, with a tragic irony that French, for example, can hardly
compass. Compare our all-significant "unloved," "unforgiven," with any
phrase of French. There are abysses, in those words, at our summons,
deep calling to deep, dreadful or tender passion, the thing and its
undoing locked together, grappled. But in order to keep these great
significances the "un" should not be squandered as we squander it. And
neither should the less closely embraced "in" be so neglected. It has
its right place and dignity and is, as it were, more deliberate. It is
worth while, furthermore, to enhance the value of both our negative
particles (one of them, of course, shared with French) by considering
how poor a negative that last-named tongue has often and often to use
for lack of a better; not even a particle, but a thing unfastened,
a weak separate word, a half-hearted denial--"_peu_." Let us try to
keep our "un" in its right place by considering how, for instance, it
makes of "undone" a word of incomparable tragedy, surpassing "defeated"
and "ruined" and all others of their kind. "Undone" has the purely
English faculty, moreover, of giving to a little familiar word a sudden
greatness, such greatness as leaps to Lear's "every inch." This was
found to be intranslatable when Rossi acted King Lear in Italian; he
had to speak the phrase in English. Wonderfully well furnished as
we are for all adventures, is it not then time that we reviewed and
revised our habits, and restored to their proper lineage the great
contemporary histories of our language by a right and left distribution
of the "in" and the "un"? Our incorrect ways were never standardized,
or they standardized themselves by precedent. No, it is all too late.
We shall never undo the habit now, or cease to be "unconscious" in our
custom.
But for the other particle--"the less"--there is hope or there might
be, but for Shakespeare's strange and slightly ambiguous "viewless." We
might at least check new coinings. "Less" is in the construction here
to be considered, though not in other combinations, fairly equivalent
to the Teutonic "without." It has great value. It also locks close
meanings with its word. But that word should be a noun, and not a verb.
Yet it is a verb at the present day, not only in hasty column after
column, but in page by deliberate page, and especially in stanza by
deliberate stanza. For no doubt the perfervid poets have spread that
fashion. You will find "relentless" scattered in modern verse, and
"quenchless" and "tireless" frequent. Keats, instigated indirectly if
not directly by Leigh Hunt, has "utterless." The misuse of "less" is
even somewhat more to be resisted than that of "un" because in the
case first named the grammatical construction of our English words
(and we have not too many laws of construction) is violated. And
beautiful words that are neglected for "quenchless" and "relentless"
pass out of use; the words that have "less" for their lawful negative
are cheapened; and writers of talent learn to dash and as it were to
gesticulate.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
GENERAL NOTES
We are glad to see that the Clarendon Press has published Mr. Percy
Simpson's edition of _Every Man in His Humour_, a pioneer volume to
the complete edition of Ben Jonson's Works, which the same editor,
in conjunction with Professor Herford, has been for many years
preparing. Their edition should, we think, be definitive (we use Sir
Eric's magical word with extreme caution for fear of provoking the
National Union of Textual Editors to down books and refuse to continue
their researches). A new edition of Ben Jonson's work is certainly
needed: Gifford, re-edited by Cunningham, is sadly inadequate; the
text is bad and the notes explain nothing that one wants to know.
One walks darkling through the _Discoveries_. Take Ben's remarks
about painting--they are Hermetic. What, for instance, does this
mean? "Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry
to picture.... Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other
elegancies." We shall indeed be grateful to the new editors if they
can tell us exactly how Eupompus gave splendour to art by numbers--and
other elegancies. The secret might be whispered along the galleries of
Burlington House.
* * * * *
Another interesting book that should soon, though there is no news of
its immediate arrival, be coming from the Clarendon Press is the third
volume of Mr. Saintsbury's _Caroline Poets_. The first two volumes
of this massive anthology opened up a whole province of literature
hitherto almost unknown to the general reader. In the last this great
work of excavation and exploration should be completed. With the
exception of Chamberlayne and the Matchless Orinda the Carolines of
Mr. Saintsbury's choice have been very obscure. In the last volume,
we understand, he intends to soar to the dizzy heights of eminence on
which Cleveland stands. A good critical edition of Cleveland will be
welcomed by all lovers of seventeenth-century literature. The early
editions of his works are a piratical sort of publication. Some of his
poems were, even in his own life-time, attributed to other writers,
notably his _Hermaphrodite_, which was fathered on Randolph, and which
he claimed as his own in an amusing little poem appended, later on,
to the stolen piece. And yet, in spite of Cleveland's claim to his
own property, Carew Hazlitt, in his reprint of Randolph, continues to
attribute the _Hermaphrodite_ to its wrongful owner. A very unnecessary
and supererogatory blunder.
* * * * *
While we are on the subject of the Caroline Poets we would like to
express a pious hope that some day, when we are all immensely rich,
the Clarendon Press, or some other great publishing institution, will
bring out a complete corpus of English poetry. More than a century has
elapsed since Chalmers issued his _English Poets_, and the book, in
spite of bad editing and very imperfect--indeed non-existent--critical
apparatus, is still an extremely useful one. It contains a complete
Gower, a complete Lydgate, a complete Hawes, and a complete Skelton.
The text of these older poets is indeed atrocious; but the fact remains
that they are there, reprinted and easily accessible in Chalmers's
stout volumes. For any study of the eighteenth century Chalmers is
invaluable; everything is in him, from the _Ruins of Rome_ to the
_Pleasures of Digestion_--or is it the _Art of Preserving Health_? A
well-edited Chalmers would be a work of immense value. And if the
Clarendon Press would go on, in the same edition, from the Carolines to
the Georgians and back, through the Elizabethans and Tudors as far as
the Brutians (the contemporaries of our first Trojan king), we should
be for ever grateful. But before that comes to pass we must all, as has
already been hinted, be immensely rich
* * * * *
A rather battered Purchas's _Pilgrim_ minus its title-page came into
our hands recently. It appears to be the second edition, but the only
actual indication of date that we can discover is to be found in the
following passage, on which by a happy chance we lighted while turning
over the pages of the book. "Sultan Achmet is now, Anno 1613, five and
twentie yeares old: of good stature, strong and active more than any of
his Court. He hath three thousand Concubines." We cannot help believing
that someone had been pulling the Reverend Samuel Purchas's leg on the
subject of young Sultan Achmet's harem.
* * * * *
The other day we bought a charming little first edition of _Candide_
(1759). The title-page is amusing: "Candide, ou l'Optimisme, traduit
de l'Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph"; no publisher or place, but the
date MDCCLIX. It was often Voltaire's custom not to acknowledge his
publications till they were a success. _Zadig_ (1749) is similarly
without author's or publisher's name.
* * * * *
Perhaps some of our readers may be able to throw some light on a
curious and interesting book, _Specimens of Macaronic Poetry_,
published by J. Richard Beckley in 1831. The volume contains epics
written on a single letter, like that which begins:
Cattorum canimus certemina clara canumque,
Odes in this style:
Emma! fer chartam, calamos, et inkum,
And the old Scottish Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, of which the first
stanza runs:
I Master Andro Kennedy,
A matre quando sum vocatus,
Begotten with some incuby,
Or with some freir infatuatus;
In faith I can nocht tell redely,
Unde aut ubi fui natus,
But in truth I trow trewely.
Quod sum diabolus incarnatus.
No author's name is given and we have had no time or opportunity to
make researches. But perhaps, as we have suggested, some of our readers
may be able to give us the information desired.
* * * * *
We were fortunate in recently securing a very fine copy of _Certaine
Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke,
written in his Youth and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney_,
Henry Seyle, 1633. It is high time that a new edition of these very
interesting and, by moments, very great poems was published. Grosart's
reprint is faulty and is, furthermore, practically unprocurable. As a
matter of fact a new edition was, we understand, in process of being
prepared by a very able young scholar of Christ Church, when the war
broke out and the would-be editor was unhappily killed. Mr. Rose had,
we believe, made considerable researches and had even discovered a
certain amount of new material, but he had not committed the results
of his labours to paper; so that the possible new edition of Greville
has perished with him. If the rest of Greville's works could be edited
as well as his Life of Sidney has been by Mr. Nowell Smith we should be
very well pleased. But the prospect of getting any new edition at all
seems now extremely unlikely.
RECENT ADDITIONS TO LIBRARIES
Some early printed books of considerable interest have recently
been added to the Library of the British Museum, among them a copy
of Sannazaro's _Arcadia_, Venice, 1502, in a contemporary binding
of boards covered with designs printed from woodblocks. _Terentius:
Comediæ cum interpretatione Donati_, Baptista de Tortis, Venice,
1482. _Elegantiolae_, by Augustinus Datus, produced at Verona by
an unidentified printer in 1483. _Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartit_,
Ratdolt, Venice, 1484. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris: _Les
exposicions des euungilles en romant_, Antoine Neyret, Chambéry, 1484.
(Only four fully authenticated incunabula of Chambéry are known, of
which this is the earliest and rarest. It is printed in large Gothic
type and adorned with woodcuts. The Museum possesses specimens of
the second, third, and fourth Chambéry books, and this is a perfect
copy of the first.) _Jo: Balbus Januensis_: Catholicon, Jean du Pré,
Lyon, 1492. Several examples of early Spanish printing have also been
presented, as well as two first editions of Swinburne, _Laus Veneris_,
Moxon, 1866, and _Dolores_, Hotten, 1867, with "The Devil's Duel: a
letter to the editor of _The Examiner_," an attack on Robert Buchanan,
written by Swinburne under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and
printed for private circulation in 1875.
ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is
unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers,
to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The
collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance
of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune
to find a copy of the extremely scarce _Lyric Poems_ of Philip Ayres
(1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of
luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay
pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items
from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for
early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested
to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late
Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of
October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting
seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early
printed books.
* * * * *
Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite.
_Barnabee's Journall_, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced
at £48, and _Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture_, 1640, at
£25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books
at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in
the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of
Dekker's _Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London_ (1631), at £14. A
copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of
Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page,
is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another
book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's
_History of the Civil Wars_, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints
of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the
eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio
_Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the Reigns of
Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I._, printed by J. Hughs
and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century
books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's _Carmen Deo Nostro_ in
the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of
Herbert's _Temple_, and a first edition of _Hesperides, or the works,
both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq._, £140.
* * * * *
It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can
always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting
novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the
others early issues, is offered for £37 10_s._
On the other hand, a first edition of _Friendship's Garland_ can be
bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10_s._ 6_d._, and a first edition of
Buchanan's _Book of Orm_ for half-a-crown.
People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from
the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10_s._ and two
first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece.
A first edition of _Trilby_ (1895) can be purchased for 7_s._ 6_d._
at Messrs. Dobell's, and of _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) at 18_s._ _Evan
Harrington_, in the twelve original parts of _Once a Week_, is offered
at 25_s._ at the Serendipity Shop.
* * * * *
Mr. Everard Meynell has a curiosity of nineteenth-century literature
for sale in the shape of Coventry Patmore's _Odes_, dated 1868, but
never published, for the following reason: "Early in 1868 he had
written nine odes, which in the April of that year he printed for
private circulation. Afterwards, keenly mortified at the coldness of
their reception by friends, he made a fire in the hall and cast on it
(as he thought) all the copies remaining in his hand, while he calmly
sat and watched them burn. A friend, who had heard of the intended
bonfire, persuaded his daughter Emily to abstract a copy or two, and
these, with the few which had been sent to friends, were all that
remained of the edition." The price of this soul saved from the burning
is £8 10_s._, and a first edition of _The Unknown Eros_ (1878), with
inscription from the author to Richard Garnett, is priced £2 10_s._
* * * * *
Having recently picked up cheap a third edition (1872) of FitzGerald's
_Omar Khayyám_ (Quaritch, 1872), we are interested to see that a copy
of the fourth edition (1879) is for sale at three guineas. We suspect
ourselves of having made a bargain, but are not yet quite sure.
* * * * *
Messrs. Dobell have an interesting collection of first editions of
works by Victor Hugo, most of them presentation copies, with Hugo's
autograph inscription, to Mademoiselle Louise Jung.
A. L. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--On the assumption--I hope justified--that you propose to have a
"Correspondence Column" in your paper, I write to plead that you should
devote some of your attention to the subject of what is, I believe,
called "book production." That your guidance as to the contents of
books will be valuable I do not doubt; but I feel that an organ such as
yours might be of considerable service if it would determine to devote
some consideration to their physical form.
It may fairly be said, I think, that, as a body, English publishers
produce their books as respectably as any publishers in the world.
The Germans produce--or produced before the war--a larger number of
agreeable-looking cheap books, and a larger number of finely-printed
and bound editions _de luxe_, such as were specialised in by firms
like Langen of Munich. But the ordinary German book of commerce was
frequently very shoddy and the pseudo-romantic "Albert Memorial"
tradition had never been entirely shaken off. The French presses issue
many books which are a delight to possess. Their tradition is an old
one. It can be traced through the delicate eighteenth-century editions,
with their unequalled engravings, back to the Estiennes and the Torys,
who were infinitely superior to the printers of their time. Throughout
the last fifty years French publishers and "societies of bibliophiles"
have issued editions of poetry and of old rarities exquisite in their
taste: beautifully printed on the best paper and never eccentric.
But the ordinary French novel or political book, printed in blunt
unattractive type and "bound" in yellow paper covers, which fall in
pieces at a touch, is certainly not a model that anyone would wish to
copy. Much may be said against our wood-pulp paper and our common cloth
bindings; but, on the whole, we certainly clothe most books in garments
more durable than the books deserve; and the same thing holds good of
America, though there the types and bindings are, as a rule, uglier
than ours.
The fact remains that not one book out of twenty that we produce can
be called beautiful, and that fifteen out of twenty are indisputably
ugly. That the "public" will ever demand an improvement is a fantastic
dream. The ordinary reader likes a nice book when he sees it, but will
never make an "effective demand" on his own account. We have to rely on
the initiative, largely disinterested, of (1) the publishers, (2) the
authors, and (3) the critics.
Publishers, we know, must earn their living like other men; their
chief attention must be given to procuring saleable "matter." But they
have to get their books printed, and they have to get them bound; and
while they are about it they would lose nothing, and we should all
gain something, if they would see to it that the work was done by
someone who cared about types and was anxious to make the best of the
materials available at a specified price. Authors, again, may often
be heard complaining that they do not like the look of their books;
but does any author (except Mr. Bernard Shaw and a few bibliophiles
who patently supervise the job themselves) ever take any steps to
secure a "production" of which he would approve? Finally, though the
critics occasionally praise a book for being "beautifully printed" or
tastefully "bound," not one of them seems to make a regular practice
of commenting on the physical design of books--which, after all, is an
ingredient in our civilisation just as much as the design of cottages.
I should, as I say, be relieved to hear that the MERCURY, from which we
all hope so much, intends to "do its bit" in this connection.--Yours
faithfully,
ORIGINAL SUBSCRIBER.
[We think our correspondent is a little hard on English publishers.
Some of them, though a minority, seldom produce an unattractive book;
and the book-production of them all is on a higher average level than
it was ten years ago, or has ever been in our time. But we agree that
there is room for improvement, and scope for commendation or the
reverse; and we purpose in our next issue to institute a regular page
of "Book Production Notes," which we hope will give our correspondent
satisfaction.--ED. L.M.]
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
REYNARD THE FOX. By JOHN MASEFIELD. Heinemann. 5_s._ net.
It is an agreeable thing to find a man whose work has been overpraised
writing better than he has ever done before. Mr. Masefield's earlier
narrative poems were panegyrised for their vices: their unreal plots,
their bad psychology, their sentimentality, their jog-trot metres. He;
wiser in his generation, appears to have realised that the best parts
of them were the "descriptions": details of vivid imagery, pictures of
scenes and brief incidents; and that where he was dealing with a person
he was at his best when the person was alone and in one self-centred
mood. The picture of the widow alone in her cottage was worth all that
incredible plot in the _Widow in the Bye Street_; the public-house
scene and the birds following the plough remain in the memory when Saul
Kane's spiritual struggles have faded away; Dauber was little more than
a means of arriving at that peaceful entry when the ship trod the quiet
waters of the harbour like a fawn; and landscapes were the only excuse
for _The Daffodil Fields_. Mr. Masefield (who very likely realises
that _Biography_, a poem that will not die, is the best thing he has
done) seems to have discovered his bent. In _Reynard the Fox_ there is
only one leading character, the fox, and he is shown in no complicated
relationships. It is the description of a chase and of a fight for
life, and we could not hope to see it better done. Mr. Masefield's
faults of writing are still evident. Lines like
He, too (a year before), had had
A zest for going to the bad
might have come out of one of the numerous parodies which have been
perpetrated at his expense; he is unscrupulous in rhyming, he takes
pot-shots with words, and he is occasionally grossly sentimental. But
none of these faults is bad enough in this poem to get in the way. It
is a poem to read again as soon as one has forgotten it, and it will
give equal enjoyment every time.
The opening section, which describes the meet, is a little too
drawn out; too much time is taken up with describing a multitude of
characters, once seen and then forgotten. But no Dutch painter ever
gave a better idea of the bustle about an inn than Mr. Masefield does,
and the approach of the Hunt is done deliciously. We would spare little
of the long description of the hounds who come round the corner in
front of the red-coats:
Intent, wise, dipping, trotting, straying,
Smiling at people, shoving, playing,
Nosing to children's faces, waving
Their feathery sterns and all behaving,
and then draw round Tom Dansey on the green in front of the Cock and
Pye:
Arrogant, Daffodil, and Queen
Closest, but all in little space.
Some lolled their tongues, some made grimace,
Yawning, or tilting nose in quest,
All stood and looked about with zest,
They were uneasy as they waited.
Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is,
unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into
anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the
way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of
earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to
follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country.
But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely
interesting us in the fox without (as a rule) making him any less an
animal. When he finds one earth and then another stopped the reader's
feelings are what they are when a hero of romance walks blind along
the plank, and it is with an immense relief that, in the end, we find
the fox (at the expense of another) escapes. The final description of
the rested fox's nocturnal hunt and the hounds going home is admirable
fresh painting. Here is the close:
Then the moon came quiet and flooded full
Light and beauty on clouds like wool,
On a feasted fox at rest from hunting,
In the beech-wood grey where the brocks were grunting.
* * * * *
The beech-wood grey rose dim in the night,
With moonlight fallen in pools of light,
The long dead leaves on the ground were rimed,
A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed.
It is just the end of such a day.
THE SUPERHUMAN ANTAGONISTS. By SIR WILLIAM WATSON. Hodder & Stoughton.
6_s._ net.
Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid
violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do
him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as
grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it;
and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but
uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster
Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and
Ahriman) we find lines like
Legible haply in that brow benign.
Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons
With the huge monster's dragon armature,
Out of the pregnant and parturient dust
Large hereditaments of bliss and woe,
sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what
Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can
be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite
of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his
language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems
are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape
commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would
not have been poorer had none of them been written.
MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. By ARTHUR WALEY. Allen & Unwin.
3_s._ and 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Waley's 170 _Chinese Poems_ (Constable) was one of the most
memorable books of recent years; and, what is more, was instantly
recognised as such. Even those of us (and we can certainly claim to
be a majority) who do not know Chinese could tell at sight that they
were accurate beyond the wont of translations. They were obviously
beautiful poems in the original tongue, and they became beautiful
English poems through Mr. Waley, who has handled unrhymed verse as
skilfully as anyone alive or dead, with a variety of rhythm and a flow
of sound correspondent to sense, which is amazing in translations. The
new collection should not be missed by anyone who has the old one;
those who have not should get the old one (which contains a historical
sketch, and which, on the whole, covers better poems) before this one.
In his second collection Mr. Waley still devotes most of his space to
Po Chu'i, really a greater poet than Li Po, of whom we have heard so
much. The poems from him are again very diverse in subject and mood;
and the more we see of him the more his personality attracts us. We
may quote two shorter examples. One is _The Cranes_, which has the
terseness, the melancholy, the directness of the best of Verlaine:
The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden boy is leading the cranes home.
Po Chu'i's mild humour is seen in _The Lazy Man's Song_ (A.D. 811):
I have got patronage, but am too lazy to use it;
I have got land, but am too lazy to farm it.
My house leaks; I am too lazy to mend it.
My clothes are torn; I am too lazy to darn them.
I have got wine, but I am too lazy to drink;
So it's just the same as if my cellar were empty.
I have got a harp, but am too lazy to play;
So it's just the same as if it had no strings.
My wife tells me there is no more bread in the house;
I want to bake, but am too lazy to grind.
My friends and relatives write me long letters;
I should like to read them, but they're such a bother to open.
I have always been told that Chi Shu-yeh
Passed his whole life in absolute idleness.
But he played the harp and sometimes transmuted metals.
So even _he_ was not so lazy as I.
The finest thing in the book is perhaps Ch'u Yuan's _The Great
Summons_. That is too long to quote; but we cannot resist Mr. Waley's
version of a brief lyric by Li Po, _Self-Abandonment_:
I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few.
These translations may be not without their influence on English
poetry; and though the Chinese spirit is not ours, the example of their
exactitude and economy will not be thrown away.
COLLECTED POEMS OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
In a note Lord Alfred Douglas observes that all great art is founded
on morality; and that "good poetry is made up of two things: style
and sincerity." These apophthegms are brief and unelaborate but
indisputable. Unfortunately he proceeds to say that poetry has never
sunk so low as now, and that "there is not a good poet among the lot,"
which suggests that he does not know where to look for poetry. He is
out of touch with the time, and it is unfortunate for him. Again and
again as we read his collection we feel that he is the last of the
pre-Raphaelites, clothing genuine feelings in a faded vesture, and
images and words gone stale. He has improved. His earliest poems might
well have been left out; his latest include several sonnets (notably
that beginning "I have been profligate of happiness") which have
been, and deserve to be, in the anthologies. But the last exactitude
of statement he seldom, as yet, has achieved; and his feelings about
persons come out much more strongly and convincingly than his feelings
about Nature or the eternal. This edition has a portrait.
FORGOTTEN PLACES. By IAN MACKENZIE. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
In the last four years many young men have died who would have helped
to make our age--as it will in any case be--glorious in song. Brooke
and Flecker and Edward Thomas had at least partly expressed themselves;
others, such as Wyndham Tennant and Julian Grenfell, had written one
or two perfect poems and justified the muse; but there were some,
whose talents only their friends knew, who might have ranked with the
first of these, and died before they had outgrown their boyhood. Ian
Mackenzie was one of these. He was in the H.L.I.; had a breakdown
in England (he had outgrown his strength) and died of pneumonia on
Armistice night, after hearing that peace had come. He was just twenty.
The present volume (his second) gathers up what was left over from his
first, and is prefaced by a memoir by Arthur Waugh, every word of which
will be echoed by those who knew Mackenzie, one of the handsomest,
sunniest, most candid boys in the world. He was twenty; and as yet
too young to hammer into form the large visions of his precocious
imagination, and the queer thoughts that engaged his intellect. The
reader who knew him will see in every line the promise of a great
maturity; the reader who did not know him will probably fail to see
more than a tumble of confused thoughts and images obscurely worded
in rhythms that are often ungainly. But even he may be arrested here
and there by a phrase beyond the common range of eighteen or nineteen.
There are several such in _Eyes_:
Eyes swim out like strange blue fishes
Recovering beauty from the dark.
And several also in the poem which arises out of the childlike
reflection:
What a strange marvel is the telephone.
The whole of the second section of _Friends_ is clear and passionate,
and there are lines at the beginning in which he makes the comparison
of a thinker with a child looking at pebbles in a pool, which are of
the last simplicity and completeness. He oscillated between an extreme
analytical habit and a profound love for ordinary things. The first
mood may be illustrated by his strange poem on Words:
I watch you talking, catching mouthfuls of air,
Which you twist around till you throw them out
In various shapes, such that each is clear.
Patterns of sound: some soft, some you shout;
Some are round and soft or dimpled and thin,
Some writhe and quiver fantastic about,
Some slip through the lips, and turn whispering in,
Till the waves of silence shut them out.
So, if we could not hear any sound,
But could see air moving like waves in a pond,
And the shape of every word had been found
Till they faded away in the air beyond,
And words came twisted in breaths of air,
You could tell each one by a careful stare.
The other is naïvely expressed in his phrase:
There is as much of beauty in one breath
As there could be upon the largest star!
He was immature; but he need not have troubled to cross-examine himself
about
These three last years of fraudulent
Subconscious plagiarism,
For there never was a person so unable to be anything but natural.
A CHALLENGE. By MAITLAND HARDYMAN, Lt.-Col., D.S.O., M.C. Allen &
Unwin. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
Col. Hardyman was a young civilian soldier who believed in peace,
was on the committee of the Union of Democratic Control, and died at
twenty-three at the head of his regiment. "I have never seen or heard
of a man," says Mr. N. H. Romanes, in his introduction, "to whom not
merely a lie, even a harmless one, but any kind of misrepresentation,
was so abhorrent." He wrote his own epitaph thus: "He died as he lived,
fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe
in." The verse of the man described here cannot but be interesting. But
it would be an affectation to call it poetry. Genuine feeling often
comes through, but in an amateur way. The nearest thing to good poetry
in the book is _Via Crucis_, which begins:
Lord Jesus of the trenches,
Calm, 'midst the bursting shell,
We met with Thee in Flanders,
We walked with Thee in hell;
O'er Duty's blood-soaked tillage
We strewed our glorious youth;
Yes, we indeed have known Thee,
For us the Cross is Truth.
POEMS OF THE DAWN AND THE NIGHT. By HENRY MOND. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._
6_d._ net.
"Youth's a stuff will not endure," and in a year or two Mr. Mond will
probably not be talking of storming the battlements of Heaven, and will
not care to begin a poem with
An aged filthy hag, with bloated face,
Upon her haunches, wrapped in bloody rags,
There squats Bellona--splashed with entrails--
--words which do not really horrify us, and did not really horrify him.
He shows certain gifts. There is observation at the end of _The Silver
Corpse_, and in parts of _The Fawn_. But he strains after effects and
misses them. Honest vision and honest feeling may be later discoveries.
He would do well, for a time, to subject himself to a strict discipline
formally.
NAPOLEON. By HERBERT TRENCH. Oxford University Press. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is a cheap reprint of Mr. Trench's play, previously published at
10_s._ 6_d._ net, and recently acted by the Stage Society. With the
exception of _The Requiem of the Archangels_ and one or two other poems
it is certainly the finest thing he has done. Unfortunately the finest
things in it are probably those which are least suitable to the theatre.
ATHENIAN DAYS. By F. NOËL BYRON. Elkin Mathews. 2_s._ 6_d._ and 1_s._
6_d._ net.
Mr. Byron seems to have read the classics, and is obviously fond of
Greece. The unfortunate moon has been compared to many things; this
time it is a beckoning courtesan. There are few notable blemishes about
Mr. Byron's poems; but he never ends them properly, and it is seldom
clear why he begins them.
ANY SOLDIER TO HIS SON. By GEORGE WILLIS. Allen & Unwin. 1_s._ net.
A volume of lively verses, some of them in the military vernacular. The
speaker in the title poem, after long service in the trenches, sums up
his feats thus:
I never kissed a French girl and I never killed a Hun,
I never missed an issue of tobacco, pay, or rum,
I never made a friend and yet I never lacked a chum;
I never borrowed money, and I never lent--but once.
Not a bad record. The conventional poems at the end are competently
written; "Bed" has something of the neatness, and something of the
allusiveness, of Prior.
THE STATION PLATFORM AND OTHER POEMS. By MARGARET MACKENZIE. Sands,
2_s._ 6_d._ net.
"These Verses are not all sad--indeed, I hope that in a very real sense
none of them are that." They are poems of sorrow and consolation,
decently worded and written with a sincerity and simplicity that is
sometimes moving. The author has a habit of being _too_ simple. It
takes some time to recover from a beginning like "I think maybe the
souls of men are bulbs."
ECHOES FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY. By J. G. LEGGE. Constable. 2_s._ 6_d._
net.
Mr. Legge has long been known as one of the most competent and
comprehensive of the many who in our time have tried their hands on
the Epigrams of the Greek Anthology. This selection is based on that
given in Mr. Mackail's excellent little book. Mr. Legge says that many
of his versions were made on the top of a municipal tram. He must be a
self-possessed man. He never touches the level of inspiration reached
in Lang's or in Shelley's few translations from the Anthology, but no
translator, so far as we know, has done so many so well. He is always
smooth, neat, perspicuous; his principal lack is music. He gives what
is perhaps the best extant version of the epitaph on the dead of
Thermopylæ.
NOVELS
JEREMY. By HUGH WALPOLE. Cassell. 7_s._ net.
THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN. By F. BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 7_s._ net.
POOR RELATIONS. By COMPTON MACKENZIE. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE TENDER CONSCIENCE. By BOHUN LYNCH. Secker. 7_s._ net.
SEPTEMBER. By FRANK SWINNERTON. Methuen. 7_s._ net.
TIME AND ETERNITY. By GILBERT CANNAN. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.
RICHARD KURT. By STEPHEN HUDSON. Secker. 7_s._ net.
The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms
of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who
have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail.
The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers
concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is
within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose.
Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good
deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are
they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up
to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a
popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd
of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in
time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening
to the English novel? Is anything happening to it?
It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development
or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate
one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned
by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its
extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his
hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion,
conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final
medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's _Jeremy_
is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why
he should have written it.
Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game,
searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate
under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him
with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached
him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily hurt her,
said:
"Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?"
"I don't care," he answered gruffly.
"It isn't any fun without you." She paused and added: "Would you mind
if I stayed here too?"
"I'd rather you played," he said; and yet he was comforted by her,
determined, as he was, that she should never know it!
"I'd rather stay," she said, and then gazed with that melancholy
stare through her large spectacles, that always irritated Jeremy, out
across the garden.
"I'm all right," he said again; "only my stocking tickles, and I
can't get at it--it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate
the Dean's Ernest?"
A not too exigent reader might still fail to be surprised or delighted
by that passage or by a hundred like it, and of such passages the book
is made up. If Mr. Walpole continues the child's career on the same
scale his followers will groan; and yet perhaps as Jeremy grew older
he might grow more interesting. For it is unlikely that, except in
rare cases, a grown man will remember enough of childhood to make the
material of a long novel. And the character of even the most remarkable
child is not, after all, sufficiently broad, sufficiently varied, to
bear the weight of this exhaustive description.
Mr. Brett Young's less unusual design gives him better opportunities
for the use of his talent, but not often the opportunities his talent
deserves. He came into notice a little later than that younger
generation which we have mentioned, and in some ways his gifts are
superior to those of any novelist of his own age. But it is a matter
for doubt whether they are strictly the gifts of a novelist. In the
row of his books, all sincere, all well written, all with obvious
merits, the best is undeniably his account of the East African
Campaign, _Marching on Tanga_, the second his collection of poems,
_Five Degrees South_. In these two, landscape and his delight in it had
an uncontested supremacy. In his novels up to now that supremacy has
been contested by the characters, who have, however, faded away in the
end against the background like puffs of smoke. This certainly allowed
the author's best talent to be displayed at advantage, and yet it is a
doubtful recommendation of a novel to say that the persons in it can
hardly be noticed.
In _The Young Physician_ the persons are not so unobtrusive, and the
hero, if we had not been aware of him before, would have forced himself
on our attention by committing manslaughter in the last pages of the
book. He does, however, live and move before that, and the characters
around him at home, at school, at the university where he studies
medicine, are living and moving human beings. But the more clearly we
see Edwin and his surroundings the less, very unfortunately, we see
of those poetical qualities to which we have grown accustomed in Mr.
Brett Young. Certain of the human relations are indeed very well drawn.
Edwin's love for his mother and his grief at her death make moving
passages. The episode in which he is drawn closer to his lonely father
is excellently done. But the second part of the book, where Mr. Brett
Young voluntarily confines himself in North Bromwich, is not, on the
whole, a distinguished piece of work. Here the author is without his
hills, trees, and clouds, and is compelled to exert himself in the
observation and delineation of character. But though he does his work
here cleanly and honestly, as we have a right to expect from him, he
does it lifelessly and without enthusiasm. "W. G.," Boyce, even Rosie
Beaucaire are alive and credible, but it is hard for the reader not
to suspect that Mr. Brett Young takes but little interest in them and
impossible, with that suspicion in his mind, to take much interest in
them himself. Much the best part of the book is the description of the
journey made by Edwin and his father to the deserted mining village in
the Mendips, which had been the father's home. Here Mr. Brett Young has
his opportunity for description and uses it well in a dozen passages.
And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the
scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts
to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of
the highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip:
the black bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of
Callow, and a bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it
might well have claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that
swam beyond in the grey sea. In the light of his new enthusiasms
Edwin found it more impressive than any scene that he remembered;
more inspiring, though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy
plain of the Severn's upper waters that he had seen so many times
from Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and mightier in
that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in water
within the memory of man. And more than all this ... far more ...
they were the home of his fathers.
This quotation does not indicate, a dozen such could not exhaust, the
grace and charm of the episode in the Mendips. Here, perhaps, for a
moment in the midst of an unsatisfactory book Mr. Brett Young has
attained a higher level of achievement than ever before. His persons
do not here fade into the landscape, but rather blend with it into one
picture, of which they are as essential a part as the hills and clouds.
There is still, it must be confessed, a certain lack of vigour in the
presentation, but if the author could compose a whole book in this
manner it would be a very fine and remarkable performance. Perhaps he
may still do so. It would be very rash to decide at this moment that
the novel is not the form of art which he ought to pursue. But even
if we reserve judgment on this point, there can be no doubt that the
scheme of _The Young Physician_ is in any case not well adapted to his
particular gifts.
Mr. Compton Mackenzie, however, who invented and popularised this
kind of novel, has, in his latest production, thought fit to drop it.
It was indeed desirable, after the unfortunate affair of _Sylvia and
Michael_, that he should attempt to break new ground; but we think that
many of his admirers will read _Poor Relations_ in a mood of pleasure
mingled with dismay. One critic observed of _Guy and Pauline_ that the
future of the English novel was, to a quite considerable extent, in
Mr. Mackenzie's hands. But the future of the English novel does not
really lie in the direction of rattling books for railway journeys,
where humour is derived from cows, comic clergymen, and an overwhelming
hair-wash. Those who fixed Mr. Mackenzie with solemn expressions of
expectation on the ground of _Carnival_ and _Sinister Street_ will
probably be hard put to it to know what to make of this romping and
boisterous piece of work. It contains little more of what the author
has been praised for than his vitality--which was much diminished in
_Sylvia and Michael_--and his verbal ingenuity. But it does show high
spirits and an eye not blind to those obvious humorous effects, such
as bad wine, mischievous and inquisitive children, the nervous author
with his secretary, and so forth, which when they are whole-heartedly
embraced are, after all, still humorous. If the future of the English
novel really is in Mr. Mackenzie's hands and if he continues in his
present mood, the English novel is going to have a queer time of
it. But if he has done nothing else, he has proved himself free of
priggishness.
Among these novelists only two, Mr. Swinnerton and Mr. Lynch, much
concern themselves with what was once an urgent topic of conversation,
with the business, namely, of giving the novel shape and compactness.
This, it was at one time announced, was the direction in which English
fiction was moving, and perhaps it is still the most significant
movement, though it is accidentally a little veiled at present. But
Mr. Swinnerton, who is a novelist pure and simple, who follows no
extravagant theory, has no doctrinaire axe to grind, seems bent on
making shipwreck of his powers. Some novels can be written, as was
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, in six weeks. But Mr. Swinnerton has not
yet written a novel like _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, nor does it appear
probable that he will do so. He seems to have fallen into the habit
of producing a cross between a good book and "the commercial article"
in good time for the autumn publishing season once a year. Thus are
the hopes raised by _Nocturne_ disappointed; and those who were
disconcerted but cheerful last year under the stroke administered by
_Shops and Houses_ will possibly falter in despair this year under
the more poignant blow of _September_. It is the theme of a beautiful
woman, whose placid life does not flower into passion until she is
nearing middle age. Cherry Mant, who hardly hurts Marian Forster by
tampering with the affections of her good fellow of a husband, wounds
her deeply by making off with her youthful lover, Nigel Sinclair; and
both acts of rapine are cleverly introduced by a silly joke about the
name of a brand of cigarettes. It is true: Mr. Swinnerton knows his
business. And if he has not the final fusing fire of genius, he has
talent in great quantities, experience, and knowledge and cleverness.
He has learnt his art, but rather than apply his learning he gives
us once a year the irritating phantom of a good book. His theme and
his conception of its treatment are excellent. But he will not pursue
sufficiently deeply his researches into character, and unless he can
resign himself to missing the season now and again, he will be lost to
the English novel. His is not one of those talents that shine in rash
and careless brilliance. It requires intensive labour to make the best
of it.
The same judgment applies with equal force to Mr. Lynch's talent. The
difference between him and Mr. Swinnerton is that he has taken the
trouble to make the best he can of his theme, which is exiguous and yet
sufficient. The story turns on Jimmy Guise's gradual discovery of his
wife's worthlessness; and the hasty reader might complain that in a
short book Mr. Lynch has spent a great deal of time over a very small
matter. But those who range through contemporary fiction, anxious to
be hopeful, will be more interested in the care which he has spent
on every facet of the tale. The device, by which Jimmy is at once
presented, full length and in detail, to the reader, while Blanche is
gradually discovered, is one of those solid and sufficient inventions
which immediately command respect. The exact and measured discovery
of her worthlessness takes place by slow, inexorable degrees which
show that the author has never once relaxed his vigilance over his
composition. There are, it is true, irrelevancies even in so short a
work. Jessie Carruthers was not really necessary as a foil to Blanche.
The "New Department," though it is deliciously sketched, takes too
prominent a place. But these irrelevancies do not noticeably distort
the general scheme, and are in fact probably the result of Mr. Lynch's
unconscious recognition that his plot was a little too slender for even
so brief a novel. But, in spite of this initial difficulty, _The Tender
Conscience_ is a very creditable and satisfactory performance and gives
grounds for looking forward with much interest to Mr. Lynch's future
development.
The novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. Stephen Hudson are of the
sort in which an attempt is made to simulate distinction by gratuitous
eccentricity. Some painters, in order to improve the landscapes with
which nature has provided them, screw up their eyes until the scene
before them runs into a confused blur. Mr. Cannan and Mr. Hudson
make this grimace before the spectacle of life. It is a fashion like
another, but it has less usefulness and, we imagine, less durability
than the novel of adolescence.
Mr. Cannan's book contains a gentleman named Perekatov with a "massive
Jewish face, thick, sensitive lips, a heavy blue chin, and tragic,
short-sighted eyes," another gentleman named Stephen Lawrie, whose
characteristics are not so obvious, and a young lady named Valérie
du Toit, who appears to be the incarnation of all that Mr. Cannan
considers glorious. The thesis of the story, so far as we have been
able to discern it in the gyrations of these and other characters, is
that the true England was not in the war, but sat unheeded, forgotten,
alone, in a little garret until the fighting was over. Mr. Cannan is
plainly dissatisfied about something, but he lacks a brain sufficiently
clear to make the reader understand what it is or what he wishes done.
Meanwhile he creates unreal scenes of physical and mental misery and
squalor through which the stoutest hearted could not drag themselves
unyawning or undepressed. Their yawns and their depression are, it is
true, in some sort a tribute to Mr. Cannan's powers. He creates these
scenes with a certain vigour and finish, but his qualities will be for
ever wasted unless he can raise himself out of his present state of
aimless gloom.
Mr. Hudson, perhaps even more than Mr. Cannan, has forgotten the
limitations imposed on him by his material, which is life. In this
story of Richard Kurt, his shallow and philandering wife, Elinor, and
his crafty young mistress, Virginia, he seems to suppose that nothing
more than his bare word is needed to carry off impossible events
and unnatural psychology. But the novelist's task is not so easy as
this. He cannot secure originality by willing it or by producing an
unexpected situation out of the void. The unusual situation must be
justified, not only by itself, but by all that has preceded it. The
novel effect which is obtained by suddenly altering a character already
defined is below childishness. As for the rest, this is a tale of the
idle and indigent rich and their experiments in adultery. Richard
Kurt appears to be a perfectly worthless person, so irritating in his
sins and weaknesses, that it is easy to understand the feelings of
his disagreeable father and his frivolous, selfish, restless wife.
Virginia, unfortunately, does not in a strict sense, exist. The maiden,
whose one desire it is to be seduced without appearing to consent or
even to be aware of the incident, may live somewhere in the case-books
of the pathologists; but Mr. Hudson has not delivered her from that
prison-house. He tells us that such was her behaviour and such her
motives, but the reader involuntarily declines to accept the assertion.
Nor is it likely that the reader would much care if it were true.
OVER AND ABOVE. By J. E. GURDON. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is a curiously naïve and artless story of the adventures of an
airman, as seen through the eyes of one Warton, whom we meet crossing
to France for the first time and leave going back to England on
transfer to home service, with a Military Cross and two bars. It is
written with evident knowledge and covers most of the typical incidents
in an airman's life at the front. It is written, too, with complete
sincerity, and it is easy to discern the author's personality behind
the speeches of his characters and his own asides. Yet for all this it
is hardly a success, hardly so convincing or informing as a number of
books that have been built on a much slighter foundation of first-hand
knowledge. The fights described are not clear or lucid, the persons
introduced never become real. All this goes to show that both some
natural gift for, and some practice in, literary composition are
necessary for any book as well as experience of the life it depicts.
THE NEW DECAMERON. By VARIOUS AUTHORS. Blackwell. 6_s._ net.
_The New Decameron_ is a fascinating title which covers a disappointing
book. The greatness of the original Decameron springs, after all, in
the first place from the extraordinary beauty of the introduction,
which sets the reader in a proper state of mind for the stories that
follow and which lingers with him ever afterwards if he reads a story
here and there at random. But the state of mind produced by the setting
here, in which a miscellaneous collection of rather disagreeable
persons is becalmed in mid-Channel in an excursion steamer, by no means
recalls the magic of the Tuscan garden. The stories vary greatly in
quality, but none of them is entitled to be considered very seriously.
The best would make pleasant patches in our magazines, and the worst
would be bad anywhere. The jokes at the expense of German dullness
in the "Professor's Tale" are made with neatness and point. _The
Stone House Affair_ is not a bad detective story. _The Upper Room_ is
a decadent effort of a somewhat antiquated kind, but it is not too
ill-written. There is no reason why these stories should not have been
both written and published. But the great name under which they are
announced and the elaboration of their frame make them seem perhaps
more insignificant than they really are.
THE REVOLT OF YOUTH. By CORALIE HOBSON. Werner Laurie. 6_s._ net.
The squalors of theatrical touring companies seem to be, and no doubt
are, capable of indefinite exploitation by novelists. Readers who care
to be mildly harrowed by these topics will find in this volume all the
pabulum to which they have been accustomed in innumerable other books.
But those who have no particular taste for this sort of thing beyond
moderation will confine themselves to wondering in what the revolt of
youth here consists and in what way they are expected to find it a
moving performance. Louie breaks away from home, goes on the stage, is
a failure, returns and marries her cousin. There is a suicide and a
good deal of illicit love-making, and at the end the heroine behaves
with conventionally noble unconventionality. But these things are
wearisome if one has no special taste for them.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
SOME DIVERSIONS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. By EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. Heinemann.
7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Diversions? In a sense they are all, they have always been, diversions.
Mr. Gosse has never allowed the chains of the critical vocation
to weigh heavily upon him. It has been consistently his especial
characteristic that he has approached the most difficult problems in
literature with undaunted courage and vivacity. Where others have sat
down to the difficult siege of Donne or Swinburne with the pedantic
long faces of writers determined not to flinch even though all their
readers fall asleep during the fray, Mr. Gosse advances lightly, blows
a pleasant blast on the trumpet of his familiar prose and topples the
most obdurate walls over before him, without ever losing the least
part of his dignity. This it is which makes his reputation one of the
assets of modern English literature. He represents among us a school
of critics of which the disciples in this country are by no means too
numerous. During a long career he has found and continually practised
the secret of being almost always sound and never dull, invariably
vivacious, and hardly ever superficial. His critical essays have always
the gay, untrammelled air, if not the frivolous substance, of pure
diversions.
In his new collection he ranges among a variety of subjects and takes
now a well-worn road, now a path that has tempted few enquirers.
_The Songs of Shakespeare_ is not precisely a subject to attract the
dealer in literary fireworks. It is, on the other hand, a subject
ripe for the most portentous, the most meaningless, the most tedious
aberrations of the pedant. Yet how delicately does Mr. Gosse, in no
more than five pages, steer between these extremes and plant the arrow
of his comment exactly on the necessary spot! Benjamin Disraeli, in
his capacity as novelist, makes a theme not much less forbidding to
the critic who doubts his own ability to be original. But Mr. Gosse
is, with justice, serenely confident in the power of his style to
overcome this difficulty. There is perhaps little in this essay which
has not been both perceived and expressed before. But it is Mr. Gosse
who crystallises mature opinion on the novels of Disraeli in a passage
which might be taken as a model of discrimination and style or critical
prose:
Disraeli began his career, as I have pointed out in the earlier
part of this essay, as a purveyor of entertainment to the public
in a popular and not very dignified kind. He contended with the
crowd of fashionable novelists whose books consoled the leisure of
Mrs. Wititterly as she reclined on the drawing-room sofa. He found
rivals in Bulwer and Mrs. Gore, and a master in Plumer Ward. His
brilliant stories sold, but at first they won him little advantage.
Slowly, by dint of his inherent force of genius, his books have not
merely survived their innumerable fellows, but they have come to
represent to us the form and character of a whole school; nay, more,
they have come to take the place in our memories of a school which,
but for them, would have utterly passed away and been forgotten.
Disraeli, accordingly, is unique, not merely because his are the only
fashionable novels of the pre-Victorian era which anyone ever reads
nowadays, but because in his person that ineffable manner of the
"thirties" reaches an isolated sublimity and finds a permanent place
in literature. But if we take a still wider view of the literary
career of Disraeli, we are bound to perceive that the real source of
the interest which his brilliant books continue to possess is the
evidence their pages reveal of the astonishing personal genius of
the man. Do what we will, we find ourselves looking beyond Contarini
Fleming and Sidonia and Vivian Grey to the adventurous Jew who,
by dint of infinite resolution and an energy which never slept,
conquered all the prejudices of convention, and trod English society
beneath his foot in the triumphant irony of success. It is the living
Disraeli who is always more salient than the most fascinating of his
printed pages.
We have chosen this passage, not because it is the most remarkable in
the book, but almost at random, and in preference to some which are
more brilliant and more highly wrought. But it is a fair example not
only of the grace, but also of the precision, with which Mr. Gosse
habitually uses his pen. His _Three Experiments in Portraiture_ are
specimens of the same skill in delineation with the added advantage
that the author knew his subjects directly. This is an art in which he
has always excelled. His slighter, and his more elaborate, portraits
of Swinburne stand easily among the first things of the kind in our
language; and though perhaps Lady Dorothy Nevill, Lord Cromer, and
Lord Redesdale did not offer material so variegated or so unusual, it
may be for that reason that Mr. Gosse's portraits of them are even
more interesting as studies by a virtuoso. When we come again to pure
criticism, we find in _The Message of the Wartons_, a lecture delivered
before the British Academy, the same graceful and distinguished gesture
with which Mr. Gosse points to the interesting and useful traits to
be discerned in his subject. Mr. Gosse will never be a true or a
factitious fanatic elevating some spark of genius in a neglected worthy
above the true fire discovered in others by the just sense of mankind.
He makes no exaggerated claim for the Wartons, but he does see in them
what has not been sufficiently insisted on before.
They struggled for a little while, and then they succumbed to the
worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes no light task
to disengage their thought. In their later days they made some sad
defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at
Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. We
are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow
cold," and he was an ineffective Poet Laureate. His brother Joseph
felt the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without
attaining more than a muffled and a second-rate effect.
All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between
1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to
make itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy
of the poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some
faint conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbé Du Bos had
laid down in his celebrated _Réflexions_ (1719) that the poet's
art consists of making a general moral representation of incidents
and scenes, and embellishing it with elegant images. This had been
accepted and acted upon by Pope and all his followers. To have been
the first to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which
excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to
demand respectful attention from the historian of Romanticism, and
this attention is due to Joseph and Thomas Warton.
They had a faint conception: they demand respectful attention. These
are indeed the accents of moderation, but then, as Mr. Gosse knows, to
praise the Wartons with enthusiasm would be unjust. It is the centre
of his critical talent that he is always moderate and precise in his
estimates, and this fact gives his commendation more value, his blame
more weight, and makes his judgments more readily acceptable.
It is possible to bring forward charges against Mr. Gosse. The two
essays in this book on contemporary literature, _Some Soldier Poets_
and _The Future of English Poetry_, suggest that, at least when they
were written, the author was not fully acquainted with the buds of the
new spring. The opinions expressed in them are, within the limits of
his apparent knowledge, equally acceptable to both older and younger
critics; but these limits are somewhat narrower than they might have
been. But it would be ungracious, as well as disproportionate, to make
much of this point. What is important is that Mr. Gosse is a veteran
of English criticism, who has enriched our literature with a body of
work which has no parallel and whose powers show no signs of flagging.
When we consider his latest, we involuntarily turn our eyes back to his
earlier books, and we cannot resist the conclusion that he has rendered
to English letters a very remarkable service indeed. The latest is
a continuation of the earliest, and this is, after all, the most
important thing which can be said of it.
A CRITIC IN PALL MALL. By OSCAR WILDE. Methuen. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.
This volume appears, rather regrettably, with no indication of how it
came into existence, how Wilde wrote the essays of which it is composed
or who chose them for republication and on what principle. But the
references given at the heads of the essays show that they are reviews
collected from the _Woman's World_, the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and other
papers. Wilde did not gather them together nor, so far as we know,
even contemplate such a book. It is probable that he would be a little
dismayed by it if he could see it.
In some of these pieces there occur phrases and judgments which are the
genuine Wilde at his best, witty and well turned if not always wise.
There is, for example, a pleasing pertness in his remark on dialect
poetry:
To say "mither" instead of "mother" seems to many the acme of
romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in
the pathos of provincialism.
There is a long essay on Lefébvre's _Embroidery and Lace_ which is very
characteristic, and has, we think, been quoted before. There is a short
essay on _Dinners and Dishes_, from which the following passage may be
extracted:
There is a great field for the philosophic epicure in the United
States. Boston beans may be dismissed at once as delusions, but
soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks, blue fish, and the
pompons of New Orleans are all wonderful delicacies, particularly
when one gets them at Delmonico's. Indeed, the two most remarkable
bits of scenery in the States are undoubtedly Delmonico's and the
Yosemite Valley, and the former place has done more to promote a good
feeling between England and America than anything else has in this
century.
These are worth having, if Wilde is worth having at all, because they
are characteristic. There would have been no great occasion for weeping
if they had been lost or if they had never been clipped from the papers
in which they appeared. But since someone has had the industry to
collect them, and since there is a sufficient demand to warrant their
issue in volume form, we may receive them with a moderate pleasure.
The greater part of the volume, however, does not rise to this level.
Even the most brilliant and versatile of writers cannot consistently
display his individual powers in journeyman work; and Wilde, though his
wit was irrepressible, almost involuntary, was no more conscientious
than any other reviewer. When the good sentences came they came: when
they did not, he made no particular effort to maintain either his style
or his ideas on any very elevated plane. There is no great value for
the reader of to-day in a picture of Mrs. Somerville in a review of a
book on her by a Miss Phyllis Browne. And no reader is likely to take a
very vivid delight in Wilde's comment on a book called _How to be Happy
though Married_, that
Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful
collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a
perfect museum of salt-cellars. We strongly recommend this book as
one of the best of wedding presents
or in the jokes that Wilde quotes from the book. Unfortunately it is
by no means clear that the anonymous compiler has realised how much
uninteresting matter he is reprinting. He closes the volume with
twenty-odd pages of _Sententiæ_, selected from reviews in which the
gems of thought and language were detachably scattered. But these gems
include such remarks as "No one survives being over-estimated," and "No
age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor." We cannot therefore
excuse him on the ground that he knew he was dragging lumber into the
light, and did so from a pious if mistaken motive.
CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE. By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE PROBLEM OF HAMLET. By the RT. HON. J. M. ROBERTSON. Allen & Unwin.
5_s._ net.
Swinburne's book, as Mr. Gosse explains in his introduction, is the
complement of his work _The Age of Shakespeare_. He had intended
a comprehensive survey of the whole of the Elizabethan drama, the
glories of which he spent a great part of his life in celebrating. He
did enough of it to show what the complete work would have been; the
outlines are all here, but they are only filled in patches.
That, carrying on as he did the Lamb tradition, and expressing it in
his own language, he was sometimes over-enthusiastic, every reader of
his sonnet on Tourneur knows. That he was liable to say incompatible
things on different pages, where his purposes were different, is
also common knowledge. We do not go to him for an exact "placing" of
men or for temperate statement; it might be roughly said that he was
willing to regard any minor Elizabethan writer as a master, unless he
desired to use him to point a contrast with someone else, in which
event the unfortunate playwright might be treated as a buffoon, an
incompetent, and an impostor. Yet even of just and balanced criticism
there is much in this book. No critic before him has so acutely
dissociated the great Marlowe from the Greenes, Peeles, and Lodges,
who are indolently classed with him. (It is characteristic that in
making this dissociation he says of one of Peele's plays that it is
"a riddle beyond and also beneath solution" how a man of any capacity
could have "dropped upon the nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in
its spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play of _Edward
I_.") And the essay on Chapman, here reprinted, is one of the finest
panegyrics and most illuminating pieces of imaginative criticism in the
language. He may, when he turns his searchlight on little men, illumine
them too much; but Chapman was not a little man, and with space to move
in and time to think in Swinburne here produced a masterpiece. The long
passage on Browning and his obscurity is almost as good, so good that a
digression, otherwise unpardonable, is self-excused.
The book as a whole is among Swinburne's best prose books. His writing
is what it ever was. Almost every word and sentence is duplicated.
He would write: "No man and no woman who has ever ridden on a bus or
driven on a cab down the quiet bye-streets and crowded thoroughfares
of Paris or of London could fail to have noticed with interest and
to have condemned, or at least deprecated, without hesitation or
afterthought, the design of the posters displayed on the hoardings or
exhibited in the windows, even as, with no greater hesitation and no
less microscopic afterthought, he would have," &c., &c. We feel that the
sentences might have been split into halves and two books of precisely
similar meaning made out of the one. Yet his manner is a part of him.
Even his most serpentine sentences have vigour and directness when they
are read aloud; and his invective is as entertaining as ever. Swinburne
had a very small vocabulary as a poet, but a very large one as a writer
of denunciatory prose. He refers to a play of James Howard's as "a
piece of noisome nonsense which must make his name a stench in the
nostrils of the nauseated reader," and through a series of "laughing
jackasses," "howling dervishes," and things ignoble, impure, infamous,
and abominable he reaches the climax of his abuse with the beautiful
appellation, "verminous pseudonymuncule."
Mr. Robertson also has planned a large work on the drama, but his
is restricted to Shakespeare. He proposes to complete a series,
of which his _Shakespeare and Chapman_ was an instalment, on "the
canon of Shakespeare." He has more concentration and more industry
than Swinburne, and he may complete his task. He is not an inspired
critic and, unlike Swinburne's, his manner does not contribute to
the readableness of his books. He is often--though an engagingly
acrimonious controversialist--heavy-footed; and he has a passion for
words like "theorem" and "confutation" which is almost incomprehensible
in a man who obviously loves the simplest and most beautiful art. In
the present volume he tackles the problem of Hamlet. He ridicules
those who think that Hamlet was very vacillating; who would not be
upset if he discovered that his father had been murdered by his uncle
and his mother, and who would not hesitate before killing a man on
the word of a ghost? But he admits, as we all must admit, that there
are inconsistencies in the play, and he argues, with what we think
conclusive force, that these are derived from Kyd's lost _Hamlet_,
which Shakespeare used as a basis. Here, as elsewhere (in _Othello_
and _The Merchant of Venice_ for example), Shakespeare was handicapped
by his sources. Mr. Robertson sometimes pushes his arguments too
far, and he exaggerates, we think (where he finds it convenient),
the inexplicability of Hamlet's character. But he has spent immense
industry on the book, and it is a contribution to Shakespearean study
that no scholar will be able to ignore. We wish, by the way, that he
would not spend so much of his time, here and elsewhere, arguing with
people, German and other, who are not worth arguing with.
APPRECIATIONS OF POETRY. By LAFCADIO HEARN. Heinemann. 15_s._ net.
Hearn was a sensible critic. But it is a fact--and a pity--that his
criticisms of English literature were addressed to an audience of
Japanese students. In examining a few of them (and we have already
had two immense volumes) we get some instruction and entertainment
from observing what he selects for Japan and how he explains it--a
comparison and a contrast of the Eastern and Western points of view.
Here and there, too, trying everything "on the dog," he reveals
unexpected merits in English writers. In the "Interpretations" he
demonstrated not merely the worth of Longfellow, but the intermittent
genius of Mrs. Norton. But we can have too much of a rather interesting
thing, and it is inevitable that these lectures on Tennyson, Rossetti,
Swinburne, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Morris, and various minors should
be too elementary, however sound they may be, and however happy the
quotations, to give serious English readers much satisfaction. We note
with pleasure that many years ago Hearn was pointing out to Japan the
great qualities of Robert Bridges as a poet of landscape.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE (1415-1789): A History of the Foundations
of the Modern World. By W. C. ABBOTT, Professor of History in Yale
University. Bell. Two vols. 30_s._ net.
Every schoolboy, in the Macaulayan sense, has at some time or other
determined to write a history of the world in twenty volumes from the
earliest times to the present day. Achievement is fortunately given
to few. Omniscience becomes yearly more impossible, and, since the
human mind can no longer single-handed cope with the accumulations
of human knowledge, in history, as in so many other things, we have
reached an age of intensive specialisation. These are truths which
are continually being impressed upon us by the schools of modern
history, and that they are to a great extent truths will be shown by
a glance at any well-loaded shelf in a library devoted to the output
of the modern historian. Yet there is distinct evidence of a reaction
against this meticulous specialisation; there are signs that several
most learned historians are discarding the historical microscope for
the historical telescope and are yielding to the old fascination of
writing histories of the world. The free airs of the New World seem
to encourage this new phase of an old fascination. It is not very long
ago that Professor Hayes of Columbia University took a large brush
and a large canvas and produced two excellent and impressive volumes
which he called _A Political and Social History of Modern Europe_.
These two volumes were in effect a world history from 1500 to 1915. The
mere thought of such a venture would produce a feeling of intellectual
vertigo in most historians of the old world. But now Professor Abbott
of Yale University comes along with two great volumes, and a promised
third, in which he approaches world history with an even larger
canvas and larger brush. He tells us himself that he is presenting us
with "a new synthesis of modern history." We confess to as profound
a distrust of the word "synthesis" as some people have of the word
"definitive," and when a professor tells us that he has produced a new
synthesis of history we are inclined to believe that this is another
way of admitting that Providence has not granted him the gift of clear
thinking or clear writing. But Professor Abbott's preface does him and
his book an injustice. Some doctors, if you go to them with a swollen
arm, will tell you that you have œdema of the arm; but there is no
need to be frightened--the doctor is only telling you, what you know
already, that you have a swollen arm. So, too, there is really no need
to be frightened by the historian who assures you that his book has a
synthesis; he probably only means, what you know already, that his book
has a subject.
We have not discovered the synthesis in Mr. Abbott's 1000 pages, but
we have discovered that he has a very good subject and has written,
in many respects, a very good book. The book itself proves that he is
well equipped with knowledge and has made full use of the intensive
and microscopic study of the modern historian. But he approaches
history from the standpoint of enthusiastic and large-minded youth.
He has thrown away his microscopes and determined to look back at
history through a telescope. Immediately a large and dominating fact
has attracted his attention. The age we live in is pre-eminently
the European Age. The world is dominated by Europe and Europeans:
there have in the past been eras in which a race or races have by
migrations and conquests spread themselves and their civilisation and
government over wide spaces of the earth, but never before has there
been so universal and permanent a domination and expansion from one
small quarter of the globe. Professor Abbott, seizing his historical
telescope, has looked back and tried to discover the origin, the
causes, and the courses of this amazing phenomenon. And the more one
investigates the phenomenon the more amazing it appears. Take the case
of migrations. The European Age or the modern world, as Professor
Abbott has no difficulty in showing, began in the fifteenth century.
(In history, of course, there is really never any real beginning
or any real end; there are no abrupt transitions, only faster or
slower currents in the stream of change; nevertheless there are
periods in which the movement quickens so perceptibly that they are
clearly turning-points in human history; and the fifteenth century is
undoubtedly such a turning-point.) Now one of the most striking facts
in the modern world has been the migration of Europeans. In North
America, Northern Asia, Australia, South Africa, and to some extent in
South America we see the Europeanisation of vast regions of the earth
still being accomplished by the most ancient form of migration and
colonisation. At the same time Europe has sent out a continual stream
of conquerors and traders by whose efforts practically the whole of
the rest of the world, where the inhabitants were not exterminated,
has been subjected to European rule and the European's political and
economic system. As Professor Abbott points out, this was a complete
reversal of the rôle of Europe and the European in history. "Between
the fall of the Roman Empire and the discovery of America Europe
had been rather the passive than the active element in that great
shifting of population to which we give the name of folk-wandering or
migration." And it is a curious fact that the new period of history,
of the expansion of Europe, and of the modern world begins with
an event--it is the event mentioned in the very first sentence of
Professor Abbott's book--which involved not the expansion but the most
notable shrinking and invasion of Europe and was characteristic of the
old world. To the European of 1453 the fall of Constantinople before
the victorious Turk seemed to portend one more desperate and disastrous
struggle against a horde of Asiatic invaders, and the inevitable
and universal blindness of contemporaries to the great movements
and currents moulding their destiny and history could not be better
illustrated than by this fear and foreboding of the European in 1453.
Within a hundred years of the fall of Constantinople, instead of Europe
fighting desperately against the non-European world of invaders, the
non-European world was already engaged in a hopeless struggle against
the swarm of European invaders. In fact, however, the movement, which
within a generation was to send Portuguese and Spaniards ranging
over Africa, Asia, and the New World, had already begun in 1453.
Contemporaries thought the end of a European world had come with the
capture of Constantinople; they should have seen that the fall of Ceuta
to the Portuguese prince in 1415 and the discovery and colonisation of
the Madeiras in 1418 marked the beginning of a new European world of
colonisation, conquest, and territorial expansion.
It is the story of this expansion, this change from the mediæval to
the modern world, which Professor Abbott seeks to unfold in his two
volumes. The estimation of his success or failure raises an important
question for the historian. He is clearly right in his view that "a
proper basis for the understanding of what has happened during the
past five hundred years" cannot be found merely in the history of
territorial expansion. If you look at the past through his historical
telescope you soon see that you cannot isolate the voyage of Columbus
from the break up of the feudal system and mediæval institutions,
or the exploits of Hernando Cortez from those of Martin Luther.
Consequently Professor Abbott attempts, as he says in his preface, to
combine three elements into a narrative of European activities from
1415 to 1789. The three elements are described by him as first "the
connection of the social, economic, and intellectual development of
European peoples with their political affairs"; second, "the progress
of events among the peoples of Eastern Europe, and of the activities of
Europeans beyond the sea"; and third, "the relation of the past to the
present--the way in which the various factors of modern life came into
the current of European thought and practice, and how they developed
into the forms with which we are familiar." The real question for
the critic of Professor Abbott's book is how far he has succeeded in
this tremendous undertaking. The undertaking is so tremendous and the
attempt so gallant that we hesitate to give an answer which is in fact
so easy. With all its good points, its wide learning, its scholarly
arrangement, its great interest and enthusiasm, the book cannot really
be said to succeed in its chief aim. To judge from our personal
experience, the reader, when he is about a third of the way through the
two volumes, begins to have an uncomfortable sense of having lost his
way, and this feeling gradually grows stronger and stronger. The man
who writes a history of the world which is not to be a mere catalogue
of facts, but is to illustrate and explain the present by the past and
is to keep us on the track of great world movements, has to select his
facts, and it is mainly upon his intuition for relevant facts and his
skill in selection and presentation that the success of his enterprise
depends. Professor Abbott's failure to keep our vision clear and our
feet steadily upon the right path comes from a failure to select and
an error in method. His book as it proceeds tends to become more and
more a catalogue of facts, divided into chapters and labelled with such
labels as "Europe beyond the Sea" and "Social and Intellectual Europe";
the general theme which should connect these innumerable facts becomes
lost and forgotten, or at least no longer visible to or present in
the consciousness of the reader. The measure of this failure is the
frequency with which Professor Abbott makes the connection between his
facts purely one of time, for it is almost a confession of failure on
the part of a world historian with a synthesis when he has to point
out to us that the summoning of the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg, the
conversion of John Calvin, and the conquest of Peru all happened in the
same year. Professor Abbott's mistake seems to us to consist largely
in having overloaded his book with detailed facts. As it stands it is
invaluable as a mine of facts bearing upon the change from mediævalism
to modernity and upon Europe's conquest of the world; but an immense
number of these facts are irrelevant to his general theme and purpose.
Open the book at random and this immediately becomes apparent. Here
is page 384 in a chapter called "The Rise of Holland," and on it we
find ourselves immersed in the details of the Thirty Years' War. Here
Professor Abbott has failed to decide whether he is writing a text-book
of history in which the military exploits of the Margrave, John George
of Brandenburg-Jägerndorf are relevant, or a wide survey of the great
currents of history in which John George had but a microscopic place.
Here the author abandons his telescope and world history for the
microscope and John George, with the result that the feet of his reader
wander from the path and his eyes are clouded. It is fatal to attempt
to use a telescope and a microscope at the same time on the same object.
BOCHE AND BOLSHEVIK. By HEREWARD T. PRICE. Murray. 6_s._ net.
The author of this book was born an Englishman, but at the outbreak of
war he was living in Germany, a naturalised German. He was called up
and served in the German Army on the Eastern front, was taken prisoner,
sent to Siberia, and was a witness of the Russian revolution there.
The book is a record of his personal experiences and views. He is as
bitterly hostile to his adopted country as he is to Bolshevism and
Bolsheviks. His book does not add very much to our knowledge of the war
or the revolution, and his own knowledge may be measured by the fact
that he apparently thinks that the "secret treaties" published by the
Bolshevik Government were made by Kerenski.
TO KIEL IN THE "HERCULES." By LEWIS R. FREEMAN. Murray. 6_s._ net.
Mr. Freeman was Official Correspondent with the Grand Fleet, and he
accompanied Admiral Browning to Kiel after the surrender of the German
fleet as "Keeper of the Records" to the Allied Armistice Commission.
The book contains an interesting record of the various inspections and
of conditions in Germany immediately after the armistice.
MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE! By WILLIAM ALLISON. Richards. 21_s._ net.
If he never sacrificed a kingdom, Mr. Allison at least abandoned a
first-class in his schools for the sake of horses. That day was,
indeed, evidently the turning-point of his life. He was an admirable
writer of Latin verse, and when he was in for Moderations at Oxford
the Latin verse paper fell on the same day as the Derby. He left
his composition unwritten to go and see whether Prince Charlie had
won the Derby. Mr. Allison, with the modesty proper to heroes, now
calls his action "extremely silly," but few readers of this book
of recollections will agree. Many men get firsts; few men pursue
horse-breeding and racing with the poetic fervour which Mr. Allison
brought to them. His recollections are of Rugby under Temple and
Balliol under Jowett, and this part of his book is an amusing mixture,
recalling now _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ (for Rugby still kept the Arnold
stamp) and now _Ruff's Guide_. When he left Balliol he was called to
the Bar, but never gave it undue preference over the paddock. He ran
a famous breeding establishment, and when the Stud Company Limited
failed Mr. Allison combined practice at the Bar with journalism.
As editor of _St. Stephen's Review_, which was started with £500
capital in 1883 and lasted till its famous conflict with the Hansard
Union in 1891, Mr. Allison deserves praise for one notable act--he
discovered Phil May. The cartoons of May's which he reproduces will
not compare with the artist's later drawings, but it is not possible
to estimate the value to May of the training he obtained in this early
political work. The Fleet Street of the '80's, when Romano's was a
place the quieter journalist entered with trembling, is portrayed
in a dry, matter-of-fact way far more effective than any elaborate,
highly-coloured description. There may be people who are not interested
in horses or journalism; to them we can recommend the pleasant tributes
to Bacchus which lace engagingly the more serious chronicle. As a boy
Mr. Allison was not strong, and a good old-fashioned doctor ordered
him a glass of port every morning at eleven; this "advice was followed
scrupulously, both at home and when I went to school," and Mr. Allison
never actually says that he has abandoned the prescribed dose.
Mr. Allison writes with no pretensions to literary art, and he
sometimes chronicles very trifling occurrences; but he has an engaging
modesty and a genial "take it or leave it" attitude which redeem his
book from the charge of triviality. _My Kingdom for a Horse!_ should
be invaluable to the historian of social manners and to the novelist
who is anxious to get material for the reconstruction of a time which
already seems historical. There are plenty of illustrations--mostly
process reproductions of old photographs and examples of Phil May's
work. We wish, by the way, if Mr. Allison owns the copyright, that he
would persuade some publisher to issue a new and worthier edition of
May's _The Parson and the Painter_, which first appeared in the _St.
Stephen's Review_.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
HOW THE WAR CAME. By the EARL LOREBURN. Methuen. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
There is very little disagreement to-day, we suppose, as to who were
the prime authors of the War. But on the minor question, whether any
blame attaches to the Entente Powers, opinion is, as it was from the
beginning, far more divided. The controversy as to our own position in
the crisis, which had almost faded out of the public mind, is sharply
revived by Lord Loreburn's book. Lord Loreburn, let us hasten to say,
does not deny the guilt of Germany. Indeed, he is at pains to show how
the Bismarckian tradition, improved upon by chauvinistic professors,
a more or less demented monarch and a ruthless military caste, had
sapped the morality of the German nation and made it all too ready to
follow its rulers into a deliberate attack on the peace of Europe. Nor
does he lend any support to the suggestion that the British Government
or the British people wanted war with Germany. He pays a tribute to
the efforts made by the Foreign Secretary to avert the disaster at
the eleventh hour. And yet Viscount Grey cannot, in his mind, escape
a large share of responsibility for the final conflagration. For what
made the war inevitable, he asserts, was our entente with France.
That entente was a departure from the traditional British policy of
holding aloof from all Continental entanglements. It was developed by
Sir Edward Grey, with the assistance of Mr. Asquith and Lord Haldane,
behind the backs of Parliament, and even of the Cabinet, from the end
of 1905 onwards. Not only was Sir Edward Grey working in secret; he was
committing this country to the support of France (and through France
of Russia) without taking the necessary steps to increase the army so
as to make that support effective. And, worst of all, he had nothing
in black and white to define exactly to what amount of support we were
committed. The result was seen on August 4th, 1914, when it became
manifest that we were under an obligation of honour to join our arms
with the French against Germany. Sir Edward Grey, of course, maintained
that we were not so bound, that we were free to decide whether to
declare war or not. And it is certain that a large part, if not the
whole, of the nation, was convinced that it was the attack on Belgium
which did finally bring us in. But this, says Lord Loreburn, was a
delusion, which flowed from the arch-delusion of Sir Edward Grey that
our hands were free.
Lord Loreburn's case, it will be seen, clearly has two heads. He did
not like the policy of the French Entente, and he did not like the
methods by which it was promoted. On the first point most readers will
disagree with him, and, in any event, the matter is now of merely
historic interest. On the second point, public opinion will be more
interested in his criticisms. Some will say that Lord Loreburn's old
hostility to the Liberal Imperialists inclines him to magnify the
faults that were committed between 1905 and 1914. Some will say that he
exaggerates the ignorance under which we are alleged to have laboured
in regard to our relations with France. His opponents will certainly
suggest that everybody knew where we stood, as towards France, and that
the secrecy was secrecy in name only. But these are not matters for
discussion in these columns. Lord Loreburn thinks that "the persistent
danger of secret diplomacy is hitherto tolerated and abused in this
and other countries" is one that the nations ought to lose no time in
taking to heart.
THE MASTERY OF THE FAR EAST. By A. J. BROWN. Bell. 25_s._ net.
This massive volume (it runs to some 650 pages) is a very interesting
account of the Japanese and Korean peoples, their customs, their
religions, their politics, and the influence of Christian missions in
their countries. Dr. Brown is an American with an agreeable style, a
sense of humour, and, in general, a nice critical faculty, and, though
we are very doubtful of some of his conclusions, we do not hesitate to
say that his book is a valuable contribution to the literature of the
Far East.
From a political point of view the Far East means to-day--and it will
mean more and more in the future--Japan. Every schoolboy knows the
story of Japan's rapid emergence from feudalism to the position of a
first-class modern Power, of her successful struggles with China and
Russia, of her mastery of the Korean peninsula, of the great part she
played in the late war. And schoolboys, as well as statesmen, may
presently watch the effects upon world politics of her status in Asia.
Dr. Brown is a candid friend of the Japanese. He is not under the
illusion that they are a model people, nor is he of those who describe
them as "varnished savages." He comments severely on the lamentable
labour conditions that prevail under their newly-created industrial
system. He is no lover of the autocracy of their government. He does
not deny the faults of their diplomacy. Nevertheless he is their
friend, who believes in them. He expresses his sympathy with Korea
and with China in their subjection. But he takes what he calls "the
large way" of viewing Japan's Korean policy. "The large way," he says,
"is to note that, in the evolution of the race and the development
of the plan of God, the time had come when it was for the best
interests of the world and for the welfare of the Koreans themselves
that Korea should come under the tutelage of Japan." As for China,
she is "an enormous and backward country ... like a ship without a
captain or pilot, helplessly drifting on the high seas, apparently
unable to right herself and, in her present water-logged condition,
a menace to other ships." And so he sympathises "with the feeling of
the Japanese that they cannot ignore this incontestable situation."
He is an enthusiastic believer in Christian missions, and he hopes
that Christianity will be the salvation of Japan. Japan's great need,
he says, is to be spiritualised. Neither Buddhism nor Shintoism have
the necessary moral influence. But Christian missions are a great
reconstructive force--economical, social, intellectual, political,
spiritual, international. What, then, is the position of Christianity
in Japan? Dr. Brown produces statistics to show that it has made
enormous strides, and quotations from Japanese statesmen and publicists
as evidence that its growth is welcomed by the rulers of the country.
Yet all the public schools are forbidden to teach religion; Buddhism
has been driven to reform itself; Shintoism, as he admits, is a waxing
rather than a waning force. In another passage he says that the old
religions of Japan are losing their hold on the educated classes.
Thus a recent census in the Imperial University of Tokio showed fifty
Buddhists, sixty Christians, 1500 atheists, 3000 agnostics. It would
appear, therefore, that the missionaries have a long row to hoe before
Christianity becomes the general religion of the Japanese.
RACE AND NATIONALITY. By JOHN OAKESMITH, D.Litt., M.A. Heinemann.
10_s._ 6_d._ net.
There is some chance, now that the heat and passion of the war are
past, that the vexed questions of nationality and nationalism will
be discussed with a little more intelligence and discrimination. Dr.
Oakesmith certainly sets a good example. He tells us that he was
formerly one of those (they were the vast majority, we think) who had
but a vague idea of what they meant by nationality, till he set himself
to study the question and classify his mind. The results appear in this
very interesting book. He criticises alike the theory that nationality
is based on "race," and the opposing theory that there is no such
thing as nationality at all. In his own view nationality develops as
an evolutionary process, and the full-grown thing may be defined as
"organic continuity of common interest." He argues strongly against the
internationalist pacifist's contention that nationality is the cause of
war, and that peace is to be obtained by the spread of cosmopolitanism.
On the contrary, he avows, nationality is "actually the one instrument
destined, if wisely directed, to secure lasting and universal peace."
This is a statement which most sane persons to-day will accept easily
enough. But the crux is the "wise direction." Dr. Oakesmith does
not give us much practical guidance on this point. Generalities and
fine words are not very helpful, whether they come from the side of
passionate enthusiasts for the League of Nations or from those who,
like Dr. Oakesmith, are a little doubtful whether the world is quite
ripe for it. However, the book is well worth studying, especially on
its critical side.
WAR-TIME FINANCIAL PROBLEMS. By HARTLEY WITHERS. Murray. 6_s._ net.
Mr. Hartley Withers is not only a "financial expert"; he is also a
really interesting writer. Even though one may not agree with all his
views, one can enjoy this collection of vigorous essays on war finance,
company law and banking, currency problems at home and abroad, the
conscription of wealth, the theory of Guild socialism. Mr. Withers does
not spare his criticism of the Government's financial policy, which has
brought us to the verge of bankruptcy. He dismisses the "capital levy"
as impracticable; but he advocates a high income tax, with super-tax
beginning at a much lower level, and "with skilful differentiation
according to the circumstances of the taxpayer."
THE GREAT UNMARRIED. By WALTER M. GALLICHAN. Werner Laurie. 6_s._ net.
This book is a painstaking attempt to show the evils of celibacy
(including the common state of "pseudo-celibacy") both to society and
to the individual. Mr. Gallichan arraigns the false ideals and the
economic pressure of our industrial system, the perverse influence of
ecclesiasticism, and the other causes which produce the myriads of
involuntary or voluntary celibates in the western world. He advocates
no "fancy" remedies, such as free love, polygamy, or the taxation of
bachelors, but rather an attack on poverty, the spread of education,
the moralisation of the marriage laws. The book is not a profound or
scientific study, but it might be instructive to those who have never
given any thought to the subject.
ULSTER AND IRELAND. By JAMES WINDER GOOD. Maunsel. 6_s._ net.
This little volume is one of the clearest and the most interesting
books that we have seen on the Irish problem. Mr. Good gives us a
survey of Ulster history from the seventeenth century, which shows the
unifying influence of the genuine democratic ideals common to both the
contending parties. He argues that this unification has been, and is,
thwarted by "religion," and by "Carsonism," "the supreme example in
modern times of the triumph of the influences that make for divisions
in Ireland." Sinn Fein, in Mr. Good's view, offers no practicable way
out of the difficulty of Ulster. "If Sinn Fein is," he says, "as it
can now claim to be, the creed of the Irish people it must propound
a solution of the Ulster riddle based, not on abstract theories, but
on the realities of the situation." Mr. Good's concluding chapters
on "Ulster as It Is" are excellent reading. We do not suppose Ulster
Unionists will agree with all the views he expresses there, still less
with his conclusions--one of the chief of which is that Ireland is
really one nation and not two. But his book may induce a good many mere
Englishmen to take a more intelligent attitude towards Irish politics.
THE GUILD STATE: ITS PRINCIPLES AND POSSIBILITIES. By G. R. STIRLING
TAYLOR. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Taylor is an enthusiastic Guildsman, though a heretic, in that he
stands for a localised system as against the orthodox National Guilds.
His book is a very naïve account of the Guild proposals, and we can
hardly imagine that it will convert anyone to his views. There is a
vast amount of idealisation of the Middle Ages--an idealisation which
frequently verges on the ridiculous. Many of the historical statements
are extravagant. We are told, for instance, that Queen Elizabeth "had
perhaps the most honest and most efficient ministers of State that this
nation has ever possessed." And is it not going rather far to say that
"the French peasant remains much as he has been for centuries--the most
substantial fact in European civilisation, and perhaps its highest
product"? Mr. Taylor's style would not suffer if it were less arrogant
and less splenetic. He lets us know, till we are sick of it, that there
is but little wisdom in the world save in the common-sense simple man
and the hard-headed Guildsman. And his virulence against politicians
and University professors almost assumes the dimension of a disease.
RECONSTRUCTORS AND RECONSTRUCTION: A PLEA FOR COMMON-SENSE. By OXON.
B.H. Blackwell. 1_s._ net.
The greater part of this brochure is taken up with a defence of the
capitalist against the attacks of revolutionaries, impossibilists, and
all the tribe of intellectual "high flyers"--such as Mr. Bernard Shaw,
Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Orage, and the late Mr. Sidney Ball. The author's
own plan is to harmonise the interests of capitalists and workers
in a system of "separate autonomous industries co-ordinated with a
National Federal Parliament of Industry." It is in fact something like
Guild socialism with the socialism left out. "Oxon" hardly appears to
appreciate the limitations or the difficulties of his scheme.
A PRIMER OF NATIONAL FINANCE. By HENRY HIGGS, C.B. Methuen. 5_s._ net.
This is a purely elementary volume which explains the revenue and
expenditure of the British Government and local authorities, the
National Debt, and the study of financial statistics. It is clearly and
simply written, and might be a valuable schoolbook. For the interested
and courageous student there is some useful advice on further reading.
But Mr. Higgs will strike fear into the heart of many beginners by
telling them in the first chapter that the science of finance is so
vast a subject that Professor Jèze of Paris is preparing twelve bulky
volumes upon it, and that his elementary treatise alone consists of
over 1100 large octavo pages!
THEOLOGY
THE SUPREME ADVENTURE. By MERCEDES MACANDREW. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._
6_d._ net.
Certain Nonconformist ministers had a habit--it is now fast dying--of
interspersing the reading of the Lesson in service-time with comment
and illustration. Mrs. Macandrew has applied a similar method in this
volume. Writing to satisfy the needs of an agnostic friend, Mrs.
Macandrew retells the story of the four Gospels and supports the
narrative with critical expositions of her own or, occasionally, of
such authorities as Edersheim. It is not easy to see for whom the book
is intended. Mrs. Macandrew is frankly uncritical. She not only ignores
the whole body of "higher criticism," but she makes no reference
to textual difficulties, and, in discussing such a passage as the
Confession of Peter, does not even mention the fact that a considerable
controversy has gathered for some years around the precise significance
of the promise, "On this rock I will build my Church."
It will not be to everybody's taste to have the annunciation described
in this way:
God the Father sent an angel called Gabriel to that city of
flowers--Nazareth in Galilee--sent him to a sweet and good and lovely
_but quite poor girl_ called Mary who was soon to be married to a man
much older than herself, called Joseph.
And when we tried to read Mrs. Macandrew's paraphrases of the parables
we recalled with a sigh Mr. Birrell's complaint against Canon Farrar,
"who elongated the Gospels." It no doubt gave Mrs. Macandrew some
months of happiness to write the book, but we think she was ill-advised
in submitting it to the public.
SCIENCE
CATALYSIS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. By ERIC K. RIDEAL and HUGH S. TAYLOR.
Macmillan & Co. 17_s._ net.
In spite of the difficulties which war-time placed in the way of
publishers, the production of scientific books, both in England and
Germany, has been astonishingly large during the past five years. The
greater number of them have--naturally enough--been devoted either
to technical subjects or to branches of science having an immediate
technical application. The field of industrial chemistry, especially,
has been well tended by the writers, and not only new books, but new
series of books--such as Messrs. Longmans' _Monographs on Industrial
Chemistry_, Messrs. Churchill's _Textbooks of Chemical Research_,
and Messrs. Baillière, Tindall, and Cox's _Industrial Chemistry_
series--have appeared to bear witness to the activity of the English
chemists. Certain subjects in particular have been extensively treated;
we may instance synthetic colouring matters, colloid chemistry, and
catalysis, the last-named subject having books devoted to it in all
the series just specified. In these the subject is handled from the
industrial point of view, but it is frequently seen that the commercial
and the theoretical developments of a science are mutually stimulating,
discoveries made in the laboratory without any object but the wresting
of knowledge from nature finding commercial application, and the
commercial processes suggesting fresh theoretical problems. The great
industrial importance of catalysis has led to a revived interest in the
scientific theories of the process, and the latest book on the subject,
by Drs. Eric Rideal and Hugh Taylor, deserves praise for having devoted
considerable attention to the historical and theoretical aspect of the
subject, which has been rather neglected of late.
There are many chemical reactions which are promoted or accelerated by
the addition of a small quantity of some foreign substance which is not
used up in the process and does not appear in the final products. Thus
one of the romances of chemistry was the discovery, occasioned by the
chance breaking of a thermometer in the vessel, that the presence of a
small quantity of mercury greatly hastens the oxidation of naphthalene
to phthalic acid, a process of great importance in the manufacture
of synthetic indigo. Similarly the presence of finely divided metals
accelerates many reactions, such as oxidations and hydrogenations--for
example, asbestos impregnated with particles of platinum promotes
the oxidation of sulphur dioxide to the trioxide in the manufacture
of sulphuric acid. The researches of Baker and others, showing that
certain gas reactions, which ordinarily take place rapidly, proceed
very slowly indeed if the gases are thoroughly dried, point to a
catalytic action of small traces of moisture. The enzymes of the
human body which accelerate the chemical processes of digestion and
assimilation constitute another class of catalysts, and Drs. Rideal and
Taylor class under catalytic action the effect of radiant energy in
promoting such combinations as that of hydrogen and chlorine, although
it is perhaps rather extending the usual conception of the term to do
so. These examples will indicate the wide range of the subject and
help to make intelligible Ostwald's famous generalisation that "there
is probably no kind of chemical reaction which cannot be influenced
catalytically, and there is no substance, element, or compound which
cannot act as a catalyser," which is no doubt true if very slight
accelerations of reaction be taken into account. Of course a catalyst
cannot affect the final state of equilibrium, but only quicken or
institute (the discussion as to whether, in some cases, the catalyst
initiates or merely accelerates a reaction already taking place
imperceptibly slowly seems to us pointless) a reaction theoretically
possible. Other, the so-called negative, catalysts hinder reactions;
other substances "poison," or stop, the action of ordinarily activating
materials; others again, the "promoters," increase the efficacy of the
catalyst. The phenomenon is a complex one.
By no means the least interesting and valuable feature of the book
before us is the exposition of the historical development of the
subject. We who are apt to look on the feminine scientist as a product
of the last twenty years are reminded that there was at least one woman
chemist of ability in the eighteenth century, Mrs. Fulhame, whose
_Essay on Combustion_, published in 1774, emphasised the importance of
the presence of moisture in gaseous reactions. Faraday, "the prince of
experimenters," also worked on catalysis, and, in fact, originated the
adsorbtion theory of the process, which attributes the action to the
extended compressed film formed at the surface of a porous solid. It
is not only in the chapter expressly devoted to the early history that
we find an account of the original workers; the advances made by them
receive recognition throughout the book in connection with the branches
in which they experimented. The treatment of the various theories of
catalysis--the intermediate compound, the adsorbtion, electrochemical,
and radiant energy theory--might have been extended with advantage.
The mathematical exposition of the adsorbtion theory is one of the
weakest things in the book, and McLewis's work is not very clearly
handled. The difficulties of giving an adequate summary of this part
of the subject are undoubted, but the need of it is so marked that we
regret that the authors have not spent more energy on the task. This
is not the place to deal in detail with the account of the practical
applications of catalysis, which is excellently done and includes the
most recent work, some of it, such as Partington's improvements in
oxidising ammonia, only made public last year. The use of catalysts in,
to take a few examples at random, surface combustion, the hardening of
oils by hydrogenation (used so extensively in margarine making), the
fixation of nitrogen, and electrolysis is well described, and there is
a good chapter on ferments and enzymes, and another on the Grignard
reagent. Omissions may be noted here and there, but the book is not,
of course, intended to give detailed instructions to the commercial
chemist. Rather, we believe, is it meant to supply to chemists in
general, and even to the lay reader, an idea of the nature of the
process of catalysis, which is becoming more important every day,
and the extent of its applications, with sufficient detail to make
the reactions clear, as far as they are at present understood. As a
general exposition of the subject the book is really needed, and will
undoubtedly find a place on the shelves of all who follow the advances
of science.
TEN BRITISH PHYSICISTS. By ALEXANDER MACFARLANE. John Wiley & Sons, and
Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Writing of the life of Rankine, Professor P. G. Tait gave as his
opinion that "the life of a genuine scientific man is, from the common
point of view, almost always uneventful," and, if the man in question
has no interests but science, this is, in general, true. Engaged in
researches on the laws of nature, the most that he demands from life
is that he shall have his study, his laboratory, food, shelter and
peace, and such an attitude does not lead to high adventure or romances
of passion. Consequently, in writing biographies of physicists it is
advisable not to dwell too long on their everyday life, marriages and
meals, for there is a certain monotony about the material lives of
these great men. In the lives before us, which are little more than
sketches, the author has rightly laid most stress on the scientific
achievements of his ten physicists, but he has a tendency to reduce
his account to a catalogue of the discoveries and advances made. An
estimate of the place of each man in the thought of the time, and of
his scientific character, of the general tendencies of his work and the
place it now occupies in the history of the science, deserves to take a
rather larger place in these short biographies than it has received.
Happily many of the ten are men of very interesting personality.
The selection--James Clerk Maxwell, W. J. M. Rankine, P. G. Tait,
Lord Kelvin, Charles Babbage, William Whewell, Sir G. G. Stokes, Sir
G. B. Airy, J. C. Adams, and Sir J. F. W. Herschel--if based on no
clearly-defined plan, has the merit that it includes one or two men who
have been unduly neglected. Rankine, in spite of his important work on
thermodynamics, does not receive much attention from the physicists of
to-day, possibly owing to his unattractive "molecular vortices," and
Babbage is known to most people rather from the sneer in the _Ingoldsby
Legends_:
Master Cabbage, the steward, who'd made a machine
To calculate with, and count noses--I ween
The cleverest thing of its kind ever seen,
than for his really great, though imperfect, achievements. Why Babbage
is set down as a physicist, when his whole effort was devoted to the
perfecting of calculating machines, we do not know, but the life is
one of the most interesting, and makes an attempt to expound the
causes--obvious enough, perhaps--of his misfortunes. It is a generous
appreciation of an ill-starred genius, now seldom heard of. Whewell,
again, is scarcely known as a physicist, but rather as the historian
of inductive science; we suppose that his writings on the tides have
secured him his place. Joule is mentioned in early life, and was
certainly one of the leading physicists of the century, yet he is not
among the selected ten--neither, for that matter, is Faraday, so it is
evident that scientific prowess has not been the test of admission.
On the whole the ten are versatile men, although no one of them could
come near in diversity of performance to the great Thomas Young, who
was not only a physicist of the first rank but also a physician, a
classical scholar, and one of the first successful decipherers of
Egyptian hieroglyphics. Rankine and Whewell were fair poets, and Clark
Maxwell deserves higher praise for his verses. His description of
Kelvin's reflecting galvanometer, in the form of a parody of Tennyson's
"Blow, bugle, blow," illustrates the ease and finish of his light verse:
O love! you fail to read the scale,
Correct to tenths of a division.
To mirror heaven those eyes were given,
And not for methods of precision--
Break, contact, break, set the free light-spot flying,
Break contact, rest thee magnet, swinging, creeping, dying.
The poem is quoted in the life of Kelvin, and two of Rankine's
songs are given. We hope that physicists can still show the same
accomplishment.
The lives are well written, and, while not a very profound contribution
to the history of the science, make very pleasant reading for scientist
and layman. There is, however, occasionally a lack of proportion, as
when Clark Maxwell's work on electro-magnetic waves receives little
attention compared to his other far less important achievements.
A LETTER FROM FRANCE
THE PRESENT STATE OF THE FRENCH NOVEL
_Paris, October, 1919._
In France as much as, and perhaps more than, in England the novel has
been since the eighteenth century the central massif of literature.
While in England the poets and the novelists formed two quite distinct
groups, while the poets Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns, Tennyson,
Swinburne remained pure poets, in France there have been few poets
who have not wished to write novels. Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Vigny,
Gautier have done so. A pure critic like Sainte-Beuve wished, with
_Volupté_, to try his hand at the novel. Taine left in manuscript
the novel _Etienne Maylan_ and Renan the novel _Patrice_; they did
not publish these books because they recognised them to be mediocre,
but both wished to obtain the glory of the novelist. The novel is in
France the highest object of literary ambition. It alone assures a
position of material and social importance. Thus it is that a novelist
who is read by the upper and middle classes is necessarily admitted
to the Academy while a historian or a philosopher is admitted only in
exceptional circumstances, and great poets like Baudelaire, Gautier,
Banville, Paul Fort remain outside unless they have certain connections
and certain sources of support. The prosperity of the novel at a given
moment may then be considered, in France, as the most obvious mark of
a powerful literary activity. No form of literature addresses a larger
public, provokes more discussion, or gives more of its own colour to a
generation or to an epoch. I will endeavour to indicate here in a few
pages the condition of the French novel on the morrow of the war.
Beyond doubt it is passing through a moment of mediocrity. This is not
because its public is beginning to break up. Publishers and readers
demand novels. In default of genuinely new novels many old ones are
reissued and read again and cheap reprints are swarming. Every new
novel in which any grain of originality can be perceived is discussed
and brought into the light and sells satisfactorily. And yet nothing
so far has told us of the appearance of the Flaubert, the Zola, the
Maupassant of to-morrow.
Naturalism proves to have been the last great school, massive,
compact, and powerful, of the French novel. Well, the survivors of
the naturalist movement, such as MM. Céard, Hennique, Descaves, have
ceased to write novels or else, if they still write them, have given
up completely the methods of naturalism, and seek, without success, to
adapt themselves to new tastes. It is not, however, impossible that in
a little time from now naturalism in several ways may again be somewhat
in fashion. There is a tendency among young writers and critics to
revise the judgment given in the case of Zola, as the judgment on
Dickens has been revised in England, and to consider that the poverty
and emptiness of his last books has unjustly thrown a shadow on the
profound and powerful works of his maturity. Those works, born of the
war, which have been most favourably received, have been on the whole
inspired by naturalist methods of observation and composition. The
European success of _Le Feu_ is due in large part to the fact that the
author applies to the great war the point of view and the methods of
Zola. It was also from the point of view of the story of a squad that
Zola wrote _La Débâcle_.
So far the novel of manners and psychology born of the war has only
been attempted by writers of the older generation, that which knew the
masters of the naturalist novel, which lived their life, which took
part, from one side or another of the barricade, in their struggles.
I am here thinking especially of the works written during the war by
the doyen of the French novel, M. Paul Bourget. M. Bourget occupies
to-day in the novel a position analogous to that of Zola in his
last years. The young literary generation is hostile to him or
regards him with contemptuous indifference, except that part of this
generation which is grouped round M. Maurras, whose political ideas
he has adopted. He is justly reproached with a painful style, with
conventional psychology in upper and middle class surroundings, with
laborious intrigues carried out according to antiquated formulæ. He
must be regarded, nevertheless, with respect as a great worker, who
seeks conscientiously to extend the limits of his manner, and, above
all, as the sole representative to-day of the old tradition of the
French novelists of the nineteenth century--that of Balzac, of Sand,
of Flaubert, of Maupassant, of Zola. Perhaps he marks the irremediable
decadence of this style which the twentieth century will replace by one
more supple and more precise.
The war novels of M. Bourget, _Le Sens de la Mort_, _Nemesis_, are
mediocre, though showing always the same technical qualities of solid
construction. But he has written a short _nouvelle_ of profound beauty,
_Le Justicier_, on a great theme of human peace and reconciliation
within a divided family; and this sketches perhaps the general lines of
to-morrow's reconciliations on our torn planet.
Among the innumerable books written by combatants, in which novels
abound, no novel has achieved the powerful interest of certain
collections of letters and journals which render, without literary
modelling, fresh, authentic, and actually seen impressions. The
generation which has lived through the war as an immediate and tragic
reality has not written and certainly will not write the novel of the
war. The Thackeray, the Balzac, the Tolstoi of to-morrow have probably
been born, but are hardly out of the nursery.
The two forms of the novel preferred by the young generation of to-day
are the novel of adventure and the little novel of irony and sentiment.
Neither has yet produced any great result. The first, after a year, is
already out of fashion, and the second will probably follow it in a few
months. And the writers of value who have passed through these phases
are now passing through some other.
The English novel of adventure has been in favour in France for some
time. The novels of Wells have found here for twenty years, like those
of Kipling, great numbers of ardent readers. Before that, a long
time ago, in symbolist circles, it was the fashion to speak with the
greatest admiration of Stevenson. And the novels of Chesterton, the
influence of which was visible in André Gide's _Les Caves du Vatican_,
have been appreciated by a narrower, but select, circle. Nevertheless
it was only during the war that the younger writers were tempted
systematically to compose romantic novels of adventure. The two novels
of M. Pierre Benoit, _Königsmarck_ and _l'Atlantide_, are clever books,
in which old methods are enhanced by a true novelist's temperament. An
Englishman will find little in them which Stevenson, and even Rider
Haggard, have not already given him. The _Maître du Navire_ of M. Louis
Chadousne seems to introduce in addition a note of irony which shows
that the author writes to amuse himself and does not believe in his
adventure. And this note of irony is still more obvious in _Le Chant
de l'Equipage_ of M. Pierre Mac-Orlan, which parodies the novel of
adventure. The French novelist is a rationalist who pretends to believe
in his mystery and does not believe in it. Between the adventure of
the English novel and the adventure of the French novel there is the
same difference as between the ghost in _Hamlet_ and the ghost which
Voltaire brings on to the stage at full noon, without deceiving anyone,
in _Semiramis_. The novel of adventure proves to have been a season's
fashion which those who launched it abandon in the following season.
What I have called the little novel of irony and sentiment has had a
longer, a more vivacious, and a more durable existence. It is almost
peculiar to French literature and produces every year a good harvest of
agreeable books. It is generally an invertebrate composition, made up
of humorous episodes and reflections, the slight daily impressions of a
man of letters, delicate and fatigued, in Parisian surroundings. It is,
as it were, the chronicle-novel of French literary life.
A great number of the works of M. Abel Hermant belong to this style,
and among them, in particular, the Anglo-French novel, half of Paris,
half of Oxford, which he is now publishing, and the first two parts of
which are called _L'Aube Ardente_ and _La Journée Brève_ (the latter
in course of publication in the _Revue de Paris_). These are, like M.
Hermant's books, the elegantly but frigidly written compositions which
come only from a literary and conventional atmosphere and appear to
have been developed in the author's mind as in an artificial incubator.
The true novel of this sort comes into existence under freer and more
fanciful conditions than obtain in the intelligent and tidy, though
somewhat melancholy, manufacture of M. Hermant. A young writer, who
died a score of years ago, Jean de Tinan, produced masterpieces in
_Pense-tu réussir?_ and _Aimienne_, which have not been surpassed.
To-day this type of novel has a right and a left--elegance on the
right and Bohemianism on the left, the latter as a rule being more
picturesque and more highly flavoured. On the right there is what
one might call, using the word in the sense in which it is used by
historians of mediæval literature, a _littérature courtoise_--I mean
a literature of the court with some refinement and some sensuality.
Here the author describes his little amatory adventures, endeavouring
to relieve their inevitable banality with a certain piquancy in the
introduction of portraits of his men and women friends, chosen among
an elegant society. _Les Papiers de Cleonthe_, by M. Jean-Louis
Vaudoyer, and _Le Diable a l'Hôtel_, by M. Emile Henriot, which
have just appeared, though they fall sometimes into banality, make
agreeable reading. On the left there is the little Bohemian novel,
which deals with Montmartre as ancient stories dealt with Miletus. Its
characters are artists and their more or less interesting friends,
young women and their more or less interested friends. The novel of
Montmartre, in which style Charles-Louis Philippe wrote the earliest
masterpieces, is practised to-day in the most agreeable fashion by M.
Francis Cares, author of _Bob et Bobette_, M. Mac-Orlan, author of _La
Clique du Café Brebis_, and M. André Billy, the author of _Scènes de
la Vie Littéraire_. Nevertheless these sometimes shady cabarets, where
boredom is chased away, must not be confused with the higher spheres of
literature.
* * * * *
The French novel, regarded as a whole, is at the present moment going
through a crisis. The qualities of original, free, and vigorous
creation which were the causes of success from Balzac to Maupassant
have become rare. The novel no longer produces those real and living
characters round whom, as Taine said, it is possible to walk. But it is
remarkable for qualities of intelligence.
Alphonse Daudet somewhere makes a distinction between creative
novelists and essayist novelists. The distinction is very just. We lack
to-day creative novelists, but we have a number of essayist novelists.
Our contemporary novelists are very intelligent persons, who are often
admirable in their knowledge of human nature, but who rarely succeed in
making it live. It is nevertheless probable that there is nothing to be
gained by retracing our steps. We shall no doubt reach something new by
continuing to the end this exercise of the intellect, by applying it
to an increasingly profound and refined psychological analysis. If we
take examples from the English novel, the sign-post of our French novel
of to-day would not be such a name as that of Dickens or of Eliot or
of Kipling but rather that of Meredith. This is what is indicated by
the great success now enjoyed by two complex and delicate writers, M.
Marcel Prevost and M. Jean Girandoux. _A l'Ombre de Jeunes Filles en
Fleur_ and _Simon le Pathétique_ are both novels of rich and fugitive
personalities, who are absorbed in the contemplation of themselves,
and who thus find a real world of inward adventures. It seems that the
French novel is now moving by choice in this direction, and that the
public is assisting the movement. This should not be astonishing in a
country which has always regarded psychological analysis as the supreme
goal of literature.
ALBERT THIBAUDET
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
Stonehenge was formally handed over to the nation on October 26th,
1918, and H.M. Office of Works at once made plans to secure some of the
standing stones in danger of cracking, and to excavate the entire area
without disturbing the monument. The archæological supervision of the
work was entrusted to the Society of Antiquaries, and the programme was
to have a season of about three months for several consecutive years on
the same lines as in 1901, when the great leaning stone was raised with
interesting results. Professor Gowland's health, however, prevented
his participation in the scheme, and his successor, Lieut.-Colonel
Hawley, unfortunately met with an accident, which, with a strike among
the contractor's men, prevented any but preliminary work being carried
out on the site this year. If funds are available--and the opportunity
of solving the riddle of Stonehenge must appeal to all interested in
antiquity--there is a good prospect of starting in earnest next summer,
without prejudice, it is hoped, to the society's enterprises at Old
Sarum and Wroxeter, the Roman town near Shrewsbury, on both of which
sites considerable progress had been made before the outbreak of war.
The recent death of Professor Haverfield is one of many severe losses
incurred by the society during the past summer.
SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS
For years the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has been
associated with the work of protesting against the destruction or
spoiling of good examples of the building art of the past. This year
it is developing the more constructive side of its activities. The
following instances will suffice to illustrate this development.
First, the Society is endeavouring to show that the humbler forms of
English architecture--the old cottages--should not only be saved, but
used, and how they can be made decently habitable, though much injured
by time and neglect. Works replete with old-time building lore should
not be permanently condemned because they lack damp courses, proper
ventilation, larders, or upstair fireplaces. Instead of building new
at £800 or so, the Housing Committees should acquire cottages of this
kind and repair them at, say, £250 or £300. To draw attention to this
subject the Society has issued a well-illustrated booklet (Batsford,
94 High Holborn; 2s.), which it hopes to follow by a practical
demonstration on a pair of old cottages, proving the possibility of
remedying common defects. It hopes to publish the results in a second
booklet which would in fact be a pictorial specification.
The second illustration of the Society's constructive activity is the
offer to give lectures on the objects and work of the Society, in which
special emphasis is to be laid on what may be learnt in matters of
economy and beauty, from old buildings.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
The Royal Numismatic Society has removed from 22 Albemarle Street to
22 Russell Square, W.C.1, where meetings will be held and the library
is housed. On October 16th, Sir Henry Howorth, Vice-President, in
the Chair, Mr. Lawrence read a note on some of the difficulties of
distinguishing halfpence from farthings during the period between 1465
and 1523. Parliament in the latter year directed some alteration of
type of the farthings, as it was shown that halfpennies and farthings
were with difficulty distinguishable owing to both denominations having
been struck from the same "coin." A discussion was also raised on the
profile half-groats of Henry VII. bearing the mint-marks martlet and
rose. Some of these have keys below the shield on the reverse and
others are without the keys. The question raised was whether these
later coins were to be considered as having been struck at York in
consequence of the martlet mint-mark, previously only known at York,
or whether the absence of the keys denoted their issue at London. Mr.
Brooke and Col. Morrieson urged that these coins were _sede vacante_
issues of York.
Mr. H. Mattingly read a paper entitled "A. Vitellius Imp. Germanicus,"
in which he attempted to determine the reasons for the variations
in Vitellius's obverse legends, between the forms _Imp. Germ._ and
_Germ. Imp._ After distinguishing clearly the class of coins on which
these titles appear, he brought evidence to show that the title _Imp.
Germanicus_ is characteristic of the non-Roman coins of Vitellius
and of the early period of the reign before the victory over Otho.
It implied a definite challenge thrown out by the German armies to
the rest of the Empire, and in consequence when Vitellius became
constitutional Emperor at Rome the title was deftly deprived of offence
by inversion to _Germanicus Imp._, a normal form of title already borne
by Claudius and Nero.
THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
The forty-second annual meeting of the Library Association was notable,
not by reason of its bibliographical or literary interest, for either
was to seek, but as marking a definite cleavage between librarians
and the Board of Education upon a matter of national importance. Were
it not that education in this country has always been the province of
the amateur, one might say that the cleavage was between amateur and
professional opinion. The third interim report of the Adult Education
Committee to the Ministry of Reconstruction proposed to hand over
the control of the Public Library to the Local Education Authority;
the Library Association, as a body possessed of a charter for the
support and advancement of the public library movement, opposed the
main recommendations of that report and returned to the Minister of
Education a memorandum of counter argument. The four points of the
memorandum were: (1) "That, with the already heavy responsibilities
of the Education Authority, an additional duty--problems requiring
detached consideration--will result in the convenient relegation of
the library to a mere appendage of the school; (2) that, although
co-operation between school and library does exist, the initiative
has come almost wholly from the latter, and that assimilation by the
comparatively untried and empirical "1918 model" education will be
fatal to its general usefulness; (3) that the interest of the public is
the main interest of the library, and that this is subordinated by the
Adult Education Committee to the special interest of the school; (4)
that the recommendations upon the provision of technical and commercial
books were unduly extravagant and wasteful as regarding the first, but
unduly parsimonious and wrongly conceived in the case of the second. To
this document, beyond a bare acknowledgment, no reply has been given.
Its form and tenor were unanimously approved by the Association at
Southport.
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
The Bibliographical Society opens its 28th Session on November 17th,
with a paper by Mr. R. F. Sharp, of the British Museum, on "Travesties
of Shakespeare's Plays." The Society has not only kept up its normal
output of books during the war, but has produced some volumes of
exceptional importance, notably Mr. Gordon Duff's wonderfully complete
record of _English Fifteenth-Century Books_, with facsimiles of all
the types used in them; Mr. E. F. Bosanquet's illustrated Monograph
on _English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications_; the first volume
of Professor Carleton Brown's _Register of Middle-English Religious
Verse_; and two exceptionally interesting volumes of _Transactions_. _A
Bibliography of Landor_, by Mr. Stephen Wheeler and Mr. T. J. Wise,
will shortly be issued, and the second volume of Professor Carleton
Brown's _Register_ should be ready early next year. The books of the
Society are only printed for its own members, and until 1914 it was
a close corporation, with an English and American membership limited
to 300. In the January before the war it opened its ranks in order to
obtain a hundred additional members and further increase its output.
It is still open to book lovers to join at the old subscription of
a guinea, but unless the Annual Meeting in January next decides
otherwise, the roll of the Society is due to be closed on the third
Monday of the new year. That the Society has done so well during the
war is largely due to its genial President, Sir William Osler, who has
held office longer than any of his predecessors and is soon further to
help the Society by producing for it a Monograph on the Medical books
published by the earliest printers, _i.e._ not later than 1480. Among
the earlier presidents were Dr. Garnett and Mr. Fortescue, of the
British Museum, the late Earl of Crawford, Mr. H. B. Wheatley, and Mr.
A. H. Huth, owner of the splendid library which has already furnished
material for eight sales at Sotheby's. Mr. A. W. Pollard, the present
Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, has been its Hon.
Secretary since 1893, and was given some years ago a notable partner in
Mr. R. B. McKerrow, the Editor of Nashe.
THE FOLKLORE SOCIETY
During the war the Folklore, like other societies, has suffered by
the absence of some of its most active members on service, but the
work of the Society has not been interrupted, its meetings have been
regularly held, many valuable contributions have been received, and
the attendance has been well maintained. _Folk-lore_, the quarterly
Proceedings, has retained its position as one of the leading
authorities on popular beliefs and superstitions of races in the lower
stage of culture. Its principal function is to publish papers read by
members at the Society's meetings, and to review the more important
literature on subjects in which it is interested. But it also welcomes
from the general public notes and queries on British and foreign
folklore and beliefs. The foundations have been laid for two important
works which, it is hoped, will soon be ready for publication. As
regards the folklore of these islands, the leading authority is the
_Observations on Popular Antiquities_, by John Brand, subsequently
edited by Sir H. Ellis. Large collections have been made under the
supervision of Miss S. C. Burne, an ex-president of the society and
author of a valuable book on the folklore of Shropshire, with a view
to the compilation on the basis of Brand's work of a cyclopedia of
British folklore. The second work now in progress is a general index to
the long series of special books and Proceedings issued by the society
since its foundation, the work of compilation having been entrusted to
Mr. A. R. Wright.
THE SOCIETY OF PURE ENGLISH
The Society of Pure English, which was founded shortly before the war,
and which during the war was temporarily suspended, has now begun to
carry out its original purpose, and probably before this note appears
its first two pamphlets will have been published. Pamphlet No. 1 will
contain a list of the members of the Society and a reprint of the
original prospectus, which was privately printed in 1913, and which
contains a statement of the Society's aims in general terms. Pamphlet
No. 2 will consist of a discussion by the Poet Laureate of a curious
and hitherto almost unnoticed phenomenon of contemporary speech, the
great increase, namely, of homophones, or words of the same sound but
different meanings, in the English language. As the original prospectus
shows, the Society does not in the least aim at the absurd project of
"fixing" the language--its conception is rather that, since all living
languages change and must change as life changes, an attempt should
be made to guide this necessary process by acknowledged principles of
tradition and taste.
DRAMA
A LIVING CORPSE
This section opens amid a furore for improving the Drama in this
country. Leagues have sprung up, with imposing committees of enormous
length, and are canvassing for money and members with considerable
success. A Conference of the Theatre, lasting a fortnight, was held in
the summer at Stratford-upon-Avon for the first time in history, at
which actors, dramatic critics, trade unionists, authors, publishers,
newspaper proprietors, theatrical managers, voice trainers, poets,
scenic artists, school teachers, clergymen, and one bishop expressed
day after day their intense determination to have more drama and
better drama than we have ever had in England before. This assemblage
of people, whom as one of them I may perhaps be permitted to call
without offence fanatics, may have appeared to the detached onlooker
to have been of very little use. The Conference melted away, leaving
the British Drama League and the Arts League of Service still without
sufficient money to do any of the practical things without which the
gathering of conferences and the sitting of committees are merely
occasions for the ventilation of private grievances.
But the Conference could never have been held if there were not,
widespread through the country, a genuine passion for the theatre
far more extensive and far stronger than it had ever been in England
during the whole of the nineteenth century. There are no statistics
available to give us the percentage of the population who were regular
theatre-goers during the last century, but it was certainly very small,
and everyone knows that it has increased enormously during the last
ten years, and has probably even doubled again during the war. This
is a fact which is generally overlooked, but which really provides us
with the soundest basis for hope. What is the matter with the theatre
in England is mainly that there is not enough of it. Nearly all its
faults and shortcomings may be put down to deficiencies of _matériel_,
both structural and human. _There are not enough theatres_, those in
existence are obsolete, cranky, ill-ventilated, absurdly constructed,
badly placed buildings, an eyesore to passers-by, a hell of discomfort
for 90 per cent. of the audience, a death-trap for actors. Only a
fanatical human passion for the theatre could drive people into such
places away from the comparative comfort of their own firesides. _There
are not enough actors_, and those that survive the barbaric tortures
of rushing week by week from one cold and slatternly apartment-house
to another, always arriving in their next provincial town on the
dismallest of Sundays, generally find that they are the one spark of
life in the place, and end, like Sir Henry Irving, by expiring in their
miserable and draughty dressing-rooms. The English provincial town in
its dreariness and dirt awaits the coming of the actor much as the
Esquimaux in winter await the coming of the sun, but the actor during
the day when he is free wanders through its streets as Virgil wandered
by the banks of the Styx--forlorn, and like a man among shadows who
have no commerce with him, but belong to another world. It is no wonder
that they become more and more divorced from their fellow-creatures,
more and more inefficient, more and more lacking in zest for experiment
and enterprise, until neglected and isolated the profession sinks, with
bright exceptions, to a level of illiteracy, incompetence, and sloth
that lately even in London moved a commercial manager like Mr. Cochran
to express his astonishment.
But the municipal councils, which are the civic committees of the
townspeople entrusted with organising their social life, cannot remain
for ever indifferent to their duty in face of a growing popular demand
for the theatre; that is why I point to the enormous increase in the
number of habitual theatre-goers as our strongest basis of hope. Or if
they do so persist private enterprise will inevitably step in, as it
did in the case of so many electric-lighting, tramway, gas, and water
undertakings, build up a profitable theatrical business, mulct the
town annually of thousands of pounds in profits, and ultimately will
have to be bought out by the municipality at an inflated price. As Mr.
Granville Barker pointed out in an extraordinarily able speech at the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the people's greatest need is to become
articulate. Art means nothing if it does not mean giving speech to
the people, and the art of the Drama is the most democratic, the most
popular, the most wide-reaching, the most easily understood, and the
most stimulating, because the most social of all the arts. There was
a time, and it is not so very long ago, when primary education in its
most rudimentary, that is to say, its school form, was left to private
enterprise, and if private enterprise could have done it at all it
might possibly have done it better than the nation; but every argument
that can be used in favour of teaching everyone to read and write
applies still more forcibly to giving the people a real education. It
is far too important and too urgent to be left to the chance provision
of speculators out merely to make profits for themselves, and it is
to enlighten public opinion on the subject that these leagues have
primarily been founded. But let me not be mistaken. There can be no
intention of priggishly educating the people in the "higher drama." We
must carefully discriminate between advocating for theatres--municipal,
if possible, but if not, private--and advocating for the performance of
plays by any dramatist or school or coterie of dramatists. The Drama is
a much bigger thing than Mr. Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, or anyone else, and
what has always prevented these movements from gaining popular sympathy
has been their lack of breadth, their curious fascination for pedants
and cranks. Almost every decent, sane human being will appreciate and
support a demand for a theatre to enlighten the dismal misery and
boredom of the winter evenings of his native town and to take him out
of the narrow groove into which he will inevitably stick if left alone
with his books and his relations; but he will not support a scheme to
ram down his throat obvious propaganda.
The Calvinists of the Drama
I have sat for hours in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square,
watching the people. The most heterogeneous collection of persons
imaginable assemble there. Washerwomen, soldiers, artisans, clerks,
clergymen, navvies, all classes and ages. Some wander aimlessly about,
some stand petrified before one picture for a quarter of an hour, some
look only at portraits, others search for familiar landscapes, others
again are attracted by historical interest. There is hardly one of them
that would not probably earn the contempt of Mr. Clive Bell if he were
to give Mr. Bell the reason of his enjoyment; but I assert with all the
emphasis I can command that there is not one of them who has not gained
by even ten minutes within that building something impossible to value
and precious, beyond estimation. Can any human being go out of the
dirt, the indignity, the ugliness, the noise, the formlessness of the
modern city into the serenity, the colour, the dignity, the peace, and
the beauty of the rooms of the National Gallery without a quickening of
the spirit, however imperceptible? What is there in Trafalgar Square
apart from the National Gallery which in any degree witnesses that man
is more than an animal? True, there is St. Martin's Church, but the
associations of the church--irrelevant if you will--adulterate and
weaken its spiritual influence on men's minds to-day. But the National
Gallery exerts a completely catholic and irradiating power on all who
enter.
So does the theatre, even exactly as it stands to-day. I am in profound
disagreement with those who raise up their hands in horror at the
present state of the theatre where it exists. What causes me to join
the chorus of Jeremiahs is the scarcity of theatres, their complete
and utter absence in hundreds of large towns where they should exist,
and the smallness of their numbers in our largest cities. My mention
of Mr. Clive Bell in connection with the National Gallery was doubly
relevant, for there is a set of high-brows connected with the theatre
who have set their eyes so fixedly on an unreal and abstract perfection
that they have become blind. They talk about Serious Drama in the
same solemn, pompous and hopeless way that the Calvinists used to
talk about salvation, and the mass of the people, cheerfully ignoring
them, continues to go tranquilly to perdition. Ask anyone of these
apostles of Serious Drama to show you one serious drama, and the odds
are that they will say, _Man and Superman_ or _Ghosts_ or _Justice_.
Well, there is something to be said for the authors of these three
plays, although not one of them is a really first-rate dramatist, the
equal of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, or even Racine, but for
their followers--the dealers in the doleful realism of Manchester,
Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the London suburbs--there is in
the main nothing to be said whatever. Their works are for the most
part immeasurably inferior to the average London Revue, and to accuse
the theatre of sinking into degradation because it prefers the wit,
humour, beautiful dressing, vivacious dancing, and high spirits of an
Ambassador's, Vaudeville, Pavilion, or Alhambra Revue to a serious,
machine-made play by Mr. Sutro or two hours of mechanical dulness from
someone I had better not name is simply to accuse it of preferring life
to the undesirable "seriousness" of the tomb.
Influence of the Existing Theatre
It is not as if there were no drama better than the Revue or the
Musical Comedy, but the stupidity of the high-brows, their dull
acceptance of the solemn and the pompous, of anything in fact that is
not bright or imaginative or stirring, but is sufficiently pretentious,
does incalculable harm to that annually growing fraction of the
public which, fully appreciative of Revue and Musical Comedy, is yet
unsatisfied and is really thirsting for finer things. This public is
continually essaying samples of the drama of the high-brows and is
continually being driven back from such dry, unprofitable verbiage to
those theatres where there is humour, wit, charm and beauty. And for
this evidence of good taste it is roundly abused. I frequently wonder
whether anyone of these misguided zealots has ever been inside the
popular theatre, the theatre of the Musical Comedy. Have they any idea
what a revelation of beauty it is to large numbers of the population?
I dare to assert that in London the popular theatre has done more
to develop and educate the taste of the masses in dress, furniture,
and decoration than fifty years of propaganda from Ruskin, William
Morris, and all their disciples. The theatre, of course, has learnt
from the artists of all countries, but it has been the great cultural
organisation which has taken the fruits of the artists' work to the
people and opened their eyes.
In educating the senses the popular theatre has done and is still
doing invaluable work; it is when it comes to educating the finer
emotions that it fails so lamentably, though hardly so utterly as the
high-brow theatre, in which there are no emotions but those of despair,
disillusionment and derision. And yet it is strange that in spite of
the general abuse of the low standards of London plays, on the rare
occasions when a really fine play is put on it is generally met by the
critics with a chorus of disapproval or the praise that damns. We have
had a good example in London recently. Mr. Henry Ainley, by common
consent our finest actor, begins his management of the St. James's
Theatre with Tolstoy's _The Living Corpse_, the title being changed
to _Reparation_, in consideration of the mental state of a public
frightened out of its wits by the high-brows and the cranks. Tolstoy
was a great man, and _The Living Corpse_ is a fine play, a play that
ought to have a great success; but do the critics say, "Here at last is
a magnificent play, a play which everyone must see"? Not a bit of it.
The general spirit of their notices is one of chilly respect for the
famous name of Tolstoy, with an insinuation that the play would have
been much better if it had been handled by a competent dramatist like
Sir Arthur Pinero or Mr. Sutro. "What is the central theme? We are not
quite sure," says the critic of the leading London daily. Is it a mere
coincidence that on the same page that journal's musical critic, in
reference to _Prometheus_, the work of Tolstoy's compatriot, Scriabin,
one of the greatest of modern composers, says he does not understand it
and, asking himself whether Scriabin was "sane or deranged," declares
that he does not know? Here is a lesson for Drama Leagues, for it is
almost certain that when we do get good drama scarcely anyone will know
it.
* * * * *
A society called "The Phœnix," with headquarters at Dudley House,
Southampton Street, Strand, has been formed to revive plays of
Elizabethan, Restoration, and later times. The following plays have
been selected for early production:
_The Duchess of Malfi_ (John Webster), _Marriage à la Mode_ (John
Dryden), _The Fair Maid of the West_, Part I. (Thomas Heywood), _Don
Carlos_ (Thomas Otway), _Volpone_ (Ben Jonson). _The Duchess of Malfi_
will be given on Sunday, November 16th.
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
HEARTBREAK HOUSE, ETC. By BERNARD SHAW. Constable. 7_s._ 6_d._
Mr. Shaw is one of the most consistent authors living. His readers know
almost to a comma what he is going to give them every time they open
his latest book. That is perhaps the chief reason why there has been
such a falling off in Mr. Shaw's popularity of recent years. Another
reason is, of course, the war; but it is strange that Mr. Shaw's
opinions, or his particular way of expressing his opinion, during the
war should have alienated and even made bitterly hostile men of wide
knowledge and experience of his writings and his character who, if they
could be persuaded momentarily to reflect without prejudice, would have
to admit that what offends them now was precisely what offended so many
others in the years before the war, when they on the contrary were Mr.
Shaw's ardent champions or, at the very least, his apologists. It only
goes to show how very far anyone of us is from being able to judge a
man's work rationally once our own particular prejudice is touched. We
are all raw somewhere, and woe to the man who touches us on the raw,
for then all hope of dispassionate criticism, of Christian toleration
even, is gone. It has been Mr. Shaw's most vivid characteristic that
he has never lost his intellectual integrity. It is easy to be honest
among one's enemies, but to be honest among one's friends is a virtue
so rare, so uncomfortable, and outwardly so contrary to the spirit of
fair play that it is not surprising it should be generally detested.
Mr. Shaw has always retained what he believes, perhaps conceitedly, to
be his right to say the worst that can be said of his dearest friends,
and of the advocates of whatever cause happens at the moment to be
nearest to his heart. However ruinous such conduct may appear to be to
the immediate interests of the movement he is supposed to support, he
will not abandon his right to forge weapons for the enemy more damaging
than any discoverable by their own brains. When life or one's country
or one's family is at stake, such conduct appears little less than
devilish, yet Mr. Shaw has his right to express his opinions as lucidly
and as pointedly as he can, and it may be that when we are far enough
removed from the heat and blinding dust of the moment's conflict we
shall realise that Mr. Shaw has been faithful to the truth that is in
him, and if we have any reason to complain it is certainly not of Mr.
Shaw, but of the God who made him.
It may seem that what the ordinary man would call, and call wrongly,
Mr. Shaw's unreliability does not square with the assertion that he
is consistent, and that his readers know beforehand exactly what Mr.
Shaw is going to give them. But Mr. Shaw's consistency lies in his
artillery, not in his object of attack. The enemy varies, but the same
guns are always going off. In _Heartbreak House_ there is at times
all and more than all the old brilliancy. The dialogue of the first
and third acts is concentrated, savage, and burns with an intensity
that casts a dull imaginative glow over the play. The characters of
the Hushabyes, of Captain Shotover, of the sham millionaire Mangan,
of Mazzini Dunn, and the fluteplayer are drawn with a pen steeped in
vitriol and, exaggerated as they are, they have a genuine imaginative
reality deeper than most Shavian figures. There is a moral passion in
this play gloomier and more savage than in anything Mr. Shaw has yet
done, and an absence of that childish and inconsequent flippancy which
so often mars his work. The other plays in the volume vary in quality
from some excellent fooling in _Great Catherine_ to a depressing
mechanical liveliness, almost utterly without humour, in _Augustus
Does His Bit_. The best of them is _O'Flaherty, V.C._; but although it
frequently makes one laugh one finds oneself, at the end, closing the
book with that tired yawn that seems to be the fatal consequence of
reading a great deal of Mr. Shaw at one time.
FIRST PLAYS. By A. A. MILNE. Chatto & Windus. 6_s,_
I am not sure that I do Mr. Milne any injustice by asserting that
the best thing in his first volume of plays is the Introduction,
describing how the five plays came to be written. It is turned with
that inimitable grace and lightness of touch which have made Mr. Milne
famous as a journalist. Mr. Milne's charm and quaint humour need a
certain space in which to display themselves. It would be fatal to
hurry him or to try to straighten his meanderings and digressions, but
that is exactly what the dramatic form does do. It is not that Mr.
Milne cannot express himself in a few sentences, he can; but however
few the sentences they will be allusive, indirect, full of parabolas
and curves that seem to lead away but really come back to the point.
These qualities are difficult to transfer to dialogue, especially when
one is hampered by the consciousness of theatrical convention, and in
his first effort, _Wurzel-Flummery_, after inventing that wonderful
name, Mr. Milne fails entirely to get his own individual qualities
into the play. The dialogue is in short, flavourless sentences that
seem to have been shot out of a popgun, and the characters being mere
lay-figures, the play is simply dull. The _Lucky One_ is a much more
ambitious and more successful experiment. The people are alive, but
Mr. Milne is probably right in seeing no hope of its being produced.
It is intelligence without frills or decoration; and, as he says, "the
girl marries the wrong man." It is in _Belinda_ that Mr. Milne is most
successfully himself. Mr. Milne calls it an "April Folly in three
acts." and that describes it exactly.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
It may be of interest at this juncture, now that the "close time"
for artists between the spring and autumn exhibitions has come to an
end, to review past events in artistic circles, and attempt to place
readers _au courant_ with events to come. The war has not been without
its effects on some branches of artistic development. The supporters
of Burlington House, it is true, pursue their way more or less
undisturbed by the startling incidents of the last four years; I would
be inclined to rank with them the greater part also of the members of
the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, whose
twenty-sixth exhibition is now being held at the Grosvenor Galleries.
It is only fair to say, however, that the so-called revolutionary in
art can sometimes find a place for his work even on these august walls.
The New English Art Club has been handicapped by the commandeering of
its gallery by the Government. Still, here again the god-fathers and
professors still hold the sway, and it is only in such bodies as the
Allied Artists Association, the Friday Club, and the London Group,
that the new blood can be more or less assured of a place to exhibit
their work and obtain their share in the business of acceptance for,
and arrangement of, exhibitions. All these societies are now firmly
established, though the last-named has sustained a great loss by the
death of its admirable president, Harold Gilman. The Allied Artists is
a thoroughly democratic institution and a step towards a trade union of
artists, if such a thing is possible: that some step in that direction
is needed there can be no doubt, as the artist suffers very severely
indeed from the middleman. These societies, then, in their exhibits
generally, show renewed signs of energy and development in art.
The employment of younger men in an official capacity as war artists
instead of such Academicians as were not too infirm to bear the weight
of a steel helmet, showed unusual wisdom and perspicuity on behalf
of the responsible bodies concerned. The direct result was a fine
collection of paintings by men who, for the most part, had been able to
depict their impressions of war in war's surroundings, or record their
experiences, not easily forgotten, after they had been freed from the
ranks. An exhibition of these paintings held in America was attended
with marked success, and helped to make known the work of young English
artists in that country. C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, Wyndham Lewis,
and Eric Kennington, to mention only a few, have produced some fine
and lasting records of their impressions _in medias res_. The public
will have an opportunity of seeing the fine collection of paintings
commissioned and collected by the Imperial War Museum this winter. The
effect of this official employment is particularly noticeable upon the
more extreme body of painters known as the Vorticists with Wyndham
Lewis at the head: they have voluntarily or involuntarily made certain
concessions to representation ("compromise" is in bad odour now) in
their work, but these concessions have in no way weakened the results
of their toil, as appeared evident at the Canadian War Memorials
Exhibition this spring.
Turning to other events--the exhibition of foreign artists at the
Mansard Gallery, which has recently closed, is, I believe, the first
one of its kind since the post-impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton
Galleries before the war. Now, as then, I fancy, it will be found
to be a case of a little garden in a patch of wilderness. Mr. Clive
Bell would perhaps have us bow unreservedly before the lions of the
continent, but I feel that some of the artists are only repeating with
variations the themes given out by their forerunners. Even the work
of the accepted masters, such as Picasso and Derain, and so forth,
does not seem quite convincing at first sight, but perhaps these
were acting purposely as foils to their younger contemporaries. The
Exhibition was, nevertheless, of great interest, especially if we may
take it to show roughly the various tendencies of continental art.
The Memorial Exhibition of the works of Harold Gilman at the Leicester
Galleries deserves special notice. Harold Gilman died suddenly of
influenza this spring. To everyone who knew him his death must have
come as a severe shock; his unfailing courtesy and true gentleness of
manner had endeared him to many. As an artist, the sane outlook and
sincere purpose in his work were valuable assets to whatever movement
he was connected with. It is difficult at this time to estimate his
value as a painter, but I am inclined to think it will be considerable.
He had elaborated a fine sense of colour which was as effective in his
painting as it was useful in his teaching. His work, hung all together
in this exhibition, seems far more striking than when seen in isolated
examples, the drawings forming a decidedly important part of the whole.
He was not accustomed to show these drawings nor did he seem to value
them very much, except as a means to the end; and I am surprised by
their excellence. No. 23 is a design for a large painting commissioned
by the Canadian Government, and left unfinished at his death. No. 37
is one of the gems of the collection. An illustrated memorial volume
of Gilman's work will be published shortly. Other picture shows
forthcoming in London during the autumn and winter are--an exhibition
of the works of Matisse, Mr. Marchant's Salon, open for the first
time since the war at the Goupil Galleries, the Imperial War Museum
Exhibition, and the London Group at the Mansard Gallery in November.
* * * * *
To the most hardened critic the sounding title of the International
Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Engravers may seem a little
overaweing; each time, as the Society's exhibition comes round, he must
feel this peculiar thrill; the catalogue also, with its crescendos of
lay members, honorary lay members, and deceased honorary lay members,
has a conscious feeling of "well-to-do-ness" which is very impressive,
and may tend to undermine impartial judgment. The twenty-sixth
exhibition of this Society is, notwithstanding, very like many others
which have gone before. A long search for instances of any serious
purpose, with a few exceptions, meets with nothing but superficial
cleverness or work of a purely negative value. As in the exhibitions
of Burlington House, so here, the artists seem entirely concerned with
the portrayal of the anecdote for itself, without the least regard for
design, in fact with the least amount of solid purpose or feeling, and
with the free use of cheap _bravura_ painting. There are, of course,
the well-known stand-bys who provide what is expected of them with
satisfactory regularity. Mr. MacEvoy's portraits of the nobility and
gentry seem more and more evanescent, and one would hardly credit them
with a drop of red blood, let alone blue--but they have their charm.
The portraits in general are not peculiarly interesting, characterised
as they are by good but uninspired painting. Mr. Frampton's No. 29 is
a case in point. The only bright exception, both as a portrait and a
work of art, is Mr. Alvaro Guevara's portrait of Miss Edith Sitwell,
which alone is worth paying 1s. 6d. to see. The painting throughout is
curiously realistic, the colour is very fine, and the arrangement of
the figure so as to present a view looking down upon it, together with
the placing of the mats on the floor, make a most interesting design.
Placed as it is among the portraits of Mr. MacEvoy, the contrast is
startling and a little cruel, not unlike a bird of paradise amongst a
batch of ring-doves. I am surprised to see that the perseverance of the
firm of Nicholson and Son, though the business is now mostly carried on
by Mr. Benjamin Nicholson, has not yet been awarded by royal warrant.
No one, I hope, will be so obtuse as not to distinguish the filial from
the paternal jug. Considerable mention has been made of the landscapes
in water-colour by Miss Frances Hodgkins, and though I cannot
quite agree with all that has been said, I think her work has charm
and a strong sense of pattern. No. 214, _Threshing_, is especially
attractive. The drawings of J. D. Revel will repay attention,
particularly No. 194. Mr. Keith Baynes contributes two pleasing
drawings, one of which has an interesting design of boats, while Mr.
William Rothenstein has a good but very war-like self-portrait. I
feel glad my acquaintance with him has been so far only in a civilian
capacity. It would appear that sheep-skin jerkins are regulation dress
for official war-artists.
ARTISTIC PUBLICATIONS
Art and Letters
With the autumn number of _Art and Letters_ the periodical completes
its fourth publication since the beginning of the new series. _Art and
Letters_ was first published in July, 1917, under the editorship of
Frank Rutter, Harold Gilman, and Charles Ginner, and was devoted to the
reproduction of the graphic arts and the publication of short essays,
stories, poems, and reviews. After the first four numbers the magazine
came under the management of Mr. Frank Rutter and Mr. Osbert Sitwell,
who changed the cover from a set design to one of a varied pattern each
quarter.
_Art and Letters_ has continued to supply a certain demand as an
artistic quarterly, and indeed, with the exception of _Colour_, it
seems to be the only periodical which reproduces the works of younger
contemporary artists. The first numbers contained some excellent
drawings by Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman, and Charles Ginner, with
woodcuts by Lucien Pissaro; later, work by Paul Nash, MacKnight
Kauffer, and Therèse Lessore formed a pleasing contribution. With the
inception of the new series in 1918, the paper was given fresh impetus
and still maintains its high level. A criticism which applies to many
other like publications may be also applied to _Art and Letters_: it is
too precious. There is need of a wider scope and more general appeal to
the public.
The chief item of artistic interest in Volume 2, No. 4, of _Art and
Letters_, which has just appeared, is the drawing by Modigliani, who
was one of the most promising exhibitors at the recent exhibition of
Continental Artists held at the Mansard Gallery, and referred to above.
This is really a beautiful drawing, delicate and sensitive; the artist,
while relying chiefly on the rhythmic value of his line, has introduced
ever so slightly into the face the literary interest, so to speak,
of a subtle expression which is the quintessence of placid kindness.
There are also excellent drawings by the late Gaudier Brzeska and
Wyndham Lewis, and a wood-cut by Paul Nash which, at the risk of being
censored for partiality, I venture to think is of interest in another
branch of his art. The drawing by Miss Anne Estelle Rice is competent
and decorative. A new periodical entitled _The Owl_ was hatched in the
early summer, in which the excellence of the literary contributions
greatly outweighed the value of the artistic reproductions. I hope in
the future that the art editor will range a little wider in his choice
of drawings.
The Poetry Bookshop
Mr. Harold Monro is publishing a series of monthly chap-books, which
has already run into three numbers; it purports to be a record of the
poetry and drama of to-day. In so far as it bears upon these columns,
Volume 2 is of interest as containing reproductions of Mr. Albert
Rutherstone's theatre designs for Bernard Shaw's play, _Androcles and
the Lion_, produced at St. James's Theatre before the war. This is
altogether an admirable and valuable little book. The most recently
published number is entitled _Poems Newly Decorated_, and contains some
charming and effective designs by the younger artists.
JOHN NASH
MUSIC
THE PROMENADE CONCERTS
IT has been good to see the Queen's Hall filled once more with a
happy crowd, after the thin and uncertain audiences which listened to
the Promenade Concerts during the war. Even to a jaded professional
critic there is a peculiar sense of pleasure to be derived from them
which no other concerts can convey. One is free to smoke, to begin
with, and free to move about and see one's friends; for that is one of
the pleasant things about a Promenade Concert, that one always finds
friends there. And just as one finds unexpected old friends on the
floor of the house, so one finds them in the programme. There are many
works from which the hardened concert-goer flees when he sees them put
in to fill up time in an ordinary symphony concert. At the Promenades
he may find himself listening to them in the company of someone who has
never heard them before, and suddenly discover that they have taken on
a new aspect in relation to all the music which memory has accumulated
since the last time that he came across them. The more heterogeneous
the programme, the more delightful it is, and one wonders what goes
on in the minds of those listeners who crowd to the evenings that are
given up to Wagner alone or to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. It is on a
Wagner night that one begins to be conscious of how badly the band is
playing. They are trotting through the old stock extracts, which they
are supposed to know by heart. The old hands are bored to death, the
new ones do not yet know their way about. At least so one is tempted
to think for the moment. And on a classical night one is tempted to
quarrel with some of Sir Henry Wood's interpretations.
Such judgments are unprofitable, even if one could be sure that
they were true. It is the homogeneous programme that alters one's
critical angle. The last new versification of a suburban house-agent's
advertisement in the second half of the programme restores a juster
balance. To judge from old Promenade programmes, the "one-style" night
must be a relic of earlier tradition. When Mr. Robert Newman first
started the concerts, in 1895, there would be a Scottish night, an
Irish night, a Military night, and, besides a Wagner night, a Gounod
night. The Irish night meant a programme of Stanford, Balfe, Wallace
and Sullivan. Sullivan still figures in our programmes; the others have
dropped out, and so has the Gounod night. The programme of a Military
night does indeed seem a curiosity to-day. Here it is: _Military
March_ (Schubert), overture _Les Dragons de Villars_ (Maillart), _The
German Patrol_ (Eilenberg), _Trumpet Overture_ (Mendelssohn), _The Red
Hussar_ (Solomon), _The British Army Quadrilles_ (Jullien), _The Drum
Polka_ (Anonymous), and the "Soldiers' Chorus" from _Faust_. Maillart's
overture still figures in this year's list; but probably no one wants
a military programme in these days, even if it were made up from the
classics. It is interesting to note that what we called a "Popular"
night differed very little from the Saturday programmes of this year,
in spite of the number of novelties that have in the course of time
been gradually added to the repertory. The operatic selections were
dropped a long time ago, but such things as Handel's _Largo_, Grieg's
_Peer Gynt_, the overture to _William Tell_, and Bizet's _L'Arlésienne_
have probably been played once or even twice in every season.
The book of programmes may be regarded as a fair index of average
taste, and as such is instructive. English people, on the whole, have
had too much common sense to allow their musical interests to be
distorted by the war. It is true that modern German music is no longer
heard, and that the names of modern French, Russian, and Italian
composers figure largely on the programmes. But it is probably also
true that the accident of the war has merely helped to consolidate
a tendency that was apparent some time before. Brahms was never a
composer for the man in the street. What the ordinary man wants in
music is a clear-cut tune, a vigorous rhythm, and an exciting volume
of sound. He gets these in _William Tell_ and _L'Arlésienne_. In the
presence of these and other old favourites we are all ordinary men.
They are the things which the man in the street enjoys at a first
hearing, the things which the cultivated musician never ceases to
enjoy. It is through such music that the average man has gradually
learned to enjoy Beethoven's Symphonies and the Brandenburg Concertos,
for they too possess those essential qualities.
On the other hand, there is a very large section of the public which
demands a more sensuous and emotional type of music. The emotion which
these people seek is not necessarily erotic, nor is it consciously
religious, though the prelude to _Tristan_ and Handel's _Largo_ (with
harp and organ) are among the works which appeal to them most. It was
they who made the popularity of Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss, and it
is they who will establish the popularity of Scriabin. Together with
this desire for sensuous emotion there is often combined a delight in
curious and amusing orchestral effects. This was another factor in the
enjoyment of Strauss, and it can be satisfied not only in such works as
Scriabin's _Prometheus_, but in Sir Henry Wood's ingenious orchestral
transcriptions of Moussorgsky. Brahms has always been too difficult of
understanding for the _William Tell_ public, and too austere for what
one may call the "wallowers." He is hardly a composer for the Promenade
Concerts at all; the _Requiem_, the chamber music, and the songs are
his best works, and those can always be heard in their proper places.
The complaint is frequently made that the music of the modern English
composers is crowded out, not so much by foreign contemporaries as
by the classics. New works by English composers are played once, it
is said, but never again. Yet even if we leave out Elgar, as being a
classic as surely established as Saint-Saëns, there are several English
works which are played over and over again. Sullivan's _In Memoriam_ is
one of those which might well be laid on the shelf; but like Walford
Davies' _Solemn Melody_ it brings in the organ, and to many English
people music of this kind would appear to offer all the spiritual
advantages of church-going without its discomforts, intellectual or
physical. Besides these there are Mackenzie's _Benedictus_ and Edward
German's _Henry VIII._ dances, as well as various pieces by Balfour
Gardiner and Percy Grainger, which undoubtedly possess those desirable
qualities of tune, rhythm, and a jolly noise. In one case Sir Henry
Wood has managed to add the attractions both of organ and _batterie de
cuisine_, thus combining mirth with devotion.
It is perhaps because a Promenade audience is so kind and so
undiscriminating that these concerts have become the recognized trial
ground for new works. This year's novelties have been, on the whole,
of little interest. Malipiero's second set of _Impressioni dal Vero_
was the most original, Roger Quilter's _Children's Overture_ the most
attractive.
The want of discrimination shown by the audience is most apparent in
the case of the vocal and instrumental soloists. A few years ago, it
is related, the students of the Paris Conservatoire used to make a
hostile demonstration against every concerto on the ground that the
concerto was of its nature a bad form of art. There are indeed a fair
number of musicians in this country who in private conversation will
confess to much the same opinion. Generally, however, if pressed, they
will make four or five exceptions, such as the favourite concertos of
Mozart and Beethoven, together with Schumann's and the B flat concerto
of Brahms. As regards the rest, they at least afford proof of the good
manners inculcated at our music schools. The more recent ones, such as
those of Rachmaninov and Tcherepnin, are no better than the others.
That of Delius alone stands out as a work of real beauty. The real
disfigurement of the Promenade Concerts is provided by the singers.
One might have supposed that a public which had enjoyed a _scena_
of Wagner or Verdi would refuse to tolerate the vapid domesticities
of the second half of the programme. But, alas! it is probably this
very domesticity that evokes the applause. The promenaders will
admire Isolde's Death Scene or _Eri tu_, but they must worship at a
distance. When they hear the other stuff they know that it is something
which they themselves can sing successfully in their own suburban
drawing-rooms. Sir Henry Wood was once heard to express the hope that
some day there might be a Promenade Concert in London every night of
the year. Could that hope ever be realized it would be the noblest
monument to the man who for our generation at least has created the
Promenade Concerts. But must there always be those songs? They are
symbols of bondage to commercial interests.
* * * * *
After five years of absence Busoni has returned to England, and his
recital at the Wigmore Hall on October 15th showed that his playing
has lost none of its former strength and vitality, whilst it has
undoubtedly gained in dignity and serenity. His audience consisted
mainly of musicians, and his programme was evidently intended for
serious and cultivated listeners. He began with the first prelude and
fugue from Bach's _Forty-Eight_, producing a wonderful effect at the
end of the fugue by a continuous haze of pedal, through which the
counterpoint yet stood out with perfect clearness. His reading of the
_Goldberg Variations_ was startling, both in its quality of tone and
in its departures from the text. But it was clear that there was a
considered reason for everything that was done, and as a commentary
on Bach the performance was of singular interest. Busoni was at his
best in Beethoven's _Hammerklaviev_ sonata. It is probably the most
difficult work in all the literature of the pianoforte. When Busoni
plays one does not take technical difficulties into account; but
this sonata is both supremely difficult to understand and supremely
difficult to interpret to an audience. To grasp its vastness of
conception and to present it without the least appearance of struggle
in perfect balance of poetry and philosophy is a task which Busoni
alone of living pianists can accomplish. It was evident from the
behaviour of the audience after the end of the sonata that they all
realised how in comparison with Busoni most other pianists, despite
their admirable qualities, are very small fry.
EDWARD J. DENT.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS[4]
[4] In this section we propose to give monthly skeleton
lists of the works of modern authors: where feasible
of contributors to the issue current.
THOMAS HARDY
[_Poetical works only. Full information as to all his writings may be
obtained from the bibliographies by A. P. Webb and H. Danielson._]
COLLECTED POEMS. Macmillan. 1919.
[This volume and that containing _The Dynasts_, mentioned below, give a
full collection of Mr. Hardy's work in verse. The Wessex and Mellstock
editions of his complete works include his poems in several volumes.]
SELECTED POEMS. Macmillan. 1916.
[In the Golden Treasury Series.]
WESSEX POEMS. Macmillan. 1898.
[This volume contains illustrations in pen and ink by the author.]
POEMS OF PAST AND PRESENT. Macmillan. 1901.
THE DYNASTS. Macmillan. Part I., 1903. Part II., 1906. Part III., 1908.
[Now published in one volume.]
TIME'S LAUGHING STOCKS. Macmillan. 1909.
SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE, with miscellaneous pieces. Macmillan. 1914.
MOMENTS OF VISION. Macmillan. 1917.
[Certain poems and small collections have been published in very small
editions, mainly by CLEMENT K. SHORTER. These include _Song of the
Soldiers_ (1914), _When I Weakly Knew_ (1916), _In Time of the Breaking
of Nations_ (1916), _The Fiddler's Story_ (1917), _Call to National
Service_ (1917), and _Domicilium_ (1918).]
WALTER DE LA MARE
_Verse_
SONGS OF CHILDHOOD. Longmans. 1902.
[Reissued in Longmans' Pocket Library.]
POEMS. Murray. 1906.
A CHILD'S DAY. Verses to pictures. Constable. 1911.
THE LISTENERS AND OTHER POEMS. Constable. 1912.
PEACOCK PIE. Constable. 1913.
[Reissued with pictures by HEATH ROBINSON.]
THE SUNKEN GARDEN. Beaumont. 1918.
[A limited edition de luxe.]
MOTLEY AND OTHER POEMS. Constable. 1918.
[Embodies the whole of the material in the last-named.]
_Prose_
HENRY BROCKEN. Murray. 1904.
THE THREE MULLA MULGARS. Duckworth. 1910.
THE RETURN. Arnold. 1910.
W. H. DAVIES
_Verse_
COLLECTED POEMS. With a portrait by W. ROTHENSTEIN. Fifield. 1916.
[This volume contains a selection of what the author considered the
best of his poems up to that date.]
THE SOUL'S DESTROYER. Alston Rivers. 1907.
[This book was published in the Contemporary Poets' Series, after a
privately published issue by the author from the Marshalsea. It has
since been reissued by Mr. Fifield.]
NEW POEMS. Elkin Mathews. 1907.
NATURE POEMS AND OTHERS. Fifield. 1908.
FAREWELL TO POESY. Fifield. 1910.
SONGS OF JOY. Fifield. 1911.
FOLIAGE. Elkin Mathews. 1913.
THE BIRD OF PARADISE. Methuen. 1914.
CHILD LOVERS. Fifield. 1916.
RAPTURES. Beaumont. 1918.
[A limited edition de luxe.]
FORTY NEW POEMS. Fifield. 1918.
[Contains the poems in the last entry and ten additional pieces.]
_Prose_
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP. Fifield. 1908.
[With an introduction by Bernard Shaw.]
BEGGARS. Fifield. 1909.
A WEAK WOMAN. Fifield. 1911.
[A novel.]
THE TRUE TRAVELLER. Fifield. 1912.
NATURE. Batsford. 1913.
[An essay in the Fellowship Books.]
A POET'S PILGRIMAGE. Melrose. 1918.
RUPERT BROOKE
_Verse_
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RUPERT BROOKE. With a memoir by EDWARD MARSH.
Sidgwick & Jackson. 1918.
[The memoir was separately printed by the same publishers in the same
year.]
SELECTED POEMS. Sidgwick & Jackson. 1917.
* * * * *
POEMS. Sidgwick & Jackson. 1911.
[This, Brooke's first book, has gone into an enormous number of
editions, and the first is so scarce as to cost £4 or more in the
second-hand market.]
1914 AND OTHER POEMS. Sidgwick & Jackson. 1915.
[This appeared with a portrait shortly after Brooke's death.]
THE OLD VICARAGE, GRANTCHESTER. Sidgwick & Jackson. 1916.
[A poem from the last volume, separately published.]
_Prose_
LETTERS FROM AMERICA. With a preface by HENRY JAMES. Sidgwick &
Jackson. 1916.
[James's preface was the last of his published writings. The letters
originally appeared in the _Westminster Gazette_; one or two stray
papers are added.]
JOHN WEBSTER AND THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. Sidgwick & Jackson. 1916.
[Brooke's fellowship thesis at King's. There exists in the British
Museum in typescript an essay that Brooke wrote in 1910 for the Harness
Prize. The subject is _Puritanism as represented or referred to in the
Early English Drama up to 1642_.]
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY. For the British Academy. Milford
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MORE LITERARY RECREATIONS. By SIR EDWARD COOK. Macmillan. 7_s._ 6_d._
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DUBLIN ESSAYS. By ARTHUR CLERY. Maunsel. 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
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SOME DIVERSIONS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. By EDMUND GOSSE. Heinemann.
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SOME WINCHESTER LETTERS OF LIONEL JOHNSON. Allen & Unwin. 7_s._ 6_d._
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NORSE MYTH IN ENGLISH POETRY. By C. H. HEREFORD, M.A., Litt. D
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THE LONDON
MERCURY
_Editor_--J. C. SQUIRE _Assistant-Editor_--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 2 December 1919
EDITORIAL NOTES
Our last notes in this place were written "in the dark." We sketched,
in a general way, our attitude, our intentions, and our hopes whilst
we were still without more evidence than our private enquiries could
produce as to the degree of confidence that our proposals would inspire
and the amount of support that we should receive. We are now more fully
informed; and we may honestly say that, although our expectations were
not, perhaps, coloured by an excessive diffidence, they have been more
than realised.
* * * * *
The extraordinarily cordial reception given us, both by critics in
the Press and by our readers, has proved that there is a demand for a
paper on the lines which we have laid down, and that our first number
was regarded as a satisfactory beginning. We must express our profound
gratitude to those--there are hundreds--who have written to us in terms
of unqualified appreciation and benevolence, and to the reviewers,
whose kindness is more encouraging than they probably know. It now
remains for us to attempt to live up to the promises we have made.
* * * * *
One more thing we must add before we turn to detail. Editors do not
normally discuss the economics of their enterprises in public, and
nobody wishes that they should. But before the LONDON MERCURY appeared,
we made a special effort to start it on a firm basis by securing a
large number of Original Subscribers. That effort was remarkably
successful; thousands of persons subscribed for a year before they had
seen a copy of the paper. These proved by their willingness to buy a
pig in a poke that they were thoroughly interested in our scheme;
and we are entitled to assume that they will be interested to hear
that our initial success has been so great that our immediate future
is securely guaranteed. In other words (though much ground remains
to be won), we have been spared the wearing and worrying struggle to
obtain a position and a "hearing" which so often embarrasses literary
and artistic periodicals. A direct result of this is that we shall be
under no necessity to experiment hastily, but shall be able to give
due consideration to every possible development that occurs to us. A
direct implication of it is that should we, in the long run, fail to
satisfy the public, we should have nothing and nobody but ourselves to
blame. Either our conception would have been proved unpopular or our
execution would have been deemed inadequate. It is the most comfortable
of situations. That is all we need say on the subject. We have spoken
frankly about it (rather than affect an impassive indifference) simply
because we think our readers would like us to do so.
* * * * *
We have as yet received no great number of detailed criticisms or
suggestions for improvement. But there have been some, both in
the Press and in the letters from our correspondents. Some of the
suggestions that have been made we shall adopt; some we shall not;
one or two of the most interesting are based on a misunderstanding.
The most noticeable of these derive from the notion that the LONDON
MERCURY was intended to be an exact analogue of the _Mercure de
France_, and borrowed its title from that excellent paper. We may as
well explain, once and for all, that the similitude with the _Mercure
de France_, happy though it may be, was reached by accident; our own
title was derived directly from the Mercuries which were the earliest
products of the English periodical Press; and for our scheme we are
indebted to no paper, British or foreign. A Scottish critic observes
that "Belgian literature owed its notable capture of Europe largely to
its [the _Mercure's_] whole-hearted welcome, and the new movement in
Germany associated with the names of Rilke and Zweig found its first
foreign recognition in its pages. Moreover, it surveyed the whole field
of human intellectual achievement--philosophy, science, religion--in
its articles.... The name of M. Davray at the foot of a _Mercure_
article has made more than one British writer's reputation in Paris,
and Europe would have been entirely ignorant that there was a new and
rich literature in Spanish-America had not the _Mercure_ discovered
it and blazoned forth its merits." We might, if we would, make some
remark on the detail of this. Rilke is not a major poet; Zweig is an
unimportant, over-exuberant critic who tried, in vain, to persuade the
late Emile Verhaeren that he was a German; the fame of Spanish-American
literature, trumpeted though it may have been by the _Mercure_, has not
yet reached London. But we prefer to concentrate on the more important
point, and that is that our functions, as we conceive them, are not
those of the _Mercure de France_. We have already published letters
from French and American correspondents; we shall shortly publish
letters from Italian, Russian, and German correspondents; we shall
from time to time publish fuller articles about recent developments
in foreign countries. But there _are_ certain limits to our space,
and there _is_ a centre in our plans. It is an admirable thing to
disseminate the works of good Belgian and Spanish-American authors, and
we hope that we shall not overlook anything really important that comes
from any quarter of the globe. But our principal object is to assist
people to read the good English authors of the past, and to stimulate
the popularity of good English authors of the present. There are those
to whom any foreigner, writing in some mysteriously wonderful language,
like French or Polish or Spanish-American, is a portent; but we are not
amongst them. We desire to keep the British public in touch with all
foreign developments that may be considered likely to be of special
interest to the British public; but we certainly do not intend to
devote to the study of foreign authors space that might more profitably
be given to the examination of a dead or living man who has written
in our own tongue. The _Mercure_ bestows a great deal of attention
on foreign authors; it publishes political articles; it concerns
itself largely with problems of philosophy and religion. Some of these
questions will be ignored by the LONDON MERCURY. Some it will discuss;
regarding some its functions will be purely that of a recorder. But it
does not propose to deflect from its original purpose, which was to
publish the best contemporary "creative work" that it could obtain, to
criticise new books and old, and to minister to the other needs of the
British reader and the British book-collector. It is just as well that
this should be clear.
* * * * *
In the present number one or two slight changes are to be observed.
There is a minor, but not insignificant, typographical change, and two
new, and we hope welcome, "features" have been added. These had already
been premeditated, but we made them with all the more satisfaction
in that several correspondents had recommended--we had almost said
demanded--them. We hope, in an early issue, to add to these a section
on Architecture, similar to the sections on Art, Music, and the Theatre.
* * * * *
Several correspondents have written to ask us whether we propose to
devote any attention to the economics of authorship, and two of them
(persons whom we conceive to have a direct and immediate interest
in the subject) make special reference to the question of American
copyright. To all of them we can reply that, although economics in
general, like politics in general, come within the sphere of our
self-abnegation, we shall throw what light we can on the economics
of authorship, just as we shall hold ourselves free to trespass on
politics when politics touch art. American copyright, as a fact, we had
already marked out as one of the matters to which we intend to return
again and again until America puts her laws straight. The British
copyright laws are now, so far as they affect the author, on a very
satisfactory footing. The principal countries of the world have signed
the Berne Convention, and even Russia, had there been no Revolution,
would by this time have agreed that the works of British authors should
be automatically copyrighted in Russia. The more widely the civilised
custom spreads the more glaring becomes what, without offence, we
may call the offence of America. There only--and it is the largest
English-speaking and English-reading community in the world--is the
British author defenceless, there only may he be robbed with impunity
of the fruits of his labour.
* * * * *
Let us recapitulate the elements of the American copyright law as they
at present stand. Copyright in America is defined by a law of 1909.
That Act lays down that a book, to secure legal protection, must be
manufactured in the United States of America; the stipulation was
carried on from an earlier statute. A book published in the English
language may obtain interim protection for one month from the date of
publication if a copy is forwarded to an office in Washington; but at
the end of the month protection lapses. Copyright is lost unless a
book (or a newspaper contribution) has been "set up" in the States and
issued there within a month of its publication in Great Britain.
* * * * *
Now we have no hesitation in describing the present copyright
arrangements as between England and America as immoral and unjust. They
do not greatly handicap authors of international reputation, so far as
their new books are concerned. If--he will forgive us for using his
name as an illustration--Mr. Rudyard Kipling has written a new book,
he will have no difficulty whatever in getting an American publisher
to put it into type in America and issue it at a date approximate to
that of the English publication. But even the eminent and the "arrived"
are put to some trouble and expense by the necessity of "securing
copyright," and on those who are not so eminent the law presses very
hardly indeed. There are famous English authors whose early books are
not copyright in America; there are young English authors who have to
go through the anguish of seeing American copyright expire whilst some
American publisher is debating whether or not he shall take "sheets"
of a book from England; and "first books" of any character published
in England can virtually never be copyrighted in America. It may, and
should, be granted that as a body American publishers are more just and
generous than their laws. We know of many cases in which the English
authors of non-copyright books have obtained from American publishers
precisely the same royalties as they have obtained from their English
publishers. We know also of cases--relatively few, we gladly admit--in
which the works of English authors have been pirated by American
editors and publishers without sanction, thanks, or payment. But the
mere fact that in most instances American publishers are ashamed to
take advantage of the law, and that in other instances they do the
handsome thing in order to secure "favours to come," is no palliation
of the law. It is a harsh and a selfish law; a law unworthy of a great
nation, a nation which is second to none in its professions and in its
intentions with regard to the welfare of humanity at large.
* * * * *
The state of the law is commonly ascribed to the typographical unions.
"Protection for Printers": books should have no rights in America
unless American typographers have been employed upon them. Beneath this
argument lies the naked, brutal fact that at present, America having
not yet produced the great universal literature that she is destined
to produce, America imports much more from us than we do from her. If
"sheets" were copyright, whenever sent, we should get the better of
the exchange; we produce ten Masefields for one O. Henry, and England
would print far more for America than America would for England. This
may determine the printers' attitude; though even the printers might
realise that a time might come when the boot would be on the other
leg, and British publishers will be in a position to squeeze American
authors to any extent, and British printers will insist on printing
books which might more conveniently and economically be printed in
America. But surely, in a matter like this, the law ought not to be
dictated by the selfish and shortsighted conceptions of a trade. We
have never met an English author who has had, or who has contemplated,
relations with America who has not been bitterly contemptuous of the
American attitude towards the copyright law. We have never spoken
to an American author or publisher who has not admitted that it was
a disgrace to America. Authors may be a small body, but they are as
entitled to their rights as anybody else; these, also, are God's
creatures. President Wilson himself, for all we know, may under the
present regime have lost English copyright in his early works; and
the irony of the law is that it presses most hardly on those who have
still their fortunes to make, for the celebrated, or their agents, can
successfully cope with it.
* * * * *
These lines will, as we are happy to know, meet the eyes of many
Americans who write and many who do not. We appeal to them to agitate
for a change in their law. That the American copyright law should be
placed on precisely the same basis as the English copyright law we do
not ask, and have no right to ask. But that English authors should
automatically enjoy in the United States the same privileges as are
enjoyed by native authors is a reasonable proposition. Cannot somebody
move the Legislature?
* * * * *
We shall return to this subject at greater length. Meanwhile, if we
may hark back for a moment to the point from which our digression
started, may we say that we shall welcome any suggestions our readers
may make as to the development of the paper within the limits we have
defined? Particularly we desire to hear--though we should not be human
if we pretended to enjoy--objections, provided they are conceived
in a friendly spirit, to anything in our present arrangements which
may strike readers as unsatisfactory. It was another god who sprang,
perfect and in full panoply, from the head of Jove.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
The death of Mr. Bruce Cummings on October 22nd, at the age of thirty,
brought to an end a literary career which was singular alike in its
character and in its brevity. He did not expect to live to see the
publication of his book, _The Journal of a Disappointed Man_, and
himself inserted the last and the only falsity in it, except the
name he gave himself: "Barbellion died on December 31st." But he did
actually witness its remarkable success on its appearance in the early
part of this year; and it is impossible not to feel that this must, to
some extent, have alleviated his disappointment. He was remarkable,
not only in his personality and his gifts, but also in the fact that
he was fully and frankly conscious, at all events for some years
before his death, that his journal would be published and would be
examined as a literary composition. He compared it with the journals
which were already famous, he speculated on the reception it would
have, he experienced a thrill in discovering a sister-soul in Marie
Bashkirtseff. And it is hardly doubtful that his expectations will be
realised. His career was one of struggle under almost overwhelming
difficulties. His earliest ambition was to be a naturalist; and
without training or assistance of any kind he had almost achieved
it, when the breakdown of his father compelled him to earn a more
substantial, though still meagre, living as a reporter on the staff of
a provincial newspaper. He struggled out of this pit, and eventually
succeeded in obtaining a position at South Kensington, which, in view
of the obstacles in his way, was an extraordinary performance. Through
all this battle against odds he was handicapped by an ill-health
which seems to have affected almost every organ in his body--a weak
heart, susceptible, if not actually tubercular, lungs, dyspepsia, and
disordered nerves; and these ailments were accompanied and intensified
by a perpetual brooding over his health which, had it had no basis,
might have been called acute hypochondria. But it was only after
his marriage that he discovered, by a dramatic and extraordinary
accident, that he was already condemned to death by a more terrible
malady than any of these. Under the rapidly-approaching shadow of this
end, he continued his work and his journal as long as his strength
permitted, and survived, though but for a little and in a state of
complete collapse, the success which had been so persistently denied
him before. His journal tells an extraordinary story and reveals an
extraordinary person. Its confessions are frank, quiet, and obviously
truthful; and neither his introspective habit of mind nor his belief
that his journal would be published seems ever to have vitiated his
powers of observation and notation. But he was something more than a
remarkable personality and a veracious reporter of himself. He was also
a writer and a critic of great ability. His notes on literature and
music, here and there through the diary, show considerable penetration
and judgment; and his descriptions of persons and places are vivid,
fascinating, and often humorous. A volume of his remains has just been
issued under the title, _Enjoying Life, and Other Essays_; and this
includes the paper on the great journal-writers to which he alludes
more than once in his diary.
* * * * *
As a token of their admiration for a master in their craft, a number
of poets recently united to make a presentation to Mr. Thomas Hardy,
O.M., on the occasion of his entering his eightieth year. Their tribute
took the form of a manuscript volume in which each of the poets wrote
one of his own pieces and which was prefaced by an address written,
it is understood, by the Poet Laureate, with whom are joined in the
volume the Hon. Maurice Baring, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Laurence
Binyon, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Walter de la Mare,
Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Ralph
Hodgson, Mr. A. E. Housman, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. John Masefield,
Mrs. Alice Meynell, Mr. Sturge Moore, Professor Gilbert Murray, Sir
Henry Newbolt, Mr. Alfred Noyes, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Mr. G. W.
Russell ("A. E."), Mr. Arthur Symons, Mr. Herbert Trench, Sir William
Watson, Mr. W. B. Yeats, and many of their younger fellows. A sentence
from the address, "We would thank you for the pleasure and increasing
delight that your art has given us," explains the purpose of the gift
and supplies a text on which a discourse might be pronounced. For if
it is a delight for an established master to receive the homage of his
juniors, it should be, and is, an especial delight for them to be able
to offer it. We think it probable that some of the younger contributors
to this volume will live to remember with wonder and gratitude the fact
that they were able, while he still lived, to express their gratitude
to one of the greatest of modern English poets.
* * * * *
Mr. Edmund Gosse, the doyen of English critics, celebrated his
seventieth birthday in September, and, through Lord Crewe, a
presentation was made to him accompanied by a memorial of almost
unexampled length and distinction. Each of the signatories has since
received a beautifully printed "memento." Those who saw Mr. Gosse's
paper on George Eliot will not need to be told that his powers seem,
if anything, to increase with age. Great and diverse as have been
his services to literature since his first book was (when he was in
his early twenties) published, his finest work, both "original" and
critical, has appeared in recent years; and it is easily conceivable
that the decade between his seventieth and his eightieth birthdays
will be his most productive. A man of letters can be paid no higher
compliment: Mr. Gosse has retained, and will retain to the end, the
energy and the freshness of youth, whilst his knowledge and experience,
in the natural course of things, broaden and deepen.
* * * * *
The death of Leonid Andreef removes the most savage pessimist of all
the pessimists who have come out of modern Russia. But the author of
_The Life of Man_, _The Seven that Were Hanged_, and _The Red Laugh_
was not a pessimist for pessimism's sake: he suffered and he expressed
his suffering sincerely. One of his short stories--that which tells
of a student and his girl who were overtaken by a band of ruffians in
a wood--is perhaps the most ghastly story that has ever been written;
yet the most revolted reader could not suppose that the author had been
less revolted than himself. Andreef had refused enormous offers to work
for the Bolsheviks, and died, in great poverty, from shock induced by a
rain of Bolshevik bombs near his house.
POETRY
_Ishak's Song_[5]
[5] _This song comes from Flecker's unpublished drama
_Hassan_, which those who have seen it consider
immeasurably the finest thing that he ever wrote. It
has remained in manuscript since his death, awaiting
stage production. His _Yasmin_ is another song from
the play, and his well-known _Golden Journey_ to
_Samarkand_ is its epilogue. Ishak is the Court poet
of Haroun-al-Raschid._
Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn,
The hour the lilies open on the lawn,
The hour the grey wings pass beyond the mountains,
The hour of silence when we hear the fountains,
The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,
The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,
O Master of the World, the Persian dawn!
This hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:
Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,
The braves who fight thy fight unsheath the sabre,
The slaves who toil thy toil are lashed to labour,
For thee the waggons of the world are drawn--
The ebony of night, the red of dawn!
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
_The Buzzards_
When evening came and the warm glow grew deeper,
And every tree that bordered the green meadows
And in the yellow cornfields every reaper
And every corn-shock stood above their shadows
Flung eastward from their feet in longer measure,
Serenely far there swam in the sunny height
A buzzard and his mate who took their pleasure
Swirling and poising idly in golden light.
On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,
So effortless and so strong,
Cutting each other's paths together they glided,
Then wheeled asunder till they soared divided
Two valleys' width (as though it were delight
To part like this, being sure they could unite
So swiftly in their empty, free dominion),
Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,
Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,
Swung proudly to a curve, and from its height
Took half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.
And we, so small on the swift immense hillside,
Stood tranced, until our souls arose uplifted
On those far-sweeping, wide,
Strong curves of flight--swayed up and hugely drifted,
Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tide
Of sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholden
Through shining deeps of air, the fields were golden
And rosy burned the heather where cornfields ended.
And still those buzzards wheeled, while light withdrew
Out of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,
Till the loftiest-flaming summit died to blue.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
_The Moon_
_(To Maurice Baring)_
1
I waited for a miracle to-night.
Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,
Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light,
Her current rippled past invisibly.
No stir was in the dark and windless meadows,
Only the water, whispering in the shadows,
That darkened nature lived did still proclaim.
An hour I stood in that defeat of sight,
Waiting, and then a sudden silver flame
Burned in the eastern heaven, and she came.
2
The Moon, the Summer Moon, surveys the vale:
The boughs against the dawning sky grow black,
The shades that hid those whispering waters fail,
And now there falls a gleaming, lengthening track
That lies across the wide and tranquil river,
Burnished and flat, not shaken by a quiver.
She rises still: the liquid light she spills
Makes everywhere quick sparkles, patches pale;
And, as she goes, I know her glory fills
The air of all our English lakes and hills.
3
High over all this England doth she ride;
She silvers all the roofs of folded towns,
Her brilliance tips the edge of every tide,
Her shadows make soft caverns in the downs;
Even now, beyond my tree serenely sailing,
She clothes far forests with a gauzy veiling,
And even as here, where now I stare and dream,
Standing my own transfigured banks beside,
On many a quiet wandering English stream
There lies the unshifting image of her beam.
4
Yes, calm she mounts, and watching her, I know
By many a river other eyes than mine
Turn up to her; and, as of old, they show
Their inward hearts all naked to her shine:
Maids, solitaries, sick and happy lovers,
To whom her dear returning orb discovers
For each the gift he waits for: soft release,
The unsealing of imagination's flow,
Her own sweet pain, or other pain's surcease,
The friendly benediction of her peace.
5
I gaze as they: as kind she is, as fair,
As when long since a younger heart drank deep
From that sweet solace, while, through summer air,
Her lucid fingers hushed the world to sleep.
O as I stand this latest moon beholding,
Her forms unresting memory is moulding;
Beneath my enchanted eyelids there arise
Visions again of many moons that were,
Fair, fleeting moons gathered from faded skies.
Greeted and lost by these corporeal eyes.
6
Unnumbered are those moons of memory
Stored in the backward chambers of my brain:
The moons that make bright pathways on the sea,
The golden harvest moon above the grain;
The moon that all a sleeping village blanches,
The woodland moon that roves beyond the branches,
Filtering through the meshes of the green
To breast of bird and mossy trunk of tree;
Moons dimly guessed-at through a cloudy screen
The bronze diffusion shed by moons unseen;
7
Moons that a thin prismatic halo rings,
Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;
The fairy moons of luminous evenings,
Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;
Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,
When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,
Erect and heavy, and all waters lie
Oily, and there is not a bird that sings.
All these I know, I have seen them born and die,
And many another moon in many a sky.
8
There was a moon that shone above the ground
Where on a grassy forest height I stood;
Bright was that open place, and all around
The dense discovered treetops of the wood,
Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,
Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;
Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone.
Protruding from the middle of the mound,
Fringed with close grass, a moonlight-mottled stone,
Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.
9
A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,
Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams;
An orator exultant in defeat;
Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;
My heart was one with those rebellious people,
Until along a chapel's pointing steeple
My eyes unwitting wandered, and I found
A moon, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;
And in my spirit's life all human din
Died, and eternal Silence stood within.
10
And once, on a far evening, warm and still,
I leant upon a cool stone parapet.
The quays and houses underneath the hill
Twinkled with lights; I heard the sea's faint fret;
And then above the eastern cape's long billow
Silent there welled a trembling line of yellow,
A shred that quickened, then a half that grew
To a full moon, that moved with even will.
The night was long before her, well she knew,
And, as she slowly rose into the blue,
11
She slowly paled, and, glittering far away
Flung on the silken waters like a spear,
Her crispèd silver shaft of moonlight lay.
The lighthouse lamp upon the little pier
Burned wanly by that radiance clear and certain.
Waiting I knew not what uplifted curtain,
I watched the unmoving world beneath my feet
Till, without warning, miles across the bay,
Into that silver out of shadows beat,
Dead black, the whole mysterious fishing-fleet.
12
These moons I have seen, but these and every one
Came each so new it seemed to be the first,
New as the buds that open to the sun,
New as the songs that to the morning burst.
The roses die, each day fresh flowers are springing,
Last year it was another blackbird singing,
Thou only, marvellous blossom, whose pale flower
Beyond mankind's conjecture hath begun,
Retain'st for ever an unwithering power
That stales the loveliest stranger of an hour.
13
But O, had all my infant nights been dark,
Or almost dark, lit by the stars alone,
Had never a teller of stories bid me hark
The promised splendours of that moon unknown:
How perfect then had been the revelation
When first her gradual gold illumination
Broke on a night upon the conscious child:
My heart had stopped with beauty, seeing her arc
Climbing the heavens, so far and undefiled,
So large with light, so even and so mild.
14
Most wondrous Light, who bring'st this lovelier earth,
This world of shadows cool with silver fires,
Drawing us higher than our human birth:
To whom our strange twin-natured kind suspires
Its saddest thoughts, and tenderest and most fragrant
Tears, and desires unnameable and vagrant:
Watcher, who leanest quietly from above,
Saying all mortal wars are nothing worth:
Friend of the sorrowful, tranquil as the dove,
Muse of all poets, lamp of all who love.
15
Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,
But always peaceful and removed and proud,
Whether with loveliness revealed complete,
Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:
Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonder
That men who made of sun and storm and thunder
The awful forms of strong divinity,
Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,
Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,
Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?
16
Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,
The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,
Diana, she whose downward-bending kiss
One only knew, though all men yearned to know;
The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,
The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:
She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,
And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless bliss
Lapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,
All the still night, until the night was gone.
17
By many names they knew thee, but thy shape
Was woman's always, transient and white:
A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,
A sweet descent of beauty in the night:
Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,
Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,
A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,
A witch the man who saw might not escape,
A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,
The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.
18
And even to-night in African forests some
There are, possessed by such a blasphemy;
Through branching beams thy fevered votaries come
To appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.
There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,
Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguish
In the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.
They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,
And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,
Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.
19
So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,
In all the continents, by all the seas,
Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,
Adoring her with gentler rites than these:
The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee uplifted
Rise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,
Perpetual incense poured before thy throne
By those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,
Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,
Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.
20
For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,
Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;
Entranced on templed lakes is many a boat
For thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;
On the great seas where none but thou is tender
Rising and setting, unto thee surrender
All lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;
And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,
Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slips
To gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.
21
O thus they do, and thus they did of old;
Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;
Ere our first records were thy shrine was cold
That speechless eyes went seeking in the night;
Beyond the compass of our dim traditions
Thou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,
Their loves and their despair; within thy ken
All our poor history has been unrolled;
Thou hast seen all races born and die again,
The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.
22
Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyes
Who paced with backward arms beyond his tents,
Lone in the night, and felt above him rise
The ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,
Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,
Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,
But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,
Fighting with his moon-coloured memories
Of vanished kings who builded, and the bare
Sands in the moon before those builders were.
23
Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,
Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fame
Amid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.
And, circling round that fixed monition, came
Woven by moonlight, random, transitory,
Fragments of all the dim receding story:
The moonlit water dripping from the oars
Of triremes in the bay of Syracuse;
The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,
That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.
24
He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,
The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,
The moonlight on the Atlantean wave
That covered all a multitude's distress:
Cities and hosts and emperors departed
Under the steady moon. And sullen-hearted
He turned away, and, in a little, died,
Even as he who hunted from his cave
And struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hide
Under the moon, and was not satisfied.
25
For in the prime, thy influence was felt;
When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;
Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion melt
Before men dreamed of empire. The abyss
Of thought yawned through their jungle then, as ever
Dark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:
Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and sea
Naked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,
Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in thee
Thought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.
26
Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,
Thou shinedst there ere any life began,
When of his pain or of his powerless love
Thou heardest not from heart of any man;
Though long the earth had shaken off the vapour
Left by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,
Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did grow
Ere aught but her blind elements did move;
Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,
And afterwards again shalt see her so.
27
A time there was when Life had never been,
A time will be, it will have passed away;
Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,
When Life which in thy sister's yesterday
Had never flowered, will have drooped and faded;
Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.
She will be barren then as not before,
Bared of her snows and all her garments green;
No darkling sea by any earthly shore
Will take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.
28
Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,
Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,
Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,
Not any voice will cry upon thee then;
Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,
The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,
An end there will have been to all their lust,
Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;
O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,
Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.
29
Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,
The rumours and the marching and the strife;
Earth will be still, and all the face of her
Swept of the last remains of moving life;
The last of all men's monuments that defied them,
Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,
Into the waiting elements will fade,
And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,
A forlorn round of rocky contours made,
A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,
30
Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;
The old, the cold companions, you will go,
Obeying still some long-forgotten past,
And all our pitiful history none will know;
Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,
But on that greater ball no heart will ponder
The thought that rose and nightingale are gone,
And all sweet things but thou; and only vast
Ridges of rock remain, and stars and sun;
O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.
31
And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,
Passing beyond imagination's range,
Away into the void where waits for thee
Thy inconceivable destiny of change;
And after all the memories I have striven
To paint, this picture that thyself hast given
Lives, and I watch, to all those others blind,
Thy form, gliding into eternity,
Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,
The last, most wonderful image of the mind.
32
Moon, I have finished, I have made thy song,
I have paid my due and done my worship, Moon;
Yet, though I truly serve and labour long,
Thou givest not, nor do I ask, one boon;
That peace which clings around thee where thou goest,
Which many seek from thee and thou bestowest,
Did never this most faithful heart invest;
Even now thou shinest clear and calm and strong,
And I, and I, the heart within my breast,
Troubled with beauty, Moon, and never at rest.
J. C. SQUIRE
MISADVENTURES
By L. PEARSALL SMITH
_At Solemn Music_
I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust and her high-coloured
wig. And how could I listen to the music in the close proximity of
those loud stockings?
Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we
both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of
musical, shared delight--these awful things will happen--our souls
joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.
_The Platitude_
"It's after all, the little things in life that really matter!" I
exclaimed, to my own surprise and the general consternation. I was as
much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak;
but from my reading of the Chinese mystics, and from much practice in
crowded railway carriages, I have become expert in that Taoist art
of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of
"sitting and forgetting." I have learnt to lay aside my personality in
awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading;
to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat
there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on, according to the heaven's
rolling, inert and unconcerned, with rocks and stones and trees.
_The Communion of Souls_
"So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?" Then lifting
the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a
higher level, "This notion of free will," I went on, "the notion, for
instance, that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition,
seems, when you think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion
really. I like to think I must follow the things of desire as--how
shall I put it?--as the tide follows the moon; that my actions are due
to necessary causes; that the world inside isn't a meaningless chaos,
but a world of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful
laws, as the Stars are governed."
"How I love the Stars!" murmured Lady Hyslop. "What things they say to
me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions--the promise of ineffable
mitigations."
"Mitigations?" I gasped, feeling a little giddy. But it didn't
matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful
conversations. And is not their greatest charm precisely the fact that
neither of us understands a word the other says?
_Disenchantment_
Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in
the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.
Opalescent, infinitely desirable, tinged with all the rainbow hues of
fancy, inaccessible in the window of a stationer's shop around the
corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my day-dreams. Every day I passed
it, but every day some inhibition paralyzed my will; or my thoughts
would be distracted in a golden dream or splendid disenchantment, some
metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation with the world's woe.
So time rolled on; the seasons followed in each other's footsteps.
Empires rose and fell; and still that paste-pot hung, a dragon-guarded
fruit of the Hesperides, in the window I walked by every day.
Then one morning, one awful morning, my pins gave out. I met this
crisis with manly resolution: I was the master of my fate! Summoning
all the forces of my moral nature, I put on my hat and went calmly out
and bought that paste-pot. I bought three paste-pots, and carried them
with me calmly home. At last the countercharm was found, the spell
was broken, and the Devil finally defeated--but, oh, at what a cost!
In the reaction, which immediately followed, I sat, facing those pots
of nauseating paste, unnerved and disenchanted, beyond the reach of
consolation, with nothing to wait for now but Death.
_The Listener_
The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't
at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it
was the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I
had been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they
were all impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the
fastidious lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me
with almost ecstatic attention.
As in an eclipse the earth's shadow falls upon the moon, or as a cloud
may obscure the sun in his glory, so a shadow fell, so from some morass
of memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment.
I brushed them aside: they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the
lovely mirror of those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that
devil-suggested explanation of their gaze.
And anyhow--thus I laughed away the notion--how could she do it anyhow,
even if she tried? Other people perhaps--but me? No, that phrase I had
heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the words, "She mimics you
to perfection," could be nothing but a bit of unintelligible jabber.
For who can turn the rainbow or the lightning-flash into ridicule, make
fun of the moon's splendour, or mimic the Daystar in his shining?
_Shrinkage_
Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations, then all
the vast life of the universe is mine. Then again it evaporates,
it shrinks, it dwindles, and of all that flood of thought which
over-brimmed the great Cosmos there is hardly enough now left to fill a
teaspoon.
_The Lift_
What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom,
having completely forgotten the errand, which, just as I was going out,
had carried me upstairs, leaping two steps at a time.
Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did
gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world bursting with misery, as Dr.
Johnson describes it?
O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralizing way of
regarding natural phenomena--this crying of vanity on the beautiful
manifestation of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out
of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the
law of gravitation--if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or
forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day,
and several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as
remarkable and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?
_The Danger of Going to Church_
As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath
adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor laughing.
Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered
across the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers, remembering some
maledictions from the Prophets, and from the Psalms we had sung that
evening. Yes, yes, their eyes should be darkened, and their lying lips
put to silence. They should be smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a
sore botch in the legs that cannot be healed. All the teeth should be
broken in the mouths of those bloody men and daughters of backsliding;
their faces should become as flames, and their heads be made utterly
bald. Their little ones should be dashed to pieces before their eyes,
and brimstone scattered upon their habitations. They should be led away
with their buttocks uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a
drunken man staggereth in his vomit.
But as for the Righteous Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the
blessings of those who walk in the right way. "These blessings"--the
words came back to me from the Evening Lesson--"these blessings shall
come upon thee and overtake thee." And suddenly, in the mild summer
air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened,
the blessings of the Old Testament were actually rushing after me.
From the hot, remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the
Oriental climate and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross
good things were coming to reward me with benedictions for which I had
not bargained. Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close
behind me, he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan.
My barns should burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop
fatness. My face should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all
my household and the beasts of my household should beget and bear
increase; and as for the fruit of my own loins, it should be for
multitude as the sands of the sea and as the stars of heaven. My sons
and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the third and fourth
generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet should be
dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should flourish
as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.
My Prayer Book began to smoke in my hand from the hot lava embedded
in it; the meadow was scorched by the live coals of cursing and still
more awful benediction I had so thoughtlessly raked out of the church
furnace and brought down in a hot shower on myself and my neighbours.
_The Wrong Word_
We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared
that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since
faced the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears,
and was completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said,
was a great mechanism; man, with his reason and moral judgments, was
the chance product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon
destroy him, he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate
with passionless despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront
a hostile universe with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the
Gorgon face of Destiny, to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling
defiance at the icy stars--this, he said, was his attitude, and it
produced, as you can imagine, a very powerful impression on the
company. As for me, I was completely carried away by my enthusiasm. "By
Jove, that is a stunt!" I cried.
_Interruption_
"Life," said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever--"life
is a perpetual toothache."
In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were
discussed of food-restrictions, epidemics, cancer, and so on.
Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea,
and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. "Well, I must say," she
remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, "I must say I
enjoy life."
"So do I," I whispered.
"When I enjoy things," she went on, "I know it. Eating, for instance,
the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always
thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference," she added, as
she got up to go with the others.
"All the difference in the world," I answered.
It's too bad that I had no chance for further conversation with that
wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot
to tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the
mind with garbage: we make a better use of that divine and adorable
endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the
pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir
from our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of
consciousness everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could
have discussed at greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and
practice of our art.
_The Rationalist_
Occultisms, fairyisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond,
intimations from another world--all kinds of supernaturalisms are most
distasteful to me; I cling to the world of science and common sense and
explicable phenomena; and I was much put out, therefore, to find this
morning a cabalistic inscription written in letters of large menace
on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB--what could be the meaning of these
cryptic words, and how on earth had they got there? Like Belshazzar,
my eyes were troubled by this writing, and my knees smote one against
the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to look downward from her
contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards for me, with a pitying
smile, the homely, familiar, harmless inscription on the BATH MAT,
which was lying there wrong side up.
_Justification_
Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon-party? Do I not
owe it to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration;
ought I always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt?
And how about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph
tell of the dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted, and Deborah sing
without blame how she arose a mother in Israel? And didn't David boast
of his triumph over the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay,
in his confabulations with His chosen people, does not the Creator of
the universe Himself take every opportunity of impressing on those
Hebrews His importance, His power, His glory?
Was I not made in His image?
_Day-dream_
"Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More
and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We
dress, we go out to dinner," I went on, "but surely we walk in a vain
show. How good this asparagus is! I often think asparagus is the most
delicious of all vegetables. And yet I don't know--when one thinks
of fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus as one can of
strawberries--but tender green peas and peaches I could eat for ever.
And there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. It's one of
my favourite day-dreams for my declining years to live alone, a formal,
greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say, in Devonshire,
with a square garden, whose walls are covered with apricots and figs
and peaches; and there are precious pears, too, of my own planting, on
espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a gold-headed cane
in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment pick a delicious
pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to say----"
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY
(_A paper based on, but not identical with, a discourse delivered at
what may be called the headquarters of the subject--the Pump Room,
Bath, October 1st, 1919_)
The effect of convincing anyone against his will is sufficiently
familiar, but it may be questioned whether there is not another state
of mind which is still more insusceptible of real conviction, which it
is still more of a labour of Sisyphus to convince. In this state there
is too much mere inertia for the word "will" to come in. There is no
intention of relapsing into the same opinion; there is indeed no need
of any, for the opinion is never disturbed. The attempts at convincing
need not be resisted or contemned; they may even be listened to and
enjoyed like a very pleasant song, but they are at once forgotten.
Something of this sort, it may be feared, is the case with the subject
of this present paper. People have made up their minds that there was
_no_ eighteenth-century poetry or, at best, that such as there was was
not properly eighteenth-century poetry at all, but merely a survival
or an anticipation. The present writer had a perhaps accidental but
certainly curious illustration of the fact in reference to the origin
of this very paper; for having expressed his intention of discussing
"eighteenth-century _poetry_," he found the subject announced at
first as "eighteenth-century _verse_." In face of such a popular
attitude--let us be bold and give it its proper name: such a vulgar
error--it may not be quite idle to make a fresh attempt against it. I
am not sure that in some of the versions of the Pagan Apocrypha it is
not recorded that Sisyphus _did_ get that stone lodged at last. At any
rate it is worth trying, even at the risk, which is almost a certainty,
of the very illogical suspicion that if you like eighteenth-century
poetry, you _don't_ like--or don't sufficiently understand--seventeenth
and nineteenth. On that point the present writer may, he thinks, slap
his sword home and decline duello with any man. But he will take the
liberty firstly, in order to confine the matter within reasonable
limits, of leaving Pope almost entirely out. Obviously the famous and
much-argued question, "Was Pope a poet?" can be answered, even in the
negative, without deciding our general point here.
There is, of course--the fact has been already admitted by glance--a
division of the poetry of 1700-1800 to which, in a more or less
grudging way, the poetical franchise is generally granted. Scraps
of Lady Winchilsea and Parnell quite early; Dyer and Thomson at the
beginning of the second quarter; Collins and Gray in the middle; Blake
and Burns and Chatterton if not also Cowper and Crabbe, in the last
division are admitted, if only to a sort of provincial or proselyte
membership. Gray, indeed, has always been granted special grace,
even, as some think, to an unfair comparative extent, and perhaps
Mr. Swinburne's exuberant championship was never less wasted than in
the cases of Collins and Blake. But Blake really does belong to no
time at all except in a few fragments, and most of the others are too
well known for further comment. Let us in the very limited space here
available, before passing to other aspects of the subject, take two
poems, one of the earlier, one of the later time, as examples of pure
poetry charged with special eighteenth-century difference--for that
is the point at issue. They shall be Dyer's _Grongar Hill_ and Mrs.
Greville's _Prayer for Indifference_. The one is a picture of that
external nature to which as a rule the century is supposed to have
been blind, yet charged with an "inwardness" to which that century is
equally supposed to have been callous. The other is a poem of mood,
almost a pathological poem, possessing the same inwardness, but charged
with a flutter of feeling, again supposed to be quite unknown to the
age of prose and sense. Both are curious examples of what is called the
conventional phraseology of the time, flushed and animated by something
additional--a characteristic which also appears in Collins, but is more
disputable in Gray, save perhaps in the remarkable "Vicissitude" ode.
_Grongar Hill_ ought to be given whole, but it is not difficult of
access; the "Hymn" is not so easy to get at, but it suffers less from
"sampling."
There is not the slightest extravagance, from any catholic point
of view over poetry, in calling _Grongar Hill_ simply beautiful. I
think it deserves that term better than anything of Gray's, though
not perhaps quite so well as some things of Collins's in the first
half of the century; while nothing outside them can touch it, and it
came before both. Its attractions, to a somewhat close student, are
manifold, not the least of them being the fashion in which, for the
first time since Milton, and in a way not directly imitated even from
him, it moulds the couplet of mixed eight and seven syllable lines. But
one need not neglect the late Mr. Lowell's remark that when Edgar Poe
talked of iambs and pentameters he made other people d----n metres.
The poem has plenty of other attractions for the most untechnical
reader. Dyer, who was himself a painter, invokes the Muse of Painting
as well as Her of Poetry, and it is really remarkable how, at this
time when hardly anybody is supposed to have had his eye on nature
except Thomson, and in the very year of _Winter_ itself, full eighty,
too, before Scott provoked from Pitt his famous surprise that verse
should be able to express the effect of painting--how visual as well as
audible effect is produced. The exordium to the
Silent nymph with curious eye,
Who in the purple evening lie
On the mountain's lonely van;
the following description of the landscape in general with its unusual
and extraordinarily true conclusion:
And swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight,
in which everybody who has after climbing a hill turned round and seen
the prospect must acknowledge the felicity of "swelling," though he may
never have formulated the appearance before; the details of wood, and
ruin, and river, with the sudden and just sufficient moral:
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter's day;
for the castle, and for the rivers:
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave they go,
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life to endless sleep;
the fillings in of various detail and the penultimate passage formed
into a sort of roundel:
Now, even now, my joys run high
As on the mountain turf I lie,
While the wanton Zephyr sings
And in the vale perfumes his wings;
While the waters murmur deep,
While the shepherd charms his sheep,
While the birds unbounded fly,
And with music fill the sky--
Now, even now, my joys run high;
with the finale to Peace and Quiet, close allied to Pleasure--all these
and all the rest of the 150 lines or so of the poem have their own
appropriate agreeableness. And it will be very dangerous for anyone to
try the usual sneer at eighteenth-century convention, lest haply he be
thought to be blinded or hoodwinked by conventions of another sort.
He has, for instance, been taught to think "wanton Zephyr" very bad.
But has he quite realised the simplicity and perfection with which the
single word "sings" distinctively characterises the rush of the wind
aloft, and the next line brings before the mind's senses the flowers
and crops and woods, from which the "perfume" is derived below? Is
"unbounded," in the particular and yet fully legitimate sense, quite
what Edmond de Goncourt used disdainfully to call "everybody's epithet"
for the apparently limitless freedom of the birds' flight? Without
quoting the whole piece it would be impossible to show the singular
uniformity of pictorial and musical skill which distinguishes it; but
this can be left, with complete security of mind, to anyone who gives
it an impartial reading to discover for himself. Even the impartial
reader is not recommended to proceed from _Grongar Hill_ to _The Ruins
of Rome_, as the poet in this latter piece most unwisely invites him to
do--still less to _The Fleece_. But no attempt is being made here to
prove that the eighteenth century never produced bad poetry: one merely
endeavours to point out that it sometimes produced good.
The _Prayer for Indifference_ is much less varied in kind, and much
more limited in degree, of attraction, but it is perhaps subtler. The
personal application of it can escape no reader of Fanny Burney's
Diaries, but is not necessary to appreciation. The idea is that of an
appeal to Oberon for a "balm" slightly different from that which plays
so important a part in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_--a spell causing
neither love nor hate, but only indifference. The metre is ordinary
ballad or common measure; the language not very different from the
ordinary poetic diction of the time. You are not, as in _Grongar Hill_,
made to believe that you are not in the eighteenth century at all,
or, if at all, as far from its usual and central ways and thoughts as
Grongar itself was and is from London. But, by a quaint and pleasing
paradox, the suppliant infuses into her prayer qualities which were
the very opposite of that which she prays for, and which in a certain
sense might be said to be the quality of the century itself at least
on the common estimate. Indifference--in the sense of abstinence from
enthusiasm--certainly _was_ affected by many, and positively approved
by some, in those days. But when the lady says:
I ask no kind return in love,
No tempting charm to please--
Far from the heart such gifts remove
That sighs for peace and ease,
there is a quiver in verse and phrase and sense alike which indicates
and expresses very effectively aspirations quite different from
indifference. And the quiver becomes a throb, emphasised by the
repetition of that potent word "far," as she goes on:
Nor ease, nor peace that heart can know
That, like the needle true,
Turns at the touch of joy or woe,
But, turning, trembles too.
Far as distress the soul can wound,
'Tis pain in each degree;
'Tis bliss, but to a certain bound,
Beyond, 'tis agony.
And there is not much less real passion, though the expression has
become ironic instead of direct, in the concluding stanza:
And what of life remains to me
I'll pass in sober ease:
Half-pleased, contented I will be--
Content but half to please.
Now it is probably hopeless to expect readers who have been thoroughly
broken to other styles of poetry themselves to be contented, to be
even "half-pleased" with this. The metre will seem to them jog-trot,
the language hopelessly prosaic, the expression, as Nietzsche says of
John Stuart Mill, "offensively clear"; the absence of any attempt at
elaborate ornament or elaborate ugliness almost more offensive still.
And it may also seem idle boasting or sheer mendacity to observe that
there are people who delight in intricate versification, who love
even metaphysical ambiguousness and obscurity; people for whom Blake
is not too uncommonplace or Rossetti too flamboyant, or--to come to
more recent days, while keeping to the equal waters of the dead--Mary
Coleridge too problematic, who yet can enjoy this verse very much
indeed, and feel that, having known it, they could not do without it,
which some have held to be the great test of poetry. Indeed, to them,
not the least interesting point about it is that it _does_ take the
form and colour of the time to so large an extent and vindicates its
indispensableness thereby. On the other hand, if anyone says, "But I
do not perceive the quiver, or feel the throb of which you talk," why,
of course, there is nothing more to be done or said. For that person
Mrs. Greville's work is undoubtedly not poetry. But whether his or her
state is the more gracious, because of the fact, is a further question,
though one on which we need not enter. The whole purport of this paper
is once more to make an effort to establish the old position that there
are many mansions in the Heaven of Poetry, and that the mere fact that
some one does not care to live in or to recognise the existence of this
or that among them does not prove that they ought to be pulled down or
that they do not exist at all.
It may, however, be admitted--in fact no admission or confession
is required, no idea of contesting or denying having been
entertained--that neither the qualities of _Grongar Hill_ nor those
of the _Prayer_, that still less the general characteristics of
the group of romantic precursors from Collins to Blake distinguish
eighteenth-century poetry generally. And it may in the same way be
further allowed that some of the actual characteristics of this
poetry in general are not _strictly_ poetic at all. Its didacticism
is perhaps the chief of these; but there are undoubtedly others.
And we are busy not with what is not poetical in eighteenth-century
verse, but with what is poetical in eighteenth-century poetry. There
are two departments in which it is almost pre-eminent, in which it is
certainly very distinguished. The strict poeticalness of both of them
has indeed been denied by extremists. All of us probably have heard it
said, perhaps some of us have said it ourselves, that rhetoric is not
poetry; and (though here there may not have been so much agreement)
that "light" verse, whether regularly satiric or not, is at best poetry
by allowance and, short of the best, not poetry at all. Now undoubtedly
some rhetoric is not poetry, and a good deal of light verse is poetry
only by extremely generous allowance. But the complete ostracising of
either kind from the poetical city involves two propositions which are
contentious in the extreme, and which I and those who think with me
hold to be abominable heresies. The one is that "All depends on the
subject" in poetry, and the other is that "Verse is not an essential
feature of poetry." _We_ maintain that anything can be treated
poetically, though some things are very rebellious to such treatment,
and that though rhetoric is strictly a characteristic of prose, it cam
be, so to speak, super-saturated with poetry when it adopts poetical
form, the same contention extending to the subjects of satiric or of
merely light verse. A great deal of the abundant rhetorical verse of
the eighteenth century is no doubt not poetry, or not very poetical
poetry, and a good deal of its abundant satire, not a very little of
its _vers de société_ and trifles is not poetry or not very poetical.
But, on the other hand, not a very little of both kinds is poetry,
and the reason and origin of its poetical character are by no means
uninteresting to trace. There is no room, and indeed not much occasion,
to do this at length here. Suffice it to say that for its rhetorical
verse the century was very much indebted to Dryden, and that for its
light verse it was still more indebted to Prior.
The positions of the two were indeed different, for Dryden was a dead
man when the century opened, though he had died on its very eve,
while Prior was an actual member of its first great literary group.
And, further, Dryden's influence, though it continued to some extent
directly through the whole time, was largely exercised at second-hand
through Pope, while Prior's was first-hand all through. For which
reasons we need not say anything more here on Dryden himself, while we
must say something on Prior. But the rhetorical influence which had
produced such great poetry (for great it is, let who will gainsay)
as the finest passages of Dryden's satires, the opening of _Religio
Laici_, the "wandering fires" paragraph in _The Hind and the Panther_,
and not a few things in the neglected plays, was well justified of its
children in the following century. I have never seen any successful
attempt to deny the name of poetry to such magnificent things as the
close of _The Dunciad_ and the close of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. I
have never seen any real fight at all made for this denial except the
endeavour to turn them, as scapegoats, into the wilderness of rhetoric.
And that, as I have said already, is really a begging of the question.
Most certainly there is rhetoric which is not poetry--there is a very
great deal of it--in fact most of it; as certainly there is rhetoric
which is. And the passages which may claim that name in the eighteenth
century, if never quite so great as the two just mentioned, are very
numerous. There is that fine one in Tickell's epitaph on Cadogan
which, after the eclipse of eighteenth-century verse in the earlier
nineteenth, Thackeray was the first to rediscover:
Ah, no! when once the mortal yields to fate
The blast of Fame's sweet trumpet sounds too late--
Too late to stay the spirit on its flight
Or soothe the new inhabitant of light,
with its later address to Fame herself:
Thou music, warbling to the deafened ear!
Thou incense, wasted on the funeral bier!
There is Akenside's still finer _Epistle to Curio_, which Macaulay
laughed at rather ignobly as unpractical. Well, Akenside, like Macaulay
himself, was a Whig, and I am a Tory; nor are the ideals expressed
in the following lines by any means mine. But if they are not fine
lines, if they are not, though in one of the outer provinces no doubt,
poetical, I will acknowledge that I know nothing at all about poetry:
Ye shades immortal, who by Freedom led,
Or in the field or on the scaffold bled,
Bend from your radiant seats a joyful eye,
And view the crown of all your labours nigh.
See Freedom mounting her eternal throne,
The sword submitted, and the laws her own;
See public power chastised beneath her stand,
With eyes intent and uncorrupted hand,
See private life by wisest arts reclaimed,
See ardent youth to noblest manners framed,
See us acquire whate'er was sought by you,
If Curio! only Curio! will be true.
Well, once more, Curio, _alias_ Pulteney, was _not_ true, but deserted
Akenside's party and became Earl of Bath and possessor of no small part
thereof. And private life and ardent youth were not reclaimed much in
the days of the historic Charteris and the fictitious Lovelace. And the
practical realisation of something like Akenside's undoubted principles
and aspirations was the French Revolution fifty and the Russian
Revolution nearer two hundred years later. But all this has nothing
to do with the question whether in this passage also rhetoric, which
hardly anybody will deny to it, has not passed under the influence and
received the transforming force of poetry. I say it has, though I am
perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical
form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I
myself like best. But one of the cries which the critic should never
be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness,
is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another
thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or
fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out.
The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best
poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush,
the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.
There is less specific prejudice against "light" poetry on the part
of poetical highfliers than there is against poetical rhetoric, but
there is some. Once more I venture to disallow this prejudice _in
toto_ as far as kind is concerned, though, of course, each individual
specimen of that kind must pass its individual muster as a piece of
intenser thought or feeling, expressed in appropriate language and
inspired by the charm of verse-music. For that, though no one ever has
defined or will define poetry, is one of the divers good approaches
to a description of it. Now here, as was briefly said above, the
eighteenth century possessed, for nearly the whole of its first quarter
as an actual living practitioner, and for the whole of the rest of
it as a past contemporary of still living persons, an unsurpassed
general of light verse in Matthew Prior. On the whole I know few
English poets who have so seldom had full justice done to them. No
competent judge, indeed, has ever denied Prior's excellence in pure
lightness, but there have been frequent failures to allow for that
undercurrent of seriousness, sadness, and almost passion--that "feeling
in earnest while thinking in jest," according to the best definition
of humour--which characterises him. Thackeray has, indeed, equalled,
but in obvious and even frank following, the great lines written (or
not written) in Mézeray's _History of France_; but hardly anyone else
has come near them in irony and melancholy and music, blended as three
appeals in one. There is even a touch, though more than a touch would
have been out of place, in the famous _Child of Quality_, and a great
deal more, not quite so perfectly expressed, in the _Lines to Charles
Montague_. If the touch of sadness be for the moment unwelcome, there
is _Daphne and Apollo_ or the famous _English Padlock_, with a dozen or
several dozen others ready to hand. And to go to yet another _nuance_,
the recent discovery at Longleat of _Jinny the Just_, with its touches
of sincere sorrow and the three unequalled stanzas of kindly irony:
Thus still, while her morning unseen fled away,
In ord'ring the linen and making the tea,
That she scarce could have time for the psalms of the day--
And while after dinner the night came so soon
That half she proposed very seldom was done,
With twenty "God bless me's, how this day has gone!"
While she read, and accounted, and paid, and abated,
Ate and drank, played and worked, laughed and cried, loved and
hated,
_As answered the end of her being created_,
especially with that last unsurpassable line; all these and many
more exemplify and illustrate that indescribable raising of the
expression--that making the common as if it were not common--which is
the essence of poetry and the privilege of verse.
How this side of the matter was produced (in the mathematical sense)
and maintained throughout the century would take many times the space
of the present paper to show in anything but the briefest and barest
epitome. Almost all Prior's own shorter later poems would have to be
quoted; Swift, though so much greater in prose, and though best in
verse on the severer side, especially in the magnificent and quite
sufficiently authenticated _Judgment Day_ verses, could not be left
out; and it might be possible to make more fight than even lovers of
the eighteenth century have recently made for Gray. But perhaps the
scraps and orts of lesser men of letters--though sometimes not lesser
_men_--show the strong point of the century even more convincingly.
Where will you find more musical lightness of a certain easy but far
from unpoetical kind than in those verses on Strawberry Hill in which
Pulteney almost paid his rather heavy debts in more serious ways to the
House of Walpole? Or than in the others in which he and Chesterfield
combined to estimate "Hanover Bremen and Verden," that is to say, the
whole continental dominions for which George the Second was making
England fight, as worthless compared with the charms of Molly Lepell?
Go lower still, take a professional littérateur and laureate like
William Whitehead, to whom hardly anybody save Mr. Austin Dobson (and
it is certainly no small exception) has been favourable, and read
the piece on Celia, which is a more or less independent expansion
of Ausonius on Crispa. It begins with a sort of pettish avowal of
ignorance how the mischief of love came, and goes on with rather rude
depreciations of the lady's face, figure, air, and even sense. Then it
slides rapidly into a sort of grudging allowance:
Her voice, her touch, _might_ give the alarm--
'Twas both perhaps or neither,
and then capitulates headlong:
In short 'twas that provoking charm
Of Celia altogether!
Trivial, of course, but then it ought to be trivial, and the trivial
can be, and is, here super-trivialised.
One might go on, even in this skipping fashion, for a long time till
one came to the great political satires of the close of the century,
but once more time and space forbid. As it has been frivolously said:
You have only to search
In Dodsley and Pearch
(the standard ten volumes of eighteenth-century miscellaneous poetry)
and you will find; though, of course, if you only look for bad things
you will find them, too, in plenty. But even this collection is by
no means exhaustive, and with some of the more famous verse-writers
it does not deal at all; while we have in this survey confessedly
left most of them alone. What has been intended is to show that
making of the common uncommon by means of treatment in verse was not
an unknown thing between 1700 and 1800; that it was attempted and
achieved in various kinds. Finally, if the attempts were rarely and the
achievements hardly ever in kinds that can be called the very highest,
one may at least urge that there is not an absolute vacuum between the
loftiest mountain-tops of poetry and the actual plain of prose--that
Parnassus has lower slopes, some of which are not so _very_ low
SAMUEL BUTLER[6]
[6] _Samuel Butler: a Memoir. By H. Festing Jones. 2 vols.
Macmillan. 42s. net._
By EDWARD SHANKS
Samuel Butler was a philosopher whose favourite doctrine was expressed
in the words _pas trop de zèle_; and he spent a great part of his life
complaining a little too eagerly that the world was not sufficiently
zealous in the appreciation of his works. His reception and his
reputation did indeed deserve a considerable part of the almost
excessive attention which he lavished on them; for at this moment, now
that the first is accomplished and the second enormous, they make a
very curious subject for study. In his notebooks they occur again and
again as themes for his meditation. "I am the _enfant terrible_," he
says, "of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot,
get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I
can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." "I
have chosen the fighting-road," he says elsewhere, "rather than the
hang-on-to-a-great-man road, and what can a man who does this look for
except that people should try to silence him in whatever way they think
will be most effectual? In my case they have thought it best to pretend
that I am non-existent." There is something pathetic in the spectacle
of a man pursuing "the fighting-road" with no one to fight him and
heaving bricks into the middle of persons who obstinately continue to
ignore his existence. There is something more pathetic in the spectacle
of an original thinker and a great wit sitting down in isolation to
pen these apologies for his obscure position, always affecting to
be indifferent to it and never deceiving anyone. For Butler was not
indifferent to his lack of success. Had his been a true and not an
assumed indifference he could not have returned to the subject so
often as he does and in so many keys. He betrays himself again and
again beyond mistake. He was an intensely, a morbidly sensitive man,
one to whom success would have been very pleasant. He was damaged, and
confirmed in oddity, by the want of it. He missed it because of what
first started him in oddity--that is to say, an unfortunate childhood.
"The subject of this memoir," so Butler once suggested that his
biography ought to begin, "was the son of rich but dishonest
parents." Dishonest they may have been: respectable they certainly
were. Dr. Butler, the first distinguished member of the family, was
for twenty-seven years headmaster of Shrewsbury, a man with all the
attributes of the great schoolmasters of the early nineteenth century,
an imposing figure, who, towards the end of his life, became Bishop
of Lichfield. His son was not so distinguished. His sole claim to be
remembered, if his canonry be disregarded, is the fact that somehow
or other he became the father of Samuel Butler. There is much detail,
in Mr. Festing Jones's enormous book, on Butler's early life and his
relation to his parents; but there is nothing quite so significant as
an anecdote which occurs in the second volume:
At Saas he made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. MacCarthy, who were
staying in the hotel with their son, an Eton boy. One day the father
and son had been for an excursion and the father returned alone. The
anxious mother, hearing that her boy preferred speculating in short
cuts to accompanying his father, borrowed a red umbrella to make
herself conspicuous, and went out "to look for Desmond." Presently
she came upon Butler loaded up with his camera and toiling along on
his way back after a fatiguing day. He told her he had seen a little
white figure among the trees on the mountain-side and had no doubt it
was her son who, he assured her, would be all right, and he himself
was loitering, intending to be overtaken so that they might arrive at
the hotel together.
"You see," he explained, "I know he will be late for dinner, and it
may make things a little easier for him if he does not come in alone."
Years afterwards Mrs. MacCarthy told me that she had been reading
_The Way of All Flesh_, and had remembered this incident and had
for the first time understood why Butler thought that her son would
require the presence of an elderly gentleman to protect him from his
parents if he came in late for dinner.
This throws a curious and unexpected sidelight on Butler's childhood
from the effects of which he never recovered. His parents learnt the
art of bringing up children from a book which adjured them to "Break
your child's will early or he will break yours later on." They did
not break it, but unquestionably they deformed it. This may have been
done on principle. To Butler, however, it sometimes seemed to spring
from other motives. "I have felt," he once said of his father, "that
he has always looked upon me as something which he could badger with
impunity." He said that, like Ernest Pontifex, with regard to his
father he could remember no feeling during his childhood except fear
and shrinking.
Nor was this life of terror and pain lightened by any gracious or
liberal influences. The world which Mr. Festing Jones exhibits to us
in his opening chapters is full of the drabbest and most depressing
horrors of Early Victorianism. Its measure can be taken by a single
story which Butler preserved:
Archdeacon Bather was lunching with my grandfather some two or three
years after the Archdeacon had lost his first wife. Dr. Butler dearly
loved a hard crust of bread baked nearly black, and it so happened
that a piece was set by his plate with hardly any crust, and what
little there was, very thin. My aunt, then Miss Butler, observing
what had happened, at once said:
"Oh, Papa, this won't do at all! I will find you a piece more to your
liking." Whereon she went to the kitchen and returned with a crust
baked exactly to Dr. Butler's taste.
When Archdeacon Bather saw this he said to himself: "That is the
young woman for me"; and shortly afterwards he proposed and was
accepted.
Readers will remember the scene in _The Way of All Flesh_ in which
Theobald, driving away for his honeymoon, insists that Christina shall
order their dinner at the first stop, and in which Christina protests
with tears her nervousness, and Theobald replies, "It is a wife's duty
to order her husband's dinner; you are my wife, and I shall expect you
to order mine." A sensitive child, neglected or even ill-treated by its
parents, might, if the relations of the parents between themselves had
anything beautiful or kindly, see some possibilities of happiness in
the institution of the family. But Samuel Butler was brought up in a
world where no such possibilities seemed to exist. He came to believe,
Mr. Festing Jones tells us, that, like Habakkuk, _le père de famille
est capable de tout_. It has often been maintained that the greatest
poets and artists do nothing throughout life but draw on those fresh
and lovely impressions which they have gathered in childhood. When
he was a child Butler acquired habits of suspicion against all those
surrounding him who were not connected with him by freely-chosen bonds
of friendship. Canon Butler bullied him on moral grounds; and he grew
to suspect every claim made on him, every exhortation addressed to
him, on moral grounds. Ernest Pontifex is described on one occasion
as assuming the expression of a puppy which is being scolded for
something it does not understand; and Butler did indeed develop some
of the habits of an ill-treated dog. He shied and snarled at a lifted
hand, which might have been lifted in kindness or in ignorance of his
existence. Having, as he supposed, penetrated the fraud of the family,
he felt a distrust of all human institutions. He suspected the world of
being in a conspiracy to pretend that parents were naturally kind to
their children, that Christ rose from the dead, and that Tennyson was a
great poet. And, turning from all these discredited shows, he devoted
himself in isolation to the care of his own idiosyncrasies and the
companionship of a very few, very intimate friends.
Here, where he might in one case have suspected with justice, he was
all blind trust. The story of Charles Paine Pauli is one of the most
extraordinary that have been brought to light in human records in
recent years. A correspondent who knew him and admired him wrote not
long ago to the _Times_, not to controvert Mr. Festing Jones's account
of the relations between him and Butler, but to protest, in an almost
agonised manner, that there must be some explanation of it; and this is
precisely what the reader, who did not know Pauli, feels when he comes
upon these pages. But there seems to be no explanation.
In 1859 Butler rebelled against his father, and finally decided that he
could not take Orders, basing his refusal on "doubts," which in after
years seemed to him no less absurd than the doctrines against which
they were directed. As a result of this, he emigrated to New Zealand,
taking with him an allowance from Canon Butler and a promise of support
in capital, in order that he might establish himself as a sheep-farmer.
In this occupation he was, against all the probabilities, moderately
successful and, largely owing to the rapidly-developing condition of
the colony, managed to turn an original capital of £4400 into the sum
of £8000. But finding the life uncongenial, he concluded that it would
be wiser to invest his money in New Zealand, where the current rate of
interest was 10 per cent., and go home and live on the proceeds. While
he was making preparations to this end, a previous slight acquaintance
with Pauli developed into an intimate friendship. Pauli was handsome,
fascinating, well dressed, ineffably well mannered. He was, in fact,
the Towneley of _The Way of All Flesh_, though Providence, not doing
as well by him as by Towneley, had omitted to make him rich. He was
actually poor and in ill-health, and anxious to go to England in order
that he might recover. He then proposed to get called to the Bar and
to return to New Zealand to practise. Butler, who believed himself
to be worth about £800 a year, promptly lavished on this creature
the generosity and tenderness which had found no outlet during his
childhood. He offered to lend him £100 for his passage, and to allow
him £200 a year for three years--that is, until his return to New
Zealand as a barrister. They accordingly made the passage together;
and Butler kept his promise, and more than kept it, extending the
allowance, even through the time of his acutest financial difficulties,
until Pauli's death in 1897. It was then discovered that at one time
Pauli had been earning £900 a year, and that even at the last he earned
between £500 and £700. He left a fortune of £9000; but Butler was not
mentioned in the will and received his invitation to the funeral from
the undertaker.
A singular and enlightening circumstance in the intercourse between
Butler and Pauli unhappily prevents Mr. Festing Jones from making this
astonishing but veracious narrative entirely lifelike. The charming
young man did not reciprocate the feelings of his pathetic and somewhat
uncouth adorer. "I had felt from the very beginning," says Butler,
"that my intimacy with Pauli was only superficial, and I also perceived
more and more that I bored him." Pauli confessed that he had never
been more miserable in his life than once when he spent a holiday with
Butler at Dieppe. Consequently it soon came about that the essential
part of the relations between them was the punctual payment of the
allowance. Latterly, they only met three times a week, when Pauli
lunched in Butler's chambers. He discontinued informing Butler of his
changes of address, so that at the end Butler did not know where he was
living, and Mr. Festing Jones met him "only on business, for he would
have nothing to do with any of Butler's friends in any other way."
Butler learnt of his death from an announcement in the _Times_.
Truly a mysterious creature! And his friend is very comprehensible in
supposing that there must be some explanation. Possibly Mr. Festing
Jones, if he had met him otherwise than purely on business, might have
given us some impression of his personality which would have let in
light on this dark business. As it is, we must content ourselves with
wonder at the extraordinary situations which human nature is capable of
creating. But this unhappy friendship is worth examining, apart from
its intrinsic curiosity, because it presents in extremity an essential
and determining part of Butler's life. His devotion and loyalty to his
friends were perhaps the most beautiful things in his character and do
much to redeem his somewhat unlovely attitude of snarling and suspicion
towards all strangers.
Life might be thought to have treated him savagely in following up
his parents with the hardly less cruel Pauli. He disguised the shock
of his discovery on Pauli's death by remarking that he would now save
not only £200 a year, but also the cost of those three lunches a week
in Clifford's Inn. Yet a nature that opened itself so trustingly, so
defencelessly, must have suffered on finding its bounty abused. But in
his other friends, in Miss Savage, in his clerk, Alfred Emery Cathie,
and in Mr. Festing Jones he had ample compensations. He was a man who
at first sight was not readily liked. He was awkward and nervous in
the company of strangers, and it is likely that he did not disguise
so well as he supposed his grave misgivings that they were either
pretentious scoundrels or conceited hypocrites. He was always badly
and carelessly dressed; and though his portraits, when one is used to
them and can associate them with the best one knows of his mind, become
attractive, there can be no denial that his appearance was on the most
lenient showing decidedly grotesque, that of a difficult, taciturn,
maliciously observant gnome, roughly carved in a hard wood. It took
some time and some degree of intuition to penetrate behind this mask.
Those who did so were rewarded and rewarded him. Miss Savage, who used
to meet him first at Heatherley's art-classes, was not attracted by him
for a considerable time. When at last she was, it was by a flash of
remarkable intuition. In commenting on one of his books, she writes:
I like the cherry-eating scene, too, because it reminded me of your
eating cherries when first I knew you. One day when I was going to
the gallery, a very hot day, I remember, I met you on the shady side
of Berners Street eating cherries out of a basket. Like your Italian
friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and you handed the
basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word. I pulled out a
handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying a word either. I
had not before perceived you to be different from anyone else.
It is not certain whether Miss Savage became a Butlerian or whether
Butler acquired something of what we consider his characteristic
attitude of mind from her. If it was not so, then her spirit leapt at
once to answer his as soon as she had perceived the possibility of
common interests between them, for her first letters to him are written
in his own vein. She entered immediately into his concerns, read all
his books in manuscript, criticised them, gave them more praise than
they received from anyone else, and abused his enemies with a gusto
equal to his. The only trouble between them in their long connection
was his gnawing fear that she wanted to marry him. And he did not want
to marry anyone, let alone her who was
Plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and overkind.
But if all these disabilities had been removed, he would still have
been disinclined to marry her. He did not believe in marriage, had a
hatred of the family; and he slunk away snarling from the danger like a
terror-stricken wild animal at the sight of a trap, only to reproach
himself in after years for unkindness to his friend. But his relations
with women were not, and he did not intend that they should be, of the
sort that lead to marriage. He had mistresses, whom he visited. Mr. J.
B. Yeats, in a recent paper of reminiscences, has repeated his avowals
on this point in a manner which conveys well enough Butler's view that
his lapses were caused by a necessity of the flesh. Mr. Festing Jones
reinforces this impression. One of his mistresses, referred to as
"Madame," was, after a long connection, allowed to visit his chambers
in Clifford's Inn. No other gained this privilege; and Butler extended
it to her as he might have done to an old and well-tried servant.
Butler did not love these women, he frequented them. He was insensible
to the notion that there might be anything beautiful in the relations
between the sexes, as he was insensible to the notion that there might
be anything of value written in verse. Theobald and Christina pretended
to like poetry: Theobald and Christina pretended to love one another
and him. It was all of a piece with their pretence that Christianity
was a religion of kindliness and enlightenment.
So he remained a bachelor, and, when Miss Savage was dead, contented
himself with the intimate companionship of Mr. Jones and Alfred, his
clerk. After he had resigned the ambition of becoming a painter, after
his odd and disastrous excursion in the world of business, his daily
life was that of an eccentric gentleman with a small independent
income. He read and wrote in the British Museum, he went for walks in
the country and took holidays in Italy, he published his books at his
own expense, and he scrambled out of invitations to dinner as best he
could. For a hobby he wrote music in collaboration with Mr. Festing
Jones, oratorios which were to be as much like Handel's oratorios as
possible. The first of them, _Narcissus_, was inspired by his own
misfortunes in business, and the final chorus ran:
How blest the prudent man, the maiden pure,
Whose income is both ample and secure,
Arising from consolidated Three
Per Cent. Annuities, paid quarterly!
"We remembered Handel's treatment of 'continually,'" says Mr. Festing
Jones, "and thought we could not do better than imitate it for our
words 'paid quarterly.'"
And so his life went on and his interests drifted through the theory
of evolution, the authorship of the _Odyssey_, the life of his
grandfather, and the meaning of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The sales of his
books pursued a course by no means so varied, but steadily declined. In
1899, when he drew up a statement of profit and loss, the average sales
of his eleven books, excluding _Erewhon_, which was the first, amounted
to 306 copies each. Of his _Selections from Previous Works_, 120 copies
were sold in fifteen years. Of _The Authoress of the Odyssey_, 165
copies were sold. He might well have added discouragement to his first
cause of bitterness. The religion of Christ produced Canon Butler, the
religion of science produced Darwin, the religion of good looks and
good breeding produced Pauli. On paper he was indomitable. He swore he
had enjoyed life, that on the balance his good luck overbalanced the
bad. But he swore a little too often, he explained a little too much
in detail for this to have been quite true. And then, at the very end
of his life, the luck turned, and his last book, by a strange irony,
was produced at the publisher's own risk, the greatest triumph in his
literary career which Butler was able to see since the success of his
first book. After he was dead his reputation, magically assisted with
incantations by Mr. Bernard Shaw and others, sprang up to an amazing
height, like the plant grown from the Indian enchanter's bean.
Now the world is confronted with a situation in which the neglected
philosopher of Clifford's Inn has attained an importance he never
dreamt of and perhaps would not have approved. "Above all things," he
said, "let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in _me_."
This useful motto was printed on the menu of the first Erewhon dinner;
but a great number of his disciples have disregarded the admonition.
I was once the witness of one undergraduate trying to proselytise
another and telling him that it was a worthy ambition to desire to
be like Christ. "I don't want to be like anyone else," replied the
second undergraduate, "but if I did, I shouldn't choose Christ, I
should choose Samuel Butler." This is at once an extreme instance and
one strictly guarded against Butler's own disapproval: for the kernel
of the remark would meet with his applause. But it illustrates the
direction in which many of his admirers have more frenetically rushed.
It is an ironic fate for so ironic a philosopher that his teaching
should have become a sort of Tom Tiddler's ground for so many solemn
and ridiculous persons.
What, after all, is his total achievement? He himself summed up
what he considered to be his life-work in a statement which is not
dated but which must have been written in 1899 or later. It begins
with (1) The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease
[_Erewhon_], and ends with (17) The elucidation of Shakespeare's
_Sonnets_ [_Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered_.] "The foregoing," he
continues, "is the list of my mares'-nests, and it is, I presume, this
list which made Mr. Arthur Platt call me the Galileo of Mares'-nests
in his diatribe on my _Odyssey_ theory in the _Classical Review_." The
two to which he probably attached most importance, to judge from the
bitterness of his remarks on their reception, were his intervention
into the great evolution dispute and his great discovery that the
_Odyssey_ was written by a female inhabitant of Trapani in Sicily.
With regard to the second he continually complained that no classical
scholar had ever replied to his arguments. It was once remarked in
answer to this, that if a classical scholar published a book arguing
that no player of Rugby football ought to be allowed to pass the
ball to another without obtaining a signed receipt for it, the great
community of Rugby footballers, intent on other matters, would
probably ignore his suggestion. Butler's claim may perhaps be left
there. Yet he did apparently take it seriously, in spite of his failure
to deal with the singular fact that no scrap of confirmation of his
theory has survived from the writings or the traditions of antiquity.
His "mares'-nests," he said, "were simply sovereigns which he found
lying in public places and which people would not notice and be at
the trouble of picking up." They were mostly, however, one cannot
help suspecting, recommended to him less because they seemed to be
sovereigns than because other people would not pick them up. They were,
in fact, the notions of a crank, who, having acquired a distrust of the
rest of the world, took pains to differ from it as much as he could.
His theories of evolution hold a different position. Darwin's theory
has now been so greatly modified, as much by his supporters as by
his opponents, that it cannot be said any longer to hold the field
as he first presented it; and Butler's attitude has been in a manner
justified. But this change has been accomplished not by the acceptance
of Butler's views but by the work of experimental biologists. He
did, in fact, offer many general principles, some well founded, some
mistaken, all stimulating, for the consideration of practical workers;
and it would not be possible to assert, without an exhaustive enquiry
into the history of the matter, that his writings have had no influence
on the development of science. But Charles Darwin and his followers
were practical men--men no doubt with faults, with the intolerance and
impatience of the laity that are often to be found in the scientific
investigator. It is not hard to see why they received Butler with
tepid interest, and finally ignored him when he forsook their path
of enquiry. For they did ignore him: they did not, as he supposed,
conspire to silence him. He seems to have believed that Darwin was a
sort of Anti-Christ malevolently determined to force on humanity a
diabolical belief of his own invention; and he was only too ready to
suspect him of unscrupulous dealing and machinations. When he conceived
that Darwin had engineered an attack on him, though he obtained an
expression of regret for an accident, he flung violently into print,
and did, though he remained ignorant of the fact, get from Darwin and
his friends the attention as an enemy which they would not bestow on
him as a scientist. His letter to the _Athenæum_ seriously perturbed
Darwin, who drafted two replies to it, and submitted them for advice to
the members of his family and to Professor Huxley. The advice given was
against replying; and Butler was accordingly confirmed in his opinion.
But this was an opinion which a less suspicious man would have been
slower in forming and readier to discard.
Darwin was not, in his career or in his handling of Butler, a model of
the urbane virtues. Butler did right to protest against the sacerdotal
attitude which Victorian men of science frequently adopted. But he did
wrong not to realise that Darwin did not take him altogether seriously,
and why this was so. Butler's challenging manner of writing, the
prickly defensiveness which he developed on the smallest provocation,
must have been disagreeable to the great investigator who had spent
years of careful research into the problems which Butler airily
settled at his writing-table in the intervals of other pursuits.
Darwin is perhaps to blame, but not so greatly to blame as Butler
contended, if he regarded Butler at first as a well-disposed, and then
as an ill-disposed, amateur; and that was in effect his view of the
whole matter. When he sent _Evolution Old and New_ to Dr. Krause, he
expressed the hope that the German writer "would not expend much powder
and shot on Mr. Butler, for he really is not worthy of it. His book is
merely ephemeral." And it was in fact ephemeral or nearly so. Butler's
works on evolution contain many inspired guesses; but the inherent
value of these ceases to have much more than a historical interest
when they are confirmed by practical observation. If they are not so
confirmed they remain open to question, though they may have their uses
in suggesting paths for research. Butler's place in science is somewhat
below that of Goethe, who did after all make a practical discovery
which remains valid to-day.
Some of his "mares'-nests," then, were "mares'-nests" from the
beginning. Others, neglected when they might have been useful, had
begun to be superannuated when they first attracted attention. But
Butler, apart from his theories and his discoveries, remains as an
observer of life and a teacher of conduct. Passages of this nature
exist in all his works; but, generally speaking, his claim to be
accepted as a philosopher rests on five books, _Erewhon_, _Erewhon
Revisited_, the _Note-books_, _The Way of All Flesh_, and Mr. Festing
Jones's biography.
Mr. Festing Jones observes that "I was struck by his uncompromising
sincerity. If a subject interested him, he took infinite pains to
find out all he could about it first-hand, thought it over and formed
an opinion of his own, without reference to what anyone else thought
or said." In demonstration of this, Mr. Jones relates the following
reminiscence:
We talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her; I said, as
though taking the odd trick with the ace of trumps:
"Well, at all events, she wrote three splendid novels."
He replied in a low voice, reluctantly but decidedly: "They are not
splendid."
These four words shifted the subject under discussion from the
splendour or otherwise of Charlotte Brontë's novels to the sincerity
or otherwise of my opinion.
It was no doubt well that Mr. Jones's sincerity should be probed; and
this is in fact what Butler does at his best. He challenges established
opinions and forces those who hold them to consider whether they have
any good ground for doing so. But the reader who is not dazzled by
Butler's originality of judgment in this instance will ask himself
whether the sentence which Mr. Jones quotes is anything more than a
very facile assertion. He will then perhaps ask himself how often
Butler's original pronouncements on established reputations are of the
same order. He will certainly find some. In the _Note-books_ there is
an elaborate arraignment of Raphael. It may not be convincing; but the
critic has produced his arguments. Here, also, may be found Butler's
explanation of his hostility towards post-Handelian music. But one
may search the two volumes of the biography for a considerable time
without finding his appreciation of any book published in his own time.
Here, again, we must be just: Butler did like one book. It was called
_Pusley, or My Summer in a Garden_; its author was Charles Dudley
Warner; and Butler said, "I like _Pusley_ very much and have read it
all."
But the majority of his opinions are on the model of the much-quoted
passage in the _Note-books_:
Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt
Italian at sixty in order to study Dante, and we knew Dante was no
good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because
Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson--well, Tennyson goes without
saying.
That is an exceedingly witty way of expressing an indolent prejudice;
and those who share that particular chain of prejudices may well
rejoice in it, without supposing that it proves their case. But this
particular form of humour and Butler's independence of attitude would
be slightly more entertaining if he had occasionally replaced the
reputations he smashed with these hammer-strokes by some discovery of
his own. Unfortunately, it is not easy to remember any unknown author
whom he brought into the light--unless Nausicaa be taken as an example.
But this is, in a way, the defect of his qualities. It is easy, too
easy, to grow incensed with him when he inanely doubts any convention
or opinion that comes in sight. It is possible to remark of him,
adapting the remark made of Dr. Johnson, that he may have been very
sensible at bottom, but that there was a great deal of nonsense on
top. But the fact remains that by challenging everything he did detect
a great many frauds, and he did let the light of scepticism into a
great many topics where scepticism is a healthy attitude. If his view
of family life was bigoted and unreasonable, there is a great deal of
use in the reminder that family life is not necessarily perfect and
needs a deal of watching to keep it from being very imperfect indeed.
Some of the assumptions he challenged have now disappeared. We no
longer believe that good looks and good manners are the unmistakable
indices of an ill heart; and we are becoming convinced that it is
better to have these attributes than to be without them. But these
lessons can be enforced as Butler continually enforces them. It was
his fate that life made him a suspicious man. But suspicion made him
a doubting, questioning, and therefore enquiring man. And his natural
gift of humour taught him what he has ever since been teaching others,
that it is possible to be serious without being solemn. This was
perhaps the most valuable thing he had to say to a society emerging
from the Victorian era and passing over into another that was to be
as desperately serious as we are now realising. It is a reflection
pathetically ironical that his loudest followers in these days should
be persons whom he would very likely have described as Simeonites of
the intellect.
Of the value of his writings judged as literature it is not so easy
to speak with confidence. _Erewhon_ is not so much a novel as a
collection of essays roughly pressed into a common mould. They are
not merely disconnected, they are also composed on different planes
of satire, at different removes from reality, so that the reader as
he goes from chapter to chapter has an uncomfortable sense of being
jolted from level to level. Yet the satire, on its varying levels, is
extraordinarily easy, ingenious, and penetrating; and, in another key
again, the opening chapters make one of the best introductions to a
story of exploration ever written. _Erewhon Revisited_ is the book of
an old man; and it has much of the beauty so often to be found in such
compositions. The manner of its writing was very different from that of
its predecessor, and it is impossible to complain of any unevenness in
its structure. Nevertheless the satire is not so easy. It is a little
strained, a little too ingenious, a little too closely calculated to
make good reading. Butler himself picked out the best part of the book
when he complained that none of his critics had noticed the idea of a
father attempting by noble conduct to deserve the good opinion of a
newly-found and adored son. Thus, at the end of his life, still haunted
by early memories, he attempted to fashion in imagination what should
have been and completely to invert the facts of his own childhood.
_The Way of All Flesh_ is precisely the opposite of this. It has
long been known to be of the photographic order of novels; but how
minutely photographic it is we could not know until the appearance of
Mr. Jones's book. This need not, and should not, affect our judgment
of it, even when we are informed that Theobald's delightful letters
are almost literal transcriptions from those of Canon Butler. We can
very well continue to admire the inimitable accuracy and vividness
with which these real scenes are described, while we suffer from the
painful bitterness of this exhaustive improvisation on the old theme
of parents and children. But the whole book is not of equal merit.
It begins to weaken at the point where Ernest's career diverges from
Butler's own experience; and when it reaches the catastrophe it sinks
into improbabilities from which it never recovers. The Ernest, whose
thoughts and feelings at Cambridge have been described, and who was
Butler, would never have made that disastrous mistake over Miss
Maitland's real profession. Butler did not in fact ever make it, nor
did he ever develop into the super-prig which Ernest became after his
release from prison.
Butler's reputation will probably rest more and more, as time goes
on, on his _Note-books_ and on Mr. Jones's biography, which might be
described together as the story of a distrustful man. Indeed, posterity
reading these alone, will probably miss little of what it should
retain: for Butler was careful of his best things, and most of them
are to be found here as well as in the books in which he enshrined
them among more perishable material. On the strength of these two
books he will remain a definite and unforgettable character, though
he may, probably will, recede in importance, perhaps even to the
level of those wits whose "table-talk" is read by the curious in every
generation.
But even so, there he will be still: a man whom fate tortured into
such distrust of his fellows as to make him question everything and
teach others to do the same. He suffered intensely in the process
that made him what he was: he suffered again, much more than he would
ever admit, from the ineffaceable results of the process. "I do not
deny, however," he bursts out, "that I have been ill-used. I have been
used abominably." This cry rings truer, echoes longer in the memory,
than the assertion which follows that he considered the balance of
good fortune to have been on his side. By one of those contrivances
of events with which fate marks the lives of distinguished men, an
atmosphere of distrust followed him on to his death-bed and beyond it.
For the doctors disagreed during his last illness, and Mr. Festing
Jones doubts the accuracy of the causes given in the certificate of
death.
THE CRYSTAL VASE
By MAURICE HEWLETT
I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly
in life, thank goodness, nothing happened. Jane Austen, it has been
objected, forestalled me there, and it is true that she very nearly
did--but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the
novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events;
events--well, that means that there were collisions. They may have been
mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads together, and there
were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of cases,
there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to be
interesting; and even if stars should happen to be struck out, it is
not the collision, nor the stars either, which interest us most. No, it
is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which we care
about; and as mental process is always going on, and the state of the
soul never the same for two moments together, there is ample material
for a novel of extreme interest, which need never finish, which might
indeed be as perennial as a daily newspaper or the Annual Register.
Why is it, do you suppose, that anybody, if he can, will read anybody
else's letter? It is because every man-Jack of us lives in a cage, cut
off from every other man-Jack; because we are incapable of knowing what
is going on in the mind of our nearest and dearest, and because we burn
for the assurance we may get by evidence of homogeneity procurable from
any human source. Man is a creature of social instinct condemned by
his nature to be solitary. Creatures in all outward respects similar
to himself are awhirl about him. They cannot help him, nor he them; he
cannot even be sure, for all he may assume it, that they share his hope
and calling.
Ensphered in flesh we live and die,
And see a myriad souls adrift,
Our likes, and send our voiceless cry
Shuddering across the void: "The truth
Succour! The truth!" None can reply.
That is the state of our case. We can cope with mere events, comedy,
tragedy, farce. The things that happen to us are not our life. They are
imposed upon life, they come and go. But life is a secret process. We
only see the accretions.
The novel which I dreamed of writing has recently been done, or rather
begun, by Miss Dorothy Richardson. She betters the example of Jane
Austen by telling us much more about what seems to be infinitely less,
but is not so in reality. She dips into the well whereof Miss Austen
skims the surface. She has essayed to report the mental process of a
young woman's lifetime from moment to moment. In the course of four, if
not five, volumes nothing has happened yet but the death of a mother
and the marriage of a sister or so. She may write forty, and I shall
be ready for the forty-first. Mental process, the states of the soul,
emotional reaction--these as they are moved in us by other people are
Miss Richardson's subject-matter, and according as these are handled
is the interest we can devote to her novels. These flitting things are
Miss Richardson's game, and they are the things which interest us most
in ourselves, and the things which we desire to know most about in our
neighbours.
But of course it won't do. Miss Richardson does not, and cannot, tell
us all. A novel is a piece of art which does not so much report life
as transmute it. She takes up what she needs for her purpose, and
that may not be our purpose. And so it is with poetry--we don't go to
that for the facts, but for the essence of fact. The poet who told us
all about himself at some particular pass would write a bad poem, for
it is his affair to transfigure rather than transmute, to move us by
beauty at least as much as by truth. What we look for so wistfully in
each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished
article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry
which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that
which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact,
to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer.
Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now
no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so
it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, I think, by
analysis, to track the successive waves of mental process in _In
Memoriam_. Again, _The Angel in the House_ brought Patmore as near to
self-explication as a poet can go. Shakespeare's Sonnets offer a more
doubtful field of experiment.
What then? Shall we go to the letter-writers--to Madame de Sévigné, to
Gray, to Walpole and Cowper, Byron and Lamb? A letter-writer implies
a letter-reader, and just that inadequacy of spoken communication
will smother up our written words. Madame de Sévigné must placate her
high-sniffing daughter, Gray must please himself; Walpole must at any
cost be lively, Cowper must be urbane to Lady Hesketh or deprecate
the judgment of the Reverend Mr. Newton. Byron was always before the
looking-glass as he wrote; and as for Charles Lamb, do not suppose
that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin
thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree
with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be
merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic
turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it
in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation--on account of my
dying day, and because women have cancers." Where will you match that
but from Hamlet? But Keats knew himself. "It is a wretched thing to
confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I can utter can be
taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature." So
I find him in his letters, swayed rather by his fancies than his states
of soul, until indeed that soul of his was wrung by agony of mind and
disease of body. Revelation, then, like gouts of blood, did issue, but
of that I do not now write. No man is sane at such a crisis.
_Parva componere magnis_, there is a letter contained in _The Early
Diary of Frances Burney_ (ed. Mrs. A. R. Ellis, 1889) more completely
apocalyptic than anything else of the kind accessible to me. Its writer
was Maria Allen, daughter of Dr. Burney's second wife, therefore
half-sister to the charming Burney girls. She was a young lady who
could let herself go, in act as well as on paper, and withal, as
Fanny judged her, "flighty, ridiculous, uncommon, lively, comical,
entertaining, frank, and undisguised"--or because of it--she did
contrive to unfold her panting and abounding young self more thoroughly
than the many times more expert. You have her here in the pangs of a
love affair, of how long standing I don't know, but now evidently in
a bad state of miss-fire. It was to end in elopement, post-chaise,
clandestine marriage, in right eighteenth century. Here it is in an
earlier state, all mortification, pouting and hunching of the shoulder.
I reproduce it with Maria's punctuation, which shows it to have
proceeded, as no doubt she did herself, in gasps:
"I was at the Assembly, forced to go entirely against my own
Inclination. But I always have sacrificed my own inclinations to the
will of other people--could not resist the pressing Importunity of--Bet
Dickens--to go--tho' it proved Horribly stupid. I drank tea at the
---- told old Turner--I was determined not to dance--he would not
believe me--a wager ensued--half-a-crown provided I followed my own
Inclinations--agreed--Mr. Audley asked me. I refused--sat still--yet
followed my own Inclinations. But four couple began--Martin (c'etait
Lui) was there--yet stupid--nimporte--quite Indifferent--on both
sides--Who had I--to converse with the whole Evening--not a female
friend--none there--not an acquaintance--All Dancing--who then--I've
forgot--nimporte--I broke my earring--how--heaven knows--foolishly
enough--one can't always keep on the Mask of Wisdom--well n'importe
I danced a Minute a quatre the latter end of the Eve--with a
stupid Wretch--need I name him--They danced cotillions almost the
whole Night--two sets--yet I did not join them--Miss Jenny Hawkins
danced--with who--can't you guess--well--n'importe----"
* * * * *
There is more, but my pen is out of breath. Nobody but Mr. Jingle ever
wrote like that; and in so far as Maria Allen may be said to have had a
soul, there in its little spasms is the soul of Maria Allen, with all
the _malentendus_ of the ballroom and all the surgings of a love affair
at cross-purposes thrown in.
As for Fanny Burney's early diary, its careful and admirable editor
claims that you have in it "the only published, perhaps the only
existing record of the life of an English girl, written of herself, in
the eighteenth century." I believe that to be true. It is a record, and
a faithful and very charming record of the externals of such a life.
As such it is, to me at least, a valuable thing. If it does not unfold
the amiable, brisk, and happy Fanny herself, there are two simple
reasons why it could not. First, she was writing her journal for the
entertainment of old Mr. Crisp of Chessington, the "Daddy Crisp" of her
best pages; secondly, it is not at all likely that she knew of anything
to unfold. Nor, for that matter, was Fanny herself of the kind that can
unfold to another person. Yet there is a charm all over the book, which
some may place here, some there, but which all will confess. For me it
is not so much that Fanny herself is a charming girl, and a girl of
shrewd observation, of a pointed pen, and an admirable gift of mimicry.
She has all that and more--she has a good heart. Her sister Susan is
as good as she, and there are many of Susan's letters. But the real
charm of the book, I think, is in the series of faithful pictures it
contains of the everyday round of an everyday family. Dutch pictures
all--passers-by, a knock at the front door, callers--Mr. Young, "in
light blue embroidered with silver, a bag and sword, and walking in the
rain"; a jaunt to Greenwich, a concert at home--the Agujari in one of
her humours; a masquerade--"a very private one, and at the house of Mr.
Laluze ... Hetty had for three months thought of nothing else ... she
went as a Savoyard with a hurdy-gurdy fastened round her waist. Nothing
could look more simple, innocent, and pretty. My dress was a close pink
Persian vest covered with a gauze in loose pleats...." What else? Oh, a
visit to Teignmouth--Maria Allen now Mrs. Ruston; another to Worcester;
quiet days at King's Lynn, where "I have just finished _Henry and
Frances_ ... the greatest part of the last volume is wrote by Henry,
and on the gravest of grave subjects, and that which is most dreadful
to our thoughts, Eternal Misery...." Terrific novel: but need I go on?
There may be some to whom a description of the nothings of this our
life will be as flat as the nothings themselves--but I am not of that
party. The things themselves interest me, and I confess the charm. It
is the charm of innocence and freshness, a morning dew upon the words.
The Burneys, however, can do no more for us than shed that auroral
dew. They cannot reassure us of our normal humanity, since they needed
reassurance for themselves.
Where, then, shall we turn? So far as I am aware, to two only, except
for two others whom I leave out of account. Rousseau is one, for it is
long since I read him, but my recollection is that the _Confessions_ is
a kind of novel, premeditated, selective, done with great art. Marie
Bashkirtseff is another. I have not read her at all. Of the two who
remain I leave Pepys also out of account, because, though it may be
good for us to read Pepys, it is better to have read him and be through
with it. There, under the grace of God, go a many besides Pepys, and
among them every boy who has ever befouled a wall with a stump of
pencil. We are left then with one whom it is ill to name in the same
fill of the inkpot, "Wordsworth's exquisite sister," as Keats, who saw
her once, at once knew her to be.
In Dorothy Wordsworth's journals you may have the delight of daily
intercourse--_famigliarmente discorrendo_--with one of the purest
and noblest souls ever housed in flesh; to that you may add the
reassurance to be got from word and implication beyond doubt. She tells
us much, but implies more. We may see deeply into ourselves, but she
sees deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern. It is not
only that, knowing her, we are grounded in the rudiments of honour and
lovely living; it is to learn that human life can so be lived, and to
conclude that of that at least is the Kingdom of Heaven.
These journals are for fragments only of the years which they cover,
and as such exist for Jan.-May, 1798 (Alfoxden), May-Dec., 1800,
Oct.-Dec., 1801, Jan.-July, 1802: all these at Grasmere. They have been
printed by Professor Knight, and I have the assurance of Mr. Gordon
Wordsworth that what little has been omitted is unimportant. Nothing is
unimportant to me, and I wish the whole had been given us; but what we
have is enough whereby to trace the development of her extraordinary
mind and of her power of self-expression. The latter, undoubtedly,
grew out of emotion, which gradually culminated until the day of
William Wordsworth's marriage. There it broke, and with it, as if by
a determination of the will, there the revelation ceased. A new life
began with the coming of Mary Wordsworth to Dove Cottage, a life of
which Dorothy records the surface only.
The Alfoxden fragment (20 Jan.-22 May, 1798), written when she was
twenty-seven, is chiefly notable for its power of interpreting
landscape. That was a power which Wordsworth himself possessed in a
high degree. There can be no doubt, I think, that they egged each other
on, but I myself should find it hard to say which was egger-on and
which the egged. This is the first sentence of it:
"20 Jan.--The green paths down the hillsides are channels for
streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running
between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the slopes.
After the wet dark days the country seems more populous. It peoples
itself in the sunbeams."
Here is one of few days later:
"23rd.--Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o'cl. The sea perfectly calm
blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or
points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The
crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly
heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer.
We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to
the absence of the singing birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless
noise which lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by
beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading into the mountain road."
She handles words, phrases, like notes or chords of music, and never
gets her landscape by direct description. One more picture and I must
leave it:
"26.-- ... Walked to the top of a high hill to see a fortification.
Again sat down to feed upon the prospect; a magnificent scene,
_curiously_ spread out for even minute inspection, though so
extensive that the mind is afraid to calculate its bounds...."
Coleridge was with them most days, or they with him. Here is a curious
point to note. Dorothy records:
"March 7th.--William and I drank tea at Coleridge's.... Observed
nothing particularly interesting.... One only leaf upon the top of
a tree--the sole remaining leaf--danced round and round like a rag
blown by the wind."
And Coleridge has in _Christabel_:
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
William, Dorothy, and Coleridge went to Hamburg at the end of that
year, but in 1800 the brother and sister were in Grasmere; and the
journal, which opens with May 14, at once betrays the great passion of
Dorothy's life:
"William and John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at half-past
two o'clock, cold pork in their pockets. I left them at the turning
of the Low-Wood bay under the trees. My heart was so full I could
hardly speak to W. when I gave him a farewell kiss. I sate a long
time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of
tears my heart was easier. The lake looked to me, I know not why,
dull and melancholy, and the weltering on the shore seemed a heavy
sound.... I resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and
J. return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not
quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it
when he comes again...."
"Because I will not quarrel with myself!" She is full of such
illuminations. Here is another:
"Sunday, June 1st.--After tea went to Ambleside round the lakes.
A very fine warm evening. Upon the side of Loughrigg _my heart
dissolved in what I saw_."
Now here is her account of a country funeral which she reads into, or
out of, the countryside:
"Wednesday, 3rd Sept.-- ... a funeral at John Dawson's ... I was
affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying
before me. There were no near kindred, no children. When we got out
of the dark house the sun was shining, and the prospect looked as
divinely beautiful as I ever saw it. It seemed more sacred than I had
ever seen it, _and yet more allied to human life_.... I thought she
was going to a quiet spot, and I could not help weeping very much...."
The italics are mine. William was pleased to call her weeping "nervous
blubbering."
* * * * *
And then we come to 1802, the great last year of a twin life; the last
year of the five in which those two had lived as one soul and one
heart. They were at Dove Cottage, on something under £150 a year. Poems
were thronging thick about them; they were living intensely. John was
alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still Coleridge,
not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for Dorothy,
she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is the
third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we had quite
finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for Wm. We had a
deal to do, pens to make, poems to put in order for writing, to settle
for the press, pack up.... Since he left me at half-past eleven (it
is now two) I have been putting the drawers into order, laid by his
clothes, which he had thrown here and there and everywhere, filed two
months' newspapers, and got my dinner, two boiled eggs and two apple
tarts.... The robins are singing sweetly. Now for my walk. I _will_
be busy. I _will_ look well, and be well when he comes back to me. O
the Darling! Here is one of his bitter apples. I can hardly find it in
my heart to throw it into the fire.... I walked round the two lakes,
crossed the stepping-stones at Rydalefoot. Sate down where we always
sit. I was full of thought of my darling. Blessings on him." Where
else in our literature will you find mood so tender, so intimately, so
delicately related?
A week later, and William returned. With him, it seems, her descriptive
powers. "Monday morning--a soft rain and mist. We walked to Rydale for
letters. The Vale looked very beautiful in excessive simplicity, yet,
at the same time, uncommon obscurity. The church stood alone, mountains
behind. The meadows looked calm and rich, bordering on the still lake.
Nothing else to be seen but lake and island." Exquisite landscape. For
its like we must go to Japan. Here is another. An interior. It is the
23rd of March, "about ten o'clock, a quiet night. The fire flickers,
and the watch ticks. I hear nothing save the breathing of my beloved as
he now and then pushes his book forward, and turns over a leaf...." No
more, but the peace of it is profound, the art incomparable.
In April, between the 5th and 12th, William went into Yorkshire upon
an errand which she knew and dreaded. Her trouble makes the words
throb. "Monday, 12th.... The ground covered with snow. Walked to T.
Wilkinson's and sent for letters. The woman brought me one from William
and Mary. It was a sharp windy night. Thomas Wilkinson came with me to
Barton and questioned me like a catechiser all the way. Every question
was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart. I was so full
of thought of my half-read letter and other things. I was glad when he
left me. Then I had time to look at the moon while I was thinking of
my own thoughts. The moon travelled through the clouds, tinging them
yellow as she passed along, with two stars near her, one larger than
the other.... At this time William, as I found the next day, was riding
by himself between Middleham and Barnard Castle." I don't know where
else to find the vague torment of thought, its way of enhancing colour
and form in nature, more intensely observed. Next day: "When I returned
_William_ was come. _The surprise shot through me_." This woman was not
so much poet as crystal vase. You can see the thought cloud and take
shape.
The twin life was resumed for yet a little while. In the same month
come her descriptions of the daffodils in Gowbarrow Park, and of the
scene by Brothers Water, which prove to anybody in need of proof
that she was William's well-spring of poesy. Not that the journal is
necessarily involved. No need to suppose that he even read it. But
that she could make him see, and be moved by, what she had seen is
proved by this: "17th.... I saw a robin chasing a scarlet butterfly
this morning"; and "Sunday, 18th.... William wrote the poem on _The
Robin and the Butterfly_." No; beautiful beyond praise as the journals
are, it is certain that she was more beautiful than they. And what a
discerning illuminative eye she had! "As I lay down on the grass, I
observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the
sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them
look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of
another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world...." What a
woman to go a-gipsying through the world with!
Then comes the end.... "Thursday, 8th July.... In the afternoon, after
we had talked a little, William fell asleep. I read _The Winter's
Tale_; then I went to bed, but did not sleep. The swallows stole in
and out of their nest, and sat there, _whiles_ quite still, _whiles_
they sung low for two minutes or more at a time, just like a muffled
robin. William was looking at _The Pedlar_ when I got up. He arranged
it, and after tea I wrote it out--280 lines.... The moon was behind....
We walked first to the top of the hill to see Rydale. It was dark and
dull, but our own vale was very solemn--the shape of Helm Crag was
quite distinct, though black. We walked backwards and forwards on the
White Moss path; there was a sky like white brightness on the lake....
O beautiful place! Dear Mary, William. The hour is come.... I must
prepare to go. The swallows, I must leave them, the wall, the garden,
the roses, all. Dear creatures, they sang last night after I was in
bed; seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to
rest for the night. Well, I must go. Farewell."
Next day she set out with William to meet her secret dread, knowing
that life in Rydale could never be the same again. Wordsworth married
Mary Hutchinson on the 4th October, 1802. The secret is no secret now,
for Dorothy was a crystal vase.
BEN JONSON[7]
[7] _Ben Jonson. By G. Gregory Smith. (English Men of
Letters Series.) Macmillan, 1919. 3s. net._
By ALDOUS HUXLEY
It comes as something of a surprise to find that the niche reserved for
Ben Jonson in the "English Men of Letters" series has only now been
filled. One expected somehow that he would have been among the first of
the great ones to be enshrined; but no, he has had a long time to wait;
and Adam Smith, and Sydney Smith, and Hazlitt, and Fanny Burney have
gone before him into the temple of fame. Now, however, his monument has
at last been made, with Professor Gregory Smith's qualified version of
"O rare Ben Jonson!" duly and definitively carved upon it.
What is it that makes us, almost as a matter of course, number Ben
Jonson among the great? Why should we expect him to be an early
candidate for immortality, or why, indeed, should he be admitted to the
"English Men of Letters" series at all? These are difficult questions
to answer; for when we come to consider the matter we find ourselves
unable to give any very glowing account of Ben or his greatness. It
is hard to say that one likes his work; one cannot honestly call
him a good poet or a supreme dramatist. And yet, unsympathetic as
he is, uninteresting as he often can be, we still go on respecting
and admiring him, because, in spite of everything, we are conscious,
obscurely but certainly, that he was a great man.
He had little influence on his successors; the comedy of humours died
without any but an abortive issue. Shadwell, the mountain-bellied "Og,
from a treason tavern rolling home," is not a disciple that any man
would have much pride in claiming. No raking up of literary history
will make Ben Jonson great as a founder of a school or an inspirer of
others. His greatness is a greatness of character. There is something
almost alarming in the spectacle of this formidable figure advancing
with tank-like irresistibility towards the goal he had set himself to
attain. No sirens of romance can seduce him, no shock of opposition
unseat him in his career. He proceeds along the course theoretically
mapped out at the inception of his literary life, never deviating from
this narrow way till the very end--till the time when, in his old age,
he wrote that exquisite pastoral, _The Sad Shepherd_, which is so
complete and absolute a denial of all his lifelong principles. But _The
Sad Shepherd_ is a weakness, albeit a triumphant weakness. Ben, as he
liked to look upon himself, as he has again and again revealed himself
to us, is the artist with principles, protesting against the anarchic
absence of principle among the geniuses and charlatans, the poets and
ranters of his age.
"The true artificer will not run away from nature as he were afraid
of her: or depart from life and the likeness of truth; but speak to
the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from
the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the
Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them
but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them
to the ignorant gapers. He knows it is his only art, so to carry it
as none but artificers perceive it. In the meantime, perhaps, he is
called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer, or by what contumelious
word can come in their cheeks, by these men who without labour,
judgment, knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred
before him."
In these sentences from _Discoveries_ Ben Jonson paints his own
picture--portrait of the artist as a true artificer--setting forth,
in its most general form, and with no distracting details of the
humours or the moral purpose of art, his own theory of the artist's
true function and nature. Jonson's theory was no idle speculation, no
mere thing of words and air, but a creed, a principle, a categorical
imperative, conditioning and informing his whole work. Any study of the
poet must, therefore, begin with the formulation of his theory, and
must go on, as Professor Gregory Smith's excellent essay does indeed
proceed, to show in detail how the theory was applied and worked out in
each individual composition.
A good deal of nonsense has been talked at one time or another about
artistic theories. The artist is told that he should have no theories,
that he should warble native wood-notes wild, that he should "sing," be
wholly spontaneous, should starve his brain and cultivate his heart and
spleen; that an artistic theory cramps the style, stops up the Helicons
of inspiration, and so on, and so on. The foolish and sentimental
conception of the artist, to which these anti-intellectual doctrines
are a corollary, dates from the time of romanticism and survives
among the foolish and sentimental of to-day. A consciously practised
theory of art has never spoiled a good artist, has never dammed up
inspiration, but rather, and in most cases profitably, canalised
it. Even the Romantics had theories and were wild and emotional on
principle.
Theories are above all necessary at moments when old traditions are
breaking up, when all is chaos and in flux. At such moments an artist
formulates his theory and clings to it through thick and thin; clings
to it as the one firm raft of security in the midst of the surrounding
unrest. Thus, when the neo-Classicism, of which Ben was one of the
remote ancestors, was crumbling into the nothingness of _The Loves of
the Plants_ and _The Triumphs of Temper_, Wordsworth found salvation by
the promulgation of a new theory of poetry, which he put into practice
systematically and to the verge of absurdity in _Lyrical Ballads_.
Similarly in the shipwreck of the old tradition of painting we find
the artists of the present day clinging desperately to intellectual
formulas as their only hope in the chaos. The only occasions, in
fact, when the artist can afford entirely to dispense with theory
occur in periods when a well-established tradition reigns supreme and
unquestioned. And then the absence of theory is more apparent than
real; for the tradition in which he is working is a theory, originally
formulated by someone else, which he accepts unconsciously and as
though it were the law of nature itself.
The beginning of the seventeenth century was not one of these
periods of placidity and calm acceptance. It was a moment of growth
and decay together, of fermentation. The fabulous efflorescence of
the Renaissance had already grown rank. With that extravagance of
energy which characterised them in all things, the Elizabethans had
exaggerated the traditions of their literature into insincerity. All
artistic traditions end, in due course, by being reduced to the absurd;
but the Elizabethans crammed the growth and decline of a century into a
few years. One after another they transfigured and then destroyed every
species of art they touched. Euphuism, Petrarchism, Spenserism, the
sonnet, the drama--some lasted a little longer than others, but they
all exploded in the end, these beautiful iridescent bubbles blown too
big by the enthusiasm of their makers.
But in the midst of this unstable luxuriance voices of protest
were to be heard, reactions against the main romantic current were
discernible. Each in his own way and in his own sphere, Donne and
Ben Jonson protested against the exaggerations of the age. At a time
when sonneteers in legions were quibbling about the blackness of
their ladies' eyes or the golden wires of their hair, when Platonists
protested in melodious chorus that they were not in love with "red and
white" but with the ideal and divine beauty of which peach-blossom
complexions were but inadequate shadows, at a time when love-poetry had
become, with rare exceptions, fantastically unreal, Donne called it
back, a little grossly perhaps, to facts with the dry remark:
Love's not so pure and abstract as they use
To say, who have _no mistress_ but their muse.
There have been poets who have written more lyrically than Donne,
more fervently about certain amorous emotions, but not one who has
formulated so rational a philosophy of love as a whole, who has seen
all the facts so clearly and judged of them so soundly. Donne laid down
no literary theory. His followers took from him all that was relatively
unimportant--the harshness, itself a protest against Spenserian
facility, the conceits, the sensuality tempered by mysticism--but the
important and original quality of Donne's work, the psychological
realism, they could not, through sheer incapacity, transfer into their
own poetry. Donne's immediate influence was on the whole bad. Any
influence for good he may have had has been on poets of a much later
date.
The other great literary Protestant of the time was the curious subject
of our examination, Ben Jonson. Like Donne he was a realist. He had
no use for claptrap, or rant, or romanticism. His aim was to give his
audiences real facts flavoured with sound morality. He failed to be
a great realist, partly because he lacked the imaginative insight to
perceive more than the most obvious and superficial reality, and partly
because he was so much preoccupied with the sound morality that he was
prepared to sacrifice truth to satire; so that in place of characters
he gives us humours, not minds, but personified moral qualities.
Ben hated romanticism; for, whatever may have been his bodily
habits, however infinite his capacity for drinking sack, he belonged
intellectually to the party of sobriety. In all ages the drunks and
the sobers have confronted one another, each party loud in derision
and condemnation of the defects which it observes in the other. "The
Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age" accuse the sober Ben of
being "barren, dull, lean, a poor writer." Ben retorts that they "have
nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation
to warrant them to the ignorant gapers." At another period it is the
Hernanis and the Rollas who reproach that paragon of dryness, the
almost fiendishly sober Stendhal, with his grocer's style. Stendhal
in his turn remarks: "En paraissant, vers 1803, le _Génie_ de
Chateaubriand m'a semblé ridicule." And to-day? We have our sobers and
our drunks, our Hardy and our Belloc, and Chesterton. The distinction
is universally and eternally valid. Our personal sympathies may lie
with one or the other; but it is obvious that we could dispense with
neither. Ben, then, was one of the sobers, protesting with might and
main against the extravagant behaviour of the drunks, an intellectual
insisting that there was no way of arriving at truth except by
intellectual processes, an apotheosis of the Plain Man determined
to stand no nonsense about anything. Ben's poetical achievement,
such as it is, is the achievement of one who relied on no mysterious
inspiration, but on those solid qualities of sense, perseverance, and
sound judgment which any decent citizen of a decent country may be
expected to possess. That he himself possessed, hidden somewhere in
the obscure crypts and recesses of his mind, other rarer spiritual
qualities is proved by the existence of his additions to _The Spanish
Tragedy_--if, indeed, they are his, which there is no cogent reason
to doubt--and his last fragment of a masterpiece, _The Sad Shepherd_.
But these qualities, as Professor Gregory Smith points out, he seems
deliberately to have suppressed; locked them away, at the bidding
of his imperious theory, in the strange dark places from which, at
the beginning and the very end of his career, they emerged. He might
have been a great romantic, one of the sublime inebriates; he chose
rather to be classical and sober. Working solely with the logical
intellect and rejecting as dangerous the aid of those uncontrolled
illogical elements of imagination, he produced work that is in its
own way excellent. It is well-wrought, strong, heavy with learning
and what the Chaucerians would call "high sentence." The emotional
intensity and brevity excepted, it possesses all the qualities of
the French classical drama. But the quality which characterises the
best Elizabethan and indeed the best English poetry of all periods,
the power of moving in two worlds at once, it lacks. Jonson, like
the French dramatists of the seventeenth century, moves on a level,
directly towards some logical goal. The road over which his great
contemporaries take us is not level; it is, as it were, tilted and
uneven, so that as we proceed along it we are momently shot off at a
tangent from the solid earth of logical meaning into superior regions
where the intellectual laws of gravity have no control. The mistake
of Jonson and the classicists in general consists in supposing that
nothing is of value that is not susceptible of logical analysis;
whereas the truth is that the greatest triumphs of art take place in a
world that is not wholly of the intellect, but lies somewhere between
it and the inenarrable, but, to those who have penetrated it, supremely
real, world of the mystic. In his fear and dislike of nonsense, Jonson
put away from himself not only the Tamer-Chams and the fustian of the
late age, but also most of the beauty it had created.
With the romantic emotions of his predecessors and contemporaries
Jonson abandoned much of the characteristically Elizabethan form of
their poetry. That extraordinary melodiousness which distinguishes the
Elizabethan lyric is not to be found in any of Ben's writing. The poems
by which we remember him--_Cynthia_, _Drink to Me Only_, _It is Not
Growing Like a Tree_--are classically well made (though the cavalier
lyrists were to do better in the same style); but it is not for any
musical qualities that we remember them. One can understand Ben's
critical contempt for those purely formal devices for producing musical
richness in which the Elizabethans delighted.
Eyes, why did you bring unto me these graces,
Grac'd to yield wonder out of her true measure,
Measure of all joyes' stay to phansie traces
Module of pleasure.
The device is childish in its formality, the words, in their obscurity,
almost devoid of significance. But what matter, since the stanza is a
triumph of sonorous beauty? The Elizabethans devised many ingenuities
of this sort; the minor poets exploited them until they became
ridiculous; the major poets employed them with greater discretion,
playing subtle variations (as in Shakespeare's sonnets) on the crude
theme. When writers had something to say, their thoughts, poured into
these copiously elaborate forms, were moulded to the grandest poetical
eloquence. A minor poet, like Lord Brooke, from whose works we have
just quoted a specimen of pure formalism, could produce, in his moments
of inspiration, such magnificent lines as:
The mind of Man is this world's true dimension,
And knowledge is the measure of the mind;
or these, of the nethermost hell:
A place there is upon no centre placed,
Deepe under depthes, as farre as is the skie
Above the earth; darke, infinitely spaced:
Pluto the king, the kingdome, miserie.
Even into comic poetry the Elizabethans imported the grand manner. The
anonymous author of
Tee-hee, tee-hee! Oh sweet delight!
He tickles this age, who can
Call Tullia's ape a marmosite
And Leda's goose a swan,
knew the secret of that rich, facile music which all those who wrote
in the grand Elizabethan tradition could produce. Jonson, like Donne,
reacted against the facility and floridity of this technique, but in a
different way. Donne's protest took the form of a conceited subtlety
of thought combined with a harshness of metre. Jonson's classical
training inclined him towards clarity, solidity of sense, and economy
of form. He stands, as a lyrist, halfway between the Elizabethans and
the cavalier song-writers; he has broken away from the old tradition,
but has not yet made himself entirely at home in the new. At the best
he achieves a minor perfection of point and neatness. At the worst he
falls into that dryness and dullness with which he knew he could be
reproached.
We have seen from the passage concerning the true artificer that Jonson
fully realised the risk he was running. He recurs more than once in
_Discoveries_ to the same theme, "Some men to avoid redundancy run into
that [a "thin, flagging, poor, starved" style]; and while they strive
to have no ill-blood or juice, they lose their good." The good that
Jonson lost was a great one. And in the same way we see to-day how a
fear of becoming sentimental, or "chocolate-boxy," drives many of the
younger poets and artists to shrink from treating of the great emotions
or the obvious lavish beauty of the earth. But to eschew a good because
the corruption of it is very bad is surely a sign of weakness and a
folly.
Having lost the realm of romantic beauty--lost it deliberately and of
set purpose--Ben Jonson devoted the whole of his immense energy to
portraying and reforming the ugly world of fact. But his reforming
satiric intentions interfered, as we have already shown, with his
realistic intentions, and instead of re-creating in his art the actual
world of men, he invented the wholly intellectual and therefore wholly
unreal universe of Humours. It is an odd new world, amusing to look
at from the safe distance that separates stage from stalls; but not
a place one could ever wish to live in--one's neighbours, fools,
knaves, hypocrites, and bears would make the most pleasing prospect
intolerable. And over it all is diffused the atmosphere of Jonson's
humour. It is a curious kind of humour, very different from anything
that passes under that name to-day, from the humour of _Punch_, or
_A Kiss for Cinderella_. One has only to read _Volpone_--or, better
still, go to see it when it is acted this year by the Phœnix Society
for the revival of old plays--to realise that Ben's conception of a
joke differed materially from ours. Humour has never been the same
since Rousseau invented humanitarianism. Syphilis and broken legs
were still a great deal more comic in Smollett's day than in our own.
There is a cruelty, a heartlessness about much of the older humour
which is sometimes shocking, sometimes, in its less extreme forms,
pleasantly astringent and stimulating after the orgies of quaint pathos
and sentimental comedy in which we are nowadays forced to indulge.
There is not a pathetic line in _Volpone_; all the characters are
profoundly unpleasant, and the fun is almost as grim as fun can be.
Its heartlessness is not the brilliant, cynical heartlessness of the
later Restoration comedy, but something ponderous and vast. It reminds
us of one of those enormous, painful jokes which fate sometimes plays
on humanity. There is no alleviation, no purging by pity and terror.
It requires a very hearty sense of humour to digest it. We have reason
to admire our ancestors for their ability to enjoy this kind of comedy
as it should be enjoyed. It would get very little appreciation from a
London audience of to-day.
In the other comedies the fun is not so grim; but there is a certain
hardness and brutality about them all--due, of course, ultimately to
the fact that the characters are not human, but rather marionettes
of wood and metal that collide and belabour one another, like the
ferocious puppets of the Punch and Judy show, without feeling
the painfulness of the proceeding. Shakespeare's comedy is not
heartless, because the characters are human and sensitive. Our modern
sentimentality is a corruption, a softening of genuine humanity. We
need a few more Jonsons and Congreves, some more plays like _Volpone_,
or that inimitable _Mariage à la Mode_ of Dryden, in which the curtain
goes up on a lady singing the outrageously cynical song that begins:
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
That long ago was made,
Constrain us to each other now
When pleasure is decayed?
Too much heartlessness is intolerable (how soon one turns, revolted,
from the literature of the Restoration!), but a little of it now and
then is bracing, a tonic for relaxed sensibilities. A little ruthless
laughter clears the air as nothing else can do; it is good for us,
every now and then, to see our ideals laughed at, our conception of
nobility caricatured; it is good for solemnity's nose to be tweaked,
it is good for human pomposity to be made to look mean and ridiculous.
This should be the great social function--as Marinetti has pointed
out--of the music halls, to provide this cruel and unsparing laughter,
to make a buffoonery of all the solemnly-accepted grandeurs and
nobilities. A good dose of this mockery, administered twice a year
at the equinoxes, should purge our minds of much waste matter, make
nimble our spirits and brighten the eye to look more clearly and
truthfully on the world about us.
Ben's reduction of human beings to a series of rather unpleasant
Humours is sound and medicinal. Humours do not, of course, exist in
actuality; they are true only as caricatures are true. There are times
when we wonder whether a caricature is not, after all, truer than a
photograph; there are others when it seems a stupid lie. But at all
times a caricature is disquieting; and it is very good for most of us
to be made uncomfortable.
STEPHEN CRANE
_A Note Without Dates_
By JOSEPH CONRAD
My acquaintance with Crane was brought about by Mr. S. S. Pawling,
partner in the publishing firm of Mr. William Heinemann.
One day Mr. Pawling said to me: "Stephen Crane has arrived in England.
I asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned
two names. One of them was yours." I had then just been reading, like
the rest of the world, Crane's _Red Badge of Courage_. The subject of
that story was war, from the point of view of an individual soldier's
emotions. That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was
interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that
little book which had for the moment secured such a noisy recognition
I had been even more interested in the personality of the writer. The
picture of a simple and untried youth becoming through the needs of
his country part of a great fighting machine was presented with an
earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative
force of expression which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether
worthy of admiration.
Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from
reading the _Nigger of the Narcissus_, a book of mine which had also
been published lately. I was truly pleased to hear this.
On my next visit to town we met at a lunch. I saw a young man of medium
stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the
eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to
some purpose.
He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the
things of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating
force that seemed to reach within life's appearances and forms the very
spirit of their truth. His ignorance of the world at large--he had seen
very little of it--did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of
facts, events, and picturesque men.
His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting,
and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly
Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever
he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic
simplicity which was extremely engaging. He knew little of literature,
either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a
wonderful artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then
his gift came out--and it was seen to be much more than mere felicity
of language. His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the
surface. In his writing he was very sure of his effects. I don't think
he was ever in doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed
to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his
achievement.
This achievement was curtailed by his early death. It was a great loss
to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature. I think that he
had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write.
Let me not be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of
the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible
revelation. As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by
quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set
before us in terms of his own artistic vision? Perhaps he did not lose
a great deal. The recognition he was accorded was rather languid and
given him grudgingly. The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales
in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the _New Review_ and later,
towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his
magazine. For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England
he had the misfortune to be, as the French say, _mal entouré_. He
was beset by people who understood not the quality of his genius and
were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature. Some of them
have died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about
now. I don't think he had any illusions about them himself; yet there
was a strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character
which prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless
and patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret
irritation whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes.
My wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the
gate of the Park at Brede. Born master of his sincere impressions he
was also a born horseman. He never appeared so happy or so much to
advantage as on the back of a horse. He had formed the project of
teaching my eldest boy to ride and meantime, when the child was about
two years old, presented him with his first dog.
I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his first arrival in London. I saw
him for the last time on his last day in England. It was in Dover, in
a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea.
He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in
Germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that
it was the most forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out
to me were: "I am tired. Give my love to your wife and child." When
I stopped at the door for another look I saw that he had turned his
head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out of the window at the
sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim
shadow against a grey sky.
Those who have read his little tale, _Horses_, and the story, _The Open
Boat_, in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he
loved horses and the sea. And his passage on this earth was like that
of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and
without sunshine.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
GENERAL NOTES
One of the great autobiographies, and a very important document for any
one who undertakes the most rudimentary study of the English romantic
movement, is the _Life of B. R. Haydon_, drawn from his journals. He
was the friend of Keats, Lamb, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt; he moved in
many different spheres, among Dukes and politicians, and artists, and
the debtors in King's Bench Prison. A man of boundless energy, an able
writer capable of rendering his impressions vividly and with force, he
was, indeed, everything but what he believed himself with passionate
faith to be, what he even succeeded in persuading others that he was--a
great painter. He was convinced--as firmly convinced as of the fact
that two and two are four--that he was a genius as overwhelmingly great
as Michael Angelo. He was, as a matter of fact, one of the second-rate
romantic painters of the early nineteenth century, in some things a
little better, in others a good deal worse, than his contemporaries in
the same line of trade. The book is a fascinating study in psychology
as well as one of the most vivid pictures of an interesting society.
It is, therefore, unfortunate that it should now be a matter of some
difficulty to lay one's hand on a copy. The first edition of the book
appeared in 1853, the second and last some ten years later--more than
half a century ago. We venture to express the pious hope that some
beneficent publisher will reprint what is certainly one of the most
peculiar human and historical documents of the nineteenth century.
* * * * *
We learn from Mr. Leslie Chaundy, of Oxford, that he has purchased
intact the whole library of the late Provost of Worcester. Dr. Daniel's
collection comprises a great number of rare and interesting books,
including, of course, all the volumes issued from the famous Daniel
Press. A catalogue is, we understand, in course of preparation and will
be issued shortly.
* * * * *
October 31st saw the publication of the first number of the _Bookman's
Journal and Print Collector_, qualified in a sub-title as _The Journal
for the Trade, for Collectors, and for Libraries_. "Our aim," we read
in the editorial, "is to be useful, not ornamental. Booksellers,
publishers, librarians, and collectors alike from all parts of the
country have agreed with the need for such a journal as this, and
have given us generous support." The magazine contains reviews, a
library supplement of "New Publications and Reprints of the Week,"
miscellaneous articles and notes on books and booksellers, prints
and engravings. A useful feature of the journal will be the series
of complete bibliographies of modern authors which it is proposed to
publish. The first is devoted to the works of Hubert Crackanthorpe,
who died in 1896, aged only twenty-six. Similar bibliographies of
Masefield, Galsworthy, Conrad, Gissing, George Moore, and Merrick are
in preparation. Those who wish to buy or sell books will be interested
in the "Books Wanted" and "Books for Sale" columns of advertisements.
Altogether, we think that this little paper will have no difficulty
in substantiating its claims and will prove very valuable to all
book-lovers.
Another interesting event in the world of books is the opening of the
Chelsea Book Club at 65 Cheyne Walk. "It is being founded," we are
told, "in the belief that in bookselling selection and specialisation
are essential. It will aim, therefore, at having a stock of those
books, new and second-hand, English and foreign, dealing with
Belles Lettres and Art which appear to be most worthy of study and
appreciation." A reading-room for the use of members will be attached
to the club, in which lectures and exhibitions of works of art will be
held from time to time. Those who wish to have further particulars as
to membership, country book-service, lectures and exhibitions are asked
to apply to the Secretary, 65 Cheyne Walk, London, S.W.3.
* * * * *
At the sale, by Messrs. Sotheby, of the late Mr. W. J. Leighton's
stock, to which we referred last month, a copy of Walton's _Compleat
Angler_ (1655) fetched £21 10_s._; _The Pricke of Conscience_,
fifteenth century M.S., £50; _Myrrour and Description of the Worlde_,
printed by Laurence Andrews, _circa_ 1530, £72. Important auction sales
in the month of November were Messrs. Sotheby's sale of the late Sir
Frank Crisp's library and the sale of Mr. Christie Miller's library on
the 28th of the month. We shall have gone to press before the results
of the sale are known. What will be paid for Lot 81, we wonder_?--Mr.
William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies_, the first
edition, folio, 1623.
The Christie-Miller library contains many other books of extraordinary
interest, among them three unique copies of works by Nicholas Breton:
_A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, Selected and Gathered out of
the Lovely Garden of Sacred Scripture_; _A Floorish upon Fancie_,
_As Gallant a Glose upon so Triflinge a Text as ever was Written_;
and _The Workes of a Young Wit Trust up with a Fardell of Prettie
Fancies_. Robert Greene is represented by three unique copies, one of
_Gwydonius_, and another of _Arbasto, The Anatomie of Fortune_; and
the third of the earliest edition of _A Quip for an Upstart Courtier_,
containing the passage, suppressed in all the later editions, in abuse
of Gabriel Harvey and his brothers, which started the literary war
between Greene and the pedant of Cambridge.
* * * * *
ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
It is possible, with a bundle of booksellers' catalogues, to waste
more time more pleasantly than in any other way. As one idly turns the
pages, catching sight here and there of a strange title or a book on
some impossibly queer subject, one realises, more fully than one could
do in years of social intercourse with one's fellow-men, how fantastic
a thing is the human mind--a stable full of prancing hobby-horses for
crochety horsemen to ride about the world. We can speculate pleasantly
on the character of the practical parson who wrote the _Clergyman's
Intelligencer; or, a Compleat Alphabetical List of all the Patrons
in England and Wales, with the ... Benefices in their Gift and their
Valuation Annexed_ (1745), for which Mr. Mayhew asks 5_s._ In the same
catalogue is offered that curiosity in the history of science, P. H.
Gosse's _Creation (Omphalus); an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot_,
published in 1857, two years before the _Origin of Species_. The title,
_Ode to the Duke of Wellington and Other Poems, Written Between the
Ages of Eleven and Thirteen Years_, by Robert Charles Dallas (1819),
calls up visions of some tight-trousered infant prodigy; and we wish
that the book were not an example of fine binding, and that Mr.
Chaundy could part with it for less than 30_s._ Just above the infant,
alphabetically and perhaps also in order of merit, we find the name
of D'Adelsward, the author of a volume of poems (of which, in our
ignorance, we had never heard) entitled _Les Cortèges Qui Sont Passés_.
The volume, which was published in 1903, is bound in pink watered
silk, and costs four guineas. We have a vision of something even more
prodigious than the infant of 1819.
* * * * *
Mr. Chaundy has a number of first editions of Disraeli's novels for
sale. The very scarce _Contarini Fleming_ (1832) is priced at £6; _The
Voyage of Captain Popanilla_ (1828) at 35_s._; _Vivian Grey_ (1826) at
21_s._; _Venetia_ (1837) at 20_s._ A first edition of Borrow's _Wild
Wales_, in three volumes (1862), is offered by Messrs. Heffer, of
Cambridge, for £9 _9s._ It is almost worth paying that for the sake of
the description, at the beginning of the book, of the negro who sat on
the walls of Chester, spitting into the void. You can have George Eliot
for a good deal less. Mr. James Miles, of Leeds, has a _Silas Marner_
(first edition, 1861) for 25_s._ First editions of Robert Bridges are,
we notice, priced a good deal higher than the later firsts of Robert
Browning. _Eros and Psyche_ costs 15_s._ at Messrs. Heffer's, and
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangan_ only 5_s._ The four volumes of the first
edition of _The Ring and the Book_ (1868) cost one 32_s._ at the same
bookseller's.
Similarly Conrad firsts are more precious than Bennetts, if we may
judge from the fact that _Hilda Lessways_ (1911) costs 7_s._ at Mr.
Chaundy's shop, while _Chance_ and _Victory_ (novels of Mr. Conrad's
corresponding period), at Messrs. Heffer's, are priced at 12_s._ and
9_s._ respectively, and the precious _Almayer's Folly_ of 1895 costs £3
3_s._
* * * * *
Mr. P. J. Dobell has already done good work in the field of
bibliography. The catalogue published by him last year, under the
title, _The Literature of the Restoration_, was a useful guide for all
students of the period. He has now issued a supplementary catalogue of
works connected with the Popish Plot.
Most of the pamphlets which he offers for sale are unknown to us; but
here and there we light on an old friend. We can remember laughing
heartily over _A Modest Vindication of the Earl of S[haftesbur]y, in
a Letter to a Friend Concerning His Being Elected King of Poland_.
The ironical eulogy of Shaftesbury with which the pamphlet begins is
an admirable piece of satire. The Earl is praised for "his unshaken
obedience to every Government he has been concerned in or lived under;
his steady adherence to every religion that had but hopes to be
established." It is interesting to note that in this pamphlet, written
after the production of the _Spanish Friar_, and before the publication
of _Absalom and Achitophel_, Dryden is regarded as a Whig poet. For
the new King of Poland appoints "Jean Drydenurtzitz to be our Poet
Laureate for writing panegyrics upon Oliver Cromwell and libels against
his present master, King Charles II. of England." The deputy Laureate
is no less a person than "Tom Shadworiski," or Shadwell, Dryden's most
bitter enemy in the later years of the Plot. Mr. Dobell's price for
the pamphlet is 7_s._ 6_d._ Two pamphlets in this collection refer to
the fantastic rector of All Saints', Colchester--Edmund Hickeringill,
one time chaplain in the Scottish regiments of the Commonwealth, and
the author of the first retort to _The Medal, The Mushroom_, which
was written and sent to press on the day following the publication of
Dryden's poem--a feat of composition which he modestly suggests was due
to divine inspiration.
_Great News from the Old-Bayly, Mr. Gar's Recantation; or, the True
Protestant Renegade, the Courantier Turn'd Tony_, sounds interesting.
Henry Care had the distinction of being the first to reply to _Absalom
and Achitophel_. His _Towzer the Second_ was published three weeks
after the appearance of the _Tory Satire_, for Care was a true blue
Protestant in those days. "His breeding," says Anthony Wood, "was in
the nature of a Petty Fogger, a little despicable wretch ... a poor
snivelling fellow." He was a poor literary hack, and at James II.'s
accession, "for bread and money sake, and nothing else," he went over
to the side in power and turned his pen against the Protestants.
Three pamphlets deal with Roger L'Estrange, or "Towzer," as he was
nicknamed by his enemies. But there is one enchanting ballad entitled
"_A New Ballad on an Old Dog (Towzer) that Writes Strange-lee_," of
which Mr. Dobell does not seem to have a copy. We could wish that we
had space to quote it. But we have embarked on a subject which needs
treating at length. The literary history of the Popish Plot remains to
be written. A volume of extracts joined together by explanatory notes,
biographical, political, and critical, would be a thing of absorbing
interest.
* * * * *
We notice, by the way, in Mr. Dobell's catalogue that _The London
Mercury, or Moderate Intelligencer_, from December 24th to 27th, 1688,
may be purchased for 5_s._ It is to be hoped that the intelligence of
its namesake of to-day will prove more than moderate.
A. L. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--All schoolmasters and schoolmistresses will be grateful to you
for your services to a great cause in allowing Mr. J. C. Stobart to
talk at length on the teaching of English, but I was surprised to find
myself selected as his scapegoat and "guillotined in distinguished
company" (that of the old _régime_). My colleagues will be amused at
that. Unfortunately Mr. Stobart is not a very skilful executioner.
He tries to show that in my _English Course_ I have followed the
traditional methods in "thoroughly normal chapters." And yet he does
allow that I am "trying to shake off a yoke which is not entirely
congenial" to me. It is more than ten years since I shook off the yoke
which he describes as uncongenial. "The traditional method," he says,
"begins with the copybook and proceeds by way of dictation and formal
exercises to its goal in the essay." I do _not_ advocate the use of
the copybook for the simple reason that copybooks insist on the Vere
Foster type of handwriting, while I require from my pupils an artistic
caligraphy which is opposed in every particular to the uniform ugliness
of the old Board School and present Army Council standard.
Dictation I use most sparingly, though I certainly do prefer a boy
to leave me with an elementary knowledge of punctuation and a slight
acquaintance with the more normal forms of spelling rather than with
a contempt for or slavish adoration of stops, and a phonetic system
of spelling which is intelligible and phonetic to no one but himself.
The reading that I advocate, both in my book and in practice, is
not limited (has Mr. Stobart himself read _all_ the books that I
recommended as useful for boys?), and the text is never obscured with
comment. Where did he get this false information from? To definite
grammar I assigned four and a half pages out of 500, which exactly
expresses my opinion of its importance. Having misrepresented me in
every detail so far, Mr. Stobart proceeds to attack me on two sides at
once. "If you ask the schoolmaster why he makes his English the dullest
subject in the syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing
for the London matriculation." I am both a schoolmaster and the English
examiner for the "Matric." I will pay Mr. Stobart's first-class return
fare from his home to Tonbridge and board him for a week if he will
visit my English classes and at the end of his stay retain that word
"dullest" in all sincerity. I cannot believe that it is only I who
enjoy these English hours so whole-heartedly. I certainly should find
them dull if I were proceeding on "traditional" lines, either in my
book or in the class-room.... I am next taken to task for daring to
teach observation and originality. Mr. Stobart rather rudely (I wish he
would practise gentleness and love himself) calls my methods here "a
generous diet of cold minced hash." It is "up" to him to prove it. The
point is, do I or do I not achieve observation and originality by my
methods? Come down to Tonbridge, Mr. Stobart, and I will let you judge
for yourself.
When, therefore, you suggest that every boy should learn how to express
himself freely and to read widely, I can only reply that every boy has
been doing so with very great advantage for years. You cannot picture a
Public Schoolmaster so zealous for the purity of his own tongue that he
treats a misplaced "and which" or "unrelated participle" as a personal
affront. You cannot have been inside a Public School class-room for
"donkey's years." I can show you scores as devoted to our classics as
Whitelaw was to _Latin and Greek_?--Yours, etc.,
S. P. B. MAIS.
Tonbridge.
MACARONIC POETRY
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--The author of _Specimens of Macaronic Poetry_, published by J.
Richard Beckley in 1831, is William Sandys, F.S.A. (1791-1874). He
was a barrister of Gray's Inn, and a member of the law firm of Sandys
and Knott, of Gray's Inn Square. He was born and died in London, and,
in addition to the book mentioned above, was the author of _A Short
History of Freemasonry_ (1829), _Christmas Carols_ (1833), and a few
other books, a full bibliography of which will be found in _Bibliotheca
Cornubiensis_. He was an enthusiastic musical amateur from youth, and
further biographical particulars will be found in the _Dictionary of
National Biography_.--Yours, etc.,
WINIFRED SPARKE.
Bolton.
* * * * *
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--_Specimens of Macaronic Poetry_, to which reference is made on
page 74 of your last issue, is chiefly remarkable for its interesting
introduction to the subject and to the fact that most of the specimens
printed are, or were at the date of publication, rarely met with.
The epic which you mention first is discussed on page 17 of the
introduction, where it is said to be an imitation of Folengo. I have
not been able to trace the author, but it bears many evidences of
having been written by Folengo himself. The ode was written by Dr.
Geddes, and the author of the old Scottish Testament was Wm. Dunbar,
whose name is printed at the end of the verses in my copy.
Macaronic Poetry creates but little interest in these days, though
there are still students who appreciate some of its qualities.
If "A. L. H." is interested, I am sure that an article on the subject
would be read with very great appreciation even if that quality be
confined to very few in number.--Yours, etc.,
B. BAGNALL.
43 Chancery Lane, London, W.C.2.
* * * * *
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--What does "A. L. H." mean by "no" author's name is given? The
_editor's_ of the book--or the author's of Mr. Andro Kennedy?
The latter is, of course, my compatriot, William Dunbar, but neither
of my editions of him mentions this poem's having been printed in that
particular book.
Also, your reviewer of Wilde, on page 91, begins, quite in error,
saying that the book has no indication of how it came into existence or
who chose them for republication. The wrapper, cover, and title-page,
all three, say, "Being extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies" (one
of those large white volumes on hand-made paper that smelt so of bad
paste, published by Methuen in 1912); while behind the title-page is,
"This selection has been made by Mr. E. V. Lucas." The best thing in
it is, I think, the charming paragraph on Balzac, "A steady course of
Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows and our acquaintances to
the shadows of shades"--Yours, etc.,
C. K. S. M.
* * * * *
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--With regard to your query in No. 1, as to who was the author
of _Specimens of Macaronic Poetry_, I think I can supply the answer.
After reading your paragraph on the subject I took down the book from
its shelf and found that my father, the late Dr. Henry B. Wheatley,
had pencilled on the title-page the name of Sandys. I then turned
to Lowndes and found the book under the name of William Sandys. The
_Dictionary of National Biography_ states that the author was born in
1792 and died in 1874, and that he is best remembered for his share in
Sandys' and Forster's _History of the Violin_, 1864. The _Specimens_,
published in 1831, was his second venture in authorship. My father
evidently bought the book when he was engaged in writing his own first
book _Of Anagrams_, containing in the introduction (I quote from the
title-page) "numerous specimens of Macaronic poetry, Punning Mottoes,
Rhopalic, Shaped, Equivocal, Lyon, and Echo Verses, Alliteration,
Acrostics, Lipograms, Chronograms, Logograms, Palindromes, and Bouls'
Rimes." To any one interested in queer forms of verse this book is full
of entertainment. It was published in 1872, and is now out of print.
In the first of your Bibliographical Notes, in which you notice Mr.
Percy Simpson's edition of _Every Man in His Humour_, you say, "A new
edition of Ben Jonson's work is certainly needed: Gifford's, re-edited
by Cunningham, is sadly inadequate." I have not yet had the pleasure
of reading Mr. Simpson's book, but I would point out that Gifford's
edition was not the only predecessor. An edition of Ben Jonson's play
was edited, with an introduction and critical apparatus, by my father
in 1877, for the "London Series of English Classics," edited by J. W.
Hales, M.A., and J. S. Jerram, M.A., and published by Longmans, Green &
Co. The excellent introduction contains, besides the facts of Jonson's
life, a lucid explanation and examination of the Comedy of Humours,
together with a critical comparison of the various editions. The notes
are adequate, and placed at the end of the book. It was a labour of
love, and, although doubtless scholarship has advanced since it was
published, my filial partiality compels me to think that it still ranks
as a worthy edition of this classic of our literature.--Yours, etc.,
GEO. H. WHEATLEY.
83 Salisbury Road, Harrow.
VOLTAIRE'S CANDIDE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--A Bibliographical Note in your first number makes reference to
"a charming little first edition of _Candide_ (1759)", and the writer
of the paragraph, commenting on the absence of the author's name and
of any particulars concerning the publisher and place of publication,
states that "it was often Voltaire's custom not to acknowledge his
publications till they were a success."
There lies before me as I write, however, a copy of an edition also
published in 1759, but which contains the author's name and particulars
as to publication. As it may interest some of your readers, as well
as "A. L. H.," I venture to transcribe the title-page, which is as
follows:--
_Candidus: or, the Optimist_ By Mr. De Voltaire. Translated into
English by W. Rider, M.A., Late Scholar of Jesus College, Oxford.
London: Printed for J. Scott, at the Black Swan, in Pater-noster-Row,
and J. Gretton, in Old Bond-Street. MDCCLIX. [Price One Shilling and
Six-Pence.]--Yours, etc.,
LEWIS H. GRUNDY.
Highgate.
PARTICLES
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Mrs. Meynell has the support of a great master in the niceties of
the English language when she takes exception to the particle "less"
being tacked on to a verb.
Writing to Bernard Barton (February 7th, 1826) in acknowledgment of his
_Devotional Verses_, Charles Lamb says: "One word I must object to in
your little book, and it recurs more than once--FADELESS is no genuine
compound; loveless is, because love is a noun as well as a verb, but
what is a fade?"--Yours, etc.,
(Mrs) G. A. ANDERSON.
The Moorlands, Woldingham, Surrey
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
GEORGIAN POETRY, 1918-1919 Edited by E. M. The Poetry Bookshop 6_s._
net.
The new collection of _Georgian Poetry_ contains specimens of the
work of nineteen poets, fourteen of whom have appeared in one or more
of the previous volumes of the series, while five are represented
for the first time. The fourteen are Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, Mr.
Gordon Bottomley, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. John
Drinkwater, Mr. John Freeman, Mr. W. W. Gibson, Mr. Robert Graves, Mr.
D. H. Lawrence, Mr. Harold Monro, Mr. Robert Nichols, Mr. Siegfried
Sassoon, Mr. J. C. Squire, and Mr. W. J. Turner. The five are Mr.
Francis Brett Young, Mr. Thomas Moult, Mr. J. D. C. Pellow, Mr. Edward
Shanks, and Mrs. Fredegond Shove. On account of their editorial
connection with the LONDON MERCURY, the contributions of Mr. Squire and
Mr. Shanks will not receive further mention in this notice.
"I hope," observes E. M. in his preface, "that [the present volume]
may be thought to show that what for want of a better word is called
Peace has not interfered with the writing of good poetry." Certainly
many critics have supposed that war was the prime generator of what
they admit to be a new movement in poetry. But the anthologist's hope
is justified, on _a priori_ grounds at least, by the fact that the
movement began, however tentatively, before the late war. The first
collection of _Georgian Poetry_ appeared in 1912, when the title
expressed an act of faith, based on an act of divination, which has
since been confirmed. A comparison of the four members of the series
suggests that what, for want of a better word, has received this name,
is still in a state of slow development towards a certain community
of spirit and attitude, which does not however connote any uniformity
of style. In the third volume the nebula appeared to be taking shape,
and in the fourth the process has advanced a stage. E. M. may be
issuing the fourteenth before that shape can be accurately defined and
described. The curve has not been drawn far enough for us to say what
course it will trace; but there is already enough of it to look like a
curve and not merely like a wavy line.
That remote first volume, which was of course a symptom and a
rallying-point or the new tendencies, not their origin, seems now to
have been somewhat chaotic and lacking in direction. It included such
older poets as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Sturge Moore, and Sir Ronald
Ross; and some of those who appear to-day the most characteristic had
not then shown themselves. At that time the most powerful tendency
seemed to be leading towards the realism, sometimes informed with a
conscious brutality, of Mr. Masefield, Mr. Gibson, and Mr. Abercrombie.
In 1919 this sort is fully represented only by Mr. Abercrombie's
_Witchcraft: New Style_, a poem principally in dialogue which is
realistic in method, if its conception has a fairy-tale brutality about
it. Such lines as the following are in a familiar style:
A little brisk grey slattern of a woman,
Pattering along in her loose-heel'd clogs,
Push't the brass-barr'd door of a public-house;
The spring went hard against her; hand and knee
Shoved their weak best. As the door poised ajar
Hullabaloo of talking men burst out,
A pouring babble of inflamed palaver.
In spite of their vividness and exactitude, they make us think of a
good passage of prose slightly spoiled. Mr. Gibson has not continued in
the vein, and is confined here to a few momentary impressions, mostly
in the sonnet form.
But if we dismiss this tendency from those we imply when we speak of
"Georgian," poetry, if we admit too that Mr. W. H. Davies is often not
characteristic but a poet who might have appeared at almost any time
(as, in another way, is Mr. John Drinkwater), what are we to take for
our definition? If we are ever to devise one, we must somehow reconcile
and bring under one heading a bundle of qualities, which seem to have
but little in common when they are separately described. Yet that there
is some common term, some central motive, is suggested by the fact
that the pieces in this book which may be thought to be on a lower
level than the rest, those by Mr. Moult and Mrs. Shove, are yet not
wholly out of place. These writers have been touched in some degree
by the spirit of the time, which manifests itself with more power and
originality in poets so diverse as Mr. de la Mare, Mr. Sassoon, and Mr.
Turner. But it is likely that for some time we shall have to content
ourselves with such vague recognitions of spirit, without attempting to
be more precise in definition.
We must at all events include Mr. Monro's curious and good poem, _Man
Carrying Bale_, which by its title gives a faint suggestion of some
sorts of modern painting, and is actuated by the same desire, to flash
suddenly a light on a familiar thing from an unfamiliar angle:
The tough hand closes gently on the load,
Out of the mind, a voice
Calls "Lift!" and the arms, remembering well their work,
Lengthen and pause for help.
Then a slow ripple flows from head to foot
While all the muscles call to one another:
"Lift!" and the bulging bale
Floats like a butterfly in June.
With this may be associated Mr. Davies' remarkable piece, _A Child's
Pet_:
When I sailed out of Baltimore
With twice a thousand head of sheep,
They would not eat, they would not drink,
But bleated o'er the deep.
Inside the pens we crawled each day,
To sort the living from the dead;
And when we reached the Mersey's mouth,
Had lost five hundred head.
Yet every night and day one sheep,
That had no fear of man or sea,
Stuck through the bars its pleading face,
And it was stroked by me.
And to the sheep-man standing near,
"You see," I said, "this one tame sheep:
It seems a child has lost her pet,
And cried herself to sleep."
So every time we passed it by,
Sailing to England's slaughter-house,
Eight ragged sheep-men--tramps and thieves--
Would stroke that sheep's black nose.
Yet of how different a quality is the whole admirable selection of
eight poems from Mr. de la Mare, to illustrate which we quote the
exquisite _Fare Well_:
When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
Perishing be?
Oh, when this my dust surrenders,
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,
May those loved and loving faces
Please other men.
May the rusting harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller's Joy entwine.
And as happy children gather
Posies once mine.
Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight.
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.
We come again upon another manner in the poems of Mr. Robert Nichols.
Here an inadequate passage from a long and very lovely piece called
_The Sprig of Lime_ will serve to suggest his qualities:
Sweet lime that often at the height of noon
Diffusing dizzy fragrance from your boughs
Tasselled with blossoms more innumerable
Than the black bees, the uproar of whose toil
Filled your green vaults, winning such metheglyr.
As clouds their sappy cells, distil, as once
Ye used, your sunniest emanations
Towards the window where a woman kneels--
She who within that room in childish hours
Lay through the lasting murmur of blanch'd noon
Behind the sultry blind, now full, now flat,
Drinking anew of every odorous breath,
Supremely happy in her ignorance
Of Time that hastens hourly and of death
Who need not haste.
These poems are not realism, but passages of reality imaginatively
seized and transfigured by passion; and the same description may be
applied to a number of pieces in this book as different from these
as these are from one another. If we attempt to map out the whole
achievement and promise which the book represents, we must refer to
the originality and beauty of rhythm displayed by Mr. John Freeman in
such a poem as _The Alde_, which begins:
How near I walked to Love,
How long, I cannot tell;
I was like the Alde that flows
Quietly through green level lands,
So quietly, it knows
Their shape, their greenness, and their shadows well;
And then undreamingly for miles it goes
And silently, beside the sea.
We must refer also to Mr. W. J. Turner's noble and largely conceived,
if a little chaotic, poem _Death_; and to Mr. Sassoon's extraordinarily
economical and finished pictures of impressions at the front and in
England. There is moreover Mr. Brett Young's graceful and delicate
talent.
If we say that in all these it is possible to perceive reality
imaginatively seized and transfigured by passion, even if we add a
general curiosity to penetrate behind the appearances of things to
their substance, we say no more than we ought to say of any poetry
which we are disposed to praise. Perhaps if we could say much more we
should distinguish the literature with which we are dealing as one
which has forsaken the proper traditions of the art for qualities of a
merely temporary interest. It is not necessarily the business of new
poets to discover new objects for poetry; it is their business to bring
to bear on the old objects their own new personalities and whatever has
accrued both to the language and to general human experience. We are of
opinion that the "Georgian" poets are doing this; and though to give
them that title still requires something of an act of faith, it is one
much easier to make than it was seven years ago.
The survival of the word as the name of a period is, of course, not
yet assured. Many of these writers are still extremely young. Some of
them will develop in ways which cannot yet be foreseen. Mr. Nichols and
Mr. Turner, both of them capable of grandiose conceptions and engaged
in making a style to sustain them, will very likely attempt the drama,
where an empty throne is waiting. Mr. de la Mare, who is probably the
oldest of the distinctively Georgian writers, grows every year deeper
and solider, and it is impossible to say what will become of him. Mr.
Robert Graves is producing a body of work almost every line of which is
as sweet and sound as a nut, and is an influence against the obscurity
from which a good many of his contemporaries suffer. The author of _A
Ballad of Nursery Rhyme_, which begins:
Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June,
Beside the trickling stream,
may perhaps have done a service by writing these lines at the same time
as Mr. Turner was writing such a fine but involved stanza as this from
_Death_:
That sound rings down the years--I hear it yet--
All earthly life's a winding funeral--
And though I never wept,
But into the dark coach stept,
Dreaming by night to answer the blood's sweet call,
She who stood there, high-breasted, with small, wise lips,
And gave me wine to drink and bread to eat,
Has not more steadfast feet,
But fades from my arms as fade from mariners' eyes
The sea's most beauteous ships.
And others no doubt will appear who are now no more thought of than
were Mr. Nichols or Mr. Graves or Mr. Turner in 1912.
At least this movement--we do not use the word in the sense of
"organised movement" or "school"--has had the luck of early recognition
and careful fostering. There are faults to be found with this as with
the three earlier volumes of the series, but, in a world which has
produced no faultless anthology, we ought not to expect the first to be
a collection of contemporary verse. No one will be able to look through
the book without objections rising to his lips. Every reader will want
this or that poet omitted, this or that included. There are few readers
of anthologies who do not find, on mature consideration, that they
could have done the work better themselves, and this would be just if,
in fact, anthologists worked only for themselves. But to E. M. we must
assign the credit of having carried through an exceedingly difficult
task with as few mistakes as could be thought possible. He has the
extra distinction of having foreseen seven years ago the beginning of a
"liveliness" which has justified him by enduring until at this moment
it shows no signs of recession. He would be no doubt the last person to
claim the invention, or even the discovery, of the "Georgian" movement.
But he might reasonably claim, and, if he does not, the honour must be
thrust upon him, to have provided it with a means of growing naturally
and without undue extravagance.
NEW POEMS. By IOLO ANEURIN WILLIAMS. Methuen. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Williams' first book of poems, published four years ago, was a
quite little book, noticeable for some polished little songs with a
Caroline or Queen Anne air. His tastes have remained the same; his
capacity for writing has developed; he paints miniatures, and his
ingenuity expends itself on the elaboration and variation of the
frames. The frontier between success and non-success is narrow in
this kind of work; a slight flaw ruins all, and Mr. Williams does
not always escape collapse. But _Alice_ and _Song_ are of a neatness
and completeness which would do credit to the best of the Queen Anne
practitioners. _The Country Songs_ is a fragment of what may become
a really excellent celebration of our folk-songs, and _Rocks_ and
_Astronomy_, though still with something of the song in them, let
delicate plummets into deeper waters. The image of the rock, doomed to
decay, yet
The lizard's immortal friend,
And deathless to the flower,
is happy _Astronomy_ we quote in full:
Jupiter may be that or this
Of stars that shine in heaven,
Neptune a mere hypothesis,
And Saturn one of seven.
They will not make the dark less bright,
For names I do not know;
Nameless the stars across the night
In nameless beauty go.
Over my head their vault is bent--
A mirror and a screen--
An ever fresh prefigurement
Of glory past the seen.
It is an unambitious and uneven but very pleasant little book.
THE WAR POEMS OF SIEGFRIED SASSOON. Heinemann. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
This volume contains fifty-two poems selected from Mr. Sassoon's
previous volumes, and twelve new ones. The former are far too well
known to need description at this date; but we think that even in
these, and still more in the new poems, there is ground for the
conjecture that those who think of Mr. Sassoon primarily as a savage
realist and satirist are likely in the future to be surprised. It was
a genuine and profound sensibility, tenderness, and a cheated passion
for beauty that produced his war poetry; not an innate predilection for
violence, vituperation, or caricature. Now the storm has gone over he
seems to be becoming more and more a poet of nature. The transition is
perhaps symbolised in the most beautiful of the new poems here printed.
It is called _Everyone Sang_, and concludes the book, so full of blood
and corpses, rats, evil smells, and all the turmoil and _débris_ of war:
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark green fields; on; on; and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears and horror
Drifted away.... O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be
done.
The book contains much that, however sincere, can only be described
as journalism _in excelsis_, but it is all inextricably mixed with
genuine poetry, and the collection as a whole, we suspect, will have
a permanent interest and value. Better than from a hundred histories
posterity will get from these poems a picture of how men felt and
looked in that world of
Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.
Their merits are never more clearly displayed than when they are
compared to the poems of the imitators who have sprung up like
mushrooms since Mr. Sassoon began publishing. These have taken his
brutal words, his more obvious attitudes, and the senile and complacent
objects of his satire; but in the copies the life is lacking.
ARGONAUT AND JUGGERNAUT. By OSBERT SITWELL. Chatto & Windus 5_s._ net.
At first sight this book looks like a revolutionary manifesto. Its
title is vehement and original, and its paper "jacket" is decorated
with the photograph of a negro head surmounted with a towering and
tapering wickerwork structure. It has no bearing on the contents, and
we can only assume that the author put it there because he liked it
or to arrest attention. Attention having been arrested, expectation
is disappointed. It is true that Mr. Sitwell often writes in _vers
libres_, and that he opens with a challenge and hearty proclamation in
the key of
Let us prune the tree of language
Of its dead fruit.
Let us melt up the clichés
Into molten metal;
Fashion weapons that will scald and flay
Let us curb this eternal humour
And become witty.
Let us dig up the dragon's teeth
From this fertile soil;
Swiftly,
Before they fructify.
And that, at a later stage, he observes that
The world itself
Dances
To make us dance
In cosmic frenzy.
But his frenzies have a very calculated air; he has not got rid of
those clichés, and that wit does not emerge. He cannot really play
the revolutionary with gusto, so, as Queen Victoria said, "We are not
amused": and when he lapses into more ordinary forms and more connected
statements he is revealed as an ordinary immature writer of verses. He
has some gift of observation which he will waste unless he treats it
more conscientiously, but observation will not make a poet.
CARMINA RAPTA. By GRIFFYTH FAIRFAX. Elkin Mathews. 3_s._ 6_d._ and
2_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Fairfax's volume consists of "Verse translations from the French,
Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, with a few Arabic, Japanese,
and Armenian renderings from French prose versions." Mezzofanti and the
monk Calepino, in another sphere, must be alarmed for their linguistic
laurels. Some of Mr. Fairfax's translations are neat; but we hope those
from the Armenian--our Armenian wants rubbing up--are nearer the spirit
of the originals than are some of those from European languages. He
is at his neatest in some brief poems from the Spanish. His versions
of Hérédia and Baudelaire are especially lifeless; and he inflicts an
additional injury upon the latter by attributing the famous _Don Juan
in Hell_ to Hérédia.
THE CLOWN OF PARADISE. By DORMER CRESTON. Heath Cranton. 3_s._ net.
We notice this volume merely in order to record a neologism which we
commend to the notice of the editors of the _Oxford Dictionary_. It is
found in this passage:
My tearful soul did slip into those silver pools,
And, bathing in that stillness,
Was oned with God.
In the Court of Sir Henry Duke, we may continue, people are twoed.
NOVELS
COUSIN PHILIP. By MRS. HUMPHRY WARD. Collins. 6_s._ net.
SAINT'S PROGRESS. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
IF ALL THESE YOUNG MEN. By ROMER WILSON. Methuen. 7_s._ net.
MADELEINE. By HOPE MIRRLEES. Collins. 6_s._ net.
LEGEND. By CLEMENCE DANE. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
THE MASK. By JOHN COURNOS. Methuen. 6_s._ net.
It seems probable that a long time must elapse before the novel escapes
altogether from the spell of the war; and the reasons why this should
be so are fairly obvious. It is not only that the novelists, like
all of us, have received in their minds an indelible impress of that
great event. We must recognise that the last five years have made a
gulf between us and preceding time only comparable to a long interval
of history. The manners and habits of 1913 are not connected in an
imperceptibly changing fabric with our own. They are already a matter
of archæological interest, and definitely to place the action of a
novel in that year requires a course of archæological research--say
among old numbers of _Punch_. In 1919 the war is still so vivid a
thread in the web of our minds that we are constantly influenced by
it, constantly referring to it, in our actions, our conversations,
and our thoughts. When we meet a character, whether in a novel or a
drawing-room, it is still our instinct to enquire where he has been,
what he has been doing since August, 1914, and the present moment.
This is natural indeed; but its tendency in the novel is to produce
ephemeral work. The tidal wave may have subsided, but it has left the
mental waters exceedingly muddy.
Mrs. Humphry Ward's novel, _Cousin Philip_, is an excellent example of
the work which this state of affairs elicits from even the most serious
authors. It is a study, careful and detailed, of the sort of young
woman who has emerged from the war. Helena Pitstone, aged nineteen,
arrives at the house of her guardian, Lord Buntingford. She looks like
Romney's Lady Hamilton; but "the beautiful head was set off by a khaki
close cap, carrying a badge, and the khaki uniform, tunic, short skirt,
and leggings, might have been specially designed to show the health
and symmetry of the girl's young form"--all this though she has been
demobilised. She naturally begins her stay with Lord Buntingford by
quarrelling with him over one of her men friends, whom he refuses to
allow her to invite to his house. This gentleman had run away with the
wife of a friend, not for any base motive--"He didn't mean anything
horrid," says Helena--but "for a lark," and to show her husband that
she was not to be bullied. In the end Helena marries a politician, who
says to her, "Are you mine--are you mine at last?--you wild thing!"--a
remark which has been made by other lovers in other novels. In between
these two points lies Mrs. Humphry Ward's study of the girl of the
period, in order to make which, it may be supposed, she wrote this
novel. An idea of its quality and usefulness may be gained from the
following specimen of Helena's conversation:
"The chauffeur here is a fractious idiot. He has done that
Rolls-Royce car of Cousin Philip's balmy, and cut up quite rough when
I spoke to him about it."
"Done it what?" said Mrs. Friend faintly.
"Balmy. Don't you know that expression?" Helena, on the floor, with
her hands under her knees, watched her companion's looks with a grin.
"It's _our_ language now, you know--English--the language of us young
people. The old ones have got to learn it as we speak it."
Mrs. Ward would no doubt be shocked by a writer who delivered his, or
her, views on the French people with an obvious ignorance of the French
language. She would despise the affectation of an author who used
Latin tags incorrectly. But it is only fair to say that her views on
the younger generation are rendered slightly ridiculous by her obvious
ignorance of its idioms. She would perhaps have been better employed
in a detailed picture of the manners of 1913, a period to which she
doubtless looks back as to a lost paradise of decorous behaviour.
Mr. Galsworthy's _Saint's Progress_ suffers less from insufficient
documentation. His heroine Noel, with her short hair, is the daughter
of a clergyman, and follows the course gloomily foretold for so many
young girls during the war-period to the predestined end of bearing
a war-baby. She and her sister Gratian are forced by the pressure of
events to think and act for themselves. Gratian, safely married to a
doctor, delivers herself as follows:
"Dad," said Gratian suddenly, "we can only find out for ourselves,
even if we do singe our wings in doing it. We've been reading James's
_Pragmatism_. George says the only chapter that's important is
missing--the one on ethics, to show that what we do is not wrong till
it's proved wrong by the result. I suppose he was afraid to deliver
that lecture."
But, while Mr. Galsworthy is much superior to Mrs. Ward in the accuracy
of his information, he can hardly be said to be superior to her in
the justice and clearness of his presentation. The traits of his
persons are correctly observed and generalised, but they are not shown
through the medium of living individuals. We feel of Noel that many
girls of such a disposition found themselves in such circumstances and
behaved thus; and so far, regarded as a sociological study, the book
is deserving of praise. But what we never feel is that the individual
girl, Noel, ever existed; and by the deficiency it is condemned as a
novel. This book will be a serious disappointment to those who imagined
from _Five Tales_ that Mr. Galsworthy had recovered the original
freshness of his talent and was about to begin a new and a sincerer
period.
But perhaps the desire to depict, and to comment on, phenomena so fresh
and living in the mind as these, which has been fatal to experienced
craftsmen of the order of Mrs. Ward and Mr. Galsworthy, is one which
will ruin any novel in which it is attempted. Miss Romer Wilson has
not the experience of either; but as her first book, _Martin Schuler_,
demonstrated, she has really extraordinary natural gifts. These
gifts are still obvious in her second book, which is nevertheless
disappointing and all but a complete failure. It describes a circle
of non-combatants during the last year of the war, young people, of
whom Mrs. Ward has hardly heard, who sway between cynical disgust with
the world around them and cynical disgust with their own natures. No
man, it has been wisely said, is uninteresting, and these persons,
regarded from a sane and tolerantly humorous point of view, might have
been the theme for a good book. But since the thoughts, or actions,
the manners through which they manifest themselves not being genuine
or spontaneous, are important neither for good nor evil, the method
of treating them seriously results in making them appear thin and
tedious. Affectations, except in the rare event of their producing
serious consequences, are a topic only for satire; and here the loves
of Josephine and Sebastian, of James Blanchard and Susan and Amaryllis,
are expressed purely by affectations, which overlie and conceal
whatever genuine feelings these persons may have possessed. This type
has had in recent years a curious attraction for young novelists, who
have as a result produced many books which are not worthy of attention.
But the author of _Martin Schuler_ must sin deeply before we can refuse
to read any book of hers, however unwillingly we may persevere in it.
And even here her special qualities are altogether beyond mistake. She
can still, even in this dreary and pointless tale of people we should
prefer not to meet, astonish us with vivid and enchanting fragments
of pictorial beauty. A couple of these passages, which are all that
redeems the book from dullness, may be given as specimens:
... At the turn of the night it began to rain, and at daybreak the
whole country was grey with driving rain, which spluttered against
the bedroom window and beat upon the thatch. The noisy sparrows
under the eaves shook themselves angrily and fluttered up and down
in the garden after worms. The tom cat, who had been out all night,
gathered himself up on the doorstep and brooded there with one eye on
the sparrows, waiting for the door to be opened. The draught under
the door made his paws cold, so he blew himself out and crouched
down with his paws folded up underneath him. He was angry and tired,
and his fur was covered with minute drops of water that in places
had penetrated to his skin, but he sat there patiently dosing and
dreaming for two hours until half-past eight, when the bolts were
drawn. At the sound of the bolts being shot back he at once stood
up and mewed, and the door was hardly opened before he ran into the
kitchen, where a stick fire roared in the grate and a frying-pan gave
out an odour of frying fat.
... The people came out of the house door, mysterious in the fading
light like a procession of Boccaccio's women and a clerk of the
Decameron seen through the romantic distance of seven hundred
years. They lit the candles in the dark garden-room and sat down
as if waiting for somebody to begin a story. Overhead the blue sky
gleamed through the gathering darkness, and in the west a rosy glow
spread up behind the delicate aspens and maples and acacias of the
little plantation above the yew garden. Up in the mazy blue sky the
transparent half moon and a few bright planets gleamed beneath the
outermost heavens, where faint white constellations began to appear
as the darkness quickly gathered upon the earth.
We do not quote these descriptive passages as proving Miss Wilson's
aptitude for the novelist's multifarious task. They represent only one
of the many gifts of which she must dispose; and they are themselves in
several details open to criticism. They do moreover represent almost
everything in this book which can be distinguished for commendation.
They suggest, however, that Miss Wilson possesses one of the most
important gifts of the novelists, namely, a sense of the scene; and
it remains for time to show whether she can imagine persons and a
situation worthy of her background.
It is a relief to recede from the tangled epoch, which has spoilt and
hindered all these writers, into the seventeenth century in France.
Miss Mirrlees has written, not a wholly satisfactory or very agreeable,
but a very strange book, one far removed from the historical romance of
commerce. She has combined what appears to be a close knowledge of her
period, of the time of the Jansenists, the Précieuses, and Mademoiselle
de Scudéry, with a desire to study a curious case of mental pathology.
Madeleine, her heroine, is a provincial girl who removes to Paris
with her family and is consumed by an intense longing to enter that
fantastic circle of elegance and _galanterie_ which revolved round
Mademoiselle de Scudéry and was depicted by her in _Le Grand Cyrus_.
But her awkward shyness forbade that this longing should ever be
satisfied; and when she sought to pacify it by the familiar device of
the "endless story," she exacerbated it into madness. This is a brief
and inadequate account of a most unusual composition, but it will
serve to show how Miss Mirrlees has loaded the historical novel with
a heavier freight than that ornamental craft is accustomed to carry.
But she has not developed either the psychology or the descriptive
detail at the expense of the other. She dissects Madeleine's mind with
almost morbid closeness and makes of it a terrifying spectacle, but at
the same time she has contrived to make her setting in time and place
convincing. Her picture of mind and manners may or may not be strictly
accurate; but it is certainly not conventional, it is original, it
_bites_. There are certain crudities apparent both in the style and in
the construction of the book, as well as in the choice and development
of subject; but it will be very interesting to see the next production
of a mind so unusual.
Miss Clemence Dane's _Legend_ touches Miss Mirrlees' work fleetingly at
one point. It too describes a literary "circle," dominated by women,
of the sort which draws weaker characters into it and causes them to
deteriorate. But it interests not so much as a study of this particular
phenomenon as in that it is an extraordinary attempt, the only one
among these books, to carry on the history of the novel, to give that
form a new task, to enlarge its range and its adaptabilities. It
consists of one long conversation; and the principal character, Madala
Grey, makes no appearance, unless the regrettable introduction of her
ghost towards the end be counted as such. Madala is a woman-novelist
who has contracted what seems to her friends an inexplicable marriage
with a dull country doctor. She is in child-bed; and her circle meets
to await news, hears of her death, and discusses her. Their views,
all mistaken, are reported by the one person present who had never
seen her and who deduces the true and simple explanation--that she
was actually in love with her husband. This is, it may be objected,
merely jumping through a series of hoops; and in a sense the objection
has its justification. For, when the story should reach its climax,
when Madala herself begins to emerge from the mists of misjudgment
and misinterpretation, she is revealed as being only a lay figure.
This does not mean that Miss Dane's singular device in the end misses
its aim. On the contrary she accomplishes what she set out to do with
perfect precision. Nevertheless, the fact remains that she has locked
in a very complicated cabinet, and thence extracted again by very
subtle means, not a living woman but a doll. Hence her book is not the
masterpiece it might have been. But we are almost brought to overlook
this fact by the amazing skill with which she manages her invention;
and her jumping through hoops, whether it be regarded as an unrelated
exhibition of agility or as an experiment in a new method of progress,
deserves all attention even though it leads only to disappointment at
the end. Miss Dane's first novel, _Regiment of Women_, was much praised
not long ago; her second, _First the Blade_, did not receive so much
notice. This reveals in her originality, daring and ingenuity which
could hardly have been predicted from her earlier work; and there is no
doubt that it will be widely discussed, since it is in fact rare for
any really remarkable display of these qualities to miss its reward.
But Miss Dane has yet some distance to advance if she is to do more
than win fame as a conjuror or open up paths for other novelists.
For an artist capable of so distinguished a conception her style is
strangely flat and undistinguished; and the introduction of some very
bad and banal passages from the works of Madala Grey is a curious lapse
of tact.
Mr. John Cournos's _The Mask_, which is perhaps the most satisfactory
of all these books, though it is not so dazzling and exciting as
_Legend_, is one which has very little to say to the development of
the novel. We generally reckon it impertinent to see in any book not
avowed as such the autobiography of the author; but in this story of
a Jewish boy in Russia and America, without knowing anything of Mr.
Cournos, we are forced to make the inference. Its tone and flavour are
those of autobiography; and its softened reminiscences of things not
always pleasant give it its peculiar charm. It reveals, at all events,
more than most novels, a temperament; and this temperament, whatever
turn the story may take, is always agreeable and gracious. Vanya
Gombarov, the little boy, was brought up in Russia by a stepfather,
who wasted all his money in mechanical researches and was obliged to
emigrate with his family to America. Here Vanya added to the family
income by selling papers, and in other ways, and saw many horrible
things. The family experienced many misfortunes; and at the end Mr.
Cournos abruptly leaves it moving from one house to another. We have
here no pyrotechnics of construction; nor does such a book offer any
opportunities for them to the author. But he is able to show himself
an artist in the softening veil which his narrative throws over his
incidents without in any way distorting them.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
SEVEN MEN. By MAX BEERBOHM. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.
It is a common ground of complaint against Mr. Max Beerbohm that he
publishes too little. But the very fastidiousness which makes him,
compared with the word-fountains of our time, so notable an example
of limitation of output is what makes the work he does print so
surpassingly good. Economy is a word freely used and much abused. It
is sometimes applied to writers whose only claim to it is that they
use short sentences or that they omit everything except inessentials.
But Mr. Beerbohm deserves more than any artist of our time the epithet
"economical." Always, and increasingly so with the passage of time, he
has taken pains to print no sentence and no word that does not help
his effect; and the five stories in this book, even were their other
merits less than they are, might serve as models of simple and exact
expression, the cunning accumulation of telling detail, the complete
avoidance of detail which does not tell.
Of the five stories one, _James Pethel_, is a study of the gambling
temperament localised in an attractive but terrifying man, and one, _A.
V. Laider_, is an astonishingly clever fantasia on the theme of lying.
The other, and more ambitious, three are studies, we might almost call
them historical studies, of literature, literary men, and "the literary
life." They all relate to that remote period, now faded and therefore a
little charming, "the nineties"; they give us types of writers, second
or third or tenth rate, whose reputations die, but who are interesting
enough to be celebrated as types, if not as individuals. Savonarola
Brown--the obscure man who spent his life on an unfinished tragedy on
the best blank-verse models--is the most slightly sketched of them;
but here what the portrait lacks--perhaps that shadowy figure offered
no more lines for the pencil to seize--is more than made up for by the
best parody that even Mr. Beerbohm has written. Remove the burlesque,
the comic stage directions, the juxtapositions of Lucrezia Borgia, St.
Francis, Andrea del Sarto and Pippa (who "passes" in her own inimitable
way), and the more extravagant convolutions of the plot, and you will
see that Mr. Beerbohm could quite easily have manufactured a play
better than most modern poetic dramas, and written in verse at once so
fluent and so reminiscent of the best masters as to command the respect
of the reviewers, and possibly a production (for a few nights) by some
manager ambitious to show that he desired to reunite Literature and the
Stage. At times we forget that we are reading a burlesque:
POPE. Of this anon.
[_Stands over body of Gaoler._]
Our present business
Is general woe. No nobler corse hath ever
Impressed the ground. O let the trumpets speak it!
[_Flourish of trumpets._]
This was the noblest of the Florentines.
His character was flawless, and the world
Held not his parallel. O bear him hence
With all such honours as our State can offer.
He shall interred be with noise of cannon,
As doth befit so militant a nature.
Prepare these obsequies.
[_Papal Officers lift body of Gaoler._]
Did Mr. Beerbohm write this? Or was it Brown, fresh from _The Duchess
of Malfi_ or _The Broken Heart_?
The two stories that remain are more elaborate. In _Enoch Soames_ we
are given the picture of the kind of sepulchral, costive, dedicated,
fame-gluttonous minor poet who has haunted the by-ways of literature
in all ages; we are given, as well, a realistic picture of what those
by-ways were twenty years ago, and a plot (which races between the
future and the past) the intricacies of which are followed with equal
ingenuity and imperturbability. But there can be little dispute that
_Maltby and Braxton_ is the great achievement of the volume. These two
were rivals who had a brief vogue in the nineties; the very scent of
the time comes back with the titles of their masterpieces, _Ariel in
Mayfair_ and _A Faun in the Cotswolds_. Maltby in a weak moment cheated
Braxton out of a week-end at the Duchess of Hertfordshire's, and when
the hapless Maltby got to Keeb Hall Braxton's ghost haunted him,
driving him into perpetual solecisms and misadventures. There is the
background: the gossiping coteries of London, the fleeting fashions of
literature, the first vogue of the bicycle, the dabbling great dames,
the house-parties, soirées, dinners, church-goings. And in front of it
the most comic of tragedies, the most tragic of comedies is played. The
story is written with such skill that the cruelty is never quite cruel,
the laughter never quite flippant, the extravagances always anchored
to reality: at the end, in spite not only of the caricature but of the
"tallest" fiction about a ghost that we remember, we feel that we have
been reading a plain statement of fact. And this is what, at bottom,
the story is: it is more realistic than any naturalist novel: it is
the work of one who, for all his fantastic invention and wit, has a
prodigiously keen pair of eyes and a profound understanding of human
nature. We hope, by the way, that Mr. Beerbohm's passage about literary
fauns will finally expel these overworked creatures from our midst.
DONNE'S SERMONS: SELECTED PASSAGES WITH AN ESSAY. By LOGAN PEARSALL
SMITH. Milford. 6_s._ net.
Donne's reputation as a poet, very high for some time after his death,
sank almost to nothingness for two centuries. In the last thirty years
he has, by virtue partly of his occasional splendours of passion,
imagery, and even music, partly of a modernity in him which is attuned
to the spirit of our own time, regained his old position. Much has
been written of him; Mr. Gosse has written his _Life_ in two volumes,
Professor Grierson has edited him in one of the most exhaustive and
scholarly of the Oxford editions of poets; he has exercised a traceable
influence on men now writing. But the revival has been confined to his
poems. His prose, contained in three huge folios and several small
pamphlets, has remained unread; and it is significant that until a few
years ago he who wished to possess (for none thought of perusing) the
Dean's sermons was likelier to find them at a theological bookseller's
than in one of those shops which cater for the collector of fine
literature. The neglect was doubly explicable. Not only were Donne's
Sermons sermons, and therefore liable to fall into the disregard into
which the sermons of South and Tillotson, and even those of Jeremy
Taylor, have fallen, but they were sermons so voluminous as to be
terrifying to the most insatiable reader, and (for the most part) so
involved, so stuffed with scholasticism, theological hair-splitting,
debate about texts and about commentaries on texts, that a first
attempt at perusal might have made the bravest quail. But the few who
have dared the darkness of the great mine have never been disappointed;
all over it, sparkling magnificently to the explorer's touch, are great
jewels of imagination cut with the craft of a master of language.
Mr. Pearsall Smith, performing for his readers the labour they would
have shirked, has gone through the whole of Donne's Sermons and
extracted a hundred-and-fifty passages, short and long, illustrating
his character and his genius. Not quite the whole of the ground is
covered; the editor has chosen nothing of which the principal claim
to distinction was that it conveyed, with great justice or great
force, a doctrine of the Church or an edifying lesson. He has made
his anthology as a poet and a student of character would make it;
and the result is a volume of passages which exhibit that strange
vehement man of genius more clearly than could any biography, and
which substantiates his claim to be considered as being, at his best,
a writer of English prose that has never been surpassed for music and
richness. His greatest passages--and this holds good of all English
prose--are those in which he is contemplating large elemental things.
A roll like the roll of the prophetic books comes into his voice
when he speaks of the majesty of God, the powers of Death and of
Evil, the passage of time, the justice that waits for sin, and the
decay that will overtake beauty; when he stands in the attitudes and
assumes the voice of adoration, of accusation, or of grief. But even
in his dialectics the restless intellectual in him was continually
striking out sparks of wit; the insatiable observer in him was noting
small things, sticks, straws, and insects, puddles and ponds; the
insuppressible poet pouring out images copious enough to furnish out
a hundred minor men. This is a long-needed book, done with competence
and exquisite taste. His greatest, loveliest things are as good as Sir
Thomas Browne's; his grandest are grander than Jeremy Taylor's. There
is probably no sentence in our language so long as that in which he
depicted Eternal Damnation, yet it swells and swells, never breaking
its back, always borne up by the mighty mind of his spirit. Hell is
deprivation of God. "That God," begins this great passage,
that God should let my soule fall out of his hand, into a bottomlesse
pit, and roll an unremoveable stone upon it, and leave it to that
which it finds there (and it shall finde that there, which it never
imagined, till it came thither) and never think more of that soule,
never have more to doe with it. That of that providence of God, that
studies the life of every weed, and worme, and ant, and spider, and
toad, and viper, there should never, never any beame flow out upon
me; that that God, who looked upon me, when I was nothing, and called
me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of
darknesse, will not looke upon me now, when, though a miserable, and
a banished, and a damned creature, yet I am his creature still, and
contribute something to his story, even in my damnation....
so it proceeds in tremendous crescendo describing, or failing to
describe, what it must mean "to fall out of the hands of the living God
... a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination"; and this
is but the sublimest of many sublime utterances in these sermons of the
greatest of the Church's poets. We commend Mr. Pearsall Smith's book,
and shall return to it and its subject at length in an early number.
SOUTH SEA FOAM. By A. SAFRONI-MIDDLETON. Methuen. 6_s._ net.
The sub-title of this book, "The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don
Quixote in the Southern Seas," gives the clue to a quality in Mr.
Safroni-Middleton that might repel a fastidious reader. He is a little
too effusive, a little too self-conscious in his adventurousness. But
the reader who is repelled early will miss something; for with all its
defects _South Sea Foam_ is a full and exciting and often beautiful
book. Mr. Middleton has not the technique of the artist; he does not
write well. But he has the artist's sensibility, and his writing is at
its most vivid when the greatest demands are made upon it. "My greatest
literary effort in the following pages," he says, "has been to keep
to the truth of the whole matter, even though such frankness should
leave me, at the end of this volume, with a blackened name." He need
not be anxious about his name; but if this book is all true he has had
adventures as wild and strange as any man alive. His book is a medley
of Polynesian legends, and the most extraordinary events on the ocean
and among the islands; storms, moonlight dances, abductions of "dusky
maidens" from chiefs' palaces, orgies in saloons, chases and shots,
canoes, sharks, and love-songs: a great flood of brightly-coloured
reminiscence tumbled out in language which is never quite "right" but
always picturesque. At any page one is liable to come across some
passage that thrills or deeply touches; and occasionally there is an
episode narrated so well that criticism is silent. Such an episode is
that of the old dog Moses, which falls overboard on a murky night.
He barks amid the waves to guide the boat; but there comes a scream
that means a shark and no more is heard. Next night the old bearded
sailor-men sit on their chests in the fo'c'sle puffing out smoke,
drinking rum in silence, brooding over the dog: and no scene could
be more vividly painted. The last adventure (in a castaway boat with
a brown girl), which we should call incredible were it not for Mr.
Middleton's assurance, is the loveliest and most terrible of all. We
think that anyone who reads this book once will make a habit of reading
it.
RUPERT BROOKE AND THE INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION: A LECTURE. By WALTER DE
LA MARE. Sidgwick & Jackson. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
The lecture here printed was delivered before Rugby School on the
occasion of the unveiling of a memorial there to Rupert Brooke.
Mr. de la Mare, as he recalls, was chosen to go to America as Mrs.
Brooke's representative to receive the first presentation of the
Howland Memorial Prize, the posthumous award of which to Brooke was an
act of international courtesy and generosity, too little noticed in
this country at the time. It was fitting that Mr. de la Mare should
be again associated with the dead poet; and in this short paper he
outlines his character and his achievement with as much affection as
discernment. Brooke, he is insistent to make plain, was a happy man,
a vigorous, healthy creature, who found the world teeming with food
for his multifarious appetites. It is with this fact in mind that
all his poems, not omitting those which are "disquieting to read at
meals," must be judged. He desired truth at all costs; and "if, unlike
Methuselah, he did not live long enough to see life whole, he at least
confronted it with a remarkably steady and disconcerting stare." "The
theme of his poetry," says Mr. de la Mare, "is the life of the mind,
the senses, the feelings, life here and now, however impatient he may
be with life's limitations. Its longing is for a state of consciousness
wherein this kind of life shall be possible without exhaustion,
disillusionment, or reaction." This essay is short, but it is full both
of wise judgments and beautiful sayings. It conveys a sense not only of
the value of Brooke's poetry but also of the charm of his personality.
More, much more, will be written about him; and we shall have his
character carefully examined and defined, both by those who knew him
and those who did not. But this brief study, at once an exposition and
a ceremonial and moving eulogy, will retain its place in the literature
collecting around his name.
SOME SOLDIER POETS. By T. STURGE MOORE. Grant Richards. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This volume contains short essays on the poems of Julian Grenfell,
Rupert Brooke, Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, R.
E. Vernède, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Edward Thomas, F. W.
Harvey, Richard Aldington, and Alan Seeger: with a paper on "The Best
Poetry" at the end. A casual student of the list of contents might make
several hasty criticisms. He might suppose that he was going to find
here a series of short lives, manufactured because of an accidental
connection between them. He might be fortified in this suspicion by
the fact that one or two poets are in the list who have no claim to
rank with the others. But he need only begin to read the book to
remember that Mr. Sturge Moore is a poet, a sound critic, and a writer
incapable of hackwork. There is one obvious defect; he has omitted a
few poets (Edward Wyndham Tennant is an example) who had better claim
to admission than some in his list. But there is little else that can
be urged against him. Mr. Sturge Moore wastes no space over biography.
He takes, _seriatim_, the books of these young poets and confronts them
in a generous but not an undiscriminating mood, asking himself what is
their spirit, what their technical qualities and defects and which are
their best poems. These essays are not (even when their subjects are
unworthy of effort) facile journalism; they are considered criticism
written in the prose of a poet, prose rich with novel and beautiful
images and embodying the results of profound reflection upon life and
art.
Mr. Sturge Moore's essay on Brooke is too brief to be a final
estimate; the main fault of all his essays is that they are not
long enough to include sufficient quotations; otherwise they would
certainly be of permanent value. But it is a penetrating essay,
full of interesting _obiter dicta_, such as the statement that "the
fallacy of impressionism" has tainted modern æsthetic thought, and
the more disputable statement that "failure in love and war is much
more inspiring to the poet than success; when the real world has
rejected a man he feels freer in the Muses' house; he no longer has
any interests that conflict with theirs." Julian Grenfell's _Into
Battle_ he describes (and we think he is right) as the best poem of
the war. Of three poets commonly linked together, he says that "Those
who shall gaze back a century hence may discern rather in Nichols than
in Sassoon or Graves the poet's mind that is independent of time and
approaches all human circumstance with the kinsman's joy and pain,"
though he admits that the race has only just begun, and another runner
may outstrip the others. He is admirable on Sorley, whom many think
the greatest loss to literature of all who fell in the war, and he has
found--and no one before has, we believe, so celebrated this poem--in
Mr. Harvey's _The Bugler_ something like an isolated great poem. The
one chapter which we find relatively inadequate is that which deals
with Edward Thomas. "Every time I read them I like them better," he
says; and he quotes in full Thomas's superb welcome to death; but
the reader misses here all the rest of the poet's most beautiful
poems and passages. They are even yet not known as they should be;
we wait for a collected volume to reveal to most English readers how
profuse, in his last two years, Thomas was of exquisite poems crowded
with characteristic English landscape, and often profoundly moving
by their sincere expression of universal emotions. He died resigned,
and fulfilled at last. In Mr. Moore's words, "Our house was not well
ordered; he should not have had to write hastily for his own and his
children's bread; we have lost the chance of using him to the best
advantage; yet he leaves us more than we deserved, something that
will be treasured by posterity for ever. As his body fell, its cloak
melted off the soul and we caught a glimpse which confounded our poor
recollections of the man, and words of his still tolling round our ears
make us aware that for him this dark casualty had a different meaning."
A BOOK OF R. L. S. By GEORGE BROWN. Methuen. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This work is really a Stevenson Encyclopædia reminiscent of that
colossal Browning Cyclopædia which still goes into new editions. Mr.
Brown arranges, in alphabetical order, the names of Stevenson's books,
characters, friends, critics, dwelling-places, etc. We have tested him
with several questions and not found him to fail. He gives more than
the facts he might be expected to give; for example, when a book is
under notice he enters the latest prices paid for its first edition
in the sale-room. He also lightens his pages with compact but pungent
comments. For instance, he describes Mr. Swinnerton's able but hostile
study of Stevenson as "the kind of study which it can be imagined Dr.
Clifford would write of Ignatius Loyola." A good book of its kind and
one that should be bought by everyone who has a Collected Stevenson.
The illustrations do not greatly add to its charms.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPE, 1870-1919. By C. D. HAZEN. Bell. 14_s._ net.
Professor Hazen ends his survey of the last fifty years of European
history with the words: "The evil that men do lives after them."
The remark is not original, but it is none the less historically
true and melancholy. Upon page 414 of this book it refers to Wilhelm
Hohenzollern, but as the final note struck in a text-book of European
history it has a wider significance. After reading Professor Hazen one
is tempted to ponder the question whether the good men do is interred
with the bones of history, and only the evil done by them lives after
them and their time. Here is the story of fifty years in 414 pages,
and indisputably the story is concerned far more with the evil that
men have done than with the good. What is the reason of this? The
question is extraordinarily difficult to answer, and, though the
reviewer _ex cathedra_ is officially supposed not to admit anything but
infallibility, we confess to be at a loss for a prompt and unhesitating
answer. The cause may be subjective rather than objective: the
historians may look at history from a wrong angle, so that the shadows
are exaggerated or intensified. On the other hand, it may really be,
as Shakespeare seemed to think, that the effects of evil are actually
more permanent than those of good. And there is a third alternative
which the philosophical historian and the historical philosopher cannot
dismiss out of hand: history is the tale of men's communal actions,
and it may be that man is so incompletely a political animal that his
communal actions are more often evil than good.
We cannot answer these questions, but they rise naturally from a
consideration of Professor Hazen's volume. The first question which a
reviewer has to put to himself is "What is the object of this book?"
The object of Professor Hazen's is obvious: it is a text-book, a rapid
survey of a period of history which, as he rightly says, possesses
"a unity that is quite exceptional among the so-called 'periods' of
history." As a text-book it has great merits; it is accurate and
brief, it runs with great rapidity through all the more important
facts of its "period," and the author's opinions and prejudices are
severely repressed. It has some obvious faults: the author seems to us
ill-advised to have added his last chapter in the form and size adopted
by him. This chapter deals with the actual events of the world war, and
occupies nearly a quarter of the entire book. This throws the whole
of his book out of shape. The war in itself had, of course, enormous
importance, but the details of its progress are of little importance
in a survey like this. In the previous pages we have been whirled from
the Balkan question to the Irish, from the Irish question to the rise
of Japan, from the rise of Japan to the Russian internal struggle,
and many of these immense complicated problems have necessarily been
dismissed in a few pages. There is no room in a book on this scale for
a description of the campaigns of the war, and Professor Hazen's volume
loses rather than gains by his attempt to deal with them. But as a
text-book it has merits above the average. One great merit is inherent
in it--it looks at history not from a national but a European or world
angle. We are inclined to believe that for use in schools no histories
of "France," "England," or other individual countries should be
tolerated, that all history should be either of Europe, Asia, of some
continent or era, or of the world. And then, perhaps, historians might
be able to deal a little more with the good that men do communally than
with the evil.
THE TANK CORPS. By MAJOR CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS, M.C., and A.
WILLIAMS-ELLIS. With an Introduction by MAJOR-GENERAL H. J. ELLES,
C.B., D.S.O. _Country Life._ 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is, if not an official, at least a semi-official history of
the Tank Corps; and if the other arms of our fighting forces get
histories as good they will be fortunate. It contains the whole story
of the machine and of those who manned it--invention, manufacture,
organisation, training, use--from the nebulous beginnings in the minds
of the various gentlemen whose claims to paternity are now being
disputed to the last battle of 1918. The information has an air of
final authority: official reports are backed with copious personal
narrative. There is no attempt at fine writing; the book is a long
series of short paragraphs containing essential facts. Yet, when
occasion demands, the authors' terse sentences are far more vivid and
more full of emotion than are the elaborate pages of the professional
battle-painters. This is never more noticeable than in their chapter
on the "Battle of Cambrai," where the fortunes of the whole Tank
experiment were at stake. Nothing is elaborated, yet we see very
vividly the whole panorama of those days of intense surreptitious
preparation, and the final overwhelming advance against the enemy,
whose suspicions had been aroused too late. The authors finally dispose
of the story that the General's last order to his Tanks told them to
"do their damnedest." "That spurious fosterling he hated the more the
more he perceived its popularity." The authentic Order is given: a
brief restrained document ending "5. I propose leading the attack of
the Centre Division." This he did, in the "Hilda," which reached the
outposts line in the van of the battle, General Elles standing with
his head through the hatch picking up targets for the gunners. The
"Hilda's" flag was several times hit, but not brought down. It was at
this battle that sixteen Tanks were knocked out by one gun, served
single-handed by a German officer, who died at his post. The story of
the Tanks that crossed a canal on the back of another does not seem to
be verified. The authors' conclusion is that "in the phase at which
military science has arrived, and at which it will probably remain for
a generation, a superior force of Tanks can always top the scales of
the military balance of power." The illustrations are many and well
chosen. We recommend the book, both as a work of reference and as a
book to read.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE PRACTICAL MYSTIC. By FRANCIS GRIERSON. With an
introduction by John Drinkwater. John Lane. 5_s._ net.
Mr. Grierson states that Abraham Lincoln was "the greatest practical
mystic the world has known for nineteen hundred years," thus
unnecessarily challenging comparisons with Saint Teresa and others. His
book, both as an effort to sustain this thesis and as a book to read,
is something of a disappointment. Some of his earlier works--notably
the beautiful _Valley of Shadows_--are closely thought and admirably
written; the best have never had in full the credit they deserve. But
the present volume is little more than a small scrap-book of other
people's impressions and anecdotes of Lincoln, sprinkled with Mr.
Grierson's not very profound comments and assertions to the effect that
we are now at the end of a dispensation, and are emerging into "the
mystical dawn of a new day." That Lincoln was a very great and a very
good man we know, and that he lived in the light of conscience. Of such
we can never be told too much, and the book might well serve as an
introduction to more elaborate biographies. But we cannot say that Mr.
Grierson adds anything to our knowledge. He tells us of Lincoln's sense
of duty, his dedication to the service of his kind, his premonitions.
"One of the most memorable mystical demonstrations ever recorded in any
epoch occurred in the little town of Salem, Illinois, in August, 1837,
when Lincoln was only twenty-three years of age," and "some of his
deepest thoughts on the mysteries of life and death were never voiced
by this man, who never spoke unless he deemed it imperative to speak."
The New York _Times_ says this or that, the _Spectator_ says so-and-so;
Lincoln was a "unique" manifestation of the Supreme Mind, like Moses.
"The American people were at that time practical, democratic seers,
without whom the greatest practical mystic could not have existed."
These passages are not cheering. There is an introduction by Mr. John
Drinkwater, who says something and says it clearly.
MEN AND MANNERS IN PARLIAMENT. By SIR HENRY LUCY. Fisher Unwin. 10_s._
6_d._ net.
Sir Henry Lucy's reprint of his notes on the Disraeli Parliament of
1874 will find a place in that world-museum where a bottle containing
the Bruce's spider stands next on the shelf to the original kettle
which inflamed the young imagination of George Stephenson. They were
published serially in (how distant it all seems!) the _Gentleman's
Magazine_, and a set of bound volumes of that venerable periodical
found its way (by the steam-packet, no doubt) to the young republic
of the United States. There in the beautiful new-world calm of the
Chancellor Green Library, at Princeton, the old printed words in
their quaint black-letters met the young eye of Woodrow Wilson, a
smart student of his seniors, Chatham, Burke, and Brougham, of the
more recent writings of Lord Macaulay, then recently dead, and of the
positively burning message of the still more topical Mr. Bagehot. But
it was Sir Henry Lucy, not yet dubbed a Knight, who produced, if we may
believe the official biographer--and Sir Henry does--an "influence ...
on his broadening thought." The debt was very gracefully acknowledged
by the President long afterwards in a letter which pays tribute to "the
interest you stirred many years ago in the action of public affairs in
Great Britain." He added that he would always think of Sir Henry as one
of his instructors.
The whole story is one more example of the ineradicable romanticism of
the New World which led Henry James to the belief that great leaders
in England conversed intelligently (if not always quite intelligibly)
and drew Whistler to dramatise the Thames. One sees the American
undergraduate hanging spellbound over Sir Henry Lucy's parliamentary
notes, and rising from the table with bright eyes and burning cheeks
to mutter, as he walked out among the chipmunks and prairie foxes, "I
too will hold assemblies in the grip of my eloquence like the Right
Honourable George Sclater-Booth; in me Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen shall
have his transatlantic counterpart." And one is inclined to wonder, as
one rambles through the pages of what the President, remembering his
constitutional obligations to the American language, described as "The
Syndicated London Letter," which of these amiable pages of political
gossip it was that finally tilted the young Wilson on to that inclined
plane which led to Washington and the Galerie des Glaces. Was it the
picture of Mr. Disraeli on the Treasury Bench, impassive, arms folded,
forelock well in evidence, or the more vivacious scenes in which Mr.
Bright, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Lowe chased one another across the
Mid-Victorian stage? No one except Mr. Wilson can say. But the anecdote
lends point to the reissue of Sir Henry's notes, which always possess a
high interest for political historians, apart from the addition which
the story makes to their intrinsic value.
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF LADY DOROTHY NEVILL. By RALPH NEVILL. Methuen.
18_s._ net.
This is a most disappointing book. Of Lady Dorothy's charm and
intelligence we have had evidence in the two volumes published in
her lifetime, and edited by Mr. Nevill. She certainly deserved a
biography which should preserve for posterity a true portrait of one
who typified what was best and most likeable in a state of society
that became historical even in her lifetime. Unfortunately, Mr. Nevill
has been content to give us merely gleanings of his mother's notebooks
and post-bag. He makes no effort at all at formal biography, keeps
no sequence, and betrays no sense of proportion. The writing of the
book is slack and formless, as, for instance, in such sentences as the
following:
No one probably knew more about the inner social history of her time
than Lady Cork; a very clever woman, who long after she had ceased
to be able to leave her couch, owing to her numerous visitors, kept
herself excellently posted as to everything of interest which was on
foot. At the time of the Druce case, being a confirmed invalid, her
evidence, which would have completely put any claimant out of court,
was taken on commission.
The book is full of writing as careless as this, and is, in
consequence, very trying to read. All one can do is to search through
the volume for amusing stories of the world Lady Dorothy Nevill
adorned, and to make some guess at the character of the woman who
could number among her friends Lord Clanricarde, Father Dolling, Lord
Beaconsfield, Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Lytton, and Mr. John Burns.
The second task is difficult. One knows her better from that glowing
portrait by Watts--which we wish Mr. Nevill had reproduced--than from
any of her letters given here. She was not a good letter-writer, though
better than some of her correspondents. She had both generosity and an
aptitude for mischief, stout prejudices, but a lovable curiosity which
prevented her being their slave. Her Toryism was of the "Young England"
variety, and never stopped her from making friends where she could. Her
wit seems to have been a wit of personality rather than of mind, almost
a spiritual glow which is rarely apparent in the printed page. Of her
family life we are told practically nothing--not even the date of Mr.
Reginald Nevill's death is given.
Many of the anecdotes in the book are old, but we have not met this
before. Lady Pollington, Lady Dorothy Nevill's sister, "adored dancing,
her love of which may be realised when it is stated that the night
before her only son was born she was at Lady Salisbury's dance in
Arlington Street till one-thirty and her son was born at three." New
to us also is the story of the petition presented to the United States
Congress "by some zealots who entertained strong religious objections
against the use of oil." Mr. Nevill does not assign its precise date,
but gives it as an instance of "mid-Victorian bigotry."
The signatories to this remarkable document prayed that a stop
might be put to the irreverent and irreligious proceedings of
various citizens in drawing petroleum from the bosom of the earth,
thus "checking the designs of the Almighty," Who, they said, had
undoubtedly stored it there with a view to the last day, "when all
things shall be destroyed."
Mr. Nevill tells us one thing about his mother which possibly reveals
her character and the temper of her time more truly than anything else
in the book: it seems to belong to the England of General Gordon and
Lady Burton. Lady Dorothy practised illumination, presumably as taught
in the once popular Owen Jones' volume.
One of the works she executed was Hood's _Song of the Shirt_, another
was _The Service for the Burial of the Dead_, which she finished and
signed in 1848, when twenty-two years of age--a curious instance of
the strange mixture of seriousness and vivacity which went to form a
highly original mind.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
INDUSTRY AND TRADE. By ALFRED MARSHALL. Macmillan. 18_s._ net.
Dr. Marshall's well-known _Principles of Economics_ was published as
long ago as 1890. For many years he continued to work at the volume
with which he designed to follow that, but weak health, as well as
heavy professional duties and much time devoted to the public service,
made his progress slow. It is only now, therefore, after an interval
of nearly thirty years, that he has been able to complete the present
book. And even so his scheme is not yet complete, for there is still
a companion volume to come, which will deal with "influences on the
conditions of man's life and work exerted by the resources available
for employment; by money and credit; by international trade; and by
social endeavour."
_Industry and Trade_ is a monument of lucidity and carefulness. Every
student of economics will read it with interest, even though it does
not appear to throw much new light on the problems it discusses. Dr.
Marshall traces out for us in a general way the technical evolution
of industry, both in this country and elsewhere. We have an analysis
of the conditions which produced in turn the industrial leadership
of Britain, of France, of Germany, of the United States. We have a
minute discussion of the dominant tendencies of business organisations,
the expansion of the unit, the application of scientific method, the
problems of joint-stock companies, of banking, of marketing. And
finally the question of monopolies is examined--the American and
German experience of trusts and cartels, the great movement towards
aggregation, federation, and co-operation in British trade. Dr.
Marshall writes throughout in a spirit of large and rather fatherly
benevolence, here reproving some "anti-social practices" of trade
unionism, there gently censuring abuses of power by a trust. It is
admirable, of course, but there are times when his elaborate avoidance
of partisanship and his cautious non-committal attitude leave the
reader a little perplexed. Dr. Marshall tells us that his aim has
been to present as accurate a picture as he can without advocating
any particular conclusions. This is very well in a general way, but
where an economic problem becomes an ethical problem a conclusion may
not be an altogether bad thing. There are two chapters devoted to a
consideration of "Scientific Management," in which the author has
certainly achieved an almost superhuman impartiality. He thinks, as
everyone does, that there is much that is valuable in the application
of efficiency methods in industry. He does not think that the worker
need be unduly strained by scientific management. He is apparently
doubtful about the danger of monotony that it introduces. Finally, he
suggests that "though it be true that scientific management diminishes
the need of the operative for resource and judgment in small matters,
it may help him ... to estimate the characters of those who bear
large responsibilities. Unless and until he can do that, democratic
control of industry will be full of hazards." True, but some bolder
critics will turn back a few pages and refer to a quotation given of
some of Mr. F. W. Taylor's principles: "All possible brain-work should
be removed from the shop and centred in the planning department,
leaving for the foreman and gang-bosses work strictly executive in
its nature.... Each man must ... adapt his methods to the many new
standards and grow accustomed to receiving and obeying directions
covering details large and small, which in the past have been left to
his individual judgment." Will a manipulation of human beings on these
lines really make ideal "democratic controllers of industry"? Leaving
the desirability or undesirability of such control out of the question
it will certainly be argued that Mr. Taylor's is not the way to get
it. However, Dr. Marshall admits that American methods of scientific
management will need to be somewhat modified before they can obtain a
very wide acceptance in British industry. He does not discuss how they
are being modified in their application in this country, where a good
many experiments are actually being made.
* * * * *
In general, the book presents us with a pretty bright picture of
capitalist industry. There is much that needs to be altered, yet
progress, we are reminded, has been great: education has spread, the
standard of comfort of the working-class has risen enormously, and
"both competition and combination in Anglo-Saxon countries generally
have been more inclined to construction than to destruction: emulation
has often given an incitement to exertion stronger than that which
was derived from the desire for gain...." We are not to be led away,
therefore, by large socialistic schemes of reform. Collectivism
would be unfavourable to the best solution of men for the most
responsible work in industry; National Guilds "look only at the surface
difficulties of business" and promise to lead us into nothing but
chaos.
INFLATION. By J. SHIELD NICHOLSON, M.A., Sc.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
(Professor of Political Economy in the University of Edinburgh). King.
3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Until the other day we all thought we were threatened with national
bankruptcy, and a great many people think so still, despite the recent
rapid conversion to optimism of the Government and the House of
Commons. Professor Nicholson, we are sure, is not one of those who are
impressed by the change. His interesting and outspoken little book may
be summed up in two sentences--"The principal cause of the disorder of
the body politic is the abuse of paper money," and "Our present need
is to get back to a sound monetary system and to get rid of the mirage
of inflation." He does not believe in the theory that an internal debt
"makes no difference": that it is merely a transference from one set
of pockets to another. And he does not think that the burden of the
debt can be removed either by a capital levy or by a continuance of
inflation, which, as he gloomily observes, is a popular remedy, both
with the industrial and commercial classes. If that continues, its
evils will continue--high profits, high wages, higher prices, and a
general scarcity. The great practical difficulty is to stop the rise
in prices. It may be done partly by greater output and lower profits,
partly by reduced public expenditure, but, above all, by a reduction in
the volume of paper currency. For that, Professor Nicholson observes,
moral courage is needed, and also hard thinking.
IRISH IMPRESSIONS. By G. K. CHESTERTON. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
"These are the notes of a visit to Ireland during the dark days when
a last effort was made to undo the blunders that had wrecked the
great promise of Irish recruitment." Mr. Chesterton, in lamenting the
fact that a large section of the Irish population remained neutral in
the war, blames both sides. The case against England and the British
Government is familiar; but, he argues, however badly Ireland may
have been treated in the past, and however the Irish situation was
mishandled in the early days of the war, the Sinn Feiners are still to
be blamed. They were as men who should have abstained from Marathon
because of a quarrel with some archon, or refused to fight Attila
because of a grievance against Ætius. All civilization was at stake;
that being so, even the claims of nationality should have been, if
necessary, postponed--though, in fact, they would have been actually
assisted had Ireland made the plunge. Mr. Chesterton states with
characteristic force the existence of a definite Irish nationality, a
thing to be perceived in any Irish home. As a practical politician he
believes that the extreme demand for separation can still--though time
presses--be effaced if Dominion Home Rule is offered. The bargaining
peasant lives in the fighting rebel; and when even the last Home Rule
scheme was postponed a genuine disappointment was to be seen throughout
Ireland.
This is his central case. He argues it characteristically: that is
to say, his method of exposition, by means of rapid generalizations,
digressions, witticisms, allusions, will fascinate those who believe
there is great sagacity behind his fireworks, and irritate or bore
those who habitually dislike him. In making out a case for Ireland he
also makes out a case for a rural, a Catholic, and a "distributive"
civilisation. Everywhere there are quotable sayings. He speaks of "the
brilliant bitterness of Dublin and the stagnant optimism of Belfast."
"Modern industrial society," he says, "is fond of problems, and
therefore not at all fond of solutions."
Arguing that on the outbreak of war England abjured her pro-Teutonist
delusions, he says the Sinn Feiners fatally played with the thing they
had always denounced:
That is why the Easter rising was really a black and insane blunder.
It was not because it involved the Irish in a military defeat; it was
because it lost the Irish a great controversial victory. The rebel
deliberately let the tyrant out of a trap; out of the grinning jaws
of the gigantic trap of a joke.
"Imperialism," he observes, "is not an insanity of patriotism; it is
merely an illusion of cosmopolitanism." Such epigrams--and there is
always something in them--are all over the book; but in two places,
where he is talking of the war and of Kettle's death and where he
celebrates the Christian virtues of charity and humility, he reaches an
eloquence almost comparable to that of the magnificent passage at the
close of his _Short History of England_. That passage deserves to go
into all anthologies of English prose henceforth compiled.
THE HANDMAIDEN OF THE NAVY. By G. S. DOORLY. Williams & Norgate. 6_s._
net.
There are still two books which ought to be written about the war.
One is a real novel of the adventures and sufferings of the Merchant
Service, and the other is a historical account of the partnership
between the Navy and the Merchant Service, and that marvellous convoy
organisation which unobtrusively won the war. Mr. Doorly ought to help
with the latter, but we hope he will not attempt the former. These
stories, collected under a cumbrous and not too accurate title, are a
painstaking but disappointing attempt to deal with both. Mr. Doorly
has not the literary gifts necessary to do complete justice to the
human side of his subject, though he faithfully pictures the very real
camaraderie which the convoy established between the naval officer and
the mercantile marine. All his sailors are of the "hearty" type made
familiar by "Bartimeus" and the Press. His troopships "plough their way
across the leagues of ocean towards the great-little island home." The
sinking of a ship is "another foul victory for the wretched Hun." It is
a pity, because Mr. Doorly has clearly had a wide experience, and gives
the fullest account we have yet seen of the intricacies and anxieties
of convoy organisation and escort work, though the convoy of his
stories is a primitive affair compared with the perfected form of 1918.
He is technically accurate and very thorough, and does not shrink from
explaining such complexities as the methods of "zigzagging," and he has
an eye for the humorous sides of submarine warfare. But his accounts of
exciting moments frankly do not excite, and the merchant captain who
says "'Tut-tut,' swallowing a lump in his throat," does not move us as
perhaps he should. Yet it is an interesting little book, and until the
theme receives the treatment it deserves, we hope it will be read.
POLAND AND THE POLES. By A. BRUCE BOSWELL. Methuen. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is a useful and interesting book. It is, as Mr. Boswell says
in his Preface, a series of essays. In these essays he deals with
the Polish people, their national characteristics, their country,
history, literature, music, and art, their industry and commerce, and
their future. Poland, which has for centuries exercised a fascination
over the romantic mind, always makes good reading; and Mr. Boswell
communicates his enthusiasm. He is perhaps not altogether untouched
by that partisanship which seems almost inevitably to fall upon the
foreigner who becomes intimately associated with any nation. The truth
is that all the peoples of the earth have so many good qualities that
it is impossible for anyone who is brought into contact with any one
of them not to feel for it occasionally as a lover or a child. Mr.
Boswell certainly feels for Poland as a lover, and his book is none
the worse for that. At first, however, we thought that he was to
prove one of those whose love of a particular nation engenders hate
of other nations. Indeed, we hardly think that he is altogether fair
to Russians, Jews, and others. But his prejudices are mild compared
to those of most historians, and, despite his frank bias towards the
Polish outlook, when he comes to deal with so vexed a question as that
of the Ukraine he displays a praiseworthy impartiality.
SPORT
SUCCESS IN ATHLETICS AND HOW TO OBTAIN IT. By F. A. M. WEBSTER, T. J.
PRYCE JENKINS, and R. VIVIAN MOSTYN. Sidgwick & Jackson, 10_s._ 6_d._
net.
Every man is more or less an athlete, and training begins in the cradle
and ends with the grave--at least it should do. Unfortunately many
people of our generation were brought up in the languid atmosphere of
Victorianism where ill-health was tolerated, almost worshipped. In due
time we went to school--if it was summer we played cricket; if winter,
we played football; if spring, we ran races and jumped jumps and threw
hammers; but as for any real education in physical culture or athletics
we had none. Every young athlete should read _Success in Athletics_,
for in it he will find very simple and very excellent advice as to
how to train for every branch of field sport. The elements of success
upon which stress is laid are as follows: First, to choose a branch of
athletics suitable to the build of the individual. Second, to build up
the necessary muscles by training at home and in the gymnasium long
before practices are carried out on the track. Third, to study the
scientific side of the particular sport chosen, so as to acquire a
perfect style and to economise energy to the utmost extent.
The book begins very properly with a tribute of respect to athletes
who have fallen in the war; then chapters follow on running, jumping,
hurdling, and throwing weights of all descriptions; there are also
chapters on diet, massage, and clothing, and an appendix on leg
exercises. The book is illustrated with admirable photographs, but
it is a pity that these are not placed more in accordance with the
text. The chapter on "Hurdling" is among the best. The hurdler must
be "tall, fairly slim, and well 'split up,'" which being interpreted
means that his height must be contained in his legs rather than in his
body. He must build up the strength of his legs by special exercises,
such as high kicking, the splits, and skipping; and there is yet
another admirable exercise--the athlete, in a sitting position, puts
himself into the attitude of a hurdler topping a hurdle, the left leg
is stretched straight out, the right leg is at right angles to it, the
knee is bent and the inside of the leg is resting on the ground. The
exercise consists in raising the body so that only the left heel and
the inner side of the right calf are resting on the ground. It is a
most painful and excellent exercise.
We are glad to see that in the chapter on diet athletes are warned
against an excess of meat; one good meat meal a day is all that is
recommended. Meat, besides its nourishment, contains many poisonous
substances which are with difficulty eliminated from the system. Many
a good athlete has been wasted through inattention to this fact. The
chapter on massage is to our mind inadequate.
In the last chapter the following passage occurs: "... it is felt that
a new epoch of athleticism in Great Britain is about to commence--that
an entirely new breed of athletes will arise or be recruited from the
ranks of those who through four and a half years of war have learned
the true meaning of discipline and the importance of close attention to
the least little detail of instruction." Now we all feel that something
good must come after all this suffering and slaughter; the Briton has
proved that he is possessed of true greatness; how can this greatness
be turned to full account? Let us give up once for all this idea of
record-breaking and producing freaks who can jump an inch higher than
any other man or throw a hammer a foot farther. At best that is a
very low ideal, and such over-specialisation produces ugliness and
unhealthiness. The only kind of athlete that we want to contemplate is
the all-round athlete who can run fast and far, jump high and broad,
and have sufficient strength for heavy events. An instance of what
we mean occurs in this book--the pictures of A. E. Flaxman show a
magnificent athlete of about eleven stone; such a man would have to
compete in heavy events with mountains of flesh weighing twenty stone;
hence all Flaxman's symmetry and grace and style are wasted, and the
mountain wins the points for his side. This is all wrong. We should
abandon the practice of selecting one athlete for one event. We should
have teams composed of all-round athletes, each of whom competes in
all events; these athletes will not break records, but they will be
super-athletes such as a great nation should aim at producing. When we
have got rid of this odious specialisation it will be time to aim still
higher, and produce not only the all-round athlete but the all-round
man, made up of mind, character, and muscle, all developed to the
utmost extent.
PHILOSOPHY
AN INVISIBLE KINGDOM. By W. S. LILLY. Chapman & Hall. 15_s._ net.
The late Mr. Lilly was a Roman Catholic journalist who combined
attachment to his faith with adherence to a benevolent paternalism
in politics. This posthumous volume, edited by Dr. William Barry, is
partly concerned with political and sociological problems, though
there are two essays on _Memory_ and _Sleep_ which do little but
review current opinion on those two functions. The political essays
suffer from their date. Although fond of appeals to history, Mr. Lilly
discusses the affairs of the moment from the angle of the moment; there
is much talk of universality, but very little application. Indeed at
times one doubts if he could have seen the precise significance of his
opinions. For instance, he was a determined opponent of democracy,
and quotes with approval Mill's statement that "Equal voting is in
principle wrong"; and he proceeds to state a doctrine of political
justice which does not differ in principle from that stated by Trotsky.
Where Mr. Lilly and Trotsky would differ is, of course, on the question
into whose hands political power was to be put. Also one finds it
difficult to understand how a Roman Catholic can agree--as Mr. Lilly
does--with Ibsen's creed, "The minority is always right." Here are Mr.
Lilly's words:
If there is one lesson written more legibly than another in the
annals of the world it is that majorities are almost always wrong;
but that is the prerogative of minorities--nay, it may even be of a
minority of one. That is the verdict of history. It holds good of all
ages.
Mr. Lilly might contend that he is not bound to square his opinions
with St. Augustine's _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_; but how can his
statement be reconciled with the practice of his Church? All General
Councils, which decide Catholic dogma, have come to their decisions
by taking a vote and accepting the verdict of the majority. This has
been so from the Council of Jerusalem to the Vatican Council. Are we to
believe that only in matters ecclesiastical the minority is wrong?
Mr. Lilly was also rather apt to substitute mere statement for
argument. Thus, in discussing the modern position of women, he writes:
Of course reason itself declares that on the physical and psychical
inequality of the sexes, and on the willing obedience of the weaker,
the happiness of both depends. It is the lesson which Shakespeare has
worked out, with consummate art, in the _Taming of the Shrew_.
It is evident that, whatever may be thought by a modern man or woman
about the equality of the sexes, no satisfactory argument can be
based on the premise that women's physical and psychical inferiority
is an axiom. In his discussion on Socialism and on Trades Unions,
Mr. Lilly displays the same incapacity to understand his opponent's
starting-point. He has plenty of sense and a desire for fairness which
makes him quote Aquinas' declaration on riches--that they are only
lawful if they are possessed justly and used in a proper manner for the
owner and others--and apply it to modern fortunes. His last essay is on
Newman, and is rather inadequate, as it appears to have been written
without reference to Mr. Wilfrid Ward's life. It is too early to
write about that excessively human, lovable spirit in the artificial
language of the official hagiographer: there are, however, sentences
which arouse interest. We do not remember seeing it stated before
that, late in life, Newman "perused translations of _The Critiques of
the Pure_ and _The Practical Reason_, pen in hand--that was his usual
way--and made some notes on them." It would be interesting to see these
notes.
EMERSON AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. By J. ARTHUR HILL. W. Rider. 3_s._ 6_d._
net.
This brief essay on Emerson is marked by enthusiasm, and shows
evidence of a wide acquaintance with Emerson's works, but is otherwise
unremarkable. Mr. Hill gives a brief biography of his hero, and then
discusses him in relation to his views on religion, science, with
chapters on Emerson's style, poetry, and criticism. His last chapter is
a brief _résumé_ of _English Traits_ and _Representative Men_, treating
those very readable books as if they were essays in some unknown
language. Mr. Hill's own opinions hardly inspire one with confidence in
his capacity to interpret emotions.
Beautiful language, true poetry, often contains little truth and not
much passion; we feel that the poetry is in the beauty of the images
evoked, or in the sheer unanalysable charm of the words as sounds,
or--more generally--both combined. The more "thought" there is in
poetry the less poetical it is.
There is much virtue in inverted commas, and no doubt "thought" is
absent from the _Antigone_, the _Divina Commedia_, _Hamlet_, _Paradise
Lost_, _Tintern Abbey_, and _The Ring and the Book_; but we cannot
follow Mr. Hill in his contention that these poems lack truth or
passion. Nor indeed can we remember any poem of which his remark
would be true. Mr. Hill's observations on Emerson's style and his
biographical portions of the essay are not quite so off the mark. Few
readers will accept his very high estimate of Emerson, and he fails
to remove our suspicion that the great American writer, who was never
known to laugh, was at times perilously near being an ordinary prig.
As to Emerson's influence on his contemporaries and successors, it
is generally underestimated. The _Essays_ in particular are always
a delight to youth, and are read with avidity by boys at the most
impressionable age. A great deal of modern individualism, of modern
defiance, which is often put down to the discredit of Ibsen, or
Nietzsche, or Blake, is really due to Emerson. He was the first eminent
man to preach disobedience as an ethical duty; his conscience was
always uneasy if he caught himself conforming; and this uneasiness,
which a more vigorous man in a more natural society would have
recognised as an emotional mood, Emerson distorted into a kind of
council of perfection. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,"
he proclaims exaltedly, not seeing that this sentiment has, as a
generalisation, already been contradicted by his birth and his
marriage, and is to be finally quashed by his death.
SCIENCE
A TREATISE ON GYROSCOPIC AND ROTATIONAL MOTION. By ANDREW GRAY, F.R.S.
Macmillan. 42_s._ net.
It was quite time that we had in English a standard treatise on
gyroscopic motion. Space is, of course, devoted to the subject in
various well-known text-books on rigid dynamics, and there are one
or two good little books of an elementary nature, such as Perry's
_Spinning Tops_ and Crabtree's _Spinning Tops and Gyroscopic Motion_,
but hitherto the man in search of detailed information on problems
concerning tops in the widest sense has had to go to Klein and
Sommerfeld's _Theorie des Kreisels_, if he could not find what he
wanted in Sir George Greenhill's _Report_. That Professor Gray should
be the man to supply our want is only fitting. At the University of
Glasgow, where he succeeded to the chair of Natural Philosophy left
vacant by Lord Kelvin's death, an interest in gyroscopic motion is
traditional, and Professor Gray inherited a collection of apparatus
for experiment in this field which he has extended by many ingenious
and convenient forms of gyroscope described in the book before us.
His own researches on the general dynamics of gyroscopic systems have
added clearness to that branch of applied mathematics, and his son
is an expert in the design and application of practical gyrostats. A
judicious combination of experimental and theoretical treatment forms
the great attraction of Professor Gray's book.
The problems of gyroscopic motion range from the behaviour of the
schoolboy's top to that of this great top, the earth, and include a
great number of engineering applications. The torpedo is kept in its
course by a gyroscope; the gyroscopic compass, which makes no use
of magnetic properties, has rendered possible the navigation of a
submerged submarine; Schlich invented a gyroscopic apparatus, which
has been tried successfully in small ships, for keeping a vessel from
rolling in a rough sea; with Brennan's monorail the car is kept upright
by means of a gyroscopic device; and many other ingenious uses have
been made of the seemingly paradoxical properties of spinning tops. The
gyroscopic compass is, unfortunately, not treated in Professor Gray's
book, nor is there any account of other naval and military applications
of the gyroscope, since the author, finding that the official secrecy,
necessarily imposed at the time of writing, would prevent him giving
anything but a fragmentary account, has preferred to reserve his
discussion of these appliances to a promised second volume. Very little
is said of the monorail (in fact, Brennan's name is not mentioned),
which is less explicable. Many practical applications of gyroscopic
theory to such problems as the drift of projectiles, golf balls, and
boomerangs (the last-named treated necessarily in a very general
manner) come up for consideration, and the forgotten diabolo, child of
a passing craze, is resurrected to provide an example of the effect
of equality of the principal moments of inertia on the stability of
rotation of a body under no forces. Most attention is, however, given
to the first two subjects mentioned above--the top spinning on a flat
surface, and the earth spinning through space--which are, of course,
the classical problems in rotational dynamics. It need scarcely be said
that Sir George Greenhill's work is abundantly cited.
"In the present work my aim has been to refer, as far as possible, each
gyrostatic problem directly to first principles, and to derive the
solutions by steps which could be interpreted at every stage of the
progress," says the author in his preface, and he has followed this aim
with considerable success. It is, of course, impossible to treat many
of the problems of rotational dynamics without mathematical analysis of
some complexity, and a knowledge of elliptic functions and such-like
weapons of the applied mathematician lies, perhaps, outside the scope
of the average engineer and inventor. Professor Gray, who deplores the
present ignorance of inventors in the matter of gyroscopic motion, has
kept the needs of this class before him, and has taken care to arrange
his matter so that those who cannot always follow the mathematical
exposition given can, at least, gain a clear knowledge of the results.
The first chapter, which contains no mathematical symbols, forms an
excellent introduction to the subject and is quite elementary, and
elsewhere in the book, when practical problems, such as the drift of
a projectile, are being discussed, the nature of the investigation is
stated as simply as may be. Throughout the inquiry is illustrated, as
far as possible, by experiment and diagram.
"Les Anglais enseignent la méchanique comme une science expérimentale;
sur le continent, on l'expose toujours plus ou moins comme une science
déductive et _a priori_. Ce sont les Anglais qui ont raison, cela va
sans dire." In these words, the late Henri Poincaré, the greatest
mathematician of his generation, praised the British tradition of
teaching dynamics as an experimental subject, which is so well
maintained in this book. Some specialists, no doubt, will find minor
omissions in their subject, but, on the whole, with the exceptions
already noted, the book is very complete. It is printed with the
well-known elegance in all that pertains to mathematical symbols of
the firm of Robert Maclehose, and the general production is very good.
We do not understand, however, why the illustrations in the first
chapter are nearly all reproduced a second time further on in the book,
especially as they are mostly photographs of apparatus, which do not
necessitate frequent reference. And--the question that has to be asked
so often with English books--why is the index so defective?
EVERYDAY EFFICIENCY: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO EFFICIENT LIVING. By FORBES
LINDSAY. W. Rider & Son. 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
It is stated in the preface that the material of this _Practical Guide
to Efficient Living_ has been used extensively as a correspondence
course, so that anyone who is thinking of paying pounds to be taught
by post how to be efficient can save most of his money. All the most
notable authorities on Efficiency--Ike Marvel, Buddha, Arnold Bennett,
Walter Dill Scott, Prentice Mulford, Yoritomo-Tashi, and Baudelaire (to
what the last-named said is added what he might have said)--are quoted,
and many varieties of type and a liberal use of capital letters add to
the strenuousness of the book. There is much about Ideals ("Ultimate
and Other Ideals") and much about Money, much about Character Formation
and much about Vocational Efficiency. We attribute our own inefficiency
largely to the fact that we cannot whistle, for this seemingly trivial
accomplishment is of far-reaching use--"Whistle and wear a smile for
fifteen minutes, and you will most assuredly begin to feel cheerful";
"Sing and whistle as you dress." But, again, we have not done the
essential thing, which is, we are told, to read the lessons of the
Course again and again, and to devote close thought to them. Alas,
we fell a victim to Waning Will, a fault early handled in the book,
and although somewhat comforted to learn that it is a "common form of
weakness," we could not bring ourselves to adopt the cure, which is
"When a resolution is formed, record it definitely in your file under
the head of Ideals, Aspirations, Tasks, Duties, or other appropriate
designation." The appropriate designation for the reading of this book
is undoubtedly Task. The author, who has also written books entitled
_Efficiency_ and _The Psychology of a Sale_, is a man who has evidently
obeyed his own great precept, "Don't admit any limit to your attainment
and capacity." His intense self-respect will prevent him feeling hurt
on learning that a smile is the only aid to efficiency which we have
derived from his book.
ANAPHYLAXIS AND ANTI-ANAPHYLAXIS. By DR. A. BESREDKA. English Edition
by S. Roodhouse Gloyne. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
Medical research bears so directly on the well-being of every one of
us that it is astonishing that more people do not take an interest
in it. The existing indifference may be attributed partly to the
lack of good popular books describing recent advances in an easily
comprehensible way, partly to the nomenclature adopted by the medical
profession, which is apt to frighten the layman into imagining that
the exotic polysyllables in question can be used only for phenomena
of unimaginable complexity and obscurity. Complex they always are, of
course, with the complexity of all natural manifestations, but very
often the main lines of the problems which have arisen, and the methods
of attack, can be stated in plain language. The book before us, which
deals with the profoundly interesting subject of anaphylaxis, is not
avowedly written for the enlightenment of the public, yet it is in
most parts accessible to anybody with a slight knowledge of medicine,
and, not being a "popular" book, it has the advantage of being free
from the erroneous generalisations so often introduced in presenting
a branch of science to the lay reader. The subject is described as one
still in the course of development, and is not given that false air of
completion so dear to the populariser.
The phenomena of anaphylaxis are among the most striking in medical
science, and have only recently been investigated, for although
isolated cases of what we should now call anaphylaxis had been
previously noted, Richet was the first to show the significance and
extent of the subject in his memoir of 1902, in which he established
many of the most important points. The essence of anaphylaxis is that
the injection into an animal of a small quantity of one of certain
substances--which in some cases are, and in others are not, poisons
(with a poison the dose must, of course, be less than the fatal
one)--puts the animal in a particular sensitive state, so that a very
small second injection produces fatal results of a very violent and
well-marked character. Some time must elapse after the first injection
for the sensitive state to establish itself, and the second injection
must be of exactly the same nature as the first, this latter fact
constituting the so-called specificity of the anaphylactic effect.
This specificity has been applied for identifying blood of a doubtful
source, since an animal which has been sensitised with an injection
of blood from a given species is sensitive only to blood of the same
species. Further, the blood of an animal in the sensitive state can
be used to render another animal sensitive, a result known as passive
anaphylaxis.
The important bearing of anaphylaxis on clinical practice is obvious.
With therapeutic sera accidents have been fairly common in the
past, grave effects following a second injection; this is a pure
anaphylactic phenomenon. Much research has been done to find out
methods of preventing the anaphylactic shock, and the most important
advances in the field of anti-anaphylaxis are due to Dr. Besredka. His
book naturally devotes much space to this aspect of the study, and
gives details of the successful technique which he has developed. He
worked mainly on guinea-pigs, having obtained extreme regularity of
reaction with these animals. His most important result, both from the
theoretical and the practical standpoint, is that vaccination against
anaphylaxis can be produced by a system of gradually increasing doses,
starting with the injection of a very small amount of the substance in
question. This has led to a routine for serum injection by graduated
doses, which has been successful in averting serum sickness. Besredka's
interpretation of his results is against Richet's theory that the
second injection combines with a substance, the toxogenin, present in
the serum as a consequence of the first injection, and so produces a
poison, the apotoxin. He considers rather that the reaction of the
injected substance, the antigen, with the substance already formed
(which he calls sensibilisin) itself produces the fatal result by
disturbing the equilibrium of certain nerve cells where the combination
takes place. By graduating the doses the reaction is watered down
into a series of slight shocks, so that the great shock produced by a
single injection is spread over a comparatively large time, and becomes
innocuous. He finds an analogy between the effect and the mixing of
water and sulphuric acid. If the water is poured in quickly there is an
explosive action, but if it is added gradually the combination takes
place without violence. "In our opinion the anaphylactic poison does
not exist."
There are a great number of interesting experiments cited in the book
which we cannot mention here. The translator has done his work well,
although we do not like some of his importations from the French. It
should not be impossible to find expression more English than "titre of
toxicity" and "fulminating cases." He has added an excellent chapter on
"Recent Work on Anaphylaxis." We are glad to see at last a short work
in English on the subject, which is one of the most fascinating fields
in modern medicine. Somebody should translate and bring up to date
Richet's excellent little book. It is a pity that the nomenclature of
the subject cannot be made uniform.
THE NEW TEACHING SERIES OF PRACTICAL TEXT-BOOKS:
APPLIED BOTANY. By G. S. M. ELLIS.
FOUNDATIONS OF ENGINEERING. By W. H. SPIKES.
CHEMISTRY FROM THE INDUSTRIAL STANDPOINT. By P. C. L. THORNE.
Hodder & Stoughton. 4_s._ 6_d._ net each.
This new series is rather pompously announced as striving to build
"up the New Humanism on the basis of the student's immediate economic
interest and environment" (which implies a considerable modification of
the accepted meaning of Humanism). We translate this as meaning that
it is intended to give the reader some idea of the various sciences
and arts as they find application in industry and commerce. This is a
worthy object, and, on the whole, the books are simple and interesting
expositions of the utilitarian aspect of the sciences in question.
There is, perhaps inevitably, a tendency to hurry over fundamental
difficulties which will not, we think, leave an intelligent student
satisfied. For instance, to say that a force is whatever changes
motion, without further explanation, may well puzzle the reader, who
knows that he can push against a heavy stone without producing any
apparent motion. However, there is a distinct place for books of this
general character, which do good work by showing to a wide audience
the peaceful achievements of science and its practical aspects; they
act as a counterblast to the deadening tradition of rule of thumb.
The industrial chemistry is particularly comprehensive, and has an
excellent set of original diagrams of industrial plant. The series is
well printed and well illustrated, and, for present times, moderately
priced. It deserves wide recognition.
PROJECTIVE VECTOR ALGEBRA. By L. SILBERSTEIN. G. Bell & Sons. 7_s._
6_d._ net.
It is not often that a book appears describing an essential advance
in pure mathematics which is intelligible to the man of moderate
attainments in that science--by moderate attainments we mean such
knowledge of mathematics as is picked up in one or two years at
a university. Dr. Silberstein, who is well known in this country
for his original work, especially in connection with the theory of
relativity, has, in his _Protective Vector Algebra_, developed his
latest researches in geometry in a form which is attractive and free
from pedantic formalities, and has throughout aimed at simplicity of
expression, in contrast to certain modern mathematicians who endeavour
to lend importance to minor conventional problems by a bewildering
display of definitions and theorems. The essential novelty of the book,
from which the whole theme is developed, is the generalised definition
of the addition of vectors, which does not need any construction of
parallel lines, but depends solely on a straight line construction
making use of the points where the vectors cut an arbitrary fixed
straight line. Dr. Silberstein's definition is a generalisation of the
Euclidean one, to which it reduces if the arbitrary line just mentioned
is moved away to infinity, and if the space is Euclidean. The knowledge
of geometry which is demanded is little more than the usual postulates
of projective geometry and Desargues' theorem. From his definition the
author proceeds to prove the associative law, and then, after dealing
with the equality of non-coinitial vectors, gives many interesting uses
of the generalised vector algebra. The proof of Pascal's theorem gives
a striking example of the power and simplicity of the new method, and
the whole treatment of conics will delight the student of projective
geometry. Altogether the book is a very original and striking
contribution to a fascinating branch of mathematics.
BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
The important work done by the private presses of the last twenty-five
years will probably be found to be in its results more far-reaching
than that done in any other artistic craft. For, in addition to giving
the world monumental editions of chosen works, such as the _Kelmscott
Chaucer_, the _Doves Bible_, and the _Ashendene Dante_, they have set
up the right standards in type lettering, margins, spacing, paper,
illustration, and binding.
Even in binding they have set a standard that can be widely applied;
for the linen back and paper sides that were good enough for a
Kelmscott Press book set an example of wholesome plainness that has
done a great deal to improve the task of publisher and public. The
publisher of this generation is in strong reaction, as a rule, against
the cloth gilt extra of his father and grandfather. _The Artistic
Crafts Series_, edited by Professor W. R. Lethaby, is a notable example
of such a plain, useful cover. One of the earliest, the first I think,
of this series was that dealing with Bookbinding, and doubtless this
was largely the cause of the series starting right in the matter of
covers. One regrets that there wasn't a printer available to have
influenced the choice of type and dimensions of the page--the series
that is satisfactory in both respects has not yet been published.
Type, paper, proportions of printed page and margins, and finally
the cover, are the chief matters to be considered in producing a
satisfactory book, and all of these cost no more--with the exception of
paper--when right than when they are unsatisfactory. Even in the matter
of paper, there is a wide range of choice, in normal times, at every
price above the very cheapest.
One generally sees the best attempts at book-production in small
volumes of verse. Some of them are very attractive and show that care
and thought have been spent in producing them. Yet, as a rule, they
show some weakness, some lapse, to which the amateur is liable. The
little book of verse, _Arcades Ambo_, by Lily Dougall and Gilbert
Sheldon, published by Blackwell of Oxford, is an instance. A pleasant
type, based on that of Jenson, the Venetian printer, pleasing both in
design and weight (the thin lines are not in strong contrast to the
thicks), predisposes us in favour of the book at first glance. The
normal margins are good without being excessive, but they are spoilt on
most openings by the dropped beginnings of each poem. Thus, on pages
22, 23, instead of the tail margins being three-quarters of an inch
more than the head margins (the normal), they are practically equal.
The result is that the type appears uncomfortably low on the page. Yet
the good Venetian capital lines would have given an excellent line to
the top of the page. The three-line initials are not in keeping with
the capitals of the text; for their thin strokes are in too great a
contrast with their thick strokes. Moreover, they are of a different
shape--note the "T" in the text, and compare with the initial on page
22. The little black ornament in the headlines and the arrangement of
the title-page and the label are also unsatisfactory. The press work
is good, the inking of the type being full and even, and does the good
design of the type full justice.
Another book with pleasant margins--perhaps a little more at the
head would have been an improvement--is Max Beerbohm's _Seven Men_,
published by Wm. Heinemann. (Miss Dane's _Legend_ is, roughly, uniform
with it.) To secure a good foredge margin without unduly shortening the
line the book is half an inch wider than the ordinary crown octavo;
this gives a squarer format, which is much preferable to the ordinary
octavo. Such a format, too, gives the binder, in case the book is
thought worth a leather binding, a chance to make a good design for the
sides--the ordinary octavo precludes certain good designs. I cannot
commend the "modern" type which has been chosen for this book; but I
will discuss "modern" type on some other occasion.
A LETTER FROM AMERICA
_New York, November, 1919_
American life, as it now is, would seem to make original literary
production almost impossible. Energy here cannot work distinctively;
it is forced at its very birth into one or the other prepared channel.
No one who has not lived in this country can have any conception of
the unrelenting and unremitting drive that would subdue, and does
subdue, all thought, all feeling, to mediocrity. It is a drive of vast
circumference: no single activity, whether political or artistic or
religious, can escape it. Religion, indeed, it has destroyed; there is
no religion in America. The experiences of religion can only be felt
by the man who has realised himself as an individual terribly separate
and distinct from all others--an individual whose soul has awful
significance as a thing-in-itself, a thing eternally unmatched, forever
recognisable by God. Such conceptions cannot breathe the American air:
neither terror nor awe nor mystery have room within the borders of this
sceptical and destructive continent. The implacable rule prevails: that
the soul may have no adventures of its own.
"Adventures," indeed, there are, and many. You can go in for anything
you like--everybody does--provided that you go in for it in groups. You
may present yourself for the smearing of a particular brush, you may
band yourself with those who have received a similar treatment. You may
become a "society man," a church worker, a Bolshevik revolutionary, a
philanderer, a writer of _vers libre_, a "realistic" sex-novelist, a
Cubist, or a Futurist; but whatever you become, you will always know
precisely where you are and precisely what will come of your being
there. Every square inch of your region will be defined. And the
conventionalities of every cult are essentially identical; the set
phrases of the man about town or the church worker have the same ring
as the set phrases of the littérateur. The raisers of the standards of
artistic or political revolt will expound their theories in just the
same way, except for the mere words, as the business man will expound
his. The various samples of modern American "free verse" resemble
one another quite as closely--they keep quite as deliberately clear
of individual distinction--as do the articles in the magazines of
culture or the jokes in the comic sections of the Sunday papers. Their
own conventions weigh no less heavily on the unconventional than the
most hidebound provincial's do on him. Even the wicked know what is
expected of them, and they, no less than the virtuous, answer public
expectation. Conventional or unconventional, virtuous or wicked,
all enact their ordered and calculable rôles according to schedule;
there can be nothing unexpected anywhere, nothing that can startle or
embarrass or discomfort or strike wonder.
Can we say, then, that literature, like wickedness and virtue, like
religion--and, of course, education--does not, and cannot, exist at
all in America? Is it really true that nothing at this moment can
be expected from the land of Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman? Has
America no authentic poet now writing, no novelist? Even granting that
American conditions are intolerable to the man of artistic impulse,
and that most artists must be paralysed by them or forced to a sterile
cleverness, must there not be some, at least, who will react?--react
violently and at least interestingly and with a certain distinction
against the pressure of their period? How about Mr. Theodore
Dreiser and Mr. Edgar Lee Masters? What of the novels of Mr. Joseph
Hergesheimer? Is not Mr. Dreiser at least original? Have not critics of
well-reputed judgment written, strongly moved, of his "deep original
mysticism"--that mysticism which "penetrates the rough chaotic surface
of American life" and "lays bare its primitive foundations"? Has not
the genius of Mr. Dreiser been credited with the "impetus of a huge
cosmic plough"?
Yes: and in America one can understand an enthusiasm for Mr. Dreiser,
but only in America. This writer has courage, that is undeniable:
the courage to look with the naked eye at as much of American life
as he can bring within his heavily-blinkered vision. It is not a
slight thing to have achieved so direct a gaze in a country where
sentimental make-believe triumphs more amazingly and more comically
than in any other country under the sun. On this account we can forgive
Mr. Dreiser his unequalled incapacity for artistic selection, his
unvarying preference for making fifty or a hundred sentences do the
work of one; we can forgive him the dullness of his æsthetic nerve, his
mountainously heaped banalities of phrase, his grinding tediousness,
his incoherence, his clumsiness that produces the distressing effect of
some obtruded physical deformity. At least he has done something: he
has given us a sense of the Middle West that is almost as depressing,
almost as spiritually devastating as any that actual contact with
the Middle West itself can produce. He is a realist: and it is an
extraordinary feat of heroism to be a realist in America. But if Mr.
Dreiser had written in any European country, he could not have been
read. The tremendous strain that he imposes on his readers is only
tolerable because they feel that he is doing something, or, with the
throaty groans and gastric rumbles of an elderly Hercules badly out of
condition, trying to do something that no one else has found the nerve
or the stomach to attempt.
It will be asked if Mr. Edgar Lee Masters has not also the distinction
of having dared to tell the truth in a land where, whenever truth
shows itself, public opinion is instantly on the alert to suppress it.
Does not the author of the _Spoon River Anthology_ expose, powerfully
and memorably, the vices of the respectable provincial bourgeois, the
"Pillars of Society"? But again the question may be raised--did the
_Spoon River Anthology_ enjoy its vogue on account of its power and
distinction as a work of art, or on account of the unusualness that
lay in the subjection of American material to treatment of the kind?
Guy de Maupassant had, long since, the same idea as Mr. Edgar Lee
Masters, and de Maupassant executed it with genius. If a European,
coming after de Maupassant, after Ibsen, had written such an Anthology
from, say, the Potteries, with so much less than de Maupassant's or
Ibsen's power, would his work have made any noticeable impression?
Time will show--indeed it has done much to show already--how much less
formidable Mr. Masters's power is. And how unfortunate that, induced by
the success of _Spoon River_, Mr. Masters should have committed himself
to other verse--rhymed verse, schoolboy exercises limping after models,
otiose in expression, commonplace in thought. Mr. Masters writes in
America: there is nothing to keep him back.
Mr. Dreiser, it is true, has never done anything quite so deplorable as
the later verse of Mr. Masters: the tendencies of the author of _The
Titan_ and _The Genius_ go another way. Intrigued by the fantasies of
pseudo-scientific speculation he has of late taken to writing queerly
and embarrassingly juvenile plays and stories about "energies" that
form the subject-matter of Physics: he makes ponderous Teutonic play
with electrons and the like. Or, stung by the crass persecution of
American Puritanism, he writes grimly and solemnly and staidly about
lust, turning pornographer out of a quaint and harassed sense of
moral duty, or, it may be, merely out of obstinate combativeness,
under impulse to retaliation. Mr. Dreiser is at least a phenomenon of
psychological interest.
There are no poets who are in any way observable, but there is Mr.
Joseph Hergesheimer, whose novels have been highly commended on both
sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, his style, self-conscious though it
is, has an unquestionable claim to serious regard. His honesty in
characterisation, his vigour, his sense of the running sap of human
existence, his energy in narrative, all mark him out. We can hardly,
after our later experience of them, expect any new values, any
development, from Mr. Dreiser or from Mr. Masters; we can justifiably
expect a good deal more from Mr. Hergesheimer than we have yet had,
for he has only begun. _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Java Head_ point
the way perhaps to much more considerable novels. Mr. Hergesheimer,
far less unsurely than any other American writer of to-day, gives us
hope for the future of American literature. To anyone familiar with the
conditions of American life, it is amazing that he should have been
able to write so well, to advance so far under so heavy a handicap.
But, of course, no conditions of life are all-powerful. The individual
will in the end escape from under the blight and the burden of any
general mass whatsoever; partial evasions herald complete release.
In ten years time, maybe--or in twenty--there will be very different
letters to be written from America.
News there is little. Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, the one American
writer of verse who shows signs of genius, is projecting a visit to
England, and Mr. Hugh Walpole, Lord Dunsany, and Mr. Drinkwater are
touring the country as so many of their British colleagues have done
before. Mr. Walpole's addresses are very popular. Mr. Drinkwater has
been more than once to Springfield, the shrine of Abraham Lincoln, in
whom he now has a sort of property, and Lord Dunsany has been lecturing
to a large audience at the Æolian Hall in this city. His reception was
marred by excited interruptions from patriotic Irishwomen who wanted to
know why he had ignored the grievances of his country. In a despairing
way he repeated again and again, "I am a poet, not a politician."
R. E. C.
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
The influence of the war is plainly seen in the Society's programme
for the coming session, and the prospect of exploring the ancient
seats of civilisation hitherto under Turkish rule will give general
satisfaction. The Latin monastic buildings of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre will be described and illustrated, and a mosaic pavement
found at Um Jerar during the advance in Palestine will be discussed.
In Mesopotamia official excavations have been carried out at Ur of
the Chaldees, Abu Shahrain, and El-Obeid; a Sumerian figure has been
found, dating from the pre-Semitic period; and a marble slab of
about 1200 A.D., carved with a double-headed eagle, has found its
way to the British Museum from the neighbourhood of Diarbekr. The
heraldry of Cyprus and recent excavations in that island are other
items from abroad; but discoveries at home will not be neglected. The
megalithic monument known as Wayland's Smithy (caricatured by Scott in
_Kenilworth_) was thoroughly examined last summer; a report is promised
on excavations at Templeborough, a Roman camp between Sheffield and
Rotherham; and a small ivory carving of the later Anglo-Saxon period
from St. Cross will take rank as a rarity of peculiar charm. It reached
Winchester Museum unprotected among a miscellaneous collection of
fossils.
THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY
The Society was just preparing to recover from the loss it suffered by
the death of Dr. Furnivall when the war broke out. The officials had
to do their best to keep the Society going whilst many members were
away. A tentative unofficial revival of the annual report was made
official and permanent, but several winter meetings were suppressed on
grounds of war economy. The question of a proposed official phonetic
transcription came before the Council, which also considered that
of adhesion--as a section--to the British Association. In 1917 the
seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society's foundation was celebrated.
Recent publications include _The Tale of the Armament of Igor_, A.D.
1185, translated from the Russian by Leonard A. Magnus; an address on
Jacob Grimm; and a paper by Sir James Wilson, K.C.S.I., on _The Dialect
of the New Forest in Hampshire_ (as spoken in the village of Burley).
The President this year is Sir Israel Gollancz, and the secretary Mr.
Leonard C. Wharton, of 31 Greville Road, N.W. 6. Forthcoming meetings
(at University College) will be held on December 5th, January 9th, and
February 6th, the subjects being _Existing Parts of Speech Distinctions
have no Topical Basis_ (Mr. H. O. Coleman), _A Middle English Topic_
(Sir I. Gollancz), and _The Perception of Sound_ (Dr. W. Perrett). New
members are wanted. The subscription is a guinea.
THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS
We are hearing at the present moment a good deal about the Enabling
Bill, and considerable interest has been evinced at the large majority
which approved its second reading. This is not without its bearing on
a matter in which the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
feels very strongly--_i.e._, that the laity should not only have a
voice in church legislation, but that where church buildings (which
may legitimately be looked on as national possessions of the highest
value) are concerned the public has a right to know of improvements or
additions which may be in contemplation, and to express its approval or
disapproval of any such scheme.
Two cases which have come to the notice of the Society within the last
two months have brought this subject again to the fore. In the present
condition of things the Dean and Chapter of a Cathedral can exercise
an arbitrary ruling over the structure under its charge which none can
gainsay.
In certain cases, doubtless, no great harm may result even from the
arbitrary decision of a small body of men who may or may not have
any architectural or archæological knowledge, but the past bears
many glaring instances in which succeeding generations have had good
reason to deplore that in a preceding age a Dean and Chapter has held
undisputed sway and worked its will.
What is needed is that it should be made illegal to add to or alter
a cathedral--in fact, to do anything beyond ordinary works of
upkeep (which do not involve removing stones or timbers from the
structure)--without the permission of either the advisory board set up
under the Ancient Monuments Act (1913), or, if the church would prefer
it, some advisory board on which the opinion of such societies as the
Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Institute of British Architects,
and this Society would be represented equally with the dignatories
of the church. This is a case about which the public should express
its opinion so strongly that a revision of the existing system would
inevitably follow.
THE EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND
The Egypt Exploration Fund is arranging a series of lectures to be
given in the rooms of the Royal Society, Burlington House (by the kind
permission of the President and Council). The lectures are primarily
for the benefit of its own members and subscribers, but others will be
admitted by tickets, which can be obtained gratis by application to the
Secretary of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 13 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.
The first of these lectures was delivered on Friday, November 21st,
at 8.30 p.m. The chair was taken by Professor Percy G. Newberry, and
the lecture, entitled "The Egyptian Origin of the Alphabet," was given
by Mr. T. Eric Peet, who urged the view that both the North Semitic
and South Semitic alphabets, from which together the Greek alphabet
was derived, were derived in their turn from a common source which
was taken, on the acrophonic principle, from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
This argument is largely based on the inscriptions discovered in 1905
at Serâbît-el-Khâdim, in the Sinai peninsula, by an expedition of the
Egypt Exploration Fund. The fund has recently published a pamphlet
dealing with its aims and accomplishments, in which it is pointed out
that Egyptology to-day demands more precise and scientific methods than
were formerly employed, and that, as Egypt is now a protectorate of
the British Empire, the responsibility for safeguarding the records of
its history must be accepted by this country in a fuller measure than
heretofore.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
At a meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society on November 20th, Mr.
Harold Mattingly read a paper on "The Republican Origins of the Roman
Imperial Coinage." His main contention was that the Imperial coinage
was the direct successor not of the Republican mint of Rome, but of
the coinage of the "Imperator" in the provinces, as issued from about
83 B.C. onwards. He traced the history of military coinages under the
Republic and brought evidence to show that it was not till about the
time of Sulla that the "Imperator" himself exercised the right of
striking coins. He then showed how out of this provincial coinage the
coinage of the triumvirs naturally developed, and again from that
coinage of Augustus. Augustus chose to found his system on this basis
in view of the failure of the triumvirs, following in the steps of
Julius Cæsar, to establish a personal coinage at the Republican mint of
Rome.
THE GEOLOGISTS' ASSOCIATION
This Association celebrated its sixtieth anniversary on December 7th,
1918, when a Lecture was delivered by Major Sir Douglas Mawson, in the
Architectural Theatre, University College, Gower Street, W.C.1, on
"The Glaciation of Antarctica." During 1919 several important papers
have been read, including the Annual Address by the President, Mr. J.
F. N. Green, B.A., F.G.S., on "The Vulcanicity of the Lake District"
and a paper on "Old Age and Extinction in Fossils," by Dr. W. D. Lang.
Three parts of the Proceedings for 1919 have already been published
containing a full report of Dr. Lang's paper, another paper by the
same authority on "The Evolution of Ammonites," and the Presidential
Address by the Past-President, Mr. George Barrow, F.G.S., on "Some
Future Work for the Geologists' Association," which is an interesting
and exhaustive study of the post-Eocene deposits of clays, sands and
gravels, older than the River Terrace deposits. The Proceedings also
contain accounts of the excursions made to certain places of geological
interest during the year. At Easter an excursion was conducted to the
Bristol District by Professor S. H. Reynolds and Mr. J. W. Tutcher, and
at Whitsuntide the Association visited the Isle of Wight, under the
guidance of Mr. G. W. Colenutt and Mr. R. W. Hooley. Llangollen was
selected as the district for the "Long Excursion" in August, and about
forty members spent a week in the study of the Ordovician, Silurian
and Carboniferous systems of the neighbourhood. Mr. L. J. Wills, M.A.,
F.G.S., was the Conductor. Excursions were also made to Sevenoaks,
Farnham, Berkhamstead, Codicote (Herts), St. George's Hill (Weybridge),
Box Hill, Headley Heath and Epsom. The first meeting of the Winter
Session was held at University College on November 7th, which was
followed by a conversazione. Many exhibits were made of Fossils and
Flint Implements. Mr. Llewellyn Treacher showed a fine specimen, one of
the largest known, of a flattened, pear-shaped late Chellean implement,
12½ inches long, recently found in the Maidenhead gravels; a slab of
shale studded with Graptolites, from the Tarannon of Peebleshire, was
exhibited by Mr. R. J. A. Eckford; and Mr. J. Francis showed many fine
examples of Jurassic Ammonites and Belemnites, illustrating chambers,
septa, siphuncles and sutures.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
[_This list is a selection._]
A PRIMER OF FRENCH LITERATURE. Clarendon Press. 1866 (fourth edition,
revised, 1912).
JOHN DRYDEN. Macmillan. 1878. (English Men of Letters Series.)
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF LE SAGE. Privately printed,
London, 1881.
A SHORT HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. Clarendon Press. 1882 (Current
edition, 1917).
FRENCH LYRICS. Kegan Paul. 1882. (Parchment Library.)
MARLBOROUGH. Long. 1885. (English Worthies.)
A HISTORY OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. Macmillan. 1887 (ninth edition,
1907).
[The material in this volume deals with the larger "Elizabethan"
period from Wyatt and Surrey to the Restoration.]
MANCHESTER: A HISTORY OF THE TOWN. Longmans. 1887.
ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1780-1860. Percival. 1890.
THE EARL OF DERBY. Dent. 1890. Prime Ministers of Queen Victoria.
ESSAYS ON FRENCH NOVELISTS. Percival. 1891.
MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. Percival. 1892 (second edition, Rivington, 1895).
THE COOKERY OF THE PARTRIDGE. 1893. (Watson's Fur and Feather Series.)
THE COOKERY OF THE GROUSE. 1894. (Watson's Fur and Feather Series.)
CORRECTED IMPRESSIONS. Essays on Victorian Writers. Heinemann. 1895.
ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1780-1860. Second Series. Dent. 1895.
INAUGURAL ADDRESS AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, October 15th, 1895.
Blackwood. 1895.
SIR WALTER SCOTT: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Walter Scott Co. 1896. (Famous
Scots Series.)
A HISTORY OF NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE, 1780-1895. Macmillan. 1896.
THE FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. Blackwood. 1897.
(Periods of European Literature.)
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Macmillan. 1898.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 1899. (Modern English Writers.)
HISTORY OF CRITICISM AND LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE. From the earliest
texts to the present day. Three volumes. Blackwood. 1900-4.
THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Blackwood. 1901. (Periods of European
Literature.)
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSODY FROM THE TWELFTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT
DAY. Two volumes. Macmillan. 1906.
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY. Blackwood. 1907. (Periods of European
Literature.)
HISTORICAL MANUAL OF ENGLISH PROSODY. Macmillan. 1910.
THE HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF THE ENGLISH LYRIC. 1912. (From
_Proceedings_ of the British Academy.)
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM. Macmillan. 1912.
THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Dent. 1913. (Channels of English Literature.)
A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 1914.
THE PEACE OF THE AUGUSTANS. A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literature
as a place of rest and refreshment. G. Bell. 1916.
A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL TO THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Macmillan. Vol. I., 1917. Vol. II., 1919.
LOCI CRITICI. Passages Illustrative of Critical Theory and Practice
from Aristotle downwards; selections, part translation, and
arrangement. Ginn. 1903.
CAROLINE POETS. Clarendon Press. Two volumes. (The complete works
of certain minor Caroline Poets with reproductions of first edition
title-pages, etc., and introductions to thirteen poets. A third volume
is in preparation.) 1905.
[Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_, Ayres's works, and other rarities are
here to be found.]
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. _Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle_; _Melincourt_;
_Gryll Grange_; _Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey_; _Misfortunes of
Elphin and Rhododaphne_.
He has also edited various series: the works of Dryden, Fielding,
Goldsmith, Herrick, Montaigne, Racine, Donne (Poems), Longfellow,
Shadwell, Thackeray, Richardson, Smollett, Sterne, Swift, and numerous
collected or selected works of English and French authors.
He has written prefatory memoirs to _Pride and Prejudice_, _Merope_,
_A Calendar of Verse_, _Gil Blas_, J. B. B. Nichols' _Words and Days_,
Scott's _Lives of the Novelists_, Staël's _Corinne_, and various
separate works of Thackeray, and he contributed many chapters to the
_Cambridge History of English Literature_.
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
_Verse_
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF J. E. FLECKER. Edited with an introduction by J.
C. Squire. Secker. 1916.
[Contains several poems not published before Flecker's death.]
SELECTED POEMS. Secker. 1918.
* * * * *
THE BRIDGE OF FIRE. Elkin Mathews. 1908.
[In the Vigo Cabinet Series.]
THIRTY-SIX POEMS. Adelphi Press. 1910.
FORTY-TWO POEMS. Dent. 1911.
[A reissue of the last with additions.]
THE GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND. Goschen. 1913.
[This book, which contains Flecker's Parnassian preface, was
subsequently taken over by Martin Secker.]
THE OLD SHIPS. Poetry Bookshop. 1915.
[Published just after Flecker's death.]
THE BURIAL IN ENGLAND. 1915.
GOD SAVE THE KING. 1915.
[Each of these was privately printed in a very small edition by
Clement K. Shorter.]
_Prose_
THE LAST GENERATION. New Age Press. 1908.
[A short satire.]
THE GRECIANS: A DIALOGUE ON EDUCATION. Dent. 1910.
THE SCHOLAR'S ITALIAN GRAMMAR: An Introduction to the Latin origin of
Italian. D. Nutt. 1911.
THE KING OF ALSANDER: A NOVEL. Goschen. 1914.
[Now published by Allen & Unwin.]
DRAMA
THE POETIC DRAMA
The question, Is there or is there not a future for poetic drama?--that
is to say, drama wholly or principally in verse--is very much like
the question, Is there a future for sport? There are times when
everybody seems to be talking about sport, times when even bookworms
begin to play ping-pong; there are other periods--one thinks of
the novels of George Eliot and Thackeray--when the world seems to
have been without sport, and in the England of Jane Austen and the
Brontës (contemporaries of Chopin) the sportswoman-composer, the
"horsy" musician revealed in the pages of Miss Ethel Smyth's recent
_Memoirs_ is a figure less conceivable than the Phœnix. But through the
darkest of ages sport has persisted, often as nothing more than the
eccentricity of a few cranks, who in the eyes of the world about them
have neglected serious affairs "idly to knock about a ball."
It was characteristic of a utilitarian age that sport and the poetic
drama should have been abandoned together for what the unhappy people
of that time, caught in an unimaginative and rigid scientific theory,
thought to be "real life." The spirit of the age was like the sudden
seriousness that seizes a young man when he first realises that he has
great ability and that he must improve the universe. It is a state of
mind that rests upon the conviction that one knows everything, and
that what ought to be done is always as plain as a pikestaff. Once the
bottom is knocked out of that omniscient self-confidence the whole
policy and fabric of the time crumbles to pieces, and that is exactly
what happened towards the beginning of the twentieth century when the
scientists, like the decent fellows they are, began to realise that the
great clarity and understanding which had fallen upon the middle of
the nineteenth century was in reality a thick fog. But the old mental
attitude persisted well into the present century, and is by no means
yet dead. Owing to the way in which it brought the young intellectuals
into practical affairs and set them studying economics and political
policy, chiefly under the influence of that great spiritual survival of
the nineteenth century, Mr. Bernard Shaw--who happened by a freak of
nature which suggests the comic chuckle of an all-seeing God, to have
a passion for writing plays--that utilitarian influence continued to
pervade the drama when it had almost faded from the rest of literature.
Mr. Shaw's plays are really a sort of inverted Smiles' _Self-Help_,
and might well be called _Plays for Paralysing the Puny Emotions_--all
emotions being puny to Mr. Shaw and Mr. Samuel Smiles compared with
the necessity of getting on--with the job! With Mr. Smiles the job
is one's own career, with Mr. Shaw the career of the universe--that
is the only difference. The young intelligentsia of to-day, having
almost all of them become materialists under the influence I have just
mentioned, have at last, however, begun to realise that the universe
is not only not going to have the career planned for it by Mr. Shaw
or any other group of thinkers, but also that to plan a career for
the universe is like planning an "occupation" for the Sun. To imagine
that in a Daylight Saving Bill you have set the course of the Sun is
to imagine exactly what this social-political school of realists has
imagined in its programme for the universe! Naturally, when one knows
what the world ought to be, and knows one has the power to produce that
ideal, one has no time to spare for sport or for letting one's feelings
interfere with one's business. Supermen, like self-made men, have no
time for sentiment. It is here that we find the link--which might
escape the superficial glance--between Samuel Smiles and Nietzsche, who
has had such an influence on the Shavian school. It explains, also, why
this school was so largely "pacificist" during the war, for really its
intellectual sympathies were with the Prussians, whose philosophic
justification was that they alone had the right conception--the
conception of an efficient world--and that it was their task, in
fact, their duty, to bring this conception forcibly into being. Such
ideas always bring in their train a morality wholly opposed to sport
and to poetry--a morality whose essence is the duty of preaching to
the unenlightened. The drama became suddenly useful as a vehicle for
intellectual propaganda.
The Intellectual Drama
The young intellectuals began to go to the theatre for the pleasure of
hearing their theories preached at a public unable to answer back or
easily to walk out, but dumbly conscious that it had paid its money to
be entertained, and was having its head punched. It is no wonder that
the drama suddenly became so popular with the intelligentsia. Here was
an end to crying in the wilderness, to preaching your world panacea in
dull tracts and essays! They had hit upon a method of getting the man
in the street actually to pay to be instructed in the true doctrine,
thinking that he was going to see the drama of the modern Shakespeare
or of one who was "greater than Shakespeare." This, of course, was
hailed as a great dramatic revival, and in so far as it brought the
intellectuals back to the theatre which they had deserted, it was
a revival. That is to say, it was a revival of the intellectuals,
not of the theatre. You do not revive the drama by pouring into it
a mass of sociological or philosophical theories, any more than you
could be said to have revived poetry by suddenly writing verses about
machines. One of the chief objects of art is to keep alive in our minds
the realisation of the extraordinary depth and complexity of life.
All the greatest dramatists do this; that is why people write books
called _The Problem of Hamlet_; but the characteristic of this modern
school of realists is not only that they are propagandists--that is
to say, expounders of a certain point of view--but that they really
believe that they understand the world. With that amazing certainty
which is the hall-mark of the materialistic mind, the mind to which
everything presents a hard, distinct superficies, they have no doubts
about anything, and they display a set of characters who, to use a
horrible but expressive phrase, are "all there." These characters
are worthy inhabitants of the world as it appears to their creators.
A world whose stupidity and wrong-headedness is so extraordinarily
obvious--a world in which it is always so patent what ought to be done,
that when one lives in it for the space of two or three hours during
the play's performance one feels like a higher mathematician with a
child's problem out of Euclid. This outrageous simplification and
externalising of life is an intellectual mania fatal to great drama.
It is the antithesis of poetry, just as we have seen war become the
antithesis of sport, thereby offending the soundest instincts of the
English people who, though they could find no arguments against the
Prussian intellectual logic, yet felt dumbly but intensely that this
simplification of war to something which shut out all ethics and all
play made war damnable and finally unendurable.
We find now the war is over that this drama, whether written to get
slums abolished, to expose prostitution, to draw attention to our
prison laws, to expound socialism, to influence our marriage customs,
to kill conventions, to explain strikes, or merely to be witty at the
stupidity of mankind, is no longer in demand. There will always be a
place for comedy, however bitter, savage, and loveless, and all the
subjects named are traditional and excellent for the comic dramatist;
but a comedy which is cold at heart, a comedy in which there is no
love, occupies a very insignificant position in dramatic literature. At
this moment the stage is mainly held by the stage play, which is little
more than the bare bones of drama, the actors' device for entertaining
an audience, resembling conjuring and the displays of acrobats. This
kind of thing will always be more plentiful than poetic drama, for the
simple reason that it is easier to obtain and easier to appreciate.
Mr. Sutro's _The Choice_, as well as _The Voice from the Minaret_, by
Mr. Robert Hichens, and Mr. Arnold Bennett's _Sacred and Profane Love_
belong to this category. I find them often much more entertaining than
the drama of ideas which to-day lives on the first ghost of its former
self, in such a play as Mr. Maltby's _A Temporary Gentleman_, which
has naturally won the approval of no less a person than Mr. William
Archer. Mr. Archer has lately had the courage to declare that he has no
use for the poetic drama of the Elizabethans (Shakespeare excepted).
This is not surprising. Mr. Archer has been the champion of the school
of modern English dramatists gathered around Ibsen and Mr. Shaw. It
is natural to most Scotsmen to prefer argument to poetry, and Mr.
Archer's animadversions on the Elizabethans only reveal Mr. Archer's
limitations. But he will find that whereas a quarter of a century ago
what he wanted to say was exactly what the young men and women wanted
to hear, now nobody has the slightest interest in discussing social
problems on the stage, and _A Doll's House_ and _Man and Superman_
are more absolutely dead than Tennyson's _Becket_. It is amazing to
feel the change. I was at Oxford a short time ago, and I found that
the forthcoming performances by the newly-formed Phœnix Society of
Webster's _Duchess of Malfi_ and other Elizabethan plays aroused the
same interest and excitement there as I had felt myself. It is evident
that the last wave of Victorian materialism is rapidly ebbing. The Age
of Drains is past. This does not mean that we shall sink back into the
diphtheric state from which the Victorians rescued us; it is simply
that after two or three decades during which the young intellectuals
have been annually sucked into a frenzied enthusiasm for social reform
there has come a reaction in which we have suddenly had quite another
vision of life--a vision far more profound and closer to reality than
the one concentrated in the famous saying: "What is the matter with the
poor is their poverty"--which has been the social slogan of the last
decade.
Materialism and Poetry
It is important to stress this connection of the drama with life,
because if we are going to have, as I believe, poetic drama in the near
future, it will be because it is the best dramatic form for expressing
what we feel, and as the demand must come in the first place from the
intellectuals--since in them alone are the common desires sufficiently
conscious--it was impossible to get a flowering of poetic drama until
the intelligentsia had recovered from the epidemic of materialism,
and had begun to feel the need of something more satisfying than
glittering theories of reforming mankind by pure economics. The leaders
of materialistic thought have always been uncomfortable about art,
and have never been completely honest. In their uneasiness as to its
practical value they have explained it on the ground that art develops
and trains the senses--pictures train the eye, music trains the ear,
drama presumably trains both.
To knock the bottom out of this ridiculous nonsense one has only to
ask: What drama would you give a man in order to train him to pick up
pins in the dark? Is it any wonder that the leaders of this precious
substitute for thought could not appreciate Shakespeare, and is it any
wonder that under their influence poetic drama has been extinct? The
deadening influence of this utilitarian materialism has not only been
felt in drama, it has been present in the whole life of the community;
but the masses have been less subject to it than the intelligentsia,
that is why the masses on the whole have stayed away from the
intellectual theatre and have patronised the purely sporting, purely
poetic, utterly useless Revue, Musical Comedy, and Farce. And their
instinct has been sound, as sound as it is when they ignore the offer
from the same quarter of a social millennium to be obtained merely by
the exercise of logic. But the result has been a wider cleavage between
the people and the intelligentsia than has ever existed before, and
most of the dissatisfaction with the present state of the theatre is
due to this fact.
It is a curious thing, but Mr. Herbert Trench, in his fine play
_Napoleon_, which was produced last month at the Stage Society, and
made a strong impression, occasionally touches on the very idea I have
been setting forth. His _Napoleon_ is a type of the materialistic
intellectual who has a routine plan for the universe, and he harps
continually on "order," as if "order" were something simple, something
he had invented to enable the universe to run smoothly: "Your tide-work
taught you poetry. I seek order," he says to Wickham--and it sounds
like Mr. Shaw or some intellectual dramatist speaking. I will quote
one passage from the central scene--the scene between Napoleon and
Wickham--which really puts the case against the intellectuals:
_Wickham:_ . . . . . . .
Because you have no love you have no eyes;
Your naked energy, working lovelessly,
Be it balanced like a planet is not wise.
* * * * *
How we have suffered from you, ghosts of Cæsar,
Suffered through concentrations of our hope,
Age after age about your glittering figures,
That have polarized and crystallized and chained
Awake! Rome left our tribes one great bequest,
Her law. That's in our blood, absorbed for ever.
But is then Europe's many-fountained forest
Bubbling with ten thousand springs of life--clans, nations,
Coloured by the ruddy soils from whence they spring,
Is this multi-coloured, insuppressible world
To be controll'd from one centre? Not again!
To be twice Roman'd? Never!
The grass will lift you as it lifts the stone.
Mr. Trench's play is a beginning. If we had--what is an elementary
requirement of civilisation--a National Theatre, we would certainly see
Mr. Trench's play there, and I should not be in the least surprised to
find it a popular success. The public will never demand Mr. Trench's
play; but then the public never demanded compulsory education, much as
it needed it. I have little doubt but that what the public needs in the
theatre to-day is poetic drama.
* * * * *
The Phœnix Society produced Webster's _The Duchess of Malfi_ on
November 23rd. The performance will be noticed next month. The date of
the production of Dryden's _Marriage à la Mode_ has not yet been fixed.
* * * * *
A series of French Classical _Matinées_ is being given by Mlle. Gina
Palerme at the Duke of York's Theatre on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at
2.30. The plays will be produced as at La Comédie Française, with
original music by Lully and other old masters. The list of plays is as
follows: _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ (Molière), _Le Malade Imaginaire_
(Molière), _Les Précieuses Ridicules_ (Molière), _Le Barbier de
Seville_ (Beaumarchais), _Les Romanesques_ (Rostand), _Le Voyage de Mr.
Perrichon_ (Laliche).
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
BEN JONSON'S EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR. Edited by PERCY SIMPSON.
Clarendon Press. 6_s._
This is a pioneer volume to a complete edition of Ben Jonson's works,
projected by Professor C. H. Herford and Mr. Percy Simpson, and its
excellence is such that it is fervently to be hoped that we shall not
have to wait long for the companion volumes. When these appear nothing
more will be needed, and it will be possible for the ordinary person to
read Jonson without floundering hopelessly among the maze of queries
which the text at present available raises, and which its paucity of
notes does nothing to explain. Mr. Simpson's admirable introduction
deals with the quarto and folio texts, the date of the play's revision,
and the general question of the portraiture of humours. It contains
some excellent criticism of Jonson's revisions, and Mr. Simpson comes
to the conclusion that Jonson began preparing the folio edition in
1612, and his reasons are, on the whole, convincing. There are sixty
pages of notes.
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE. By ARNOLD BENNETT. Chatto & Windus. 3_s._ 6_d._
A writer of Mr. Arnold Bennett's eminence and great sagacity would
be the last person to expect us to take this play seriously as a
contribution to dramatic literature. Although it is a play of modern
life in the most colloquial prose, it has less reality than the wildest
and most phantasmagoric drama of the Elizabethans. We may not expect
Mr. Arnold Bennett to create for us an imaginative world of his own in
which there is an inner and satisfying truth, but we look to him to
mirror in his own peculiarly brilliant fashion a part of contemporary
life with that precision which has so often delighted us. There is
nothing in this play that could not actually have happened, but it
is impossible to believe in it as it is happening. Mr. Bennett has
not visualised his people intensely enough; they are mere puppets
borne along by the machinery of the play. This machinery is from the
theatrical point of view effective, and it leaves the creation of the
illusion of life to the flesh and blood of the actors, so that on the
stage the play may have an effect which it can never have when read.
The play, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with sacred or
profane love; no hint of the tremendous reality of love in any sense
appears between its covers.
W. J. TURNER.
THE FINE ARTS
Group Making and Group Breaking
There is a distemper prevalent amongst artists of to-day. I refer to
the mania for group forming. We are told by grave scientists that
we carry in us the germs of various diseases; the latent microbe is
in our system, apt to be shaken into active life by some unforeseen
circumstance. Artists, it would appear, have the germ of "group making"
inborn in their systems; less quiescent than other microbes, it awaits
the often trivial cause for its activity--in some cases too much fame,
in other cases the gall of unnoticed mediocrity. Given, then, one or
other of these causes, a series of events is set in motion.
Mr. Maguilp gathers round him various fellow-brushmen of whose work he
approves and, if he is wise and is conversant with the recipe of group
making, he will exclude from the number any one who will be likely
to offer serious rivalry to his own position; he may also luckily
procure someone who can make play with the quill as well as the brush
to boost him and his band of worthies with the public. A manifesto is
next issued in which the faithful band begs to be entirely dissociated
from any form of art movement prior to its own, and its members
present themselves purged from original influences, risen like several
phœnixes from the fire. They offer, so to say, a firm breakwater to the
untiring waves of mediocrity. Good! After a few exhibitions of their
united work the brothers may be considered established and perhaps
not unnoticed by the critics. But now, mark the subtlety of the evil
genius which haunts artistic circles, the group begins to think of
self-aggrandisement. "Let us have other members, let us enlarge, let
us, in fact, become (fatal word) representative." But these good men
do not really mean "representative," their exact intentions are rather
to increase their numbers by a process of eclecticism. Alas! The most
carefully selected members may develop different ideas after their
election. What trouble might not be averted if we could see the mental
condition, as it were, of every chicken's egg through the shell; to
emphasise this point, however carefully you choose your cabbage there
may always be a slug in it. So, in this little band, which has now
become a "group," there are already forces of unrest, as the papers
say. The stages of dissolution from this point are very rapid: the
undesirables multiply, they question the authority of our original
worthies, they manage to introduce other undesirables, and on all sides
there is mutual suspicion and distrust of each other's motives. "I
fear he intends to swamp us with the work of his followers," or "He
intends to try and get control of the Group" is whispered round. Then
the rot sets in. One member, for convenience A., refuses to show in the
same room as B., as if the mere presence of the latter's work would
corrode the gilt on his frames. Another disagrees with the gallery,
a third has been maliciously hung. Worse follows, for one of our
original friends secedes and forms another group, drawing others away
with him: fresh manifestos are issued, and all original ideas revised,
"We shall burst upon the public," and so on, _da capo al fine_. The
public! What do they think of it all, does it interest them; do our
friends, the artists, fancy that their petty strife is watched with
eager anxiety? Surely to the public this formation and dissolution
of groups must be as puzzling as were the military categories of the
war. A layman, having once become accustomed to one artistic movement,
has his attention diverted to another; on refixing his attention to
the first he finds it split up into other formations. He is as a man
watching a parade of soldiers, he sees each battalion form and reform,
wheel and turn, flaunting the while their separate banners as they
march, a bewildering kinetic display. Samuel Butler used to wonder
why curates could not be hatched fully fledged in surplice and gown,
without the troublesome prelude of ordination. Could not artists be
allocated at birth in a system of unchangeable groups? Now all this
lamentable state of affairs is largely due to "cliquishness," and in a
lesser degree to an inherent distrust of each other which all artists
seem to possess. There is also another contention which hampers them in
their deeper divans. One man regards the exhibition of pictures as a
purely business concern, whereby he hopes to sell his work; another man
imagines it to be an opportunity of displaying, for the education of
the uncultured, the results of his own deep inspiration. The possible
difference in their position may be that the former has to live by what
work he sells, the latter has very likely a private income. If, for
the sake of convenience, we introduce our alphabetical friends again,
B. will despise A. for what appear to him to be mercenary feelings,
while A. holds B. in contempt for amateurishness. Of the two I prefer
A.'s idea because, once he has carried out his painting, his next idea
(a very sensible one too) is to sell it; while B. affects indifference
and thinks A. has been calculating his possible assets between his
brush strokes. This idea is neither just nor relevant. What can be
done for us all? We all want to sell our pictures; what need is there
for pretence, and why are we at the mercy only of a few members of the
"intelligentsia"? After all, I suppose group forming is in a sense
a protective instinct against the dealer, though the results are so
inadequate. What then is the alternative to group making, the remedy
for group breaking?
At the back of my mind I have visions for the future. A huge emporium
for pictures, run on business-like lines, and on a scale which will
put Mr. Gattie's warehouse scheme completely in the shade. Here each
artist may have his work shown in his turn, not one or two isolated
pictures disseminated among the exhibits of fifty other artists, but
each man's work hung in a group that all may see his development, note
his improvement, and criticise his faults. Why not a Selfridge Emporium
for the pictorial arts? "Woodcuts, Madame, fourth floor." Orders for
drawings and paintings and sculpture might be received, and commissions
for decorations undertaken in any possible style. Then imagine the
satisfaction of procuring a Lewis or a Nevinson in the Bargain
Basement: and the sales! "Things _were_ cheap!" as Little Tich says,
especially after the failure of the spring shows.
Mr. Nevinson's Exhibition at the Leicester Galleries
I do not imagine that Sisyphus in Hades ever wantonly let his stone
roll down to the bottom of the hill after his laborious ascent, yet
this is what Mr. Nevinson appears to have done in his passage up
the incline of artistic endeavour. The simile is perhaps not quite
applicable because, to be just, his work has seldom shown outward
evidence of great stress: perhaps it were better if it had. He seems
to have reached with extraordinary ease a position in contemporary art
which was entitled to our respect. We are grieved then, rather than
angry, to see his descent from that position. If this is his Peace
work then give me his War pictures. I suppose we are all conscious
that reconstruction is very slow in realising our anticipations; the
business of changing from war to peace makes this inevitable, but Mr.
Nevinson seems to have rushed, over-hurriedly, from one to the other.
I think he has not considered reconstruction enough, for his outlook
at present is chaotic and rather vulgar. This might be excused on the
ground that he was pulling the public's leg, but the diversion is worn
rather threadbare now. There are a few exceptions in the show, and
moreover his colouring remains good, even shows improvement, and no
one can deny his skill. "See," he cries, "how versatile I am. I have
catered for all sorts of people!" Yes, but _what_ sort of people?
No, we would speak more in sorrow than in anger; as Ruskin addressed
Millais in his decline--"If Mr. Nevinson were to paint nothing but
apricots for four years, etc...." But we feel sure his relapse is only
temporary.
The London Group
The eleventh exhibition at the Mansard Gallery does not differ greatly
from previous exhibitions. Probably most people have ceased to expect
any great surprise, pleasant or otherwise, though there may be still
a few who mount by lift to the gallery with the feeling rather of an
airman approaching some planetary _terra incognita_. I was assured the
other day by a candid friend that "your" London Group was as dull as
the Academy. This uncomfortable sort of person must give us a moment's
heart-searching, but I think nevertheless that the London Group still
holds its own pretty well amongst art exhibitions of to-day. With these
hopeful feelings uppermost let us examine the works displayed for
our notice. The absence of Charles Ginner's work is to be regretted,
and the rather alarming tendency of some artists to fasten on the
characteristics of other artists' work and mould them rather obviously
to their own use is more marked this year than formerly. I feel sure
that several of the members will have to try and throw these ingenious
people off their trail, for it is disconcerting to the highest degree
to find the plagiarist out-doing the original worker at his own job.
One would have thought that Mr. Gertler's apple painting was the last
word in that line, but some people appear to differ and you will find
many feeble echoes of these rare fruit and many paintings also of the
chipped corner variety _ad nauseam_. I do not really know to whom most
sympathy should be extended: to Mr. Gertler for his apples, to Mr.
Fry who is very hotly pursued by his admirers, or to the landscape
painters who, I think, might almost seek the assistance of the patent
law. Mr. Bomberg has returned in great force, and his _Barges_, No.
31, is indeed an earnest of further excellence; all his paintings have
distinction. Mr. Dickey has presented us with a very fine effort in
his _Kentish Town_, a careful and refined painting, very beautiful
in colour. Mr. Gertler's paintings at the Goupil Gallery are more
interesting than his exhibit here. No. 36, _Still Life_, by Mr. Coria,
is a painting of note, despite its cold flatness of texture. The
exhibition deserves more detailed criticism than space permits. There
is great character in the two paintings of _Caledonian Market_, by
Therese Lessore, whose exhibition at the Eldar Gallery is now open. Mr.
Duncan Grant's pleasant _Farmyard_ painting should not go unmentioned,
and there is other good work by A. P. Allinson, Mrs. Bashford, Keith
Baynes, Ethelbert White, and Bernard Meninsky.
ARTISTIC PUBLICATIONS
THE LIFE OF JOHN THOMSON OF DUDDINGSTON. By R. W. NAPIER, F.R.S.A.
Oliver & Boyd. Price 42_s._
This is a vast book. Besides the usual foreword and introduction
there are six chapters in which Mr. Napier most anxiously assures
us that Thomson's evangelical labours and lack of artistic training
in no way interfere with the exercise of his genius. This seems a
little unnecessary; for we are quite ready to take him on his merits.
Then comes the biography proper, and there are also five indices, a
three-part appendix, and six separate catalogues of his work, besides
numerous illustrations, etc. All this immense labour and care over an
artist who I think was not a very significant figure among British
painters. Perhaps he was overshadowed by his contemporaries Turner and
Constable. He was not free, it appears, from the landscape tradition of
Claude and Poussin, which he applied to his own Scottish scenery, and
there would also seem to be a strong influence of Richard Wilson in his
work. For all this, I think we may call him a "great little man," and
Mr. Napier's book will be most valuable to the student of the history
of British art.
JOHN NASH
MUSIC
THE BEECHAM OPERA
The season of opera in English at Covent Garden, which opened at
the beginning of November, offers a programme of unusual interest.
_Tristan_ and _Prince Igor_ are its oldest classics; Mozart, so it is
rumoured, is being held in reserve for a special season of his own. The
list contains hardly a single work that is not either a masterpiece
or at least a novelty. Wagner is represented only by _Tristan_ and
_Parsifal_, Verdi by _Otello_ and _Falstaff_. Except for a few Puccini
operas on Saturdays, the commonplace popular operas that are obliged
to form the backbone of every continental opera-house's repertory have
been struck out altogether. It is certainly to London's credit that
for so uncompromising a choice the response of the public has been
enthusiastic.
As long as Sir Thomas Beecham was fighting the battle of English opera
with dogged persistence and unstinted expenditure of material in the
face of apathy and indifference, and possibly the hostility of vested
interests as well, there was a very general feeling that his courage
and high idealism should not be hampered by a too searching criticism
of his performances. The Beecham opera has by now become an established
institution, and it is inevitable, now that it has taken possession of
Covent Garden, that it should be considered in a more impartial spirit.
It need not fear comparison with the imported opera of the summer
season. It has made its own high standards; but it follows that its
performances must be judged in general by the standards of its highest
individual achievements.
The present season has so far been something of a disappointment.
Several of the operas to be seen have been given over and over again
in the provinces if not in London. In the case of an absolutely new
opera insufficiency of rehearsal may be pardoned; but it is not a
sign of good management when the performance of stock classics is
allowed to become slack and indifferent. Sir Thomas has not been
seen very often at the conductor's desk, and this is the more to be
regretted, since he has a most remarkable genius for pulling through
a performance which in other hands would be always trembling on the
verge of disintegration. He has very little sympathy with singers, it
seems. He always tends to regard the orchestra as the main thing, and
the singers as mere adjuncts to it, so that an opera under his beat
might easily become a symphony with voices _ad libitum_ unless, as,
for instance, in _Trovatore_, the composer has understood voices and
written for them in such a way that nothing could ever dominate them.
Mr. Goossens follows in the steps of his master, but with less genius.
The performance of _Falstaff_ was instructive on this problem. Compared
with that in the other Verdi operas, the treatment of the orchestra
is so complex as to make it almost symphonic in character. None the
less, it is an opera in which the voices must lead and the band
accompany, for if this is not done the work at once becomes patchy and
formless. It requires, in fact, that the singers should have a strong
symphonic sense, should feel themselves all parts of a continuous vocal
_ensemble_ which must be kept going not by the conductor but by their
own co-operative efforts. The orchestra can then accompany, and it must
also play its part with a sense of vocal expression and individual
personality. This is the real difficulty of _Falstaff_. As it was, the
singers had little or no feeling for _ensemble_. I use the word in a
large sense, meaning not merely the passages where several voices are
singing simultaneously, but all those in which the phrase of one voice
is answered directly, or even at some bars' distance, by another. Mr.
Goossens did his best to hold the singers to a steady beat, but he
allowed the orchestra to get very much out of hand. Mr. Percy Pitt has
probably suffered too much from the old conventional Covent Garden
routine. He lets the singers do more or less what they like, and allows
the orchestra to play Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov as if their music
were no more interesting than that of Bellini and Donizetti. The one
salvation of the opera season will be Mr. Albert Coates, who, even
considered merely as a concert conductor, is in a different category
from any of our English conductors. He adds to this a real knowledge
and understanding of the stage, and a personality which has the quality
of being able to get the best possible work out of every single person
under his control. That quality is as rare as it is important.
The stage-management of the season has been, on the whole, good.
_Falstaff_ went with plenty of activity and comic business, if with
nothing else. Indeed, there seems to be a pretty general tendency to
romping, which might well be put under restraint. Romping may pass
with some audiences as a substitute for acting, but it can never,
even in English opera, quite take the place of singing. Singers, it
must be frankly admitted, are the weak point of the Beecham company.
Covent Garden, partly by its own acoustic properties, partly by its
traditions, which no one who enters the house can quite forget, shows
up vocal deficiency only too severely. Sir Thomas Beecham possesses
only one really first-class operatic artist--Mr. Frederick Ranalow. He
is a real actor, equally at home in comedy or tragedy, and always a
real singer. It is because he is a real singer, singing all the time,
that one never misses a single word that he says. He is a musician with
a large understanding of the deeper things of music. His Falstaff forms
a continuous line; as King Mark he makes what with most singers is a
tedious recitative into a perfect song of rare beauty. Mr. Frederick
Austin is a good second; but whereas Mr. Ranalow is a singer who is
also a musician, Mr. Austin is a musician who also sings. Of the other
male singers there is not much to be said. Some have voices, some can
sing, a few can act and throw their words out. At the best they may
in certain cases do remarkably good work in one or two special parts.
Among the ladies the most interesting is Miss Sylvia Nelis. At present
she is little more than a singer. As a singer she goes on steadily
improving, in accomplishment of technique, in diction, and in quality
of tone; indeed, there can be little doubt that if she continues at her
present rate of progress she will from about 1970 onwards be annually
enrapturing the Albert Hall with _Home, Sweet Home_. As an actress
she has a good deal to learn, but with her intelligence and undoubted
capacity for hard work there is no reason why she should not develop
in this direction. Sir Thomas Beecham has hitherto confined her almost
exclusively to _coloratura_ parts; it would be well to give her a
chance in some part that required bright and vivacious acting rather
than vocal agility. Miss Agnes Nicholls has worked so hard to become
an operatic actress that one regrets bitterly the non-existence of the
Beecham company in the days when she made her first appearance. As it
is, she has obviously sung too often in oratorio. That is the great
fault of English singing. It has only two styles (apart from the ballad
concert style)--oratorio or Gilbert-and-Sullivan. Neither of these will
take a singer through _Falstaff_. Miss Nicholls did not happen to be
in her best vocal form that evening; but her acting was surprisingly
good--indeed, she was the only character on the stage, except Mr.
Ranalow and sometimes Mr. Percy Heming as Ford, who gave one a real
impression of a Shakespearean character. Miss Rosina Buckman has also
improved, but is very unequal in different styles. As Isolde she sang
with a firmer sense of rhythm than before, and if she did not act very
convincingly, at least looked--in a black dress with a long white veil
and a small crown--a figure of so queenly a dignity that it was not
surprising to see Mr. Mullings as Tristan keeping a respectful distance
even in the most passionate moments.
Stravinsky's _The Nightingale_ was the nearest approach to a novelty
that has yet appeared. Evidently it had been very inadequately
rehearsed. The performance fell far below the level of the Russian
production at Drury Lane in 1914. Miss Nelis as the Nightingale seemed
to be the only singer who was certain of the notes to be sung, and
almost the only singer who was taking the opera seriously. Stravinsky's
music is a good deal less bewildering now than it was five years ago.
The first act has a good deal of beauty: so has the third. The second
seemed merely bizarre--but the performance did not do the composer much
justice. A modern opera of such intricate difficulty ought to be staged
properly and conscientiously or not at all.
There has not yet been time since the end of the war for foreign
artists to visit England in the large numbers which were inevitable
five or six years ago. Yet even though the givers of concerts are at
the moment almost exclusively natives of this country, or foreigners
who have definitely made England their home, the scarcity of concert
halls is being very acutely felt. Almost every day there are three
concerts at the Æolian and Wigmore Halls, and when operas begin at 7.45
or earlier, music-lovers have often to choose between their first act
or their dinner. What is to happen when travelling conditions become
easier and the annual foreign invasion reaches its full tide?
A new and very attractive series of Sunday evening concerts has been
inaugurated at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, under the direction
of Mr. Arthur Bliss. The programmes have been generally of a simple
and informal character, with a liberal admixture of seventeenth and
eighteenth century music, either for chamber combinations or for what
may be called a chamber orchestra. Designed originally to supply the
artistic needs of the Hammersmith neighbourhood, these concerts have,
as a matter of fact, attracted a great many of the habitual frequenters
of the more central concert-rooms. Mr. Bliss intends to continue his
concerts after Christmas, and has announced for performance several
works, both modern and ancient, which are of exceptional interest.
The Patrons Fund, originally founded by Sir Ernest Palmer, has resumed
its concert-giving activities, but on new and much improved lines.
Instead of giving performances of new English works at public concerts,
the programmes of which contained nothing else but the music of
unknown or almost unknown composers, it is proposed to hold a series
of semi-private rehearsals in the hall of the Royal College of Music,
at which the works selected are tried over and properly studied, as
far as is possible within the limits of a single morning. The first of
these rehearsals took place on November 13th, and it was very generally
agreed that the new system was an undoubted improvement on the old. One
could not help feeling that the atmosphere was both more friendly and
more genuinely critical. There is undoubtedly a very strong feeling
among all lovers of music in this country that the young British
composer deserves far more encouragement than he gets, although it
must be admitted that the young British composer is actually getting a
great deal more than he did twenty or thirty years ago. Rehearsals of
this kind are also of great educational value to the representatives of
the Press, for in the struggle for publicity it is not always the most
serious and genuinely original composers who receive the most attention
in this period of violent and natural reaction against the overcharged
emotionalism of the last generation.
EDWARD J. DENT
SELECT LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
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THE LONDON
MERCURY
_Editor_--J. C. SQUIRE _Assistant-Editor_--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 3 January 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
The first whole year of peace has ended, and it is natural to throw a
backward look upon its literary production. It is certain that to the
historian it will be a year in which various tendencies continued to
act; it is possible that his eye, in long retrospect, will observe in
it the appearance, the sudden appearance, of new literary developments
and important personalities. But it is, as a rule, only in long
retrospect that such portents are recognised as such; and though we
think that during the year certain movements which have been for some
years in existence have been continued, that there are drifts which
are easier to perceive than to analyse, we cannot persuade ourselves
that 1919 added more than the normal amount to the existing volume
of good English literature. It was, in fact, as a literary year very
much like one of the war years. Perhaps it should properly be regarded
itself as a war year. The principal physical factor which, in our
present relation, operated during the war was the absence on service
of the great majority of those young men who would have been beginning
to write. These were, with rare exceptions, precluded by sheer force
of outer circumstances from literary enterprises of a sustained kind;
and, as most of those who survived have left the Army within the last
year, we could scarcely expect so soon as this to find them producing
large and ambitious books. It may also reasonably be argued that the
war-atmosphere still prevails. Peace has come--and it has not yet come
universally or conclusively--not suddenly but with the slowness of a
northern dawn. Problems from which even the most self-sufficing mind
cannot escape harass the intellect and weigh on the spirit of the
civilised world. We are not yet in a position to estimate post-war
literature, for we have not yet got post-war literature.
* * * * *
The opinions of intelligent men may differ to some extent as to which
were the most remarkable novels of 1919; that they were very few is,
we conceive, a matter of general agreement. Of the older novelists,
Mr. Conrad produced in _The Arrow of Gold_ (a work begun long ago and
recently completed) a book which, though not among his masterpieces,
was worthy of him. Mr. Wells, in _The Undying Fire_, a modernisation
of the Book of Job, wrote an imaginative, an exciting, and an eloquent
book. It was much better shaped and trimmed than has lately been usual
with his books, and, for the first time since he abandoned scientific
romance, he concentrated entirely on doing what he can do better than
other people instead of trying to do what he cannot do. The other elder
novelists did nothing that was unexpected and little that was good; and
their successors have not appeared. A Fielding or a Dickens is a rare
product; but we see no young novelists of whom it can be predicted with
any assurance that ten years hence they will occupy places such as are
now occupied by Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett. It seems certain that they
will not be found amongst that pre-war group whose merits Henry James
examined with such generous consideration, whose defects he indicated
with such delicate diffidence, in a famous article which "betrayed"
rather than stated his alarm, even his pity, for the English Novel.
There have been a few books which have attracted attention by their
qualities of construction and detail or by touches of original genius;
but of most of their authors we could not be sure that they will
become even habitual, much less great, novelists. The book which more
than any other appeared to us to be notable, both for its workmanship
and for its imaginative power, was Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer's _Java
Head_--and Mr. Hergesheimer is an American. It was not so good a
book (we think _Java Head_ was the earlier written) as _The Three
Black Pennys_; but the two books are certainly the work of a born
novelist. Miss Romer Wilson, whose _Martin Schuler_ (1918) was a vivid,
vigorous, and original book, published another, and a dull, novel,
_If All These Young Men_, the subject and setting of which offered
less scope to her peculiar gifts: but she is clearly capable of doing
something surprising. Miss Dane's _Legend_ was a remarkable technical
achievement; and Mr. Cournos's _The Mask_, Miss Macaulay's fantasia,
_What Not_, and Mr. Brett Young's _The Young Physician_ were all, in
their degrees, notable for a poetic quality.
* * * * *
Mr. Beerbohm's _Seven Men_ could scarcely be classed with novels. It
was Mr. Beerbohm's best book, than which those who appreciate him
could pay no higher compliment; but Mr. Beerbohm is an artist who
stands outside contemporary movements, literary and other, and one of
whose charms arises from that very detachment. "W. N. P. Barbellion's"
_Journal of a Disappointed Man_ was a full and poignant record
which will probably continue to be read in a narrow circle as Marie
Bashkirtseff's memoirs are read; his posthumous essays, _Enjoying
Life_, are even more convincing evidence of what their author might
have done had he not been stricken by disease. Amongst works of
critical and miscellaneous literature those which will continue to be
enjoyed, or--in some cases--used, are Mr. Festing-Jones's _Life of
Samuel Butler_, Professor Gregory-Smith's _Ben Jonson_, Mr. Gosse's
_Diversions of a Man of Letters_, the late George Wyndham's _Essays
in Romantic Literature_, certain books on the old Drama (Swinburne's
_The Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, and Mr. J. M. Robertson's study of
Hamlet especially), and Miss Ethel Smyth's _Impressions that Remained_.
This last is one of the best autobiographies that have appeared in our
time, and Dr. Smyth during a long and active life as a composer has
been nursing a rich and racy English style.
* * * * *
The department--it is difficult in making such a summary to avoid
the language of the catalogue--in which life has been healthiest has
certainly been poetry. Several of the best and most promising of our
living poets published no book in 1919, but what is incontestably a
revival has continued. Several poets of established reputation have
done better work than ever before. Mr. Hardy has published little, but
his _Collected Poems_, now published, establish once and for all--and,
old as he is, he belongs as a poet to this generation--his right to a
place among the great poets. Mr. Masefield's _Reynard the Fox_ is as
certainly his finest book, as Mr. Herbert Trench's play _Napoleon_,
whatever its defects on the stage, is Mr. Trench's. There is the
largeness about this long and ambitious piece that there was about
some of his earlier and shorter poems, and supremely in his _Requiem
of Archangels_. Mr. Binyon's _The Four Years_ was a collection of the
verses its author had written concerning the war. It contained several
poems made beautiful by the straightforward utterance of a noble and
suffering spirit. Mr. Yeats's _The Wild Swans at Coole_ it would be
affectation to describe as equal in interest to his earlier volumes,
but there were one or two lyrics in it which would adorn any anthology
of English verse; and in Mr. Kipling's _The Years Between_ there were
also flashes of genius. From Mr. Yeats and Mr. Kipling, however, we do
not now expect the unexpected. It is in the hands of the young that
the immediate future of our literature lies. The most notable volumes
by young poets have been (we are tempted to add Mr. Waley's _More
Translations from the Chinese_) Mr. Brett Young's _Poems_ and Mr. John
Freeman's _Memories of Childhood_. But in periodicals and anthologies
there has appeared much new and genuine work. A great deal is to be
found in the fourth volume of _Georgian Poetry_, which was reviewed in
our last number. Mr. de la Mare's latest poems show that his thought
is steadily deepening, whilst he is losing none of that delicacy of
music and beauty of phrase that made his early lyrics as lovely as any
in the language; and both Mr. Sassoon and Mr. Nichols have done work
which makes their future a matter for profound curiosity. Scattered
about in other volumes there have been many single good poems: and it
is the characteristic of a prolific lyrical age that a few good things
are written by many men. We would mention as especially interesting,
in that it is one of the few long successful narrative poems of
recent years, Mr. Aldous Huxley's _Leda_; the myth was difficult and
dangerous, the versification often ungainly, but the poem contained
passages of great strength and beauty. We may add finally Captain
Scott-Moncrieff's fine translation of the _Song of Roland_.
* * * * *
We used the term "a lyrical age." Opinions may and do differ as to
the number and quality of good short poems that have been written in
the last ten years, but that the prevalent tendency amongst the most
intelligent young men is to write poems, and short poems, cannot be
disputed. The paucity of good novels, and especially good novels by
young writers, is not entirely to be ascribed to the fact that during
the war many of those who might have written, and may write, good
novels were not in a position to write books at all. The deflation,
temporary perhaps, of the Novel has been proceeding for some years; the
absence of even tolerable new novelists has been too nearly complete
to be attributable to the peculiar war conditions. The novel of
"psychology," the novel of minute observation, the propagandist novel
are still produced in quantities; but the best literary brains are
not going into them. The drift towards poetry was noticeable before
the war; the war accelerated it. It is not a mere matter of change of
fashion, of a form being worked out and becoming tedious--though we
do, in fact, believe that the next revival of the novel will see a
new development of the novel. It is a matter of a change in attitude
towards life; a return on the broader emotions; a desire to acknowledge
and praise the things men love and find beautiful rather than to labour
at analysis and at speculation--not to mention sophistry. It is mostly
lyric poetry that men are writing; and it is one of the results of the
war, which has intensified our awareness of the old familiar things
around us, which were in a sense threatened for all, and the loss of
which was imminently before millions of individuals, that much of it is
poetry of the English landscape and especially of the English landscape
as a historic thing.
* * * * *
Long poetical works, large essays in the poetic drama, are complacently
manufactured by mediocre writers in most literary epochs. But it is
commonly remarked that in this age men of genius, and particularly
young men in whom genius is suspected, are mostly content with "short
pieces." It is rash to theorise about such things, as the wind has a
way of blowing where it listeth. No one can desire that men should
systematically force themselves to literary undertakings which are
uncongenial and towards which they feel no inner impulse. If a man
agree with that poet who--acutely conscious, it may be, of the nature
of his own talent--said that no good poem should or could be longer
than a couple of hundred lines, he will serve no useful purpose by
manufacturing large patchworks in cold blood. The presumption that any
long work is better than any short one by the same hand is made by
those (we are referring to intelligent men) who do not go to poetry
for the quintessence of poetry, the thing peculiar to it: it is from
those that we hear most insistently the demand for works on the large
scale, and the complaint that modern writers mostly insist (these are
the stock, if unjust and inaccurate, phrases) on writing sonnets to
their mistresses' eyebrows and carving peach-stones.
* * * * *
The fact remains that by the common consent of mankind lyrics
alone--even the lyrics of a Heine, a Herrick, or a Burns--will not
give a man rank with the greatest poetic artists. It may be that in
Poe's sense a work of thousands of lines, which maintains the highest
level of poetry, is impossible; that what Professor Quiller-Couch calls
"the Capital Difficulty of Verse" is insuperable: but this does not
invalidate the claim of the _Iliad_ or _Paradise Lost_ to be considered
greater than _Lycidas_ or the songs of Meleager. That they share in
some measure the defects of _The Purple Island_ and _Pharonnida_
does not prevent _The Fairy Queen_ and _Faust_ being the greatest of
their respective authors' works. From a poet as from another we want
something beyond "jewels five foot long," the loveliest impressions
of the most beautiful particular scenes, reflections of moods, verbal
chamber music, momentary vision, sensibility, song. By the common
consent of mankind the greatest things in the world are those works
which, while full of beautiful details and informed with the poetic
spirit, are moulded to a larger conception and attempt a larger picture
of the Universe, of the destiny of man, or of the moving life of
the world. We can, therefore, to some extent sympathise with those,
however broody and disgruntled, who, when they meet a volume of new and
exquisite lyrics, complain that the author has not written an epic or
a tragedy. Is it likely that the present imaginative revival, assuming
it to exist, will produce tragedies or epics, or works on the scale of
such?
* * * * *
To us it is difficult to believe that it will not: unless the nervous
unrest, the absence of leisure and of the inclination so to employ
leisure, are worse even than we suppose them to be. We see in much
of the work of the younger men a vigour, a passion, a catholicity of
interest, a zest for all life, that nothing but the most ambitious
tasks could satisfy. But when we ask of what nature such works are
likely to be we cannot answer. This one observation may be made: the
demand for long poems is commonly coupled with a demand for doctrine.
The poets are to add to scientific knowledge or to contribute new
notions towards political or moral development: they are to dogmatise,
to enlighten, to direct. Well, poets have done such things. But not
all poets have considered it their business to be religious teachers,
political liberators, or contentious intellectuals. The question: What
did Shakespeare stand for? is disputed to this day. They have read
many theories into him but got very few out of him. That he admired
fidelity, hated cruelty, believed in honour, and loved his country,
might be postulated of him; but the truths he stated there were old
truths, and he stated them only incidentally: he did not write his
plays with the primary object of illustrating principles, above all
principles invented by himself. Milton has been called the poet of
Puritanism, and Shelley the poet of Liberalism, but there is no "ism"
for Shakespeare, and a very, very small one for Keats. The very persons
who most insistently demand "ismatic" poetry are most contemptuous
of the didactic, informative and disputatious parts of the works of
the late Lord Tennyson, who began as a pure Keatsiam poet. _Non omnia
possumus omnes_: and, over and above this, it is most important to
remember that poets, like other men, are affected by the intellectual
conditions of their own times. If there is a clear tendency some of
the poets will be caught up in it. But the men are very rare who
generate their own spiritual revelations in some secluded corner of
an antipathetic world. Wordsworth and Shelley were what is called
"philosophic poets," but their age was the age of Rousseau and Godwin,
of the Libertarian movements that were part cause and part effect of
the French Revolution. If the human spirit is moving in one definite
direction at this moment we can only say that we do not know what that
is. A generation of thorough and often conscienceless scepticism,
followed by a breakdown of civilisation, has produced a mental and
moral chaos, a welter of doubt amid which numbers of the doubters make
random and mutually contradictory affirmations. Something concrete
will, if the race is to live, emerge; but we are not yet in a position
to see it. Nor are we, as mere holders up of the mirror of nature, in a
position as yet to see the vast events in our own material world. For
the great philosophic poem we have probably still many years to wait;
for the epic of the German war we may have a century to wait; for a
great drama we may arguably, owing to the peculiar conditions of the
theatre, have to wait for a generally accepted scale of values which
does not at present exist. But the imaginative temper is abroad, and
the next generation may be a great era in English literature.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
The announcement of a new and especially sumptuous edition of the
works of Mr. Thomas Hardy, to be known as the _Mellstock_, reminds us
that there are other authors to whom the same process might be applied
with equal benefit to themselves and to their readers. The collected
edition presents a writer's career in an orderly shape and in proper
perspective: it first permits a sober and probable judgment to be
passed on his achievement. We understand that the works of Mr. Joseph
Conrad will shortly be collected and issued as a whole; and this will
certainly reveal in a definite manner what is now vaguely felt as to
his greatness. We believe also that a definitive issue of the writings
of Mr. Max Beerbohm is in contemplation. It is to be hoped that it will
be found possible to include the full list of his drawings, in some
shape not too incompatible with the rest of the volumes. The _Collected
Poems_ of Mr. Walter de la Mare have been announced as in preparation;
and this will, we think, mark a definite stage in the career of a poet
whose real value is not yet fully appreciated. But there are authors,
concerning whom no announcement is made, who might be added to the list
with advantage. What might be called "selected-collected" editions
of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton would very likely secure for these
writers a much higher place in contemporary literature than current
opinion is always ready to give them.
* * * * *
Mr. Chesterton will shortly start for the Holy Land. He intends to
write a book about it. The book may, and probably will, be his best,
for obvious reasons. It is commonly remarked even by those who think
him one of the greatest natural geniuses and, at bottom, one of the
wisest men of our time that he has never yet written the books of
which he is capable. His best books, such as _The Ballad of the White
Horse_ and _A Short History of England_, are, for all their fine
qualities, too slight to give his powers full room for display. As a
rule, though he cannot be accused of a lack of energy, he has seemed
never to put into a whole book that last effort which is necessary if
a work is to be completely satisfactory; he has bothered too little,
content to waste his imaginative largesse on hastily-written romances
and polemical articles. How good _The Flying Inn_ might have been had
a little more trouble been taken with it! In Palestine, away from
politics and journalism, with a new and romantic landscape around him,
in the home of our religion and on the fields of the Crusades, he may
provide the last answer to those who do not see an artist in him.
* * * * *
Mr. Percy Lubbock's edition of Henry James's letters will, it is
expected, be published in the spring. Mr. Edmund Gosse, with the
letters as a starting-point, has written his memories of James. These
will be published, in two instalments, in the LONDON MERCURY.
* * * * *
It is five years since James Elroy Flecker died and over three since
his _Collected Poems_ were published. Some of his other literary
remains will probably appear this year. There will be a collected
volume of prose studies and critical articles, and another volume
containing his play _Hassan_, which is awaiting production by Mr. Basil
Dean. Some of those who have read this play say that it is the best
tragedy since Shakespeare. The claim is not so large a one as it may
appear at first sight. There are Ford and Webster. There is _Venice
Preserved_ and there is _The Cenci_, which last is not a great acting
play, though it has magnificent scenes in it and contains sublime
poetry. He who reflects on the history of the English drama since the
age of Elizabeth and James I will be surprised at the paucity of plays
of permanent interest, other than comedies, that have been produced.
* * * * *
Monsieur Yves Delage has presented before the Académie des Sciences
a most interesting note by Monsieur V. Galippe on micro-organisms in
paper. It was, of course, known that paper-making materials of all
kinds abounded with these low forms of life, but it was generally
assumed that they were destroyed by the chemicals and heat employed
during the processes of manufacture. Monsieur Galippe's exhaustive
experiments prove that this is not the case, and, moreover, the
micro-organisms retain their vitality even in printing paper,
apparently irrespective of the lapse of time. Ovoid bacilli were found
both free in the mass and in the fibres of papers of all ages.
The method of examination employed was the following: The paper was
reduced to fragments and steeped in sterilised distilled water, being
frequently stirred. The paper was then dried and again steeped for
several hours in sterilised water saturated with ether. After once more
drying, cultures were taken from the paper.
Eighteenth-century paper thus treated gave positive results within
twenty-four hours, microscopic examination revealing large numbers of
rodlike organisms as well as ovoid diplo-bacilli. A leaf from a printed
book of 1496 gave a quantity of large micrococci, those from the
mass being endowed with movement, and those from the fibre remaining
immobile, though preserving the faculty of multiplication. Old Chinese
manuscripts and Egyptian papyri dating back ten centuries gave similar
results. It is to be noted that exposure to light and air does not
appear to have the slightest influence on these organisms.
Although the bibliophile is more particularly concerned in problems
relating to fox-marks and the ravages of the borer insect, nevertheless
these experiments are of great interest. These investigations, if
carried further, may well furnish some explanation of the processes
leading to the ageing of paper. From such a vantage-point the
technologist might possibly go forward to discover a palliative against
the decay of documents and printed paper. Pessimists would probably
consider this a doubtful blessing, but, on the whole, it would prove a
great boon.
POETRY
_A Glimpse from the Train_
At nine in the morning there passed a church,
At ten there passed me by the sea,
At twelve a town of smoke and smirch,
At two a forest of oak and birch,
And then, on a platform, she.
Her I could see, though she saw not me:
I queried, "Get out to her do I dare?"
But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,
And the wheels moved on. O could it but be
That I had alighted there!
THOMAS HARDY
_Tarantella_
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of the tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the dark of the vine verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in----
And the Ting, Tong, Tang of the Guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground.
No sound:
Only the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.
H. BELLOC
_Lines Written in Gallipoli_[8]
[8] _The author of this poem, a Fellow of All Souls, went
out to Gallipoli in the Royal Naval Division with
Charles Lister, Rupert Brooke, and Denis Browne. He
was afterwards killed in France._
I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die,
I ask and cannot answer
If otherwise wish I.
Fair broke the day this morning
Against the Dardanelles,
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea shells.
But other shells are waiting
Across the Ægean sea,
Shrapnel and high explosive,
Shells and hells for me.
O Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?
Achilles came to Troyland,
And I to Chersonese:
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.
Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and I know not,
So much the happier I.
I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.
PATRICK SHAW-STEWART
_November_
As I walk the misty hill
All is languid, fogged and still;
Not a note of any bird,
Nor any motion's hint is heard
Save from soaking thickets round
Trickle or water's rushing sound,
And from ghostly trees the drip
Of runnel dews or whispering slip
Of leaves, which in a body launch
Listlessly from the stagnant branch,
To strew the marl, already strown
With litter sodden as its own.
A rheum, like blight, hangs on the briers,
And from the clammy ground suspires
A sweet frail sick autumnal scent
Of stale frost furring weeds long spent,
And wafted on, like one who sleeps,
A feeble vapour hangs or creeps,
Exhaling on the fungus mould
A breath of age, fatigue and cold.
Oozed from the bracken's desolate track,
By dark rains havocked and drenched black,
A fog about the coppice drifts
Or slowly thickens up and lifts
Into the moist despondent air.
Mist, grief, and stillness everywhere....
And in me, too, there is no sound
Save welling as of tears profound
Where in me cloud, grief, stillness reign,
And an intolerable pain
Begins.
Rolled on as in a flood there come
Memories of childhood, boyhood, home
And that which, sudden, pangs me most,
Thought of the first-beloved, long lost,
Too easy lost! My cold lips frame
Tremulously the familiar name,
Unheard of her upon my breath:
"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!"
No voice answers on the hill.
All is shrouded, sad and still ...
Stillness, fogged brakes and fog on high.
Only in me the waters cry
Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever.
Hours of boding, joy and fever,
When we loved, by chance beguiled,
I a boy and you a child;
Child! But with an angel's air.
Astonished, eager, unaware,
Or elfin, wandering with grace
Foreign to any fireside race;
And with a gaiety unknown
In the light feet and hair back-blown;
And with a sadness yet more strange
In meagre cheeks which knew to change
Or faint or fired more swift than sight,
And forlorn hands and lips pressed white,
And fragile voice and head downcast
To hide tears, lifted at the last
To speed with one pale smile the wise
Glance of the grey immortal eyes.
How strange it was that we should dare
Compound a miracle so rare
As, twixt this pace and Time's next pace,
Each to discern th' elected's face;
Yet stranger that the high sweet fire,
In hearts nigh foreign to desire,
Could burn, sigh, weep and burn again,
As oh, it never has since then!
Most strange of all that we so young
Dared learn but would not speak love's tongue,
Love pledged but in the reveries
Of our sad and dreaming eyes....
Now upon such journey bound me,
Grief, disquiet and stillness round me,
As bids me where I cannot tell,
Turn I and sigh, unseen, farewell:
Breathe the name as soft as mist,
Lips, which nor kissed her nor were kissed,
And again--a sigh, a death--
"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!"
No voice answers, but the mist
Glows for a moment amethyst
Ere the hid sun dissolves away,
And dimness, growing dimmer gray,
Hides all ... until I nothing see
But the blind walls enclosing me,
And no sound and no motion hear
But the vague water throbbing near,
Sole voice upon the darkening hill,
Where all is blank and dead and still.
ROBERT NICHOLS
_Draft for "A First and Last Song"_
Deep in the harvest of the night the sickle of the moon is
sweeping,
We have sowed, O my desire, now is the time for reaping!
Turn not your face, O heart, give not your love
To aught of heaven or the stars above,
These dauntless robbers purloined long ago
The crown of Kaous, the belt of Kai Khosro;
And what have we to search for in the skies
Who have the blue pavilion of your eyes?
Or what need of the gold gates flung apart
Having the crimson portals of your heart?
... So shall it be when some day by and by
You mount the glitt'ring ramparts of the sky,
Loud to the wheeling heavens you shall boast:
"O sun and moon and Pleiads at the most
You're worth a wisp of barley or of straw
Unseen, unheeded, on Love's threshing floor:
And God the praises that your angels sing
Are all celestial but can never bring
The simple wonder of a mortal's doubt
Upon those faces upturned and devout
That every blessing of Your work recall,
Nor ever need to ask: What means it all?"
Be peace! The hour is passing. Here or there
The curtain swings to lay life's secret bare.
Ah, when the dawn of ending breaks around,
Be it that in Love's garden I am found.
To immortality I leave but this:
Your head reclining in a swoon of bliss,
Your hand uplifted to pour out the wine,
The minstrels singing this one song of mine.
COLERIDGE KENNARD
_A Country Mood_
Take now a country mood,
Resolve, distil it:
Nine Acre swaying alive,
June flowers that fill it,
Spicy sweetbriar bush,
The uneasy wren
Fluttering from ash to birch
And back again,
Milkwort on its low stem,
Spread hawthorn-tree,
Sunlight patching the wood,
A hive-bound bee,
Girls riding nim-nim-nim.
Ladies, trot-trot,
Gentlemen hard at gallop,
Shouting, steam-hot.
Now over the rough turf
Bridles go jingle,
And there's a well-loved pool
By Fox's Dingle
Where Sweetheart, my brown mare,
Old Glory's daughter,
May loll her leathern tongue
In snow-cool water.
ROBERT GRAVES
_Scirocco_
Out of that high pavilion
Where the sick, wind-harassed sun
In the whiteness of the day
Ghostly shone and stole away--
Parchèd with the utter thirst
Of unnumbered Libyan sands,
Thou, cloud-gathering spirit, burst
Out of arid Africa
To the tideless sea, and smote
On our pale, moon-coolèd lands
The hot breath of a lion's throat.
And that furnace-heated breath
Blew into my placid dreams
The heart of fire from whence it came:
Haunt of beauty and of death
Where the forest breaks in flame
Of flaunting blossom, where the flood
Of life pulses hot and stark,
Where a wing'd death breeds in mud
And tumult of tree-shadowed streams--
Black waters, desolately hurled
Through the uttermost, lost, dark,
Secret places of the world.
There, O swift and terrible
Being, wast thou born; and thence,
Like a demon loosed from hell,
Stripped with rending wings the dense
Echoing forests, till their bowed
Plumes of trees like tattered cloud
Were toss'd and torn, and cried aloud
As the wood were rack'd with pain:
Thence thou freed'st thy wings, and soon
From the moaning, stricken plain
In whorlèd eagle-soarings rose
To melt the sun-defeating snows
Of the Mountains of the Moon,
To dull their glaciers with fierce breath,
To slip the avalanches' rein,
To set the laughing torrents free
On the tented desert beneath,
Where men of thirst must wither and die
While the vultures stare in the sun's eye;
Where slowly sifting sands are strown
On broken cities, whose bleaching bones
Whiten in moonlight stone on stone
Over their pitiful dust thy blast
Passed in columns of whirling sand,
Leapt the desert and swept the strand
Of the cool and quiet sea,
Gathering mighty shapes, and proud
Phantoms of monstrous, wave-born cloud,
And northward drove this panoply
Till the sky seemed charging on the land....
Yet, in that plumèd helm, the most
Of thy hot power was cooled or lost,
So that it came to me at length,
Faint and tepid and shorn of strength,
To shiver an olive-grove that heaves
A myriad moonlight-coloured leaves,
And in the stone-pine's dome set free
A murmur of the middle sea:
A puff of warm air in the night
So spent by its impetuous flight
It scarce invades my pillar'd closes,--
To waft their fragrance from the sweet
Buds of my lemon-coloured roses
Or strew blown petals at my feet:
To kiss my cheek with a warm sigh
And in the tired darkness die.
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
Anacapri
THE CREATURES
By WALTER DE LA MARE
It was the ebbing light of evening that recalled me out of my story
to a consciousness of my whereabouts. I dropped my little red book to
my knee and glanced out of the narrow and begrimed oblong window. We
were skirting the eastern coast of cliffs, to the very edge of which
a ploughman, stumbling along behind his two great horses, was driving
the last of his dark furrows. In a cleft far down between the rocks a
cold and idle sea was soundlessly laying its frigid garlands of foam. I
stared over the flat stretch of waters, then turned my head, and looked
with a kind of suddenness into the face of my one fellow-traveller.
He had entered the carriage, all but unheeded, yet not altogether
unresented, at the last country station. His features were a little
obscure in the fading daylight that hung between our four narrow walls,
but apparently his eyes had been fixed on my face for some little time.
He narrowed his lids at this unexpected confrontation, jerked back
his head, and cast a glance out of his mirky glass at the bit of
greenish-bright moon that was struggling into its full brilliance above
the dun, swelling uplands.
"It's a queer experience, railway-travelling," he began abruptly, in
a low, almost deprecating voice, drawing his hand across his eyes.
"One is cast into a passing privacy with a fellow-stranger and then is
gone." It was as if he had been patiently awaiting the attention of a
chosen listener.
I nodded, looking at him. "_That_ privacy, too," he ejaculated, "all
that!" My eyes turned towards the window again: bare, thorned, black
January hedge, inhospitable salt coast, flat waste of northern water.
Our engine-driver promptly shut off his steam, and we slid almost
noiselessly out of sight of sky and sea into a cutting.
"It's a desolate country," I ventured to remark.
"Oh, yes, 'desolate'!" he echoed a little wearily. "But what always
frets me is the way we have of arrogating to ourselves the offices
of judge, jury, and counsel all in one. For my part, I never forget
it--the futility, the presumption. It _leads_ nowhere. We drive
in--into all this silence, this--this 'forsakenness,' this dream of
a world between her lights of day and night time. Consciousness!...
What itching monkeys men are!" He recovered himself, swallowed his
indignation with an obvious gulp. "As if," he continued in more
chastened tones--"as if that other gate were not for ever ajar, into
God knows what of peace and mystery." He stooped forward, lean,
darkened, objurgatory. "Don't we _make_ our world? Isn't _that_ our
blessed, our betrayed responsibility?"
I nodded, and ensconced myself, like a dog in straw, in that basest of
all responses to a rare, even if eccentric, candour--caution.
"Well," he continued, a little weariedly, "that's the indictment. Small
wonder if it will need a trumpet to blare us into that last 'Family
Prayers.' Then perhaps a few solitaries--just a few--will creep out of
their holes and fastnesses, and draw mercy from the merciful on the
cities of the plain. The buried talent will shine none the worse for
the long, long looming of its napery spun from dream and desire.
"Years ago--ten, fifteen, perhaps--I chanced on the queerest specimen
of this order of the 'talented.' Much the same country, too. This"--he
swept his glance out over a now invisible sea--"this is a kind of dwarf
replica of it. More naked, smoother, more sudden and precipitous,
more 'forsaken,' moody. Alone! The trees are shorn there, as if with
monstrous shears, by the winter gales. The air's salt. It is a country
of stones and emerald meadows, of green, meandering, aimless lanes, of
farms set in their clifts and valleys like rough time-bedimmed jewels,
as if by some angel of humanity, wandering between dark and daybreak.
"I was younger then--in body: the youth of the mind is for men of an
age--yours, maybe, and mine. Even then, even at that, I was sickened
of crowds, of that unimaginable London--swarming wilderness of mankind
in which a poor lost thirsty dog from Otherwhere tastes first the
full meaning of that idle word 'forsaken.' 'Forsaken by whom?' is the
question I ask myself now. Visitors to my particular paradise were few
then--as if, my dear sir, we were not all of us visitors, visitants,
revenants, on earth, panting for time in which to tell and share our
secrets, roving in search of the marks that shall prove our quest not
vain, not unprecedented, not a treachery. But let that be.
"I would start off morning after morning, bread and cheese in pocket,
from the bare old house I lodged in, bound for that unforeseen nowhere
for which the heart, the fantasy aches. Lingering hot noondays would
find me stretched in a state half-comatose, yet vigilant, on the
close-flowered turf of the fields or cliffs, on the sun-baked sands
and rocks, soaking in the scene and life around me like some pilgrim
chameleon. It was in hope to lose my way that I would set out. How
shall a man find his way unless he lose it? Now and then I succeeded.
That country is large, and its land and sea marks easily cheat the
stranger. I was still of an age, you see, when my 'small door' was
ajar, and I planted a solid foot to keep it from shutting. But how
could I know what I was after? One just shakes the tree of life, and
the rare fruits come tumbling down, to rot for the most part in the
lush grasses.
"What was most haunting and provocative in that far-away country was
its fleeting resemblance to the country of dream. You stand, you sit,
or lie prone on its bud-starred heights, and look down; the green,
dispersed, treeless landscape spreads beneath you, with its hollows
and mounded slopes, clustering farmstead, and scatter of village, all
motionless under the vast wash of sun and blue, like the drop-scene
of some enchanted playhouse centuries old. So, too, the visionary
bird-haunted headlands, veiled faintly in a mist of unreality above
their broken stones and the enormous saucer of the sea.
"You cannot guess there what you may not chance upon, or whom. Bells
clash, boom, and quarrel hollowly on the edge of darkness in those
breakers. Voices waver across the fainter winds. The birds cry in
a tongue unknown yet not unfamiliar. The sky is the hawks' and the
stars'. _There_ one is on the edge of life, of the unforeseen, whereas
our cities--are not our desiccated jaded minds ever continually
pressing and edging further and further away from freedom, the vast
unknown, the infinite presence, picking a fool's journey from sensual
fact to fact at the tail of that he-ass called Reason? I suggest that
in that solitude the spirit within us realises that it treads the
outskirts of a region long since called the Imagination. I assert we
have strayed, and in our blindness abandoned----"
My stranger paused in his frenzy, glanced out at me from his obscure
corner as if he had intended to stun, astonish me with some violent
heresy. We puffed out slowly, laboriously, from a "Halt" at which
in the gathering dark and moonshine we had for some while been at a
standstill. Never was wedding-guest more desperately at the mercy of
ancient mariner.
"Well, one day," he went on, lifting his voice a little to master
the resounding heart-beats of our steam-engine--"one late afternoon,
in my goal-less wanderings, I had climbed to the summit of a steep
grass-grown cart-track, winding up dustily between dense, untended
hedges. Even then I might have missed the house to which it led, for,
hair-pin fashion, the track here abruptly turned back on itself, and
only a far fainter footpath led on over the hill-crest. I might, I
say, have missed the house and--and its inmates, if I had not heard
the musical sound of what seemed like the twangling of a harp. This
thin-drawn, sweet, tuneless warbling welled over the close green grass
of the height as if out of space. Truth cannot say whether it was of
that air or of my own fantasy. Nor did I ever discover what instrument,
whether of man or Ariel, had released a strain so pure and yet so
bodiless.
"I pushed on and found myself in command of a gorse-strewn height,
a stretch of country that lay a few hundred paces across the steep
and sudden valley in between. In a V-shaped entry to the left, and
sunwards, lay an azure and lazy tongue of the sea. And as my eye slid
softly thence and upwards and along the sharp, green horizon line
against the glass-clear turquoise of space, it caught the flinty
glitter of a square chimney. I pushed on, and presently found myself at
the gate of a farmyard.
"There was but one straw-mow upon its staddles. A few fowls were
sunning themselves in their dust-baths. White and pied doves preened
and cooed on the roof of an outbuilding as golden with its lichens as
if the western sun had scattered its dust for centuries upon the large
slate slabs. Just that life and the whispering of the wind, nothing
more. Yet even at one swift glimpse I seemed to have trespassed upon
a peace that had endured for ages; to have crossed the viewless border
that divides time from eternity. I leaned, resting, over the gate, and
could have remained there for hours, lapsing ever more profoundly into
the blessed quietude that had stolen over my thoughts.
"A bent-up woman appeared at the dark entry of a stone shed opposite
to me, and, shading her eyes, paused in prolonged scrutiny of the
stranger. At that I entered the gate and, explaining that I had lost
my way and was tired and thirsty, asked for some milk. She made no
reply, but after peering up at me, with something between suspicion and
apprehension on her weather-beaten old face, led me towards the house
which lay to the left on the slope of the valley, hidden from me till
then by plumy bushes of tamarisk.
"It was a low grave house, grey-chimneyed, its stone walls traversed by
a deep shadow cast by the declining sun, its dark windows rounded and
uncurtained, its door wide open to the porch. She entered the house,
and I paused upon the threshold. A deep unmoving quiet lay within,
like that of water in a cave renewed by the tide. Above a table hung a
wreath of wild flowers. To the right was a heavy oak settle upon the
flags. A beam of sunlight pierced the air of the staircase from an
upper window.
"Presently a dark long-faced gaunt man appeared from within,
contemplating me, as he advanced, out of eyes that seemed not so much
to fix the intruder as to encircle his image, as the sea contains the
distant speck of a ship on its wide blue bosom of water. They might
have been the eyes of the blind; the windows of a house in dream to
which the inmate must make something of a pilgrimage to look out upon
actuality. Then he smiled, and the long, dark features, melancholy yet
serene, took light upon them, as might a bluff of rock beneath a thin
passing wash of sunshine. With a gesture he welcomed me into the large,
dark-flagged kitchen, cool as a cellar, airy as a belfry, its sweet air
traversed by a long oblong of light out of the west.
"The wide shelves of the painted dresser were laden with crockery. A
wreath of freshly-gathered flowers hung over the chimney-piece. As we
entered, a twittering cloud of small birds, robins, hedge-sparrows,
chaffinches fluttered up a few inches from floor and sill and
window-seat, and once more, with tiny starry-dark eyes observing me,
soundlessly alighted.
"I could hear the infinitesimal _tic-tac_ of their tiny claws upon the
slate. My gaze drifted out of the window into the garden beyond, a
cavern of clearer crystal and colour than that which astounded the eyes
of young Aladdin. Apart from the twisted garland of wild flowers, the
shining metal of range and copper candlestick, and the bright-scoured
crockery, there was no adornment in the room except a rough frame,
hanging from a nail in the wall, and enclosing what appeared to be a
faint patterned fragment of blue silk or fine linen. The chairs and
table were old and heavy. A low light warbling, an occasional _skirr_
of wing, a haze-like drone of bee and fly--these were the only
sounds that edged a quiet intensified in its profundity by the remote
stirrings of the sea.
"The house was stilled as by a charm, yet thought within me asked no
questions; speculation was asleep in its kennel. I sat down to the
milk and bread, the honey and fruit which the old woman laid out upon
the table, and her master seated himself opposite to me, now in a low
sibilant whisper--a tongue which they seemed to understand--addressing
himself to the birds, and now, as if with an effort, raising those
strange grey-green eyes of his to bestow a quiet remark upon me.
He asked, rather in courtesy than with any active interest, a few
questions, referring to the world, its business and transports--_our_
beautiful world--as an astronomer in the small hours might murmur a
few words to the chance-sent guest of his solitude concerning the
secrets of Uranus or Saturn. There is another, an inexplorable side
to the moon. Yet he said enough for me to gather that he, too, was
of that small tribe of the aloof and wild to which our cracked old
word 'forsaken' might be applied, hermits, clay-matted fakirs, and
such-like, the snowy birds that play and cry amid mid-oceanic surges,
the living of an oasis of the wilderness, which share a reality only
distantly dreamed of by the time-driven, thought-corroded congregations
of man.
"Yet so narrow and hazardous I somehow realised was the brink of
fellow-being (shall I call it?) which we shared, he and I, that again
and again fantasy within me seemed to hover over that precipice
Night knows as fear. It was he, it seemed, with that still embracive
contemplation of his, with that far-away yet reassuring smile, that
kept my poise, my balance. 'No,' some voice within him seemed to utter,
'you are safe; the bounds are fixed; though hallucination chaunt its
decoy, you shall not irretrievably pass over. Eat and drink, and
presently return to "life."' And I listened, and, like that of a drowsy
child in its cradle, my consciousness sank deeper and deeper, stilled,
pacified, into the dream amid which, as it seemed, this soundless house
of stone now reared its walls.
"I had all but finished my meal when I heard footsteps approaching on
the flags without. The murmur of other voices, distinguishably shrill
yet guttural, even at a distance, and in spite of the dense stones and
beams of the house which had blunted their timbre, had already reached
me. Now the feet halted. I turned my head--cautiously, even perhaps
apprehensively--and confronted two figures in the doorway.
"I cannot now guess the age of my entertainer. These children--for
children they were in face and gesture and effect, though as to form
and stature apparently in their last teens--these children were far
more problematical. I say 'form and stature,' yet obviously they were
dwarfish. Their heads were sunken between their shoulders, their hair
thick, their eyes disconcertingly deep-set. They were ungainly, their
features peculiarly irregular, as if two races from the ends of the
earth had in them intermingled their blood and strangeness, as if
rather animal and angel had connived in their creation.
"But if some inward light lay on the still eyes, on the gaunt,
sorrowful, quixotic countenance that now was fully and intensely bent
on mine, emphatically that light was theirs also. He spoke to them,
they answered--in English, my own language, without a doubt: but an
English slurred, broken, and unintelligible to me, yet clear as bell,
haunting, penetrating, pining as voice of nix or siren. My ears drank
in the sound as an Arab parched with desert sand falls on his dried
belly and gulps in mouthfuls of crystal water. The birds hopped nearer,
as if beneath the rod of an enchanter. A sweet continuous clamour arose
from their small throats. The exquisite colours of plume and bosom
burned, greened, melted in the level sun-ray, in the darker air beyond.
"A kind of mournful gaiety, a lamentable felicity, such as rings in the
cadences of an old folk-song, welled into my heart. I was come back to
the borders of Eden, bowed and outwearied, gazing out of dream into
dream, homesick, 'forsaken.'
"Well, years have gone by," muttered my fellow-traveller deprecatingly,
"but I have not forgotten that Eden's primeval trees and shade.
"They led me out, these bizarre companions, a he and a she, if I
may put it as crudely as my apprehension of them put it to me then.
Through a broad door they conducted me--if one who leads may be said
to be conducted--into their garden. Garden! A full mile long, between
undiscerned walls, it sloped and narrowed towards a sea at whose
dark unfoamed blue, even at this distance, my eyes dazzled. Yet how
can one call that a garden which reveals no ghost of a sign of human
arrangement, of human slavery, of spade or hoe?
"Great boulders shouldered up, tessellated, embossed, powdered with a
thousand various mosses and lichens, between a flowering greenery of
weeds. Wind-stunted, clear-emerald, lichen-tufted trees smoothed and
crisped the inflowing airs of the ocean with their leaves and spines,
sibilating a thin scarce-audible music. Scanty, rank, and uncultivated
fruits hung close their vivid-coloured cheeks to the gnarled branches.
It was the harbourage of birds, the small embowering parlour of their
house of life, under an evening sky, pure and lustrous as a water-drop.
It cried 'Hospital' to the wanderers of the universe.
"As I look back in ever-thinning, nebulous remembrance, on my two
companions, hear their voices gutturally sweet and shrill, catch
again their being, so to speak, I realise that there was a kind of
Orientalism in their effect. Their instant courtesy was not Western,
the smiles that greeted me, whenever I turned my head to look back at
them, were infinitely friendly, yet infinitely remote. So ungainly,
so far from our notions of beauty and symmetry were their bodies and
faces, those heads thrust heavily between their shoulders, their
disproportioned yet graceful arms and hands, that the children in some
of our English villages might be moved to stone them, while their
elders looked on and laughed.
"Dusk was drawing near; soon night would come. The colours of the
sunset, sucking its extremest dye from every leaf and blade and petal,
touched my consciousness even then with a vague fleeting alarm.
"I remember I asked these strange and happy beings, repeating my
question twice or thrice, as we neared the surfy entry of the valley
upon whose sands a tiny stream emptied its fresh waters--I asked
them if it was they who had planted this multitude of flowers, many
of a kind utterly unknown to me and alien to a country inexhaustibly
rich. 'We wait; we wait!' I think they cried. And it was as if their
cry woke echo from the green-walled valleys of the mind into which I
had strayed. Shall I confess that tears came into my eyes as I gazed
hungrily around me on the harvest of their patience?
"Never was actuality so close to dream. It was not only an unknown
country, slipped in between these placid hills, upon which I had
chanced in my ramblings. I had entered for a few brief moments a
strange region of consciousness. I was treading, thus accompanied, amid
a world of welcoming and fearless life--oh, friendly to me!--the paths
of man's imagination, the kingdom from which thought and curiosity,
vexed scrutiny and lust--a lust it may be for nothing more impious
than the actual--had prehistorically proved the insensate means of his
banishment. 'Reality,' 'Consciousness': had he for 'the time being'
unwittingly, unhappily missed his way? Would he be led back at length
to that garden wherein cockatrice and basilisk bask, harmlessly, at
peace?
"I speculate now. In that queer, yes, and possibly sinister, company,
sinister only because it was alien to me, I did not speculate. In their
garden, the familiar was become the strange--'the strange' that lurks
in the inmost heart, unburdens its riches in trance, flings its light
and gilding upon love, gives heavenly savour to the intemperate bowl
of passion, and is the secret of our incommunicable pity. What is yet
queerer, these beings were evidently glad of my company. They stumped
after me (as might yellow men after some Occidental quadruped never
before seen) in merry collusion of nods and wreathed smiles at this
perhaps unprecedented intrusion.
"I stood for a moment looking out over the placid surface of the sea.
A ship in sail hung phantom-like on the horizon. I pined to call my
discovery to its seamen. The tide gushed, broke, spent itself on the
bare boulders. I was suddenly cold and alone, and gladly turned back
into the garden, my companions instinctively separating to let me pass
between them. I breathed in the rare, almost exotic heat, the tenuous,
honeyed, almond-laden air of its flowers and birds--gull, mandrake,
plover, wagtail, finch, robin, which as I half-angrily, half-sadly
realised fluttered up in momentary dismay only at _my_ presence, the
embodied spectre of their enemy, man. Man? Then who were these?...
"I lost again a way lost early that morning, as I trudged inland at
night. The dark came, warm and starry. I was tired, dejected, exhausted
beyond words. That night I slept in a barn and was awakened soon after
daybreak by the crowing of cocks. I went out, dazed and blinking into
the sunlight, bathed face and hands in a brook near by, and came to a
village before a soul was stirring. So I sat under a thrift-cushioned,
thorn-crowned wall in a meadow, and once more drowsed off and fell
asleep. When again I awoke, it was ten o'clock. The church clock in its
tower knelled out its strokes, and I went into an inn for food.
"A corpulent, blonde woman, kindly and hospitable, with a face
comfortably resembling her own sow's, that yuffed and nosed in at
the open door as I sat on my stool, served me with what I called
for. I described--not without some vanishing shame, as if it were a
treachery--my farm, its whereabouts.
"Her small blue eyes 'pigged' at me with a fleeting expression which I
failed to translate. The name of the farm, it appeared, was Trevarras.
'And did you see any of the Creatures?' she asked me in a voice not
entirely her own. 'The Creatures'! I sat back for an instant and stared
at her; then realised that Creature was the name of my host, and Maria
and Christus (though here her dialect may have deceived me) the names
of my two gardeners. She spun an absurd story, so far as I could tack
it together and make it coherent. Superstitious stuff about this man
who had wandered in upon the shocked and curious inhabitants of the
district and made his home at Trevarras--a stranger and pilgrim,
a 'foreigner,' it seemed, of few words, dubious manners, and both
uninformative.
"Then there was something (she placed her two fat hands, one of them
wedding-ringed, on the zinc of the bar-counter, and peered over at me,
as if I were a delectable 'wash'), then there was something about a
woman 'from the sea.' In a 'blue gown,' and either dumb, inarticulate,
or mistress of only a foreign tongue. She must have lived in sin,
moreover, those pig's eyes seemed to yearn, since the children were
'simple,' 'naturals'--as God intends in such matters. It was useless.
One's stomach may sometimes reject the cold sanative aerated water of
'the next morning,' and my ridiculous intoxication had left me dry but
not yet quite sober.
"Anyhow, this she told me, that my blue woman, as fair as flax, had
died and was buried in the neighbouring churchyard (the nearest to,
though miles distant from, Trevarras). She repeatedly assured me, as if
I might otherwise doubt so sophisticated a fact, that I should find her
grave there, her 'stone.'
"So indeed I did--far away from the elect, and in a shade-ridden
northwest corner of the sleepy, cropless acre: a slab, scarcely
rounded, of granite, with but a name bitten out of the dark rough
surface, '_Femina Creature_.'"
ON BLAKE AS A PROPHET
By A. CLUTTON-BROCK
Men have always lost their heads over prophets, and prophets have often
lost their heads over themselves. The word itself expresses a common
misunderstanding. The prophet is not a tipster--if he has any power of
foretelling, it is only a part of his wisdom; he is a man in whom the
universal man speaks, not the lower or generic or animal universal,
but that higher universal to which individuals and societies sometimes
attain. You may, of course, disbelieve in it altogether, in which case
the prophet is to you merely one who talks nonsense; but he himself is
aware of it when it speaks in him, and it makes him vehement, hasty,
impatient both of his own medium of language and of all opposition or
failure to understand. It is to him an absolute which forces him to
utter that, true always and everywhere; but he has to express it in
human language, a medium relative to human wants and human conditions.
So his expression is always imperfect and cannot be understood except
with the goodwill of the hearer. This goodwill he demands, not from
egotism, but because he is uttering the universal, and the refusal of
it exasperates him. I have piped to you and you have not danced--is
always the cry of the prophet. Argument he hates and the dialectic of
Dons, because his universal is not to be proved, its convincing power
is in itself. It is the truth which, like beauty, is believed when
seen; and, if you will not believe it, that is because you refuse to
see or hear it. You are like the deaf adder that stoppeth its ears, and
you are refusing to see your own truth as well as his; you are refusing
to find yourself in the universal. Who are you, says Whitman, that
wanted a book to encourage you in your nonsense? Your nonsense is your
private opposition to the universal, the obstacle which you set up in
yourself to your own wisdom and happiness; and with this the prophet
has no patience. He will make no terms with it; he will not attempt a
worldly lucidity or even the contrivance of the artist. It is not he
who speaks but the universal that speaks in him, often beautifully but
careless even of beauty, finding what human words it can; and men must
not look this gift-horse in the mouth, must not criticise him, for it
is not he who speaks as an individual but--my father that speaketh in
me.
So many men, whether they stone the prophet or accept him,
misunderstand him always; after they have stoned or ignored him, they
worship him as a magician. In the past he was to them one who foretold
the future; now they find an equal value in all that he says and does.
Any words of his have a biblical authority, and he is the one genuine
prophet, compared with whom all others are impostors. They do not know
that the chief reason for believing prophets is that they all say the
same thing, that this universal of theirs is a real universal, _quod
semper_, _quod ubique_, _quod ab omnibus_. When they assert that their
particular prophet has a monopoly of the truth, they are depriving
him of his chief authority, turning his universal into a particular;
and this they do because they will not be at the pains to seek the
universal in his works. It must be recognised by its own quality, and
every man must recognise it for himself; but they, flinching from the
effort of recognition, seek a gospel made authentic by the name of its
author; the prophet has said it and it must be true.
Unfortunately the prophet himself often shares this infirmity and
believes that he is always a prophet; he becomes a disciple of himself,
and sets himself above criticism, not from mere egotism and conceit so
much as because he too flinches from the task of discerning his own
universal. The prophetic vehemence becomes a habit with him; and he
despises the artist's patience and contrivance; he may even believe
that he is a prophet because he himself does not clearly understand
what he says; he may mistake the automatism, which lies in wait for
everyone who constantly practises any art, for the universal speaking
in him and imperiously snatching at language to express itself.
Now Blake was artist as well as prophet, a great artist in two arts;
but everything conspired to make him confuse the functions of artist
and prophet, which indeed are easily confused. A man is helped to
understand himself by the understanding of others; and Blake had no
one to understand him, as artist or as prophet. His masters were in
the past; his own achievements belonged to the future; he lacked that
contemporary education which is best worth having. There was no one
even for him to talk to, but only a few listeners who were not sure
that he was sane. As artist, he was a prophet in the literal sense;
he did what men were going to do as well as what they had done long
ago. Naturally he believed that, as artist, he was always right, while
Reynolds and the other popular ones of his own time were always wrong.
He had a blood-feud with them, and was in love with his own work; he
believed that the universal, which sometimes possessed him, possessed
him always, because his writing and his drawing were unlike those of
other men of his time. So he made a myth about himself to express his
lack of criticism, namely, that his works were dictated to him by an
angel, they were not his, and it was not his business to improve or
judge them.
In his own time he was neglected; but now he is subject to the other
kind of misunderstanding. He has disciples who are as uncritical of his
works as he was, for whom he is always prophet, never artist, or rather
an infallible artist because a prophet. They tell us that, if we enjoy
his poems as poems or his pictures as pictures, we have not found the
key to them. With the key of his symbolism we can enter a sanctuary
beyond beauty in which the secrets of the universe are revealed. But
they cannot tell us what these secrets are any more than Blake could;
and I would rather believe that he told us all he could by the methods
proper to a writer, and that the faults of the artist are not the
virtues of the prophet; that where in verse that begins beautifully
he becomes incoherent, uses catchwords not to be understood except by
reference to other writings and often not then, he is himself confusing
the artist with the prophet and making the mistake of his disciples.
If you are in danger of believing in the magic of Blake, of treating
him as our pious grandparents treated the Hebrew prophets, you may
recover your senses by considering his other art; for in that the
difference between his artistic failures and successes is plain. I
myself believe that Blake was the greatest master of design among all
modern artists, that for the shaping imagination you must go back to
Tintoret to find his equal. But, whereas in poetry he freed himself
easily from all influences foreign to his own character and genius, in
his other art he was free only intermittently and blindly. There are
two kinds of drawing which I will call rhythmical and constructional,
although, of course, there is rhythm in all good constructional
drawing and some construction in all good rhythmical drawing. But the
difference is one of kind, it is the difference between Cimabue and
Michelangelo. Cimabue expresses himself mainly in rhythm to which the
descriptive shapes of things are subordinate--it is enough if you can
recognise them. Michelangelo's line itself constructs, it tells us
how things are made and insists upon their functions. It is the line
natural to an age eager for consecutive thought; it is, as it were,
an arguing line. Now, Blake was by nature, by conviction, by habit,
a rhythmical draughtsman, and all his best work is rhythmical rather
than constructive; he is not arguing with us, he is telling us, in line
as in words. It is enough for him if we can recognise his shapes for
what they are; he expresses his real content in the sway of lines, as
if it were a dance or a gesture, and he is most at his ease when his
shapes are like flames blown in the wind, almost transformed by his own
emotion. And yet he was not often at his ease in drawing, for all his
life he was, like Fuseli, haunted by the ghost of Michelangelo, whose
actual works he had never seen. Even he was subdued by the prestige of
a master whose method was poison to his genius. In poetry he could be
inspired by the past art of his own country, and in his earliest poems
alone does he speak for a few words, in the language of his time. "And
Phœbus fired my vocal rage"; but his drawings are infested by formulæ
taken second-hand from Michelangelo. It is only now and then, in the
decorations to books which he printed himself, in the magnificent
woodcuts for Thornton's Pastorals, in some of the Dante illustrations,
that he quite frees himself from a pretence of constructional drawing.
If you would excel in that, you must study the particular fact
passionately, you must get your construction from the fact, not from
your own mind; but Blake, like so many imitators of Michelangelo, did
not study the fact; he gives us a pretence of constructional drawing
in formulæ often struggling to be rhythmical and failing because they
are formulæ of construction. There he is like St. Paul, who sometimes
spoils matter that should be prophetic with a pretence of Greek
dialectic, who makes a bad argument for the Resurrection out of an
image. Even in his most famous design, the Morning Stars of the Book of
Job, the rhythm of the wings and garments is cramped by the drawing,
anatomical without freshness, of the bodies. Compare this with the last
drawing but one of the series, where rhythm is master of all, and you
will see how Blake, even in his great maturity, only practised his true
method by accident, and when there was no association to mislead him;
the nude was a snare to him, and seldom could he find a method of his
own for it. Often he was merely an inferior Fuseli; and bits of Fuseli
obtrude even in his finer works. Nothing could be more tiresome than
the drawing of some of his faces, and no one could for a moment suppose
that there was any prophetic infallibility in these failures; they are
as dull as late Roman sculpture or the efforts of Reynolds in the grand
style.
But, if Blake is not infallible as a draughtsman, he is not infallible
at all; for he himself would sometimes claim infallibility in all
his works; by the common infirmity of prophets, when they cease to
be prophetic, he assumed a status different from that of the artist,
and so was induced to set down whatever came into his mind, as if an
angel were dictating to him or he had command of the pencil of the Holy
Ghost. But the artist and the prophet are both what they are by effort
not by status; if they rely on status they become bores or charlatans;
and that is true of all human beings, of Blake no less than of
Habakkuk. If ever he seems to have written nonsense, then we must take
it to be nonsense until we find sense in it; we must pay no heed if we
are told that the seeming nonsense is symbolism.
Even in his finest poems we must not assume a clearer purpose than we
find. Take, for instance, the third verse of the Tiger:
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
We may persuade ourselves that there is some peculiar virtue in the
two broken questions of the last line; but the original draft of the
poem[9] proves that Blake did not at first mean them to be broken
questions at all. They were continued in the next stanza:
[9] _The original draft is given in the excellent Oxford
edition of Blake's _Poetical Works_, published by Mr.
Milford, and edited by Mr. John Sampson, at the price,
in 1913, of 1s. 6d. net. In spite of the price, it is
the most complete edition of the poems, and contains
all the shorter Prophetic Books, including the French
Revolution, with extracts from the longer ones._
Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep
In the well of sanguine woe, etc.
Blake seeing, what was obvious, that this did not promise well and
was leading nowhere, gave it up and changed the punctuation of the
preceding stanza which had run simply--"What dread hand and what dread
feet"--to its present form, so as to finish off the stanza to the eye,
if not to the mind.
It is a masterful way out of a difficulty, but it takes the risk that
we shall ask what the dread hand and feet are there to do? The original
draft tells us--to fetch the tiger's heart from the furnace deep;
but in the poem as we know it we may guess for ourselves, and there
is no answer. This is not the dark sublimity of the prophet, but the
wilfulness of the poet, who, having hit upon a fine sounding line,
prefers it to sense. (There is also another reading which may come
from Blake himself--"What dread hand forged thy dread feet?" It is not
"prophetic," but it does make sense.)
It does not matter much, for the rhythm of the poem carries one through
obscurities of detail; but the broken questions are not an added beauty
or sublimity, they are merely Blake's way out of a difficulty that may
beset any poet.
So I come, gradually and cautiously, to the Prophetic Books themselves,
and to my contention that they too are to be judged, like the works
of the Hebrew Prophets, as literature, since they were written for
men to read. We must make a reasonable allowance for all mystics;
they try to say what is very hard to say, what they have seen as in a
glass darkly. If you think them worth reading at all, you believe that
they are concerned with a reality men do not perceive naturally and
immediately with the senses, a reality that we are aware of, if at all,
only by hints and whispers. There are no commonly accepted sense-data
for this reality, upon which we can reason as we can reason about the
movements of the stars. Men are most fully aware of it when they are
in an exalted state of mind--a state which expresses itself in images
rather than in syllogisms. You may say, of course, that this state
of mind is "purely subjective" and therefore only of artistic value;
but the mystic himself denies that. He believes that he is aware of a
reality not himself, though himself is a part of it; and aware of it,
not by the normal use of the senses, but by a more immediate perception
of the spirit. He knows it, perhaps, through sense perceptions, but by
means of a faculty beyond them; he knows it with the whole of himself,
that self which is not often enough of a unity to attain to this kind
of knowledge. This you too must believe, or at least not refuse to
believe, if you are to take him seriously; but the mystic, even if he
does speak to us of an independent reality, speaks with a personal
expression of his own, like the artist. Lâo-tsze has put it better
than anyone: "It is the way of Heaven not to speak, but it knows how
to obtain an answer." When he says Heaven he implies an independent
reality; but men make other men aware of it by the answer they give to
it, and this answer is personal to them.
So a man must convince us of his experience of this Heaven, this
reality not perceived by the senses, by his own expression of it,
his own answer. He must say what moves us by the ordinary means of
expression; he must not pretend that he has a secret to tell us which
we can understand only if he will play his game with his counters, his
symbols, and allegories. If he has seen heaven, then it knows how to
obtain an answer from him, exoteric in its power if esoteric in its
meaning, and leading men into its meaning by its power. The power is
in the answer, if the meaning is in the heaven he has seen, and that
heaven is to be known by its fruits.
You must, of course, read a mystic with attention; but you should be
able to gather his meaning as you read; it is to be found in each
sentence and in the whole of each work, not by reference to some
other work; for it is the mark of a bad writer not to be able to say
what he has to say in the sentence he is writing, to give us always
jam yesterday, or jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day. Yet that is
what the Blake-fanatics offer us in the Prophetic Books. You cannot
understand this unless you know that the key to it is in that. You must
grasp Blake's "system" if you are to profit by him. They are like the
Gnostics for whom nothing in the Gospels meant what it seemed to mean;
they alone could give you the key to Christ's inner meaning.
Master Eckhart says that the eternal birth which God the father bore
and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time and in human
nature. "St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But, if it
happen not in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall
happen in me." So what matters for the mystic, and his readers, is that
the eternal truth shall happen and be expressed in him, in his actual
words. We must not be told that we can find it by turning from one work
to another and by piecing them all together. He must utter it sentence
by sentence, and it must happen in his sentences, with pain and labour
perhaps, but still here and now and in these very words.
In Blake's Prophetic Books sometimes it happens and sometimes it does
not, and often Blake by his very method seems to prevent it from
happening. He has the weakness of many mystics, the desire for a vast
geometrical system equivalent to the reality he believes himself to be
aware of. Such a system, if once a man will abandon his mind to it,
can unroll itself almost automatically, like a fugue. But many fugues
are empty of content; they persuade the composer that he is saying
something with the mechanical inevitability of their form; and they
may also persuade the hearer. It is the very mechanism that prevents
him from saying anything and the hearer from seeing its emptiness. We
do not yet understand that automatism of the mind which can produce
form without content so easily; the automatism of improvisation in
many arts, which you find in some cubist pictures, in much music,
and in Prophetic Books of all ages, especially in the Bible. Blake
himself speaks of it, with seeming inconsistency, in his preface to
_Jerusalem_: "When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a
monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare, and all
writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of
Riming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon
found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only
awkward but as much a bondage as rime itself. I therefore have produced
a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables.
Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place."
You may ask how there could be this choice and study where the verse
was dictated; but Blake means, no doubt, to describe a process of
writing half-conscious and half-unconscious, as a composer might choose
to write a fugue and then let it write itself. We may use Sheridan's
words of this method: "Easy writing makes damned hard reading"; and
_Jerusalem_ is not easy to read.
Yet it contains great passages and ideas, of which Messrs. Maclagan
and Russell give a very clear account in their edition of it. Like all
the great mystics, Blake was a foreteller of the discoveries of modern
psychology; he knew the evils of "suppression"--Sooner murder an infant
in its cradle than nurse unacted desires--and his story, in so far as
there is one, is the story of the human mind in its effort to reach
unity, not by suppression but by "sublimation." Yet it seems to me that
his ideas often lost their way in the myth which he made about them;
it is like allegorical painting in which there is a conflict between
the allegory and the people and things represented, and a sacrifice
of one conflicting element to the other. In Blake's story you have
to remember that the characters are not men and women but different
parts or faculties of the human mind; this requires a kind of double
attention fatal in itself to the experience of a work of art, a double
attention like that sometimes demanded by symphonic poems, in which you
have to remember the story while you are listening to the music. If you
are writing about the faculties of the human mind it must be best, both
for yourself and for your readers, to call them by their names and to
see them as themselves; so will you think most clearly and so will the
reader understand most easily.
The subject-matter of _Jerusalem_ is really philosophy and psychology,
and it is better expressed in the prose sentences of the _Marriage of
Heaven and Hell_ than in myth. This should be read first by those who
wish to understand Blake's ideas. Like Nietzsche, he went "beyond good
and evil." Good according to the religious, he says, is the passive
that obeys reason; evil is the active that springs from energy; but for
Blake himself the conflict between this active and passive is the real
evil; it is what makes men prefer dreams to reality. By the _Marriage
of Heaven and Hell_ he means the reconciliation of reason and energy
and the destruction of the delusive, dreamer's, sense of a sin which
yet allures. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. If the
fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. The pride of the
Peacock is the glory of God. Exuberance is beauty. Energy is eternal
delight. "Those who restrain Desire," he says, "do so because theirs is
weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its
place and governs the unwilling." To Blake Christ means the harmonious
man in whom desire is master, and uses reason as an instrument. From
this follows his belief, which is the belief underlying all religion,
that true, supreme and harmonious desire is for reality, and that from
it alone can reality be discovered. "Everything possible to be believed
is an image of the truth." But, of course, belief to Blake means real
belief, belief of the whole self, belief that is acted upon, not the
acceptance of anything on authority. "I asked--Does a firm persuasion
that a thing is so, make it so? He replied--All poets believe that
it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed
mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything."
Firm persuasion is that unity of the self which, for Blake as for all
mystics, is salvation.
Blake is united to Christianity by his mystical doctrine of
forgiveness; that is what makes him one of the great designers or
creators of Christianity, those who know what Christ himself meant,
in whom his passion is born anew, and to whom his theology is natural
truth. This doctrine expresses itself in Blake's poetry without symbol;
we need no key to understand it, and, whenever it possesses him, it
lifts him to its own height and clearness. The evil of unforgivingness,
to him, is in the remembrance of sin which keeps the sin itself alive:
To record the sin for a reproach, to let the Sun go down
In a remembrance of the sin, is a woe and a horror,
A brooder of an evil day, and a Sun rising in blood.
Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of sin.
That is so, whether a man remembers the sin of others or his own; and
he who remembers the sin of others will remember his own. The sense
of sin comes of the conflict between reason and desire; what we have
to do is to end that conflict and attain to supreme desire and firm
persuasion; thinking of the conflict only perpetuates it. The religion
of Jesus was for Blake freedom from the past, and we attain to it by
forgetting the sins of others; then we can forgive, and forget, our
own past selves. Hence his doctrine that Jesus, the child of desire,
was born in the forgiveness of sin; and the most beautiful passage in
_Jerusalem_ is the forgiveness of Mary by Joseph and her song that
follows, "O Forgiveness and Pity and Compassion! If I were pure I
should never have known Thee: If I were unpolluted I should never have
glorified thy Holiness, or rejoiced in thy great Salvation." There is
the same doctrine in the last section of the Everlasting Gospel, and
it runs all through the Songs of Innocence and Experience. God Himself
for Blake, as for Christ, is, by the very logic of the idea God, He
who pities and forgives, He who blots out the past; the divine energy
pours itself out in pity and forgiveness, making life and growth and
beauty out of sin itself, justifying even evil, since, by the forgiving
and forgetting of it, it is changed into a good more subtle, more
entrancing, more assured of an infinite increase than any pure good
that needs no change or forgiveness.
In his expressions of this doctrine Blake rises above all our poets
by reason of the richness of his mastered content. He is simpler and
deeper, more passionate and more philosophic, and attains in art to
that harmony which he foretells in life. When I think of it, I am in
danger myself of seeing in him the one prophet, the one poet, the
infallible. I am sure, at least, that he will seem greater through all
the new discoveries and enlarged experience of posterity.
SHELLEY AND HIS PUBLISHERS
(_With Some New Letters_)
By ROGER INGPEN
Shelley's transactions with his publishers were numerous; the books
of no great English poet, and certainly none whose literary career at
the most extended for not more than thirteen years, can have borne
the names of so many separate firms. Until he placed his poems in the
hands of the Olliers, almost every book was issued by a new publisher.
Every one of his works was a failure, and only one went into a second
edition; his wide fame as a poet was entirely posthumous. Although
none of Shelley's publishers was sufficiently interested to repeat the
experience of issuing a second book by him, he was not discouraged
by this want of sympathy. He continued until the end to write and
to print his works at his own expense, and, if possible, to find
publishers for them. In the absence of a publisher he issued them
himself. He began and ended by verse-writing, but in the interval his
work was varied enough, comprising novels, drama, philosophy, satire,
religious polemics, and politics. In recalling some facts connected
with Shelley's literary enterprises a curious repetition of names and
incidents will be noticeable. There were two separate publishers of
the name of Stockdale with whom he treated, one in Pall Mall and the
other in Dublin. There was an Eton and an Eaton, the former a printer
in Dublin, and the latter the publisher of the Third Part of Paine's
_Age of Reason_, on behalf of whom Shelley wrote his _Letter to Lord
Ellenborough_. Stockdale, of Pall Mall, and Munday, of Oxford, both
listened with astonishment to his unrestrained conversation on matters
of religion, and endeavoured to lead him into an orthodox frame of
mind. His boyish appearance and engaging enthusiasm undoubtedly made
a strong appeal to them. There was a prolonged similarity in the fate
of some of his early productions. Practically the whole edition of the
_Victor and Cazire_ volume was destroyed at the author's request, and
_The Necessity of Atheism_ and the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_ shared
a like fate, though without Shelley's consent.
In the year 1809 Shelley and his cousin, Tom Medwin, wrote a poem
in the style of Scott's narrative verse on _The Wandering Jew_. It
was sent to Scott's publisher, Ballantyne, of Edinburgh, who replied
that it was "better suited to the character and liberal feelings
of the English than the bigoted spirit" which the writer declared
"yet pervades many cultivated minds in this country. Even Walter
Scott is assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual
and evangelical magazines and institutions for having promulgated
atheistical doctrines with _The Lady of the Lake_." This astonishing
statement was evidently an excuse for declining _The Wandering Jew_,
which found no publisher during Shelley's lifetime. He was, however, at
that date busily occupied with his novel _Zastrozzi_, which he offered
to Longmans. He may have been drawn to that firm as the publishers of a
romance, which he is said to have admired and indeed to have imitated
in _Zastrozzi_, entitled _Zofloya, or the Moor_, by Mrs. Byron, or
Charlotte Dacre, better known by her pseudonym, Rosa Malilda. Although
rejected by Longmans, _Zastrozzi_ was published while Shelley was still
at Eton by another Paternoster Row firm, Wilkie and Robinson. We are
told that the young author received £40 or £50 for the book, apparently
the only money he ever earned by his pen, which sum he spent in
providing a farewell banquet to twelve of his schoolfellows.
There is a tradition that Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe, paid for
the printing at Horsham of some of the boy's earliest writings, but
apparently none of these efforts has survived. Local printing offices
seem to have had an attraction for Shelley; we shall see later that he
printed books at Dublin, Barnstaple, Oxford, Leghorn, and Pisa.
Shelley's selection of Worthing, rather than Horsham, for his next
venture may have been determined by his desire for secrecy. He made
a selection of seventeen poems by himself and his sister Elizabeth
with the title of _Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire_, and put it
into the hands of C. and W. Phillips, of Worthing. A daughter of the
printer, "an intelligent, brisk young woman," was the active member
of the firm, with whom Shelley was on very good terms. Shelley took
great interest in the technical side of the business, and spent hours
in the printing office learning typesetting. Some months later when
at Oxford he had occasion to find a printer for his pamphlet, _The
Necessity of Atheism_, he again resorted to Messrs. Phillips, who both
printed and added their names to the tract. When Shelley got into
trouble in connection with _The Necessity_, his father's solicitors
drafted a letter warning the printers of an impending prosecution, and
recommending them not to proceed with the printing of any manuscripts
that they might have by Shelley. Apparently the letter was never sent,
and no prosecution was instituted against the printers, as Munday,
the Oxford bookseller, who had been an unwilling agent in selling the
pamphlet, sent a similar warning to them.
Before the printing of the _Original Poetry of Victor and Cazire_ was
completed, Shelley called on J. J. Stockdale, a publisher in Pall Mall,
and persuaded him to publish the volume. Stockdale was a man with a
doubtful past, who had issued a good deal of verse on commission for
obscure verse-writers, besides the scandalous _Memoirs of Harriette
Wilson_. In later years he described, in _Stockdale's Budget_, a
curious publication which is to be seen in the British Museum, how he
received 1480 copies of the _Original Poetry_, and how he discovered,
after some of them had been sent out to the press, that the volume
contained a poem by M. G. Lewis. On inviting Shelley to explain
this circumstance, the poet "expressed the warmest resentment at
the imposition practised upon him by the coadjutor," and instructed
Stockdale to destroy all the remaining copies; only three or four are
now known to have survived. In the meantime Stockdale had undertaken
to revive and publish Shelley's second novel, _St. Irvyne: or, the
Rosicrucian_. The author's expectation to get at least £60 for this
romance from Robinson, the publisher of _Zastrozzi_, was not realised,
as the terms arranged with Stockdale were that the book should be
published at the author's expense. The publisher mournfully recorded
the fact some years later that the romance did not sell, and that
he was never paid for the printer's bill. While _St. Irvyne_ was
going through the press Shelley used to call at Stockdale's shop.
The publisher became alarmed at the tone of Shelley's conversation,
and, in the hope that his intentions would be well received, he
communicated his suspicions to Shelley's father. Mr. Timothy Shelley,
however, only snubbed Stockdale for his pains. Shelley was furious at
the interference, and all hopes of obtaining a settlement of his bill
vanished.
When Mr. Timothy Shelley took his son up to Oxford in October, 1810,
he called with him at the shop of Munday & Slatter, the booksellers,
where he advised him to get his supplies of books and stationery.
Then, turning to the bookseller, he said, "My son here has a literary
turn, he is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing
freaks." A month later Shelley took some of his verses to Munday, who
agreed to publish them. His friend Hogg saw the proofs and, ridiculing
their intended sincerity, suggested that with some corrections they
would make burlesque poetry. Shelley somewhat reluctantly agreed, and
the verses were altered to fit the title of _The Posthumous Verses
of Margaret Nicholson_, edited by her nephew, John Fitzvictor. The
lady in question was a mad washerwoman, who had attempted the life of
George III. in 1786, and was in 1810 still an inmate of Bedlam, though
nominally dead as far as the world was concerned.
The fictitious nephew Fitzvictor was apparently a son of the Victor who
had but recently collaborated with the peccant Cazire. When Shelley
informed the bookseller that he had changed his mind about publishing,
and showed him the altered verses, Munday was so pleased with the idea
that he offered to publish the book on his own account, promising
secrecy and as many gratis copies as might be required. The book was
issued as a bold quarto, and it became the fashion, says Hogg, among
gownsmen to be seen reading it in the High Street, "as a mark of nice
discernment of a delicate and fastidious taste in poetry and the very
criterion of a choice spirit." Shelley was frequently in Munday &
Slatter's shop, where he was in the habit of talking on his favourite
subjects. The booksellers, like Stockdale, became uneasy at the tone
of his conversation and endeavoured to reason with him. Failing to
make any impression, they persuaded him to meet a Mr. Hobbes, for
whom they afterwards published a poetical work called _The Widower_.
Mr. Hobbes undertook "to analyse Shelley's arguments, and endeavoured
to refute them philosophically." But Shelley was not convinced; he
declined to reply in writing to Mr. Hobbes' arguments, and declared
that he would rather meet any or all of the dignitaries of the Church
than one philosopher. If Mr. Hobbes' arguments were no better than his
verses, Shelley was fully justified in his objections. Mr. Slatter,
who has left a record of these facts, tells us that when some months
later Shelley strewed the windows and counters of Munday's shop with
copies of _The Necessity of Atheism_, which he had caused to be printed
by his Worthing friends the Phillips, he instructed their shopman to
sell the pamphlet as fast as he could at a charge of sixpence each. The
result was magical. Mr. Walker, Fellow of New College, dropped into the
shop and examined the tract and drew the booksellers' attention to its
dangerous tendency. They resolved to destroy the copies, and promptly
made a bonfire of them in the back kitchen. Shelley's expulsion from
the University followed in due course.
Shelley's activities in Dublin, in February and March, 1812, made
it necessary for him to employ a printer, or printers, for his two
pamphlets, _An Address to the Irish People_ and _Proposals for an
Association of Philanthropists_, but neither of these tracts bore
the name of a publisher, and there are no details forthcoming of the
circumstances connected with their production. Shelley, however, placed
a collection of his poems in the hands of a firm of Dublin printers,
Messrs. R. and J. Stockdale, but they refused to proceed with the book
until they were paid, and it was never issued. The manuscript was
recovered after Shelley left Dublin, and remained unprinted for seventy
years, until Professor Dowden included some selections from it in his
_Life of Shelley_.
I can find no record of when or how Shelley first met Thomas Hookham,
but his earliest published letter to him, July 29th, 1812, was
evidently preceded by others that have not been preserved. Hookham's
Library was an old-established business in Old Bond Street, and about
the year 1811 Thomas Hookham the younger and his brother Edward started
publishing on their own account at their father's address. They issued
the second edition of Peacock's _The Genius of the Thames_ and _The
Philosophy of Melancholy_, and Hogg's novel, _Memories of Prince Alexy
Haimatoff_, of which Shelley subsequently wrote a review. Shelley sent
Thomas Hookham copies of his _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_, which he
had printed at Barnstaple, but the tract shared the same fate as _The
Necessity of Atheism_, and was destroyed by the printer as a dangerous
publication. One copy was preserved by Hookham, the only one now known
to exist; it is in the Bodleian Library. In March, 1813, when Shelley
was in Dublin for the second time, he sent Hookham the manuscript of
_Queen Mab_, and added that he was preparing the notes to be printed
with the poem, which was to be long, philosophical, and anti-Christian.
"Do not," he said, "let the title-page be printed before the body of
the poems. I have a motto to introduce from Shakespeare and a preface.
I shall expect no success. Let only 250 copies be printed in a small
neat quarto, on fine paper, and so as to catch the aristocrats. They
will not read it, but their sons and daughters may." Nothing further
seems to be known about the printing of the poem. It was issued as a
small octavo, with a title-page bearing the name of Shelley as author
as well as printer, and the address of his father-in-law, 23 Chapel
Street, Grosvenor Square. The late Mr. Edward Hookham, Thomas Hookham's
nephew, stated that _Queen Mab_ was the cause of Shelley's quarrel
with Hookham. A coolness was certainly evident between the poet and
the publisher after Shelley came to London in 1813. _Queen Mab_ may
have been placed in the printer's hands before Hookham saw the notes,
and when he saw them he probably declined to go on with the book or
allow it to bear his name. But Shelley's connection with Hookham, which
previous to this rupture had been friendly, was not entirely severed,
for Hookham's imprint, with Ollier's, appears on _The History of a Six
Week's Tour_, 1817. Thomas Hookham was a cultivated and well-read man
and the author of an anonymous little record of foreign travel which
he undertook during the same year as Shelley's visit to the Continent,
and published as _A Walk through Switzerland in September_, 1816. He
is said to have written the _Shelley Memorials_, which is described on
the title-page as by Lady Shelley, the wife of Shelley's son. Thomas
Hookham's brother, Edward, was the friend and correspondent of Thomas
Love Peacock, whose letters to him have been lately printed.
_The Vindication of Natural Diet_, Shelley's vegetarian tract, was
reprinted in 1813 from one of the notes to _Queen Mab_. As the text
of the pamphlet differs in some respects from that as given with the
poem, it is evident that Shelley was responsible for the reprint,
which was issued by J. Calow, a medical bookseller in Soho. Nothing,
however, is known of the circumstances connected with the publication
of this tract, and there are no references to it in Shelley's published
correspondence.
John Murray was not one of Shelley's publishers, but he had some
correspondence in 1816 with the Great Cham of Albemarle Street. In
his first letter he described himself as "a total stranger" and
offered Murray the publication of _Alastor_, of which he had printed
250 copies at his own expense. The offer was declined, and the book
was subsequently published by two firms, Baldwin, Craddock & Joy, of
Paternoster Row, and Carpenter & Son, of Old Bond Street. In the summer
of that year Shelley was in Switzerland with Byron, who requested him
to correct and see through the press the third canto of _Childe Harold_
and _The Prisoner of Chillon_. Shelley brought the MS. of the _Childe_
with him to England, and when he saw Murray he reminded him that he
wished to see the proofs. From a later letter it appears that Murray
announced the poems without sending the proofs to Shelley, who at once
wrote urging him to carry out Byron's request.
The names of the Olliers, Shelley's last publishers, first appear
on the title-page of his Hermit of Marlow pamphlet, _A Proposal
for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom_, 1817. This
tract must have been one of the first publications of Charles and
James Ollier to bear their imprint, for they commenced business at
3 Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square, in the year 1817. The Ollier
family was of French descent, but they had been settled in the West of
England for many years. Charles Ollier, Shelley's correspondent in
his negotiations with the firm, was born at Bath in 1788, came up to
London and entered a banking house. At an early age he showed a liking
for literature, and developed a taste for collecting and reading old
books. He subsequently became an author and the friend of authors,
among whom was Leigh Hunt, who probably introduced him to Shelley.
Ollier and Hunt were both devoted to the theatre and to music. Hunt
addressed his verses, "A Thought on Music: suggested by a Private
Concert, May 13th, 1815," to Ollier, who published some volumes of
Hunt's poetry. One of the earliest of the Olliers' publications was
Keats's first volume of _Poems_, 1817. The book, unhappily, was not
well received, and Keats, who attributed its want of success to the
neglect of his publishers, took his next volume, _Endymion_, to another
firm. The Olliers published besides Lamb's works in two volumes, 1818,
and Ollier's own stories, _Altham and His Wife_ and _Inesilla_, all
of which are mentioned in the letters printed below. Shelley followed
up his pamphlet with a more ambitious venture, namely, _Laon and
Cythna_, which he printed at his own expense, and arranged for it to be
published jointly by Sherwood, Neeby, & Jones, and the Olliers. Before
the book was published, but after some copies had been sent out, Ollier
discovered in the poem certain passages which he regarded as too frank
for circulation, at least by his hands. Shelley agreed, though not
without some vigorous protests, to tone down the offending expressions,
and the book was issued, with the names of the Olliers alone, as _The
Revolt of Islam_. The correspondence relating to this and other matters
has been published, but the following letters to Ollier have not, so
far as I am aware, been printed, except portions of the first and last.
Ollier apparently kept all the letters that he received from Shelley,
but when Mrs. Shelley asked for the use of them, he declined on the
score that they were valuable to him and he had been offered no money.
To conclude these remarks on Ollier, it may be mentioned that he also
published for Shelley _The Cenci_, second edition (1821), _Rosalind and
Helen_ (1819), _Prometheus Unbound_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1821), and
_Hellas_ (1822). He also issued a publication called _Olliers' Literary
Miscellany_ (1820), to which Peacock contributed an essay on Poetry.
This essay prompted Shelley to write as a reply his eloquent _Defence
of Poetry_, which was intended for a later issue, but the first was the
only number issued. The Olliers abandoned publishing in 1822, the year
of Shelley's death. Their want of success was attributed to a lack of
business capacity on the part of the partners and insufficient capital.
To CHARLES OLLIER.
[Great Marlow],
March 14, 1817.
DEAR SIR,--Be so kind as to let the Books I ordered (so far as you have
completed them) to be sent together with my prints immediately--by the
Marlow Coach.
Mr. Hunt has, I believe, commissioned you to get me a _proof_
impression of a print done from a drawing by Harlowe of Lord Byron: I
said that it should be framed in oak, but I have changed my mind and
wish it to be finished in black.
How does the pamphlet sell?
Dear sir, yours very truly,
P. B. SHELLEY.
Send in addition Mawe's _Gardening Calendar_.
Marlow,
April 23, 1817.
Mr. Shelley requests Messrs. Ollier will have the goodness to send the
books and the little pictures as soon as they can.
In great haste,
Bagni di Lucca,
June 28, 1818.
DEAR SIR,--I write simply to request you to pay ten pounds on my
account to a person who will call on you, and _on no account_ to
mention my name. If you have no money of mine still pay it at all
events and cash the enclosed at the bank.
Ever most truly yours,
P. B. SHELLEY.
The person will bring a note without date signed A. B.
It is of so great consequence that this note should be paid that I hope
if there is any mistake with Brookes you will pay it for me, and if you
have none of mine in your hands, that you will rely on my sending it
you by return of Post.
[Postmark] F. P. O., Se[p.] 1, 1818.
DEAR SIR,--Oblige me by honouring a draft of £20 that will be presented
to you signed A. B. If there should be any mistake with the bankers it
shall be rectified by return of Post, but I earnestly intreat you to
pay the draft.
Of course these letters are put to my account.
Sir, yours very truly,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
I had just sealed my other letter when I discovered the necessity of
writing again.
Probably August 20 to 24, 1819.
DEAR SIR,--Yesterday evening came your parcel, which seems to have been
above a year on its voyage. Be good enough to write soon, instantly,
about my books, etc., and how the eclogue[10] sells, and whether you
wish to continue to publish for me. _I_ have no inclination to change
unless you wish it, as your neglect might give me reason to suppose. I
have only had time to look at Lamb's works, but _Altham_ and _Endymion_
are both before me.
[10] _Rosalind and Helen._
I have two works of some length, one of a very popular character, ready
for the press.
Be good enough to pay for me seven pounds to Mr. Hunt.
With best wishes for your literary and all other success.
I am, yours truly,
P. B. SHELLEY.
Pray send a copy of my Poem or anything which I may hereafter publish
to Mr. Keats with my best regards.[11]
[11] Shelley had cancelled here "If I should say when I
have read it that I admire _Endymion_ he probably."
Accept my thanks for _Altham and His Wife_: I have no doubt that the
pleasure in store for me this evening will make me desire the company
of their cousin _Inesilla_.
Postmark May 30, 1820.
Pray tell me--are there any differences between you and Mr. Hunt, and
if so, do they regard the advance either made or proposed to be made to
him on my quitting England?
You know I pledged myself to you to see all right [on] that subject,
and if any dispute should have arisen without giving me an opportunity
of arranging it, I have reason to think myself slighted--I imagine you
cannot mistake the motives which suggest this question. Mrs. Shelley is
now transcribing for me the little poems to be printed at the end of
_Prometheus_; they will be sent in a post or two.
Pisa,
April 30, 1820.
DEAR SIR,--I observe that an edition of _The Cenci_ is advertised as
published in Paris by Galignani.[12] This, though a piracy both upon
the author and the publisher, is a proof of an expectation of a certain
demand for sale that probably will soon exhaust the small edition I
sent you. In your reprint you will be guided of course by the apparent
demand. I send a list of errata; the incorrectness of the forms of
typography, etc., which are considerably numerous, you will be so
obliging as to attend to yourself. I cannot describe the trouble I had
with the Italian printer.
[12] This edition was never published.
I request you to give me an immediate answer to the questions of my
last letters. Reynell the printer has sent in his account for the
_Six Weeks' Tour_, which of course I counted upon to pay from the
profits--and I therefore suspend my answer until I receive yours and
Hookham's accounts. I do not particularly care about an account item by
item. I only wish to possess a general idea of our mutual situations
in regard to profit and loss--and this will be afforded by your reply
to my late letters, which I reiterate my request that you will be good
enough to attend to.
Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, my particular friends, are now on the point of
leaving Italy; they will call on you; and any politeness in your power
to them I shall regard as a particular favour to myself. Be kind enough
to present them with copies of whatever I have published. They only
propose to stay in England a few weeks.
I beg you to send me all the _abuse_.
Dear Sir,
Your obliged faithful Servt.,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Address Pisa.
I have just heard from Mr. Hunt, who tells me that you propose
publishing _Peter Bell_. This I have no objection to provided my name
is _entirely suppressed_, not that I am not ready to answer to anything
that it contains, but that I think it a trifle unworthy of me seriously
to acknowledge.
Naples,
February 29, 1818.
Postmark F.P.O., Mr. 20, 1819.
DEAR SIR,--Pray let me hear from you addressed to Rome on the several
subjects of my last letter, and especially to inform me of the name of
the ship and the mode of address by which my box was sent. As yet I
have no tidings of it.
Your obliged servant,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
N.B.--If you do not write within three months after the receipt of this
address as before, Mr. Gisborne, Livorno.
Pisa,
June 16, 1821.
DEAR SIR,--I am requested to propose to you, for publication, a work,
of which the accompanying sheets are a specimen, on the terms stated
in the enclosed paper; that is that you should defray the expenses of
printing, etc., and divide the profits with the author.[13] Should you
object to this arrangement, be kind enough to tell me on what terms,
short of the author's entire risk, you would be inclined to engage in
it.
[13] This work, a commentary by Taafe on Dante, was
printed, like _Adonais_, at Pisa by a printer who used
the types of Didot, the celebrated French typefounder.
Byron interested himself in the book, and it was
subsequently published by John Murray. Professor
Dowden printed the middle paragraph of this letter.
The more considerable portion of this work will consist of the comment.
I have read with much attention this portion, as well as the verses,
up to the eighth Canto; and I do not hesitate to assure you that the
lights which the annotator's labours have thrown on the obscurer
parts of the text are such as all foreigners and most Italians would
derive an immense additional knowledge of Dante from. They elucidate
a great number of the most interesting facts connected with Dante's
history of his times; and everywhere bear the mark of a most elegant
and accomplished mind. I know you will not take my opinion on Poetry,
because I thought my own verses very good, and you find that the public
declare them to be unreadable. Show this to Mr. Procter, who is far
better qualified to judge than I am. There are certainly passages
of great strength and conciseness; indeed the author has sacrificed
everything to represent his original truly, in this latter point pray
observe the great beauty of the typography; they are the same types as
my elegy on Keats is printed from.
You cannot do me a greater favour than in making some satisfactory
arrangement with the author. Of course I cannot expect, nor do I wish,
that you should undertake any thing that should not fairly promise
to promote your own interest. But pray allow my recommendation to
overbalance, if your determination should be in equilibrium. I feel
persuaded that I am recommending a most excellent work, and one without
which the history and the spirit of the age of Dante as relates to him
will never be understood by the English students of that astonishing
poet.
Dear sir, your obliged and obt. servt.,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Pisa, June 16, 1821.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART
By HOWARD HANNAY
I
Ever since Plato reluctantly condemned art on the ground that it was
mere imitation of superficial outward appearances the problem of art
has been disputed on this basis. Plato did not allow the artist any
initiative except to imitate, and his conception of ideal beauty had
no connection with the activities of the poet, painter, and sculptor:
it was not concerned with æsthetic beauty, but with intellectual and
moral fitness and perfection. Aristotle gave a slightly different
interpretation to the work of the artist, defining it as a description
of the possible as contrasted with history which determines what has
actually happened. Plotinus introduced the element of the ideal: the
artist does not so much imitate natural reality as externalise an
archetype existing in his mind or soul. Plotinus partly identified art
with Plato's ideal beauty.
These three alternative views constitute the starting-point for the
three chief divergent explanations of art which have been developed
during the last two thousand years. In modern terminology they would
be designated as theories of art, respectively as "reproduction,"
as "imagination," as "idealisation." The extent of their mutual
discrepancy varies according to the exact meaning attached to the
last two conceptions, imagination and idealisation. For instance,
if the latter ultimately amounts to selecting certain particularly
attractive real forms and events, it is virtually merely an eclectic
process of reproduction. Imagination, again, may be regarded simply as
a composite memory. Samuel Butler said, "Imagination is mainly memory,
but there is a small percentage of creation of something out of nothing
with it." It is only in so far as imagination is creative that it is
different in kind from reproduction, from perception and history. And
if idealisation is not a selection of given realities but a making
articulate of an inner vision it also is a kind of imagination, only it
is confined to the pleasantly beautiful, the attractive. The importance
of all three definitions tends to be diminished when, as is often the
case with modern theories, the chief emphasis is laid on the feeling
or emotional element in art. Natural objects and real events can
presumably excite emotion as much as imaginative creations, and this
fact appears to lend a new value to the act of reproduction. The centre
of interest is transferred from the knowledge content to the feeling of
the subject and the knowledge content, the consciousness of the object
is regarded simply as a cause which brings about that for which art
exists, viz., emotion. The aim of reproduction is no longer intrinsic,
but falls outside in the resultant subjective feeling. But this
means a somewhat arbitrary distinction between the emotion and the
representation. In actual concrete experience the two are so closely
linked together that they appear almost identical: the emotion inheres
in the representation. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as an instance
of cause and effect: it is not analogous to the process of a pin and
the ensuing prick, where the cause, the pin, is quite distinct from and
independent of the feeling of pain. Mere associations of ideas are,
on the other hand, nearer to the cause and effect sequence. A certain
scent recalls a whole chapter of one's past history. Mr. Bosanquet's
portmanteau reminds him of Florence.[14] For this reason a tendency
is apparent to connect emotion more definitely with imaginative and
idealistic art. Mere reproduction is cold and bald and only evokes
an emotion by a fortuitous association of ideas: whereas the genuine
product "expresses" or contains the emotion; and in doing so it is
thought that it inevitably alters the "natural" or "historical" fact,
distorting, transmuting it.
[14] _Three Lectures on Æsthetics_, p. 49.
The applicability of these various theories appears on the surface, at
any rate, to differ according to the different arts. No one can be a
thorough-going realist with regard to music, which is so indisputably
a self-contained independent construction. It may be debatable whether
music expresses experiences which are not of music, but music certainly
does not imitate or reproduce them unless they are in the first place
sounds, and for the most part they are not. The problem, therefore, is
not whether music reproduces but whether it "expresses" anything except
itself. Literature, again, can only directly imitate conversations
between people: for the rest it can only reproduce indirectly either
by symbolising or expressing. The symbol is purely arbitrary, it is
entirely a referring to something other than itself. Letters of the
alphabet have become symbolical. The expression, on the other hand,
contains something of the object expressed, it carries a world in
itself and of its own. Literature is admittedly expression, and here
the problem takes the form of a contrast between history and fiction,
whether at bottom literature only expresses historical fact (realism)
or imagined fact, the possible.
Painting and sculpture are for the æsthetic theorist in many ways the
most complex of the arts. As has been pointed out, neither music nor
literature can be said to reproduce directly if they reproduce at all,
because they employ a different medium, namely, sounds and words. But
painting and sculpture apparently employ as a medium the very objects
to be reproduced or expressed, viz., colours and lines. In literature
the word refers to a reality that seemingly is not itself a word. In
painting the picture and the reality can apparently be "matched" so
that here literally the picture imitates reality. Outside and around
us are already colours and forms, but there are no words, and only the
crudest sounds. And so painting is easily regarded as _par excellence_
the imitative or reproductive art, and of all arts to have the easiest
and most direct criterion: resemblance to external reality.
II
These are the premises with which the realists and the romanticists,
cubists, futurists, etc., start. They all assume rather naïvely the
existence of an immediately perceived natural reality of given colours
and forms. Their divergence is in their views as to the activity of the
artist in respect of this natural reality. The realist considers that
the painter's function is to transcribe it, to copy it on to canvas.
He may select certain aspects which appeal to him, in fact he paints
a particular scene exactly because that scene gives him more pleasure
than others. But his creativeness is limited to this selection of given
scenes and to their skilful and accurate reproduction.
The opponents of this view (and they include the majority of persons
who have any serious acquaintance with painting) maintain that the
essential element in a picture is not its resemblance to something
else, but its intrinsic interest, and, this being the case, so long
as the painting contains and conveys an emotion that is inherent in
its line and colour it does not matter if there is not a literal
resemblance to real objects. In fact, it is thought that the very
effort to express a subjective mood centring round an external
situation, to project one's own imaginative life into that which
itself has no life, inevitably results in a certain distortion of the
natural reality, in a deliberate emphasising of certain features. The
line vibrates with feeling, the colour is grouped and blended so as to
conform to the emotion of the individual mood, irrespective of whether
"out there" the artist can actually "see" such an arrangement. The
photograph has tended strongly to confirm this theory. Back in the
eighties J. A. Symonds wrote, "The artist cannot avoid modifying his
imitation of the chosen object by the impression of his own subjective
quality. Human art is unable to reproduce nature except upon such
terms as these. It cannot draw as accurately as the sun does by means
of the photographic camera. Art will never match the infinite variety
and subtlety of nature; no drawing or painting will equal the primary
beauties of the living model ... yet art has qualities derived from the
intellectual selective imaginative faculties of man which more than
justify its existence." Walter Pater went a step further and asserted
that "Art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while
in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from
the form and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it
is the constant aim of art to obliterate it."
The cubist and futurist art theories are a logical development of
certain implications contained in arguments such as these: they are an
attempt to make pictorial and plastic art identical with what music
is supposed to be to get rid altogether of the irrelevant incubus
of representation. They are quite distinct from the explanation
often advanced for the primitive simplificatory character of
Post-Impressionist art. The latter retains and is not a bit afraid of a
representative content; it merely advocates a revolt from tradition and
from the inclusion of facts which we know to be there in the objects
depicted without actually seeing or perceiving them. Its purpose is
not a musical elaboration of our vision, but a clarification and
purging of it of all derivative and merely intellectual elements. Hence
the stress laid on the art and vision of the child and the primitive.
There is no doubt, however, that the explanations offered of the art of
Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne gradually led to the cubist theory. It
was felt that not only were these artists breaking away from tradition
in order to attain clearness and directness of vision, but that their
vision was expressive rather than representative. "Primitive art, like
the art of children, consists not so much in an attempt to represent
what the eye perceives as to put a line round a mental conception
of the object. Like the work of the primitive artist, the pictures
children draw are often extraordinarily expressive."[15]
[15] Catalogue, Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Grafton
Galleries, 1910-11, pp. 11-12.
It should be noted that the early Post-Impressionists were artists
first and theorists afterwards, and they did not themselves produce
the theories which attempt to explain their art. The later men, on
the other hand, appear to have consummated a remarkable marriage of
philosophical reflection and artistic expression. Their art is the
conscious execution of their argument. There is no _a priori_ objection
to this luminous rationality. The only essential is that the argument
should be correct. Therefore, while one cannot condemn the art of Van
Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne on the ground that the explanatory theories
subsequently put forward are fallacious, a great many of the cubist
experiments live or fall with their theory.
While Cubism and Futurism had a similar origin they very soon parted
ways, and each followed the light of its own peculiar interpretation.
The difference of opinion concerned not the departure from
verisimilitude to persons and natural objects, about which both were
in agreement, but the content and character of the expression. The
futurists wanted, so to speak, programme music, the cubists pure music
without any taint of worldly and literary associations. It is curious
that these two movements which started so near together should diverge
to either extreme, Cubism to enshrine itself in a pure inhuman emotion
which possesses an absolutely divine "in itselfness," but is totally
unrelated to the rest of life, and can, therefore, only be ejaculated
about, and Futurism "to introduce brutally life into art, to combat the
old ideal æsthetic, static, decorative, effeminate, precious, cynical
that loathed action."[16] Cubism is fugitive, mystical, averse to
science and the world of raw human passion. Futurism is explosive with
mundane energy; it is not merely a theory of art, literature, music, it
is a new orientation embracing the whole of life; "on every question,
in Parliament, in communal councils, and in the market-places, men are
divided into lovers of the past (_passatisti_) and futurists." Yet it
is not so much the whole of life that the futurists wish to express as
that part of it which is peculiarly modern, its movement, its flux, its
dynamism. Any theory of a disruptive, hurly-burly aspect is grist to
the mill of Futurism. With what acclamation will Professor Einstein's
relativism be greeted: except that space should be angular rather than
gracefully curved! And it is again curious how the extremes tend to
meet. The Futurist's state, _nous aspirons à la création d'un type
inhumain en qui seront aboli la douleur morale, la bonté, la tendresse
et l'amour_.[17] Man must become metallic, mechanical, and dynamical.
Mr. Clive Bell aspires (if only in art) after an inhuman emotion
crystallised in abstract plastic form, in intricate relations of
masses: a sort of divine mathematical matter.
[16] _Noi Futuristi!_ Milan, 1917.
[17] _Le Futurisme_, by Maxinetti and others. 1911.
Recently an interesting controversy has taken place in the _Burlington
Magazine_ between Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. D. S. Maccoll on the question
of representative and abstract or purely decorative form. Mr. Maccoll
stands for the older school of J. A. Symonds; Mr. Roger Fry would
assimilate pictorial art to music and deprive it altogether of a world
outside itself. Both are in agreement as to art being non-photographic,
and as to the existence parallel with or prior to visual emotional art
of a photographic visual consciousness. Art, they both admit, is not
reproductive; to reproduce is the function of photography and of the
photographic side of our minds.
Art is temperamental, the expression in line and colour of emotion. But
while Mr. Maccoll thinks that the emotion lies mainly in the rhythm
of the objects represented, Mr. Fry considers that we are wrong in
concerning ourselves either with the ideas and sentiments of the artist
or with his interpretation of objects. We must appreciate and judge
a drawing solely according to the degree of beauty the lines set up
among themselves. Mr. Maccoll shrewdly points out that Mr. Fry and his
school always lay great emphasis on "mass," "volume," "plasticity,"
etc., which are definitely characters of objects and, therefore,
representative. It is possible, however, to go further: even a line and
a colour are natural objects, and if we are able to find enjoyment in
simple arrangements of lines and colours, why should we not find equal
enjoyment in trees and clouds and hills and people? Stated thus these
are generalities, but so are lines and colours: in a picture, however,
or a decoration they are endowed with individual life, with a unique
tone and significance.
In order to be absolutely logical, neither Mr. Roger Fry nor Mr. Clive
Bell should attempt to describe or explain a picture at all. It is a
world in a watertight compartment entirely severed and shut off from
the ordinary world. It either throws us into an ecstasy or it does not,
but these ecstasies are so many discrete units, and if they differ
we cannot articulate the difference. We ought not, for instance, to
describe early Italian art as ascetically religious, Botticelli as
pagan and lyrical, Hogarth as satirical. For this would be ascribing
to art a content extracted from life, it would be turning art into
literature. Even literature, however, at its best is devoid of meaning.
"In great poetry," writes Mr. Clive Bell, "it is the formal music that
makes the miracle. The poet expresses in verbal form an emotion but
distantly related to the words set down." And he quotes Shakespeare's
poetry as an instance of this great meaningless word music. This surely
is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole theory.
Mr. Clive Bell defines art as significant form. At first sight it would
appear as though the delimitations set up by the reduction of art to
abstract form were swept away by the admission of "significance" which
might include in its range the whole world. But the significance is
indescribable except in terms of form itself. Hence there is a certain
justification in Mr. Maccoll's contention that Mr. Clive Bell really
means "insignificant form." In his reply Mr. Bell falls back on the
conception of emotion. The significance is emotional, it is not only
incommunicable except by means of the actual work of art, but is
also totally unrelated to life in general: it is an intelligible and
self-contained department of its own, and does not require the liaison
work of the critical guide and commentator.
The fact is that in their most legitimate preoccupation of ensuring
that the work of art shall be a world in itself, a unity whose
essential significance and content does not lie outside itself in a
world of which it is merely a superfluous copy, but is firmly grasped
and held in its imaginative synthesis so that the content is identical
with the form. Messrs. Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Co. have gone
absolutely to the other extreme and deprived the work of art of all
content and significance; they have rendered it a discrete unit instead
of an individual unit. Now, there is only one mental activity which
deals with discrete units, and that is mathematics. Hence we can detect
a gradual assimilation in their critical terminology to the language of
mathematics and physics. The mysticism of art is becoming the mysticism
of planes, angles, cubes, surfaces and relations of lines and masses.
But Mr. Clive Bell has another and equally legitimate preoccupation. He
has observed that he experiences the same kind of pleasure from a fine
piece of architecture, a specimen of pottery, a decoration on a carpet,
as from a painting inside a frame which ostensibly refers to people and
objects existing independently outside the frame. And he concludes that
all these works must admit of reduction to a common denomination, they
all have that in common which induces us to call them works of art.
Obviously as architecture is non-representative in the ordinary sense,
we must excogitate a general definition which does not necessitate
representation. And so by a simple classificatory abstracting process
he arrives at the formula of "significant form."
Now this expressly refers only to pictorial art and does not pretend to
be a definition of music, literature, dancing, etc. These, however, all
come under the heading of art, and any formula for any single branch of
art must contain something of the universal essence of art in general.
This cannot lurk in the conception of form, because by form Mr. Bell
means not the logical concept, but the spatial physical image. It must,
therefore, inhere in the conception of significance. Pictorial art is
something significant expressed in the medium of spatial form. But here
we come up against the first preoccupation of eschewing all so-called
literary content. The significance of Rembrandt's dramatic masterpiece,
for instance, "Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery," must consist
in the relation of the colours and lines to each other and not in its
intensely dramatic human expression, which is an illegitimate literary
association of ideas. The significance is wrapt up in the abstract
spatial image and, therefore, so far from defining the essence of all
art, including literature and music, it will not even cover dramatic
representational painting. In his preoccupation of including decorative
art in his definition Mr. Bell has excluded all other kinds of art, and
has simply universalised the idiosyncrasy of decorative art.
He has not, however, really achieved that, because even decorative
art has what Mr. Bell would call a literary significance. No one can
seriously reflect upon Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architecture without
admitting how profoundly they are charged with historical meaning, and
that it is precisely this meaning which differentiates them and gives
them their individuality. They are the spirit of their respective ages,
caught up and embodied in what by an abstractive process of thought we
refer to as abstract form. Actually it is only abstract when thought of
apart from a particular instance: in any given instance, _e.g._, the
Cenotaph in Whitehall, it is as concrete and individual as an ordinary
picture or statue: it is a manifestation and expression of the human
mind in a particular set of circumstances.
The foregoing analysis brings out two facts. The new art of abstract
significant form is not, strictly speaking, anything new: it is as
old, if not older, than representational art, and it is equally
pregnant with literary meaning. Until quite recently, however, it has
never been condensed into the form of a picture and surrounded with
a frame; it has almost without exception been connected with objects
of utility. This does not detract from its value in the slightest; it
may mean that abstract art will outlive the picture; it is simply a
statement of historical fact. Nor can we draw the immediate inference
that abstract art is inappropriate in a frame. Certainly the contrary
would be inappropriate: that is to say, if we built a house in the form
of an Assyrian lion or made a hearthrug after Rembrandt's picture of
an old woman. But it is significant that the cubist and futurist art
has so far exercised a far greater and more beneficial influence in
the direction of curtains, upholstery, and dresses than of pictures.
Moreover, one of the leading English apostles of futurist art, Mr.
Wyndham Lewis, is beginning to realise the immense field which lies
open to him in the sphere of architecture, and is growing impatient
with the limitations and narrow confines of the picture frame.[18]
[18] _The Caliph's Design._ The Egoist Ltd. A brilliant
piece of destructive writing.
However this may be, the lovers both of representational art and of
abstract art must live and let live, and the wrangle as to which is the
most perfect, the purest kind of art, is as sterile and futile as the
dispute over prose and poetry, opera and chamber music, tragedy and
comedy.
III
The problem, however, of photographic reproduction and of imagination
still awaits a satisfactory solution. We have seen that no objection
whatsoever can be raised against the marvellous representative detail
of, say, Jan Van Eyck's "Jan Arnolfini and His Wife." Nor can we
explain the joy and love expressed in the picture by reference merely
to the forms and colours in abstraction from the objects and persons.
For that would be transforming the living and individual unity of
artistic vision into the abstract schemata of scientific thought. And
art is not science, although it might very well express the delights
and struggles of the scientist. But, on the other hand, there are
pictures which, at any rate, appear to represent objects with the
same accuracy and detail as Jan Van Eyck, and yet definitely fail to
rank as works of art. They may often give us pleasure, they are often
informative, but a little introspection reveals that that pleasure
is due to our being reminded of something that is not itself in the
picture, and that the information is not about our emotion but about an
historical or a scientific fact. Similarly with the photograph which
has still greater precision of scientific (not artistic) observation,
and for that very reason is artistically still more jejune and barren.
But there is yet another visual product which is neither photographic
nor artistic "reproduction," namely, imaginative representation.
From internal as well as external evidence we can infer that certain
pictures were painted by the artist "out of his head," and others from
"the models," and we find that artists like Velasquez, who painted
masterpieces from the model, often failed miserably in their attempts
at imaginative work.[19] Of course, it is doubtful how far this
distinction can be carried; for we have no direct proof that many of
the most realistic pictures were not pure inventions, and that much
of the apparently imaginative work, such as Blake's, was not simply
composite memory. Imagination is just as dangerous and ambiguous a term
as reproduction.
[19] Cf. "La Couronnement de la Vierge." A voluminous mass
of pompous clothing floating on some well-fed babies'
heads.
These, then, are the "facts" to be explained. On the one hand, we
have undeniably a reality of perception and photography which is not
that of art but often extraordinarily akin to it; on the other hand,
we have a visual art which divides itself into three groups, each
of which _qua_ art is of equal value: realistic, imaginative, and,
thirdly, formal, decorative, or abstract art. What is desired is some
synthetic conception which will make intelligible the similarities
and differences and contradictions dwelling in these, at any rate,
superficially different kinds of vision.
Behind the conception of thinkers like J. A. Symonds there always lay
the photographic reality which was the common reality of everyone, and
supplied all the materials for the artist's reality: the framework
of forms and colours, of objects and persons. It was regarded from
the æsthetic point of view as rather a nightmare, for it was so
unemotional, so much the same all through, so unpliable. And the
explanation of art was that it consisted of this same reality, but as
seen through the temperament of the artist and, therefore, somehow, by
some mysterious wizardy, coloured with emotion, electrified into all
kinds of subjective illuminations, a fascinating mirage. Or instead of
the word temperament one substituted the phrase creative imagination.
This means substantially the same thing, but it leads us away a bit
further from photographic reality, widening the gulf between the two.
We cannot create the outer world, but we can create an inner world of
imagination, and actually bring into our life something intimately new,
shedding a light of its own that never was on sea or land. Drive this
argument a little further and we arrive at Cubism and Futurism.
This is the philosophical view which dominates most art criticism
of to-day, and probably quite rightly so. It is fairly safe, and it
"corresponds to the facts" with tolerable accuracy. It is sufficiently
eclectic not to offend either an ardent philosophical realism or an
ardent idealism. And it does not fall into the error of condemning
one kind of art and exalting another, although our æsthetic taste
when unprejudiced by theory proclaims both kinds equally delightful.
This, however, is no reason why we should not attempt to deepen the
theory with a view to giving it a closer organic unity and explaining
facts which it does not seem at present to take into account. Needless
to say, we may get entangled and strike out on a wrong track. For
thinking, like everything else, is experimental.
IV
1. The very first observation to be made is that ordinary vision is not
photographic: it is shot through and through with emotional elements
which are part and parcel of every concrete colour and form that is
seen. The photographic reality is obtained by a process of thinning
down, so that only the skeleton of similarities remains. It consists of
a consciousness of general facts--this is a tree, it has leaves with
clearly delineated edges, underneath it is a brown and white cow.
2. Nevertheless, even if the normal man in the street were to depict
precisely the semi-emotional reality which he sees, it would not
necessarily be a work of art. The Royal Academy is a convincing proof
of this fact. But this is not because the normal man's vision is
essentially different from that of the artist; the reason is just the
opposite: his seeing is borrowed from the artist, it is second-hand
property. Considered in connection with the co-ordinated arrangement
of the ordinary man's life this borrowed vision is absolutely correct
and in its place, just as is his borrowed knowledge of science,
mathematics, history. But if he tries to isolate it and put it apart in
a frame, claiming for it an original independent value, it immediately
becomes false, pretentious, sentimental. It still, however, is not
photographic: it is an emotion out of place. There is, of course, also
in Academy pictures a great deal of photography, that is to say of
general statement.
3. The artistic disvalue of such statements lies not in the fact that
they are reproductive and "true to nature," but in the deliberate
stripping of all emotional content. So far from giving a completer
and truer account of reality, the photograph gives a thoroughly
impoverished account.[20] It must not, however, be inferred that art
should assist or take the place of, say, geological drawings, because
these drawings are intentionally confined to similarities and general
facts.
[20] The cinematograph drama might become genuine art,
because one can look through the generality of the
photograph into the human imaginative synthesis. It
is on a par with a photograph of a picture or of a
building.
4. The conception of the "creative imagination" is liable to lapse
into a false kind of mysticism. Imagination is always about reality.
Rembrandt possessed a marvellous imagination, yet for that very reason
he has considerably increased and enhanced the human consciousness of
reality. In the same way the interior of a beautiful church evokes
and deepens our consciousness of religious emotion, and, therefore,
of the profound significance of life. And it is not the life of some
abstract mysticism, but of man in the travail of history. All art is
imaginative, but it is equally real and objective, it adds to our
consciousness of the world in which we live. We need not even object to
the metaphor about holding the mirror up to nature, for we cannot see
ourselves except in a mirror.
It might be possible, therefore, to overcome the apparent distinction
between "painting from the model" and "out of one's head," and to
show that they are both the same kind of activity. There is no doubt
that imaginative work has its roots in ordinary perception; even the
creator of pure designs is using lines and colours which are visible,
and he gets his suggestions from the external world. And even though
in the process of creating the artist seems to move away from external
reality into his inner being, the created product is definitely about
external reality. The Cenotaph in Whitehall _is_ our mourning over the
dead: Goya's etchings _The Disasters of War are_ part of our concrete
consciousness of war. Blake, too, where he is not lost in impossible
symbolism, is always referring back to life.
On the other side, every piece of ordinary perception is shot through
with imagination, as with emotion. The mind is not a _tabula rasa_,
but a most marvellous and intricate activity. And there is another
explanation possible of the difference between the art, say, of
Velasquez and of Fra Angelico than that the one was reproductive, the
other the work of fantasy. At the time of Velasquez the whole interest
and value of life centred round man and pre-eminently round the life
of kings and nobles. On these people was focussed the emotional
imagination of the age. To Fra Angelico the world was altogether
different; its quintessential value lay outside it in our experience
after death: this life was but a preparation for the next, and art
was as it were the imaginative anticipation of the loveliness of
heaven. Nevertheless, this anticipation spoke in terms of the most
refined delights of this world, and the pæan to heaven was but a pæan
to the beauty of life. Or if one may diverge from the artist to an
appreciator of art, it is clear from Mr. Clive Bell's book, _Art_,
that at the back of his mind there is a mystical metaphysics, a sort of
conviction that the objects and events of this muddled material world
are contemptible, and that we must seek for the reality of realities
in some aloof inhuman state of consciousness. This is his third and in
many ways most interesting preoccupation.
5. Each of the three definitions of art referred to at the beginning
of this essay, those of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, sets up claims
which must be satisfied if we do not want to be continually dogged by
their importunate ghosts. One of the strongest objections to Plato's
premise that the artist imitates is that it does not allow any element
of novelty. It is true that in the physical act of painting the
artist reproduces his vision, and that this act requires considerable
technical accomplishment. But throughout the principal, all-powerful,
radiating influence is the vision. This cannot correctly be called
reproductive; it is just the unmediated consciousness of something,
and of that something for the first time. For instance, the artist
apparently works with a limited number of colours just as the musician
with notes; but out of these he produces entirely new colours in
combination (colours are never really out of combination), just as the
musician produces literally new sounds. And this production is not a
mere abstract physical fact, it is emotional and can contain the whole
significance of a given period of history. The seeing of the colours
and the emotional impulse coincide: it is an act of creation. Nor do
the colours belong, so to speak, merely to the artist's palette and
canvas, they are seen out there "in nature." It is a new vision of
nature. It is, however, futile for the man in the street, when he
sees the picture for the first time, to refer back to his own past
experience, because this is a new experience, a new vision. At the same
time, although the picture is hung up indoors in a room or gallery,
the vision pierces, as it were, right through the canvas and walls and
comes to a halt out there in the mysterious and infinite world. We have
seen that this process of consciousness is undoubtedly imaginative,
even if the completed product is almost historically real. It is not
a mere statement of fact, but it always includes facts, surrounding
them with concrete living individuality. Further, it always contains
an element of the ideal, of aspiration, not of an abstract schematised
Utopia or stereotyped moralising, but of a pulsating individual love
and hate. In all art, even in the most realistic, this is transparent.
It is, in a sense, the goodwill bending over the present and dreaming
of the future.
Briefly, pictorial and plastic art is the creation of the visual
feeling or emotional consciousness of the human mind. As such it is
inseparably bound up in real objects, actions, and events. Remove it
(speculatively in thought) and you get the bare though magnificent
framework of science and the stark matters-of-fact of history.
PROSE AND MORTALITY
By J. C. SQUIRE
In recent years several editors have put together anthologies of
English prose passages, among them Mr. S. L. Edwards (_An Anthology of
English Prose_; Dent), Messrs. Broadus and Gordon (_English Prose_;
Milford), Mr. Treble (_English Prose_; Milford), and Professor Cowl
(_An Anthology of Imaginative Prose_; Simpkin). Only the last of these
books has much in common with the "treasury"[21] now presented by Mr.
Logan Pearsall Smith. There are many kinds of good prose, of which
Samuel Butler's is one, Jane Austen's another, Cowley's another: but
the last two of these authors do not appear, and the first is only here
by favour. A few exceptions are made, presumably owing to personal
predilections or a feeling that such and such a great prose name
should not be omitted. Swift is an instance. His prose, the faithful
reflection of his mind, has many qualities, but it is out of place
here. Generally speaking, to satisfy Mr. Pearsall Smith, in his present
capacity, it is not enough--in fact, it is not anything--that prose
should be adequate to its purpose, neat, easy, vivacious, well-knit.
It must be prose on what by common consent is the highest level of
prose, prose impeccably written, and prose with a dignity, a richness,
a sonority or a sweetness of flow that rival the attributes of great
poetry. Almost all his examples come into this category: he has no room
here for the most vigorous pages of Scott or the most amusing chapters
of Dickens. His extracts are to be detachable jewels, gorgeous or
exquisite. On his fly-leaf he quotes Keats:
[21] _A Treasury of English Prose. Edited by Logan Pearsall
Smith. Constable. 6s. net._
"I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this
manner--let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy
or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it,
and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it,
and dream upon it: until it becomes stale--But when will it do so?
Never--When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect
any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post
towards all the two-and-thirty Palaces. How happy is such a voyage of
conception, what delicious diligent indolence!"
"Distilled Prose," "grand and spiritual passage": the editor gives no
other explanation than this second-hand one, but that is enough.
We must grant Mr. Pearsall Smith his ground, but on that ground
every reader is sure--as an anthologist's readers always will
be--occasionally to quarrel with him. His earlier selections, from
the Bible, Donne, and Jeremy Taylor, could not, I think, have been
better. He was bound to fill a good deal of his space with the
seventeenth-century religious writers. He does not overlook South; and
he gives a numerous and glittering selection from Milton, one of the
few English writers who have contrived to keep their singing-robes
about them, with whatever effort, when writing about every sort of
mundane subject. He has found almost everything that he could have
wanted in the writers of the eighteenth century, and he gives many
perfect passages from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Landor. But to
some of the Victorian writers, and to some of our contemporaries
(though he has quarried some exquisite things from unlikely places)
he does, if he will allow me to say so, less than justice. We could
have spared some of the eleven pages of Emerson for the sake of some
of the best paragraphs of Ruskin, who is given only two pages. The
single extract from Cardinal Newman (whose _Idea of a University_
should have been searched) does not represent him, and no single
extract could. There are two--there might well have been more--extracts
from Mr. Doughty's _Wanderings in Arabia_. The passage from Samuel
Butler is more sustained than Butler's wont, but scarcely worthy of
inclusion, though the reader would appreciate in any surroundings
his last sentence, "I am not very fond of Milton, but I admit that
he does at times put me in mind of Fleet Street." Mr. Shaw appears
and Henry James; there are good extracts from Mr. Santayana and Mr.
Lowes Dickinson. But Mr. Conrad's works--both his Reminiscences
and his novels--should have yielded many more than two pieces, and
some admirable modern writers of coloured, musical, and affecting
prose are omitted altogether. Mr. Hardy is a curious omission. Mr.
Chesterton, as a rule, troubles too little to be a good subject for
this anthologist; the journalist and the tumbler are always breaking
in; the poet appears arm-in-arm with the politician, an exasperating
contiguity. But I think that exploration would have been rewarded even
had our collector gone no farther than the splendid last pages of
_The Short History of England_. From Mr. Hudson's books, especially
from _A Crystal Age_ and _Far Away and Long Ago_, passages, I think,
could have been taken which would have competed respectably with many
that are here; Mrs. Meynell's essays and Mr. Bertrand Russell's last
book should be drawn on; and where is Mr. Belloc? Rupert Brooke said
that Mr. Belloc had a better prose style than any man alive. I should
not dispute that: it is a clear, a precise, an economical style that
serves admirably all the diverse uses to which its owner puts it. And
it often rises, always quietly, where some poignant thing is clearly
seen, into sentences of noble beauty. These are liable to occur almost
anywhere; for instance, in a digression during an article on strategy.
Possibly because he began his career with public facetiousness about
"purple patches" he often seems to allow a promising passage to break
its back because he will not seem artificial or affected. He fetters
his consciously-exercised powers and he can seldom let himself go, as
it were, unconsciously. In his books it would therefore be far more
easy to find short passages than long ones of the kind included in
this anthology; for any other sort of prose anthology his work should
be thoroughly ransacked. Nevertheless there are long ones. My memory
is that there are certainly several in _The Four Men_ and in the books
of essays. To hunt for examples which one will have no room to quote
would be tiresome; there is a long passage in _The Absence of the Past_
which begins:
There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
noblest of replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will
suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such
a house; Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were
men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with
their own. And the house where she moved is there, and the street in
which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with
her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the
rooms she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light
and movement and grace and beatitude.
But it is a stupid thing to spend much time talking about the omissions
from a good book; only less so than it would be to complain that it is
one sort of book and not another sort. Mr. Pearsall Smith set out to
collect prose passages of a certain, the most poetical and resounding,
kind; and he has made an admirable and a learned choice. A perusal of
his specimens confirms in me an opinion previously formed as to the
nature of this kind of prose in English. It is that we have a canonical
style for such prose, and that such prose most frequently arises from
meditation on a definable kind of subject.
In great writers and small, in those whose prose marches always with
majesty and in those with whom eloquence is infrequent, in the graceful
and the ungainly, in the magisterial and the familiar, this thing
is to be discerned: that their prose is least personal when at its
highest flights. The observation is common that we have in England no
standard and accepted prose style, but a medley of manners which are
continually increasing in number. This is true. But it has not been
generally noticed that amongst those passages of English prose, drawn
from authors of all our literary ages, which are received as being
the most sublime and the most musical--passages which have been, and
must be, the first resort of all anthologists of our prose who are
in search of those attributes of power and beauty--there is a strong
likeness of form and feature. There is more: the resemblance is often
so close that the differences, normally marked, between the styles of
writers divided by a great gulf of time are in such sentences not to
be distinguished. Styles so various on the lower plane meet, as it
were, on the higher: there is an established, an inevitable, manner
into which an Englishman will rise when his ideas and images lift into
grandeur. It is the style of the Authorised Version, a style in process
of formation long before the date of that Parthenon of our prose, but
reaching in that its perfection, and by means of that made an element
of the air we breathe, and many generations before us have breathed, in
childhood. Even in writers who never entirely lose the marks of their
eccentricity the most eloquent "purple patches" are always reminiscent.
Emotion deepens suddenly, or reaches an expected climax; the results
of reflection are summarised; by whatever route, the author comes to
a place at which his expression assumes a sublimity of imagery and a
perfection of rhythm; and with the emotion he communicates is always
mingled the throe of recognition. The note has been struck and a
hundred neighbouring strings respond. The writer has stepped off the
common road and into that chapel where there is one ritual and one mode
of incantation. "Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time
to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a
flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one
stay." It is the Prayer-Book of 1549. "Thou hast drawn together all the
far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man,
and covered it all over with these two narrow words, _Hic jacit_." It
is Sir Walter Raleigh. "These wait upon the shore of death, and waft
unto him to draw near, wishing above all others to see his star that
they might be led to his place; wooing the remorseless Sisters to wind
down the watch of their life, and to break them off before the hour."
It is Bacon. "A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's
dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine
eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles
me in my prayer." It is John Donne. "Methusalem, with all his hundreds
of years, was but a mushroom of a night's growth to this day; and all
the four Monarchies, with all their thousands of years, and all the
powerful Kings, and all the beautiful Queens of this world, were but
as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at
eight--all in one morning in respect of this day." That too is Donne,
and his subject Eternity. "Since the brother of Death daily haunts
us with dying Mementoes, and Time that grows old itself bids us hope
no long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation."
That is Sir Thomas Browne. "They that three thousand years agone died
unwillingly, and stopped death two days, or stayed it a week, what is
their gain? Where is that week?" That is Jeremy Taylor. "When all is
done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward
child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet,
till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." That is Sir William
Temple. "The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and
our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful." That is Gibbon. "The
stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the
blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest and their native
country and their natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords
that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their
arrival." The argument to the _Ancient Mariner_ needs no specification.
"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before.
It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late;
better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under
us, and to protract an inevitable fall." That is from a dialogue of
Landor's. "And it would not taste of death, by reason of its adoption
into immortal palaces; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and
the shadow of human imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in
its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness."
That is Charles Lamb. "In her sight there was Elysium; her smile was
heaven; her voice was enchantment; the air of love waved round her,
breathing balm into my heart: for a little while I had sat with the
gods at their golden tables, I had tasted of all earth's bliss." They
have quoted that passage from Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris_ a thousand
times. "Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure
not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in
heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries
painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the
brain." That is de Quincey. "And again the sun blinks out, and the poor
sower is casting his grain into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiacs
and far Heavenly Horologes have not faltered; that there will be yet
another summer added for us and another harvest." That is Carlyle. "To
what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such
poor weather tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or
who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle
from far." It is from Emerson. "Not to discriminate every moment some
passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their
gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short
day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." That, if modern in
conception, altogether traditional in cadence and in the phrasing of
its close, is from Pater's _Renaissance_. "We can therefore be happy
in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the
fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and
hands unstained by hatred and wrong." A peroration: the peroration
from the Poet Laureate's _Spirit of Man_. "And in the autumn before
the snows come they have all gone--of all that incalculable abundance
of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness
there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a
dead leaf, black mould or a rotting feather." Mr. H. G. Wells, never a
careful artist or fully aware of what language can be, permits himself
some looseness in the phraseology of the passage from which that
sentence comes, but he too falls, as it were unwittingly, into the old
music. And here, from another living author is a piece of declamation
which contains, indeed, sentiments and words which would have been
foreign to the seventeenth century, but is a true child of its loins:
We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears,
of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence,
of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a
period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed
compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the
energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be
dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate
the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will
go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy
consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space
broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter
will know itself no longer. "Imperishable monuments" and "immortal
deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though
they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse
for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have
striven through countless generations to effect.
This passage, summarising the conclusions that natural science unaided
has been able to reach, is detached from a longer one: it occurs in Mr.
Balfour's _The Foundations of Belief_.
* * * * *
There is one music and one speech in all these extracts. It is not the
result of deliberation, but it is not an accident, that they have so
much else in common, that their very subjects are analogous. Chosen,
however genuinely, at random and without afterthought, if they are
chosen from the best, they will be variations on but a few related
themes and half of them will be inspired by the direct contemplation of
death. There are innumerable subjects which engage the attention, and
they may be seen in countless aspects; but that large utterance comes
chiefly to English lips when things, of whatever nature they may be,
are regarded _sub specie æternitatis_. Whatever a man's philosophy and
whatever his mood, when he speaks with this music, he speaks with the
voice of mankind, awed and saddened by its inscrutable destiny. Time,
Death, Eternity, Mutability: those words, the most awful that we know,
insistently recur. It is they, unuttered yet present, which give their
grandeur to pronouncements of many kinds which do not relate directly
to the general operations of Time or of Death: to Burke's passage on
Marie Antoinette, to Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary, to Gibbon's
moonlight reverie on the conclusion of his History. Those names, those
figures with their skirts of thunder and doom, trail through all our
literature with a majesty that no others possess. Apostrophising those
our shadowy tyrants, celebrating them, rebelling against them, we may
clothe our conceptions in many images, though even here, for the most
part, we must observe a tendency, natural and spontaneous, to choose
as tokens and ornaments a few, in the earthly sense, universal and
perennial things. But those shapes tower over our whole world. Anything
we look at in the sunlight, a wave, a weed, a travelling insect, may
be like a window opening out to them; and at night, under the dark
sky, so actual and so symbolical, the reflective man is always aware
of them. We have our activities and our distractions. We must satisfy
our carnal cravings, eat, drink, and sleep; between birth and death,
under that immense and unresponsive heaven, we build and dig, hunt and
dance, carve and paint, intrigue, copulate and kill. But whenever the
moment comes that we turn round from our toys it is one spectacle that
we see: life proceeding from darkness to darkness, change, dissolution,
and death. And the greatest utterance of our tongue is a chronicle,
again and again resumed and repeated, of the wonder and dread, the
certain regret and the wavering hope which that spectacle arouses in
hearts which have immortal longings but have loved transient things:
a chronicle of grass that withers, leaves that fall, of girls like
flowers who fade like flowers, of conquerors who are dust, blown about,
of tough oaks that decay, of stone temples and pyramids that as surely,
after a few more years, fall into dust, of the world's past, and the
past of the individual which cannot be recovered, the innocence and
the illusions of childhood, the loss of which typifies all loss and
their beauty that Eden to which, with the shadow approaching, we
pitifully aspire: all framed by the most abiding things that our senses
know, the sea and the wind and the hills, the seasons which come for
all generations in their order, the stars, constant, silent, vigilant
over all: those also transitory after their own kind, arching to their
fall in epochs beyond our computation or guessing, but in relation to
us steadfast and immutable.
They say (though I do not believe it) that an age, even if it be still
far distant, is coming in which the present preoccupations of man, both
physical and mental, will have vanished and new passions and new hopes
will have taken their place. Our contact with each other is as yet
imperfect; psychological discovery is only beginning; the gates between
mind and mind will all be broken down; it will not be a question of
universal candour but of automatic communication and sympathy. The
individual will be identified with the race, will live only in the life
of the race, will not merely not fear but will not even think about
any death which does not involve the death of the race. The race will
be one animal; its members, sloughed and replaced, will want no more
immortality than that qualified perpetuation which the race can give;
no two persons will be more to each other than any other two; Man will
really be Man and will cease to be men. Should that time come (which,
speaking diffidently, it will not) the voice of Man may change. His
most eloquent words may be other than they are now, and even though,
in his corporate form, he is still most deeply stirred by frustrations
that we cannot conjecture, the range of his imagery will have altered,
he will have new symbols for his regrets, and new comparisons for his
ideas. Pending that change there is no reason to suppose that the
essential, or to a large extent the incidental, material of our poetry,
or of such of our prose as aspires to the condition of poetry, will
substantially alter. We speak most sublimely of what moves us most
deeply.
But this is not to say that we should wish that such speech, at the
cost of such experience, should be more than intermittent. Sun, sheep,
and children may take a sober colouring from the eye that has been much
busied with such watchings, but they were not put there solely for
that purpose; even if we profess ignorance of the reasons for their
existence, we shall employ ourselves better if we act on the assumption
that they were not. The last word, after so prolonged a meditation on
the incomprehensible, may lie with Stevenson who, not unaccustomed
to the thought of death and not incapable of poetry, wrote an essay
on the subject which might not supply passages "distilled" enough
for this book, but contains many so sensible that they might well be
reprinted in others. "The changes wrought by death," he said, "are in
themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their
consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and
has no parallel upon earth." That opening might have led to a piece
of great orchestral prose; but he turned on himself and wrote instead
some pages of cheerful colloquial prose, sprinkled with fine sentences.
In all views and situations "there is but one conclusion possible:
that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the
race that is set before him with a single mind"; and "as a matter of
fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings
than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under
healthy circumstances." But notice, even in this essay, the old lift,
the old attitude, the old accents, when momentarily he looks out over
the other wall: "Into what great waters, not to be crossed by any
swimmer, God's pale Prætorian throws us over in the end!"
A COLLECTION OF AUTOGRAPHS
By CANON N. EGERTON LEIGH
My collection of autographs was begun by Lady Sitwell, of Rempstone,
who married, 1798, Sir Sitwell Sitwell, Bt., M.P., who died in 1811.
She married secondly, as his second wife, my grandfather in 1821, and
died in 1860. Lady Sitwell knew everybody, and entertained a good
deal. She was a blue-stocking in the days of their power, and most of
the letters were written to her by the eminent men and women of the
day. But her friends supplied her with other autographs--for instance,
Longfellow sends her George Washington and Benjamin Franklyn. The
following remarks by Washington are interesting at the present time:
"At the beginning of the late war with Great Britain, when we thought
ourselves justifiable in resisting to blood, it was known to those best
acquainted with the different conditions of the combatants and the
probable cost of the prize in dispute that the expense in comparison
with our circumstances as Colonists must be enormous, the struggle
protracted, dubious, and severe. It was known that the resources of
Britain were, in a manner, inexhaustible, that her fleet covered the
Ocean, and that her troops had harvested laurels in every quarter of
the globe. Not then organised as a nation, or known as a people upon
the earth, we had no preparation. Money, the nerve of war, was wanting.
The sword was to be forged on the anvil of necessity: the treasury to
be created from nothing. If we had a secret resource unknown to our
enemy, it was in the unconquerable resolution of our citizens, the
conscious rectitude of our cause, and a confident trust that we should
not be forsaken by Heaven. The people willingly offered themselves to
the battle, but the means of arming, clothing, and subsisting them,
as well as of procuring the implements of hostility, were only to be
found in anticipations of our future wealth. Paper bills of credit
were emitted, monies borrowed for the most pressing emergencies, and
our brave troops in the field unpaid for their services. In this
manner, Peace, attended with every circumstance that could gratify
our reasonable desires, or even inflate us with ideas of national
importance, was at length obtained. But a load of debt was left upon
us. The fluctuations of, and speculations in, our paper currency
had, but in too many instances, occasioned vague ideas of property,
generated licentious appetites, and corrupted the morals of men. To
these immediate consequences of a fluctuating medium of commerce may
be joined a tide of circumstances that flowed together from sources
mostly opened during and after the war. The ravage of farms, the
conflagrations of towns, the diminution----" Here the MSS. abruptly
stops, but we can imagine what would follow.
Mr. Herrick, of Beaumanor Park, gave Lady Sitwell the earliest
autograph in the collection, a letter of Robert Herrick from St.
John's, Cambridge, which I lent to the late Professor Moorman for his
life of Robert Herrick. A curious entry in his uncle's account books
discloses the fact that while the impecunious student was finding
infinite difficulty in obtaining his quarterly allowance of £10, the
wealthy uncle was borrowing hundreds of pounds from the nephew. I pass
on to a letter of Lord Byron's accepting an invitation to dinner with
Lady Sitwell. In it he says, "The song you have been good enough to
send had escaped my observation or my memory when in Greece. I will
endeavour to comply with your request. The copy has a few errors which
I will try to expunge, though I have nearly forgotten my Romaic. I
believe the words should be thus arranged." He arranges them, and then
sends her, doubtless knowing her penchant for autographs, the following
lines:
1
I wander near that fount of waters
Where throng my country's virgin daughters,
And yet that haunt I might forego
Will she--my Love be there? Ah! No!
2
All, all are there save her alone,
Yet once along that fountain shone
Her imaged eyes within the stream
That glittered with the borrowed beam.
3
Yet--yet that fount is calm and clear,
Nor less to Hellas' daughters dear,
But there Reflection ne'er shall grace
Those waters with so fair a face.
4
She comes not there, yet linger still
My steps around that sacred rill,
Nor know I wherefore there I stray--
But cannot tear myself away.
_Albany, April 15th, 1814._
Another manuscript, to which an especial interest attaches at this
time, is the following letter from George Eliot:
16 Blandford Square, London, N.W.
My dear Friend--I was delighted to have your letter this morning
bringing me good news not only of a literary but of a personal kind.
It is pleasant to know that your labours on _Adam_ have been so far
appreciated; but I think it is pleasanter still to know that Maman
has had the comfort of seeing her son Charles this Christmas, and
that your prospects concerning him are hopeful. I begin, you know,
to consider myself an experienced matron, knowing a great deal about
parental joys and anxieties. Indeed I have rather too ready a talent
for entering into anxieties of all sorts.
Mr. Lewes is very much obliged to you for sending him the prospectus
and additional information, which he has already dispatched to Mr.
Trollope. It will be a valuable widening of his opportunities for
choosing a foreign school. I was not aware till I gathered the fact
from your letter that Emile Forgues had "analysed" the _Mill_ for
the _Revue des deux Mondes_, for Mr. Lewes, knowing that it would
vex me, had carefully concealed it. It is an impudent way of getting
money--this cool appropriation of other people's property without
leave asked--which seems to have become a regular practice with
him. Pray consider me responsible for nothing but what you find
in the Tauchnitz edition. I _never_ alter my books after they are
printed--never alter anything of importance even in the course of
printing, and _ce n'est point mon histoire que j'écris_, or whatever
else you may find in M. Forgues' edition that is not in the English
is due to the gratuitous exercise of his own talents in improving
my book. I can well imagine that you find the _Mill_ more difficult
to render than _Adam_, but would it be inadmissible to represent
in French, at least in some degree, those _intermédiaires entre le
style commun et le style élégant_ to which you refer? It seems to
me that I have discerned such shades very strikingly rendered in
Balzac, and occasionally in George Sand. Balzac, I think, dares to
be thoroughly congenial, in spite of French strait-lacing. Even in
English this daring is far from being general: inferior writers are
hardly ever capable of it, and in the great mass of English fiction,
from Bulwer down to the latest young lady scribbler, you find
scarcely anything but impossible dialogue--the character speaking
as no man or woman ever spoke, except on the stage. The writers who
dare to be thoroughly familiar are Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott (when
he is representing the popular life with which he is familiar), and
indeed every other writer of fiction of the first class. Even in
his loftiest tragedies, in _Hamlet_, for example, Shakespeare is
intensely colloquial. One hears the very accent of living men. I am
not vindicating the practice, I know that is not necessary to _you_
who have so quick a sensibility for the real and the humorous, but I
want to draw your attention to what you may not have observed--the
timid elegance (_alias_ unnaturalness) of inferior English writers.
You may not have observed it, because naturally you don't read our
poorer literature. You, of course, have knowledge as to what is or
can be done in French literature beyond any that my reading can have
furnished me with. I am glad that you think there are any readers who
will prefer the _Mill_ to _Adam_. To my feeling there is more thought
and a profounder veracity in the _Mill_ than in _Adam_: but _Adam_ is
more complete and better balanced. My love of the childhood scenes
made me linger over them in epic fashion, so that I could not develop
as fully as I wished the concluding "Book" in which the tragedy
occurs, and which I had looked forward to with much intention and
preparation from the beginning. My books don't seem to belong to me
after I have once written them, so I find myself delivering opinions
about them as if I had nothing to do with them. I am not afraid that
you will be unable to distinguish that frankness from conceit. I
cannot write very boastfully about our health; both Mr. Lewes and
I are very middling, easily upset, easily put out of order. But in
all other respects our happiness grows daily. Our dear boy Charles
is more and more precious to us, and seems to delight in pouring all
his young affection out in tenderness to me. Thornton, the second, is
going on well and happily with his studies at Edinburgh, and seems
to have profited morally and physically by the change. I don't know
how to describe our locality otherwise than by saying that it lies
very near Regent's Park, _westward_. It is a quiet situation for
London--alas, not quiet for me, who dream of still fields! London is
hateful to me, and I sometimes think we shall hardly have come to
stay in it three years. Mr. Lewes and I constantly recall Geneva--and
for us Geneva means all that is associated with you and Maman. It was
a vivid pleasure to me that he felt his liking and admiration go out
to you both quite apart from the fact that you were _my_ friends. He
desires to share in all assurances of affection that I send you. But
I send you few assurances. Are they necessary?
Lord Houghton once said that "the Personal is always the interesting."
This gives one of the great interests to a collection of autographs,
it illustrates the Personal. Take Tennyson's. There is not one word
in a long letter to show that he was Poet Laureate. He begins with
"Trouble not yourself about the half-crown. I am very glad to pay my
debts, however small, tho' Milnes asserts that nothing under five
shillings should ever be refunded.... It is not all ladies who would
have tolerated my fumigation so mildly; forgive my seeming roughness
at parting; there is something in the farewell shake of hands that
often breaks me down and makes me seem other than I am." My letter from
Rudyard Kipling has in it the sentence, "_I_ was a chorister once, but
somehow they managed to agree to get on without me after a while."
Samuel Smiles, of _Self-Help_, etc., writes, 1891, "I think nothing the
less of you because you are a Dominie. You have a great mission for
training the intellects and hearts of the coming generation. I hope you
are kind to the children. My Dominie, he was a hard man, though he had
favourites; told me I was only fit 'to sweep the streets of my native
borough,' and threatened to 'dash my brains against the wall.' This
was his ordinary way of speaking of those who were not his favourites.
But I understand that he became better as he grew older. Still he left
a very bad taste in my mouth." Leigh Hunt writes a kind letter to a
budding poet with the postscript, "Send your sonnets by all means to
periodicals, but have no mercy in them on superfluous words." With
equal kindness Southey writes to Mr. Ragg in 1835, "I do not remember
to have seen a more beautiful little piece than 'Why Does the Sun Go
Down?' It ought to find its way into all popular selections." Southey
wrote out for Lady Sitwell, in 1813, "The March to Moscow." From these
kindly letters let us turn to Robert Lowe: "I am a candidate for the
Greek Professorship of Glasgow ... a most excellent appointment, and
one which above all I should be anxious to obtain.... My chance is
not a bad one, as there is no candidate with whom they are content,
and to me there is no objection except my politics, and they are, you
know, not very furious or indeed in any way practical principles to
me.... This is the fairest chance that has ever offered to me of making
myself independent and affluent for the rest of my life. It is one of
the few appointments I am able to fill." This was written in 1838. In
1851 he writes to the same person, "I am a candidate for the Chair
of Political Economy at Oxford. I have every hope of success as my
reception in Oxford has been very flattering.... The contest seems to
lie between me and Neate of Oriel, a very good man, I believe, but not
very popular." Another politician, John Bright, wrote in 1865, "I fear
it would not suit your object for any Englishman to interfere in the
course that may be taken in reference to Jeff Davis. I have privately
said all I can or ought to say, and from what I hear I incline to think
that he will escape the punishment which so many men have suffered for
crimes of infinitely less guilt. I am opposed to capital punishment for
political or social crimes." Autographs from Prime Ministers include
the Duke of Portland, "Your Parishioner named Bradley tried to usurp
one of my houses. I do not consider that an amiable weakness," and Lord
Salisbury, _La Donna e Mobile_, given to a lady during an important
conversation, when she asked for his autograph. Lord Rosebery heads
his letter "Waterloo Day." Mr. Gladstone shows his kindly feeling for
Sir Stafford Northcote, but from Melbourne onwards the Prime Ministers
content themselves with few words. So does Thackeray, "Dear Sir or
Madam--Where does Mr. Ritchie live with whom I dine in 2 hours. Please
tell." John Hay says "our visit to Eton will be for Helen and me one of
our pleasantest memories of England." Eton is again mentioned by Mr.
Justice Coleridge writing to his relation there, one of the masters,
"I should like very much to know whether there is any prospect of
the College making any movement towards changes." Eton does not like
changes; to parody Lord Curzon's motto, "Let Eton hold what Eton held,"
is as true now as in the past. I will conclude with a pathetic letter
from Matthew Arnold, "I lead such a bothered and hard-driven life
that I forget what I wrote in better days." I wonder if he remembered
writing in an autograph book:
Of little threads our life is spun,
And he spins ill who misses one.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
GENERAL NOTES
The Christie-Miller sale at Messrs. Sotheby's, postponed from November
28th to December 16th, realised the enormous total of £110,356, thus
more than doubling the previous "record" for a single day's book-sale
achieved at the Yates-Thompson sale last summer, the total of which
was £52,000. The great majority of the items were acquired by Mr.
G. D. Smith, the American buyer, who seemed to have learnt to think
so imperially about book prices that very few English dealers or
collectors were able to compete with him. For the most part the bidding
resolved itself into a duel between Mr. Smith and Mr. Quaritch, Mr.
Smith being almost invariably the victor.
* * * * *
The highest price for a single lot--the highest price ever given for a
single book or manuscript--was £15,100, which was paid for the minute
vellum-bound volume containing _Venus and Adonis_, _The Passionate
Pilgrim_, and _Epigrammes and Elegies_, by J. D. (Sir John Davies) and
C. M. (Christopher Marlowe). The _Venus and Adonis_ is the only copy
known of the fourth edition of the poem; six copies of the first three
editions exist, all of which are in public libraries. _The Passionate
Pilgrim_ is one of the three known copies of the first edition (1599),
while only two or three copies are known to exist of the _Epigrammes
and Elegies_, published at Middleborough (? 1598).
* * * * *
Other Elizabethan books fetched very large prices. Greene's _Arbasto_
(1584), a unique copy, went for £820; _Gwydonius_ (1584) for £770;
_Morando_ (1584) for £680; _Planetomachia_ (1585) for £900; and the
unique copy of _A Quip for an Upstart Courtier_ (1592) for £1200. A
copy of Tottel's _Miscellany_, second edition, fetched £2400; Nash's
_Unfortunate Traveller_ (1594), £680; and the first edition of _The
Paradyse of Dainty Devises_, £1700. Copies of the _Arcadia_ (1590) and
of _Astrophel and Stella_ (_circa_ 1595) were sold for £1000 and £2700
respectively.
* * * * *
The other Shakespeare lots were sold at less astonishing figures. A
copy of the First Folio, slightly defective, sold for £2300; £2400 was
given for a fine copy of the Third Folio, _Much Ado About Nothing_, the
Quarto of 1600, sold for £2200; and _The True Tragedie of Richard the
Third_, the anonymous play used by Shakespeare in producing his own
_Richard III._, for £2000.
* * * * *
The Heber Collection of broadsheets and ballads was purchased by Mr.
Smith for £6400. This collection, comprising eighty-eight pieces, is
a portion of the great collection, a larger collection, half of which
passed, under the terms of Mr. Huth's will, to the British Museum. It
contains many pieces of remarkable beauty and interest.
* * * * *
Other interesting items in the sale were three minor works of the
"Laureate," John Skelton, printed by Pynson, the three bound together
in a single volume, which was bought for £1780; the _Amoretti and
Epithalamium_ of Spenser (1595), £1200; _The Shepheardes Calendar_
(1579), £1280; _Reynard the Fox_ (Caxton, 1481), £5900; _The Cordyale,
or the Four Last Things_ (Caxton, 1479), £1900; _Tullye of Old Age_
(Caxton, 1481), £1800; Gray's _Elegy_ (1751), £750; _Paradise Lost_
(1667), £460.
* * * * *
This sale marks the triumph and the reduction to the absurd of
book-collecting. The absurdity of picture-dealing is already manifest;
prices have long ceased to have the least relation to the merit of the
work purchased. It is out of mere _snobisme_ and not from any love of
art that people will give fifty thousand pounds for a picture by a
second-rate eighteenth-century artist. The same spirit has invaded the
book-collecting world. The amateur who collects books out of a genuine
love of literature had better retire as gracefully as he may. There is
no place for him in the topsy-turvy universe where fifteen thousand
pounds is paid for a little volume of poems. One left the sale with a
curious feeling of bewilderment and indignation, almost vowing that one
would never look at an old book again.
* * * * *
The centenary of George Eliot was celebrated at Messrs. Hodgsons'
by the sale of a first edition of _Scenes of Clerical Life_, a fine
uncut copy. It went for £17. The library of the late James Nicol Dunn
was disposed of at the same rooms. Mr. Dunn was a journalist whose
career included the editorship of the _Morning Post_ and that of the
_Johannesburg Star_. In earlier years--he always retained some flavour
of that association--he was Henley's assistant on the _National
Observer_. He was thus in a position to obtain books, manuscripts, and
autograph letters which have since become valuable. His Edinburgh set
of Stevenson (accompanied by a note from Charles Baxter, "Louis will
have nett complete about £5200 over this") went for £65, and a set of
the _Scots Observer_ and _National Observer_ for £47. An inscribed copy
of Whistler's _Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ sold for ten guineas, and
three first editions, with letters, of John Davidson £5--which suggests
that Davidson is at last getting a little notice from collectors.
* * * * *
Among the autographs were several corrected proofs and typescripts of
Mr. Kipling's. A freely corrected typescript of _Tomlinson_ fetched
£81, the MS. of _Fuzzy-Wuzzy_ £50. Three manuscript poems of Henley's,
with a letter from Mr. Yeats thrown in, brought only £6 10_s._ Still
more surprising was the sale of Mr. Yeats's MS. of _The Lake Isle of
Innisfree_, with another, for £5 15_s._ In a sale on the following day
a first edition of _The Shropshire Lad_ turned up: it was sold for £4.
* * * * *
The Arbury Library, a portion of which is to be sold at Sotheby's on
January 22nd, has an interest apart from the high rarity of many of
the books which are to be sold; for these found their way to Arbury,
not at the fancy of any individual collector of rare volumes--none
of the Newdigates have been great book-collectors in this modern
sense--but simply as current literature of the period in which they
were published. The First Folio Shakespeare, for instance, which is
described as "probably the largest available," has been at Arbury since
1660, when it belonged to Serjeant Newdegate, who was Chief Justice
under Cromwell and was made a Baronet at the Restoration; and it is
likely that it came into his possession or into that of the elder
brother whom he succeeded soon after its publication in 1623. Sir
Richard Newdegate's mother was Anne Fitton, sister to Mary Fitton,
Queen Elizabeth's frolicsome and wayward maid-of-honour, whom a modern
edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets has sought to identify with the Dark
Lady. Family papers at Arbury give no support to the late Mr. Tyler's
theory, and Mary Fitton's portraits there show her to have been fair
rather than dark. It is probable that some of the volumes which are to
be sold at Sotheby's were at Arbury when Mary Fitton found a home there
with her sister, Lady Newdigate, after her disgrace at Court. No one
whose interest in old books lies in their character, their history, and
their associations rather than in the price which they may fetch under
the hammer can fail to regret the fate by which these precious volumes
are at length taken from the home in which they have stood side by side
for some three centuries.
* * * * *
Sounds unheard are the sweetest, and the books that were never written
and the books that once existed and have been lost are by far the
world's best books. Those chapters on Chambermaids and Buttonholes
would have been the most amusing in _Tristram Shandy_; Milton's epic on
King Arthur, great and glorious in itself, would also have nipped _The
Idylls of the King_ in the bud, thus earning our gratitude as well as
our admiration. The lost books of the _Satyricon_ were the best things
Petronius ever wrote, and the vanished poems of Sappho--one dare not
think of them.
And now we have news of yet another little work that has joined the
great army of the lost. But not, we hope, for ever; for the volume can
hardly fail to turn up some time, sooner or later, in some bookseller's
shop or some collector's library. The history of this lost volume is
not uninteresting, and we propose to quote at some length from an
account of it furnished by the owner, Miss E. M. Green, of Modbury, Ivy
Bridge, South Devon:
"In 1913 a MS. book fell into my hands, thought first to be a
manuscript of Little Gidding, which proved, however, to be the work
of the Rev. Richard White, Chaplain to the English nuns of St. Monica
in Louvain from 1630 to 1687. This I published with Messrs. Longmans
under the title of _Celestial Fire_. This volume contains in the
preface an account of these Louvain Manuscripts, which are singularly
beautiful specimens of seventeenth-century script. Consequent on this
publication, the community of St. Augustine's Priory, Newton Abbot,
who fled to England during the French Revolution, sent me a similar
manuscript, _Cordial Prayer_, to be published also. It was a leather
volume, 4 inches by 2¾ inches, 1 inch in depth, bound in holland with
quaint brass clasps, and the top of the pages was a beautiful blue.
Taking it from the inspection of the Keeper of MSS., British Museum,
and from the MSS. Room home with me, I found on entering an omnibus in
Sloane Street that I had lost it. It was tied in white paper with my
address on the outside."
All efforts have so far, Miss Green tells us, proved unavailing, and no
word can be heard of the lost volume. Perhaps some of our readers may
have seen or heard of this interesting little manuscript.
* * * * *
The hand-press and type used by the late Dr. Daniel in the production
of the well-known Daniel editions have been presented by Mrs. Daniel
to the Bodleian Library. The press has now been set up in the Picture
Gallery of the Library with the chase, containing the last pages set
up, still in place. A small collection of some of the more interesting
books printed on it has been arranged on an adjoining table.
* * * * *
We recently had the fortune to come across a copy of that very
interesting edition of Louise Labé's works, published at Lyons in
1824. Printed at the expense of a local literary society, the edition
was limited to 600 copies, a number of which were printed on coloured
paper. Our copy was one of the four "coquille rose." One copy exists in
which the colour of the paper varies at every sheet.
ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
Collectors interested in the Restoration Drama will find much in
Messrs. Pickering and Chatto's catalogue to engage their attention.
Sir William Davenant is represented by First Editions of _The Siege
of Rhodes_ (1656), _The Cruell Brother_ (1630), _The Unfortunate
Lovers_ (1643). A copy of the first collected edition of Davenant's
Works (1673) is offered for sale by Mr. Francis Edwards. _Aureng-Zebe_
(1676), the opera _King Arthur_ (1691), and _The Duke of Guise_ (1683)
are all first editions of Dryden. Pordage's _Siege of Babylon_ (first
edition, 1678) is priced at £4 4_s._; Sir Charles Sedley's _Antony
and Cleopatra_ (1677) at £8 8_s._ Shadwell is well represented by his
_Virtuoso_ (first edition, 1676), a comedy that was regrettably not
included in the "Mermaid" series reprint of the dramatist's works, _The
Lancashire Witches_ (1682), and _Bury Fair_ (1689).
* * * * *
There are moments when one's literary sense gets the better of one's
purely bibliophilous instinct--moments when a profound irritation
seizes one that people should be so stupid as to collect books because
they are rare and not because they are worth reading. One wonders,
for instance, if human labour and ingenuity might not be expended in
some more profitable undertaking than the compilation of a catalogue
of about one hundred-and-fifty editions of _The Picture of Dorian
Gray_, bibliographically described. Collectors of the works of that
second-rate literary man who was the author of this _Dorian Gray_
may be interested to hear that this catalogue is at present being
prepared at "The Bungalow," 8 Abercorn Place, London, N.W.8, where they
will also find a number of Wilde's books, in every kind and shape of
edition, for sale.
* * * * *
A curiosity of 1890 literature, in the shape of _The Blue Calendar:
Praises of Twelve Saints_, written by John Gray, may also be seen at
"The Bungalow." This little book, by the author of _Silverpoints_, was
privately printed at 92 Mount Street in 1896, and may be bought for two
guineas.
A. L. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
SURTEES
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--In your admirable columns on _Bibliography_ A. L. H. writes
(November issue): "It is interesting to note what high prices the works
of Surtees can always command." They certainly do; but is it not Leech
rather than Surtees who gives them their value?
_Handley Cross_ is doubtless immortal because of the creation of
Jorrocks and James Pigg, the best portrait of the hard-riding,
reckless, witty Northumbrian since Shakespeare's _Hotspur_, but _Plain
or Ringlets_, _Ask Mamma_, and the rest are surely only valuable on
account of Leech's illustrations?
I imagine that the original _Handley Cross_, in three volumes, 1843,
London, will not fetch as much as the later and expanded _Handley
Cross_, with Leech's illustrations, published London, 1854.
I have recently inherited a set of the five Surtees-cum-Leech issue
(usually styled first editions), and I am in doubt as to what to insure
them for in view of the present high prices.
Still more so in the case of other still greater treasures: early
Aldines, Jensons, first editions Jonson, Spencer, Milton, etc., but
above and beyond all in the case of a first folio Shakespeare, a
splendid copy and intact.
According to Sir Sidney Lee, out of 140 known copies twenty only are
"perfect" (with Shakespeare's portrait _printed_ on title-page), other
twenty are intact (with portrait _inlaid_), and the remaining 100 are
all deficient in one way or another.
Well, suppose by some dreadful dispensation my library was burned down
and this gem consumed, what would it cost to procure another?
My bookseller tells me to insure it for £1500, but would this procure
another?
I feel certain it would not. What, then, is the proper
insurance?--Yours, etc.,
A PURSUER OF BOOKS AND FOXES.
[We certainly think that figure far too low, but the prices of
first folios vary greatly. Perhaps some reader can give insurance
information.--EDITOR.]
* * * * *
AMERICAN POETRY
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--The writer of your "Letter from America," in the December number,
commits himself to the astonishing statement that "Mr. Nicholas Vachel
Lindsay is the one American writer of verse whose work shows signs of
genius." Such a statement should not pass unchallenged. It is as if
an American writer, visiting England, were to remark that Mr. Rudyard
Kipling is the only English writer of verse with signs of genius.
The parallel is quite exact. Lindsay has the same free-and-easy
facility, the same preference for ragtime rhythms, the same tone of
vulgar optimism, the same desire to preach a gospel, as the author of
_Mandalay_. The only difference is that Lindsay is rather more limited
in his range, if anything. He has never succeeded in doing but one
type of poem--the ragtime exhortation. To say that he and he alone in
America shows genius is preposterous.
What about Robert Frost, whose work and influence were paramount in the
development of Edward Thomas?--a fact admitted by a recent biographer.
What about Edwin Arlington Robinson, a poet who comes nearer to
Hardy than anyone in America? What about Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg,
Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Maxwell Bodenheim? All of these
authors have shown signs of genius, each in an entirely different
and quite individual way. They have not repeated themselves into
tedious stereotype as the magazine writers of _vers libre_, or as Mr.
Lindsay has. Without any desire to belittle Mr. Lindsay's clever but
superficial talent, I should respectfully suggest to "R. E. C." that
some of his remarks about the conventionality of American writers apply
very strongly to Lindsay. They do not apply to the men I have just
mentioned.--Yours, etc.,
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER.
37 Crystal Palace Park Road, Sydenham.
* * * * *
TAM HTAB
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--May I point out what seems to me a very curious literary
coincidence?
In No. 2 Mr. L. Pearsall Smith, in his delightful collection of
"Misadventures," describes "a cabalistic inscription written in letters
of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB ... Like Belshazzar ...
my knees smote one against the other. It was ... BATH MAT, lying there
wrong side up."
In the second chapter of Forster's _Life of Dickens_, among some notes
on the hardships of Dickens' childhood, the novelist himself thus
describes a coffee shop in St. Martin's Lane: "In the door there was
an oval glass-plate, with COFFEE ROOM painted on it.... If I ever find
myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is
such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side
MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie), a shock
goes through my blood."--Yours, etc.,
J. J. BIGGS.
70 West Side, Clapham.
[These public inscriptions are responsible for much distress. There was
a woman named Jones who had her child christened Nosmo King, having
been taken by those names on two glass doors, which stood open. When
she passed again the doors were drawn together.--EDITOR.]
* * * * *
SENSIBLE AT BOTTOM
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--May I point out a small inaccuracy in Mr. Shanks's exceedingly
interesting essay on Samuel Butler? Mr. Shanks writes, "It is possible
to remark of him (Butler), adapting the remark made of Dr. Johnson,
that he may have been very sensible at bottom." The passage in Boswell
referred to, I think, is a remark made _by_ Johnson of a "printer's
devil" who had married a "very respectable author."--Yours, etc.,
A. H. SCOTT.
Kelstone, Charterhouse, Godalming.
December 15th, 1919.
* * * * *
SOME CORRECTIONS
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--The LONDON MERCURY sets so refreshing a standard of English, by
precept, and still more by example, that it is with some temerity that
I venture (1) a correction, (2) a criticism, and (3) a query.
1. Major and minor Elizabethan and "Georgian" poets receive full and
correct designation. Could not the same be spared for Canon Ottley,
of Oxford, who on p. 128 appears as _Attley_? It might be granted in
recognition of his Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse, the award of
which demands, I imagine, a certain measure of poetical feeling in
addition to the mathematically stressed rhythms of our schooldays.
2. There may be subtle and political humour intended in the word
_dignatories_ (p. 236), but with my last breath I would protest the
better (and only) spelling to be "dignitaries," take it derivatively or
euphonically as you will.
3. Is the sentence _considerable interest has been evinced at the large
majority_ (p. 235) English at all? Should it not be either:
"Considerable _interest_ has been evinced _in_ the ..." Or
"Considerable interest has been _evinced by_ the ..."?
But here, like Rosa Dartle, I merely ask for information--not being a
competent grammarian--and leave it to fair judgment.
Could you not follow up the article on "Particles" with one on "Split
Infinitives"? We were always taught that they were the unforgivable
sin. Yet I have just found two unblushing examples in one of Mr. Thomas
Hardy's novels. If he may use them, why may not the children in our
village school?--Yours, etc.,
C. A. TAIT.
Meopham, Kent.
December 13th, 1919.
[In answer to the first and second charges we plead guilty to
misprints; the third error was due to a slip of the pen.--EDITOR.]
* * * * *
JOHN THOMSON OF DUDDINGSTON
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--A material error occurs in the review of my book, _John Thomson
of Duddingston_, in your journal for December. The price is given as
42_s._, whereas the published price is 31_s._ 6_d._ net; edition de
luxe, £3 3_s._ net. The correct title of the book is: _John Thomson
of Duddingston, Landscape Painter; with some Remarks on the Practice,
Purpose, and Philosophy of Art_. Some reviewers express a high opinion
on the latter department of my book; the full title ought, therefore,
to be given--in justice to the volume.--Yours, etc.,
ROBERT W. NAPIER.
26 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh.
* * * * *
THE MOON
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--I do not know whether the scope of your "Correspondence" pages
is intended to admit small criticisms of the original pieces of poetry
and imaginative prose which you publish. If it is, I would beg leave to
offer two perhaps niggling comments upon _The Moon_.
(1) In Stanza 22, "Emperor" is a fine word and perhaps inevitable: but
would it be merely pedantic to remind the poet that when Bonaparte was
in Egypt in 1798 he was not yet Emperor, nor even First Consul?
(2) In Stanza 30, eighth line, does not grammar require the reading
"but thee" instead of "but thou"? "But" here is a preposition, not a
conjunction--in spite of the "Boy on the Burning Deck." Burns (I think)
has a line somewhere that clearly shows the true usage:
"Live but thee I canna----"
_i.e._, "_without_ thee." I do not think "but" in such a phrase can
rightly be construed as merely equivalent to "and not."--Yours, etc.,
A. F. G.
December 12th, 1919.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
POEMS, 1916-1918. By FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 5_s._ net.
Mr. Brett Young's _Marching on Tanga_ was the best written of all the
books produced during the war by men on active service. Its imaginative
quality and the charm of its style were no surprise to those who knew
his early novels, of which _The Dark Tower_ was the most notable. It
has been succeeded by two other prose works, _The Crescent Moon_,
an African story, the melodrama of which is veiled by the beautiful
descriptive writing, and _The Young Physician_, a more naturalistic
essay which was noticed in our first number. Unobtrusively, amid these
other activities, he published two or three years ago a little book of
verses, _Five Degrees South_; and in this new volume are gathered the
contents of that book and the poems that their author has written more
recently.
The volume is characteristically Georgian. There are hints, here
and there, of musings which may develop into a general conception
of the universe and of man; there are points of contact with the
problems which vex the reflective spirit. But, generally speaking,
Mr. Brett Young is content to sing, briefly and with deep feeling,
of a few things securely loved: and those points of contact are
points of departure. He writes of England--friends, landscapes, and
a woman--before he leaves England. When he is in Africa the blood
and struggle, the fell tropical scenery, seem but to make acuter the
response to the England that is lost; and when he comes home again he
sings again of home recovered and loved with a new intensity. _The
Gift_ gives the keynote of the book:
Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain,
Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani River,
England came to me--me who had always ta'en
But never given before--England, the giver,
In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver
On still evenings of summer, after rain,
By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver
When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.
Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain,
And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake
Shivering all night through till cold daybreak.
In that I count these sufferings my gain,
And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain
Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.
That is from Africa, where he rides through marshes swarming with cruel
life and admires the sickly beauty of the fever tree, but always as an
alien. Then he returns:
I saw a thrush light on a hawthorn spray,
One moment only, spilling creamy blossom,
While the bough bent beneath her speckled bosom,
Bent, and recovered, and she fluttered away.
The branch was still; but in my heart, a pain
Than the thorn'd spray more cruel stabbed me, only
Remembering days in a far land and lonely,
When I had never hoped for summer again.
All his deepest feelings--patriotism, love, friendship--are interwoven
with natural beauty. In _Testament_ he leaves to his friend the
common memory of a summer in the Cotswolds: sunlight on the gables
of Evesham, a boat on the cool water of Avon, sunsets over Bredon,
evening stocks and the scent of hay; and in the most eloquent close,
putting the most beautiful scenes of earth behind him to sing of
spiritual beauty, he lingers on them to describe them. But his
descriptions are always prompted and suffused by emotion: like Brooke
in _The Happy Lover_ and Mr. Masefield in _Biography_, he catalogues
the scenes, the fields, trees, flowers, and faces that live sweetly
in his memory, and his affection is communicated. He is poles away
from the "careful nature poet" who makes a neat drawing of anything
that at all interests him. Emotion selects his subjects; he does
not manufacture. He writes clearly too and unaffectedly. Except in
_Thamar_--the most ambitious poem in the book, but promising a greater
success than it achieves--he is never obscure for a moment. And his
simplicity of expression conceals a good deal of technical effort. The
longer pieces--such as _The Leaning Elm_--are elaborately musical, and
an examination of the first poem quoted above will reveal studied,
though not obtrusive, assonances and internal rhymes which show that
Mr. Brett Young (it might be deduced elsewhere from his metres) has
not read his Bridges in vain. There is scarcely a bad poem in the
book, or one without an interest peculiar to itself. Several beyond
those we have mentioned--the best are the exquisite _Prothalamion_ and
_Invocation_--are to be found in the recent Georgian book. The poem on
prehistoric remains on the battlefield might well have been added, and
_Bête Humaine_:
Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,
I saw the world awake; and as the ray
Touched the tall grasses where they dream till day,
Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies,
With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes
Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.
I aimed at one, and struck it, and it lay
Broken and lifeless, with fast-fading dyes.
Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain
And horror, at my own careless cruelty,
That where all things are cruel I had slain
A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:
Like beasts that prey with bloody claw: Nay, they
Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?
This is a book which excites great curiosity about its author's future;
but at present his verse, beautiful as it is, lacks energy.
COLLECTED POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY. Macmillan. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.
RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE: INCLUSIVE EDITION, 1885-1918. Three vols.
Hodder & Stoughton. 63_s._ net.
It is always a satisfaction to have in one volume--or in two or three
uniform volumes--the verses of a poet which we have previously had to
search for in self-contained books. The publication of a collected
edition of Mr. Hardy's poems is welcome for another reason. In the last
few years his reputation as a poet--quite apart from the fact that he
has continued, right up to his eightieth year, to produce novel and
beautiful work--has greatly increased. Critics may now be found who
even hold that Mr. Hardy's chief claim to greatness will rest, in the
eyes of posterity, upon his poems (including _The Dynasts_) rather
than upon those novels which in themselves made him one of the two or
three most conspicuous writers of his generation. But even now we do
not think that his stature as a poet is widely realised, the volume
and quality of his poetical work generally known: and there will
probably be many who, in perusing this "collected" volume, will be
struck for the first time with the fact that here alone, leaving all
the prose out of the question, is work sufficient, and sufficiently
good, to place its author among the greatest English writers of the
last century. There are hundreds of pages of short poems, some of them
exquisitely beautiful, and all of them so direct and fresh that even
the most faulty are worth having. Faults--though we might rather call
them idiosyncrasies--Mr. Hardy certainly has. His language is sometimes
bald and sometimes cumbrous; his consistent pessimism sometimes leads
him, in the dramatic poems, to extremes of deliberate gloom. But can we
regret a sad philosophy which has enabled a sweet and sensitive spirit
to shine with such uninterrupted brightness amid that gloom? And can
we regret a habit of phraseology which has enabled Mr. Hardy to win
some of his greatest technical triumphs (for he makes music out of
scientific or journalistic words which would ruin an ordinary lyrist)
and which will probably have direct results in the way of enlarging
the poetic vocabulary, which is in constant need of oxygenation? It is
inevitable that a collected edition in one volume should be printed in
smaller type than is entirely comfortable, and the text of this edition
is not so attractive as that of the separate volumes. But it is all
here, and when the reader compares the volume to some of its companion
Macmillan collections (Clough, for instance, falls into nothingness) he
comprehends that in the history of English literature Mr. Hardy will
rank above many of the supposedly established classics. He is a great
poet.
The Kipling collection is luxuriously got up, but unfortunately
the covers are not all they might be, and the reader is irritated
throughout by the presence on the top of every right-hand page of
"Inclusive Edition" in large black capitals. Mr. Kipling would show up
far better in a selection than in a complete edition, so much of his
verse is at best vigorous journalism. Were a good selection made we
believe that some of those who depreciate him would admit for the first
time that he has a fine poet in him; a collected edition merely shows
that he does not know the poet in him from the rhymer. The greater
one's admiration for his best work the greater the irritation one
sustains when reading through the great body of his jingling journalism
and pompous sermonising. Had he written nothing but the _Ballad of
East and West_, the songs from Puck and a few more he would be as well
remembered as he will be now with all this mass of versification to his
name.
WHEELS 1919: A FOURTH CYCLE. Blackwell. 6_s._ net.
The end-papers of this volume bear a charming design of athletes
throwing darts at targets, and it is to be observed that no one of
them as yet has hit the bull's-eye. We do not know if the symbolism
was deliberate, but it is apt, for the volume is full of potshots so
wayward that we are usually uncertain as to which target these erratic
slingers wish to hit. Music at least is not desired: most of the verses
consist of strings of statements--if they are not disconnected the
connections between them are not apparent to us--interesting neither
severally nor jointly, and entirely without beauty of sound. Miss Edith
Sitwell's verses, though incomprehensible, contain a good deal of vivid
detail, pleasant because it reminds us of bright pictures. There is one
poem by the late Wilfred Owen (_Strange Meeting_) which has a powerful,
sombre beginning:
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached here from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said. "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other. "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also."
There are several other poems by him which have all the earnestness,
and much of the force, of Mr. Sassoon's illustrations of the beastly
cruelty of war. But the one poet included who is always arousing
interest and curiosity is Mr. Aldous Huxley. Mr. Huxley, when these
poems were written (though, in _Leda_, he seems already to be partly
recovering), seems to have been in the same sort of revulsion against
sentimentality as Rupert Brooke was in when his first book was being
composed. He is anxious that we should not overlook the facts that
there are noisome smells in the world, that many people are disgusting
to see, and that even the most touching episode may be interrupted by
an eructation: though, unlike Brooke, he does not usually even try to
sing. There is something very familiar about the restaurant poem:
What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What reeking steam of kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime ... but when the wearied band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand,
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.
There is always strength about Mr. Huxley's epithets: he observes
accurately and his language is hard, clear, and original. He conveys
his unpleasing ruminations with such force that in several places
we were incommoded by a rising in our gorge. But it is not in order
to obtain sensations of that kind that we read poetry, and we shall
not in idle hours beguile our leisure by repeating over and over the
much-loved syllables of _The Betrothal of Priapus_. Mr. Huxley can see
things with his own eyes, and has a powerful intelligence, and when he
has discovered something to write about he may become a very good poet.
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN, AND OTHER POEMS. By NICHOLAS
VACHEL LINDSAY. With an Introduction by ROBERT NICHOLS. Chatto &
Windus. 5_s._ net.
Mr. Vachel Lindsay is best known as the author of poems, notably poems
inspired by negro camp-meetings, which are meant for recitation; they
have intoxicating rhythms and the language full of gusto. _The Congo_,
_The Daniel Jazz_, and others should certainly be introduced to the
British public, and perhaps Messrs. Chatto propose to follow up this
volume with another containing Mr. Lindsay's later work. It is a pity,
however, that the present collection should have come first, for it
contains little that is characteristic of Mr. Lindsay at his best, and
little, therefore, that will show readers here how good he can be. The
title-poem, though not as good as some of its successors, is the only
one now published which shows what Mr. Lindsay can do. It describes the
entrance of the late General Booth into Paradise at the head of the
motley army whom he has saved:
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said "He's come--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale--
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The other poems are far more ordinary in form and banal in language.
Mr. Lindsay, at this stage, was writing like other people, and his
verse was redeemed from commonplaceness only by its sincerity and
high spirits. He is an "uplifter" who is as jovial as Falstaff; he is
probably the only poet on record, except Shelley, to be a teetotaller,
and certainly the only one to take an active part in an anti-Saloon
campaign. The second best poem in this book is an elegy, in couplets,
on O. Henry; an elegy both romantic and truthful. Of the others an
address to the U.S. Senate is decidedly racy. A senator whom Mr.
Lindsay regarded as undesirable was elected. His verses on the occasion
begin:
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?
That is what met the eyes of the newly-elected when he opened his local
paper on the morning after the poll.
A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY, BRITISH AND AMERICAN POEMS OF THE WORLD WAR:
1914-1919. Edited by GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE. Hodder & Stoughton. 10_s._
6_d._ net.
If this be a treasury it contains not merely gold and silver, but
copper, nickel, Britannia metal, brass, and lead. Even if all the
good poems inspired by the war were brought together they would not
make a book of over four hundred closely-printed pages. Mr. Clarke is
Professor of English in the University of Tennessee. His collection,
amongst those who are sufficiently undiscriminating to like it, may
promote Anglo-American friendship; if it does it will have justified
its existence. Otherwise its only value consists in its reproduction
of certain poems which are not, we think, to be found elsewhere. We
believe that the Poet Laureate's _Wounded_ (which appeared in the
_Times_) is one of these. It is a very lusty poem inspired by Trafalgar
Square in sunshine: wounded lads lolling by the lions and Nelson
standing above. It ends:
The gentle unjealous Shakespeare, I trow,
In his country grave of peaceful fame,
Must feel exiled from life and glow,
If he thinks of this man with his warrior claim,
Who looketh on London as if 'twere his own
As he standeth in stone, aloft and alone,
Sailing the sky, with one arm and one eye.
This poem--it is not the only one--was overlooked by those who were
recently yelping at Mr. Bridges for having written nothing about the
war.
NOVELS
CHILDREN OF NO MAN'S LAND. By G. B. STERN. Duckworth. 7_s._ net,
SIR LIMPIDUS. By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL. Collins. 7_s._ net.
NIGHT AND DAY. By VIRGINIA WOOLF. Duckworth. 7_s._ net.
THE POWER OF A LIE. By JONAS BOJER. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._ net.
GOLD AND IRON. By JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.
The question how far the novel can be, or should be, a criticism of
society, not of life in Arnold's sense, but of the forms in which
life manifests itself at given times and places, is one that has been
discussed but is never likely to find a general settlement. There will
always be purists, of the "art for art's sake" order, who will maintain
that the discussion or even the exposition, as such, of practical
social problems is out of place in fiction. There will always be those
who maintain, as did Mr. H. G. Wells some years ago, that "if the novel
is to be recognised as something more than a relaxation, it has ...
to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce
pedantries of those who would define a general form for it"--writers
and critics, in fact, who, like Mr. Wells himself, are prepared to
use the novel as a means to any practical end, whether transient
or eternal, of which at the moment it seems capable. Nor is it
particularly desirable that any such settlement should be arrived at;
but the dispute suggests a distinction which has some usefulness. Mr.
Wells has picked up, with the forceps of fiction, and examined by turns
politics, religion, education, and the relations between the sexes. Mr.
Bennett, portraying modern society of all kinds no less closely, has
no special suggestion to make to this age or this civilisation: his
lesson, if his books contain one, is of universal applicability. Mr.
Conrad, so unlike him in all else, is with him in this. Mr. Conrad,
the novelist, has no views on the treatment of subject races or the
reform of the merchant marine. These two are of the older tradition:
for the novel dealing with social questions is a thing of comparatively
recent growth. Formerly only one artist was allowed, and even expected,
to be didactic--that artist in whom to-day preaching is most bitterly
resented, namely, the poet. He was the bard, the seer, the prophet, who
thundered out of a cloud and instructed the nation. The dramatist and
the novelist were by comparison mere providers of entertainment and
were required at most to give their work a flavour of good morals as a
proof of decent intentions. The drama led the way; and, in the hands of
Ibsen and his disciples, it became an instrument for the examination
of topical problems. The novel soon followed suit, so that we are now
confronted with a category of works of fiction in which the divided aim
by no means destroys all artistic interest.
Such a book, in a high degree, is Miss Stern's _Children of No Man's
Land_, which examines alternately the position of naturalised Germans
and their families in England during the war and the position of those
members of the younger generation who have been left by parental
indulgence to drift between the enforced morality, which is spared
them, and the easy immorality, from which their instincts withhold
them. In both cases the meaning of No Man's Land is perfectly clear.
It is the barren and abhorred territory in which wander those who are
rejected by both the contending nations; and it is the land of the
_demi-vierges_ or, as Miss Stern somewhat awkwardly calls them, "the
demi-maids." Both problems are clearly presented and examined; but it
is not obvious what purpose is served by thus combining them and giving
to them a common symbolism, or by making a brother suffer in one tract,
while his sister strays in the other. They are not problems in the
same category or on the same plane; and their alternate treatment here
hardly conduces to continuity or clarity of thought.
But it must be admitted that Miss Stern, having thus handicapped
herself, carries the unnecessary burden with great dexterity. The whole
book is written with a hard, brilliant cleverness that never flags and
is conducted through a remarkable variety of incidents and with the
help of a remarkable variety of characters. The study of the behaviour
of the "half-English" during the war has an inherent air of reality and
moderation. But it is not on this that Miss Stern lavishes her fullest
powers of description and reasoning. She is actually more concerned
with the development of Deb Marcus, the beautiful Jewish girl, who is
discovered at the opening of the book being kissed by a middle-aged
and unattractive German whom she does not like but whom her fear of
seeming foolish forbids her to repulse. We leave her in comfortable
wedlock declaring that her daughter will be brought up "As strictly as
I can, right and wrong, good and bad ... signposts wherever she may
stop and wander. I'm going to superintend her morals; I'm going to
say 'don't,' and I'm going to ask questions, and forbid her things.
And be shocked whenever it's necessary I should be shocked----" "You
little reactionary!" her friend replies; and this, in fact, is the
plain moral of Miss Stern's book, that modern laxity has rendered
reaction necessary. But the moral lesson, however just it may be,
would not be acceptable unless it were supported by sound observation
or palatable without good writing. Miss Stern provides both these
necessities, and her pictures of both the half-worlds are extremely
convincing and entertaining. She makes real and keeps distinct a great
variety of characters, who, as one thinks over the book, reappear
unmistakably in the mind--Manon, the marketable _ingénue_, daughter of
an operatic singer; Antonia Verity, a Diana whose virginity is almost
imperceptibly changing into spinsterhood; Winnie, stupid, sluggish and
greedy, in whom inconsistent but rigid conventions have quite taken the
place of morals, "a jumble of puritanism and prejudice and incurious
sensuality," and a host of others. Her men are equally well done, but
perhaps with a care less intense and less from the inside. But it is
a sign of Miss Stern's thoroughness that both men and women should be
there in such numbers, so delicately differentiated, so intricately
taking their places in her prolonged and exhaustive argument. If,
of course, she had done no more than provide a gallery of typical
portraits to prove a thesis, her work would hardly be worth discussing
at so much length. But she has managed to avoid the pitfall of the
social critic in fiction, and, without ever losing sight of her main
purpose, to compose a book in which no passage is mere argument. The
story proceeds levelly through all its multifarious scenes, continuing
to present incident and character as a novel must do. The skill is
perhaps even too great. The reader's attention is sometimes diverted
by it; and it must be said that juggling with cups invites praise
rather of the juggling than of the china. But, in one way and another,
Miss Stern keeps interest vividly alive through a long book, the theme
of which is by no means wholly pleasant. Her wit and vivacity are
really remarkable; and the conversations of her persons are unusually
animated. She is without great depth of feeling or perception. The
types with which she deals are shallow; and it is noticeable that the
less shallow they are the more she tends to deal with them from the
outside. But _Children of No Man's Land_ is nevertheless an admirable
performance in a difficult kind.
_Sir Limpidus_, by Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall, is another essay in social
criticism, for which the author has somewhat disappointingly deserted
the Levant. His hero is a member of the ruling classes, the son of a
wealthy baronet, who is trained from early youth to follow the code
of his peers, in evil-doing and well-doing alike. This leads him, by
way of public-school and university, one entanglement and another,
including a breach of promise case and a suitable marriage, to a seat
in the Cabinet and the reverence of his fellow-countrymen. On the last
page:
Suddenly he was recalled to London. There was war in Europe and
England might at any moment be involved in it. How would the people
take it? was the question of the hour. Sir Limpidus was of the
opinion that war just then would be a godsend. It would rouse the
ancient spirit of the people and dispel their madness. They would
once more rally to their natural leaders, who, for their part, would
throw off the mantle of frivolity. Even defeat as a united nation
would be better than ignoble peace with the anarchic mob supreme.
But Mr. Pickthall's final verdict on Sir Limpidus occurs earlier than
this, and is put into the statesman's own mouth or rather mind. Sir
Limpidus has delivered an address at his old school, and is told by
his disappointed son that "the fellows ... wanted you to talk about
yourself, the things you've done, in Parliament and foreign countries,
and all that."
"I've not done anything to make a speech about," said Sir Limpidus,
after a moment's hesitation.
His triumph as a statesman was not one of doing. It was the natural
consequence of being what he was. If it came to doing, he had fought
a duel in his youth, and in Albania had assisted to burn down a
village. Those incidents in his career were not fit subjects for a
speech to schoolboys; and besides them in the way of doing there was
nothing but pursuit of women and field sports. So it was with a smile
over the double meaning of the words that he repeated: "I've done
nothing to make a speech about."
The headmaster, following his distinguished guest, happened to
overhear this mild disclaimer, and he laughed aloud, calling his
colleagues round him to enjoy the classic joke.
These two extracts will serve better than any analysis to explain both
the direction and the method of Mr. Pickthall's satire. It has the
doubtful merit (in a satire) of being consistently moderate; and Sir
Limpidus, who is never quite a figure of truth, also misses ever being
quite a figure of fun. Social criticism on these lines may put forward
quite adequately the author's point of view; but unless it has some
imaginative vigour it cannot be said to justify the form in which it is
cast. Mr. Pickthall's book is a presentation, by means of characters
instead of by abstract arguments, of certain lines of thought regarding
politics, education, and other questions; and in so far it is an essay
in the same _genre_ as Miss Stern's novel. Where it differs is in the
fact that the lines of thought have remained to the author incomparably
more interesting than the means of their presentation. These figures
are painted in the flat: they have little imaginative life: and, as a
work of creative fiction, the book must be regarded as a failure.
With the remainder of the books on our list, we return to the older
tradition of the novel, the tradition which seeks to produce a work
of art, the lessons deducible from which (if any) are, roughly,
applicable to human nature in general. In this sort, Mrs. Virginia
Woolf has written a very extraordinary story. Katharine Hilbery,
after much hesitation, engages herself to William Rodney, a precise
Civil Servant, who writes plays in verse. He develops doubts of their
love simultaneously with hers, and is not sure whether he is not in
love with her cousin, Cassandra, as, after some curious experiments
in emotionalism, he discovers himself to be. He therefore disengages
himself from Katharine and engages himself to Cassandra. Meanwhile
Ralph Denham, a brilliant and more vital, if less polished, young man,
in love with Katharine, seeing her given to William, proposes to Mary
Datchet, who loves him but refuses him. When Katharine is free he
proposes to her and is accepted. This story Mrs. Woolf tells in nearly
five hundred-and-fifty pages of fairly close print.
The taste for her writing is decidedly an acquired one; and, as we have
proved by experiment, it is possible to read some two hundred pages
without acquiring it. But when a certain saturation point is reached,
a remarkable change takes place in the reader's sensibility; and
what before he thought amazingly tedious and thin-spun he then finds
delightful--delightful enough for it to be worth while turning back to
the beginning and reading again the two hundred pages which wearied
him at the first attempt. Mrs. Woolf has indeed proved a truth which
undoubtedly exists but which few writers are capable of establishing,
namely, that no character, properly ascertained and portrayed, can ever
be uninteresting. It is not by vivacity or humour that she maintains
the readableness of her innumerable scenes and conversations. Perhaps
the most vivacious passage in the book is the description of Cassandra,
as she appears in William's memory:
Cassandra Otway had a very fine taste in music, and he had charming
recollections of her in a light fantastic attitude, playing the flute
in the morning-room at Stogdon House. He recalled with pleasure the
amusing way in which her nose, long like all the Otway noses, seemed
to extend itself into the flute, as if she were some inimitably
graceful species of musical mole. The little picture suggested very
happily her melodious and whimsical temperament.
Mrs. Woolf is not a satirist, not even so much as was Jane Austen; and
she avoids humour for its own sake, not so much because she is not
capable of it as because that is not here her concern. The outstanding
quality of her book is its consistent wealth of minute and accurate
observation, both of behaviour and of states of mind, by means of which
the persons are at length fully revealed. Extracts from work of this
sort are unfortunately, as a rule, not very convincing: it is like a
liquid which has no colour when it is seen in a tea-spoon and a great
deal when it is seen in a bucket. But a specimen may be given. Here
Katharine and Rodney, sitting together in silence, are considering for
the first time the possibility of breaking their engagement:
She would have spoken, but could not bring herself to ask him for
signs of affection which she had no right to claim. The conviction
that he was thus strange to her filled her with despondency, and
illustrated quite beyond doubt the infinite loneliness of human
beings. She had never felt the truth of this so strongly before. She
looked away into the fire; it seemed to her that even physically they
were now scarcely within speaking distance, and spiritually there
was certainly no human being with whom she could claim comradeship;
no dream that satisfied her as she was used to be satisfied; nothing
remained in whose reality she could believe, save those abstract
ideas--figures, laws, stars, facts, which she could hardly hold to
for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.
When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence and
the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse
for a good laugh or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by
what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or
of what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon
something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness
of her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His
impulse to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the
exasperating sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not
help contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical
Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet
so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.
She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of
thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.
This is woven of gossamer threads, and so indeed is the whole novel;
but these threads make together a consistent, flexible, and beautiful
fabric. There is one further observation that is perhaps worth making.
Writers who go so deeply into the minutenesses of psychology and
behaviour as Mrs. Woolf commonly tend to obscurity not only in their
material but also in their presentation of it. In the pages of this
book there is not one thought or one sentence that is not impeccably
lucid.
_The Power of a Lie_, by Mr. Jonas Bojer, a Norwegian author,
whose book, _The Great Hunger_, has already attracted attention,
is preceded by an introduction by Sir Hall Caine; and indeed the
farmers and peasants with which it deals do a little recall the
Manxmen of that writer's early work. But there the suitability of this
sponsorship ends; and we must enter a protest against the practice
of handicapping a book with a preface by a critic who is evidently
incapable of understanding it or of expressing himself intelligently
upon it. The story is sufficiently simple. Knut Norby, a wealthy,
simple, good-hearted, irascible old farmer, has allowed himself in a
weak moment to be cajoled into backing a bill for Wangen, who is an
unbalanced, incompetent, and rather unamiable person. Wangen fails;
and Norby is reduced to panic terror by the thought of what his wife
will say when she hears of his folly. He therefore puts off the moment
of confession by speaking so evasively as to give the impression that
he denies having signed the bond, and Fru Norby, indignant against the
man who has sought to defraud her husband, takes the matter into her
own hands and lays a charge of forgery against Wangen. The innocent
man, who is guilty enough in other particulars, having brought many
persons who trusted him to destitution, is elevated into a condition of
excessive self-righteousness by this unjust accusation. Norby struggles
for some time to put matters right, but his courage always fails him
at the point of confession; and gradually he comes to regard Wangen as
a wicked man and as the tool of unscrupulous persons. Wangen, always
weak and shifty, at length forges a letter to prove his case, which
he cannot do otherwise, as the only witness to the signature is dead.
His forgery is detected, and he is sentenced to a year's hard labour.
Meanwhile Norby has argued himself out of the truth and back into
the condition of benevolent justice, which is his natural state. The
book ends with a banquet given to him by his neighbours to show their
sympathy with him in his trials.
On this very remarkable composition Sir Hall Caine has the following
observations to make:
This book says, if I do not misunderstand it, that the sense of
innocence in an innocent man may be corrupting and debasing; that
to prove himself guiltless a man may make himself guilty, and that
nearly every good and true impulse of the heart may be whittled away
by the suspicion and abuse of the world.
I confess, though I am here to introduce this book to English
readers, and do so with gladness and pride, that this is teaching of
which I utterly disapprove. It conflicts with all my experience of
life to think that a man may commit forgery, as Wangen does, to prove
himself innocent of forgery, and that a man may become unselfish, as
Norby becomes unselfish, by practising the most selfish duplicity.
If I had to believe this I should also have to believe that there
is no knowledge of right and wrong in the heart of man, no sense of
sin, that conscience is only a juggling fiend, and that the presiding
power in the world not only is not God, but is the devil.
This passage is worth quoting because it suggests what Mr. Bojer has
avoided. Sir Hall Caine demands, to all intents and purposes, a book
like one of his own, in which there are definite and distinguishable
categories of good men and bad men, in which virtue is ranged
uncompromisingly against vice. But Sir Hall Caine's books, as this
preface would suggest, even if we had never seen one of them, are,
since the very earliest of them, negligible both artistically and
morally. Mr. Bojer has attempted something different and has succeeded
in writing a most unusual and interesting novel. He makes the perennial
discovery that good and bad are mixed in all men and he adds the
discovery that the sufferings of bad men are not always the results of,
or proportionate to, their sins. He has done these things in a story
which astonishes the reader by its straightforwardness and simplicity.
The characters are presented by means of the barest lines; and no
incident or theme is elaborated beyond a few pages. Nevertheless the
central idea is adequately worked out, and the whole novel leaves a
distinct and vivid impression on the mind.
In Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer discriminating English readers found over a
year ago an American novelist whom, alone of his generation, they were
able to admire and to consider seriously. This may have been partly
because he has learnt something, but not so much as to seem ridiculous,
from English models, and because he writes with a restraint,
moderation, and detachment which are rare in his literary compatriots.
But there was certainly also a definite and individual virtue in him to
which critical opinion in this country responded. He had a lively and
exact visual gift and a power of rendering great passion without risk
of bombast; and these qualities were rightly held to redeem many faults
and weaknesses in _The Three Black Pennys_. In _Java Head_, published
in the middle of last year, the first of these qualities was still
perceptible, but, as regarded the second, Mr. Hergesheimer's avoidance
of rant appeared to have become a paralysing inhibition. We do not know
quite what to make of his third book, _Gold and Iron_. In the absence
of any information to the contrary it would be natural to suppose that
it is a later work than the other two; but this seems to us almost
impossible and, if indeed it be so, decidedly regrettable. It consists
of three _nouvelles_ or "long-short stories," of which the first, _Wild
Oranges_, describing the rescue of a girl from a household living in
isolation and terrorised by a homicidal man-servant, is, except for a
few passages of description, a negligible piece of the magazine order.
In the second and third we do discover traces of the Mr. Hergesheimer
whose talents excited us in 1918. One deals with the resuscitation,
by a cold, contained, and determined man, of a deserted blast-furnace
and his attempt to establish himself as a magnate. The other describes
the return of a gold-miner, rich but with hands reddened in one of
the incidents of Forty-Nine, from California to his prim and sleepy
native village on the coast of Massachusetts. In both of these Mr.
Hergesheimer's object is to discover to the reader the interior
passions of intense but reserved and hardly articulate personalities.
This is an ambition worthy of a novelist of the first rank; and indeed,
both in setting himself such a task and in his methods of approaching
it, Mr. Hergesheimer reveals himself as a writer of more than common
powers. But it can hardly be said to be successfully accomplished
here. In glimpses both Alexander Hulings and Jason Burrage are grasped
and shown as living men. Hulings comes vigorously and convincingly to
life in his duel with Partridge Sinnox, the dangerous gentleman from
New Orleans; it is possible to see Burrage, smoking a cheroot, feet
up on the brass rail of the hearth, with the refined and yet original
Honora Canderay beside him, at his first visit to her. But between such
glimpses as these both figures disappear, as though in a moving mist,
behind Mr. Hergesheimer's attempt to describe them. He will describe
them only in the precise and rigid way which he has chosen, a way which
involves omissions, reticences, and silences, subtle appeals to the
reader's understanding; and, in these stories at least, he has by no
means mastered it. It was used with much more success in _The Three
Black Pennys_ and in _Java Head_, and is probably capable of much
further development. If we are right in our surmise that these stories
are early work, there is a possibility that Mr. Hergesheimer may yet
show himself to be a very remarkable novelist indeed.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LETTERS OF CHARLES SORLEY. Cambridge University Press. 12_s._ 6_d._
net.
The value set on irony by the Greeks might well be studied by us
moderns. A proper sense of irony teaches both humility and patience,
and it will not lead to cynicism unless the basis of the soul be
cynical. It teaches, above all, proportion, which is the lesson needed
most, perhaps, by modern artists and sociologists, philanthropists and
theologians, business men and politicians. These letters of Charles
Sorley's, the letters of a young, eager, cultivated boy, are rendered
ironical by circumstance. After the ordinary life of a public schoolboy
at Marlborough he went, in 1914, before going to Oxford, for an
educational holiday in Germany. He stayed in a German family, he was
enthusiastic about German things and German people as compared with the
English, and he reached England only just in time to escape being a
prisoner of war in Germany. The letters are lively, intelligent rather
than terse, good-humoured, shrewd and full of that enthusiasm which was
Charles Sorley's great natural talent. It is not, however, the essays
on Masefield and Housman which give the book its interest. It is the
pages on his life in Germany and a few passages on life in the Army
which make the volume one of the most remarkable records of the young
England which bore the brunt of the war.
How delightful is this passage on the German supper--Sorley lodged in
an academic household at Schwerin:
The people come at seven, and talk about the rise in the price of
butter till 8. From 8 till 9.30 they eat and drink and talk about the
niceness of the victuals, and ask the hostess their cost. From 9.30
to 10.30 they talk about the scarcity of eggs. From 10.30 to 11 they
drink beer and cross-examine me about the Anglo-German crisis. From
11 till 12 they make personal remarks and play practical jokes on one
another. From 12 to 12.30 they eat oranges and chocolate and declare
they must be going now. From 12.30 to 1 they get heavy again and sigh
over the increased cost of living in Schwerin. At 1 they begin to
scatter. By 2 I am in bed.
That is not the only passage which takes the reader straight into the
atmosphere of the Caravaners. There is this anecdote, too:
A friend of sorts of the Bilders died lately; and, when the Frau
attempted to break the news to Karl at table, he immediately said,
"Don't tell me anything sad while I'm eating."
Charles Sorley remarks on this that an exact parallel may be found
in the Odyssey where the gentleman expostulates οὐ γαρ ἐγώ γε
τερπομ' ὀδυρόμενος μεταδόρπιος {ou gar egô ge terpom' oduromenos
metadorpios}--I hate being forced to grieve in the middle of supper.
The letters are full of casual literary criticism, and provide a
curious contrast to the letters of Lionel Johnson recently published.
Charles Sorley strikes one as having a far clearer idea of the position
of literature in life than had Johnson, but he shows little sign of
that fine critical intelligence which mark Johnson's best judgments.
Sorley passes passionately from Masefield to Housman, from Housman
to Hardy, from Hardy to Ibsen and Goethe. It seems odd that a boy
of his temperament should think _Faust_ greater than anything of
Shakespeare's, and by implication greater than _Peer Gynt_; elsewhere
he passes a really witty judgment on Goethe: "If Goethe really died
saying 'More light,' it was very silly of him: what _he_ wanted was
more warmth."
His life in the Army was not long. After a hard training in England he
left for France in May, 1915, and was killed by a sniper on October
13th. The books he had over there were _Faust_ and Richard Jefferies.
To some of us Jefferies is chiefly lovable and remarkable because of
the men who have loved him; and that he could charm Sorley and bring
to him, amid the disgust of the battlefield, something of the English
countryside, gives him an additional claim on our gratitude:
I read Richard Jefferies to remind me of Liddington Castle and the
light green and dark green of the Aldbourne Downs in summer.
The book is edited by Professor and Mrs. Sorley, and Mrs. Sorley
contributes a brief biographical chapter. There are one or two
references to living persons which would, perhaps, be better away,
though we cannot imagine any person of humour objecting to the fun
of this high-spirited, generous boy. Incidentally, in its picture of
Marlborough and Sorley's literary activities, the letters provide
a useful counterpoise to the rather reckless attacks made on the
uncultured public schools of England.
ESSAYS ON ART. By A. CLUTTON-BROCK. Methuen. 5_s._ net.
Shall we ever have a satisfactory æsthetic? Sometimes, in moments of
hopefulness, one believes that there may be a few points of agreement
in ethics, in politics, in metaphysics, even in economics: but to
read a new book on æsthetic is to wonder again whether we shall ever
get beyond the old tag, that it's a mere waste of time arguing about
taste. Certainly Mr. Clutton-Brock's book, interesting, acute, and
charmingly written as it is, does not show us how to reconcile, let us
say, Tolstoy's _What is Art?_ with Whistler's _Ten o'Clock_: or either
with the great and unjustly-despised body of criticism to be found in
Ruskin's works. His essays are provocative: at times he appears to
clear up certain matters, and then the reader finds himself wondering.
In the very first essay Mr. Clutton-Brock discourses on nature and art.
"There is one beauty of nature and another of art." "Nothing kills
art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the same kind
as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature, as we
perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is perfection
because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made, but
born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference between
them and between their beauties." Now is there any truth in those
statements? Take, for instance, the simplest kind of beauty, the beauty
which appeals to touch: is there any essential difference between the
sensations of beauty given by stroking a sable and stroking a piece of
exquisite silk velvet? Again, is the beauty conveyed by the sight of
Cader Idris really different in kind from the beauty conveyed by the
sight of Amiens Cathedral? Is a singer's appeal fundamentally different
from the appeal of the nightingale?
Mr. Clutton-Brock goes on to say that "all great works of art show
an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of craftsmanship which is the
essence of their beauty, and distinguishes it from the beauty of
nature." That sentence betrays what seems to us his saddest error. He
is confusing, we think, art and craft. It simply is not true that a
work of art must show "inadequacy of craftsmanship." What is essential
is that the artist should not seem to be satisfied with his mere
technical skill of craft. He should, somehow, convey to us that he
knows there is a beauty which no craft can render perfectly. He must,
in short, be humble. For lack of that humility Blake refused to call
Rubens a great artist. Yet Rubens, superb craftsman as he was, was not
the superior of Velasquez, who yet preserves in all his work that sense
of something desired yet unachieved--unachieved not because Velasquez's
craft was inadequate, but because his vision was interpretative rather
than imitative. It is important that the distinction between craft
and art should be recognised, otherwise Mr. Clutton-Brock's perfectly
sound contention that the beauty of art "is produced by the effort to
accomplish the impossible" will be made a mere excuse for slovenly
workmanship. This sort of discussion, however, is unsuitable for a
review; even where space is, for practical purposes, infinite (_e.g._
in a conversation), it seldom leads to agreement. We can only say
(what everybody knows) that Mr. Clutton-Brock is the sanest of all
professional art-critics and that to differ from him is to doubt one's
own opinions.
UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS. By LORD DUNSANY. Elkin Matthews. 5_s._ net.
Lord Dunsany's fancy can generally be trusted to discover many odd
prettinesses for our pleasure, but as in old Battersea enamel the
prettiness is liable to chip off and show the dull metal beneath; and
in these twelve sketches there is little of fancy. They were written
"to show," so the Preface tells us, "something of the extent of the
wrongs that the people of France had suffered," and the cultivated lack
of vigour in style does serve, somehow, to illustrate the desolation
of towns laid waste, and--which more peculiarly touches Lord Dunsany's
sympathy--gardens. The monotony of the scene is, too, well typified by
the same quality in description. Frequently, as in _The Real Thing_,
when he sets out to be fantastic he is merely trivial; and throughout
he draws from a wealth of ingenious but ungainly metaphor. However, the
author well understands that the utmost terror of desolation can be
inspired by the sound (rather than the sight) of man-made things gone
to rust. Out in the dead land, where villages are to be conjectured
from scattered heaps of stones, he was much impressed--for he refers to
it again and again--by the "mournful sound of iron flapping on broken
things," and--"this was the sound that would haunt the waste for ever."
On the other hand, in _Bermondsey versus Wurtemburg_, he observed that
a German soldier had chalked up the name of his regiment on a wall--the
156th Wurtemburgers. Subsequently a British soldier had prefaced
this with "Lost by," and added after "retaken by the Bermondsey
Butterflies." This might have served to point the less serious moments
of a special correspondent to one of the lighter newspapers, but it
scarcely warrants preservation in an admirably printed book with a
strong binding in excellent taste.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON. By ISABEL SAVORY. T. Fisher Unwin. 25_s._ net.
"The thought of 'the picturesque' repels me," writes Miss Savory in
extenuation of her offence in the kind of sightseeing which less
sophisticated tourists, for whom she accuses Nature of "touting,"
joyfully regard as inevitable. But though from time to time she is
careful lest the reader should associate her with the organisations
of Cook and Lunn, this superiority to the obvious is not always
implicit. Whether the ideal book of travels should satisfy us by our
own firesides or should merely stimulate us to go and see things for
ourselves is a question that Miss Savory has not helped to decide. Her
vision is uneven, but on the whole she provokes and does not satisfy
curiosity. The book is a record of an exhaustive (and one would say
exhausting) exploration of the Eastern Pyrenees, with Perpignan,
Ille-sur-Tet, Estagel, and other places as centres for radiating
expeditions, and "we did many wanders at Salses," she says. She climbed
high mountains, and admired the views; she visited forgotten villages,
and raked up their history; she lingered--none too long--under groined
roofs and in panelled _salles_. But in her frank delight in good wine
and food there is real vitality and emphatic, if unconscious, art.
"We picked bunch after bunch (of grapes) hot in the sun, buried our
faces in the warmness of them ... bit not one but mouthfuls, sweet and
juicy...." And then she goes on to tell us that at the same moment
there would be a "little sad, sour, tight bunch not a quarter grown"
on a house in Gower Street, and that nobody was ever quite so dead as
Queen Anne.
However, Miss Savory need not fear lest we should fail to recognise her
appreciation of the beautiful things she saw, more especially as many
of them--carvings, chateaux, plaster-work--are admirably reproduced as
illustrations in collotype from the drawings of Miss M. L. MacKenzie:
but our recognition would have been quicker if she had been at less
pains to impress us with her originality.
JACOPONE DA TODI. By EVELYN UNDERHILL. Dent. 16_s._ net.
In the preface to her life and letters of this remarkable man,
Miss Underhill says: "Three types of mind should find pleasure in
Jacopone's work and personality. First, those interested in Christian
mysticism.... Next, lovers of poetry.... Last, those who care for the
Italy of St. Francis and his descendants." The last two aspects of an
arresting personality will doubtless make the wider appeal, admirably
as his biographer has traced and explained the spiritual development of
the man she calls the first great Italian religious poet.
So sympathetically has Miss Underhill treated the religious experiences
of Jacopone that in the light of her exposition, extravagance,
futility, seeming madness even, seem to take their rightful place in
the spiritual history of a man who expresses that history in strangely
beautiful poems. Born probably about 1230, soon after the death of St.
Francis, Jacopone da Todi followed very closely in the steps of his
more famous master. Like St. Francis, he belonged to a noble Umbrian
family; like St. Francis, he turned from a gay worldly existence to the
worship of Lady Poverty. His conversion, however, compared with that
of the founder of the Franciscan rule, was a late one. St. Francis was
only twenty-four, Jacopone was nearly forty when he left the world and
its ways to begin the quest for perfection.
A legend (not perhaps entirely legendary, since it is in some respects
supported by the self-revelations of his _laude_) grew up about his
name, and was embodied, years later, in the so-called _Vita_, a
manuscript of the fifteenth century.
Here it is related that Ser Jacomo--to give him his worldly title--was
passionately devoted to his young wife, who was ascetic at heart, yet
to please her husband wore the rich clothes he gave her, and took
part in all the gaieties of the town. A tragic ending to Ser Jacomo's
happiness was brought about when, on the occasion of a marriage
festival, his beautiful Vanna was killed by the fall of a balcony.
"And when" (says the _Vita_) "they took off those garments of vanity
which she had upon her in order to make her ready for the grave they
found at last, next to her bare flesh, a harsh shirt of hair."
The legend goes on to relate that the shock of his wife's death,
together with the discovery of her pious fraud, led first to madness
and then to the conversion of Jacopone. Nowhere in his subsequent poems
is there to be found a reference to his marriage. But this in itself
is no proof of the falsity of the story, for, as with most mediæval
penitents, the casting off of his old life meant to him the abjuration
of earthly ties and memories. Jacopone the saint remains nevertheless
Ser Jacomo the passionate lover. No songs in praise of an adored wife
or mistress could be more fervid, more palpitating with emotion than
those addressed to his Saviour.
It is by means of these religious poems--_laude_, as they were
called--that the successive stages in the progress of the mystic may
be traced. But leaving the mystic aside, we may feel grateful to Miss
Underhill for having placed the poet before us. Many of his _laude_, in
the English translation of Mrs. Theodore Beck, are given at length in
this book, and very beautiful they are. To forget their theme and to
consider only their form and imagery is to be reminded of secular Italy
of the thirteenth century--its troubadours, its Court poets, its Courts
of Love. For nearly forty years after all Jacopone had lived in the
world, enjoying its laughter, its gaiety, its sunshine, and the poems
of the saint, indicate that he had not forgotten all he learnt as a
sinner--that is as an ordinary man of the class to which he originally
belonged. "_O Queen of all Courtesy_," he begins in an address to the
Blessed Virgin--and we are immediately transported in thought to a fair
garden and a lover with his lute.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE RIDDLE OF THE RUTHVENS AND OTHER STUDIES. By WILLIAM ROUGHEAD. With
thirteen Illustrations. William Green & Son Ltd., Edinburgh. 25_s._ net.
Whether we may consider the reading of criminal annals a profitable
occupation or otherwise, it is an unquestionable fact that they often
possess a human interest, for the imaginative person at all events,
far in excess of the records of the intrigues and policies of kings,
statesmen, generals, and priests. And there is a well-nigh unique and
special interest attaching to Scottish _causes célèbres_ which places
them in importance far above the general run of the great trials of all
the other nations of Europe. This is accounted for by the strangely
complex psychology of the average and typical Scotsman. He is a being
in whom the emotions are strictly subordinated to the government of his
reason. He is deeply metaphysical, and there is a powerful forensic
strain in his composition. It is seldom indeed that a Scotsman pleads
guilty to any charge, even when he has been caught red-handed. To do
so would simply spoil for him all the pleasure of the trial, and there
is probably no one in court who follows the evidence and pleadings
more carefully or with greater zest than the prisoner himself. Were it
possible for him to be closeted with the jury, it is quite conceivable
that he should be found arguing the pros and cons of the case as
forcibly and with as great detachment as any "good man and true" among
them. But there is a fatal flaw in the character of the Scot which
detracts to a large extent from the interest that one feels in his
other traits, namely, the theological tendency which in persons of
evil life at last degenerates into pure cant. The condemned prisoner
on the scaffold exhorting the multitude "to avoid the heinous crime of
disobedience to parents, inattention to Holy Scriptures, of being idle
and disorderly, and especially of Sabbath-breaking," is by no means
an edifying spectacle. The existence and prevalence of this trait is
all the more curious when one considers that the Scot generally is not
lacking in a keen sense of humour.
The special value of this collection of historic criminal trials and
other juridical studies by Mr. Roughead, however, lies in the fresh
light he has been able to throw upon the respective characters of King
James the Sixth of Scotland (First of England), the most despicable
poltroon that ever disgraced a British throne; and of Lord Braxfield,
the prototype of Robert Louis Stevenson's _Weir of Hermiston_. An old
Edinburgh University Professor of Constitutional Law and History used
to say that Charles II. was the most iniquitous ruler that England
ever had, but James II. was still worse. It was badly expressed, but
there was something in it. Its special application was Constitutional,
however, although it might easily be extended to apply universally
if we allow the addition of the proviso that James I. was the worst
of all. He was a liar, a coward, and a hypocrite, full of pedantry
and cant. This is conclusively demonstrated in _The Riddle Of the
Ruthvens_, and in other sketches that deal with the witchcraft
prosecutions that were conducted with such a degree of vindictiveness
and fury throughout the whole of his reign. But perhaps the greatest
service of all that Mr. Roughead has done in the cause of truth
and justice is his vindication of the respective characters of the
much-maligned Lord Braxfield and Robert Fergusson the poet from so
many of the absurd eccentricities which have been attributed to them
by incompetent biographers and unscrupulous scandalmongers, and have
in course of time, by constant repetition, become traditional. It is a
far cry from the Gowrie Conspiracy to "Antique" Smith, the forger of
the autograph letters of great literary and historical personages, who
is still well remembered in Edinburgh, but these are Mr. Roughead's
limits, and between them there is such a mass of history and criminal
psychology as the student of either will delight in, while the curious,
or merely general, reader will find it very good entertainment.
GEORGE BUBB DODINGTON: PATRON AND PLACE-HUNTER. By LLOYD SANDERS. John
Lane. 1919. 16_s._ net.
Here is a case of book-making of a somewhat explicit kind, since there
is little to say, and nothing to print, of Dodington which he has not
said of himself. There is, of course, no more harm in making books than
there is in making bricks; but if the one wants straw, as Moses says it
did, the other wants humanity. God made Bubb Dodington, and therefore
let him pass for a man. In his own day he passed for a coxcomb; in
ours, which is more censorious, he would certainly have passed for a
rascal. In either aspect, if he is to be treated at all, he requires a
more philosophical study than Mr. Sanders has been able to supply.
Of mean origin, some ability and unbounded impudence, Dodington
inherited both money and land. With the land there accrued to him
Parliamentary interest--to wit, in some four seats in Dorset and
Somerset, which he spent the rest of his life in hawking from faction
to faction with a flagrancy and success which even his own age found
shocking. From first to last--and he lived a long time--there were no
illusions about him. Pope scoffed at him until he found metal more
attractive, and changed "Bubo" for "Bufo"; Walpole remarked to Lord
Hervey upon "the second time that worthy has proposed to rise by
treading on my neck"; Hervey himself, who seldom had a good word for
anybody, never had a worse than for him. Hanbury Williams, who was
never malevolent, wrote of him that he was
To no one party, no one man,
Nor to his own self tight;
For what he voted for at noon
He rail'd against at night.
Horace Walpole called him a political journalist, meaning by that that
he was daily in the market-place, and for the highest-bidder. Lord
Chesterfield thought that "God made Dodington the coxcomb he is; mere
human means could not have brought it about. He is a coxcomb superior
to his parts, though his parts are superior to almost anybody's." These
are Bubb Dodington's best credentials except those which he supplied
for himself. With those, with colossal impudence and four boroughs, he
set up in trade, and did pretty well. He miscalculated the odds more
than once: first on the accession of George II., when he dropped Sir
Robert for Spencer Compton; next when Frederick Prince of Wales enticed
him over to Carlton House for the second time, and promptly died. Slips
like those kept him out in the cold until near the end of the reign.
Just in the nick of time he made friends with Lord Bute, and on the
accession of George III., a year before his own death, was made a peer.
There is evidence that he died a contented and complacent man.
Mr. Sanders proposes to "explain" Dodington, but fails for lack of
matter. There is really nothing to explain. There would have been a
good deal to expose had not the creature done it for himself in his
egregious _Diary_. That to be sure is an unexampled document. Men,
before it and since, have written themselves down rogues and peasant
slaves of various kinds, some for amusement, some for edification.
But few--I think no others--have written themselves down in the act
and intention of writing themselves up. Casanova occurs to the mind;
but Casanova neither wrote himself up nor down, whereas Dodington's
complacency in the act to be a scoundrel is his most remarkable
feature.
"I desired Lady Aylesbury to carry you Lord Melcombe's _Diary_. It
is curious indeed; not so much from the secrets that it blabs, which
are rather characteristic than novel, but from the wonderful folly
of the author, who was so fond of talking of himself that he tells
all he knew of himself, though scarce an event that does not betray
his profligacy; and (which is still more surprising that he should
disclose) almost every one exposes the contempt in which he was held,
and his consequential disappointments and disgraces!"
That is Horace Walpole, writing to Conway in 1784, when the _Diary_
was out. Lord Hervey, long before it was written, gave him a pungent
paragraph. "Mr. Dodington," he says, "whilst some people have the
_je ne sais quoi_ in pleasing, possessed the _je ne sais quoi_ in
displeasing in the strongest and most universal degree that ever
any man was blessed with that gift.... His vanity in company was so
overbearing, so insolent, and so insupportable that he seemed to exact
that applause as his due which other people solicit, and to think
that he had a right to make every auditor his admirer." And so indeed
it is, in this _Diary_ of his dealings between the Prince of Wales
and the Administration, that he solemnly records all his disgustful
traffickings of himself and his boroughs, as if they were negotiations
between high contracting powers, and in every page declares himself
both knave and fool in a way which would afford pleasant reading if
it were not so long and so dull. It is enlivened by one delicious,
but entirely unconscious, gleam. In April, 1754, he went down to
Bridgewater to an election, having done his best to sell the seat
to the Duke of Newcastle. He spent £2500 on it, and he lost it. The
fourteenth and two following days, he records, "were spent in infamous
and disagreeable compliance with the low habits of venal wretches."
Those wretches naturally were burgesses whom it was necessary that he
should buy in order that he might afterwards sell himself. It is the
only good thing in the book, but it is good enough. The next best thing
is the naïve excuse of its editor of 1784 for publishing it, that by
its means politicians might be advised how not to conduct their and the
country's affairs!
Mr. Sanders has done his part of the business with industry and
candour. He says the best he can for his subject, and has left nothing
of importance out, either for or against him, except the account of
the trouncing which he received in the House of Commons for his speech
against Sir Robert in 1742. It is told by Horace Walpole, with gusto,
as is only natural, but with obvious accuracy. Mr. Sanders should
not have let him off the chastisement of an insolence and hypocrisy
paralleled only by Disraeli's attack upon another Sir Robert. On the
credit side of the account he rightly selects the defence of Admiral
Byng as the most disinterested action of Dodington's long career. Add
to that that Lady Hervey really liked him, and that he used a steel
machine with which to pick up his handkerchief.
AN OXFORD SCHOLAR: INGRAM BYWATER, 1840-1914. By W. W. JACKSON, D.D.
Clarendon Press. 1917. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
There are probably a good many people who know something about Jowett
and have read several works of Gilbert Murray's, and yet could not even
guess who was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford who bridged the
gap. It was Bywater. Between two great popular influences the pendulum
took a swing towards scholarship in the strictest sense, and from 1893
to 1908 the chair was filled by one of the most learned Hellenists of
his day in any land, a man less great indeed than Scaliger and Bentley
and the present Professor of Latin at Cambridge, but assuredly of their
type. Those three rank even higher, not so much because they are more
"brilliant" as because their interest in the classics is primarily
the literary one. They apply their criticism and interpretation to
the more purely literary authors, and their style has a quality not
relevant to scientific scholarship, however welcome there--it has the
creative writer's _zest_. Bywater's learning ranged, certainly, over
the whole field of Greek prose and poetry; he had, moreover, a keen
interest in literature as such, read the chief contemporary poets and
novelists, and had views about them; he was master of an admirable
Latin style; but his ruling passion was not literature so much as
knowledge, and it was in the philosophic writers that he found his
special field. For that reason his most characteristic work may be said
to be his edition of Aristotle's _Ethics_, published in 1890. At the
same time, that by which he is deservedly best known is an edition of a
work on the borderland between philosophy and literature, Aristotle's
_Poetics_, to which he supplied, in 1909, an English paraphrase and a
fully explanatory commentary, both the best things of their kind for
any student of that work; and as these will always be many, the book's
future seems assured.
"Bywater," writes a relative, "was always studying"; and again, in
words of insight, "but if he were not actually a genius he was far from
being merely a learned man." His enlightenment and humanity are brought
out in Dr. Jackson's admirable little biography, which, as the story
of a scholar who died soon after the European War began, seems worth
commending now. Though he disliked what we know as Liberalism, the word
is the right one for his educational views; he supported the abolition
of University religious tests, and was against compulsory Greek.
Further than that it is not applicable; he was a Tariff Reformer. As an
undergraduate he belonged to the famous "Old Mortality Club." He was
a friend and disciple of Mark Pattison, and, like him, married a lady
who was an excellent scholar and at the same time humane and charming.
Of Walter Pater he was a friend and no disciple; "his style I do not
like: it seems to me affected and pretentious and often sadly wanting
in lucidity." In congenial company one of the most sociable of men, he
showed much kindness to promising young scholars. Some of the _mots_
ascribed to him are rather donnish, but not all: "I often think that
modern education is a conspiracy on the part of schoolmasters and dons
to keep men babies until they are four-and-twenty" is profounder than
it looks; and he realised that "those who care for manuscripts _per se_
are usually dull dogs."
All through his life he was a great bibliophile, and even in this
respect happily mated. Few wives would pack their husbands off to Paris
immediately after breakfast to inspect a copy of the _editio princeps_
of Homer, and when they returned with it the following evening give
it to them for a birthday-present. But he possessed something even
more remarkable than that (for of Homer there are, after all, other
editions); in his copy of Melanchthon's _De Anima_ was an autograph of
Rabelais.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE IN THE COUNTRY PARISH. By ELEANOR TROTTER,
M.A. Cambridge University Press. 10_s._ net.
This book has one serious fault: there is not enough of it. Miss
Trotter gives a feast of good things, suggests so many interesting
happenings of the period, that she might have expanded almost every
page into three, and still we might ask for more. It is, however,
confined strictly to showing how the ordinary business of government
was carried on during this troubled century. Readers will find good
exercise for the imagination in filling in the outlines. Take this for
example: "The beadle's chief work was of a punitive nature; he was
expected to help the constable in apprehending and punishing rogues; he
wore a special dress, and carried a whip or wand in his hand with which
he drove the dogs out of church." A footnote says: "In 1887 at Wensley
Church the wands were still to be seen. They were six in number, and
were attached to the front of the churchwardens' high pews." The vestry
book at Pittington, page 104, shows this entry: "Maie 3, 1646, John
Lazing was appointed to be bedel for driving doggs out of the church
in time of public worship, and other necessary dutys." The office of
church-warden was then of great importance, and carried with it the
dignity of a special "high pew," a matter of moment when the seating
arrangements in church almost created a table of precedence. But why
did the dogs of those days show such a church-going disposition? The
beadle's office to-day would be a sinecure, for during many years of
regular attendance the writer has only twice seen a dog in church.
The next page refers to "Rogue Money," the colloquial term for a
contribution not exceeding 6_d._ or 8_d._ a week levied on Sunday on
the parish for the maintenance of poor prisoners in the county gaol.
A further levy of not less than 20_s._ per annum from the whole North
Riding was made for the relief of poor prisoners of the King's Bench
and Marshalsea. Even taking into account the greater value of money
then, this would not go far among destitute prisoners, but it is
somewhat surprising to find that any provision at all was made in those
hard days.
The temptation to go on extracting these vignettes is great, but must
be resisted. Surprises of this sort, however, are numerous, and when we
remember the lack of hard roads, the absence of any postal facilities,
and the difficulties and cost of any sort of communication, it is
astounding to find how well acquainted the local justices were with the
statutes, and to what an extent they succeeded in administering them.
Miss Trotter's investigations have evidently much impressed this upon
her, and her preface gives an excellent summary of the conclusions at
which she has arrived.
The great majority of the men who took their share in the government
of England in the seventeenth century had neither learning nor
culture; some probably were not able to write their own names;
nevertheless, through being made responsible for the well-being
and good order of the little community to which they belonged,
they gained a considerable amount of political education. The work
of local government, carried on voluntarily from father to son
through untold generations, has produced certain characteristics--a
moderation of outlook, a reasonableness and sanity of mind, an
intensely critical faculty and a political insight--which are typical
of our race.... There is a fear lest the masses through ignorance
of the work of their forefathers may demand a centralisation of
governmental functions, which is alien to the character of the
English Constitution.
The author has earned public thanks for bringing to light these
interesting records of an interesting period. It should be compulsory
for every education authority to use this and similar works as part of
the historical instruction given in all our schools. Such books would
clothe the dry bones of history, as ordinarily taught, in a so much
more attractive garb that lessons might become a pleasure instead of
a penance. The Royal Commission on Public Records received a letter
from M. Paul Meyer, of the Ecole des Chartes, in which he says: "_En
Angleterre tout est en désordre_," referring to our widely scattered
and unorganised records. This Royal Commission is doing a great service
in trying to bring order out of chaos, but it is not its function to do
for the general reader what a book like this may do--bring to life in a
handy and digested form some of the buried records of our past.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
BALKAN PROBLEMS AND EUROPEAN PEACE. By N. BUXTON and C. L. LEESE. Allen
& Unwin. 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
Among all the ignorances of the British public there is none more
calamitous than its ignorance of the Balkan peoples and of their
importance in European politics. We persist even now in lumping them
together as a set of semi-savage tribes, who may be manipulated by the
civilised Powers in this way or that, but who ultimately will have
to fight it out among themselves like the Kilkenny cats. Any book
that is not mere partisan propaganda, that will throw light on that
dark corner of Europe, is to be welcomed. And this little volume,
slight though it is, is all to the point. Its authors are experts,
and practical experts, in their subject. Mr. Noel Buxton especially
has known the Balkans, as few Englishmen have known them, for twenty
years, and in the early days of the war he went there as the accredited
agent of the British Government to try to attach Bulgaria to our
cause. The story of our diplomatic failure is sketched for us in rapid
outline. "Allied diplomacy," Messrs. Buxton and Leese say, "exerted
no comprehensive activity, but at intervals made isolated efforts to
please one State or another by promises, some of which proved only
contradictory and embarrassing to action in another direction demanded
by circumstances a little later." We were handicapped, they say, by
the policy of Russia. We were handicapped also by ill-grounded fears
of alienating Serbia and Greece. The final chapters of the book deal
with the future prospects in the Balkans. They were written before the
conclusion of the Bulgarian Treaty, and most of the things which they
deprecate have found a place in that Treaty. Many Englishmen will not
regret this; but no reader of Mr. Buxton will believe that his plea
for Bulgaria is based on hostility to Serbia or Greece or Rumania, or,
indeed, on anything but a single-minded desire for lasting peace in the
Balkans.
THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832. By J. L. HAMMOND and BARBARA HAMMOND.
Longmans. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.
This book is the third of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's important studies
of that period of English history which fell between 1760 and 1832.
Together with _The Village Labourer_ and _The Town Labourer_ it makes
a remarkable trilogy. It is marked by the same scholarly research,
the same vividness of presentation, the same polished style as its
predecessors. Some readers may perhaps find it of slightly less general
interest: if it is so, it is simply because its scope is rather more
limited. In _The Village Labourer_ the authors gave an account of the
enclosures of common lands and of the agricultural labourers' rising
of 1830; in _The Town Labourer_ they drew a very striking picture of
the civilisation of the time, of the governing classes as well as
of the poor, of the new social and economic conditions. The present
volume gives us the history of certain selected bodies of workers
during the same period. It is, in fact, a detailed account of the
Northumberland and Durham miners, the cotton and woollen and worsted
operatives, the Spitalfields silk-weavers, and the framework knitters,
together with a very full description of the Luddite risings in the
Midlands and in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have
made very large use of the Home Office Papers, and they have been
able to throw a great deal of new light on their subject. Their tale
is, of course, a gloomy one--a tale of desperate struggles against
grinding poverty and serfdom, of wages, often family wages, of 10s.
a week or less in times of dear living, of a working day of anything
from twelve to eighteen hours, of tiny children in the mines and the
mills, of passionate strikes and brutal repressions. The chapters on
the Luddite riots are of especial importance: they are the best, if
not the only, connected account of that little-known episode in the
annals of industry. They will remove the wrong impression, which, as
Mr. and Mrs. Hammond say, is widely prevalent, that these troubles
originated in Nottingham over the introduction of new and improved
stocking-frames. In fact, the cause was not new machines at all, but
the adaptation of old machines to the manufacture of a new and inferior
kind of article. And the workmen had the sympathy and support of many
of the employers in their campaign against the degradation of the
industry. Not the least remarkable feature of the story of Luddism is
the part played by spies and _agents provocateurs_. The military, the
local magistrates, and the Government all had their spies, and the wide
extent of the mischief done by those vile creatures is very thoroughly
exposed by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. One of them, by name Oliver, _alias_
Richards, _alias_ Hollis, has a chapter all to himself. He was "a
person of genteel appearance and good address, nearly six feet high,
of erect figure, light hair, red and rather large whiskers, and a
full face, a little pitted with the small-pox. His usual dress was
a light fashionable-coloured brown coat, black waistcoat, dark-blue
mixture pantaloons, and Wellington boots." He was a special pet of
Lord Sidmouth, and in 1817 he performed the inestimable services of
fomenting sedition in the Midlands and the North and of getting quite a
number of poor and ignorant men hanged, transported, or imprisoned.
Altogether, _The Skilled Labourer_ is a book which puts every student
of history very deeply in the debt of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond.
IN THE SIDE SHOWS: OBSERVATIONS BY A FLIER ON FIVE FRONTS. By CAPTAIN
WEDGWOOD BENN, M.P., D.S.O., D.F.C. Hodder & Stoughton. 12_s._ net.
Captain Wedgwood Benn's experiences in the side shows may well fill
with envy those whose lot was cast in the main theatre of the war.
We confess that we took up his book rather doubtfully--for who was
not long ago surfeited with stories from the front? But we found it,
after all, full of diverting adventures in many lands, as well as in
the water and the air. It is written straightforwardly, without that
straining after effect which marred so many of its kind. Captain Benn
began his military career in 1914 in the Middlesex Yeomanry. He was
bored, like every one else, at Ismailia: he fought and was bored again
at Gallipoli. Then he was fortunate enough to get into the Naval Air
Service. He flew in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. He bombed the
Turks near Aden, passed the time of day over the telephone to the King
of the Hedjâz at Mecca, made a brief "Cook's Tour" to the Sudan and was
presently "observing" in Palestine, blowing up portions of the Bagdad
Railway, and commanding an astounding mixed force of British soldiers
and French sailors in Castelorizo, near Adalin. After this he comes
home on leave, gets his "wings," and is off to Taranto to join the
Adriatic Barrage, the aerial force whose task was to keep the Austrian
submarines out of the Mediterranean. Finally, after Caporetto, he is
on the Piave fronts attached to General Plumer's force. He apparently
managed from there to do a good deal of sight-seeing up and down Italy,
and he has some amusing tales of the people and places he visited. He
also took part in the melodramatic adventure of Alessandro Tandura, the
Italian spy who was dropped from an aeroplane in the Austrian lines.
This is the best adventure in the book, and must be read to be properly
appreciated.
Now and then Captain Benn interrupts his narrative to discuss an idea
or a problem. The most notable of these interludes is his criticism of
our military system. He can find little to say in praise of it. The
much-vaunted discipline seems to him to mean only mechanical obedience.
The "system" puts a premium on waste of time, on the "spit and polish"
spirit; it discourages ideas, imagination, initiative. And most of
the higher officers are monuments of stupidity and ignorance. In all
this there is no doubt much truth. But a good many of his readers will
suspect that Captain Benn was exceptionally unfortunate in the senior
officers he met.
IRELAND A NATION. By ROBERT LYND. Grant Richards. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Many Englishmen are now sick of the "Irish Question"; many are ashamed
of it. Some have argued an inconsistency between our attitude to Poland
or Czecho-Slovakia or Jugo-Slavia and our attitude to Ireland. Others
have come to feel that damage is done to our reputation abroad, both
among friends and enemies, by our Irish policy. Mr. Lynd knows how
to gauge public opinion here as well as in Ireland, and he seizes
the opportunity to press home the point that the Irish problem is an
international problem. His argument, which is as closely reasoned as
it is eloquent, is that England can save herself and save the world
only by saving Ireland. What does saving Ireland mean? "It means," says
Mr. Lynd, "the immediate surrender of Ireland into the hands of the
Irish people, to rule it either as a republic or a dominion, according
as the people themselves decide."
Many, of course, made up their minds on the matter long ago; but
Mr. Lynd is by no means satisfied with all who profess themselves
friends of Ireland. He has some pungent remarks on what he calls
"the hesitating sort of Liberal" who wants to give Ireland a
carefully-conditioned measure of self-government which will prevent
her from abusing her liberty or inconveniencing England. But there are
others who are still baffled by Ulster. It is not that they think of
the Irish as "a mob of Celts" instead of as a nation. The trouble is
that we are apparently confronted by two nations--two irreconcilable
nations. What has Mr. Lynd to say to that? He says firstly, bluntly,
that Ulstermen are Irishmen, and that "the Ulster question" is an
invention of British Statesmen. "Cabinet Ministers have no moral
objection whatever to coercing Ireland. If they have any objection
to coercing Ulster, it is not on moral grounds, but because Ulster
provides them with a plausible palliation for their guilt in denying
freedom to a race of white men." He cannot, of course, disregard the
Ulstermen's fear of Home Rule. He can only argue that it is an utterly
unreasonable fear; for "Ulster is much more likely to dominate an Irish
Parliament than to be dominated by it."
Mr. Lynd does not confine himself to the mere politician. He has much
that is of profound interest to say on the Irish soldier, on Ireland's
record in the war, on Irish literature, and Irish poetry. His book is
one which ought to be read by everyone who cares for Ireland--and still
more by those who do not.
AGRICULTURE AND RURAL LIFE
COTTAGE BUILDING IN COB, PISÉ, CHALK, AND CLAY: A Renaissance. By
CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS, with an Introduction by Mr. ST. LOE STRACHEY.
Published by _Country Life_, London. 6_s._ net.
This little volume of unassuming proportions marks a period in the
evolution of housing the people of this country. Perhaps the word
_revolution_ is more apt in this connection, for it indicates either
a reversal of the wheel of time, taking us back to ancient methods,
or a completion of the circle, bringing us round again to the use
of building materials which Nature has provided to the hand of the
builder. The author addresses himself particularly "to those who
have in the past built only with stone, brick, concrete, timber, and
plaster, etc.," but there are many people to-day thinking of building
who never thought of it before; for the scarcity of houses (not merely
of the five-roomed cottage but of the ten or twelve-roomed middle-class
house), with the consequent inevitable increase in rent, to say nothing
of the contumely of house-agents and their kind, are giving rise to a
wonder if there is no alternative to tenancy. To all such this book
will be of value, for not only will it widen the field of possibility,
but it is packed with definite facts, which have involved much labour
in their compilation. To build with either of the materials named in
its title will appear to the uninitiated, i.e., to all those who only
think of brick and stone houses, as being worthy of the man who "built
his house upon the sand"; but plenty of instances are given to show
that if proper though simple methods of construction are followed, such
houses will last for many generations. We well remember our surprise
when, some twenty years ago, we first saw in Leicestershire and
Warwickshire a number of what were locally termed "mud" cottages, and
found on enquiry that many of them were from two to three hundred years
old.
Building by-laws effectually put a stop to the use of any such
materials as those under consideration, wherever by-laws were in
operation. They were looked upon by the officials of many local
authorities and by other well-meaning but short-sighted people as a
gleam of sunshine on a dark world: they were to check jerry-building
and prevent bad housing. Though this ray of light first shed its
beams upon a startled world so long ago as 1858, through the Local
Government Act of that year, we are now discovering that jerry-building
is as rampant as ever, housing conditions are, in very many places,
execrable, and that by-laws sometimes only act as a deterrent to men
who want to build. Parliament in its wisdom has passed quite a number
of Acts since the year named dealing with the subject, which might have
been admirable if they could have been administered by supermen. As,
however, this duty fell to the lot of ordinary mortals, by-laws have
actually prevented the use of improved methods and materials, which
happened to be unknown at the time the old ones were drawn up. These
have been somewhat relaxed in recent years, but even to-day it is to be
feared that a serious proposal to build with Pisé, or Cob, might cause
the sudden death of many respected representatives of Bumbledom. The
Ministry of Health have expressed the view that further relaxation in
the direction of allowing such materials might be permitted, but many
local authorities would, we suppose, require more than that to induce
them to adopt the suggestion.
For the moment cost is of even more importance than longevity, and if
the usual materials are to be insisted upon the building of cottages
and small houses on economic lines is impossible. Transport is one of
the large items in the cost of construction; but if the heaviest and
bulkiest materials are on the spot, this item can be almost entirely
eliminated. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to hope that local
authorities will give every facility, nay, encouragement, to use any
suitable material, rather than insist upon the letter of their by-laws.
The author's view is as follows, but it must be borne in mind that the
builder is not always a free agent:
Formerly he who carried bricks into Merioneth or the Cotswolds, or
slates into Kent, or ragstone-rubble into Middlesex, was guilty of
no more than foolishness and an æsthetic solecism. Under present
conditions such action should render him liable to prosecution and
conviction on some such count as "wasting the shrunken resources of his
country in a time of great scarcity."
Mr. St. Loe Strachey contributes an instructive and amusing preface,
the humour of it giving point to his own experiences. No one has done
more than he in trying to find the cheapest suitable material for
cottages; in Pisé he has rediscovered the very thing he wanted. As one
who served under his chairmanship on the Committee of the First Cheap
Cottage Exhibition at Letchworth Garden City in 1905, the present
reviewer is glad to offer a tribute to his persistence and success. The
illustrations in this book are both interesting and instructive.
ANTHROPOLOGY
THE MYSTERY OF EASTER ISLAND: THE STORY OF AN EXPEDITION. By MRS.
SCORESBY ROUTLEDGE. Sifton, Praed, & Co. 31_s._ 6_d._ net.
Any map of the Pacific will show a minute dot standing by itself
far to the eastward of any other island south of the line, yet some
2000 miles away from the American coast. This is Easter Island, long
famous as a land of archæological wonders. Apart from these it is an
unattractive place, consisting of a triangular patch of volcanic rock,
grass-covered, bare of trees, waterless but for the rain that collects
in the craters of its extinct volcanoes, and, of course, wind-swept
and harbourless. At present it serves as a cattle-ranch managed in
the interests of a Chilian company, the natives, no more than 250 in
all, being huddled into a single village on the west coast in order
to keep them out of mischief. Formerly, however, there were enough of
them to form ten clans, who kept things merry with their local feuds.
The navigators of the eighteenth century, Roggeveen, who discovered
the island, Gonzalez, Cook, and La Pérouse, estimate their number at
anything from 700 up to 2000 souls.
How, then, in such a solitary spot, inhabited by a handful of savages,
does it happen that hundreds of giant statues of stone are to be found,
not to speak of smaller statues of wood, curious rock-carvings, and
finally a script? A few passers-by had pleasantly trifled with the
problem, but a serious attempt to solve it had not been made until
Mr. and Mrs. Scoresby Routledge gallantly resolved to take the matter
in hand. The task before them was no light one; for in order to study
Easter Island one must first get there. So a yacht, the _Mana_, was
built for the purpose. The Polynesian word means "luck," and luck
certainly attended the little vessel on its long run of 100,000 miles.
Quite apart from the account given of Easter Island itself, the log
of the voyage provides the matter for a fascinating book, proving
as it does that there are many odd corners of the much-betravelled
earth which still await exploration. This becomes apparent as soon as
Magellan Strait is traversed, and the ship hazardously works her way
north through the intricate uncharted channels that run up the western
coast of Patagonia. It was hereabouts, by the way, that the _Dresden_,
after the Falkland fight, played hide-and-seek with our gunboats for
several months. Helped by many striking illustrations, we are enabled
to picture to ourselves the deep gorges overlooked by snowy peaks, and
the gaunt half-naked Indians that these waters precariously support.
Afterwards Selkirk's Island, Juan Fernandez, was visited, and when the
Easter Island investigations were complete, the expedition went on to
Pitcairn, the home of the descendants of the _Bounty_ mutineers, an
incidental consequence being that King George in due course received
at Buckingham Palace two loyal representatives of this, the smallest
of British Colonies. But space would fail if we dwelt further on the
nautical side of the adventure, complicated as it was by the fact that
during the greater part of the three years and four months during
which it lasted there were German foes above and below water to be
circumvented. Even Easter Island, it must be added, proved no haven
of refuge, for first von Spee's squadron and subsequently the armed
cruiser _Prinz Eitel Friedrich_ paid a call there, though luckily Mana
was away on both occasions.
Passing to the archæology, we must begin by gratefully recording
the fact that at length an adequate description is available of
the monuments as they exist to-day. Thanks to the maps, plans, and
pictures, every detail is brought home to the reader; while he cannot
complain that Mrs. Routledge's commentary, precise though it be, is
ever dull. She is indeed to be congratulated on having composed a
popular account that is likewise as far as it goes scientifically
sound; though it is to be hoped that the whole collection of evidence,
of which but a digest is presented here, will hereafter be published.
The expedition was evidently at great pains to survey, catalogue,
measure, photograph, and, so far as was necessary, actually disinter,
the entire mass of remains, despite their great number and the
considerable extent of country over which they are distributed. And
fortunately the stonework is still there to be studied, since it cannot
be easily removed or destroyed, as has mostly been the fate of the
woodwork, namely, the carved human figures, twenty to thirty inches
high, with their characteristic goatee beards and prominent ribs, and
the tablets on which the script was carved. Yet, if not altogether
demolished, the statues are in large part dethroned. Those at least
that decorated the burial platforms of Cyclopean architecture that
border the coast are all overthrown; how and why we can but guess. On
the other hand, there is a certain volcanic hill with many huge figures
still standing, both within the crater and along its outer skirts.
It was here that all the images were quarried; and many exist in a
half-finished condition, while some, including the largest of all,
sixty-six feet in length, were perhaps never meant to be completely
detached from the parent rock. Excavation at these quarries revealed
the whole process of manufacture, and proved that with stone tools
it was possible to hew the soft rock into shape, though the precise
manner of the transportation and erection of the unwieldy monsters,
while plainly creditable to human muscle, remains by no means easy to
discern.
Who were the makers? What did they mean to represent? At this point
we pass from description to explanation, from the ascertained to the
purely conjectural. Certain it is that the present natives have no
use for the statues, and are not only ignorant but likewise incurious
about their origin. Even by Cook's time, namely, in 1774, though
still standing, they were apparently ceasing to be respected; whereas
Roggeveen, in 1722, rightly or wrongly, saw in them objects of an
existing worship. Thus we seem to get at least a downward limit for the
epoch during which they were part of the living culture, and this view
is borne out by the relatively unweathered condition of some statues.
It would look, then, as if the direct and not very remote ancestors of
the present islanders were the image-makers, and not some mysterious
extinct race, such as has often been postulated. Further, the pendant
ear-lobes of the statues recall a practice hardly yet obsolete among
the population of to-day.
The best argument of all, however, amongst those making for a
connection with the indigenous culture is derived from the study of
a remarkable bird-cult which it is a chief triumph of the expedition
to have rescued from oblivion. Not only can it be thus shown to the
point of demonstration that the rock-carvings occurring in a deserted
village of stone houses on the south-western headland of the island
represent the annual "bird-man" who got the first egg of a sacred
bird, and so became himself highly sacred; but it can also be made a
probable corollary that the statues of the image-mountain are memorials
of bird-men, since it was close by that the bird-man must abide in
strict seclusion for the five months in which his sacredness was at
its height. Indeed, many are the clues which are afforded by a close
examination of this curious custom. Thus it seems certain that the
present cult which centres round the Sooty Tern is derived from the
worship of the Frigate Bird as practised in far-off Melanesia. The
Frigate Bird, too, seems to have suggested various symbols belonging to
the script. The inference is that there is a Melanesian stratum in the
population; though, as a Polynesian immigration must also be assumed
in order to account for the language, responsibility for the culture
as a whole must somehow be divided between the two parties. All these
difficult questions, we fear, cannot be thrashed out within the limits
of a brief review. Yet perhaps enough has been said to induce every
student of the wider history of man not to miss a golden opportunity of
learning that anthropology and romance are sisters.
SCIENCE
SOME WONDERS OF MATTER. By the RIGHT REVEREND J. E. MERCER. Society
for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 5_s._ net.
CHEMISTRY AND ITS MYSTERIES. By CHARLES R. GIBSON. Seely, Service &
Co. 5_s._ net.
THE REALITIES OF MODERN SCIENCE. By JOHN MILLS. The Macmillan
Company. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
England has a high tradition in books on popular science. Men like
Faraday and Tyndall did not consider it beneath them to write for
children and laymen, and their books on the elementary facts of science
are models of their kind. Strangely enough--or naturally enough--the
best expositors of the elements of a science are, in general, those
who have themselves contributed to the advances of that science, while
those who are professedly popularisers present the subject not only
less correctly and logically but also less simply and pleasantly. The
books before us confirm this opinion.
Mr. Gibson is a practised hand at writing books for children, the
volume before us being the sixth of a series. He has the merit that
he attempts to bring before the reader the experimental basis of the
science of chemistry and some of its historical aspects, and does
not make a series of dogmatic statements without reference to the
researches on which they rest, as does Bishop Mercer. He describes many
experiments, and gives diagrams to illustrate them. The book covers a
wide field of interesting and, for the most part, elementary chemical
phenomena. The chief fault which we have to find is with the style in
which it is written. We find the imaginary questions put to the writer
by boys and girls distinguished as big, little, facially peculiar, and
so on, irritating, and we very much doubt if his patronising manner
will find favour with most boys, who, we believe, prefer to be treated
as friends who happen not to know. We do not pretend to Mr. Gibson's
knowledge of children, but base our criticism on the fact that Faraday
and most of his successors at the Royal Institution have managed to
interest and instruct their juvenile audiences without this painfully
evident condescension.
Bishop Mercer's method of striving to excite the wonder of his young
readers is based upon a liberal use of notes of exclamation (seldom
less than three on a page, and sometimes three together, for extra
effect) and of the words "wonder" and "wonderful," together with the
constant citation of very large numbers, which fill him with awe--"A
million is bad enough with its six cyphers. But eighteen of them--that
is awful--it is a million million million!" The machinery of nature,
as revealed by modern science, does not impress him as do these rows
of cyphers. If there were any serious attempt to show how they have
been arrived at we should think more highly of the educational value of
the book. As it is, the information is often incorrect on quite simple
matters--water does _not_ occupy "exactly" (or approximately) "the same
space as before" after sugar has been added to it; hydrogen is not
often regarded, in these days when it has been solidified, as a metal.
Often the book is most misleading, as in the description of how the
author saw a man's ribs by X-rays when the "machine" was put the other
side of the man in question. No mention is made of any phosphorescent
screen, and the inexperienced reader is led to infer by the analogy
given that he actually saw through the man. The style is vague and
slipshod in the extreme, a typical sentence being, "The elasticity of
the atoms is so perfect that they always bang about just the same."
We will not criticise the Bishop's theology, or his philosophy, which
insists that "what you really see is not the matter of the tree, but
the ether-quiverings which that matter throws off." We will, however,
take it upon ourselves to suggest that, if he should decide to write
another book on elementary science, he should model himself rather upon
Faraday's "Lectures Upon the Physical Forces" than upon an American
temperance lecture.
Mr. Mills' book on _The Realities of Modern Science_ is in a different
class from the two already noticed, and is intended for adult readers.
It gives a sketch of modern conceptions of the composition of matter,
the electron theory, and the recent experimental work on the magnitude
of molecules and electrons. The early chapters of the book are devoted
to a very brief but excellent treatment of certain aspects of the
history of physical science. A great merit of the book is that it
devotes particular attention to the recent important advances in
molecular physics, which are neither yet included in the text-books nor
easily available in popular form. We may mention especially the work of
Millikan on the electronic charge, that of the Braggs and Moseley on
X-ray spectra, and the photographs taken by C. T. R. Wilson (whose name
is not, however, mentioned) of the paths of α {a} and β {b} particles
and of X-rays. The style is simple and sober, and the author, who hails
from the research laboratories of the Western Electric Company, wisely
leaves the results which he describes to produce their own impression.
The book is, of course, written for more advanced readers than the
others here noticed, but, all the same, an intelligent schoolboy with a
smattering of scientific knowledge would, in all probability, prefer it
to the books written expressly for his benefit. The adult reader is not
likely to find a better presentation of the more striking aspects of
modern physics.
BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
Last month, in laying down the chief matters to be considered in
producing a satisfactory book, I began with type. And as if the subject
were in the air, as it were in solution, I find it precipitated in the
form of an important article in the pages of the _Saturday Review_. An
illustrated article, too, with specimens of the chief types referred
to. This is all to the good; if this example is followed by other
literary journals we shall soon form a right opinion in the lay public
on what is a good type. The appearance of our books will be improved,
the offensive advertisement--I am speaking typographically--will lose
its vulgarity, and public lettering in posters, shop names, and street
signs will reflect the improvement.
* * * * *
It is interesting to note that my view on the importance of the work
of the private presses is also confirmed by the article referred to,
and that their work is beginning to influence the typefounders, however
tardily.
* * * * *
It is quite frequently said that it costs no more to print from good
type than from bad. We might go further in the case of certain bad
types and say that their use sends up the cost of printing. For when
"modern" type of the extreme form is used, as De Vinne pointed out,
their hair-lines are soon battered by any inequality in the paper and
print imperfectly, or involve a loss of time in changing the damaged
letters. The attempt to emulate the hair-line of the engraver of plate
lettering is altogether misplaced in relief or letterpress printing.
* * * * *
The Victorian greyness of page led some printers and publishers to
resort to the use of heavier type to give their pages a richer black.
But almost all the heavier types at their disposal had been designed
for display lines in advertisements, and went too far in the thickening
of the line. Even Morris's "Golden" type, excellent as it is in his
use of it, is too heavy to be adopted as the staple type-face of our
printing.
* * * * *
Not till quite recently have type-faces of the right weight for
bookwork been designed and placed on the general market. The work of
the American Goudy, the type cut by Mr. Prince (who cut the punches
for the Kelmscott, the Doves, and other celebrated founts) for Messrs.
Shanks and christened "Dolphin," and some of the modern versions of
Venetian founts are pretty satisfactory and generally available.
* * * * *
With the exception of the Monotype Company, who designed an excellent
modified "old style" type for the "Imprint," the composing machines
that produce our newspapers, journals, and a large proportion of our
books have repeated the stock designs originally made for movable
or hand-set type. It is very desirable that they should not limit
themselves to these, and the instance mentioned above is a most
encouraging one to follow up.
* * * * *
The _Studio_ has just issued a special number dealing with modern
woodcuts and lithographs--British and French. This is the first
attempt to collect representative work of modern artists who practise
wood-cutting. The revival of the woodcut in book illustration demands
special discussion. This will form the subject of next month's Notes à
propos of the _Studio_ Woodcut Number.
A LETTER FROM FRANCE
THE FRENCH POETRY OF TO-DAY
_Paris, December, 1919_
French poetry has not been renewed since the Symbolist Movement by any
new and powerfully original poet. Besides, the Symbolist Movement is
not finished, and it is in its spirit, in its influence, in its metric,
that our poetry still lives to-day. The majority of the best French
poets have passed the age of forty and come from Symbolist circles.
The influence of the four Symbolist masters, of after 1870, Rimbaud,
Laforgue, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, is still visible. A sleeper, like
Wells's character, who fell asleep in 1898 and woke up twenty years
afterwards, would find poetry much as he left it and with the same
essential names.
He would see only that a reign has ended and that another head wears
the crown on the coinage; but this by itself is not in the ordinary way
a capital event. In his time the name of the prince of the poets was
Mallarmé. To-day his name is Paul Fort; and it is very obvious that
there is hardly any resemblance between the two. But our sleeper would
very well remember having known Paul Fort at the Thursdays in the rue
de Rome and in the _Mercure_, and having once read five or six volumes
of _Ballades_, among them what was perhaps the poet's masterpiece, the
astonishing _Roman de Louis XI_. The prince has nothing absolutely
novel to show except his crown.
The sleeper would then ask news of the prince who reigned in his time,
and would learn that in the year when he closed his eyes for twenty
years Mallarmé closed them for ever.
One of the numerous surprises of the war was the sudden return of the
purest and most authentic of the disciples of Mallarmé, M. Paul Valéry,
to the poetry which he had abandoned for twenty years. M. Valéry then
produced that admirable pendant to Mallarmé's _Hérodiade_ which is
called _La Jeune Parque_, and he published in reviews a few poems that
connoisseurs cut out and keep jealously as once they did the sonnets of
Hérédia. The volume, which will doubtless appear in a short time, will
be published by the _Nouvelle Revue Française_, and will be a jewel
of the same kind as the poems of Mallarmé, and will make the second
peak of a double snow-covered Parnassus. Another disciple of Mallarmé,
M. Jean Royère, has published a collection of poems, _Par la lumière
peints_, that the master of Valvins would have loved. One finds in them
a curious contrast between a somewhat cold and Parnassian form and a
beautiful mobility of images which change without ceasing one into the
other.
The sleeper, happy to see that the spirit of Mallarmé is still alive,
would ask news of the two poets who were in 1898 the leaders of the
Symbolist school, M. Henri de Régnier and M. Viélé Griffin. "They
still make an honourable figure," we should answer, "but the twenty
years during which you have been asleep have not added much to what is
essential to their work. In 1898 they had already written all their
most beautiful verses, those that your generation knew by heart, which
made indeed two original visions of the world."
"I remember, also," the sleeper would continue, "two other poets who
were frequently named together and who, if they did not resemble one
another in their inspirations, resembled one another in their life
apart and their solitary work. One of them lived in a little town of
the Pyrenees, and painted there with a naive fervour like that of
Francis of Assisi, and also with the irony of a shrewd observer, the
things and the faces of his quiet life, the animals and the people
of his small countryside. This was Francis Jammes. The other had
made at the age of eighteen or twenty two tragic masks shining with
genius, _Tête d'or_ and _La Ville_. Then he went as consul to China and
elsewhere. We received sometimes from him strange things, printed at
Fou-Tcheou by a widow named Rosario. This was Paul Claudel. Are they
still of this world?" "Of this poetical world and of another world
still: these are to-day our two great Catholic poets. These in the last
twenty years have, all the same, produced new works that you could not
have looked for in 1898. But they also belong to the generation that
you knew, and all of Claudel was already potentially in _Tête d'or_, as
all of Jammes was potentially in the trilogy of the _Poète_."
"Am I myself," the sleeper will ask, "an image of this poetry?
Has it, like me, been asleep for twenty years or repeating itself
indefinitely?" "Not altogether, but it has added nothing essential,
except this little in Claudel and Jammes, to what was germinating
or flourishing in the garden of 1898." "I understand. You must have
been for twenty years one of these happy people who have no history.
France has lived peaceful days. And this united and undisturbed life
has proved favourable to the continuity of the poetic routine?" "Not
at all, O Epimenides. You went to sleep precisely when France was
beginning the Dreyfus affair, which was a famous earthquake, and you
wake at the moment when we are emerging from a world-wide war which has
killed a dozen million men on our planet, and which has given to Europe
the appearance you can see here, on the wall, on this map." "And all
this has not yet produced any new poets? And, in 1919, when my eyes
open again to the light, you send me back where I was in 1898, you give
me again all my old poets and none but them, and the great news is that
Mallarmé's workshop is open again, that the attention of the poetical
world is hung on the new _Hérodiade_, which M. Valéry is exhibiting
there! That is a stupefying thing which is enough to wake up a sleeper,
which might even wake up a dead man!"
"Well, my dear sir, poetry has its own logic. The war has, we know,
been favourable for those who trade in iron; learn also that it has
been an age of gold for those who trade in diamonds. It has pleased us
to hold in our hands the diamonds of former times. But be reassured.
The war has sometimes brought into the poetic light a kind of iron
which is not without beauty. We have had true war poets. The _Hymns_
of Joachim Gasquet make a superb book. He is certainly not attached to
the Symbolist Movement. Gasquet is a southerner, a classic, a man with
sonorous lungs, with an unquenchable abundance of oratory. The book of
this poet from Aix seems as though it were written by a Mirabeau of the
trenches."
"But in 1898 I knew Gasquet pretty well, I read his verses. They
resembled most closely those of Emmanuel Signoret, and they were very
beautiful. Can you only quote to me these ghosts of my own time? Are
there, then, no young men?"
"Here are the poems of Henri Ghéon, delicate in their harmony, pure in
their emotion, _Foi en la France_."
"I remember Ghéon very well."
"The devil! I forgot that he also was of the group of 1898. All the
same, here are some that will be new to you. Here is _Europe_, by Jules
Romains, in which we find again the powerful and vigorous poet of the
_Vie Unanime_.
"Here is a charming little book which Louis de Gonzague-Frick wrote
in pencil on his military postcards: it is called _Sous le Bélier de
Mars_. In that book we find again the succulence and verve of Laurent
Tailhade. And you will find them again, in a different form, in Fernand
Fleuret's _Falourdin_. It is a pity that Georges Duhamel has written
nothing during the war except some admirable books of prose; but that
will not prevent me reminding you of his earlier, beautiful poems in
_Compagnons_. You would also like Charles Vildrac's _Livre d'Amour_.
You should certainly also read the poems, sometimes rather awkward
but very original and robust, that Jules Supervieille wrote in South
America. And as dessert I will keep for you that exquisite confection
_L'Appartement des Jeunes Filles_, by Roger Allard. Together these make
a charming bouquet, but I grant you it is a small one."
Here I end this dialogue, designed to show French poetry stationary in
the positions of twenty years ago. We may end by saying that in thus
remaining alive and healthy, in thriving for a longer period than the
Parnassian movement, French symbolism has made a place for itself which
will deserve the respect of posterity. The poetic form which will take
its place is not yet in sight. But that form will surely appear when
the generation of our sleeper has gone down, to the last man, into
slumber irrevocable.
ALBERT THIBAUDET
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
The Near East has been opened up by the war, and reports are coming in.
The Augustinian Priory of the Holy Sepulchre, a complex of buildings,
including the Calvary, St. Helen's Chapel, and the Prison of Christ,
has been described by Mr. A. W. Clapham, who, being on military duty
in Jerusalem, recently surveyed the ruins, and succeeded in making
an almost complete plan of the Latin monastery, founded in 1114.
Architectural features, both Western and Byzantine, were noticed, and
the hope expressed that cleaning and repair would soon be undertaken
now that the Holy Places are under British protection. In Babylonia
Mr. H. R. Hall has been excavating for the British Museum at Eridu and
Ur of the Chaldees. Work on the former site was begun by Mr. Campbell
Thompson last year, and buildings of the First Dynasty at Ur have been
discovered, dating about 2400 B.C. Still earlier finds of Sumerian
origin, dating from pre-Semitic times, have come to light at Tell
el-Obeid near Ur, including heads of lions and panthers in copper, on
a bitumen foundation, with inlaid tongues, eyes, and teeth of coloured
stone and shell; and a lion-headed eagle in copper relief, flanked by
stags, the group being 8 feet long and 4 feet high. Nearer home Mr.
Reginald Smith has brought forward evidence to prove that flint daggers
belong to the early Bronze Age in Britain, but to the last phase of
the Stone Age in Scandinavia. The earlier daggers point to connection
between the two areas about 2000 B.C.
THE SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS OF LONDON
Since Her Majesty the Queen graciously consented to become a Patron
membership has considerably increased, and now stands at 377. During
the winter papers have been read as follows: By Mr. Watson-Taylor on
"Joan of Arc, Her Relatives and Descendants"; by Mr. Austen-Leigh on
"Editing a School Register," Eton to wit; by Dr. G. C. Peachey on
"Bookplates"; and by Mr. George Sherwood on "Pedigrees and Next-of-Kin
Cases," all of which were well attended, and the papers recommended
for publication. A paper is promised by the Rev. T. C. Dale on "Durham
Records." The last _Report_ of the Royal Commission on Public Records
has been much discussed, and measures suggested for getting its
recommendations put into practice. Recognition has been accorded by
the British Museum authorities, with the result that the genealogical
papers of the late R. W. Twigge, F.S.A., have been added, with the
consent of Mrs. Twigge, to the Society's collection.
The Society's aim is simply to facilitate research: by making records
more accessible, by forming a collection of printed books, documents,
and MSS., and by making a great index on the card-index system to the
less-known records of biographical fact. Application should be made for
the latest Annual Report to the Secretary, at the Society's Rooms, 5
Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1.
THE VASARI SOCIETY
The Committee of the Vasari Society have decided to resume the
publication of their annual Portfolio in 1920 if enough subscribers
are forthcoming. The Society's aim is to reproduce in facsimile fine
drawings by the Old Masters from both public and private collections.
While attempting in the first place to publish less-known drawings
from private collections, it will not forget that the essential aim
is to reproduce masterly drawings rather than secondary pieces of
historical interest, and on that account will draw, as in the past, to
a considerable degree on the better-known works in public collections.
In the first ten years of the Society's work an annual Portfolio
was published with an average of thirty reproductions, covering the
fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The new series may be somewhat
broader in scope in admitting the nineteenth century, and allowing "Old
Masters" to include any deceased master of acknowledged excellence in
draughtsmanship. Moreover, it is desired to give ampler representation
to draughtsmen of the British School than has been done in the past.
To continue the annual publication at the same subscription of one
guinea, it has been decided to reduce the size of the Portfolio from 18
by 15 to 16 by 11½ inches, and it is thought that this will be welcomed
by members who have little space for the larger folios. It will not
imply reduction in size of the reproductions, which will continue to
be as far as possible facsimile in size and colour, and every effort
will be made to keep up the standard of quality. Intending subscribers
should communicate with the Hon. Secretary, Mr. A. M. Hind, at the
British Museum, London, W.C.1. Subscriptions for 1920 will not be due
until May 1st, and those who have intimated their willingness to become
members will be informed before that date if the number of subscribers
promised does not justify the committee in issuing the publication.
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
The Annual Report of the Bibliographical Society announces that the
Society's _Transactions_ will henceforth be published in quarterly
parts, and that with a view to lessening the cost it is proposed
to allow copies to be purchased by non-members and to accept
advertisements. It is hoped also that _The Library_, founded by Sir
John MacAlister in 1888 and edited during recent years by Mr. A. W.
Pollard, the Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, and the
Honorary Secretary of the Bibliographical Society, may be brought into
the scheme, and that the quarterly numbers may be gradually worked up
into a full bibliographical magazine.
At the December meeting of the Society a point of great bibliographical
interest was raised by a paper read by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon on
"Some French Romances." He showed how many of the woodcuts used in
illustration were reproduced by one printer after another with a marked
fall in quality by a method of transfer on to wood-blocks called by the
technical name of _pocher_, which, he submitted, may be an ancestor of
the modern English verb "to poach." Mr. Bourdillon urged the importance
of the comparative study of such woodcuts, and suggested that a Society
should be formed for reproducing early book illustrations in facsimile.
* * * * *
_DISCOVERY_
A Conference was called last January by the joint invitation of the
President of the Royal Society, the President of the British Academy,
and a large number of others, interested both in the production and
distribution of knowledge, to frame, if possible, a scheme for a
journal which should present in popular form the most recent results
of research in all the chief subjects of knowledge. This Conference
appointed a committee to frame a scheme, and their report was presented
and adopted at the adjourned meeting of the Conference held recently
in the rooms of the Royal Society, Burlington House. Professor R.
S. Conway, of Manchester, has acted throughout as Secretary of the
movement. The meeting approved the name _Discovery_ for the new
journal, and established a trust for its maintenance, the first
trustees being Sir Joseph J. Thomson, O.M., P.R.S., Sir Frederic G.
Kenyon, D.Litt., K.C.B., P.B.A., Professor A. C. Seward, Sc.D., F.R.S.,
Professor R. S. Conway, Litt.D., P.B.A.
The meeting further approved of the agreement made provisionally by the
Executive Committee, with Mr. John Murray as Publisher, and of his and
the committee's joint recommendation of Captain A. S. Russell, M.C.,
D.Sc., recently of the R.G.A., now of the University, Sheffield, and
Reader-elect in Chemistry at Christ Church, Oxford, as Editor. The
first number will be issued on January 15th, 1920, at the price of
sixpence.
The Conference further considered in detail and adopted the committee's
scheme for the management of the journal, of which the chief principles
may be mentioned. The control of the trustees is final, but they
undertake to exercise it through a managing committee, which they will
appoint on the nomination of a large number of bodies, the chief of
whom are the Conjoint Board of Scientific Societies, who will nominate
five members, the Classical, Historical, English, and Geographical,
each of whom will nominate one member, and the Modern Language
Association, if, as is hoped, that also adheres to the scheme. Further
the British Psychological Society and the Royal Society of Economics
will appoint one member.
This, however, is only one side of the committee's constitution.
It will comprise also representatives of the great Associations
which represent different bodies of students and teachers, and the
public libraries. Those that have already pledged themselves to
take part are the National Union of Teachers, which is to nominate
two representatives; the Co-operative Union; the Associations of
Headmasters and Headmistresses, who will appoint one member. Similar
co-operation is hoped for from the Royal Society of Literature, the
Library Association, the Young Men's Christian Association, the
Workers' Educational Association, the Associations of Assistant Masters
and Assistant Mistresses, and the Association of Education Committees,
all of which have expressed sympathy with the movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
ARTHUR CLUTTON-BROCK
ETON. Bell. 1900. (Handbooks of Great Public Schools.)
SHELLEY: THE MAN AND THE POET. Methuen. 1909.
DESCRIPTION IN POETRY. English Association. 1911.
WILLIAM MORRIS. Williams & Norgate. 1914. (Home University Library.)
THOUGHTS ON THE WAR. Methuen. 1914.
MORE THOUGHTS ON THE WAR. Methuen. 1915. [Several times reprinted.
Collected from the _Times Literary Supplement_.]
SIMPSON'S CHOICE: AN ESSAY IN VERSE ON A FUTURE LIFE. Omega Workshops.
1916.
A MODERN CREED OF WORK. Design and Industry Association. Miscellaneous
Publications. 1915.
THE ULTIMATE BELIEF. Constable. 1916.
STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY. Constable. 1918.
WHAT IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN? Methuen. 1919.
ESSAYS ON ART. Methuen. 1919. [Reprinted from the _Times Literary
Supplement_.]
(He has also written Introductions to Shelley's Works (1911); to
Kenneth Richmond's _Permanent Values in Education_ (1917); to _Letters
of a Soldier_ (1917); and an essay on _Immortality_ in the Rev. B. H.
Streeter's collection of theological essays (1917).)
HILAIRE BELLOC
_Prose_
DANTON--A study. Nisbet. 1899. Reprinted, 1911, in _Nelson's Shilling
Library_.
PARIS. E. Arnold. 1900. Second Edition. Methuen. 1907.
ROBESPIERRE. Nisbet. 1901.
THE PATH TO ROME. George Allen. 1902. Now published by Allen & Unwin
and by Nelson. [Illustrated by the author.]
AFTERMATHS AND GLEANINGS OF A BUSY LIFE CALLED CALIBAN'S GUIDE TO
LETTERS. Duckworth. 1903. Greenback Library.
TRISTAN AND ISEULT. George Allen. 1903. (French Romances.)
THE GREAT ENQUIRY. Duckworth. 1903. [A Tariff Reform satire with
illustrations by G. K. Chesterton.]
EMMANUEL BURDEN: A Novel. Methuen. 1904. [Illustrated by G. K.
Chesterton.]
THE OLD ROAD. Constable. 1904. Reprinted. 1910.
AVRIL: Being an Essay on the Poetry of the French Renaissance.
Duckworth. 1904.
ESTO PERPETUA: Algerian Studies. Duckworth. 1906. [Both the above have
been reprinted in the _Reader's Library_.]
HILLS AND THE SEA. Methuen. 1906.
THE HISTORIC THAMES. Dent. 1907.
MR. CLUTTERBUCK'S ELECTION. Nash. 1907. [Now published by Nelson.]
THE EYE WITNESS. Nash. 1908.
ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS. Methuen. 1908.
ON EVERYTHING. Methuen. 1909.
MARIE ANTOINETTE. Methuen. 1909.
THE PYRENEES. Methuen. 1909.
A CHANGE IN THE CABINET. Methuen. 1909.
ON ANYTHING. Constable. 1910.
ON SOMETHING. Methuen. 1910.
PONGO AND THE BULL: A Novel. Constable. 1910.
THE GIRONDIN. Nelson. 1911.
FIRST AND LAST. Methuen. 1911.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Williams & Norgate. 1911. (Home University
Library.)
WARFARE IN ENGLAND. Williams & Norgate. 1911. (Home University Library.)
THE PARTY SYSTEM. Stephen Swift. 1911. (Written in collaboration with
Cecil Chesterton.)
SOCIALISM AND THE SERVILE STATE. Debate with Mr. Ramsay Macdonald,
Independent Labour Party. 1911.
BRITISH BATTLES Stephen Swift. 1911. Now published by Hugh Rees. [Six
Monographs on Waterloo, Blenheim, Tourcoing, Malplaquet, Crecy, and
Poictiers.]
THE GREEN OVERCOAT. Arrowsmith. 1912.
THE FOUR MEN. Nelson. 1912. [Illustrated by the author.]
THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER. Methuen. 1912
THE RIVER OF LONDON. Foulis. 1912.
THE SERVILE STATE. Foulis. 1912.
THE HILAIRE BELLOC CALENDAR. Frank Palmer. 1913.
THE BOOK OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY. Chatto & Windus. 1913.
THE STANE STREET: A Monograph. Constable. 1913.
A PICKED COMPANY. Methuen. 1915. (Selected Writings.)
THE TWO MAPS OF EUROPE AND SOME ASPECTS OF THE GREAT WAR. Pearson. 1915.
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE FIRST INVASION OF THE ROMANS TO THE
ACCESSION OF GEORGE V. By J. Lingard and Hilaire Belloc. 1915.
[Mr. Belloc wrote a concluding volume to Lingard, covering the period
from 1688.]
A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR. Vol. I. Nelson. 1915. Vol. II.,
1916.
THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY. Chapman & Hall. 1916.
THE FREE PRESS. Allen & Unwin. 1918.
_Verse_
VERSES AND SONNETS. Ward & Downey. 1895. [Withdrawn from circulation.]
THE MODERN TRAVELLER. Arnold. 1898.
A MORAL ALPHABET. Arnold. 1899.
LAMBKIN'S REMAINS. Alden, Oxford. 1898.
THE BAD CHILD'S BOOK OF BEASTS. Alden, Oxford. 1897.
MORE BEASTS FOR WORSE CHILDREN. Arnold. 1898. [The above five books are
now published by Duckworth.]
CAUTIONARY TALES FOR CHILDREN. Nash. 1907. [Now published by Nelson.]
VERSES. Duckworth. 1910. [A collection including certain poems from
previous books.]
MORE PEERS. Verses. Stephen Swift. 1911.
(He has also written numerous Introductions, a chapter in (Oxford)
_Essays in Liberalism_, a number of penny religious tracts published by
the Catholic Truth Society, and contributions to various anthologies.)
DRAMA
THE DUCHESS OF MALFI
The production by the Phœnix Society of Webster's _The Duchess
of Malfi_ at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, gave many people an
opportunity to make an exhibition of themselves. In the first place,
it was somewhat astonishing to find that on the Sunday night the
audience, which one might have supposed to have been made up of people
of some education, contained many persons who were evidently unaware
that Webster wrote at the very beginning of the seventeenth century,
and who had gone to the Lyric Theatre expecting to find a classical
and not a renaissance tragedy. Perhaps this is being too kind to them;
perhaps they thought _The Duchess of Malfi_ was a Revue, or a Viennese
Musical Comedy by Leo Fall or Franz Lehar, which, owing to D.O.R.A.,
could not yet be produced on the ordinary stage. But perhaps they did
not even think at all, and their tittering and nudging was merely the
manifestation of the vacancy of their minds. Whatever the explanation,
it is certainly odd that such people should be--as they presumably
were--members of the Phœnix Society. It has been said to me that this
section of the audience was composed largely of the profession, to whom
Sunday night is their one opportunity of the week to enjoy the role of
spectator. I hesitate to believe it. I refuse to believe it, although
the notorious and shameful ignorance of many actors and actresses of
the dramatic literature of their own country is difficult to forget.
But if this is the explanation--and it is an unpalatable one--it also
accounts for the reception given--again by a section only of the
audience--to Mr. Farquharson's extraordinarily fine effort to grapple
with the part of Ferdinand. The rank and file of actors, like the rank
and file of musicians, are notoriously poor judges of their own art.
They are sound enough when it is a question of merely conventional
skill. They know in an ordinary way the difference between the
professional and the amateur. Mere clumsiness, roughness, or smoothness
of technique they can discern and, to some extent, understand; but even
in these matters it is the conventional, the accustomed way of doing a
thing rather than the essentially good way of doing it that they judge
by. The moment an actor goes outside routine methods he runs the risk
of being ridiculed; his slightest faults and exaggerations and mistakes
are fastened upon, while what there may be of insight, imagination, and
power in his characterisation is completely passed over.
This is what happened to Mr. Robert Farquharson at _The Duchess of
Malfi_. He gave an interpretation of the character of Ferdinand which
was a real creative effort of the actor's imagination. Even if he had
been less successful than he was in producing the effect he aimed at,
he should have met with a respectful attention from his fellow-artists
in the audience. But such an attention would have proceeded from an
interest in and some glimmer of an understanding of the serious efforts
of an artist; whereas these people who disgraced themselves by loudly
giggling at Mr. Farquharson were not obviously blind to serious art.
Of Mr. Farquharson's interpretation I will say this. It was essentially
sound and convincing. In portraying Ferdinand as a man abnormal,
fanatical, and almost insane on the subject of sex, we are made to
understand all his subsequent conduct. Ferdinand, as drawn by Webster,
is a man of diseased imagination; he is described in the very first
scene by Antonio as "a most perverse and turbulent nature"; his very
language right from the start is more violent, more imaginative than
that of any other character in the play. Sex is an obsession with him;
his first words to his sister are:
You are a widow:
You know already what man is;
And his second:
Marry! they are most luxurious
Will wed twice. Their lovers are more spotted
Than Laban's sheep.
He cannot let the subject alone, he is always returning to it. Earlier
in the scene, when he tells Bosola that he does not wish his sister to
marry again, he says:
Do not you ask the reason, but be satisfied
I say I would not.
Mr. Farquharson said these words with just the right emphasis, an
emphasis that sent a shudder through one's flesh, it was so simple, so
vague, and yet so peculiar.
Now, for this Mr. Farquharson ought to have been highly praised. It
meant, first of all, that Mr. Farquharson had an original conception
of his part; and, secondly, that he had the technique to carry
his conception across the footlights. But imagination must meet
imagination; if it meets nothing but dullness it might just as well be
dull itself, its effect is necessarily _nil_; and, apparently, that is
what Mr. Farquharson's noble effort did meet. It was really astonishing
to find written in the daily Press the pained little grumblings of men
who had been unable to discover an adequate motive for Ferdinand's
conduct, and who expressed their dissatisfaction with Webster's
capacity as a dramatist, after having been accustomed for many years to
the dramatic genius of Mr. Walter Ellis (the author of _A Little Bit
of Fluff_), Mr. George R. Sims (the author of _The Great Day_), Mr.
Oscar Asche (author of _Chu Chin Chow_), Mr. Robert Hichens (author
of _The Voice from the Minaret_), and many others of equal greatness
but too numerous to mention. It was perhaps an over-familiarity with
the works of this galaxy of genius that led one London newspaper to
describe _The Duchess of Malfi_ in headlines as "Funnier than Farce."
The atmosphere of a genuine tragedy might easily appear "funny" to
anyone accustomed to that of the average London play. One great
difficulty that confronted some critics was the impossibility--after
a war in which millions were slaughtered--of imagining the murder of
four men. Because Webster's tragedy ends in the death of four of the
principal characters, it is, apparently, farcical or funny. It never
even seems to have occurred to these detractors of a great work that in
Italy of the Renaissance--the place and period with which Webster is
dealing--such incidents were as common as divorce suits nowadays; but
it would, assuredly, be asking too much to expect people to exercise a
little historical imagination who have no imagination of any sort, and
who are, therefore, to be pitied for their inability to understand any
play that does not contain a telephone.
On the bulk of the audience, however, Mr. Farquharson's Ferdinand made
a deep impression, and the wonderful fifth scene in the second act,
where Ferdinand enters with the words: "I have this night digged up a
mandrake," was very nearly one of the finest and most blood-curdling
things I have ever witnessed. It was just marred by a few exaggerations
of gesture and crudities which could have easily been put right, but
in conception and power it was magnificent. I have used the word
"blood-curdling," although I know that nobody's blood curdles nowadays,
least of all the blood of dramatic critics. But that is just what is
wrong with them. It is no distinction to have blood that does not
"curdle." The blood of an ox does not curdle--not at the tragedy of
_King Lear_, nor _Macbeth_, nor the third act of _Die Walküre_, nor
the _Prometheus_ of Scriabin. There must be an imagination in the
spectator to take fire, and without imagination the work of a poet like
Webster must of necessity appear incomprehensible:
Methinks I see her laughing--
Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat quickly,
Or my imagination will carry me
To see her in the shameful act of sin.
To the unimaginative these lines of Ferdinand's will seem nothing, but
they are wonderful in their dramatic vividness and appropriateness. I
have quoted them because it is the sort of writing Webster gives us
on every page; it is not one of his purple patches. Webster's command
of language is little short of marvellous. To anyone with a sense of
words it is a wonderful experience to read _The Duchess of Malfi_ for
the first time; and after seeing it played one returns to the book and
finds it all ten times more wonderful still. Could anything be more
utter cant than the suggestion that the plays of many modern dramatists
are superior to Webster's even as literature? How many of them can
be read at all, even once? It is so nearly impossible that more than
half of them cannot be published, and of those that are published
the perusal of a few pages leads to their prompt consignment to the
dustbin. As for ever attaining that combination of great poetry with
perfect dramatic appropriateness culminating in moments when _vox in
faucibus hæsit_, it is utterly beyond them. Such passages as:
_Bosola._ Strangling; here are your executioners.
_Duch._ I forgive them:
The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs
Would do as much as they do.
_Bos._ Doth not death fright you?
_Duch._ Who would be afraid on't
Knowing to meet such excellent company
In the other world?
_Bos._ Yet, methinks
The manner of your death should much afflict you:
This cord should terrify you.
_Duch._ Not a whit:
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? or to be smotherèd
With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges
You may open them both ways.
Such passages are as abundant in Webster as dots in the novels of Mr.
H. G. Wells. The only readable modern English dramatist--with the
exception of Mr. Granville Barker, and possibly of Sir James Barrie--is
Mr. Shaw; but one reads Mr. Shaw for his wit, and his wit, like
water-ices, is, though tasty, very poor sustenance. Yet the same people
who treat _The Duchess of Malfi_ as "Farce" take Mr. Shaw's amusing
buffoonery quite seriously; and there is one explanation for both
phenomena, and it is the one with which I began--lack of imagination.
An imaginative man does not need Mr. Shaw to show him in a play that
soldiers value their lives, and there being nothing astoundingly novel
in the idea, he is free to appreciate Mr. Shaw's extravagant humour;
but the unimaginative man thinks, firstly, that it is some perilous
and subversive doctrine, or some new and wonderful truth--according
to his political prejudice--and then, secondly, when some personal
experience fits Mr. Shaw's formula, looks upon Mr. Shaw as a dealer
in real property, and has for him that serious consideration he has
for his landlord. This explains the fate of such a brilliant piece of
extravaganza as _Arms and the Man_, which Mr. Loraine has produced at
the Duke of York's Theatre. Originally the darling of unimaginative
intellectuals--to whom it had brought light--and the bugbear of
equally unimaginative Philistines--to whom its "light" was the flame
of revolution--it is now accepted by the ordinary man in the pit as an
ordinary, matter-of-fact account of what war is, because the man in the
pit is just back from one and recognises the likeness. The deafening
applause from ex-soldiers at the Duke of York's Theatre is something
to go and hear. To them Mr. Shaw is no intellectual forerunner opening
up obscure paths of thought, but a man who has described exactly what
used to go on in the only army they have ever known, and they have for
him the serious respect they have for all retailers of materials. He
is a dealer not in "fancies," but in real goods. But this "reality"
is just as imaginary as the former "light." Neither Bluntschli nor
Cyrano de Bergerac represents the soldier. There is, in fact, no such
thing as a soldier, there are only soldiers. The intellectual has
never had his "light" nor the plain man his "reality"; for, being
without imagination, they cannot have these things. There is no way
of truth reaching an unimaginative man; he is doomed to live under a
series of illusions, only shedding one to receive another, but, by a
sublime paradox, the only illusion he can never shed is the illusion
that poetry is an illusion, an illusion of the senses. It is the fate
of poetry, of such magnificent poetic drama as Webster's, to remain
always undraped in the world of imagination and never by any protective
mimicry to take the colour of its surroundings and put on a fashionable
dress. This, its unique greatness, is in the eyes of the unimaginative
man its weakness, because he fails to recognise in it any of the
outward appearances of his daily life--in short, he fails to see his
washerwoman because to him she is a washerwoman and not a woman.
It is pleasant to think that there are actors and actresses who
practically, for sheer love of their art, will give their time and
ability for two isolated performances of a long and difficult work like
_The Duchess of Malfi_. The performance, as a whole, was remarkably
good, and it seems to me worth while recording the cast here:
FERDINAND, Duke of Calabria ROBERT FARQUHARSON
CARDINAL, his Brother ION SWINLEY
ANTONIO BOLOGNA, Steward of the Household
to the Duchess NICHOLAS HANNEN
DELIO, his friend MURRAY KINNELL
DANIEL DE BOSOLA, Gentleman of the Horse
to the Duchess WILLIAM J. REA
CASTRUCCIO FREDERICK HARKER
MARQUIS OF PESCARA ROBERT ATKINS
COUNT MALATESTE BASIL GORDON
RODERIGO IVAN SAMSON
SILVIO CLAUDE ALLISTER
GRISOLAN J. ADRIAN BYRNE
DOCTOR JOSEPH A. DODD
THE DUCHESS OF MALFI CATHLEEN NESBITT
CARIOLA, her Woman FLORENCE BUCKTON
JULIA, Castruccio's wife and the Cardinal's
mistress EDITH EVANS
OLD LADY BLANCHE STANLEY
The Play produced by ALLAN WADE, in a setting designed by NORMAN
WILKINSON of Four Oaks.
Of Mr. Farquharson I have already spoken. Equally fine but smoother
and more accomplished was the work of Miss Cathleen Nesbitt as the
Duchess. Mr. William J. Rea gave a fine and convincing study of Bosola,
whose "garb of melancholy" he wore with an exquisite naturalness. Mr.
Rea has a beautiful voice, and I hope it gave him as much pleasure to
speak Webster's wonderful verse as it gave me to hear it so beautifully
spoken. Antonio is difficult to make attractive, but Mr. Nicholas
Hannen might have been more successful. I thought Miss Edith Evans's
Julia excellent, but the Cardinal might well have been more sinister;
he has some splendid lines to speak, including the famous:
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake,
That seems to strike at me,
and they were not always as effective as they might have been. It is to
be hoped that the Phœnix Society will get a large number of new members
through this fine production.
* * * * *
The French Classical _Matinées_ at 2.30 every Tuesday and Wednesday
afternoon at the Duke of York's Theatre will be as follows: _Les
Plaideurs_, January 6th, 7th, 13th, 14th, 20th, and 21st.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
British Comic Drawing
I have before me the Christmas Number of _Punch_. After a conscientious
perusal of its illustrated pages, I was led to think seriously
about comic drawings. _Punch_ has probably the largest circulation
of comic papers, its position is undeniably established, it is, in
fact, an institution in much the same way as the British Museum: we
are accustomed to it, it exacts its quota of mirth from hundreds
of thousands of people each week. It always contains some amusing
things, but it is a pity that its drawings are not funnier. As comic
drawings, most of them are quite valueless; they are not comic
drawings but drawings of persons correctly portrayed in more or less
amusing situations, the whole greatly helped by the wording beneath.
Even the faces joined to the carefully-rendered bodies, with their
carefully-drawn clothes (texture is felt here) and surroundings, are
presented with the correct lines and expressions which a professor
of physiognomy would connect with the various human emotions. The
artist's personality behind these productions is rarely felt except
as a stumbling-block to any progress of the absurd or whimsical. Mr.
Max Beerbohm sums the matter up in his preface to a recent book of
nonsense: "That a comic drawing should itself be comic seems to be
a reasonable demand. Yet it is a demand which few comic draughtsmen
meet. Comic drawings for the most part are but comic ideas seriously
illustrated. We are shown an angry man who has just raised his stroke
at golf; near him a caddie grinning behind his hand; and a view of
the golf-links. Admirable! The man's stockings and knickerbockers,
his cap, his collar, and tie are so rendered that a hosier would not
blush to sign them. The drawing of the caddie's fingers would satisfy
any drawing-master in any municipal art school. The treatment of the
golf-links is faithful, sensitive, reverent. But--where does the fun
come in? Through the text beneath maybe. But only for a moment. Out it
goes, arrested, in the grip of the artist's firm and laborious hand."
Quite recently a friend of mine, whose drawings were more remarkable
for their absurdity than for their strict draughtsmanship, attempted to
obtain some work at the offices of one of our latest and most frivolous
papers. The following conversation matured between him and the art
editor:
ART EDITOR: These drawings are too queer for us, they won't go down
over here.
ARTIST: How do you mean won't go down?
ART EDITOR: People don't understand them. They might do for France,
but (mind you) they'd be queer even there.
ARTIST: Ah!
ART EDITOR: Now frankly (I hope you don't mind my being
frank?)--(ARTIST: Not at all.)--You wouldn't say you could draw,
would you?
ARTIST: I should not dare to be so presumptuous.
ART EDITOR: Well, these are the sort of drawings that children do in
the suburbs of an evening.
ARTIST: Indeed!
ART EDITOR: Now, see here, in this drawing--you've only put three
fingers on one hand. People notice that, you know. Now, if you
could do us something like this (producing a third-rate imitation
of Bateman figuring some gentleman of a pronounced Semitic type)
we might be able to find you a job.
ARTIST: Well, I think I won't swell the ranks of people who are doing
drawings of this kind.
ART EDITOR (surprised and suspicious): Ah, I'm sorry, I fear the
drawings are no use to us, but I hope you don't mind my giving my
opinion?
ARTIST: No, no, not at all. I shall value it. And now, please, how do
I get out of this building?
Among the hosts of illustrators working for the comic papers there
are very few comic artists and more artists than comedians. _Punch_
would do well to relieve the monotony of its pages more often with
the drawings of Mr. Bateman. There is a strength and subtlety in Mr.
Bateman's line which places him far above other illustrators of this
nature, while his knowledge and portrayal of types with the utmost
economy of means is very stimulating: but then he can afford to be
realistic also because he is above all a humorist. He possesses the
faculty for letting himself go. Mr. George Morrow pleases us frequently
by his gentle humour, and Mr. Haselden, a remarkable man, sustains our
daily interest in the _Daily Mirror_. Mr. Heath Robinson is a master
of whimsical invention, but I am not certain if he is not a very
skilful engineer and mechanician in disguise--but certainly ingeniously
disguised. Of the too regular contributors to _Punch_ very little need
be said, and of the illustrators of the cheaper comic publications
still less: the best one can say of some of them is that they reproduce
drawings from Continental papers. Between the extremes of academic
respectability on the one hand and feeble vulgarity on the other there
would seem to be no middle course. Our humorous papers are far below
the level of such papers as the German _Jugend_ or _Simplicissimus_,
or the French _Le Rire_. One feels that their draughtsmanship is more
simple and effective and their humour more spontaneous. This is not
a plea for mere savagery of caricature, which appears foreign to our
national temperament. But what a relief it would be if one fine week
_Punch_ went quite mad and appeared with its print upside down, or,
better still, no print at all, and if all the artists gave free rein to
whatever absurdity possessed them that week!
M. Henri Matisse
I suppose it is natural that the landscapes of M. Matisse should have a
stronger appeal to me than his other works in the Leicester Galleries.
Yet, apart from any purely egotistical considerations, I think many
people will agree that his landscapes play a very important, if not
the most important, part in the success of his exhibition. In many of
them there seems to be no striving for the accomplishment of a unique
or startling design, but there is a depth of feeling in their form
and a mystery in their colour that alone accounts sufficiently for
Matisse's reputation in modern art. I am extremely covetous of any
one or all of these pictures. Matisse, in his landscapes, is a poet
as well as a painter: his intense feeling for the quiet and rather
awe-inspiring moments in Nature, his rendering of the vague profusion
of growth, the cool grey horizontal clouds and subtle effects of
light, make him a master in this branch of his art. I do not find this
intensity of feeling in his other works, they are apt to cool one's
ardour after the landscapes, and we are brought to think of design _per
se_, and confronted with a flatness of handling that is not nearly
so intriguing. His largest painting, _Portrait de Femmes_ (_trois
sœurs_), is very noble, and the drawings should not fail to satisfy
the diminishing (I hope) body of people who _will_ sniff at such an
exhibition and utter those well-worn and unpardonable remarks on lack
of draughtsmanship. Messrs. Brown and Phillips are to be congratulated
on procuring for us such an interesting exhibition, and for giving us
in the catalogue a photograph of M. Matisse. A glance at this likeness
might still the outcries of Philistia more effectually than much
argument.
Goupil Gallery Salon
Mr. William Marchant's salons, discontinued during the war, have
come to life again, and the ninth of the series has been open during
November and December. The Goupil Gallery has a large capacity, and Mr.
Marchant seems to have gone out into all parts of the United Kingdom
and gathered in a large crowd of artists, nor has he been able entirely
to exclude some of the halt and the blind. A detailed criticism from
picture to picture, or even from one man's group of work to another's,
would be very tedious, for there are some 300 exhibits displayed in the
series of rooms. The choice of work is very comprehensive, ranging from
James Pryde to Pamela Bianco, from Mr. Lewis's portrait of Mr. Pound to
the post-Millais backwash of Mr. Ranken.
In the Large Gallery are Mr. Augustus John and Mr. Sickert. The former
exhibits two soldier portraits and No. 51, _Birdie_, all of which serve
to remind us of his unequalled position in that branch of art. Mr.
Sickert, the contemporary in age with most of the artists in this room,
shines forth in his work with all the vigour and freshness of youth.
His No. 49, _Bridge at Bath_, challenges the declining interest in the
work of the more established artists in the room, while he runs level
with, even sets the pace for, the younger generation.
In the First Gallery Mr. Lewis's portrait of Mr. Ezra Pound is apt to
blunt our sensibilities to the other works therein. It is indeed a
remarkable painting, standing like a ferro-concrete factory amidst a
peaceful and rather decaying village. Of its faithfulness I am unable
to judge, being acquainted with Mr. Pound solely in the pages of the
_Little Review_, but its hard compelling colour and the solidity of its
built-up design make it a thing difficult to forget. Mr. Robert Bevan's
landscape, No. 100, has a reposeful design that is very telling. Mr.
Ginner's sturdy realism is refreshing, and his painting in this room
is, I think, more successful in design and colour than his other
exhibit.
The Third Gallery.--Here, again, Mr. Sickert's two charming paintings
attract our attention, and Mr. Mark Gertler's fine portrait is
essentially a picture that leaves an impression in this maze of
paintings. There are besides two fine wall paintings by Mr. William
Rothenstein.
The Grey Room deserves its name indeed. It is difficult to say why the
standard of water-colours is so low compared to the oils: with a very
few exceptions, noticeably the drawings of Mr. Albert Rutherston, we
seem to have touched bottom in this room, and a very muddy bottom too,
so that coming at last to Mr. Shackleton's _Peace Day_ one felt there
remained nothing but to burst through the skylight into the air again.
The absence of line in the water-colour drawings is very depressing.
ARTISTIC PERIODICALS
_ILLUSTRATION_
Foremost among the periodicals issued recently is Mr. Gerard Meynell's
_Illustration_. This is a trade circular, and as such would naturally
demonstrate within its covers the printer's aspirations in the
reproduction of blocks and lettering. "Circular" is not an attractive
word, but Mr. Meynell is no ordinary printer, and his circular is still
less an ordinary affair. To those who are unacquainted with it, I would
hasten to say that _Illustration_ is more like a beautifully-coloured
fairy-tale book than the accepted idea of a circular. This time Mr.
Meynell has surpassed himself in his efforts not merely in the turn-out
of his book, which to the professional and the amateur glance must be
entirely admirable, but in giving us the added interest of a Supplement
containing eight reproductions of modern art.
JOHN NASH
MUSIC
COVENT GARDEN
One success at least Covent Garden has achieved--_Parsifal_. It
fills the house, and it deserves to do so, for it is by far the best
performance that has been seen this season. The scenery and costumes,
as far as could be seen from the topmost proscenium box, in which the
LONDON MERCURY was accommodated, were those of the original Covent
Garden production. The Temple of the Grail was dignified and beautiful,
the magic flower-garden ridiculous. The flower-maidens, who sang
extremely well and were in themselves quite competent to look their
parts, wore dresses that might have been discarded by a travelling
Gilbert-and-Sullivan company, half from _Iolanthe_ and half from _The
Mikado_. The swan was as ridiculous as ever. That worst trap of all
for producers of _Parsifal_, the undressing and washing of the hero
in the first scene of the third act, was painfully successful. It was
a toss-up whether Kundry would not remove Parsifal's wig along with
his helmet, and the struggles of the holy knight to pull his white
draperies down from under his armour were comic in the extreme. There
are many little hitches and absurdities in all operas which pass
unnoticed, because something of greater importance happens at the same
moment and distracts the attention. But these particular episodes are
in themselves the most important things happening at their particular
moments. It is on them that all attention must be concentrated by the
audience, and if they are made ludicrous by careless handling the
solemnity of the drama is very gravely impaired. It is not as if they
depended upon elaborate machinery. What is required is forethought and
common sense.
Miss Gladys Ancrum's Kundry was a very notable achievement. Her
gestures would be the better for a little more restraint and a good
deal more sense of definite design. Her singing was full of colour, and
she showed great dramatic power in the use of different qualities of
tone. It is a part which covers a very wide range of character-drawing;
there are at least four distinct personalities in Kundry, and Miss
Ancrum went a very considerable way towards distinguishing them and
endowing them with life. Parsifal is one of the most ungrateful parts
ever given to a hero. Pure fools may be quite attractive people in
ordinary life, but on the operatic stage, especially when tenors,
there is little to be done with them. Van Dyck, who was reputed the
greatest of Parsifals, was corpulent, and sang out of tune. Mr.
Walter Hyde did not look very boyish, but he at least sang well. Mr.
Langley's melodramatic manner was well suited to the part of Klingsor.
As Gurnemanz Mr. Norman Allin showed a fine voice and a dignified
presence; but of all Wagnerian bores Gurnemanz is the most boring,
surpassing even Wolfram in tediousness, and it is only a very ripe
actor, with that quality of vocal style which may be called either
unction or unctuousness according to taste, who can make the part
really effective on the stage. The most sympathetic character in
_Parsifal_ is Amfortas, and Mr. Percy Heming being one of the most
sympathetic actors and singers in the company, it was very poignantly
realised.
When we read of a new opera by Mr. Delius, _Fennimore and Gerda_,
having been produced recently at Frankfurt with great success, it
was indeed a bitter disappointment that Covent Garden could not
even resuscitate _A Village Romeo and Juliet_. The Beecham Company
performed it in a previous season, so it cannot have presented all
the difficulties of a new creation. It may well have been better to
withdraw it altogether than to give it badly; but if more time was
wanted for rehearsal it might well have taken the place of _Nail_,
which reflects more credit on Sir Thomas Beecham's good nature than on
his artistic judgment.
Moussorgsky's _Khovantchina_ had an indifferent performance and an
indifferent house. It is less popular than _Boris Godunov_, and less
obviously dramatic, but it has more unity of purpose and contains much
better music. Both operas, however, are invariably so much cut about
that the difficulty of following the story is very much increased. Mr.
Norman Allin had a magnificent opportunity in the part of Dositheus,
but it is not sufficient to treat it as if Dositheus were one of the
conventional operatic ministers of religion. It was one of Chaliapin's
most overwhelming creations; but Mr. Allin, though undoubtedly a fine
singer, has far to go before he can achieve the ease and perfection of
Chaliapin's vocalisation. Our singers do not concentrate nearly enough
attention on the pure art of singing. They may be divided roughly
into two categories: the clever ones who think that the psychological
understanding of a character and the vigorous declamation of words are
enough to carry them through any part, and the stupid ones who think
that fine singing consists in imitating the external mannerisms of
Caruso or any other Milanese or Neapolitan star. The clever ones are
quite right in realising that English singing can never be achieved by
trying to make a bad copy of Italian tricks. Many of these tricks do
not indeed belong to the fine art of singing at all; they are merely
appeals to false emotion, which excite a vulgar Italian audience just
as the well-worn ballad-concert mannerisms excite a vulgar audience
in England. A training in the real Italian style is without doubt of
the greatest possible value to an English singer, provided that it
means a thorough training in Italian literature and conversation, for
that involves a study of speech-rhythms and a purity of articulation,
which are invaluable to any one who makes use of his voice either as a
singer or as a speaker. Pure singing and pure speaking are essential
requirements to any operatic artist, and the singer must grasp the
principle that his vocal technique is to be the servant of his artistic
idea and not a hindrance to its sincere expression.
For Bizet's _Djamileh_ Sir Thomas Beecham would no doubt have deserved
sincere gratitude had it not been postponed until too late for
inclusion in this notice. There was much that was laughable in the _The
Fair Maid of Perth_, but Bizet even at his lowest has always charm and,
what is more important, unexpected turns of originality.
There are historical reasons for thinking that the lighter forms of
opera are those most suited to the English temperament in general.
Attempts are constantly being made to re-establish light opera of a
really artistic kind in this country, and although no one has yet
succeeded in rivalling Sullivan in this field, Sir Thomas is certainly
doing an excellent work in perpetually holding up Mozart and Bizet as
working models for both the English composer and the English public to
study and to enjoy.
CONCERTS
When Busoni next visits this country it is to be hoped that he will
have better opportunities of being heard under appropriate conditions.
The crowded and enthusiastic audiences which filled the Wigmore Hall
for his two recitals showed that he might well have given half-a-dozen
similar programmes instead of appearing as star turn at the Albert Hall
on Sunday afternoons, and there is not the slightest doubt that the
Wigmore Hall audiences were of the kind that he could play to with real
pleasure. He appeared at one of the Queen's Hall Symphony Concerts as
composer and conductor, and also played Mozart's Concerto in C minor.
Here, too, it was impossible to separate Busoni the pianist from Busoni
the composer, for the concerto was embellished by cadenzas of singular
originality and loveliness. Those inserted in the slow movement were
startlingly modern, but with a modernity that Mozart himself might
well have achieved if he had lived to the age of his interpreter, for
they were certainly designed on thoroughly Mozartian principles of
composition. Two fragments from a _Faust_ opera, on which Busoni is now
engaged, gave the highest hopes of the complete work, for they were
most noble and impressive musical pictures. At his farewell recital on
December 6th he played Liszt's Sonata in B minor with a breadth and
dignity that placed Liszt almost on a level with Beethoven. As a player
of Chopin, Busoni has always been somewhat hard to accept; but the
mellowing of style which the last five years have brought him was very
apparent in his treatment of the Five Ballades, and still more in the
Nocturne in C minor, which of all the Nocturnes is the most suited to
Busoni's very monumental interpretation.
Of singers by far the most interesting has been Mme. Jane Bathori, who
appeared at one of the Classical Concert Society's concerts. She has
long been known as the finest exponent of modern French songs. She is
also an excellent pianist, and often plays her own accompaniments, thus
securing a perfect homogeneity of performance, which the best pair of
partners can hardly ever realise.
The Royal Philharmonic Society, after passing through some trying
moments during the war, has made energetic efforts to regain its
ancient honourable traditions. With Mr. Coates, Mr. Geoffrey Toye, Mr.
Adrian Boult, and Mr. Landon Ronald as conductors, it is quite clear
that London has no scarcity of orchestral directors. A new departure
has been made by the establishment of the Philharmonic Choir, under the
management of Mr. Charles Kennedy Scott, the conductor of the Oriana
Madrigal Society. The programmes of the concerts exhibit a judicious
selection of classic and modern works, among which English music is
prominent. The general verdict on the first two concerts was that
some of the pieces chosen, both old and new, were not of first-rate
importance. The compilers of the programmes were probably quite well
aware of that fact. There are, in fact, plenty of works, such as
Holbrooke's _Ulalume_ and Meyerbeer's _Struensee_ Overture, to name two
examples only, which certainly are not immortal masterpieces, but are
none the less quite interesting and well worth an occasional hearing.
Even acknowledged masterpieces have been known to suffer from too
frequent performance.
A new Italian composer, Francesco Malipiero, has been very prominent
in recent programmes. M. Yves Tinayre sang his _Chanson Morave_, Mr.
Mark Hambourg played his _Barlumi_ for pianoforte; of his orchestral
music, _Impressioni dal Vero_ was heard at the Promenades, a _Ditirambo
Tragico_ at the Queen's Hall Symphony Concerts, and, lastly, at the
second Philharmonic, _Le Pause del Silenzio_. No explanation has
been offered of this curious title, but it may possibly bear some
connection with an interesting passage in D'Annunzio's novel, _Il
Fuoco_, in which Stelio Effrena maintains that the essence of music
lies not in the sounds but in the silences that separate them. It is
something of a compliment to Malipiero that his last work succeeded in
rousing a Philharmonic audience to hostility. Such demonstrations are
rare in this country, though their rarity is due less to broadminded
receptivity than to courteous indifference. Malipiero will survive
his hisses. His language is harsh and obscure, although a study of
his scores shows that he has plenty of technical skill, for he is
evidently dealing with emotions which he has not yet been able to
express clearly, and which we have probably not been accustomed to hear
expressed. Judging from the scores, it seemed that the performances,
both under Mr. Toye at the Philharmonic and under Sir Henry Wood, were
lacking in the singing sense. There is a temptation in these days to
lay too much stress upon the strangeness of strange harmonies. They
would become clearer if more attention was given to the elucidation and
intensification of the strange melodies which are at the foundation of
all modern music that is likely to last. There can be no doubt about
the sincerity and depth of feeling in Malipiero's music, though it has
not the more attractive qualities of Casella's facile ingenuity.
EDWARD J. DENT
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THE LONDON
MERCURY
_Editor_--J. C. SQUIRE _Assistant-Editor_--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 4 February 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
An interesting exchange of opinions about modern art took place in the
_Times_ last month. The art-critic stated that modern English artists
were afraid of ugliness; Sir Sidney Colvin replied that so far was this
from being the truth "that the prevalent malady of the time, at least
among those artists and critics who arrogate to themselves the title
of 'modern,' was a much less becoming form of cowardice--namely, the
fear of beauty. Because the beauty-blind may be taken in by prettiness,
and because a new fashion in critical theory has come over from
France (to perish, as I have seen dozens of such theories perish in
their day), nothing, in the circles to which I refer, is attempted or
applauded which either bears any resemblance to nature or records any
predilection of the mind except for what is shrieking and dissonant
in colour and jumbled and jarring, like a kind of insane geometry, in
form. Of all things such 'modernity' is doubtless doomed soonest to be
ancient, or not to give it so honourable a name, at least obsolete,
discarded, and unregretted."
* * * * *
That there are many English artists who are in a sense afraid of
ugliness, in other words, who will only make pretty imitations of
things recognised as beautiful, is not to be denied: it might almost be
said that artists may be divided into those who have an unreasonable
fear of ugliness and those who have a reprehensible love of it. Many
difficult questions are involved in such a discussion: often two
disputing parties will be found to be fundamentally in agreement. The
_Times_ critic was emphasising the truth that unoriginality is bad; Sir
Sidney Colvin the equal truth that bogus originality is bad. But his
remarks reminded us of a great many observations we have all recently
heard with respect to certain tendencies to be observed in contemporary
art or pseudo-art. The elderly and many of the soberer young are
alarmed at much that they see painted or published. What does it all
mean? they ask. Are the world's artists rushing over a steep place into
the sea? Is there some new revelation in what looks at first sight like
obscure rubbish? Are these noisy rioters really the young? Do they
really hate everything that has ever been considered true? Will the
whole of the coming generation be captured by them? Mingled with the
dislike there is a great deal of bewilderment. Men doubt themselves.
After all, new artistic developments have often been incomprehensible;
these things are undeniably incomprehensible, so perhaps they are new
artistic developments. Those who are tired of strife shiver, wrap their
coats around them, prepare to retire into corners where the cold blast
cannot reach them. But we really do not think that they should be so
depressed, or that more vigorous men like Sir Sidney Colvin should be
so alarmed: a rational diagnosis of the situation dissipates these
apparent dangers.
* * * * *
Now we had better begin by premising that in the sphere of the fine
arts we are not (these things are never taken for granted) denying the
value of modern developments and the possibility of later ones. Not
all the technical experiments of modern intellectual artists (akin
to experiments in new media) may be fruitful, but at the centre of
most movements, however extravagant, may be found an original artist
who has either a peculiar way of looking at the world (El Greco is an
example) or desires to experiment with some method in order to find out
what results may accrue from it. But it is not a good thing to base a
theory on the mannerisms of an original artist; it is still worse to
build a convention on his unsuccessful experiments; and worst of all,
perhaps, for an artist to paint not what he sees as he sees it through
the medium of his temperament, but what some philosophical critic, with
a distaste for both Nature and humanity, tells him to paint. A painter
with intelligence, however, will soon tire of something which produces
results which do not interest him; and the painting of foolish pictures
by people who desire merely to attract attention is to some extent
limited because anything that would deceive anybody involves a good
deal of time and trouble. The fine arts will look after themselves;
few members of the public will pay large sums for pictures that convey
nothing to them. The printed word is in a rather different category.
The world is always full of ineffective people who have a desire to
write: a thing which can be done at any moment by anyone who has pen,
ink, and paper. They also desire to attract attention by their writing.
In our time "stunts" for their assistance have been discovered which
have never been hit upon before.
* * * * *
The various stunts with which we are now familiar have spread over
the whole world with a rapidity that no genuine spiritual movement
or technical discovery has ever equalled. Just before the war that
vivacious Southerner, Signor Marinetti, introduced us to the type-page,
which consisted of capital letters and notes of exclamation tumbled
about in apparent confusion. The first large English enterprise of
the Futurist-Vorticist-Cubist kind was (though it contained normal
patches) the magenta magazine _Blast_. It succumbed shortly after a
hostile critic, consulting his Webster, had discovered the definition:
"Blast:--a flatulent disease of sheep." But it died to give place to
countless smaller magazines and books containing bewildering designs
and extraordinary poems. The drawings and, to the eye which can
take in only their typography, the poems are indistinguishable from
others which are being published all over the world. The _blagueurs_
attach themselves to anything which will give them publicity. There
is something pathetic about the way in which, wherever the political
Bolsheviks get into office, they print the verses and cartoons of the
artistic anarchists. They don't understand them; all they know is that
the bourgeois dislike them; so in Munich last Easter, and (we daresay)
in Moscow now, there is an excellent opening for those who, for all
anyone would be able to say to the contrary, have only to scratch out
the old titles of their interlocked triangles and write underneath
"Uprising of Proletariat," or some such thing. The Vorticists and
verslibrists exist from Spain to Sweden. We saw this month a most
beautifully produced volume from Tiflis. The words, scattered about
in the Paris-and-London style, were in Georgian and Russian; but
no translation was necessary; when one was supplied, the words and
the lack of sense were precisely what we expected. They might have
been Italian or English; and in the illustrations, mingled with the
parallelograms, could be seen fragments of wasp-waisted "nuts" in
opera-hats and shirt fronts, such as never were seen in Tiflis, where
their heads are clad with fur. In a recent number of the _Monthly
Chapbook_ Mr. Flint, giving specimens of good and bad contemporary
verse, quoted one gentleman who begins a poem with:
éo ié iu ié
é é ié io ié
ui ui io iè
aéoé iaoé.
And another poet who writes:
vrron -- on -- on -- on -- on -- on
vrrr vrrr vrrr
hihihi.
It isn't really serious; but is any of this kind of thing serious?
And is this mere noise at bottom sillier than much of the free verse
to which some superficial meaning can be attached? We quote from an
American review which, as a whole, is sensible and good these lines
from a poem called _Autumn Night_:
The moon is as complacent as a frog.
She sits in the sky like a blind white stone,
And does not even see Love
As she caresses his face
With her contemptuous light.
She reaches her long white shivering fingers into the bowels of
men.
* * * * *
She is Death enjoying Life,
Innocently,
Lasciviously.
Of that kind of thing, usually done with a little less force in the
images, but always meandering, stupid, and utterly unrhythmical, good
American journals have lately been full. It has ceased to be amusing;
but we don't think that anybody need be alarmed; nobody can like it,
and in the end those who, from restlessness or fear, have pretended to
will revolt against a diet of wind and sawdust and return to something
more palatable.
* * * * *
For the simple truth is that the trick of incomprehensibility is the
best trick that has ever been invented for the benefit of writers
who, if they can feel or think, do not know how to translate their
thoughts and feelings into the language of art. Twenty years ago the
swarm of useless young writers discoursed on common themes in common
metres imitatively, after the manner of Tennyson or of Swinburne or
of Verlaine. If they favoured dignity and nobility they wrote sonnets
beginning:
Under the high invulnerable stars,
or plays like Savonarola Brown's; if Nature was their theme we heard of
The blackbird's descant from the bough.
The virtuous wrote of love in the manner of:
Your brows are calm and virginal,
warming to:
Your mouth is red as red, red roses are.
The sham rake-hells festooned their hectic amours with references
to purple breasts, absinthe, Messalina, and Semiramis: the banality
was plain to see. But Signor Marinetti and his congeners--we
had been gently acclimatised to great obscurity by artists like
Mallarmé--provided these poets with a priceless gift. Let rhythm go,
let sense go: put down in barbarous sequence any incongruous images
that come into your head: even, if you like, put down sheer gibberish:
if possible, deceive yourself, and you will deceive others. Produce
a work so opaque that it cannot be seen through. The innocents will
either wildly protest against these dangerous revolutionaries--a
much more pleasing rôle to find oneself in than that of harmless
mediocrity--or else they will knit their brows with the reflection "if
this young man expresses himself in thoughts too deep for me, why what
a very, very, very deep young man this deep young man must be." But we
have noticed that most of these dealers in chaos soon tire. Those who
have something in them (and any young man is liable to be infected by a
current fashion) get through, none the worse: those who have not flag
and stop.
* * * * *
In our second number we called attention, as many before us have
called attention, to the scandalous state of the American copyright
laws whereunder British authors have been put to immense inconvenience
and loss, and which have resulted in the early books of almost every
important British author being, in America, beyond his control. Since
we wrote the American Senate has come to a decision which greatly
ameliorates the conditions as they affect books published here since
the war. It has been clear that during the war, owing to the delays of
mails, it has often been impossible for English publishers and authors
to secure American copyright even where American publication could
easily be arranged for--copies for deposit could not be got across
sufficiently quickly, and the time-limit of thirty days from English
publication expired. Under the new decision--which is largely due
to the efforts of Major G. H. Putnam--protection is secured for all
British books of which the American copyright has been lost during the
war. The Act has been amended: friendly alien authors have been given
American copyright on works of which copyright lapsed during the war;
the concession extends to works issued within fifteen months after the
war, whatever the end of the war may be defined to be. During that
fifteen months authors may take steps to establish their copyright;
after that period, as we understand it, British authors and publishers
will have a longer period (_i.e._, four months) than before in which to
secure their rights, provided a complete copy of the English edition
has been deposited in the Copyright Office not more than sixty days
after publication. We suppose, though we await further information,
that the fact that a book, presumed non-copyright, has been published
in America during the war will not prevent its being copyrighted; but
if this be so what will happen to a pirated edition (assuming such to
exist) which was legally permissible before the new amendment?
* * * * *
An important step has been made in the development of the literary
relations of the two countries. But these are still far from perfect.
It may not be possible to make the domestic copyright laws of the two
countries the same, but it should not be impossible for each country
to extend to the books of the other a simultaneous and automatic
copyright on publication. American books should be automatically
copyright here when they appear in America; English books should be
automatically copyrighted in America when they appear here. There is
room for discussion as to the length of term of copyright to be granted
to foreigners; but a basis for mutual agreement would not be difficult
to find. We trust that Major Putnam will not flag in the good work, and
that English authors will co-operate to the best of their ability.
* * * * *
We printed in our last number a letter from Mr. J. G. Fletcher
disputing a statement made by our American correspondent that Mr.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was the only "live" poet now writing in
America, and questioning the justice of the praise given to Mr.
Lindsay. On the assumption that our readers will be interested, we are
publishing in this issue a work by Mr. Lindsay which illustrates his
recent manner. It is a poem which presents some difficulties to English
readers. It evokes memories of a Presidential campaign long gone past,
and some of Mr. Lindsay's political references (not to speak of his
presumably mythical animals) will puzzle people; even those English
people who vaguely remember who Mark Hanna was will probably not have
the ghost of a vision of Altgeld.
* * * * *
A binding case for THE LONDON MERCURY is being prepared, and will, we
hope, be ready when the first volume (of six numbers) is complete. It
would be a convenience if readers who are preserving their sets and
will desire the official binding (which we can promise will not be an
offensive one) would let us know in advance by postcard so that we may
have some basis for our first order of cases.
* * * * *
For some time after publication we were obliged to refuse orders
for our first number. We have recovered a very few copies, and, as
we prefer that they should go to persons who are really anxious to
obtain them in order to complete sets, we offer them at 7_s._ 6_d._ a
copy. Applications will be dealt with in the order in which they are
received. No. 2 will shortly follow suit.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
We congratulate Mr. Austin Dobson, whose birthday was the eighteenth of
last month, on arriving at the full age of eighty. He has lived, for
the past twenty years, since his retirement from the public service,
so noiselessly that an idle world, always attentive to sensation, has
half-forgotten to regard his presence. He has always preferred to stand
a little out of the limelight, being by nature unobtrusive, and more
conversant with books than with men. Such serene natures miss some of
the rewards of their own age, but when they possess the quality of Mr.
Austin Dobson posterity gives them their revenge. No one in our time
has pursued the profession of literature with a more disinterested
fervour than he. Mr. Dobson has taken no part in controversy, he has
been mixed up with no sensational "movements"; his whole thought has
been fixed on the study of past times and on the perfecting of his own
delicate and lapidary art. He was not precocious in his development.
When his earliest volume of poems, _Vignettes in Rhyme_, appeared he
had reached his thirty-fourth year. He did not venture upon prose until
eleven years later, when he published his memoir of _Thomas Bewick_.
His latest volume, _A Bookman's Budget_, of 1917, combined both arts in
one.
* * * * *
The quality of Mr. Austin Dobson, both in verse and prose, is
curiously out of sympathy with the general tendency of literature
to-day. In prose--though we admit that his essays have had numerous
and distinguished admirers, Mr. Balfour, if we remember right, having
once praised them above his poems in the House of Commons--in prose he
seems to us to sacrifice freedom of movement to an intensely meticulous
accuracy and to a desire to leave no fact unrecorded. But in verse
Mr. Austin Dobson is, in his own restricted field, unsurpassed. He
carries on, through the second half of the nineteenth century, the
tradition of Prior and Anstey and Praed. It may be said that his poems
are metrical pastimes, but he lifts them to the dignity of poetry.
His happiest pieces are so polished, so delicate, and so felicitous
that not a word in them could be altered; they are, of their own kind,
perfect, and perfection is not relative but positive. So long as the
English language survives there will be readers of _The Ballad of
Beau Brocade_. We wish Mr. Austin Dobson many more years, and we hope
that he will yet be encouraged to give us specimens of his graceful
penmanship.
The writers of the obituary notices of Sir William Osler were strangely
silent as to the love of books which was one of his most marked
characteristics, and this although in _Who's Who?_ he had put down
"Bibliography" as his only "Recreation," and at the time of his death
had been President of the Bibliographical Society for seven years,
nearly three times as long as any of his predecessors. In the true
spirit of humanism his interest in bibliography was first aroused by
the books relating to his own profession, and widened out from this to
a fine catholicity. Within a year of his coming to England he delivered
an address on Sir Thomas Browne's _Religio Medici_ before the Physical
Society of Guy's Hospital (printed in _The Library_ for January, 1906),
and he was never tired of singing the praise of Burton's _Anatomy of
Melancholy_ as "a great medical treatise (the greatest ever written
by a layman), orderly in arrangement, intensely serious in purpose,
and weighty beyond belief in authorities." The quotation comes from a
paper he read before the Bibliographical Society on _The Library of
Robert Burton_ in November, 1909, in which he gave a summarised account
of the 580 books of Burton's preserved at the Bodleian and the 429
in the library at Christ Church. Unless we are mistaken, the picking
out of these books, and the grouping those at Christ Church round a
portrait of Burton, copied from the original in Brasenose College,
was due mainly to his initiative. He certainly took a keen interest
in both libraries, was an enthusiastic curator of the Bodleian, and a
generous supporter of the admirable _Bodleian Quarterly_, started by
Mr. Falconer Madan. A paper he contributed to this on the Bookworm,
illustrated by an admirable coloured plate exhibiting it in all its
stages, is by far the best study of that elusive "worm" ever printed.
* * * * *
After he became President of the Bibliographical Society he gave
another stimulating address on the medical books printed before the
close of the year 1480, its object being "to get an idea of the mental
attitude of the profession of medicine from the character of the books
printed." He had then been working on this subject for some time,
and even amid the countless activities into which he threw himself
during the war did not wholly neglect it. The description of the books
was practically finished some time ago; whether the introduction, in
which he aimed at clothing the bibliographical skeleton with flesh and
blood, had been written is not yet known. He had over forty medical
books of the fifteenth century in his own collection, and was forming
a specialist library to illustrate the history of science, and of
medicine in particular, on a strikingly original plan. Its completion
should have been the occupation of a leisurely old age, but he loved
his fellows too well to give himself any leisure, and left this for
others to complete.
* * * * *
We welcome from America the first number of the new _Dial_. The _Dial_
was founded at Chicago in 1880 by Francis F. Browne. Until a few years
ago it remained in the Browne family, who produced fortnightly a paper,
sober, academic, and informative, somewhat resembling our _Athenæum_ of
Victorian days. A few years ago the paper changed hands: its offices
were shifted to New York, and it has been at one time primarily an
organ of rebellious literary youth, and at another a Radical political
journal. The latest remodelling promises stability. The _Dial_ appears
as a purely literary and artistic monthly, in shape like one of our own
monthly reviews, and typographically superior to most of them. We await
its development with interest.
POETRY
_Fortunatus Nimium_
1
I have lain in the sun,
I have toiled as I might,
I have thought as I would,
And now it is night.
2
My bed full of sleep,
My heart of content
For mirth that I met
The way that I went.
3
I welcome fatigue
While frenzy and care,
Like thin summer clouds,
Go melting in air.
4
To dream as I may
And awake when I will,
With the song of the birds
And the sun on the hill.
5
Or death--were it death,
To what should I wake,
Who loved in my home
All life for its sake?
6
What good have I wrought?
I laugh to have learned
That joy cannot come
Unless it be earned:
7
For a happier lot
Than God giveth me
It never hath been
Nor ever shall be.
ROBERT BRIDGES
_To E. G._
Were I to pause and hesitate
For something "picked," "alembicate,"
I might, by chance, no further get
Than mere parade of epithet;
So I'll just wish to You and Yours
Strength to achieve while strength endures;
And, when the power to do is done,
Remembered radiance of the sun!
AUSTIN DOBSON
New Year's Eve, 1919.
_The Shadow_
Death, would I feared not thee,.
But ever can I see
Thy mutable shadow thrown
Upon the walls of Life's warm, cheerful room.
Companioned or alone,
I feel the presence of that following gloom,
Like one who vaguely knows
Behind his back the shade his body throws
'Tis not thy shadow only, 'tis my own!
I face towards the light
That rises fair and bright
Over wide fields asleep,
But still I know that stealthy darkness there
Close at my heels doth creep,
Ghostly companion, my still haunting care;
And if the light be strong
Before my eyes, through pleasant hours and long,
Then, then, the shadow is most black and deep.
EDWARD SHANKS
_By the Weir_
A scent of Esparta grass--and again I recall
The hour we spent by the weir of the paper-mill
Watching together the curving thunderous fall
Of frothing amber, bemused by the roar until
My mind was as blank as the speckless sheets that wound
On the hot steel ironing-rollers perpetually turning
In the humming dark rooms of the mill: all sense and discerning
By the stunning and dazzling oblivion of hill-waters drowned.
And my heart was empty of memory and hope and desire
Till, rousing, I looked afresh on your face as you gazed--
Behind you an old gnarled fruit-tree in one still fire
Of innumerable flame in the sun of October blazed,
Scarlet and gold that the first white frost would spill
With eddying flicker and patter of dead leaves falling--
I looked on your face, as an outcast from Eden recalling
A vision of Eve as she dallied, bewildered and still,
By the serpent-encircled tree of knowledge that flamed
With gold and scarlet of good and evil, her eyes
Rapt on the river of life: then bright and untamed
By the labour and sorrow and fear of a world that dies
Your ignorant eyes looked up into mine, and I knew
That never our hearts should be one till your young lips had
tasted
The core of the bitter-sweet fruit, and wise and toil-wasted
You should stand at my shoulder an outcast from Eden too.
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON
_Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!_
A RHYME IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
(_The campaign of Eighteen Ninety-six, as viewed by a sixteen-year-old_)
I
In a nation of one hundred fine mob-hearted, lynching, relenting,
repenting millions
There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things
to shout about,
And knock your old blue devils out.
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American poet who could sing outdoors.
He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendour,
Wild roses from the plains that made hearts tender,
All the funny circus silks
Of politics unfurled,
Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,
And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.
There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle;
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle;
There were real lines drawn:
Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and old,
The mean and cold.
It was Eighteen Ninety-six, and I was just sixteen,
And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,
When there came from the sunset Nebraska's shout of joy:
In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat,
He scourged the elephant plutocrats
With barbed wire from the Platte.
The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.
They saw that summer's noon
A tribe of wonders coming
To a marching tune.
Oh, the long horns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,
From all the new-born States arow,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig,
The hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:
Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah--sharp was their song!
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The long-horn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.
These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
The gossamers and whimsies,
The monkeyshines and didoes
Rank and strange
Of the cañons and the range,
The ultimate fantastics
Of the far western slope,
And of prairie schooner children
Born beneath the stars,
Beneath falling snows,
Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there
Except a Kansas prayer,
With the Indian raid a-howling through the air.
And all these in their helpless days
By the dour East oppressed,
Mean paternalism
Making their mistakes for them,
Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast
Seemed a giant spider's nest.
And these children and their sons
At last rode through the cactus,
A cliff of mighty cowboys
On the lope,
With gun and rope.
And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,
And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall
Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
The bard and the prophet of them all.
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
Blotting out sun and moon,
A sign on high.
Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,
The scalawags made moan,
Afraid to fight.
II
When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting,
Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,
Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,
Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting--
In silver-decked racing cart,
Buggy, buckboard, carryall,
Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul,
And silver-decked farm-waggons gritted, banged and rolled,
With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tyres told.
The State House loomed afar,
A speck, a hive, a football,
A captive balloon,
And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes and
sunshine,
Every flag in town, and Bryan's picture sold,
When the rigs in many a line
Reached the town at noon,
And joined the wild parade against the power of gold
We roamed, we boys from High School,
With mankind,
While Springfield gleamed,
Silk-lined.
Oh, Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald,
And the gangs that they could get!
I can hear them yelling yet
Helping the incantation,
Defying aristocracy,
With every bridle gone,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Ridding the world of the low-down mean:
We were bully, wild and woolly,
Never yet carried below the knees.
We saw flowers in the air,
Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion,
Hopes of all mankind,
Made rare, resistless, thrice refined.
Oh, we bucks from every Springfield ward!
Colts of democracy--
Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.
The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.
She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.
With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,
But she kept like a pattern, without a shaken curl.
She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.
Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.
No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way,
But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.
The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck.
And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed
along.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain,
Ah, sharp was their song!
The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass,
The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass.
And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass,
The angels in the flags peered out to see us pass.
And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher,
And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire,
And then it was but grass, and the town was there again,
A place for women and men.
III
Then we stood where we could see
Every band,
And the speaker's stand.
And Bryan took the platform,
And he was introduced.
And he lifted his hand
And cast a new spell.
Progressive silence fell
In Springfield,
In Illinois,
Around the world.
Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled:
"_The people have a right to make their own mistakes ...
You shall not crucify mankind
Upon a cross of gold._"
And everybody heard him--
In the streets and State House yard.
And everybody heard him
In Springfield,
In Illinois,
Around and around and around the world,
That danced upon its axis
And like a daring broncho whirled.
IV
July, August, suspense.
Wall Street lost to sense.
August, September, October,
More suspense,
And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.
Then Hanna to the rescue,
Hanna of Ohio,
Rallying the roller-tops,
Swivel chairs, bulls and bears,
Rallying the bucket-shops,
Threatening drouth and death,
Promising Mannah.
Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;
Invading misers' cellars,
Tin-cans, socks,
Melting down the rocks,
Pouring out the long green to a million workers,
Spondulicks by the mountain-load to stop each new tornado,
And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,
Populistic, anarchistic,
Deacon-desperado.
V
Election night at midnight:
Boy Bryan's defeat.
Defeat of western silver,
Defeat of the wheat.
Victory of letterfiles
And plutocrats in miles
With dollar signs upon their coats,
Diamond watchchains on their vests
And spats on their feet.
Victory of custodians,
Plymouth Rock,
And all that inbred landlord stock.
Victory of the neat.
Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The bluebells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas,
By the Pittsburg alleys.
Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
VI
Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,
The man without an angle or a tangle,
Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,
The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner;
Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;
Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church,
The devil vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote,
The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack,
The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote,
Every vote....
Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna's McKinley,
His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?
Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,
And the flame of that summer's prairie rose.
Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform
Read from the party in a wonderful hour?
Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman
And sledge-hammer Altgeld, who wrecked his power
Where is Hanna, bull-dog Hanna,
Low browed Hanna, who said: "Stand pat"?
Gone to his own place with Pierpont Morgan.
Gone somewhere ... with lean rat Platt.
Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,
Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?
Gone to join the shadows with pious Cromwell
And tall King Saul, till the Judgment Day.
Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,
Whose name the few still say with tears?
Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,
Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.
Where is that boy, that _Heaven-born_ Bryan,
That _Homer_ Bryan, who sang from the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
Where the Kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
VACHEL LINDSAY
BLIND THAMYRIS
By T. STURGE MOORE
Since my father was a hero and my mother a goddess of the woods, I
was sent when twelve years old to the cave of Chiron, that he might
instruct me in wisdom and valour. This life, divorced from all female
tenderness, appealed to my pride, and only at night were my eyes ever
moistened with regret. I was now free to follow a stream until, too
weary to advance further, some cradle of scented herbs would lure me
to rest and doze. At length twilight brought me an energy, winged
with dread of the dusking forests, that carried me right home to the
cavern. The sources were always my goal, the more easy descent seawards
never tempted my morning moods: and, as he taught me the lyre or the
control of my voice, Chiron remarked that a similar bent was evinced by
an instinctive preference for those words and cadences that lead the
spirit away from the high-roads of thought and feeling. Surely emotions
well up in the fastnesses of tranquillity, close under the blue and
white of heaven, more virginal than can be experienced in lowland
retreats? As time wore on, Chiron, the daily lesson being ended, began
to speak to me of a rhapsodist, former pupil and great favourite of
his. "Agenor," he began, "like thyself, Thamyris was ever striving
to reach the summits before joint and sinew were sufficiently tough.
Alas, though he has often brought back with him the rarest strophes and
melodies, men have refused to listen to them! They prefer a music that
better harmonises with their garish sea-board towns, and he wanders
shrouded in an ever deeper gloom." With a sigh he paused, and I waited,
expecting to be warned not thus to estrange myself from humanity by
persistently climbing among the hills. But he seemed unable so to
conclude, and presently bid me run away and practise throwing the spear.
One forenoon when wind, so strong as to seem foreign to the settled
brilliance of the weather, was bowing the fir-trees, and now here, now
there, their backs arched silverly, flashing like waves on the dark
green ridges, while the sound was that of a chorus of Titans rejoicing
in violence (so much so that we had to retreat well back within the
cave before we could hear ourselves play or sing), Chiron broke off the
lesson, still disturbed it may be by the hurly-burly without, though
it strained but faintly through the stillness held under that roof of
rock. He sat gazing forth into the sunny turbulence, so grandly though
jaggedly framed; and I, leaning back against his flank, watched his
moved visage worn with much living. Then for the first time he began
to recite me actual words of Thamyris, recalling how their public
delivery had proved that those who thronged round the other rhapsodists
would never collect about him.
Untouched white cloud,
Like a task acclaimed
When the heart is young,
Thou fliest higher
Than the eagle deed
That is praised by men
Unheeded silence,
In the night or at noon,
Thou singest to the hilltops
A song that is richer
Than the tales of war
Which men crowd to hear.
Magnificent joys
Lie about like garments
Amazingly broidered;
A god has discarded them
Before launching upward
In naked loneliness.
But no human hand
Lifts a single tunic;
No man's heart prefigures
The deep satisfaction
Of moving vested
In the pictured raiment
That a god walked the earth in.
Chiron was silent, and I dreamed of finding and putting on the slough
of Apollo. I saw myself in a sultry glare climbing boulders with grey
lichen-crusted cheeks, and dark moss-bearded cavities down which I
peered in hopes of finding a cupful of collected dew. At last I arrived
on the crest, and there, at the bottom of a crater of wild tumbled
blocks, lay gleaming somewhat silver and violet and blue. I scrambled
down; a pattern of scaled serpents was looped inextricably over white
samite. I lifted it, and from the inside there slipped with a swish a
body-vest of pale vermilion rippled with gold in a device of arrows,
each drawn to the head in a sturdy bow: an armoury of the proper size
for an host of mice had it been real instead of pictured. I gasped; and
Chiron's eyes met mine, so that I blushed all down my neck.
Months later, on my return at dusk from a day's ramble, I learned from
our new pupil, the little Achilles, that Chiron had been fetched away
by two other centaurs, and expected to be absent all night, perhaps
longer. We prepared and ate our supper of chestnuts boiled and then
mashed in milk, and were shortly rolled in separate bears' skins to
sleep. Achilles, who was but just turned six, was soon off, but I
lay hour after hour forecasting coming events with eyes wide open.
I cannot now revive those dreamy adventures, and only recollect that
Thamyris figured in no few, and how fevered I was by the thought that,
being mysteriously like him, much sadness and disappointment lay in
wait for me. At last moonlight began to edge into the cave; travelling
along the wall it soon lit up a trophy, the skull and huge hooped
horns of an ibex; and next the rug made of four chamois hides that
Chiron hangs over his flanks and crupper in winter, when round his
bust he wraps thick folds of brown knitted wool; not long after it
was bathing the ebony lyre inlaid with polished iridescent sea-shell
that has both its fluted pillars and their screw-heads enamelled with
lines of scarlet. This wonder Jason had brought back from Colchis and
sent up by an embassy to Chiron. I rose and, stealing softly to it,
looked up, not at the well-loved colours of the lyre, but towards the
tranquil effulgence that had woken them out of the darkness, and was
surprised to see that there were many swift-travelling clouds in the
sky, for while I lay in the shelter the night had seemed quite still.
At that moment the moon was covered, and the cave became so dark that
I stepped outside and saw the moonlight fast growing again on the
lawn lower down, where we throw the spear and wrestling matches take
place. I hurried to meet it and, once there, the terror and attraction
of the hills at night shook me; for was I not brought forth by the
regent of a bosky grove? Though its sacred safety rustled leagues from
where I stood, might I not brave these mountain forests, being able
so to account for my hardihood? I was carried away, neither walking
nor running, but at a sort of shaken trot that seemed dictated by the
thudding of my heart. The almost level path wound along our valley high
above the torrent, which it would meet and cross some two miles deeper
in this fold under Pelion. My limbs moved as it were unbidden; once or
twice I stopped and said, "This is a dream," till the indescribable
reality of everything drove me on. My teeth were frequently jolted,
yet the cold did not seem intense enough to chatter them, and surely
I was not abjectly frightened? This notion roused my self-control and
calmed me till I slipped along like a peaceful thought, unchallenged
yet alert. The stream was crossed by the fallen fir-trunk, and the
path returned eastward on the opposite side of the valley till the
distant mouth of the cave was passed and the forefront of this new
ridge won. Here the view was immense, embracing islands in the sea
and snowy Olympus and the unnumbered chains of the mountainous coast.
Here I squatted on the short fine turf and folded both arms across my
knees as a cushion for my chin. Perhaps I dozed, for my head was heavy
when I lifted it to make sure of a sound--the trampling of centaurs a
great way off. "They are returning," I said to myself, and laid an ear
against the earth, and then peered into the darkness, for the moon lit
nothing now except one band of sea far out behind the islands. All but
certain by which track they were coming, I plunged headlong downward
through the brushwood as though it had been broad day, intending to cut
their road on the moor above the cliffs. How many times I floundered
into bushes or barked a shin against bough or boulder, those who have
done such things may imagine. I at last stumbled out on the heather
hundreds of feet beneath, limping but consoled to fancy my troubles
ended. Before I had cleared a thousand yards I fell, ricking my ankle,
and rose with difficulty, for an agony like death whenever my foot
pressed the ground routed the very notion of an inexhaustible endurance
latent within me. I fell again on to the thick springy couch of scented
ling and soon felt deliciously relieved. Violent activity had chased
the last vestige of night-terror, and the wind moaning round me made
even that barren place homelike as with the movements of a familiar
presence. The slightest jerk to my right foot and immediately my brow
was beaded with sweat, for pain like a savage dog held my ankle in its
jaws, and would grind them anew if I stirred. Hooves thundered nearer
and nearer; the noise so invaded my consciousness that to cry for
help seemed as useless as to halloo against tempestuous breakers on a
rocky shore, yet simultaneously there returned on me all that Chiron
had taught of the diverse tribes of sound--how some are irreconcilable
while others easily agree, how the loudest of one family may fail to
drown small ones of distinct origin, and in a continuous and familiar
uproar their different calibre may startle even as in silence. Fed
by these memories hope grew strong, and I cried out, "Father Chiron,
Father Chiron, I am here, and must die if you do not come." Then I
listened: all was still. At first I feared they had reached the hills
and entered the valley so that the sound of their trampling was walled
off. Just then it began again more slowly and unexpectedly near, so
I shouted, "Father Chiron, do not leave me to the wolves!" Then his
voice answered, and tears streamed over my face and sobs so shook me
that I could not make out his words, yet between the spasms I gasped,
"This way, this way!" And he came and knelt beside me, first on his
fore-knees, then settling down on his haunches gradually so as not to
scare me by the blundering of his fetlocks. His large gentle hand felt
my moist burning brow while I pointed at my helpless ankle; then he
lifted it between thumb and finger, and with the index of the other
hand began to stroke the swelling thoughtfully. Then lifting his head
he shouted, "Rhoetus, find me some sorrel or lettuce, and if you see
any straight wands cut me one or two. Catch! Here is my knife!" and he
slipped the thong by which it hung over his head. Now I must tell you
it was a delicately smithied blade with both edges sharp, and lived,
point foremost, in a snug trough cut along the yellow boxwood handle
over which a lid of box was spliced, the open end being secured by a
wedge of ebony attached by a thong. For use, the blade was first shaken
out on the palm, then its heft-end replaced and secured by tapping the
wedge with a stone. It was our great pleasure to borrow this knife
and scratch lions or eagles upon a horn, or out of soft pine carve
straight-robed Athena with casque and spear. I know every cut that
defines her attitude, but can never give her features, either terrible
or beautiful. But Chiron was repeating to me, "Did not Achilles tell
you that I could not be back before morning?" for my mind had suddenly
wandered to my foster-mother's farm kitchen in the lowlands forty miles
away. "Yes, he told me, but I could not sleep, and at last I wanted to
explore the woods by moonlight; after I heard you coming, in running
I caught my foot in the twisted trunks of this heather," With a low
husky chuckle he said, "Though I am supposed to be really wise, the
simplicity of your explanation has surprised me harbouring sinister
forebodings." I had no inkling then how he dreaded lest the violence
of centaur-herds and the knavery of townsmen, like clashing flints,
should cause a conflagration. For ever more pressingly he forebodes
the violation of his cavern's peace, the only spot left where men and
centaurs foregather kindly. At that time I attributed his words to the
ocean of his wisdom, which, like a shore-bred child, I was accustomed
to hear murmur, content if now and again the beauty of a thought meant
for me stranded like a dainty shell at my feet. Hitherto I had lain
like one bed-rid, haunted by the seriousness of that pain, but now,
sitting up and taking advantage of the licence accorded to sufferers, I
dared to show a curiosity which every endeavour would have suppressed
had my right ankle been as sound as the left, and asked, "Where have
you been, Father Chiron?" His husky laugh allowed the indulgence I had
claimed, and his voice grew strained as he answered, "I was called to
the death-bed of my best-beloved son Thamyris." "Is he very sick?" I
asked. "Not now, for he moaned me his last epode and ended like the
swan." At that I lay back once more and looked across the heather at
the moon, unwilling to embarrass his sorrow by staring at it. And after
a pause Chiron in a very low voice began to croon:
Falcon daughters of Apollo,
Ye spur on a man to sing,
Rend with pangs sharp as a sword:
Then for his best award
Faint praise and a broken wing.
Is it for larks to follow
The snow-feathered cloud?
They are dusky and hot and fragile
And scarcely contain a proud
Insanely throbbing heart:
Ye are amber-eyed, sleek and agile,
Taloned and savagely smart.
When the fierce blood bursts our pulses,
Darkened like Hades at noon,
There falls from the towering ether
A mangled mass of feather.
An end to the pain that convulses
Life with ambition is boon
Enough for a soul uplifted,
And by each of you severally gifted.
When silence had nursed the memory of this for a space I glanced at
Chiron; his wet eyes stared steadily at the moon. He roused himself
and began to shout to hasten Rhoetus, and the young centaur soon
approached, bounding wildly, a mat of tresses flapping like a black
flag about his head. Chiron took the knife, the leaves and the two
sallows, and measuring these last against my leg cut two wands from
their stouter ends, split them and placed their flat sides against
the leaves in which he packed my tender joint. He next cut strands
from under his white beard as long as his arm; with one he bound the
splints lightly round my calf and with the other secured them beneath
my foot. Rising, he helped me up, and warned me not to put any weight
on the cage, which lengthened and imprisoned my leg. He then signed
to Rhoetus to lift me on to his back, and side by side the two began
walking across the heath; the sky was once more almost clear and the
moon was setting. The sea, though it could be heard, was hidden by
the heathery hillocks which thatched its cliffs, as Olympus and the
great ranges were behind hills tawny and russet with beech and alder
but hooded in evergreen firs that towered dead black in the moonlight.
A whistle sounded, and there was Caudon waiting three hundred paces
off. Rhoetus advanced, crying to him, "It is my turn to carry the body
now," but his piebald fellow immediately heaved something on to his
shoulder and set off at a gallop. "What is it?" I said to Chiron, round
whose vast waist my arms clung. "They shame our breed," he replied.
"Ghosts of the dead never haunt centaurs, so for them the lifeless
body is no more than an empty smock. Men are born with older fears and
cradled in whispering awe. Reverence is thus taught them, first by
terror, and then by esteem, if they consort with finely-tempered minds.
But these rough colts, deprived of the first, scarce heed the second
lesson yet. Poor Thamyris, the fair course of thy days was driven
about till, willy-nilly, it clashed with the coarse-grained crowd;
and must thy body be tossed, fought for, and whirled away in the fury
of this boisterous rivalry?" They were fetching wide curves across
the heath; sometimes even Caudon's piebald flanks were lost in the
darkness, and they became a mere chivy of distancing sounds; then again
both toiled on the skyline above the cliffs, like shadows on a wall.
Their shouts had at first betokened no more than horse-play, but took
now an angrier accent. Chiron smartened his pace, and I felt that his
spirit was chafing, and when they next drew within earshot he shouted
commands to arrest them of such sternness as they were not sufficiently
enslaved by passion to disregard, and they came severally, muttering,
heated, and resentful towards us. The old centaur reproached them for
thus jolting the body of his friend. "But he feels nothing," argued
Caudon. "Well, well, had he been a skin of choice wine, you should have
carried him with more care." "Wine can be spoilt with shaking--but a
corpse!" grumbled Rhoetus. "Still for all he once was ..." "Why, he
was so mad as to put out his own eyes!" grunted Caudon, and Rhoetus
continued, "They say he died because he refused to eat in a rage that
outlasted his life." "Yet I, who am old enough to be your sire's
grandsire, have often wished the hour stayed when his fingers wandered
the strings." "Years ago!" they interjected. "Last evening he kissed
my hands and taught me words that fly straight to the heart." Neither
colt retorted, and the silence seemed so consecrated to the gravity of
the wise Chiron's sorrow that I feared to break it, though devoured
with curiosity about this unaccountable madness, blindness, and death.
We had entered the valley and were climbing at a foot-pace among the
trees. Though the moon had set, the sky had not darkened but greyed
with the dawn. As the light increased the body absorbed my attention;
it hung wrapped in a coarse and torn cloak over Rhoetus's shoulder; for
Caudon had ceded it to him soon after they left arguing with Chiron.
The arms dangled along his muscular back and the dead hands flopped and
turned upon the glossy black hide to which his brown skin gave place
below the loins. They went a little in advance of us, and at times I
could divine just how the head hung, by some yellow hair that appeared
and disappeared behind a rent in the cloak which, swaying, opened and
closed like the ill-hinged door of a granary loft that, swinging in the
wind, shows the gleam of golden grain to a mid-winter day. My head had
dropped in a doze before we reached the place where a path branches
down to the bathing pool, and Chiron bade Rhoetus and Caudon carry the
body up to the cave, build a fire, and seethe meat, for all would be
more than common hungry. But me he carried down to the large pool that
spreads out from the foot of a fall in the torrent; and at the outer
brim of this basin, where the clear water becomes shallow and escapes
in many minor cascades downwards, he chose a bank of sward and laid
me gently down where the water would flow over my damaged foot. While
I lounged at ease he himself gravely walked down under the pool; the
water rose above the horse and only the man remained; still he trod
carefully deeper, the white stones being often slippery with green
weed; and now his beard and hair were floating like foam about his
shoulders, as though a smaller column of invisible water were drilling
the quivering surface right out in front of the torrent that thundered
into boiling suds at the foot of the dripping rocks. Still his hooves
felt their way down, till the billowy outward curves were sweeping
right over his head. The white limestone lit up the depths and rendered
his figure clearly visible, though it seemed strangely stunted; his
chestnut crupper, silvered as it was with age, became violet by
contrast with the icy blue water. All around thinned boughs hung out
long yellow leaves, and the reflections of some of them flickered like
fish about him. Time seemed to have ceased and all hostile conditions
to have been suspended in favour of this magnificently weathered
creature, that he might become divinely amphibious and death stand
disarmed before him. Far above, a level shaft of sunlight from over the
mountain shoulder suddenly caught the tree-tops. A naked scaffold of
dark trunk, bough and intricately forking branch sustained each thin
tower-like tent of brilliant leaves. Thus, their grand swelling shapes
hollow instead of dense with foliage, tanned or yellow instead of
green, these chestnuts whose flaunting camps reach far up the valleys
made a last stand against the disenchanting season of storms. The
banks beneath were thick with fallen leaves interspersed with clusters
of nuts like hedgehogs. The whole vividly coloured scene swam in the
limpid transparent slumber which tuned my breathing, though it had not
closed my eyes. I thought, "He will stay under too long and I shall
never hear how poor Thamyris went mad," yet it seemed acceptable or
at least necessary that I should never hear and that he should remain
immersed for ever. No, he lifted his head and parted his hair and
rubbed his eyes, and came up as slowly and solemnly out of the pool as
he had descended into it. Streaming and refreshed, he cantered round
its shallow brim, splashing with his hooves; he shook and wrung from
hair and beard streamers of diamond drops, quivering the while the
glossy coat of his nether body to free its shaggy skirts, and whisking
his tail against his hocks. Pausing beside me, he smiled into my sleepy
eyes and said, "How goes the ankle?" I murmured that it was so cold as
to have stopped aching, and I could not now feel whether it were there
or not. He drew me a little higher up till my bandaged foot was out of
the numbing flow. Roused by this I could no longer refrain from asking
what had driven poor Thamyris mad; and the answer came, soothing the
terror that it stirred in my soul by the grave compassion with which it
was pronounced. "He could not endure to watch those whose attention he
had in vain tried to capture, grouped about some common rhapsodist who,
with shouts, recounted how one man killed another in some freebooting
foray. He must have wandered unwanted and uninspired for months before
at last he stood near the ships where fishermen had been chipping holes
in large flints in order to thread them along the bottom of their
great sweep-net. These had often split before they were pierced, and
fragments with knife-like edges lay all about. Suddenly dashing down
his lyre, he stooped and seized two sharp pieces, and sobbing out that
his eyes should never again watch a crowd like that gaping upon the
wharf at this bawler, he jabbed at his eyes. Others told me how they
heard him, and turned to see blood streaming from his face and beard
and from the two red hands that he waved as he staggered, unaccustomed
to darkness. They thought some goddess in the shape of a sea-hawk must
have struck him with her beak, and vanished as swiftly as she had
come through the twilight. Afterward, when his broken lyre was found,
they concluded that the Muses had sent her because he, though a mere
mortal, sang such songs as might in the halls of Olympus be preferred
to their own, for only among the gods, as those fishermen fancied,
could he have found suitable audience. They led him to the temple of
Apollo; there the priest killed a snake and bound its body across his
bleeding orbits, and the wounds healed, but sight did not return. Later
on, when he felt how he never knew where he was or who was near--when
no one could lead him far towards the stony peaks he loved, for dread
always overtook them at the danger of steep places for a blind man
whose daimon left him totally unwarned--he refused food and sat all
day on the temple steps, and never begged an alms or stooped to gather
what was thrown him. At night the hierodules had sometimes heard him
mutter as though he prayed for vengeance. They even believed that he
had challenged the nine Muses to a trial of skill, offering to yield
body and mind to their displeasure if he failed, but should he outsing
them, then each of them was to submit her body to bear him a child.
For servile minds, Agenor, ascribe the motives familiar to themselves
to those whose outstanding actions they must perforce canvass. Thus
he endured not only perpetual darkness, but companionless solitude
where streams of men were constantly passing; hearing voices but not
one conversable. Then when death first warned him, he sent a message
to me; this was delivered to Rhoetus and Caudon, who bore it on up
the shoulders of Pelion." And gazing round, he continued, "In this
spot shall he rest, screened by these chestnuts from the cruel moons
of summer; here shall a grave be dug. The distance from the cave is
convenient, and bathers may often consent to remain while I rechant
one of his lays, till, departing, they breathe a pious wish for the
peace of him whose life was full of strife and storms, though he never
joined in battle, or trod the planks of a ship. When I stood by his
side he said, 'O god-like beast, no other ears ever listened to me with
pleasure as thine did. Thou hast been rewarded with extended life, for
thy actions and customs are swayed neither by fear nor by greed, but in
the eyes of the young and in quiet haunts thou hast sought the wisdom
most easily wed to divine melodies. Thou wilt understand and perhaps
pity these strophes born of my anguish.' His fevered reveries would
seem so to have exalted me that he used an address such as gods expect,
and with the same trance-like utterance feebly and slowly delivered the
hymn I repeated to you on the heath, but then the end came. Now you had
better lie here for to-day lest you should jar that ankle, and I will
send Achilles to you with some meat." I wondered over all I had heard,
not without dread of a similar fate, till Achilles came and wanted to
know what I had seen in the night, whether nymphs or daimons or Artemis
herself. As I ate the warm meat or broke the brown crusts between
sips of wine, I told him. Then with all the roguish effrontery of his
beauty, shaking his long yellow curls, he laughed, "I should have done
as you did for all the rest, Agenor, but I should not have sprained my
ankle," and he danced off singing, "No, indeed, indeed no!" while I,
dropping the drained horn into the empty maple bowl, rolled over and
slept.
* * * * *
When I woke the sun had passed the meridian, and the sound of a spade
and the thud of falling clods could be heard, and looking across I saw
Caudon working in a grave on a crest of the opposite bank; soon the
blade rang on the rock and his action became that of shovelling out
the loam. Next, Chiron and Rhoetus arrived, carrying the body between
them wound in a long and splendid pall. This had been sent by Thetis
as a present with Achilles when he joined us in July. It measured six
yards by four, and might have served for a temple curtain or to drape
a royal bed. The goddess herself had worked it far out under the sea,
aided by the silver-shoed daughters of Doris. Flying over a ground of
deep blue were seen harpies with black wings spread and every feather
tipped with white, their brown bodies shaped like large eggs; they
wore coral necklaces, and had the heads of women with singing mouths
and long streaming raven curls. Yet they were armless and had the legs
and talons of a bird. Each of the score was exactly like every other,
and side by side and one after another they flew across the deep noon
sky. So they sweep by close above some ship, with sweet voices advising
mariners of a greater glory amid ocean than where sails are often met
around the coast. Though well they know that from the vacant unislanded
main the venturer has rarely returned. Chiron had no use in his cavern
for a cloth so splendid, and he had determined to devote this to the
honour of Thamyris. They laid his body, wholly enveloped in it, along
the turf beside the grave, while they spread in it the autumn-tinted
bracken that Achilles had been cutting with a sickle, and, armful after
armful, had made a mountainous heap of. Next they lowered him in the
great blue cloth on to that sun-saturated couch. Then Chiron took his
lyre and sang:
A gentle spring was that long past
Which brought thee to my cave;
For thought yet more than action brave,
O daring spirit, now thou hast
Gleaned all that feeble mortals give
To those in whom intenser joy has sought to live
Here woodland peace broods ever, here
Shall water alway carol in thine ear.
Caudon and Rhoetus now chanted the usual chorus of "Last Farewell,"
Achilles and myself piping in as well as their loud voices would let
us. The rest of the bracken was then thrown down and on that the dark
loam, the turfs were replaced, wine spilled in libation and grain
strewn. The rites were ended: the two centaurs shouldered spade and
mattock and clattered off. Achilles asked if he might go into the
woods with his bow and arrow to shoot something. Chiron nodded consent
and came to examine my ankle. While he uncased it and did it up again
with fresh leaves, I asked why, if Thamyris so loved the lonely hills
and scorned men, he was so angry at seeing them crowd about other
rhapsodists. When he had finished with my foot he replied, "One of our
friend's hymns is now trotting in my head," then touching his lyre he
chanted:
From the west upward
I toiled heavy-hearted;
From the east joyous,
Poising his weight on
An arching instep,
Came man to meet me.
And high in the azure,
Where the rocks ended
We sat down, friends.
He heard there how often
Was said, shown or felt
The thing that rebuked me.
Then laughed and pretended
That what the hand fashioned,
House, sword or dead body,
Alone remained;
Thoughts and intentions
Lost their existence.
His glad voice inveigled
Belief from my candour;
And lo! he was gone.
Poising my weight on
An arching instep
Down I came, gaily
Facing the sunset,
As though in the sea-port
That glittered beneath it
I had not yet smitten
The sonorous lyre.
As though the folk there
Had come from the eastward
That very morning
And found empty houses
And ships abandoned,
Needing only to be cleaned and repainted,
And meant to make them gay as spring flowers,
And were sure in the twilight
To gather about me.
"There, that is his own answer to your question. I do not think he
craved just _any_ praise, nor did he much over-prize his own gift; and
you see he was not thinking of this coast, but of one facing the other
way, so that the poet could arrive from the quarter opposite to the sun
and meet him at noon on the peak. As much as to say, 'Not myself, nor
this town's people, but any place, any people, any poet.' He worshipped
man, and it angered him to see homespun preferred to the skyey fabric
the god had helped him weave. He regretted his violence and could not
live without those eyes it had cost him." Having drawn these sentences
one by one from his sad heart, Chiron lapsed into silence till I asked,
"But why did he address the Muses as enemies in his last hymn, if what
the folk said was quite false?" "It is strange. Can they have appeared
to him smartly fledged in white plumage, with dapper tail and wings
and vulture heart? Stately women clothed in daffodil chitons delighted
my gaze the only time I ever had a glimpse of them." "When was that?"
"I was scarcely older than yourself, and woke in a cave to see them
sitting and resting at its mouth, delicately grouped against the dawn.
I remember Euterpe's lap full of flowers, and Melpomene, for her hair
was stormy, black and unbound, and a deep brown cloak had slipped from
her shoulders, but still hung over her elbows; it was only afterwards
that I regretted not having noted the features of Urania, but assuredly
no single one of them had the eye of a hawk. They rose as I woke,
and strolled on. I crept after them, but when I turned the buttress
of rock, no glad-robed figure was in sight, though it seemed that
choral voices floated in the air; yet soon I found myself listening
to silence, so could not be sure." "It must be sad to sing unpraised,
however beautiful the words." "Yes, boy, and the ecstasy that sings is
counterfaced with a destroying rage; that is perhaps why his darkened
soul figured the Muses as birds of prey." "Do you know any more of his
rhapsodies?" "Perhaps I can recall another," and he struck some strange
bell-like notes and then sang:
Leap, Ibex, leap: the drop
From that mountain turret-top
Is sheer two hundred feet!
Crash head foremost to the rock;
Those massive hoops, thy curved horns, take the shock
And throw thee up! Albeit
Tossed by their supple springs,
Without the help of wings,
Scarcely may eye believe
Thou hast righted in the air!
Rashness thou dost retrieve;
Whence thou wast bounced, even there
Arrivest without let;
Four sturdy hooves of jet
Plant thee on the slab thine eye
Had chosen from on high.
So melodist that haunts
The spirit-firing peaks,
And deep in azure chants,
Must take like dizzy leap
Back to some sea-board town
To find the praise he seeks.
And would he still his fervour keep,
As fine resilience will he need
So featly to light down,
Hoop-horned Goat, as thine,
By chamois herds acclaimed divine!
A god's grace truly will he need
If he be not to suffer, not to bleed--
A shattered heart and brain a-fire,
A trodden mantle and snapt lyre!
And how by headlong rapture whirled and blinded
Should he know where 'tis won or how to find it?
That unpredictable address
Whose magic cleaves the rough quartz stone
And makes its secret crystals known
When the most boorish bless
The most divine
And flash back to their eyes the grace by which they shine!
This history has been written with Chiron's help, who says we have
often found more appropriate words than were actually used, yet
have not departed from truth as Clio bestows it on those who do her
unfeigned reverence.
* * * * *
I covered this sheepskin years ago in the cave and have kept it ever
since; now I must soon bequeath it to the care of others. Achilles and
Chiron are both long since dead, and who wants to hear the lays of
Thamyris now? I never picked up the slough of any god; though a bit
later, when my foot was sufficiently healed for me to limp about, I
found behind some bushes, where Caudon or Rhoetus had chucked it, the
filthy ragged homespun mantle of Thamyris, for when I spread it out
one could see where the blood had run down from his eyes by the dark
stains. I folded it and laid it at the foot of his grave and raised a
pyramid of stones over it, bringing them toilsomely from the pool each
day as my ankle grew stronger, even as in two or three years' time I
was adding crooked letter to crooked letter on the inside of this skin
that Thamyris might be remembered. And as I wrote I was persuaded, in
spite of Chiron's presentiment and that vivid dream of a white chlamys
broidered over with blue, violet, and silver serpents, that such
"magnificent joys" would never be mine. Which secret conviction, as
I grew a beard and it grew grey, has been proved correct. Maeonides,
best loved of all rhapsodists, may have found it, though when I heard
him chant the war for Troy, he also was dressed in homespun and
already blind; but old Agenor has kept his two eyes as safely as this
sheepskin.
THE ROMANCE OF RHYME
By G. K. CHESTERTON
The poet in the comic opera, it will be remembered (I hope), claimed
for his æsthetic authority that "Hey diddle diddle will rank as an
idyll, if I pronounce it chaste." In face of a satire which still
survives the fashion it satirised, it may require some moral courage
seriously to pronounce it chaste, or to suggest that the nursery rhyme
in question has really some of the qualities of an idyll. Of its
chastity, in the vulgar sense, there need be little dispute, despite
the scandal of the elopement of the dish with the spoon, which would
seem as free from grossness as the loves of the triangles. And though
the incident of the cow may have something of the moonstruck ecstasy
of Endymion, that also has a silvery coldness about it worthy of the
wilder aspects of Diana. The truth more seriously tenable is that this
nursery rhyme is a complete and compact model of the nursery short
story. The cow jumping over the moon fulfils to perfection the two
essentials of such a story for children. It makes an effect that is
fantastic out of objects that are familiar; and it makes a picture that
is at once incredible and unmistakable. But it is yet more tenable,
and here more to the point, that this nursery rhyme is emphatically a
rhyme. Both the lilt and the jingle are just right for their purpose,
and are worth whole libraries of elaborate literary verse for children.
And the best proof of its vitality is that the satirist himself has
unconsciously echoed the jingle even in making the joke. The metre
of that nineteenth-century satire is the metre of the nursery rhyme.
"Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle" and "Hey diddle diddle
will rank as an idyll" are obviously both dancing to the same ancient
tune; and that by no means the tune the old cow died of, but the more
exhilarating air to which she jumped over the moon.
The whole history of the thing called rhyme can be found between those
two things: the simple pleasure of rhyming "diddle" to "fiddle," and
the more sophisticated pleasure of rhyming "diddle" to "idyll." Now the
fatal mistake about poetry, and more than half of the fatal mistake
about humanity, consists in forgetting that we should have the first
kind of pleasure as well as the second. It might be said that we should
have the first pleasure as the basis of the second; or yet more truly,
the first pleasure inside the second. The fatal metaphor of progress,
which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real
idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. The heart of
the tree remains the same, however many rings are added to it; and
a man cannot leave his heart behind by running hard with his legs.
In the core of all culture are the things that may be said, in every
sense, to be learned by heart. In the innermost part of all poetry is
the nursery rhyme, the nonsense that is too happy even to care about
being nonsensical. It may lead on to the more elaborate nonsense of the
Gilbertian line, or even the far less poetic nonsense of some of the
Browningesque rhymes. But the true enjoyment of poetry is always in
having the simple pleasure as well as the subtle pleasure. Indeed it is
on this primary point that so many of our artistic and other reforms
seem to go wrong. What is the matter with the modern world is that
it is trying to get simplicity in everything except the soul. Where
the soul really has simplicity it can be grateful for anything--even
complexity. Many peasants have to be vegetarians, and their ordinary
life is really a simple life. But the peasants do not despise a good
dinner when they can get it; they wolf it down with enthusiasm, because
they have not only the simple life but the simple spirit. And it is so
with the modern modes of art which revert, very rightly, to what is
"primitive." But their moral mistake is that they try to combine the
ruggedness that should belong to simplicity with a superciliousness
that should only belong to satiety. The last Futurist draughtsmanship,
for instance, evidently has the aim of drawing a tree as it might be
drawn by a child of ten. I think the new artists would admit it; nor do
I merely sneer at it. I am willing to admit, especially for the sake of
argument, that there is a truth of philosophy and psychology in this
attempt to attain the clarity even through the crudity of childhood.
In this sense I can see what a man is driving at when he draws a tree
merely as a stick with smaller sticks standing out of it. He may be
trying to trace in black and white or grey a primeval and almost
pre-natal illumination; that it is very remarkable that a stick should
exist, and still more remarkable that a stick should stick up or stick
out. He may be similarly enchanted with his own stick of charcoal or
grey chalk; he may be enraptured, as a child is, with the mere fact
that it makes a mark on the paper--a highly poetic fact in itself. But
the child does not despise the real tree for being different from his
drawing of the tree. He does not despise Uncle Humphrey because that
talented amateur can really draw a tree. He does not think less of the
real sticks because they are live sticks, and can grow and branch and
curve in a way uncommon in walking-sticks. Because he has a single eye
he can enjoy a double pleasure. This distinction, which seems strangely
neglected, may be traced again in the drama and most other domains of
art. Reformers insist that the audiences of simpler ages were content
with bare boards or rudimentary scenery if they could hear Sophocles
or Shakespeare talking a language of the gods. They were very properly
contented with plain boards. But they were not discontented with
pageants. The people who appreciated Antony's oration as such would
have appreciated Aladdin's palace as such. They did not think gilding
and spangles substitutes for poetry and philosophy, because they are
not. But they did think gilding and spangles great and admirable gifts
of God, because they are.
But the application of this distinction here is to the case of rhyme in
poetry. And the application of it is that we should never be ashamed
of enjoying a thing as a rhyme as well as enjoying it as a poem. And I
think the modern poets who try to escape from the rhyming pleasure, in
pursuit of a freer poetical pleasure, are making the same fundamentally
fallacious attempt to combine simplicity with superiority. Such a poet
is like a child who could take no pleasure in a tree because it looked
like a tree, or a playgoer who could take no pleasure in the Forest
of Arden because it looked like a forest. It is not impossible to
find a sort of prig who professes that he could listen to literature
in any scenery, but strongly objects to good scenery. And in poetical
criticism and creation there has also appeared the prig who insists
that any new poem must avoid the sort of melody that makes the beauty
of any old song. Poets must put away childish things, including the
child's pleasure in the mere sing-song of irrational rhyme. It may be
hinted that when poets put away childish things they will put away
poetry. But it may be well to say a word in further justification of
rhyme as well as poetry, in the child as well as the poet. Now, the
neglect of this nursery instinct would be a blunder, even if it were
merely an animal instinct or an automatic instinct. If a rhyme were to
a man merely what a bark is to a dog, or a crow to a cock, it would
be clear that such natural things cannot be merely neglected. It is
clear that a canine epic, about Argus instead of Ulysses, would have
a beat ultimately consisting of barks. It is clear that a long poem
like _Chantecler_, written by a real cock, would be to the tune of
Cock-a-doodle-doo. But in truth the nursery rhyme has a nobler origin;
if it be ancestral it is not animal; its principle is a primary one,
not only in the body but in the soul.
Milton prefaced _Paradise Lost_ with a ponderous condemnation of
rhyme. And perhaps the finest and even the most familiar line in the
whole of _Paradise Lost_ is really a glorification of rhyme. "Seasons
return, but not to me return," is not only an echo that has all the
ring of a rhyme in its form, but it happens to contain nearly all the
philosophy of rhyme in its spirit. The wonderful word "return" has,
not only in its sound but in its sense, a hint of the whole secret
of song. It is not merely that its very form is a fine example of a
certain quality in English, somewhat similar to that which Mrs. Meynell
admirably analysed in a former issue of this magazine in the case of
words like "unforgiven." It is that it describes poetry itself, not
only in a mechanical but a moral sense. Song is not only a recurrence,
it is a return. It does not merely, like the child in the nursery,
take pleasure in seeing the wheels go round. It also wishes to go back
as well as round; to go back to the nursery where such pleasures are
found. Or to vary the metaphor slightly, it does not merely rejoice in
the rotation of a wheel on the road, as if it were a fixed wheel in the
air. It is not only the wheel but the waggon that is returning. That
labouring caravan is always travelling towards some camping-ground that
it has lost and cannot find again. No lover of poetry needs to be told
that all poems are full of that noise of returning wheels; and none
more than the poems of Milton himself. The whole truth is obvious, not
merely in the poem, but even in the two words of the title. All poems
might be bound in one book under the title of _Paradise Lost_. And the
only object of writing _Paradise Lost_ is to turn it, if only by a
magic and momentary illusion, into _Paradise Regained_.
It is in this deeper significance of return that we must seek for the
peculiar power in the recurrence we call rhyme. It would be easy enough
to reply to Milton's strictures on rhyme in the spirit of a sensible
if superficial liberality by saying that it takes all sorts to make a
world, and especially the world of the poets. It is evident enough that
Milton might have been right to dispense with rhyme without being right
to despise it. It is obvious that the peculiar dignity of his religious
epic would have been weakened if it had been a rhymed epic, beginning:
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal root.
But it is equally obvious that Milton himself would not have tripped on
the light fantastic toe with quite so much charm and cheerfulness in
the lines:
But come thou Goddess fair and free
In heaven yclept Euphrosyne
if the goddess had been yclept something else, as, for the sake of
argument, Syrinx. Milton in his more reasonable moods would have
allowed rhyme in theory a place in all poetry, as he allowed it in
practice in his own poetry. But he would certainly have said at this
time, and possibly at all times, that he allowed it an inferior place,
or at least a secondary place. But is its place secondary; and is it in
any sense inferior?
The romance of rhyme does not consist merely in the pleasure of a
jingle, though this is a pleasure of which no man should be ashamed.
Certainly most men take pleasure in it, whether or not they are ashamed
of it. We see it in the older fashion of prolonging the chorus of a
song with syllables like "rumty tumty" or "tooral looral." We see
it in the similar but later fashion of discussing whether a truth
is objective or subjective, or whether a reform is constructive
or destructive, or whether an argument is deductive or inductive:
all bearing witness to a very natural love for those nursery rhyme
recurrences which make a sort of song without words, or at least
without any kind of intellectual significance. But something much
deeper is involved in the love of rhyme as distinct from other poetic
forms, something which is perhaps too deep and subtle to be described.
The nearest approximation to the truth I can think of is something
like this: that while all forms of genuine verse recur, there is in
rhyme a sense of return to exactly the same place. All modes of song
go forward and backward like the tides of a sea; but in the great sea
of Homeric or Virgilian hexameters, the sea that carried the labouring
ships of Ulysses and Æneas, the thunder of the breakers is rhythmic,
but the margin of the foam is necessarily irregular and vague. In rhyme
there is rather a sense of water poured safely into one familiar well,
or (to use a nobler metaphor) of ale poured safely into one familiar
flagon. The armies of Homer and Virgil advance and retreat over a vast
country, and suggest vast and very profound sentiments about it, about
whether it is their own country or only a strange country. But when
the old nameless ballad boldly rhymes "the bonny ivy tree" to "my ain
countree" the vision at once dwindles and sharpens to a very vivid
image of a single soldier passing under the ivy that darkens his own
door. Rhythm deals with similarity, but rhyme with identity. Now in
the one word identity are involved perhaps the deepest and certainly
the dearest human things. He who is homesick does not desire houses or
even homes. He who is lovesick does not want to see all the women with
whom he might have fallen in love. Only he who is sea-sick, perhaps,
may be said to have a cosmopolitan craving for all lands or any kind
of land. And this is probably why sea-sickness, like cosmopolitanism,
has never yet been a high inspiration to song. Songs, especially the
most poignant of them, generally refer to some absolute, to some
positive place or person for whom no similarity is a substitute. In
such a case all approximation is merely asymptotic. The prodigal
returns to his father's house and not the house next door, unless he
is still an imperfectly sober prodigal; the lover desires his lady and
not her twin sister, except in old complications of romance; and even
the spiritualist is generally looking for a ghost and not merely for
ghosts. I think the intolerable torture of spiritualism must be a doubt
about identity. Anyhow, it will generally be found that where this call
for the identical has been uttered most ringingly and unmistakably in
literature, it has been uttered in rhyme. Another purpose for which
this pointed and definite form is very much fitted is the expression of
dogma, as distinct from doubt or even opinion. This is why, with all
allowance for a decline in the most classical effects of the classical
tongue, the rhymed Latin of the mediæval hymns does express what it had
to express in a very poignant poetical manner, as compared with the
reverent agnosticism so nobly uttered in the rolling unrhymed metres of
the ancients. For even if we regard the matter of the mediæval verses
as a dream, it was at least a vivid dream, a dream full of faces, a
dream of love and of lost things. And something of the same spirit
runs in a vaguer way through proverbs and phrases that are not exactly
religious, but rather in a rude sense philosophical, but which all
move with the burden of returning; things to be felt only in familiar
fragments ... _on revient toujours_ ... it's the old story--it's love
that makes the world go round; and all roads lead to Rome: we might
almost say that all roads lead to Rhyme.
Milton's revolt against rhyme must be read in the light of history.
Milton is the Renascence frozen into a Puritan form; the beginning of a
period which was in a sense classic, but was in a still more definite
sense aristocratic. There the Classicist was the artistic aristocrat
because the Calvinist was the spiritual aristocrat. The seventeenth
century was intensely individualistic; it had both in the noble and
the ignoble sense a respect for persons. It had no respect whatever
for popular traditions; and it was in the midst of its purely logical
and legal excitement that most of the popular traditions died. The
Parliament appeared and the people disappeared. The arts were put under
patrons, where they had once been under patron saints. The schools and
colleges at once strengthened and narrowed the New Learning, making
it something rather peculiar to one country and one class. A few men
talked a great deal of good Latin, where all men had once talked a
little bad Latin. But they talked even the good Latin so that no
Latinist in the world could understand them. They confined all study
of the classics to that of the most classical period, and grossly
exaggerated the barbarity and barrenness of patriotic Greek or mediæval
Latin. It is as if a man said that because the English translation of
the Bible is perhaps the best English in the world, therefore Addison
and Pater and Newman are not worth reading. We can imagine what men
in such a mood would have said of the rude rhymed hexameters of the
monks; and it is not unnatural that they should have felt a reaction
against rhyme itself. For the history of rhyme is the history of
something else, very vast and sometimes invisible, certainly somewhat
indefinable, against which they were in aristocratic rebellion.
That thing is difficult to define in impartial modern terms. It might
well be called Romance, and that even in a more technical sense,
since it corresponds to the rise of the Romance languages as distinct
from the Roman language. It might more truly be called Religion, for
historically it was the gradual re-emergence of Europe through the
Dark Ages, because it still had one religion, though no longer one
rule. It was, in short, the creation of Christendom. It may be called
Legend, for it is true that the most overpowering presence in it is
that of omnipresent and powerful popular legend; so that things that
may never have happened, or, as some say, could never have happened,
are nevertheless rooted in our racial memory like things that have
happened to ourselves. The whole Arthurian Cycle, for instance, seems
something more real than reality. If the faces in that darkness of the
Dark Ages, Lancelot and Arthur and Merlin and Modred, are indeed faces
in a dream, they are like faces in a real dream: a dream in a bed and
not a dream in a book. Subconsciously at least, I should be much less
surprised if Arthur were to come again than I should be if the Superman
were to come at all. Again, the thing might be called Gossip: a noble
name, having in it the name of God and one of the most generous and
genial of the relations of men. For I suppose there has seldom been a
time when such a mass of culture and good traditions of craft and song
have been handed down orally, by one universal buzz of conversation,
through centuries of ignorance down to centuries of greater knowledge.
Education must have been an eternal _viva voce_ examination; but the
men passed their examination. At least they went out in such rude
sense masters of art as to create the Song of Roland and the round
Roman arches that carry the weight of so many Gothic towers. Finally,
of course, it can be called ignorance, barbarism, black superstition,
a reaction towards obscurantism and old night; and such a view is
eminently complete and satisfactory, only that it leaves behind it a
sort of weak wonder as to why the very youngest poets do still go on
writing poems about the sword of Arthur and the horn of Roland.
All this was but the beginning of a process which has two great points
of interest. The first is the way in which the mediæval movement did
rebuild the old Roman civilisation; the other was the way in which it
did not. A strange interest attaches to the things which had never
existed in the pagan culture and did appear in the Christian culture. I
think it is true of most of them that they had a quality that can very
approximately be described as popular, or perhaps as vulgar, as indeed
we still talk of the languages which at that time liberated themselves
from Latin as the vulgar tongues. And to many Classicists these things
would appear to be vulgar in a more vulgar sense. They were vulgar in
the sense of being vivid almost to excess, of making a very direct and
unsophisticated appeal to the emotions. The first law of heraldry was
to wear the heart upon the sleeve. Such mediævalism was the reverse of
mere mysticism, in the sense of mere mystery; it might more truly be
described as sensationalism. One of these things, for instance, was a
hot and even an impatient love of colour. It learned to paint before
it could draw, and could afford the twopence coloured long before it
could manage the penny plain. It culminated at last, of course, in the
energy and gaiety of the Gothic; but even the richness of Gothic rested
on a certain psychological simplicity. We can contrast it with the
classic by noting its popular passion for telling a story in stone. We
may admit that a Doric portico is a poem, but no one would describe it
as an anecdote. The time was to come when much of the imagery of the
cathedrals was to be lost; but it would have mattered the less that
it was defaced by its enemies if it had not been already neglected by
its friends. It would have mattered less if the whole tide of taste
among the rich had not turned against the old popular masterpieces. The
Puritans defaced them, but the Cavaliers did not truly defend them.
The Cavaliers also were aristocrats of the new classical culture, and
used the word Gothic in the sense of barbaric. For the benefit of the
Teutonists we may note in parenthesis that, if this phrase meant that
Gothic was despised, it also meant that Goths were despised. But when
the Cavaliers came back, after the Puritan interregnum, they restored
not in the style of Pugin but in the style of Wren. The very thing
we call the Restoration, which was the restoration of King Charles,
was also the restoration of St. Paul's. And it was a very modern
restoration.
So far we might say that simple people do not like simple things. This
is certainly true if we compare the classic with these highly-coloured
things of mediævalism, or all the vivid visions which first began to
glow in the night of the Dark Ages. Now, one of these things was the
romantic expedient called rhyme. And even in this, if we compare the
two, we shall see something of the same paradox by which the simple
like complexities and the complex like simplicities. The ignorant liked
rich carvings and melodious and often ingenious rhymes. The learned
liked bare walls and blank verse. But in the case of rhyme it is
peculiarly difficult to define the double and yet very definite truth.
It is difficult to define the sense in which rhyme is artificial and
the sense in which it is simple. In truth it is simple because it is
artificial. It is an artifice of the kind enjoyed by children and other
poetic people; it is a toy. As a technical accomplishment it stands
at the same distance from the popular experience as the old popular
sports. Like swimming, like dancing, like drawing the bow, anybody
can do it, but nobody can do it without taking the trouble to do it;
and only a few can do it very well. In a hundred ways it was akin to
that simple and even humble energy that made all the lost glory of
the guilds. Thus their rhyme was useful as well as ornamental. It was
not merely a melody but also a mnemonic; just as their towers were
not merely trophies but beacons and belfries. In another aspect rhyme
is akin to rhetoric, but of a very positive and emphatic sort: the
coincidence of sound giving the effect of saying, "It is certainly so."
Shakespeare realised this when he rounded off a fierce or romantic
scene with a rhymed couplet. I know that some critics do not like
this, but I think there is a moment when a drama ought to become a
melodrama. Then there is a much older effect of rhyme that can only be
called mystical, which may seem the very opposite of the utilitarian,
and almost equally remote from the rhetorical. Yet it shares with the
former the tough texture of something not easily forgotten, and with
the latter the touch of authority which is the aim of all oratory.
The thing I mean may be found in the fact that so many of the old
proverbial prophecies, from Merlin to Mother Shipton, were handed down
in rhyme. It can be found in the very name of Thomas the Rhymer.
But the simplest way of putting this popular quality is in a single
word: it is a song. Rhyme corresponds to a melody so simple that it
goes straight like an arrow to the heart. It corresponds to a chorus so
familiar and obvious that all men can join in it. I am not disturbed
by the suggestion that such an arrow of song, when it hits the heart,
may entirely miss the head. I am not concerned to deny that the chorus
may sometimes be a drunken chorus, in which men have lost their heads
to find their tongues. I am not defending but defining; I am trying to
find words for a large but elusive distinction between certain things
that are certainly poetry and certain other things which are also song.
Of course it is only an accident that Horace opens his greatest series
of odes by saying that he detests the profane populace and wishes to
drive them from his temple of poetry. But it is the sort of accident
that is almost an allegory. There is even a sense in which it has a
practical side. When all is said, _could_ a whole crowd of men sing
the "Descende Cœlo," that noble ode, as a crowd can certainly sing the
"Dies Irae," or for that matter "Down among the Dead Men"? Did Horace
himself sing the Horatian odes in the sense in which Shakespeare could
sing, or could hardly help singing, the Shakespearean songs. I do not
know, having no kind of scholarship on these points. But I do not feel
that it could have been at all the same thing; and my only purpose is
to attempt a rude description of that thing. Rhyme is consonant to the
particular kind of song that can be a popular song, whether pathetic or
passionate or comic; and Milton is entitled to his true distinction;
nobody is likely to sing _Paradise Lost_ as if it were a song of that
kind. I have tried to suggest my sympathy with rhyme, in terms true
enough to be accepted by the other side as expressing their antipathy
for it. I have admitted that rhyme is a toy and even a trick, of the
sort that delights children. I have admitted that every rhyme is a
nursery rhyme. What I will never admit is that anyone who is too big
for the nursery is big enough for the Kingdom of God, though the God
were only Apollo.
A good critic should be like God in the great saying of a Scottish
mystic. George Macdonald said that God was easy to please and hard to
satisfy. That paradox is the poise of all good artistic appreciation.
Without the first part of the paradox appreciation perishes, because
it loses the power to appreciate. Good criticism, I repeat, combines
the subtle pleasure in a thing being done well with the simple pleasure
in it being done at all. It combines the pleasure of the scientific
engineer in seeing how the wheels work together to a logical end with
the pleasure of the baby in seeing the wheels go round. It combines
the pleasure of the artistic draughtsman in the fact that his lines
of charcoal, light and apparently loose, fall exactly right and in
a perfect relation with the pleasure of the child in the fact that
the charcoal makes marks of any kind on the paper. And in the same
fashion it combines the critic's pleasure in a poem with the child's
pleasure in a rhyme. The historical point about this kind of poetry,
the rhymed romantic kind, is that it rose out of the Dark Ages with
the whole of this huge popular power behind it, the human love of a
song, a riddle, a proverb, a pun or a nursery rhyme; the sing-song of
innumerable children's games, the chorus of a thousand camp-fires and a
thousand taverns. When poetry loses its link with all these people who
are easily pleased it loses all its power of giving pleasure. When a
poet looks down on a rhyme it is, I will not say as if he looked down
on a daisy (which might seem possible to the more literal-minded),
but rather as if he looked down on a lark because he had been up in a
balloon. It is cutting away the very roots of poetry; it is revolting
against nature because it is natural, against sunshine because it is
bright, or mountains because they are high, or moonrise because it is
mysterious. The freezing process began after the Reformation with a
fastidious search for finer yet freer forms; to-day it has ended in
formlessness.
But the joke of it is that even when it is formless it is still
fastidious. The new anarchic artists are not ready to accept
everything. They are not ready to accept anything except anarchy.
Unless it observes the very latest conventions of unconventionality,
they would rule out anything classic as coldly as any classic ever
ruled out anything romantic. But the classic was a form; and there was
even a time when it was a new form. The men who invented Sapphics did
invent a new metre; the introduction of Elizabethan blank verse was
a real revolution in literary form. But _vers libre_, or nine-tenths
of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new
school of architecture. It is no more a revolution in literary form
than eating meat raw is an innovation in cookery. It is not even
original, because it is not creative; the artist does not invent
anything, but only abolishes something. But the only point about it
that is to my present purpose is expressed in the word "pride." It is
not merely proud in the sense of being exultant, but proud in the sense
of being disdainful. Such outlaws are more exclusive than aristocrats;
and their anarchical arrogance goes far beyond the pride of Milton and
the aristocrats of the New Learning. And this final refinement has
completed the work which the saner aristocrats began, the work now
most evident in the world: the separation of art from the people. I
need not insist on the sensational and self-evident character of that
separation. I need not recommend the modern poet to attempt to sing his
_vers libres_ in a public house. I need not even urge the young Imagist
to read out a number of his disconnected Images to a public meeting.
The thing is not only admitted but admired. The old artist remained
proud in spite of his unpopularity; the new artist is proud because of
his unpopularity; perhaps it is his chief ground for pride.
Dwelling as I do in the Dark Ages, or at latest among the mediæval
fairy-tales, I am yet moved to remember something I once read in a
modern fairy-tale. As it happens, I have already used the name of
George Macdonald; and in the best of his books there is a description
of how a young miner in the mountains could always drive away the
subterranean goblins if he could remember and repeat any kind of
rhyme. The impromptu rhymes were often doggerel, as was the dog-Latin
of many monkish hexameters or the burden of many rude Border ballads.
But I have a notion that they drove away the devils, blue devils of
pessimism and black devils of pride. Anyhow Madame Montessori, who has
apparently been deploring the educational effects of fairy-tales, would
probably see in me a pitiable example of such early perversion, for
that image which was one of my first impressions seems likely enough to
be one of my last; and when the noise of many new and original musical
instruments, with strange shapes and still stranger noises, has passed
away like a procession, I shall hear in the succeeding silence only a
rustle and scramble among the rocks and a boy singing on the mountain.
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE NOVEL
By J. D. BERESFORD
I
If the opinion of the reviewer represents in any degree the opinion of
the public, psycho-analysis is becoming at once the craze and the curse
of the modern novelist. The chief persons of the story, we gather,
are no longer units, recognisable illustrations of acceptable and
well-defined types of character, but tend to split horribly into their
component parts, revealing the workings of their unconscious minds
with a spiritual immodesty worthy of the immortal Sally Beauchamp. Our
heroes suffer from "Œdipus complexes" with a unanimity that must appear
altogether perverse to a generation reared on the works of Charles
Dickens, who consistently regarded all mothers as criminal, negligible,
or insane. Our heroines are become either displayed specimens of morbid
pathology or increasingly middle-aged. Finally, and as a culminating
horror, we occasionally come across a novel written with such a single
regard for the subjective emotions that the objective personality
appears only now and then as an uncompleted cast momentarily lifted,
for examination, from the matrix.
Moreover, these symptoms and their like--I still adapt and condense
the current opinions of the outraged reviewer--exhibit an inclination
to multiply. We picture the admirer of the world's most successful
novelist (Harold Bell Wright) as arching his back and spitting
furiously at the first indication of a Freudian thesis. And, to
conclude the indictment, it is plain that unless the novel-writing
disciples of the Vienna and Zurich schools of psychology can
promptly be bled to death--they have, thank God, quite miserable
circulations!--their influence may permeate and vitiate that sane
and admirable method which has given us an Ethel M. Dell, a Temple
Thurston, or a Zane Grey.
This indictment represents, no doubt, an extremist attitude, the
opinion of that multitude which must have its heroines pure and its
morality undiluted; but it cannot be neglected solely on that account.
And when we recognise, as we must, that authentic critics have also
shown a bias in the same direction, we have established a case that
demands both a literary and a scientific consideration.
Our analysis, however, must begin with certain exclusions. If we are
to test the influence of psycho-analysis on the novel as an art-form
we must take into account not only the effect, but also the manner
of the incidence. For it is manifest that of all theories of the
nature of man ever put forward by a reputable scientist, that of
Sigmund Freud is the most attractive and adaptable for the purposes
of fiction. It was a theory of sex, the all but universal theme of
the novel; it emphasised various peculiarities of thought, feeling,
and action that no observant, and, _a fortiori_, no introspective
novelist could thereafter overlook; it gave a new mystery to the human
mind; adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality by dwelling upon
the physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse;
and, last temptation of the enervated seeker for new themes, provided
material for comparatively unworked complications of motive.
Now, these appeals have inevitably influenced the writing of just those
experimenters and opportunists whose novels I wish to exclude from
our analysis. Their productions can only be indicative of a passing
fashion; their value, at best, such as the future historian may find
in the record of the epidemic symptoms they have documented. But since
novels of this type have a particular significance, both in relation
to our present purpose and to all literary criticism of this form of
expression, we must in the first place arrive at a clear understanding
of the quality that differentiates them from those other works which,
whatever their failings, have another representative value.
Taking, then, an extreme and therefore ideal example, I submit that
the essential difference is that between pure observation and pure
feeling, or variously between an intellectual as opposed to an
emotional response to experience. In the case of the experimenters
we are considering, such a subject as psycho-analysis is studied
from the surface, the facts and general teachings are memorised and
then applied, more or less arbitrarily, to the invented or observed
characters who figure in the story. Such a method when brilliantly used
may produce an impression of truth, may even in rare cases lead to
discovery, but in its essence it is mechanical, a mere collection and
presentation of material that has not been assimilated, and hence very
slightly transmuted by the writer.
The opposed example is that in which the study of, say, psycho-analysis
comes to the understanding of the writer as a formula that interprets
for him a mode of experience. He has, let us assume, been aware of
and puzzled by a habit of thought or feeling which is suddenly and
beautifully illuminated for him by the application of this new formula.
Nor, in the truly representative instance, does the process halt at the
first discovery, but continues to open resolutions of old difficulties
hardly recognised as such until they fall within the scope of the new
criterion. The danger that besets the young disciple in the first
ecstasies of such an adventure is that he will inevitably be tempted to
apply his touchstone too generally, to imagine that his formula will
explain all life.
In such a case as this the manner of incidence, to which I referred,
differs markedly from the first example. Here we get a sense of
interpenetration and subsequent assimilation, in the former case rather
of obliquity and reflection; the true difference being that one writer
finds in psycho-analysis an aid to the understanding of human thought
and action, the other merely a useful piece to add to his repertoire.
And, finally in this connection, one has true value as evidence of the
validity of the theory; the other has not.
Having thus cleared the ground by eliminating more particularly those
literary experiments in applied psychology that have had such an
irritant action on the nerves of the reviewer, I propose to test the
applicability of psycho-analysis to fiction by a brief examination of
certain aspects of the work of a writer who had not heard of Freud and
never attempted to anticipate his method. Dostoevsky, in fact, from our
point of view, may be regarded primarily as a patient rather than as a
doctor.
Of his life up to the age of seven years we lack that information
which would provide us with the last triumphant detail of proof. It
is exceedingly improbable that that detail will ever be forthcoming.
But it is a fairly safe inference from the later evidence that at some
time in the course of those earlier years he suffered either some
shock of terror or stress of misery that initiated the trauma which
was later confirmed and emphasised by his experience on the scaffold.
This inference is inherently probable, and since it might conceivably
be confirmed by research and could not conceivably be disproved, we
may assume it as a premise, although it is not absolutely essential
pathologically.
For the remainder of his life we see him beyond all shadow of doubt
suffering from a neurosis that, even if it were not the cause, was
the accompaniment and not the result of his epilepsy. The form taken
by this neurosis has been provisionally termed an "inferiority
complex." In its milder and practically harmless forms it is perhaps
the commonest instance of a morbid inhibition, despite the fact
that--_pace_ Dr. Freud--it depends more on the power principle of
Adler than on the pleasure-pain principle so tediously insisted upon
by the Vienna school. The symptoms in aggravated cases exhibit on the
one side an exaggerated humility, and on the other an intolerant use
of any adventitious opportunity for the use of power. Two instances of
everyday experience taken from a text-book of psycho-analysis are: The
driver of a heavy van brutally threatening the temporarily inferior
pedestrian by the threat of running him down; and the ordinarily
meek woman who takes a delight in exerting temporary superiority of
position, it may be in such a trivial act as keeping anyone waiting by
a pretence of inattention.
Dostoevsky, however, has himself analysed the condition so perfectly
that his study might well find a place in a medical library as the
ideal type of this particular neurosis. The supposed autobiographer
(his name does not appear) in _Notes from Underground_[22] is, perhaps,
too intelligently aware of his own condition, but it is evident
that Dostoevsky's purpose could only be fully served by the form of
a personal confession. It is, indeed, a confession that holds no
reserves. In the earlier part of the story we see the assumed writer of
the notes suffering agonies from the consciousness of his humiliation.
This is followed by two attempts to assert himself, both futile. We
then see him in a contest with his servant, Apollon, whose condition
is a reflex of his own. And, finally, we get the representative
instance of a brutal use of temporary superiority of position in his
dealings with the unfortunate little prostitute, Liza. Moreover, the
title is conclusive. The "underground" is clearly indicated as that of
the mind, and if the story had been written within the last ten years
the author would have been accused by the reviewers of having steeped
himself in the writings of the psycho-analysts. The opening sentences,
indeed, would probably have been a little too much for the sensitive,
since the sketch begins: "I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am
an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know
nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails
me."
[22] The novels of Feodor Dostoevsky. Vol. X. _White Nights
and Other Stories._ Constance Garnett's translations.
Heinemann.
This one story would be almost sufficient testimony as to Dostoevsky's
own condition, the essential part of it coming, as it does, not from
observation, but from the "underground" of the writer's own mind.
But if we need further evidence it can be found in almost any of
Dostoevsky's novels: the valet in _The Brothers Karamazov_ is a fine
example; Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_ develops the theme in its
less self-conscious aspect; there is more than one example in _The
Possessed_. But the truth is that, once started on this scent, the
student of Dostoevsky cannot fail to conclude that the type dominates
both the characterisation and the atmosphere of all his works.
Yet if our diagnosis rested solely on this evidence the inference would
be open to attack by the layman on the grounds that Dostoevsky wrote of
the Russian as he knew him; and has not Russia as a country exhibited
precisely the symptoms of the neurosis we have been describing?
Centuries of suppression and humiliation have been at work to foster
and confirm the complex which we now see in its typical expression,
although passing, as did that of the French in the last years of the
eighteenth century, towards its natural sublimation.
But our evidence goes beyond the examination of Dostoevsky's
imaginative writings--in which, by the way, he was continually able,
within certain limitations, to sublimate his own complex. Indeed, it
was not by his novels but by a study of his letters that I, personally,
was led in the first instance to attempt the diagnosis. In the letters
we must look chiefly for autobiographical indications rather than for
the emergence of the unconscious wisdom that enriches the novels,
but would be checked by the realisation of addressing a particular
individual.
The first of them that attracted my attention was the adulatory tone
of the letters begging for patronage, written just before the release
from Siberia. One regrets, in reading them, that genius could so bemean
itself. The common excuse for the tone of them is that Dostoevsky
was ill and over-tried by his recent experiences, but it is just in
such circumstances as these that one looks for the expression of
the dominant individuality. In any case I prefer the pathological
explanation. Then we come to the consideration of his jealousy of
Turgenev, and of the unfortunate meeting of the two men in Switzerland.
All Dostoevsky's resentment and his behaviour at the meeting in
question are readily explicable by the theory of his neurosis, but the
need for impartiality demands that we should ask if a perfectly normal
explanation is forthcoming. Personally I have failed to find one that
is consistent with an unprejudiced interpretation of Dostoevsky's
general character. Apart from his prepossession, he exhibits traits of
gentleness, affection, and tolerance that do not appear to me consonant
with his treatment of Turgenev. He did not seek to belittle his other
contemporaries. But, in this instance, like the hero of _Notes from
Underground_, he could not resist the unconscious desire to try and
jostle his superior from the pavement.[23]
[23] Cf. _op. cit._, pp. 87, _et seq._
For our present purpose, however, it is not necessary to prove that
Dostoevsky himself was the victim of a particular neurosis--although
the argument is slightly strengthened if that hypothesis be
admitted--since it is primarily only my intention to show that certain
morbid conditions of mind, now clearly indicated and with obvious
limitations explained by the psycho-analysts, may be artistically
treated in the best fiction. Another instance of this, which may
be briefly referred to, is that afforded by the writings of D. H.
Lawrence, who in all his novels has demonstrated with the passionate
conviction that is a witness to his genius the strange and occasionally
dissociated workings of the unconscious mind. In this case we are
confronted with just such a sex obsession as delights the faithful
disciples of the Vienna school, but the particular type of complex is
not of any importance in this connection.
II
The result of our preliminary examination may be summarised as the
posing of two deductions: the first, that the deliberate, intellectual
use in the pages of a novel of the teachings of psycho-analysis
produces an effect upon the reader that may be variously irritating,
unconvincing, and negligible, but is rarely, if ever, psychologically
valuable; the second, that a writer of genius such as Dostoevsky has,
in one sense, forestalled the conclusions of this branch of psychology
and used them to the benefit of literature. At first sight these two
deductions may appear to disclose an inherent contradiction, namely,
that the theories of psycho-analysis can and cannot be used for the
purposes of fiction; but this apparent contradiction is instantly
resolved by a consideration of the manner of treatment. Briefly we may
assume that, according to precedent, a true form of self-expression
must bear the impress of spontaneity, and hence that a novelist's
learning is comparatively valueless to him until it has been so
assimilated and transmuted as to become a personal experience and
conviction.
This last proposition, however, opens the second phase of our thesis,
presenting as it does the obvious deduction that such a theory as that
of psycho-analysis properly comprehended and applied may become a
powerful influence in the novel of the future. But to decide that we
must consider, first, how far the theory is a new one, and, secondly,
in what respects it illuminates the problems of normal psychology.
The answer to the first question can be stated quite briefly. The
knowledge of the facts upon which Freud's pathological method was
founded are as old as folk-lore. Certain symbols that the modern
practitioner recognises as having a peculiar significance in the
dreams of his patient are the same symbols that were used not only in
Greek and Norse mythologies, but also in the most primitive rites of
the savage. What is new is primarily the pathological method by which
the unconscious mind may be induced to reveal its dangerous secrets;
but from the study of this method there is arising the outline of a
new psychology for which we have no true precedent. Glimmerings and
faint foreshadowings there may have been, but no sure recognition or
understanding; and the answer to our second question involves some
inquiry into what this new psychology implies.
Let me begin by saying that psycho-analysis throws very little light
on the problem of the survival of the personality, and Dr. Jung, in
his address to the Society for Psychical Research last April, refused
to admit the probability of any authentic message having been received
from departed spirits. We are able, therefore, to confine ourselves
strictly to the study of humanity in its normal, that is to say, in its
terrestrial, condition, and find our main point of convergence from
older psychologies in the intensive observation of that element of our
make-up which is now commonly spoken of as "the unconscious."
A scholarly history designed to collate the main facts of man's
attitude towards and tentative realisations of his own duality
would make uncommonly interesting reading; but outside religion and
imaginative literature no real attempt was made to _characterise_ the
unconscious mind until Freud began to practise a pathology that relied
upon the interpretation of dreams as an essential part of the method
of diagnosis. In the past the oneirocritic was solely concerned with
the significance of the dream in so far as it foretold the future; the
Freudian analysis, before Jung restored the balance of factors, was
equally single-minded in relating it to the past. And this change of
attitude--so startling in its implications that it almost makes a break
in the continuity of thought--tended very quickly to crystallise a host
of speculations that had awaited a unifying hypothesis. For this method
of interpreting the dream, supported as it was by verifiable results
in the patient's nervous, mental, and physical condition, could only
signify that we are endowed with a double consciousness, and that under
a suitable stimulus the deeper consciousness could be examined and,
as I have said, characterised. We are, in short, confronted with the
theorem of a dual personality[24] in every human being, in which the
second person has peculiar and essential functions, both in connection
with our sanity and with our physical well-being. What precisely is
the scope of these functions we are not yet in a position to say, but
we can formulate with reasonable certainty various characteristic
activities, tendencies and modes of expression, common to this second
personality, that are of the greatest importance to modern psychology.
[24] In using the term "dual personality" I beg an
essential question for the sake of a convenient image;
but it must not be assumed that what I describe
hereafter as a second personality is recognised
as such by psychologists. It is possible that the
unconscious bears some such relation to the conscious
as desire bears to purpose, instinct to reason, or
reflexive to deliberative action. But see also in this
connection _De l'Inconscient au Conscient_, by Dr.
Gustave Geley, Paris. 1919.
We must, for example, face the deduction that the unconscious can
suffer from a queer and hitherto unrecognised form of ill-health.
A sudden fright, for instance, more particularly in childhood, has
apparently the effect of breaking the liaison in this one particular
relation between the conscious and the unconscious minds. The shock
itself, whatever it may be, is not remembered by the conscious mind,
and this failure of contact between the unconscious and objective
reality seems to produce a condition comparable to nervous worry.
Speaking figuratively, one may say that the second personality becomes
the victim of a growing obsession, and begins to concentrate its
efforts more and more upon signalling its message of distress. And
surely the strangest of all the strange facts that have recently
been described concerning this amazing partnership of ours is that
the second personality cannot communicate with the first except in
the language of symbol. The means by which that vital message can
be transmitted is, generally, in the first instance by a dream. But
this dream does not picture the actual circumstances of the original
shock, but seeks to describe it by a method that Dr. Maurice Nicoll
has compared to that of the political cartoon. Night after night the
message of distress is delivered with diligent ingenuity in a picture
language the images of which are frequently taken from casual and
unimportant experiences of the dreamer's waking life, such experiences
being presented in the form of an allegory which, rightly interpreted,
has a bearing on the urgent cause of distress. When this mode of
communication fails, more drastic steps are taken and the physical
actions of the body may be influenced in the form of a mania. A youth
or a young woman shocked by a sudden sexual experience or revelation to
the point of conscious forgetfulness of the incident in question may
develop a mania for the continued cleansing of the hands--again, be it
noted, the message being conveyed by a symbol. Or the effect may be the
development of a phobia that in extreme cases may cause the death of
the patient.
Now, the points of immediate interest in this amazing process are,
firstly, what may be called the anxiety of the unconscious to
communicate its distress; and, secondly, the inability to convey
its message by any means other than that of symbol. From the former
observation it may perhaps be inferred, _inter alia_, that it is vital
to the functions of the unconscious that it should have universal touch
with the objective realities of its partner; from the second, that
the existence of a trauma causing a breach between the two minds is
of such a nature that direct communication becomes impossible along
that particular circuit. For, although it is true that the majority
of dreams emerge in this form, they also contain now and then plain
statements that solve a perplexity; and it is difficult to understand
why in cases of such vital urgency, an image of the conditions
responsible for the original trauma should not be directly presented,
unless there is some nervous dissociation--it may be an actual physical
displacement or temporary rearrangement of cell tissue--producing a
restricted amnesia in the conscious mind.
Proceeding now with the characterisation of the unconscious, we come
to that aspect of it which has above all others tickled and excited
the popular imagination. In this aspect the unconscious figures as
the crouching beast of desire, the primitive immoral instigator of
all the animal passions, a thing of wonderful abilities and capable
of amazing physical dexterities, but before all else unethical and
uncivilised. But sorry as I am to destroy so romantic and intriguing
a creation, I must admit that Dr. Jung's researches do not uphold
this view of the unconscious as a universal type. It is, indeed, well
established in the mythologies and appears as the serpent, a favourite
symbol, in the second chapter of Genesis; but the individual may at
once put away the fear, or the hope, that he himself is harbouring so
fearful a beast. For, if we may argue from those abnormal instances
that furnish the bolder illustrations of tendency, we have excellent
grounds for following Jung in the assumption that the unconscious
is the complement of the conscious. Is a man brutal, then he is
suppressing the urgency to gentleness that wells up--an uncertain and
impeded flow, no doubt--from the depths of his being; and we remember
the callous murderer exhibiting a tender solicitude for some feeble
animal. Is he a miser, he is occasionally tortured by promptings to an
absurd generosity. Is he a loose-liver, he suffers from an unappeasable
longing after chastity. The saint is tempted by his unconscious being
to sin: the sinner to renounce the devil and all his works. In short,
the character of the unconscious is as various as the character of
man; although in this civilised world of ours, in which the dominant
restrictions of society are in the direction of sex and decency, we
are naturally inclined towards a generalisation that presents the
unconscious as a creature of immodesty and lust....
But it is unnecessary for the purposes of this article that I should
elaborate any further the larger inferences of the psycho-analysts
with regard to the personal traits, influences, and functions of this
astonishing partner of ours. All that I wish to demonstrate is that
such a partner almost certainly exists and has an immense influence
upon our impulses, our thoughts, and our actions. And the critical
question we have to face is whether the agency of the unconscious,
recognised now both by the philosophers and the psychologists,
can possibly be kept out of the novel. Personally, I believe that
neither the distaste of the reviewer nor that more influential
factor the distaste of the public will avail to bar the conclusions
of psycho-analysis from the fiction of the future. We are coming
inevitably to a new test in our judgments upon human action and
thought, a test that has been proved to be valid by many thousands of
well-authenticated experiments. I am willing to admit that through all
the ages genius has anticipated laboratory and clinical methods, and
that the basis of the psycho-analytical theory was firmly established
in literature before Freud applied it as a pathological method. But
once such a theory as this is established--a probability one can hardly
escape--how can any serious novelist afford to neglect the illumination
it throws upon the subtle problems of human impulse? Is it not already
tending to become a touchstone of the author's powers of observation
and understanding, helping us to evaluate the intellectual productions
of the writer, whether realist or romantic, who relies upon the
evidence of his eyes and ears rather than upon his personal emotions
and experience?
I am aware that such a postulate as this contradicts in some respects
certain implications I have previously made. But it must be remembered
that while the novelist's best material undoubtedly comes from his
personal contacts, almost infinitely extended by his powers of entering
with an emotional sympathy into the experiences of other lives either
presented or recounted, he cannot entirely neglect the precedents
afforded by learning. Such precedents may only serve him as a test
and a formula for correction, but should he overlook them altogether
he will be liable to fall into the error of regarding his personal
equation as a universal standard and generalise from the atypical.
And, finally, I would submit that we are at this moment passing through
a new phase of evolution that must have a characteristic effect on the
fiction of the future--if the form of the novel survives the change.
We may study the first evidences of this strange partnership of ours
in the lower animals. In the wild what we call the unconscious appears
to be the single control. It represents the genius of instinct, swift,
feral, and unethical. In animals, such as the dog and the horse,
age-long companions of man, we can trace the incipient rivalry of what
in ourselves we regard as the representative consciousness. The horse
and the dog have already learnt the meaning of conscious inhibition.
At our command they can deny the spontaneous impulses of their natural
desire. In civilised man that ability has been cultivated until he is
able to present to the world and himself so complete an entity that we
and he regard it as his proper expression. But, meanwhile, we cannot
now doubt that his hidden partner has evolved with him. The impulses of
the unconscious are no longer simply feral and animal. We are, a trifle
unwillingly, coming to the conclusion that it is this other shadowed
self that is responsible for all that is best and most permanent in
literature. It is being associated with genius on the one hand, and on
the other with the highest dexterity in games of skill. And is it not
possible that with our growing realisation of this co-operation the
"education of the subconscious"--as Varisco, the Italian philosopher,
calls it--will proceed ever more rapidly? And to what end, unless it be
that in the strange process of our earthly evolution this artificial
shell of the conscious will be gradually broken and absorbed to reveal
the single and relatively perfect individual that has been so steadily
developing underground?
JOHN DONNE
By ROBERT LYND
Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost
seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said
that the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a
young man in his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his
secret marriage with his patron's niece--"for love," says Walton,
"is a flattering mischief"--purchased at first only the ruin of his
hopes and a term in prison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the
pulpit of St. Paul's represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of
his own images, as "always preaching to himself, like an angel from a
cloud, though in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in
holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to
amend their lives." The picture is all of noble charm. Walton speaks
in one place of "his winning behaviour--which, when it would entice,
had a strange kind of elegant irresistible art." There are no harsh
phrases even in the references to those irregularities of Donne's
youth, by which he had wasted the fortune of £3000--equal, I believe,
to more than £30,000 of our money--bequeathed to him by his father, the
ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate," writes Walton gently, referring to
his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the greatest part spent
in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought experience." It
is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of the irregularities of
his early life. But he counts them of no significance. He also utters
a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "the remarkable error
of his life." But how little he condemned it in his heart is clear
when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife "with
so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their sufferings
made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the banquets of
dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in search of
small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the world--him
whose grave mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of curious
and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of "the
famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole
age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety, and beauty. More
than that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable
Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the
Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and,
as he mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall
see it re-animated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed
three hundred years after his death less as a great Christian than
as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings
rather than in his biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose,
and in his _Songs and Sonnets_ and _Elegies_ rather than in his _Divine
Poems_. We find, in some of these, abundant evidence of the existence
of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne
suffered in his youth all the temptations of Faust. His thirst was
not for salvation but for experience--experience of the intellect and
experience of sensation. He has left it on record in one of his letters
that he was a victim at one period of "the worst voluptuousness, an
hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages." Faust
in his cell can hardly have been a more insatiate student than Donne.
"In the most unsettled days of his youth," Walton tells us, "his bed
was not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and
it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till past
ten; all which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty
after it." His thoroughness of study may be judged from the fact that
"he left the resultance of 1400 authors, most of them abridged and
analysed with his own hand." But we need not go beyond his poems for
proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made his own. He was
versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He subdued
astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine Muses
were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called
in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and
the springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library,
and in the library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect
were the works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets
with whom London may almost be said to have been peopled during his
lifetime. I do not think his verse or correspondence contains a single
reference to Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only
nine years later. The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have
regarded with interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's
Catholicism may have been a link between them. But, more important
than that, Jonson was, like Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For
each of them learning was the necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is
true, was a pedant of the classics, Donne of the speculative sciences;
but both of them alike ate to a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge. It was, I think, because Donne was to so great a degree a
pagan of the Renaissance, loving the proud things of the intellect more
than the treasures of the humble, that he found it easy to abandon the
Catholicism of his family for Protestantism. He undoubtedly became
in later life a convinced and passionate Christian of the Protestant
faith, but at the time when he first changed his religion he had none
of the fanaticism of the pious convert. He wrote in an early satire
as a man whom the intellect had liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did
he ever lose this rationalist tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to
a friend, "I have never imprisoned the word religion.... They" (the
churches) "are all virtual beams of one sun." Few converts in those
days of the wars of religion wrote with such wise reason of the creeds
as did Donne in the lines:
To adore or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a
theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not
from ardent faith.
It is all in keeping with one's impression of the young Donne as a man
setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and
experience. He travels, though he knows not why he travels. He loves,
though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic
immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that
it was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz
in 1596 and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit,
for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had
something to do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic
descriptions of storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes:
Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,
Or to disuse me from the queasy pain
Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst
Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.
In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most
interest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously
than any other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and
loving." Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing
more than in love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been
an Odysseus of love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a
virile neurotic, comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a
sensualist of the mind even more than of the body. His sensibilities
were different as well as less of a piece, but he had something of
Baudelaire's taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. One is not
surprised to find among his poems that "heroical epistle of Sappho to
Philaenis," in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things.
His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal,
even in their grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of
the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in
the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift
were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently
from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be admitted,
turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. _Go and
Catch a Falling Star_ is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in
disparagement of women. In several of the _Elegies_, however, he throws
away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He
writes frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:
Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
In _Love's Progress_ he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography
of a woman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the
beautiful seems almost beastly. In _The Anagram_ and _The Comparison_
he plays the Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses
in insulting two of them. In _The Perfume_ he relates the story of an
intrigue with a girl whose father discovered his presence in the house
as a result of his using scent. Donne's jest about it is suggestive of
his uncontrollable passion for ugliness:
Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought.
It may be contended that in _The Perfume_ he was describing an
imaginary experience, and indeed we have his own words on record: "I
did best when I had least truth for my subjects." But even if we did
not accept Mr. Gosse's common-sense explanation of these words, we
should feel that the details of the story have a vividness that springs
straight from reality. It is difficult to believe that Donne had not
actually lived in terror of the gigantic manservant who was set to spy
on the lovers.
But the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of Donne, from
the point of view of biography, especially since Mr. Gosse gave it such
commanding significance in that _Life of John Donne_ in which he made
a living man out of a mummy, is that of which we have the story in
_Jealousy_ and _His Parting from Her_. It is another story of furtive
and forbidden love. Its theme is an intrigue carried on under a
Husband's towering eyes,
That flamed with oily sweat of jealousy.
A characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by making the
husband a deformed man. Donne, however, merely laughs at his deformity,
as he bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that reduces her to tears:
O give him many thanks, he is courteous,
That in suspecting kindly warneth us.
We must not, as we used, flout openly,
In scoffing riddles, his deformity;
Nor at his board together being set,
With words nor touch, scarce looks adulterate.
And he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have discovered
them they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at some distance
from where
He, swol'n and pampered with great fare,
Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair.
It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a scarcely less
extraordinary light on the nature of Donne's mind, if he invented it.
At the same time, I do not think the events it relates played the
important part which Mr. Gosse assigns to them in Donne's spiritual
biography. It is impossible to read Mr. Gosse's two volumes without
getting the impression that "the deplorable but eventful liaison," as
he calls it, was the most fruitful occurrence in Donne's life as a
poet. He discovers traces of it in one great poem after another--even
in the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day_, which is commonly supposed to
relate to the Countess of Bedford, and in _The Funeral_, the theme of
which Professor Grierson takes to be the mother of George Herbert. I
confess that the oftener I read the poetry of Donne the more firmly
I become convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire
gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated love.
He is often described by the historians of literature as the poet who
finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believe that,
so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a
Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under
protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame
the more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic
of _The Ecstasy_ we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be
difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue
to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love
was Anne More, whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for
her where we will, whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow
who had borne ten children when he first met her) or in the Countess
of Bedford or in another. The name is not important, and one is not
concerned to know it, especially when one remembers Donne's alarming
curse on:
Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows
Who is my mistress.
One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real
people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and
Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel,
however, that these poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love
are no mere goldsmith's compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs.
Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this sort are not wrought save
by the heart. We do not find in them the underground and sardonic
element that appears in so much of Donne's merely amorous work. We no
longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan hammering out the poetry of
base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He becomes in them a child of
Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. He makes music of so
grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder at all the critics
who have found fault with his rhythms--from Ben Jonson, who said that
"for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to Coleridge,
who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described him as
"rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without
doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne
rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a
master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an
encyclopædia in his saddle-bags.
Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he
also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue
each other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two
beautiful poems, _The Relic_ and _The Funeral_, addressed to the lady
who had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells
what will happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton
discovered with
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at the grave and make a little stay.
Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics--the relics of a
Magdalen and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile:
All women shall adore us, and some men.
He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different
from what they imagine, and tells the miracle-seekers what in reality
were "the miracles we harmless lovers wrought":
First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why;
Difference of sex no more we knew
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going, we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free:
These miracles we did; but now, alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
In _The Funeral_ he returns to the same theme:
Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm;
The mystery, the sign you must not touch,
For 'tis my outward soul.
In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the too
miraculous nobleness of their love:
Whate'er she meant by it, bury it with me,
For since I am
Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry,
If into other hands these relics came;
As 'twas humility
To afford to it all that a soul can do,
So, 'tis some bravery,
That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.
In _The Blossom_, he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares
that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where
he will find a mistress:
As glad to have my body as my mind.
_The Primrose_ is another appeal for a less intellectual love:
Should she
Be more than woman, she would get above
All thought of sex, and think to move
My heart to study her, and not to love.
If we turn back to _The Undertaking_, however, we find Donne boasting
once more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless
to communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to
love in the same kind, they "would love but as before." Hence he will
keep the tale a secret:
If, as I have, you also do,
Virtue attir'd in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She;
And if this love, though placed so,
From profane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they do, deride:
Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did;
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.
It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it
is useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love.
His poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no
other English poet--not even, perhaps, Browning's--does. He was by
destiny the complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He
passed through phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase
after phase of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the
perfect marriage. In his youth he was a gay--but was he ever really
gay?--free-lover, who sang jestingly:
How happy were our sires in ancient times,
Who held plurality of loves no crime!
By the time he writes _The Ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become
the protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is
merely an ecstatic friendship:
But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not
the enemy but the companion of the soul:
Soul into the soul may flow
Though it to body first repair.
The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater
intellectual vehemence:
So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book.
I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate
verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a
mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been
pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience.
His greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure
depths of the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt
if, in the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal
importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his
brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been
less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's
Art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness,
much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been
written.
One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne's
genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some
unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange
them in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea
that has bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant
_Anniversary_, and but a page or two before the _Nocturnal upon St.
Lucy's Day_. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted
to the Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another,
for the enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as _The Canonisation_ can
be interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne
More, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love.
It is, in either case, written in defence of his love against some who
censured him for it:
For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.
In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be
measured by the standards of the vulgar:
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canonis'd by love:
And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomise),
Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above
A pattern of your love!"
According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the
beautiful verses beginning:
Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee;
as well as the series of _Valedictions_. Of many of the other
love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the
occasion. All that we can say with confidence when we have read them is
that, after we have followed one tributary on another leading down to
the ultimate Thames of his genius, we know that his progress as a lover
was a progress from infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness
to deep and enduring passion. The image that is finally stamped on his
greatest work is not that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist
of love. It is true that there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to
have led even Sir Thomas Browne to think of Donne's verse rather as a
confession of his sins than as a golden book of love.
To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is
as much divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of
the religious ones. Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be
regarded as having been uttered in that great poem in celebration of
lasting love, _The Anniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep:
Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we, where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two?
True and false fears let us refrain;
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write three-score: this is the second of our reign
Donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and
revolutionary as his conversion in religion.
It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate
religion. When his marriage with Sir George More's sixteen-year-old
daughter brought him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed
up the sorrows of the situation in the famous line--a line which has
some additional interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his
name:
John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone.
His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due
to ill-health, debt, and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy
beyond prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in
childbed, after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis
resulted that turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. His
original change from Catholicism to Protestantism has been already
mentioned. Most of the authorities are agreed, however, that this was a
conversion in a formal rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he
took Holy Orders in 1615, at the age of forty-two, he appears to have
done so less in answer to any impulse to a religious life from within
than because, with the downfall of Somerset, all hope of advancement
through his legal attainments was brought to an end. Undoubtedly, as
far back as 1612, he had thought of entering the Church. But at the
same period we find him making use of his legal knowledge in order to
help the infamous Countess of Essex to secure the annulment of her
first marriage, and at the end of 1613 he is writing an epithalamium
for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious fact that
three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear, though
innocently enough, in the story of that sordid crime. Donne's temper
at the time is still clearly that of a man of the world. His jest at
the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower, is the jest of
an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the Church he
reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of Bedford, in
trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more than £30 to
pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an affliction
that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man of Donne's
ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of his
dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a
long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous.
To such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were
to Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing
less and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them
some volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through
the bars and sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men
suffering from claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits,
hating the walls that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush
them. In his poems and letters Donne is haunted especially by three
images--the hospital, the prison, and the grave. Disease, I think,
preyed on his mind even more terrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put
all the miseries that man is subject to together," he exclaims in one
of the passages in that luxuriant anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall
Smith has made from the _Sermons_[25]; "sickness is more than all....
In poverty I lack but other things; in banishment I lack but other
men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton declares that it was from
consumption that Donne suffered; but he had probably the seeds of many
diseases. In some of his letters he dwells miserably on the symptoms
of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness "hath so much of a cramp
that it wrests the sinews, so much of a tetane that it withdraws and
pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is not like to
be cured ... I shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a porter in a
great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to make me
weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." Even after his conversion he
felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his ill-health.
Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in October,
1623, give us a realistic study of a sickbed and its circumstances,
the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd account of
the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not gone away,
but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, but
gone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb." "I am mine own ghost,"
he cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them....
Miserable and inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the
grave by lying still."
[25] _Donne's Sermons._ Selected Passages, with an Essay.
By Logan Pearsall Smith. Clarendon Press. 6_s._ net.
It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by
wretchedness and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily
corruptions was often tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit
suicide, and that he even wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an
apology for suicide on religious grounds, his famous and little-read
_Biathanatos_. The family crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes,
and these symbolise well enough the brood of temptations that twisted
about in this unfortunate Christian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his
salvation, abandoned the family crest for a new one--Christ crucified
on an anchor. But he might well have left the snakes writhing about
the anchor. He remained a tempted man to the end. One wishes that the
_Sermons_ threw more light on his later personal life than they do.
But perhaps that is too much to expect of sermons. There is no form
of literature less personal except a leading article. The preacher
usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than a man giving
expression to himself. In the circumstances what surprises us is that
the _Sermons_ reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne. Indeed,
they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his private
letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition.
As a preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative
heat. He shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the
divine and infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most
far-sought extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies
of the Euphuists. Undoubtedly, the modern reader smiles when Donne,
explaining that man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy
to the elephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied
elephant, millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied
world, a multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite
many times over; nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a
God that hath the millions of the heathens' gods in himself alone."
But at the same time one finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in
the huge sorites of quips and fancies in which he loves to present
the divine argument. Nine out of ten readers of the _Sermons_, I
imagine, will be first attracted to them through love of the poems.
They need not be surprised if they do not immediately enjoy them. The
dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly enough. As one goes on reading
them, however, one becomes suddenly aware of their florid and exiled
beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to the passion of a great
suffering artist. Here are sentences that express the Paradise, the
Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A noble imagination is
at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an imagination that is
at home among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall Smith's anthology
almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage which gives us
a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and hope that was
Donne's contribution to the art of prose.
Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty
that we expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's _Sermons_ in
their latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find
beauty piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise,
too, not to expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that
famous confession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes,
and which no writer on Donne can afford not to quote:
I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God,
and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and
his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for
the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of praying;
eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to God; and,
if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last of God in
that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had forgot what I
was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of
yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under
my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a
nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.
If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his _Sermons_ would be
as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the
Apostles.
Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose
personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a
thousand bays and creeks and rivermouths, to the same degree as the
personality that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of
John Donne. It is a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies
only intermittently in the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and
at the base of its most radiant mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a
miasma-infested swamp. There are jewels to be found scattered among
its rocks and over its surface, and by miners in the dark. It is
richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals and curious ornaments
than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom tells his tale
uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal deities
that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo of
these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even
as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The
chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is,
no doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes
us, as we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this
ghostly apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of
his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his
head and feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with
so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and
death-like face," while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral
monument. He then had the picture placed at his bedside, to which he
summoned his friends and servants in order to bid them farewell. As he
lay awaiting death, he said characteristically, "I were miserable if
I might not die," and then repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom
come, Thy will be done." At the very end he lost his speech, and "as
his soul ascended and his last breath departed from him he closed his
eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as
required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him."
It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral monument almost
uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great Fire, and no
other monument in the Cathedral escaped. Among all his fantasies none
remains in the imagination more despotically than this last fanciful
game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a fantastic to
the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight days before
the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently egoistic
amid its worship.
Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God.
Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes,
but none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way
places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation
of the first man in a new found land.
THE NOVELS OF MR. COMPTON MACKENZIE
By JOHN FREEMAN
Wise men have foretold the death of imaginative literature.
Spider-like, science will seize the body of this gilded fly, stab it
methodically into numbness, and then, feeding upon its vitals, will
exhaust and destroy the useless thing. With sedulous precision the
scientist will do what the artist, alas, has failed to do more than
vaguely and uncertainly: he will re-interpret life, he will rediscover
man's relation to a vaster Universe. Ignoring or spurning all attempts
at the æsthetic apprehension of the significance of life and time, he
will at length announce his own positive formula by which all phenomena
and all relations must be valued. It is the scientist who will feel
and communicate, with a dry ecstasy wholly his own, the isolation of
man amid the meanness or the majesty of the world. That language which
we yet speak, stiff with ancestral associations, will be discarded;
obscure symbols, their order intelligible perhaps to another scientist
but to no one else, will be used to express the secrets of life and
riddles of death Thebes never knew. The watcher of the skies will be no
Keats: back to his galley-pots will every Keats be driven. In the midst
of that web called science the spider will sit with vigilant eyes,
holding their cunning in momentary suspense, swelling with vaster and
vaster accumulations.
It is not poetry alone that is threatened: imaginative art is not
confined to poetry. The strange thing is that when Thomas Hardy has
carried an imaginative view of life to a finer expression than that of
any artist of his time, and shown how easily prose may wear the strict
shackles of scientific precision, that prose itself should find no
younger masters ready to use and develop it; as if Hardy's forsaking
of prose for verse were no simple forsaking, but rather a subtle
betrayal. Unique success is his in combining the imaginative with the
scientific, the emotional with the rational, in his novels; his younger
contemporaries seem to have failed equally in both directions.
It would be absurd to charge this dereliction to any single novelist
or group of novelists. Mr. Conrad, for instance, simply evades the
charge by being in his turn unique; Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett
fail in varying degrees but in both directions, and of their fellows
it is hard to think of any who has not similarly failed. Where gifts
are eminent the failure is eminent: hence this preface to remarks
upon the novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. Diligent, observant,
experienced, inexhaustible, or at any rate unexhausted, he has made his
opportunities and gained a hearing; indeed, as he reminds us in the
second volume of _Sinister Street_, he has won the greater advantage
of a hearing refused, the libraries having so ineffably rejected the
first volume. Nevertheless, from him that hath not---- What is it, in
fact, that has deprived him of the truest fruit of the gifts which he
has? I make no attempt to disguise the fact that Mr. Mackenzie appears
to be a writer who is not an imaginative artist, yet who might have
been an imaginative artist; a novelist who has not concerned himself
with life at all save in its external and mechanic motions. He has not
confined himself to a single manner: his first book, _The Passionate
Elopement_, was an eighteenth-century story in a style familiarised by
less capable and less versatile practitioners. Little indeed was to be
expected from an author whose first book contained such writing as:
Presently he saw her join a blue mask and lose herself in the
flickering throng. Last time he had remarked particularly that her
_vis-à-vis_ wore brown and gold, yet the two figures were alike in
movement and gesture, and he could swear the hands were identical. It
was the same without a doubt. Charles bit his nails with vexation,
and fretted confoundedly.
"My dear boy, my dear Charles, pray do not gnaw your fingers.
Narcissus admired himself, 'tis true, but without carrying his
devotion to cannibality."
Charles turned to the well-known voice of Mr. Ripple.
"A thousand pardons, dear Beau, I was vexed by a trifle. The
masquerade comports itself with tolerable success."
--and the glitter and varnish of an upholstered narrative casually
spangled with Meredithean brightness. But Mr. Mackenzie's second novel,
_Carnival_, disappointed expectation by being readable. Like some of
its successors, it might be mistaken for realistic; while another, _Guy
and Pauline_, might be termed idyllic by those who love the phrase. He
moves and changes; he is a part of all that he has met; and you wonder
at length what _he_ is. For myself, I am reminded frequently of an
ingenious character seen in provincial music-halls, who to the eyes of
a happy audience swiftly and imperceptibly invests and divests himself
of many costumes of marvellous hue--one growing plain as another is
impetuously flung off, blue gloves giving place to pink, a crimson
shirt to an emerald, a shooting-jacket to a dinner-jacket--until I
laugh unrestrainably.
Mr. Mackenzie has not sought a fugitive and cloistered virtue; his
characters, as Johnson said of Gilbert Walmsley, mingle in the great
world without exemption from its follies and its vices. He loves their
activities; he sets them going and follows their whirring motion with
the ruthless gaiety of a child playing with toys, who stops them,
breaks them, and sometimes sets them going again. He understands
mechanics and they must move; and when they are run down in one book
he winds them up again for another. He hurries hither and thither,
clutching at the skirts of perpetual motion like that other pageant
master, time. His scene is the capitals of Europe or a railway train
between them. He shares with his characters, of whatever age, their
brilliant youth. He invents untiringly. He does not vex himself or
his readers with description, but if he pauses to paint he paints
with unmistakable bright colours. He writes clearly: there is seldom a
slovenly sentence, never a memorable one. He has a cruelly accurate ear
for slang, and presents vulgarity with fond verisimilitude. Femininity
haunts him; his flowers, even, remind him of frills. Something of
extreme youth clings to his books--its zestfulness, curiosity,
indiscriminateness, and its unregretful volatility. But when, you may
ask, remembering at once his gifts and his opportunities, his gifts and
the world amid which they are exercised, when will he grow up? When,
rather, will he grow down and strike first roots into the dark earth of
the mind? When, amid all his brisk preoccupations with men and women,
will he touch life?
Leaving generalisation, it is interesting to look at one of the
simplest of Mr. Mackenzie's novels, _Guy and Pauline_, published in
1915, and conspicuously dedicated to the Commander-in-Chief and the
General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It is the
story of Guy Hazlewood (wound up again after _Sinister Street_) and a
rector's daughter. Guy, returned from Macedonian Relief Fund work, is
charmed by a watery Oxfordshire house called Plashers Mead, and settles
there to write poetry. The rectory family are his neighbours, and with
the rector's daughters, Margaret, Monica, and Pauline, he quickly
obtains a brotherly footing, and then becomes engaged to the youngest.
The rector is a shadowy gardener with a singular fondness for answering
every question, upon whatever subject and of whatever importance, by
a reference to a blossoming or decaying plant; an idiosyncrasy which
is supposed to endear him to his family. And it is an "endearing"
book. Everybody is unvaryingly sweet; the adjective is as common and
as adhesive as mud. The three girls form a group of the kind for which
the far more finely observant and delicate art of Miss Viola Meynell
(among living novelists) has already obtained and exhausted our
sympathy. Ungracious as the comparison must seem to both writers, it
is irresistible and fatal. Linked sweetness too long drawn out becomes
tiresome, and the indistinct softness of the style makes the book
something more than tiresome.
Pauline hurried through a shower to church on Easter morning, and
shook mingled tears and raindrops from herself when she saw that Guy
was come to Communion. So then that angel had travelled from her
bedside last night to hover over Guy and bid him wake early next
morning, because it was Easter Day. With never so holy a calm had
she knelt in the jewelled shadows of that chancel or returned from
the altar to find her pew imparadised. When the people came out of
church the sun was shining, and on the trees and on the tombstones a
multitude of birds were singing. Never had Pauline felt the spirit of
Eastertide uplift her with such a joy, joy for her lover beside her,
joy for summer close at hand, joy for all the joy that Easter could
bring to the soul.
Elsewhere:
The apple trees were already frilled with a foam of blossom; and on
quivering boughs linnets with breasts rose-burnt by the winds of
March throbbed out their carol. Chaffinches with flashing prelude
of silver wings flourished a burst of song that broke as with too
intolerable a triumph: then sought another tree and poured forth
the triumphant song again. Thrushes, blackbirds and warblers quired
deep-throated melodies against the multitudinous trebles of those
undistinguished myriads that with choric pæan saluted May; and on
sudden diminuendoes could be heard the rustling canzonets of the
goldfinches, rising and falling with reedy cadences.
The story is clogged by Guy's meditations upon "poetical ambition"--he
is in the early twenties--and yet, with all these grievous handicaps,
it survives with sufficient force to express the poignancy with
which an incomplete passion may sink to oblivion. In Pauline Mr.
Mackenzie has succeeded in showing with simplicity and truth the quick
development of a child to a passionate, then a despairing, and at last
a forsaken woman; and in Guy the æsthetic frog swollen to a fraction
larger than his nature and then relapsing into insignificance. I am
not sure that the best of this novelist's achievement is not seen in
the isolation of these characters, the sufficiency of quiet incident,
and the sense--faintly yet perceptibly communicated--that the tragedy
of separation is implicit in the persons of his story. The atmosphere
may seem close, the setting fanciful, scenes, characters, and action
diminished and slightly prettified; yet there is genuine movement, rise
and decline. The occasion of Guy's last parting from Pauline is worth
noting, if only because Guy happens to be but the present name of Mr.
Mackenzie's invariable young man from Oxford; let it be remembered,
however, that Guy reappears years after in _Sylvia and Michael_ as a
larger shadow and dies with the Serbians before Nish.
"Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be
quite sure that she would always be second to you."
"But you might be interested?" Pauline asked breathlessly.
"I must be free if I'm going to be an artist."
"Free?" she echoed slowly.
There remains a negative merit. If the artist, as a hundred critics
have asserted and a thousand authors forgotten, is proved by what he
omits, it must be counted to Mr. Mackenzie for a virtue that this book
of four hundred pages does not contain a single seduction, and that,
despite the obvious piquancy of a contrast between Plashers Mead and a
London night-club, he has so easily and so blessedly avoided it.
The point is the more proper for remembrance inasmuch as such
forbearance is the last straining of the quality of mercy in this
author. Mr. Mackenzie commonly prefers cities to country scenes,
although a country scene in his earliest novel yielded him his first
opportunity of teasing innocent readers with an unsavoury interior.
Since he is a cultured writer you might imagine that Hogarth had
tutored him; but Hogarth is immensely masculine, and the origin of
our novelist's inspiration need be sought no farther back than the
'nineties. Nothing is more surprising, at any rate to men approaching
middle-age, than the fitful incandescence of that spark with which the
'nineties were tinily illuminated. The inferior intelligence and the
yet more inferior imagination which impelled certain artists--pleased
with the phrase decadent--to magnify the ferment of youthful senses,
may now seem even more trivial in their fruition than an Olympian
judgment would allow. But it is hard to be impartial when a purely
remote contemplation is forbidden by the flashing reflections from
living writers who are only in a narrow sense contemporary writers.
Coventry Patmore, chief poet and almost chief artist in that church
of which we hear so much in Mr. Mackenzie's novels, asserted with
more force than originality that what is morally bad is necessarily
bad art; and he proceeded to say, less tritely, that the delicate
indecency of so much modern art was partly due to deficient virility
which, in proportion to its strength, is naturally modest. Pleading
for plain-speaking, he maintained that indecency (which only a fool
could identify with plain-speaking) is an endeavour to irritate
sensations and appetites in the absence of natural passion; that
which passes with so many for power and ardour being really, in his
certain and indignant eyes, impotence and coldness. The distinction
between plain-speaking and delicate indecency is to be remembered
when Mr. Mackenzie's most ambitious attempts at the English novel,
_Sinister Street_ and _Sylvia Scarlett_, are considered. There may
be coarseness of expression, a fondness for trivial bluntness of
phrase; but it would be stupid to see in that more than coarseness or
bluntness. The theme of _Sinister Street_, says the author, is the
youth of a man who will presumably be a priest; a theme developed in
nearly four hundred thousand words by something like the process of
"annual elongation" which Johnson observed in a Hebridean road. The
book moves upon familiar biographical lines--the lonely children,
the local school and lesser public school, Oxford, and the betrayed
passion for a prostitute. It is an enormous and minute chronicle--of
what? Of the externals of a boy's life, of the customs of school,
flirtation with vulgar girls, evasions of school tasks, the ways of a
decrepit group surviving from the 'nineties, Catholic ritual, and a
little introspection here and there; and then, in the second volume,
of the same externals of Oxford life drawn to the same scale. Such a
scheme must needs attract the tens who have been to public school and
University, and delight the tens of thousands who haven't. Is it taking
a mean advantage of time's passage to compare _Sinister Street_ with
Serge Aksakoff's _Years of Childhood_ and its successors? Aksakoff
treats childhood with a simplicity, a quiet intentness, by the side
of which Mr. Mackenzie's enormous reconstruction seems loose and
artificial. _Sinister Street_ is vast in size and meagre in content. It
is packed with superfluities. Three-fourths of it is inessential to the
author's declared intention; it is no more than a guide-book cleverly
designed (_e.g._, the first week at Oxford) to evoke an illusion of
Oxford in Pimlico and Shepherd's Bush; and concentrating upon the
remaining fourth, you feel that your author has been aware of little
more than the physiology of adolescence and the usual facile religious
reactions. Boys from seventeen to twenty-three, girls from sixteen to
any age, may find in Henry Meats _alias_ Brother Aloysius, in Arthur
Wilmot the last of the Decadents, in the Lilys and the Daisys of the
streets, in the whole rank multitude of Mr. Mackenzie's "underworld,"
the irritation of sensation which adolescents naturally seek. Here may
curiosity be half-satisfied, half-stimulated. A Guide to Prostitution
could add little to the informations of _Sinister Street_: the dress,
the habitation, even the finances of those who have "gone gay," are
meticulously recorded. Passed, I am afraid, are the Orient promenade
and the underground gilded sty, but their glory is not departed, it
is merely transferred, and _Sinister Street_ remains sufficiently
lively and up to date to provoke the youngest and make the oldest feel
young again. Do you ask why God gives brains for such a use? I cannot
even guess. Mr. Mackenzie astonishingly blazons his book with Keats's
famous analysis: "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between,
in which the soul is in a ferment, etc."--an astonishing phrase for
index to this book; whether used in simplicity or in subtle defiance,
this also I cannot guess. Clear enough is it that what passes for
imagination is no other than the froth of yesty waves of youth.... It
is a book written, if offence may be disavowed and avoided, by a boy
for boys. Mr. Mackenzie himself, in his introductory letter, refers to
his study of Russian writers (this in explanation of the length of his
novels), and in his epilogical letter he apparently regards the book
as a work of art. An author's opinion of his own intention is to be
respected, for who shall challenge it? It does but afford an additional
ground for judgment and surprise.
To consider _Sinister Street_ a mere aberration is an extravagant
possibility, but possibility itself is left panting behind _Sylvia
Scarlett_. Here, again, the author is generous of space, and here he
has not been content to write a guide-book. He has chosen a woman
for his central figure, and she, unlike the male protagonists of
the other books, is no coloured cloudy reflection of a reflection.
She is no minikin Michael or Guy or Maurice, but a semblable moving
figure. Sinister Street is her place of origin, Vanity Fair her scene
of action--a world of music-halls where farce passes for fantasy and
women's dress for an exciting theme. Farce? Sylvia is not only farcical
in herself, but is, like Falstaff, creative--the cause of farce in
others; and though Book One opens so admirably with a paragraph showing
how well the author can follow a good model, farce ensues and recurs
and makes her chronicle an amusing thing.
But it is amusing only so long as coarseness is not strained through a
child's mind, coarseness of phrase only or more significant coarseness
of invention. I say more significant, for whether that worse coarseness
is intended or involuntary must be immaterial, save as indicating the
particular code against which the offence is primarily committed, the
code of manners or the code of art. There is here no such gentleness
in the treatment of childhood as distinguishes the earlier chapters of
_Carnival_.... The point need not be stressed. I dislike the current
practice of setting one's wits against the author whose work happens
to be the subject of discussion; I don't want to produce an artificial
dilemma and pretend that Mr. Mackenzie is inevitably trapped by it. Put
it, then, that there are certain obligations of civilised life, and
certain obligations of that flower of civilised life which we call art;
put it that coarseness of phrase or incident outrages the former, and
that an intention to commit that outrage, or an insensibility of having
committed it, is equally an offence against the less assertive but not
less imperative obligations of art. In a word, the sin is vulgarity,
two-edged vulgarity it may be, an offence against both canons or, if
you will, both conventions; and the further weight hangs on the charge
that it is here committed in the person of a child, and is, therefore,
wanton. Shall I add that the immanence of farce just spoken of does in
a little degree mitigate the cruelty by generalising the vulgarity?
Here is rude, healthy Smollett out-Smolletted, reduced to the uncostly
and only half-odious horseplay of a music-hall:
The encouragement put a fine spirit into Danny's blows; he hammered
the unfortunate Cohen round and round the room, upsetting table
and chairs and washstand until with a stinging blow he knocked him
backwards into the slop-pail, in which he sat so heavily that when he
tried to rise the slop-pail stuck and gave him the appearance of a
large baboon crawling with elevated rump on all fours. Danny kicked
off the slop-pail, and invited Cohen to stand up to him; but when he
did get on his feet, he ran to the door and reached the stairs just
as Mrs. Gonner was wearily ascending to find out what was happening.
He tried to stop himself by clutching the knob of the baluster,
which broke; the result was that he dragged Mrs. Gonner with him in
a glissade which ended behind the counter. The confusion in the shop
became general; Mr. Gonner cut his thumb, and the sight of the blood
caused a woman who was eating a sausage to choke; another customer
took advantage of the row to snatch a side of bacon and try to
escape, but another customer with a finer moral sense prevented him;
a dog who was sniffing in the entrance saw the bacon on the floor and
tried to seize it, but getting his tail trodden upon by somebody, he
took fright and bit a small boy, who was waiting to change a shilling
into coppers. Meanwhile Sylvia, who expected every minute that Jubie
and her pugilistic brother would come back and increase the confusion
with possibly unpleasant consequences for herself, took advantage of
Danny's being occupied in an argument with Cohen and the two Gonners
to put on her hat and escape from the shop. She jumped on the first
omnibus and congratulated herself when she looked round and saw a
policeman entering the eating-house.
Sylvia herself is capable enough as well as universally attractive.
The citation just made is from a passage following the second amorous
attack upon her, when Danny Lewis threatens her with a knife, and she
parries with the water in her bedroom. An earlier lover had retired
from a similar contest with his underlip bitten through. When, some
time after the knife-and-water episode, Sylvia meets the Oxford type
in Philip Iredale, she is sent by him (being still but sixteen) for a
year's schooling and then marries him. Coquetting with the Church is
followed by flight--alone, it must be added; and indeed Sylvia's whole
recorded life is fugitive, a pilgrimage between this world and some
other. Three months later her husband's Oxford composure is shocked by:
"You _must_ divorce me now. I've not been able to earn enough to pay
you back more than this [ten pounds] for your bad bargain. I don't
think I've given any more pleasure to the men who have paid less for
me than you did, if that's any consolation."
Adventures repeat themselves. A huge Russian officer bursts into
Sylvia's room one night and is pitched out of the window by a
couple of acrobats. The war begins and spreads itself over Europe
as a background for her passages and parleyings; and maybe the
Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff of the Mediterranean
Expeditionary Force have beguiled many a tiresome after-war hour in
pursuing Sylvia's wanderings between places familiarised by their late
anxieties. Sylvia is differentiated from the other women of these
novels, not only by her superior capacity for experiences, but even
more by her superior volubility. She is, consciously, mind as well
as body, and as the narrative goes on and on she develops a passion
for monologue--terrifying in any woman, and rare among women whose
occupation Sylvia Scarlett's own name is perhaps meant assonantally
to suggest. These monologues, recurrent as the farce and more deadly,
might be called shortly the jargon. "I represent the original
conception of the Hetaera," she asserts.
"He'll think of me, if he ever thinks of me at all, as one of the
great multitude of wronged women. I shall think of him, though as a
matter of fact I shall avoid thinking of him, either as what might
have been--a false concept, for, of course, what might have been is
fundamentally inconceivable--or as what he was--a sentimental fool."
She meditates upon the art of Botticelli, whose appeal she seems
to think is only childlike, upon the conflict of nationality with
civilisation. She reads Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky, putting Apuleius
by, goes to confession, analyses her sensations, details the errancy
of her parentage, and seeks to shock the priest who, when Sylvia
acutely suggests that God is "almost vulgarly anthropomorphic," can
only murmur, "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not
one of them is forgotten before God?" But here is a brief specimen of
the almost unbroken monologue to which the priest of the wisest of the
churches can make no answer but a profession of the power of the Church:
"I suppose my running away was the direct result of my bringing up,
because whenever I had been brought face to face with a difficult
situation I ran away. However, this time I was determined from some
perverted pride to make myself more utterly myself than I had ever
done. It's hard to explain how my mind worked. You must remember
I was only nineteen, and already at thirty-one I am as far from
understanding all my motives then as if I were trying to understand
somebody who was not myself at all. Anyhow, I simply went on the
streets. For three months I mortified my flesh by being a harlot.
Can you understand that? Can you possibly understand the deliberate
infliction of such a discipline, not to humiliate one's pride but to
exalt it? Can you understand that I emerged from that three months of
incredible horror with a complete personality?..."
Sylvia did not wait for the priest to answer this question, partly
because she did not want to be disillusioned by finding so soon that
he had not comprehended anything of her emotions or actions, partly
because there seemed more important revelations of herself still to
be made.
--Farce at least is unpretentious, but this crude jargon, this
retroverted intellectualism, is offensive beyond farce, odious beyond
"delicate indecency."
It may not be wholly due to perversity if the characteristics of
these long biographical novels should overshadow the sharp merits
of, say, _Carnival_. _Carnival_, even better than _Guy and Pauline_,
may serve as a measure of Mr. Mackenzie's decline from his promise;
since although its conclusion is a disharmony, its best chapters are
good enough to cause a reader to sigh over the later novels. Was it,
indeed, quite a worthless aim to follow in the footsteps of George
Gissing? _Carnival_ suggests that a new Gissing might have grown up
before our eyes, with a touch of the same veracity, the same mordancy,
and a little less than the same humourless and dishumoured regard
for what is wry and hapless; but _Carnival_ stands alone, and the
exactions of that difficult sincerity have been put by.... Or take,
again, _Poor Relations_, the latest of Mr. Mackenzie's inventions. With
its ease and brilliant vivacities, with the comedy of its conception,
what a delightful play it would make! But might not the comedy have
depended--as comedy must--more surely upon character and less upon
incident? The author of _Sylvia Scarlett_, however, has imposed a
too-swift facility upon the author of _Poor Relations_. If practice
makes perfect, then nothing was wanting to the completeness of _Poor
Relations_--but how much is wanting! Admirable are the opening notes,
but of the rest too much is a brisk _falsetto_. There is excess in the
situations, excess in the characterisation, excess in the style:
When he looked at the old lady he could not discover anything except
a cold egotism in every fold of those flabby cheeks where the powder
lay like drifted snow in the ruts of a sunless lane.
It is equally the virtue and the fault of Mr. Mackenzie that he
provokes melancholy regrets, even in the middle of frequent chuckles;
and when the chuckling has died away the shadow of _Sylvia Scarlett_
falls upon the book, just as with the same unhappy denigration it is
flung backwards over the better qualities of the earlier _Carnival_.
Yet _Poor Relations_, like _Guy and Pauline_, is free from the worst
flaw of the longer novels, the crude determination to shock, which
breaks most starkly through the superficialities of _Sylvia Scarlett_.
That is a breach of the code of art rather than the code of morals,
an eruptive _épatism_ which would disfigure a better book, if it
could be found there. Can you conceive a more attractive subject,
if you are but three-and-twenty, than the philosophic harlot? Or an
easier? I do not suppose that it is less interesting to be on the
streets than to be in the Ministry of Food; neither occupation can be
objectionable as subject of a novel. It would be untrue to say that the
subject of a novel is a thing of complete indifference, and that the
treatment is everything; for a writer would not do wisely to forfeit
the advantage which a subject might offer him. But neither would he
do wisely in exploiting a subject only to excite the curiosity or
astonish the simplicity of his reader. Merely adventitious at best
is the gain. It is to reduce subject and treatment to their lowest
terms, and reject the implicit conditions which confront every writer
who would explore the imaginative world where there can be no laws
save honour, loyalty, and delicacy. The scientific writer is secured
against deceiving himself or his readers for long; his assumptions can
be verified, his deductions precisely analysed, his whole professions
rationally weighed. The imaginative and the quasi-imaginative writer
have no such security, nor their readers such protection. Traditional
values may be inapplicable; it is hard to discriminate novelty from
originality. A book that shocks may be as profoundly conceived as _Jude
the Obscure_, as cheaply fashioned as _Sylvia Scarlett_. Incident
may be prodigal equally in Dostoieffsky and Mr. Compton Mackenzie,
but significance of incident may vary infinitely. Mr. Mackenzie's
incidents have no significance; they remain incidents. His thoughts are
insignificant except in so far as they indicate a modern intellectual
disvertebration. His view of character is insignificant except in so
far as it betrays an adolescent apprehension. Who is Sylvia? you ask,
and your author is silent. What is she? and the answer is dispersed
among eight hundred garrulous pages.
Yet, it must be repeated, Mr. Mackenzie has conspicuous gifts, and, as
the letters with which _Sinister Street_ opens and closes indicate,
he is aware of them, and has not undertaken these enormous fictions
without a sense of his task. But he has accepted the easier way. He
can invest his scene with an illusion of activity, if not of reality,
but he is unable to picture reality, for he does not distinguish;
neither does he create a reality, a world for himself, amenable to its
own laws, establishing its own consistency. That would be a wonderful
but a hard thing. Amid the booths of his Vanity Fair he moves, not
soberly and critically as Christian and Faithful moved, but as one
swiftly enchanted by externals. He approaches the field of imaginative
art, and I cannot say that his powers and pretensions are such as
must discourage entry; but for imagination he learns to substitute
invention, chooses the superficial, and does not even trouble to secure
the consistency of his characters; Michael Fane's mother, for instance,
being declined from an irregular great lady in Volume One to a parish
imbecile in Volume Two. He might have chosen otherwise. His alertness,
his preoccupation with externals, his fullness of incident, his soft
fluency of style might have been flogged into subordination; he need
not have been very serious to have taken his work seriously. But all
that he promises now is, if the tempting derangement of a line by a
modern poet be pardonable:
A torment of intolerable tales.
Mr. Mackenzie has divagated. The task of presenting reality is left to
the scientific mind, and the task of creating another reality is left
to the poetic mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
GENERAL NOTES
Mr. Septimus Rivington's recently published book, _The Publishing
Family of Rivington_ (Rivington, 1919; 10_s._ net), contains a certain
amount of interesting information about the eighteenth-century book
trade. Charles Rivington started publishing in 1711. His successor,
John, succeeded Jacob Tonson (great-nephew of the original Jacob Tonson
who published Dryden's works) as managing partner of the institution
known as the "Conger," the association of booksellers formed to share
the risks and the profits of publishing ventures. In this volume Mr.
Rivington has printed a number of Conger documents in his possession.
It is interesting to learn the trade value of well-known books of the
period. Thus, one-eighth of Archbishop Tillotson's works is bought by
Tonson in 1711 for £87 10_s._ In 1738 a third part of Watts's _Hymns_
is worth £70.
* * * * *
Mr. Rivington prints several extracts from old catalogues in his
possession, which show that a book sale in the eighteenth century was
a convivial affair. The catalogue of Thomas Osborne's stock-in-trade,
consisting of books, copyrights, and shares in publications, is issued
"to a select number of booksellers at the Queen's Head Tavern, in
Paternoster Row, on Thursday, the ninth day of February, 1743/4, at
Eleven of the Clock in the Forenoon. DINNER will be served on the table
exactly at One of the Clock, consisting of Turkies and Chines, Hams and
Chickens, Apple-pies, etc., and a Glass of very good Wine."
* * * * *
Another recent book by a member of one of our great publishing families
is Mr. John Murray's brief memoir of his father, John Murray the Third,
the inventor of what was in his day an entirely new literary form, the
_Guide Book_. Murray's first guide was issued in 1836. Three years
later Karl Baedeker published a _Handbüchlein_ of the same districts.
Baedeker, like Shakespeare, disdained to invent his own plots. Murray's
eighteen European guides were the _Plutarch_ and _Holinshed_ of the
German's stupendous creations.
Those who hope, by taking advantage of the present rate of exchange, to
secure German books at an eighth or tenth of their value will be sorry
to hear that German publishers are in league to put a stop to such
delightful bargains. They are insisting on being paid at the rate of
about fivepence to the mark; so that your books will cost you as much
as half their real price.
We were surprised, considering the blockade and the general shortage,
at the excellent "get-up" of such recent German publications as we have
seen. Among them were two illustrated volumes, one on Egyptian and the
other on Negro art, published during the war, and produced in the most
magnificent style. Almost more surprising were some exquisite little
volumes of Czech poetry published at Prague, in which print, paper, and
binding were all equally admirable.
A book for which one may search long in vain, but for which it is
worth while to take some trouble, is the _Memorie di Lorenzo da Ponte
da Ceneda_, three volumes, New York, 1829. Da Ponte is well known as
the librettist of a number of Mozart's operas, and should be better
known as the author of some of the most charming of eighteenth-century
memoirs. His memoirs and poetical works were republished at Florence in
1871, and a French translation of the memoirs only was executed by M.
C. D. de la Chavanne (Paris, Pagnerre, 1860). So far as we are aware,
no English translation of this work exists. If this is indeed the case,
it is high time that the defect was remedied. The _Memorie Inutili_ of
Da Ponte's earlier contemporary, Carlo Gozzi (three volumes, Venice,
1797), were translated by John Addington Symonds, and published in a
very sumptuous illustrated edition by Nimmo in 1890.
* * * * *
Another important book on the Italian eighteenth century, and one
which it is not easy to find a copy of in any edition, is the _Lettres
Historiques et Critiques sur l'Italie_ of the Président Charles de
Brosses (Paris, Ponthieu, An VII., and under the title _Le Président
de Brosses en Italie_, Paris, 1858). De Brosses' letters make the best
possible book to take on a voyage to Italy.
* * * * *
Londoners cannot have failed to notice in the past weeks the
presence of numerous posters--we have seen them in every part of the
city--bearing the legend: "The Bishops must open Joanna Southcott's
Box and save the country from ruin." We hope that this faint echo
of a vanished notoriety may arouse among book-lovers an interest in
Joanna's numerous literary works. The first of them, _The Strange
Effects of Faith_, was published at Exeter in 1792, and from that time
onwards she poured forth a stream of prophecies in prose and verse. In
one of the latest of them (the last part of _The Book of Wonder_, if
we remember rightly; but it is some years since we saw the book) is
a superb engraving of a cradle subscribed for by Joanna's disciples
against the birth of Shiloh. Shiloh, unhappily, was never born, and
Joanna Southcott died three months after the presentation of the
two-hundred-guinea cot. Enthusiastic bibliographers will find plenty of
interest in the study of Southcottian literature; first editions are
satisfactorily scarce. As for the box--well, why don't the Bishops open
it? Who knows? it might save us from ruin, more effectually perhaps
than all the politicians together.
* * * * *
An important collection of autograph letters and historical documents,
the property of the late Charles Fairfax Murray, is to be sold at
Messrs. Sotheby's on Thursday and Friday, February 5th and 6th. The
first 163 lots are autographs of famous artists, and include four
letters of Blake, Michelangelo's specification for the tomb of Julius
II., a letter of Benvenuto Cellini, a letter of Albrecht Dürer,
illustrated by charming little sketches, letters of Gainsborough,
Hogarth, Reynolds, and Constable, a letter of Titian written at the
age of eighty-five, and a series of notes by Leonardo on the flight of
birds.
Lots 164 to 280 are of historical, literary, and musical interest. One
of the most interesting items is the MS. of Baudelaire's _La Charogne_,
with a drawing of a woman by the poet. A beautifully written letter
from Lucretia Borgia to Cardinal D'Este is another remarkable piece.
Lots 281-286 are documents which will appeal to collectors of relics of
Mary Queen of Scots. The first is a document signed by Bothwell; four
are letters of John Lesley, Bishop of Ross; and the last a document
signed by William Davison, Queen Elizabeth's agent in Scotland.
ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
Messrs. Maggs's catalogue (No. 386) of autograph letters and MSS.
contains a number of items which will be of interest to musicians.
In a letter to Birchall, the English music publisher, dated October,
1831, Beethoven writes the following sentence: "I have duly received
the 5 £s, and thought previously you would not encrease the number of
englishmen neglecting their word and honor, as I had the misfortune of
meeting with two of this sort." He goes on to offer Birchall a Grand
Sonata for the Pianoforte for £40, and a Trio for piano, violin, and
cello for £50. The letter is priced at £21. There are also four letters
of Wagner, a note in the handwriting of Sir Arthur Sullivan (12_s._
6_d._), a signed autograph piece by Gounod (£3 10_s._), letters of
Berger, Spontini, Balfe, Hiller and Heller, Verdi, Thalberg, Paganini,
Brahms, and Liszt; there is an autograph musical MS. of Mendelssohn
dated 1844 (£10 10_s._), and another of a Scena composed by Haydn for
Signora Banti (£85).
* * * * *
Other pieces of the greatest interest are advertised in the same
catalogue. A beautifully written letter in the hand of Benvenuto
Cellini is priced £105. Another letter of slightly earlier date than
Cellini's is the almost illegible scrawl of Götz von Berlichingen, the
Knight of the Iron Hand (£32). The collection also includes several
very important letters of Byron: one to John Murray (October 29th,
1819), in which he speaks of his Memoirs, entrusted to Moore, and
afterwards solemnly burnt at Murray's house in Albemarle Street (£105):
one to Kinnaird (1822) on the morality of Don Juan.
* * * * *
Mr. Francis Edwards has also issued a catalogue of autograph letters
which contains many items of remarkable interest. _Hrothgar_, a
seventy-eight verse ballad (unpublished), by George Borrow, is a
curious by-product of Beowulf scholarship, which ought to be worth the
thirty pounds at which it is priced. Among the five autograph letters
of Thomas Carlyle we find one addressed to the Bishop of Chester
(August 23rd, 1840), in which Carlyle writes: "May I apply to you for
a charitable service on behalf of a certain Mr. Mazzini, an Italian
neighbour and friend of mine?" Two holograph manuscripts of John Evelyn
are offered for £15 and £25 respectively. Ten pounds is the price of a
letter from Sir William Hamilton (Naples, 1792) to Horace Walpole, in
which Hamilton remarks of his famous wife: "She is ... most grateful
to me for having saved her from the precipice into which she had good
sense enough to see she must, without me, have inevitably fallen, and
she sees that nothing but a constant good conduct can maintain the
respect that is now shown her by everybody. It has often been remarked
that a reformed rake makes a good husband, why not _vice versa_?"
Why not? The answer is to be found in a letter from Nelson to Lady
Hamilton (Yarmouth, 1801; £21). Other Nelson and Hamilton autographs,
the Morrison collection, are on sale at Messrs. Suckling's, of Garrick
Street.
* * * * *
Other interesting letters and manuscripts offered by Messrs. Edwards
are by Dr. Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Swinburne, Meredith, Landor,
Pepys, Lamb, Southey, Thackeray.
* * * * *
We are glad to notice that a manuscript by a young contemporary can
command as big a price as ten guineas. This is the sum asked by Messrs.
Davis and Orioli for the autograph MS. of Mr. Robert Nichols's _The
Faun's Holiday_, published in his volume of _Ardours and Endurances_.
To buy it would certainly be a speculation; but we believe there is a
good chance of the speculation turning out profitably.
* * * * *
Early Editions of Fielding: Messrs. Bowes and Bowes, of Cambridge, are
asking £25 for the first edition (two volumes in contemporary calf) of
_The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend,
Mr. Abraham Adams_. A copy of the second edition, published in the same
year as the first, is offered for 31_s._ 6_d._ by the Ex-Officers' Book
Union, 16 Rathgar Avenue, West Ealing.
* * * * *
Messrs. Pickering and Chatto are offering a copy of _Endymion_ (Taylor
and Hessey, 1818), in the original boards, for £78. Another interesting
Keats relic is the original autograph MS. of a portion of _Otho the
Great_, which is offered by Messrs. Maggs Bros. for £60. The MS.,
entirely in Keats's own writing, is a fragment of the first scene of
the play.
* * * * *
We note that a fine copy of Fulke Greville's _Poems_ (1633), of which
we recently had occasion to speak, is for sale at Messrs. Dobell's, the
price being six guineas.
* * * * *
Messrs. Maggs Bros.' new catalogue, _Bibliotheca Aeronautica_, price
5_s._, is a fascinating book. It contains the account of some fifteen
hundred volumes dealing with the problem of flight from the earliest
times to the present day. The first section contains books published
prior to the invention of the Montgolfier Balloon in 1783. A fine copy
of Francesco de Lana's _Prodromo Overo Saggio di Alcune Inventioni_
appears in this section (£16 16_s._). Paltock's famous flying novel,
_The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins_, London, 1751, is offered at
£15 15_s._, and the work which Restif de la Bretonne founded on it, _La
Découverte Australe par un Homme Volant, ou le Dédale Français_, at £18
18_s._ Fine engravings are reproduced from these books.
* * * * *
In the second section we find a number of Blanchard's narratives,
including the account of the first aerial crossing of the Channel; we
find Lunardi's _Account of the First Aerial Voyage in England_, London,
1784 (£7 10_s._); several books on the Montgolfier brothers, as well as
the works of the great Baron Munchausen, so famed for his aeronautical
exploits.
* * * * *
The third section of the catalogue deals with the evolution of aircraft
from 1851 to 1899. An interesting item is the first edition of Rémy
de Gourmont's _En Ballon_, Paris, 1883. A large number of works by
Tissandier, author of the _Bibliographie Aéronautique_, Paris, 1887,
naturally appear. We may here note the remarkable fact that by far the
greater number of the volumes on flight are in French. British interest
in the problem was not aroused till a good deal later, after the first
practical difficulties had been solved. A first edition of Jules
Verne's _Robur le Conquérant_, Paris, 1886, is included (15_s._). His
_Six Weeks in a Balloon_ also deserves a place.
* * * * *
In the fourth section we come to "Aeroplanes and Dirigibles in the
Twentieth Century." The period opens with the intrepid Santos-Dumont
and his flights and falls over Paris. His _My Airships_, London, 1904,
is priced at 10_s._ The handsomest aeronautical work published during
this period is perhaps _La Conquête de l'Air_, by Grand-Carteret and
Delteil, a finely illustrated folio, offered at £3 3_s._
* * * * *
A fifth section contains pictures of famous balloon ascents, portraits
of aeronauts, caricatures, and the like.
A. L. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
A PROTEST
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your dramatic critic writes of my play _Sacred and Profane
Love_, "A writer of Mr. Arnold Bennett's eminence and great sagacity
would be the last person to expect us to take this play seriously as
a contribution to dramatic literature." Only a certain ingenuousness
prevents this remark from being outrageous. Of course I expect the play
to be taken seriously. Your writer is perfectly entitled to condemn
my play; but he is not entitled on the strength of his opinion to
attribute to me an attitude which is not mine, and which, if it were
mine, would render me odious in the sight of artists. Why in the name
of my alleged great sagacity should I publish a play which I did not
expect to be taken seriously? Did your critic perhaps imagine that
he was being charitable? One does not expect from the critics of
THE LONDON MERCURY the ineptitudes which characterise the dramatic
criticism of the stunt daily Press. I mention the matter because I
think that an important point of principle is involved, and because
this is not the first time that one of your critics has exceeded his
province. In your first number there were references to the work of
Mr. Frank Swinnerton which amounted to a quite gratuitous imputation
against the artistic integrity of the author.--Yours, etc.,
ARNOLD BENNETT.
12B George Street, Hanover Square, W.1, December 19th, 1919.
[We gladly publish Mr. Bennett's disclaimer, but we think he
exaggerates the gravity of the supposition he repels. We need scarcely
say that our critic had no intention of imputing to Mr. Bennett
anything which we supposed would render Mr. Bennett odious. Taking
the view that he did of Mr. Bennett's play, our critic thought he was
paying a compliment to Mr. Bennett's intelligence. If it is odious
to write, occasionally, things which we do not regard as serious
contributions to literature, we can only say that a great many artists
have made themselves odious. As for Mr. Swinnerton, our reviewer,
detecting a falling off, suggested that it might be due to the novelist
having got into the habit of turning novels out regularly instead of
waiting for the impulse. If a serious reviewer is to be precluded, when
he thinks himself justified, from making suggestions like that, he
might just as well be muzzled.--EDITOR.]
* * * * *
"THE DUCHESS OF MALFI"
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Mr. Turner says he can hardly believe that the section of the
audience which behaved so abominably at the "Phœnix" performance
consisted largely of the theatrical profession. I think he is right. I
happen to know that an effort was made by two actors in the audience to
get a request for order made from the stage during the first interval.
Nor were these people entirely of the "uneducated" sort--in the
conventional sense. One of the worst offenders was a terrible woman
sitting next to me, who occasionally interrupted her nervous giggle to
remark, "A wonderfully characteristic touch!" or something of the kind.
I believe she must have been a don.
May I suggest that at the next performance by the "Phœnix," if similar
trouble occurs, the matter should be brought to the notice of the
management during the first interval, and that a request should be
made from the stage by the latter? Personal requests to individual
offenders were made by more than one member of the audience at the
performance in question, but without result. It is worth while making a
concerted effort to prevent the authentic joy of the theatre, when at
last it is offered to us, from being marred by the behaviour of vulgar
sentimentalists and neurotics.--Yours, etc.,
VICTOR GOLLANCZ.
Authors' Club, 2 Whitehall Court, S.W.1, January 9th.
* * * * *
TAM HTAB
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--In vain Mr. L. Pearsall Smith held out a juicy carrot. Lest Mr.
J. J. Biggs also be disappointed in his hope of a solemn ass, I beg to
offer myself in that capacity, and with well-feigned eagerness point
out that this page, if held to a mirror, will show that TAM HTAB is no
more the reverse of BATH MAT than MOOR EEFFOC of COFFEE ROOM.
As you say, these public inscriptions are responsible for much
distress.--Yours, etc.,
A. P.
January 6th.
* * * * *
THE LAMBKIN MSS. AND MR. BELLOC
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your valued bibliographer classifies the _Remains_ of the
Rev. J. A. Lambkin among the verse attributable to their editor.
I feel very strongly the impiety of this error. For, although the
influence of that eminent divine is traceable in the Dedicatory Ode
prefixed by Mr. Belloc to the _Remains_ of his great mentor, it is
nevertheless in the realm of prose that we must look for Lambkin's main
contributions to knowledge and literature. True it is that the late
Fellow of Burford's justly famed Newdigate Poem is included in the
definitive edition--indeed, Mr. Belloc must have felt the impossibility
of rejecting its claims to such inclusion--yet, if I may quote a
delightful "Lambkinism" which deserves a wider fame, "One swallow
does not make a summer"; and, as one who owes a goodly part of the
culture discernible (as I trust) in this letter to the author of the
_Article on the North-West Corner of the Mosaic Pavement at Bignor_,
I feel I should be untrue to the memory of my late dear tutor if I
allowed such glories to be catalogued as if they formed part of the
verses of a mere poet. No, sir, Lambkin is "this England's" Seneca,
and all who treasure a great cultural inheritance should rally to do
justice to its _Remains_. The late Dr. Pusey, whose character held
so much in common with that of his younger disciple, never tired of
narrating that wonderful instance of Lambkin's profound yet finely
epigrammatic Latinity which is connected with the death of the late
Pastor of Bremen, I think. I was present on that occasion, and can
testify that, far from any library, Mr. Lambkin, after a short silence
lasting perhaps for two minutes, whispered the words _Requiescat in
Pace_--surely the most terse and crisp of potential epitaphs and one
almost certain to secure the immediate popularity which it obtained,
falling as it did upon the receptive soil afforded by the Oxford
Movement from which event in our history the expression dates. As the
fact is not generally known, perhaps, sir, you will allow me to state
here that the present Sir Ezra Crumpton-Padge of Whortlebury Towers,
near Brixton, is now the sole surviving link between the author of
_Physiology of the Elephant_ and our own times, the claims to this
honour made by M. Lamkinski, President-elect of the Kacheefucan Soviet,
having been expressly refuted by that gentleman's father-in-law, M.
Georgeovitch Bernardenko Shavkin, the well-known big-game hunter and
editor of _Agapé_.
Curiously enough Mr. Belloc's fine monograph on the "_Padge_" _System
of Rhetoric_ makes no allusion to this interesting example of what
we may surely describe, in the truest sense of Lambkin's happiest
aphorism, as a "survival of the fittest." Your bibliographer will
doubtless wish to note these _errata_. Meanwhile I trust the importance
of the subject may condone in some measure for the length of this
letter.--Yours, etc.,
R. N. GREEN-ARMYTAGE [Curator L.L.].
Lambkin Library, Whortleboro', near Weston-S.-Mare, January 10th.
* * * * *
ONED
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your reviewer, in his notice of Mr. Dormer Creston's _Clown of
Paradise_, claims to record a neologism which he commends to the notice
of the editors of the _Oxford Dictionary_. Unfortunately they have
anticipated him. If he will turn to the _Oxford Dictionary_, vol. vii,
page 123, the top of the second column, he will find eleven examples,
the last from a book published as recently as 1839, of this astounding
grammatical invention.--Yours, etc.,
GERARD HOPKINS.
Oxford University Press, Amen Corner, E.C.4, December 17th, 1919.
* * * * *
CANDIDE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--It is interesting to learn from Mr. Lewis H. Grundy's letter in
your issue of December that an English translation of _Candide_, with
the name of M. de Voltaire as the author of the original, was published
in London as early as 1759.
According to the preface of the edition of the Académie des
Bibliophiles of 1869 _Candide_ first appeared at the beginning of
March, 1759, the _Journal Encyclopédique_ of the 15th of that month
containing an article on the book, which is headed by the following:
"We do not believe that this tale has a German original. It is
attributed to M. de V."
This note produced a reply from Voltaire signed "Démad."
Though the reply is dated April 15th, 1759, it did not appear in the
_Journal Encyclopédique_ till July 15th, 1762, with the following note:
"This letter has been mislaid for a long time, and when it reached
us we made fruitless efforts to discover the existence of M. Démad,
Captain in the Brunswick Regiment."
A facsimile of the title-page of the first edition of 1759 is also
given in the edition of 1869, and is the same as that quoted in the
Bibliographical Notes of your issue of November.
_L'Ingénu_ was also published anonymously in 1767. The title-page runs
as follows:
"_L Ingénu, Histoire véritable, tirée des manuscrits du Père Quesnel, à
Utrecht, 1767._"--Yours, etc.,
ERNEST F. GYE.
61 Tregunter Road, S.W.10, December 19th, 1919.
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS
In the recent Housing Supplement issued by the _Times_ the Society for
the Protection of Ancient Buildings has expressed its views on the
housing problem in connection with old cottages. There are in this
article two main points worth noting. The first is that until a subsidy
is made, proportionate to the value of the work of repair, old cottages
will not be readapted, but allowed to fall into ruins. The failure to
award this subsidy tends to shift the responsibility, in regard to the
upkeep of such property, from the owner to the State, for whilst the
State encourages and partially finances new building, old cottages,
though in theory valued by the Ministry of Health, in practice will
hardly receive the attention they deserve. The second point is this:
that the Society shows clearly it is no lover of mere decay, or old and
mouldering walls, features we are apt to associate with the sketches of
an early nineteenth century schoolgirl.
It lends no countenance to the habitual carping at all things new. It
is as eager that the architecture of to-day should be as clean and
decent--the natural expression of the life of to-day--as it is anxious
to preserve, and where possible render habitable, those buildings of
the past embodying the spirit of _their_ time.
But since "words will build no walls," if our fine old cottages are
to be preserved, it will need something more than mere discussions or
eulogiums on their value as relics of the nation's past. By all who are
interested more practical help must be given, and it is for this that
the Society now makes a special appeal.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
The monthly meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society was held on
December 18th, Sir Henry Howorth, Vice-President, presiding. Mr.
G. F. Hill read a paper entitled "The Mint of Crosraguel Abbey,"
written by Dr. George Macdonald, who was unable to be present. Recent
excavations at Crosraguel ("Crossregal") Abbey, a Cluniac foundation
in Ayrshire, founded in 1244, and endowed by the Scottish kings with
extraordinary privileges, resulted in the discovery in a latrine-drain
of a large number of small objects, some of a miscellaneous nature,
others evidently the remains of a local mint: large quantities of
small tags of brass, needles, portions of thin sheets, etc., as well
as objects and pieces of copper and lead, together with 197 coins of
billon, bronze, or copper and brass. The coins are (_a_) contemporary
imitations of pennies of James III. and IV., and farthings of James
IV., including twenty which are a combination of the obverse of one
type with the reverse of another; (_b_) fifty-one pennies bearing
a _cross_ on one side and a _regal_ orb on the other, and the
inscriptions _Jacobus Dei Gra. Rex_ and _Crux pellit omne crimen_
variously abbreviated; (_c_) eighty-eight copper or brass farthings, of
types not hitherto known, inscribed _Moneta Pauperum_. The imitations
of class (_a_) are the "black money" known from records. The pennies of
class (_b_) are almost exclusively found in Scotland, though they have
hitherto been attributed to one or other James of Aragon. They were
clearly minted at Crosraguel, the types having a punning significance.
They and the farthings are the only known instance in Great Britain of
an Abbey coinage, such as is very frequent on the Continent, _e.g._,
at Cluny. The inscription _Moneta pauperum_ shows that the coins were
intended to provide small change for the especial benefit of the poor
like the seventeenth century tokens. The mint was probably suppressed
by James IV.
At the meeting of the Society on January 20th, Rev. E. A. Sydenham gave
the results of his study of the "Coinage of Augustus."
THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
The passage through Parliament of a new Public Libraries Bill was
effected with the minimum of friction--one might almost say "of
interest." But public libraries, accustomed as they have been through
fifty years to Legislative stonings, can hardly yet realise that they
have in their hands at length the very bread of life. For some, that
statement "renews the unspeakable anguish" of dissolution--of the day
when they closed their doors to the public from sheer inability to
exist. Others may witness to a miracle of healing, rescue when _in
extremis_. Others, again, survey the newly-granted means wherewith to
end bravely contracted debts. But the majority become slowly conscious
that the burden has fallen from their backs, and that they may go
forward with a lighter step to a far brighter future. The removal of
the rate limit will effect a revolution in public library practice; but
its results cannot become at once apparent. It rests with individual
library authorities to make a rate each year--to afford their charges
the opportunity, as they now possess the power, of proving to all
sections of the public that they are necessities and not luxuries. That
some of these Councils will fail is certain--the public library idea
is not yet sufficiently commended to minds with the parish pump ideal;
and only external pressure and the education of the general public in
library values will bring certain painfully parochial legislators into
line with their opportunities. In London the situation is diverting;
one Metropolitan Borough has awakened rather late to its peril, and
like a surprised bather is frantically making for shore; with a
desperate consciousness that close behind is the shark-like shadow of
the London County Council. Other two Boroughs must be in doubt as to
whether their very exiguous libraries, possessed of neither service
nor system--neither use nor ornament--will place them out of reach of
attack. And, if so, for how long? Other legislation is foreshadowed,
and the Library Association (deeply grateful that the long years in the
wilderness have ended) intends to bring libraries to all the people as
a necessary preliminary to bringing all the people to the libraries.
A correspondent writes of a report in our first issue: "On page 109
you state that our forty-second annual meeting marked 'a definite
cleavage between librarians and the Board of Education' with respect
to future library policy. Here you innocently place the Association
in a false position. The third interim report, the subject of the
discussion to which you refer, was that of a committee appointed by
the Ministry of Reconstruction, and was addressed to that Ministry.
The Minister of Education considerately invited the opinion of the
Library Association on that report. The Library Association, whilst
approving certain recommendations contained therein, differed from
others, and submitted a reasoned statement of its views to the Board
of Education, as a reply to Mr. Fisher's request. It is therefore
obvious that there is no 'cleavage' between librarians and the Board of
Education; and an incorrect statement to that effect would give a wrong
and damaging impression of the facts. Moreover, the Library Association
is by no means exclusively composed of librarians. A very considerable
proportion of those present at the Southport meeting were members
of library authorities, many of whom were also members of education
committees."
THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
Of the three fragments of Christian art described by Mr. Dalton, one is
a spandril of morse ivory 3 inches long, carved in high relief with two
soaring angels back to back. This fascinating example of the Winchester
School of Art dates from about 1000 A.D., and having been found in a
garden at St. Cross, is now appropriately housed in the museum a mile
away. The other two are products of the Near East: the first a detail
from a mosaic pavement in a small church of the sixth century at Umm
Jerar, south of Gaza, representing a phœnix on a fire-altar, a rare
instance of this motive in early Christian times. The other is a
marble slab in the British Museum, apparently part of a screen, from a
church at Miafarkin, north-east of Diarbekr, Kurdistan. Dating probably
from the twelfth century, it is carved in low relief on both faces,
and a central medallion bears a double-headed eagle, which had already
started on its eventful career. A gift from Sir John Ramsden has
enriched the national collection with a fine example of the penannular
brooch, for a long time in the Breadalbane family. It was probably
found in Scotland, and falls into its place in the series of Irish
or Scotic works of art, the date being towards the end of the eighth
century. The material is silver-gilt, with gold filigree and glass
settings; and even the back is ornamented with medallions of trumpet
spirals.
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
The occasion of the annual meeting of the Society, which was held on
January 19th, was saddened by the recent death of Sir William Osler,
the President of the Society, who had held that office for seven years.
During that time he seldom failed to preside at the Society's meetings,
and his courtesy and geniality, no less than his keen interest in
bibliography, and especially in the Society's own sphere of work, won
him the warm regard of the members. For some years past he had been
engaged in the preparation of a monograph on medical works printed
in the fifteenth century, which, it is hoped, will be issued by the
Bibliographical Society. Sir William's successor in the Presidency is
Mr. Falconer Madan, formerly Bodley's Librarian. At the January meeting
he read an abridgment of a paper which he had written describing the
work of the Daniel Press, which since the death of its founder and
owner has passed into the possession of the Bodleian Library.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
FLORA. By PAMELA BIANCO. Verses by WALTER DE LA MARE. Heinemann. 25_s._
net.
Miss Bianco is twelve years old--at least she was when these drawings
were made. There is a sameness about them. Almost all of them contain
a rather languishing female face, with something of a primitive
Madonna about it and something (if we dare suggest it) of the
sophisticated 'nineties. In the coloured and in the more elaborate
of the black-and-white pictures the faces are framed in setting of
conventional but charming flowers, with, as Tennyson would put it, here
and there a rabbit. The drawings are unreservedly amazing for a girl of
Miss Bianco's age; if her future progress were to be on a par with her
present precocity she would become one of the greatest artists in the
world. We cannot assume that; nor, on the other hand, need we rummage
in our notebooks for ancient generalisations about the fate of ancient
prodigies. Miss Bianco is remarkable now; and she will be what she will
be. If we _were_ predicting we should say that she would become a very
skilful and charming decorator, a more complicated Kate Greenaway.
She has at least performed one great feat already: she has provided
little platforms from which Mr. de la Mare's Pegasus has sprung into
the æther. We can imagine nothing which could more finally illustrate
how small suggestions may germinate in a poet's mind than the verses
which Mr. de la Mare has written to these so slight, so purely
decorative pictures. His imagination has been coloured and excited by
every smallest hint of a mood; and where, to the passing observant eye,
Miss Bianco has left nothing more to be said to the little she has
stated herself, anything, a droop of the eyelids, an indicated detail
in the background, serves to send Mr. de la Mare off dreaming into
remote fairylands. Behind one of Miss Bianco's damsels, slit-eyed and
straight-fingered, is a path leading to a small crude building. The
wind bloweth where it listeth. On this small thing, missing girl and
child and leafy tree, Mr. de la Mare's eye has rested. The outlines
have filled in, atmosphere has trembled in, sounds and lights; and the
outcome is something of which Miss Bianco never dreamed:
Is it an abbey that I see
Hard by that tapering poplar-tree,
Whereat that path hath end?
'Tis wondrous still
That empty hill,
Yet calls me, friend.
Smooth is the turf, serene the sky,
The timeworn, crumbling roof awry;
Within that turret slim
Hangs there a bell
Whose faint notes knell?
Do colours dim
Burn in that angled window there,
Grass-green, and crimson, azure rare?
Would from that narrow door
One, looking in,
See, gemlike, shine
On walls and floor
Candles whose aureole flames must seem--
So still they burn--to burn in dream?
And do they cry, and say,
"See, stranger; come!
Here is thy home;
No longer stray"?
The poem _Suppose_, which appeared in our first number, starts on its
fantastic flight from a face with eyes of wonderment in it; and from
another head--a head crowned, a neck girdled--comes _The Comb_, perfect
in itself without any picture:
My mother sate me at her glass;
This necklet of bright flowers she wove;
Crisscross her gentle hands did pass,
And wound in my hair her love.
Deep in the mirror our glances met,
And grieved, lest from her care I roam,
She kissed me through her tears, and set
On high this spangling comb.
_Mirage_ is lovelier still, and far more slender in its origins; how
Mr. de la Mare's imagination can fill out an outline that really is
given is shown in his delicious poem of _Master Rabbit_. There is a
charming sketch: a rabbit, and nothing more. But to the poet a whole
scene comes up, country scents, green grasshoppers talking:
And wings like amber,
Dispread in light,
As from bush to bush
Linnet took flight.
He sees the rabbit looking out from the shadow-rimmed mouth of his
shady cavern at sunset. Rabbit sees him:
Snowy flit of a scut,
He was into his hole;
And--stamp, stamp, stamp,
Through dim labyrinths clear--
The whole world darkened,
A human near.
This is an extra number to _Peacock Pie_, and the poems as a whole
make us once more impatient for a collected volume of Mr. de la Mare's
work which will show the bulk and the quality of the performance of
one of the most exquisite artists in words who has ever contributed to
the unequalled treasury of our English lyrics. Nevertheless it must be
admitted that his average level is higher when he is not writing verses
to a series of pictures.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH VERSE, 1616-1660. Edited by H. J.
MASSINGHAM. Macmillan. (Golden Treasury Series.) 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Massingham collects here four hundred poems written, with few
exceptions, in the forty-four years that followed the death of
Shakespeare. It may not be correct to describe this period as the
most neglected period of English literature. It is true that many of
the authors and most of the poems to be found in Mr. Massingham's
collection have been ignored by anthologists, and are utterly unknown
to the reading public; but we suspect that the periods of Anne and the
Georges have been even less thoroughly searched, though they would not
yield results so rich as those which have come from the claim that
Mr. Massingham has staked out. There were great poets in that period;
it left us many poems by Milton, Herrick, Herbert Vaughan, Cowley,
Crashaw, Lovelace Suckling, and Carew which are familiar to every
reader at all interested in English poetry. Had the obvious best been
always selected Mr. Massingham would have found himself crowded out
with stock pieces before he began. He has therefore--since he desired
mainly to give publicity to the unfamiliar--left Milton and Herrick
out altogether and excluded some of the best-known poems of their
nearest rivals. This has given him room for everybody, or at least for
a hundred and more poets, for Nabbes and Festel, as well as for the
poets above mentioned, for Donne, and for such other respectable poets
as Brome, Bunyan, Cartwright, Corbet, Davenant, Denham, the Fletchers,
Habington, Bishop King, Massinger, Jasper Mayne, Quarles, Randolph,
Shirley, T. Stanley, Traherne, Waller, Wither, and Wotton. It is an
imposing array; contemplating it one realises that if that age could
not vie with the Elizabethan in the number of great works produced, it
actually beat it in the number of men it produced who wrote a few, or
many, good short poems. And it had, as Mr. Massingham rightly says, a
quality of its own. It may be difficult to deduce "tendencies" from
this mass of metaphysical, amorous, graceful, jocular, scholarly,
tripping verse. But at least the age was no mere afterglow. There are
very few poems in this fine selection which could have been mistaken
for products of any other generation, and there are few which are mere
degenerate imitations of the songs of an earlier race. There was, under
Charles and Cromwell, a distinct civilisation with a colour and a mind
of its own; less passionate (save, in some quarters, in the matter of
religion) than the last; less certain in its music; more self-conscious
in all its ways: but genuine and, temperately, ardent, cheerful,
chivalrous, genial, often tender. From the one pole of
What a dainty life the milkmaid leads!
to the other of
I saw Eternity the other night,
it covered, in its manner, the whole range of poetic experience and
expression, and it did many things perfectly. Herrick and Vaughan were
its typical products, and neither, in his sphere, has an equal.
We find no material fault in this most admirable and enjoyable
anthology. We may, however, make in passing a few unimportant
comments. Mr. Massingham, as we have said, has covered the ground more
exhaustively than we had any right to expect; and for most of his
important omissions he accounts satisfactorily on the ground that he
does not want to reprint poems which everyone already knows. There are,
however, a few things which he might have included. The selection would
have been more thoroughly represented had it contained more of the
controversial element. "I suppose," he says, "that my political temper
would urge me to declare for the Parliament in the Civil War. But a
bruising disunion of feeling would arise were such a choice forced upon
me. Before the Civil War the middle and upper classes in England were
highly educated and passionately drawn to music. Turning over these
old Song-books, printed fifty years after their Elizabethan prototypes,
one feels a horror at the men who violated the temples of song and
learning. For the Puritans killed the musical soul of England and paved
the way for our doom--the triumph of the business sense." That is as
may be: at all events he who regarded Royalism as the devil would have
to admit that, not forgetting Milton and Marvell, the devil had most
of the best tunes; and there is a lilt about many of the Rump songs
that equals anything in English polemic verse. Cleveland, in fancy,
might have been more freely drawn on. Politics apart, there are things
missing. A selection from Joseph Beaumont is given, but where is that
beautiful poem about the "sweet fury" of Mary Magdalen? One poem of
the mysterious Anne Collins (it is only, we think, one edition of her
works of which a unique copy is supposed to exist; there was a second)
is given, but not the best. Orinda is done scant justice; and another
woman (not a genius, but as good as some of Mr. Massingham's men) who
deserved quotation, however brief, is Anne Bradstreet, the Tenth Muse,
the Female Homer and what not, of New England. The admission of Philip
Ayres, who was twenty years out of date, is not really justifiable.
Granted that he was old-fashioned in style and spirit, the same might
be said of some of his Restoration contemporaries. Dr. Walter Pope's
celebrated poem, for instance, would not have been out of place in a
volume which contains Thomas Jordan and might have contained Martin
Parker. A few of Mr. Massingham's copious and highly entertaining notes
invite controversy. It is cruel of him, so tender as a rule towards
small poets who have patches of goodness, to describe Flatman as a
poetaster; it is rash of him to declare that a good Alexandrine _must_
have a noticeable cæsura; and it must surely have been a moment of
aberration which led him to detect "a superb freedom of imagination" in
the ordinary tropes of Lord Herbert's _Elegy_:
Doth the sun now his light with yours renew?
Have waves the curling of your hair?
Did you restore unto the sky and air
The red and white and blue?
Have you vouchsafed to flowers since your death
That sweetest breath?
These things, however, matter little.
We note, by the way, that Mr. Massingham, like his predecessors, is
unable to contribute anything new to the discussion concerning one of
the noblest of the poems that come under his survey. We refer to "Yet
if His Majesty our Sovereign Lord," which was discovered by Mr. Bullen
in Christ Church Library. Mr. Bullen conjectured Vaughan as author. Mr.
Massingham, with all deference, says that Mr. Bullen is wrong. We agree
with Mr. Massingham; but we should greatly like this problem to be
cleared up.
A MISCELLANY OF POETRY--1919. Edited by WILLIAM KEAN SEYMOUR. Palmer &
Hayward. 5_s._ net.
This miscellany "is issued to the public as a truly catholic anthology
of contemporary poetry." We do not quite gather what the author means
by this. He has restricted the range of his selection by printing only
poems which have not yet appeared "in book form," and he certainly
cannot suppose that he has even half of the best living poets in his
volume, or even half of the best poets of the younger generation. Mr.
Chesterton appears, but not Mr. Belloc; Mr. Binyon, but not A. E. or
Mr. Yeats; Mr. Davies, but not Mr. de la Mare; Mr. Sturge Moore, but
not Mr. Freeman; Mr. Nichols, but not Mr. Sassoon, Mr. Graves, or Mr.
Turner. Possibly the suggestion is that Mr. Seymour has consulted other
people's tastes as well as his own; this might explain the presence
here of poets who are not known to have written anything of any merit
and who certainly contribute nothing of merit to this collection.
However, the good things make the book worth having. Chief among
them is a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures
as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his _Micah_ so peculiarly
rich a poem. Mr. Chesterton's _Ballad of St. Barbara_ has glorious
lines, and the spirit is the spirit of _The White Horse_, but ballads
should not be obscure, and this one is. There is no obscurity in Mr.
Chesterton's _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_:
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home,
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a fallen star,
Alas, alas, for England
They have their graves afar!
And they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas, for England,
They have no graves as yet!
The series of lyrics by Mr. Davies are, as usual, delicious, and there
is less of rotundity than usual, and more exactness and feeling, in
Mr. John Drinkwater's _Malediction_. Mr. Gibson contributes a series
of descriptive war-sonnets, adjectival but interesting; and Mr.
Gerald Gould eight sonnets very skilfully written and full of good,
if reminiscent, phrases, which are unfortunately not as intelligible
as they look. The editor's _Fruitage_ is too much like the more
pontifical octosyllabics of Mr. Drinkwater, but his _Siesta_ gives a
hot coloured picture vividly. Of the other contributors Mr. Binyon,
Miss Macaulay, Mr. Theodore Maynard, and Mr. Charles Williams (whose
_Poems of Conformity_, difficult but sinewy, should be better known
than they are) are interestingly represented. To these we may add Mr.
F. V. Branford, who has almost made a good poem out of mathematics. It
concludes:
For here and hence I sail
Alone beyond the pale,
Where square and circle coincide,
And the parallels collide,
And perfect pyramids flower.
Obscurity is more excusable in this poem than in his others. The
discriminating reader who has read this book once will probably mark
the poems he wants to read a second time; there are many here by
authors who need not be specified which have given us an uncompensated
headache. If the editor means to follow the volume up he would be well
advised next time in being less "catholic" in this regard; an anthology
of contemporary verse has to be almost uniformly good to serve any
useful purpose.
NOVELS
INTERIM. By DOROTHY RICHARDSON. Duckworth. 7_s._ net.
VALMOUTH. By RONALD FIRBANK. Grant Richards. 7_s._ net.
FULL CIRCLE. By MARY AGNES HAMILTON. Collins. 7_s._ net.
INVISIBLE TIDES. By BEATRICE SEYMOUR. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.
Miss Richardson's novel is her fifth volume in the same manner and
about the same person; and a sixth volume is announced. She has
apparently in effect only one novel to write and only one manner in
which to do it. It is a manner distinctively her own, and yet not an
isolated phenomenon. This kind of thinking and this kind of writing
seem to be abroad at the moment. There are deep and genuine analogies
between Miss Richardson's style and the style of Mr. James Joyce;
there is a much more superficial resemblance between her work and the
_fumisterie_ of Mr. Ronald Firbank. She has influenced (but in this
case it was a conscious discipleship) the method of Miss May Sinclair.
It would not be difficult to find in her traits which she has in common
with the more sincere exponents of Futurist poetry and with the theory
an attempt to embody which was made in Futurist paintings. She is,
in fact, an individual member of a school which is mostly posing and
pretence, and which tends to discredit its very few genuine exponents.
But that Miss Richardson is genuine, whether we like reading her books
or not, is a question beyond dispute. She writes as she does because
she must, because it is the way in which it has been given her to write.
It is her object to translate the memories of sensations into words
directly and with as little change as possible. This is a specimen:
Miriam pulled up in front of a large oil-painting over the sofa; its
distances--where a meadow stream that was wide in the foreground
with a stone bridge and a mill-wheel and a cottage half hidden under
huge trees, grew narrow and wound on and on through tiny distant
fields until the scene melted in a soft-toned mist--held all her
early visits to the Brooms in the Banbury Park days before they had
discovered that she did not like sitting with her back to the fire.
She listened eagerly to the busy sounds of the Brooms. Someone had
bolted the hall-door and was scrooping a chair over the tiles to get
up and put out the gas. Dust-sheets were still being flountered in
the room behind her. Grace's arm came round her waist.--I'm so glad
you've come, sweet, she said in her low, steady, shaken tones.--So
am I, said Miriam.--Isn't that a jolly picture.--Yes. It's an
awfully good one, you know. It was one of papa's.--What's O'Hara
doing in the kitchen?--Taking Grace by the waist, Miriam drew into
the passage, trying to prance with her down the hall. The little
kitchen was obscured by an enormous clothes-horse draped with airing
linen. She's left a miserable fire, said Mrs. Philps from behind the
clothes-horse. She hasn't done the saucepans, aunt, scolded Florrie
from the scullery.--Never mind, we can't have er down now. It's
nearly midnight.
This is the reconstitution of a moment and, for what it is worth,
Miss Richardson makes the moment live again. But minds which observe
and record in her close, literal fashion are not normal minds; and
therefore her impressions of life, coloured as they are by her acute
introspectiveness, cannot correspond to life as normal persons see
it. The normal person simplifies life, not merely when, if ever, he
describes it, but also when he perceives it. The world is not to him
the fragmentary incoherent whirl of feelings and events which it is
to Miss Richardson. Nevertheless, it is obvious that this _is_ how
the world appears to her; and here, again for what it is worth, is
her description of it. With such a book, a document rather than a
novel, the ordinary attitude of the critic of fiction is naturally
unsuitable and inapplicable. He cannot assume the conventional position
of judgment from a definite and unalterable standard. He can, in fact,
do no more than explain what is the book before him and leave it at
that. We attempt to do no more. We do, however, think it worth while
to establish the fact, if possible, that Miss Richardson's "novels"
are the real expression of a real personality. On some readers they
may have absolutely no effect; on some a small or a transitory effect;
some, we know, appreciate them enormously. But they are genuine; they
are not "stunts." When the series is finished, it may, of course,
appear that Miss Richardson has given to the life of Miriam Henderson
an artistic shape and moulding, instead of making it merely an endless
film. But this does not at present suggest itself. What we have now is
the record of a particular mind in various states, a mind which is not
normal, but is not possessed to an abnormal degree of either beauty or
power. That, we confess, is all we are able to say.
That Miss Richardson's method is native and genuine may be seen by a
comparison of it with that of Mr. Ronald Firbank, whose _Valmouth_ is
worth noticing here in order to make the point. Here, again, a random
specimen is necessary:
Depositing his scrip in the outhouse, the cowherd glanced around:
"Where's Thetis got?" he asked, addressing the small boy, who,
brandishing a broken rhubarb leaf, was flitting functionarily about.
"Thetis?... She's," he hopped, "standing in the river."
"What's she standing there for?"
"Nothing."
"... Must I thrash you, Billy Jolly?"
"Oh, don't, David."
"Then answer me quick."
"When the tide flows up from Spadder Bay she pretends it binds her
to the sea. Where her sweetheart is. Her b-betrothed.... Away in the
glorious tropics."
"'Od! You're a simple one, you are!"
"Me?"
"Aye, you."
"Don't be horrid, David, to me ... you mustn't be. It's bad enough
quite without."
"'Od."
Throughout this curious book we have again an attempt at an incoherent
and bewildering style, a picture of a world which disintegrates into
a thousand pieces as we regard it. It is indeed in some sort that
deliquescence of language and thought of which a certain school
of French writers once dreamed. But it expresses not a native, if
unusual, way of seeing, so much as a perverse, deliberately assumed
attitude. Mr. Firbank has clearly talents and ingenuity enough to
prevent any nonsense he may write being thrown away as pure nonsense.
But it is also clear that his aim is to write nonsense rather than
sense and perhaps to put forward under a film of absurdity a certain
natural perversity which would not be welcomed if it were more
lucidly expressed. He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly
etherealised frivolity; but this may be inextricably connected with his
demerits, in which case it would be useless to ask him to change. If
he does not, he will remain a curiosity, mildly amusing a few readers,
deluding a few into a belief that they have found a super-genius and
boring or displeasing the great majority.
These two books taken together suggest an aspect from which it may be
profitable to consider Mrs. Hamilton's _Full Circle_. Neither of them
tells a story, in the sense in which the miraculous inventors of the
_Arabian Nights_ told stories. Miss Richardson has no "astonishing
history" to recount. She rather describes than tells: though her
heroine moves chronologically, one has yet the sense rather of movement
in space than of movement in time. Mr. Firbank tells some story or
other, but it is not possible to discern it under his incessant
saltimbanqueries. Mrs. Hamilton tells a definite tale. Certain persons
enter into relations, find themselves in a situation, resolve it:
there is an introduction, a complication, and a dénouement. It is,
however, the story that we miss when we look back on the book.
Mrs. Hamilton has observed or imagined certain persons of various
characters and, in order to exhibit them, has invented the shocks
and clashes between them which carry on her narrative. But, while
the persons are clearly observed or imagined, the book suggests that
nothing more than invention was used for the bringing forth of the
incidents. The writer might easily have been content to describe her
characters without showing them in motion. The Quihamptons, Iris
Mauldeth and Wilfrid Elstree, are vivid and real, portrayed in the
round. We should know them if we met them; and, from their presentation
here, we can make such estimates of and guesses about them as we make
in ordinary life--they are no less real than that. But in Wilfrid's
affair with Bridget Quihampton, in his disappearance and return, in
Roger's marriage and destiny, it is impossible not to discern a certain
lassitude and want of interest. The incidents are not improbable or
ill-drawn; but Mrs. Hamilton cannot have felt very much about them
as incidents. Though the people have undoubtedly come to life in her
hands, they have not proceeded to do anything of their own initiative;
except in one instance, we feel the hand of the author jogging their
elbows and ruling their fates. When two of them, when Bridget and
Wilfrid, are involved in an emotional situation, the author's interest
continues to reveal itself in Bridget and in Wilfrid, not in the
situation which the clash of their individualities has produced. A
tale need not deal with the marvellous and fantastic, with genies in
bottles and young princes transformed into calves, in order to exhibit
the special gift of the story-teller. It may concern itself with themes
as slight as those of _The Spoils of Poynton_ or _What Maisie Knew_.
But it must at least deal not with isolated personalities but with
that which is produced by the fusion, whether in love or hate or some
other emotion, of two or more personalities, or by the impact of events
on a single personality or more. We do not mean to suggest that Mrs.
Hamilton's novel is deficient in this essential: we mean only that on
this side of her work there are traces of what appeared to us to be
lack of interest, even traces of boredom. In one situation only, in
the subtly and mysteriously hinted conflict between Wilfrid Elstree,
the brilliant, untrammelled egoist, and Iris Mauldeth, the pretty girl
whose commonplace character is as rigid as iron, are these traces
absent; and here the novelist's work is done so exceedingly well as to
make the deficiencies of the rest especially noticeable.
Mrs. Beatrice Seymour's novel is also distinguished by one remarkable
incident. It is, we are informed, a first work, and as such it deserves
praise for its smoothness and competence. But in nine parts out of
ten it seems to be the attempt of a quite clever writer to sum up in
short space what Mr. Bennett did in the three volumes of the Clayhanger
series, and what Mr. Compton Mackenzie has not yet finished doing in
the four volumes of the Sylvia and Michael series. It describes, that
is to say, the separate childhood and youth of a young man and young
woman and then their union, which in this case is illicit and which
is terminated by the war. Much of it is a great deal too up-to-date
to have any depth. Hilary Sargent is a painter, calls Helena Morden
"Deirdre" as soon as he sees her, and, one day when they were together
on the Downs, "he read to her things she knew and things she didn't
from de la Mare, Drinkwater, Gould, Hodgson, and (most appropriately)
Hilaire Belloc. And there was Flecker and Brooke and Frances Cornford
and Lady Margaret Sackville; and Dora Sigerson whom Helena loved." No
wonder that, as the reader easily foresees, they lost the last train
home; they had confused their minds with too many styles, and had far
too many books to carry. This kind of modernity is too superficial and
too easy of achievement: it is presenting the reader with false coin.
For the rest the book has the slickness and the clicking regularity
which, though they are by no means common in novelists, cannot be of
great interest, except to the subscribers to circulating libraries
who are wont to ask for a novel which will enable them to support the
tedium of the week-end. But in one chapter Mrs. Seymour surprisingly
faces and masters a real and a painful situation--that of a shallow
girl who, having rejoiced that her husband at the front enables her
to be in the fashion, collapses under the news that he has been made
hideous by injuries received in the trenches. This is a thing which has
undoubtedly happened; it is unspeakably agonising to contemplate; and,
so far as we know, no novelist has hitherto attempted it. But there is
no reason why it should not be used for purposes of art if the novelist
has the requisite skill and tact and, above all, the requisite courage.
Mrs. Seymour looks the basilisk in the eyes and reduces it to her
service. The conversation between Helena and Pamela Sand--it occupies
less than eight pages--in which the whole affair is begun and ended,
projects violently out of the book, makes the rest of it look rather
emptier than it really is, and testifies unmistakably to the genuine
powers which Mrs. Seymour has not elsewhere employed. One scene does
not make a novel, much less a novelist; but one such scene as this in a
first book persuades us to look hopefully to Mrs. Seymour's future.
THE CHORUS GIRL AND OTHER STORIES. By ANTON TCHEHOV. Chatto & Windus.
3_s._ net.
In the title-story of this volume the injured wife of Nikolay
Petrovitch Kolpakov calls suddenly at the house of Pasha, a
chorus-girl, with whom he is accustomed to spend his time, and
Kolpakov, who is there, goes into hiding. He has been ruined by his
extravagances and is on the point of being arrested for embezzlement.
His wife demands the return of the gifts he has lavished on Pasha,
in order that the missing sum may be made up and dishonour averted,
but Pasha has had no gifts from him. The wife refuses to believe
it, repeats her demand, and then, without altering her attitude of
contemptuous hatred, implores and entreats. Pasha at last gives her the
presents she has received from more generous admirers. She declares
these are not enough and asks for more, and Pasha gives her everything
she has. When his wife has gone, Kolpakov comes out of his retirement
and, expressing his angry remorse that she should have had to kneel to
a "low creature," pushes the girl aside and leaves her. Then
Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting
her things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings
were hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten
her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.
This synopsis suggests, more accurately than any analysis we could
attempt in the space at our disposal, why we should welcome the eighth
volume of Mrs. Constance Garnett's admirable rendering of the tales
of Tchehov into English. An extended study might discover many traits
in this author which would be worthy of observation. There is, for
example, the peculiar acuteness of his sense of smell. "The air was
full of the smell of freshly scrubbed floors." ... "As I mounted the
soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of
india-rubber" ... a house "was half dark and mysterious and smelt of
mushrooms"--these are sentences taken at random from two or three
stories in the present volume. A minute examination would reveal other
characteristics by which a formal criticism could distinguish Tchehov
from other writers of the short story. But it is doubtful whether any
study could come nearer to defining the nature of his genius than by
naming the qualities which are immediately obvious in _The Chorus
Girl_. He has precision, economy, detachment, and, for all his gloom
and squalor, charm also. He stoops as it were from an ineffable height,
picks up a situation, describes it in the smallest possible number of
words, and lets it fall back into the welter of human lives. It is
not likely that any English author will imitate him, nor would it be
desirable, but his qualities, if they cannot be learnt, can at least be
used to correct excesses. And, apart from that, these eight volumes are
a monument of narrative and (for with Mrs. Garnett's translation one
can say so much) of style.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LONDON VENTURE. By MICHAEL ARLEN. Heinemann. 4_s._ net.
It is a little hard to know under what classification this book ought
to be considered, whether fiction, biography, or belles-lettres. The
same difficulty has occasionally arisen with the works of Mr. George
Moore. But since the author is alluded to in it by the name which he
acknowledges to be his own, we have decided that it cannot be fiction.
For a reason which has sometimes occurred to the critics of Mr. George
Moore, we beg to be excused from treating it as biography. There
remains nothing but belles-lettres.
And Mr. George Moore's name occurs here very appropriately, for not he,
not even Mr. Max Beerbohm, has written anything so characteristically
Moore-ish as some of these pages. Observe how it is done:
But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall
never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when
writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar
Wilde I might wonder now if Englishwomen who die in America come back
to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like
to be in London to-day--Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea
London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine,
London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and
racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside." ...
... Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her.
I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I
stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark;
and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the
last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile
at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her
perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs
to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when
I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never
come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive branch which has at
last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth,
Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most
perfect dream." ...
Here is the very attitude, here the very cadences of the original; and
the adventures are not dissimilar. Now Mr. Moore has acquired his style
by long labour, and it is a little amusing to see the flower of it
culled by a writer who has neither dug nor watered. But Mr. Arlen will
not in so close a discipleship make the best of the talents which the
very closeness of his discipleship shows him to possess. An author who
can copy so exactly the manner of another ought to be able to evolve a
manner of his own; and we look forward to seeing a book in which Mr.
Arlen shall have done this.
IN THE GARRET. By CARL VAN VECHTEN. Knopf.
Mr. Van Vechten is an American critic, rather of the type of the
ingenious Mr. Huneker. He is quite as fluent, not quite so versatile.
No art or aspect of life presents itself to Mr. Huneker as superior
to any other; but Mr. Van Vechten has a great deal more to say about
music than about anything else. He touches the theatre a great deal,
literature a little, and music most of all; and he gulps down greedily
all he touches. One name is as good as another to him and he knows a
great many names of all sorts. "George Moore," he says, apropos of Mr.
Moore's suggestion that _Robinson Crusoe_ ought to be rewritten, "has
rewritten many of his own books. Henry James rewrote all of his novels
and tales that he cared to preserve for the definitive edition. On
the other hand, Ouida believed (and expressed this belief in a paper
published in her _Critical Studies_) that once a book was given to the
public it became a part of life, a part of history, and that its author
had no right to tamper with it." Mr. Ernest Newman likes the operas
of Isaac Albéniz, but Mr. Marliave does not share his enthusiasm. On
two opposite pages we discovered the names of the following persons:
Mr. Cabell, Mr. Arthur Machen, George Sand, M. Maeterlinck, Mr.
Cecil Forsythe, Monet, Leonardo, Homer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Remy de
Gourmont, Dickens, Huysmans, and Mr. Havelock Ellis. This is lively
enough in all conscience, and Mr. Van Vechten is able to keep it up
without flagging and to support it with an equal vivacity of style, as
when he remarks that the art of the musician "deals with clang-tints."
Modern English criticism is sometimes reproached with being a little
too heavy. Here we have a critic so volatile that he bounces like a
child's balloon from the name of one great man to another.
AMONG ITALIAN PEASANTS. By TONY CYRIAX. Collins. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.
The brush rather than the pen is evidently the medium of expression for
Mrs. Tony Cyriax. The pictures in her book convey an infinitely better
impression of the life of the peasant in an Italian mountain-village
than all she says about it in writing, which is rather crude and
colourless. But the pictures are delightful, and are sufficiently
praised in an appreciative Introduction by Mr. Muirhead Bone.
The best chapters in the book are those dealing with the tending of
silkworms in peasant cottages, and the greatly dreaded hailstorm which,
despite the prayers of the priest, religious processions, and the
ringing of church bells, destroys in an hour the labour of months and
brings the villagers to the verge of starvation.
Such a storm as the writer describes will recall vividly to the memory
of any one who has stayed in an Italian hillside village the pathetic
anxiety of the natives when a thunderstorm is brewing. All around
stretch the vineyards, which from dawn till dusk have been the care
of people to whose toil the day's work of an English agricultural
labourer is child's play. Will the hailstones utterly ruin the vines?
If so, the villagers will be faced with semi-starvation, and yet more
bread-winners, in despair, must emigrate to America, that refuge for
the Italian destitute.
Pathetic, too, is an account of weeks of unceasing toil in connection
with the cottage silkworm industry. The _cavalleri_ (as the peasants
call the silkworms), remorseless in their greed for mulberry leaves
and their demands for the right temperature, will keep a whole family
working for them from morning till night.
Here, as given by Mrs. Tony Cyriax, is the result of the labour of one
such household:
"The work from start to finish had covered forty days, and Rosina's
cocoons had weighed fifty-six kilograms ... so Rosina had earned
exactly 224 lire, which is all but £9."
As a record of the hard existence that may be passed in the midst
of Nature's graciousness and beauty _Among Italian Peasants_ is not
without value.
SUSSEX IN BYGONE DAYS: Reminiscences of Nathaniel Paine Blaker,
M.R.C.S. Hove, Combridges. 1919. 5_s._
The recorders of Sussex must have a shelf to themselves by this time,
and there are many reasons for it. Sussex has not only individual
quality, amenity and interest: all counties have them. But it is
accessible, and it is the fashion. Not to go back to Dallaway and his
likes, the best of the moderns are Mr. Lucas and Mr. Halsham, and the
better of them Mr. Lucas, as we think. He has the mellower outlook, a
benevolent, postprandial regard. Mr. Halsham is more pedagogical; he
regrets much, and seldom approves. He cannot praise a landscape without
reminding us how much better it was before old What's-his-name cut down
those trees. Taken at some length--indeed, taken in series--he becomes
tiresome. Nevertheless, he wrote a novel once, called _Kitty Fairhall_,
which contains more of the essence of the Sussex peasant than Mr. Lucas
himself is likely to apprehend.
Mr. Nathaniel Blaker, the latest chronicler, earns a place upon the
shelf the rather because it need only be a little one. Our quarrel
with him would be that it did not ask a larger. He has lived long and
served his county honourably in an honourable profession; but he has
not much to say. That is a pity. He has stored his mind, but cannot
load his page. He remembers mail-coaches, he remembers the ox-teams, he
remembers the days of reaping with the sickle, the foot-high stubbles,
the threshing with a flail. To some of us those memories have a savour
so sharp that, with the wind, one might catch and transfigure it in
words. To Mr. Blaker they are as the primrose was to Mr. Bell, and one
feels that he puts them down rather because that is the kind of thing
one does put down in books of this sort than because they import a
perfume which it is luxury to distil upon the page. Lacking gusto, Mr.
Blaker tantalises his reader. The beautiful names which he strews about
him--Selmesten, Steyning, Hurstpierpoint, Ringmer, Fulking--flicker
like a mirage. He tells us, for example, that Steyning Fair in the
old days "was a scene of great excitement and confusion, and probably
as much iniquity as could be crowded into so small a space." We dare
say so; but we are athirst for the iniquities, and he gives us none
to drink of. One wishes to get Mr. Blaker by the fire with a matured
cigar, and ply him with questions. Gypsies now. Obviously he knows a
great deal about them. He says, "I well recollect, very many years ago,
one rainy afternoon, which prevented them working, watching a family of
gypsies in a barn. I think the family must have consisted of the father
and mother and several children, one daughter nearly grown up, and two
or three acquaintances. They all sat or lay about upon the straw, doing
absolutely nothing, while one or two girls kept singing a peculiarly
plaintive and monotonous but soothing and agreeable tune in a language,
I believe, I did not know, for I could not catch a single word." That
is the sort of thing Mr. Blaker will do with a pen in his hand--give
us the materials of a picture and leave us burning. His "broken hinted
sights" do but sting the mind.
Of course he tells us--he can't help it--some interesting things.
One of them is "a common saying that Sussex girls had such long legs
because they stretched them by pulling them out of the mud." That
must have been in the Weald--but we did not know that feature of
Sussex girls. Cobbett knew, and so do we, that they are remarkable
for their good looks. Mr. Blaker does not say so. We regret his Peter
Bell attitude to life. His best chapters are upon the horse and the
birch, with both of which he is evidently acquainted. "It used to be
considered," he says, "a great joke when a lady's first baby arrived to
send her a carefully packed parcel containing a small birch rod, with a
label, 'To be used when required.'" That is what we want. And, again,
he says that "it was the custom when the cloth was laid for dinner in
the middle of the day, for the cane, which was kept over the mantel ...
to be placed with the carving-knife and steel on papa's right hand."
Excellent. These scraps show what a handsome sack of oddments Mr.
Blaker must have. He should have shaken it more liberally over his book.
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE AFTER ITS DELIVERANCE. By JOHN FINLEY. Chapman &
Hall. 10_s._ net.
Of Mr. Finley's sincerity and enthusiasm there can be no question: of
his taste there is a good deal to be said. Many books have been written
about the Holy Land; but surely none before which deliberately puts
the history and the personages of Palestine into the background of a
picture whose foreground is occupied with the events of the recent
campaign. Mr. Finley has no hesitation in viewing sacred history _sub
specie temporis hodierni_. For him Allenby's battle at Armageddon is
"the beginning of the end of the battle with the Beast." The German is
not, however, only Anti-Christ: he is also Judas. Here are Mr. Finley's
meditations over the Holy City:
I was an ashamed spectator, standing there at the Gethsemane Gate,
feeling that we had been sleeping when we should have been watching,
when we should have been preparing for defence against the German
Judas who had professed devotion to the teachings of Him who spoke
the Sermon on the Mount. Did not the great German Hospice stand most
conspicuously on the Mount, that its pilgrims might dip their bread
in the very sop of the Master's dish? And do not the towers of the
German churches stand out most prominently (and offensively) in the
Inner City?
Most of his book is like that: and if you cannot see history in quite
the startling black-and-white of Mr. Finley's imagination you had
better leave the book unread. Mr. Finley was with the American Red
Cross, and he tells one happy story of himself, which it is only fair
to quote. He was worshipping in the Russian Church of the Ascension on
the Mount of Olives:
A woman of sharp, eager face, as of a zealot, with a grey shawl over
her head, seeing me standing near the door, approached me and said,
in rather sharp voice, "Quelle croix?" I did not at first understand
the import of her inquiry, though I realised that she was putting to
me an all-important question: "Quelle croix?--grecque ou latine?" ...
My answer was "La Croix Rouge."
If the soil of Palestine be favourable for legends, no doubt a tale
will arise of a strange religion whose devotees cross themselves
neither in the Western or Eastern manner, but in some strange, "red"
mode which Mr. Finley's zealot was probably eager to see.
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
Generalisation, which used to be a philosophy, is rapidly becoming
little more than a hobby. During the war it was a hobby savagely or
amiably ridden by those who sought to explain the mentality of the
Allies or the Enemy. Gradually individuals learnt that not every
Belgian was Belgium, nor every German Germany: but for propaganda
purposes we still used great typical figures. It saved thought,
and it flattered either our own pride or that of our friends. The
propagandists' most delicate task was always to explain Great Britain
to the United States of America: and certainly it was a wise thing to
send Mr. Galsworthy across the Atlantic. Surely he, if anyone, might be
able to justify the ways of the country house to Boston and New York,
to Washington and even to Chicago. Here we have his addresses delivered
during 1919 in the United States. In his paper on America and Britain
he takes the line that by words we are saved:
The tie of language is all-powerful--for language is the food
formative of minds. Why a volume could be written on the formation of
character by literary humour alone.
It sounds not unconvincing, until one remembers that French is not the
language of Alsace; that English is spoken by most of the inhabitants
of Ireland; or, to go further back, that the possession of a common
language did not prevent Athens and Sparta from indulging in the
Peloponnesian War.
We like Mr. Galsworthy better when he leaves his generalisations
and tells stories. In the paper "Tallary at Large" he displays that
sweet-naturedness, that mellowed irony which never lapses into satire,
that humour which is always aware that a sense of pity is invaluable in
comedy. Here is the true Galsworthy:
In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage.
One pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his
mouth. The other elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance,
was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as if his days
were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at
it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man, and said,
... "Could you give me a light, sir?" The elderly man regarded him
for a moment, dropped his eyelids, and murmured: "I've no matches."
The young man sighed, mumbled the cigarette on his watering lips,
then said very suddenly: "Perhaps you'll very kindly give me a light
from your cigar, sir." The elderly man moved throughout his body as
if something very sacred had been thrilled within him. "I'd rather
not," he said, "if you don't mind." A quarter of an hour passed,
while the young man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder man's
cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey
moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards
the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and
said: "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge."
And there are people who are surprised that the returned soldier
occasionally commits acts of violence.
THOUGHTS IN MIDDLE LIFE. By G. LOCKER LAMPSON. Humphreys. 3_s._ 6_d._
net.
This book is beautifully printed on admirable paper, and is priced very
low. Unfortunately Mr. Locker Lampson has reached middle life without
learning that most platitudes are better unwritten. "No man is a hero
to his own valet, and the same principle may be applied as in part the
cause of our invidious comparisons between the men of yesterday and
those of to-day." "He alone has a right to be called successful who
has led a happy life." Sometimes he will enliven his platitude by a
pleasing derangement of metaphors. "Autobiographies are of little value
in extending the personality of their authors. We may get an occasional
glimpse below the surface, but the waters are generally agitated by all
kinds of subsidiary motives, and the eye cannot pierce them." The one
sentence which explains the author is to be found in the essay _One's
Own Company_: "No man, then, need ever be bored by himself, although he
cannot avoid being bored by others."
DOMUS DOLORIS. By W. COMPTON LEITH. The Bodley Head. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
In the unornamental language, from which even the loftiest intelligence
may extract apt expression for itself, this little book may be called
a collection of thoughts in hospital from a patient's standpoint, and
an impression of the various nurses who attended him. And yet such a
description is unjust and utterly beside the point. The publisher's
note upon the cover tells us that Mr. Leith has "a rare sense of the
value of words and the beauty of phrases," and there is no doubt of it.
But the value to literature and humanity of phrases which are but the
vehicles of their own intrinsic beauty is to be questioned. The whole
essay is precious in the last degree.
"Oblivion flowed up like evening gloom. Life moved with it to the edge
of a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated down and down, wound in
the arms of sleep."
"A faint awareness stole into being, like the grey of morning; then
a sense of movement; but whether it was a coming up and forth, or a
declining, there was no power to tell."
This sort of thing, exquisite as it may be sometimes, constantly
reminds us, however, and with relief, that Henley, with simplicity
and humour, covered the same ground in verse. From time to time an
unpretentious passage comes to us with a shock, and we ask ourselves
again and again, if, as it seems, the writer has opinions to air,
observations about life and death to make, what especial virtue there
is in the high-falutin obscurity of his expression. One of the chief
and most necessary concealments of art lies in a well-simulated
nonchalance to the more obvious kind of purple patch. Here the entire
robe is of purple, though certainty of a royal shade. There were
voices, Mr. Leith tells us on the first page (and it was not until the
fifteenth that we knew where the voices came from), which "kept thought
strained after a meaning." A light strain is no doubt good for thought;
but in reading this book it is not light: and it is hard to say which
strain is the more severe--the student's for meaning or the author's
for effect.
A CHILDHOOD IN BRITTANY EIGHTY YEARS AGO. By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK.
Arnold. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
Nowhere in England, nor even in Ireland or Scotland, could the life
pictured in this book be paralleled. Feudalism has lingered, but
not in delicate or decorative ways: in the Brittany of which Miss
Sedgwick tells us, the beauty, the generous abundance, and the sincere
brotherliness of life almost overcome one's distaste for the feudal
system which formed its basis. The lady whose childhood is shown us
was of a noble Breton family; her father seems to have been the only
Republican she knew among the company of Royalists; life was still so
ordered that the country people, coming to Mass, would bow to the lord
and lady of the manor, after paying their respects to the altar. Yet
one is left with a sense of fraternity as genuine as that one feels in
reading Chaucer, as the story witnesses:
One peasant, I remember, Paul Simur by name, of whom my father was
specially fond, was so dirty and unwashed that a sort of mark of
dirt had formed upon his features. One day, at a hunting-party, papa
called to Paul to come and sit beside him, and the other huntsmen,
with singular bad taste, began to make fun of Paul, who sat much
abashed, with hanging head. Papa affectionately laid an arm about
his neck and defended him, until his friends finally cried out that
they wagered he would not kiss him. At this, although he confessed
afterwards to the most intense repugnance, he at once kissed Paul
heartily. Poor Paul was quite overcome. He came to my father
afterwards with tears in his eyes and said, standing before him and
gazing at him: "_Oh, mon maître, que je t'aime!_"
Although the accounts of old Breton customs--the glimpse at the Folgoat
pardon, the gently critical analysis of the lives of the gentry, the
sidelights on the peasants, their cooking and their cottages--are all
full of interest, the book is chiefly to be valued for preserving the
fragrance of an order of living which too many of us are apt to think
of as one of harsh tyranny alleviated by wanton luxury.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE OF THOMAS COUTTS, BANKER. By ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. 2 Vols.
Lane. 42_s._ net.
Thomas Coutts, virtual founder of the Bank of his name as it now
is, was born in 1735, and, according to the standards of Scotland,
well born, having, that is, wise, reputable forbears, relatives with
place-names of their own--Stuarts of Allanbank and the like--and a
coat-of-arms. "Instead of which," as the old story has it, at the
age of twenty-eight he married his mother's nursemaid, and loved and
served her faithfully until, after some fifty years' partnership, she
wandered out of her mind and then out of his world. By that time his
three daughters by her had married, one an Earl of Guilford, one a
Marquis of Bute, and one Sir Francis Burdett. By that time also Coutts
was one of the most considerable bankers in London, and one of the
richest men in England. It might now be thought that his adventures in
life were over--but not at all. At seventy years of age he stepped once
more into the _Pays du Tendre_, and took into his protection--which in
his case, it really appears, had no secondary meaning--Miss Harriot
Mellon, a low comedy actress of abundant charm, humble birth, little
education, and excellent disposition. She was then twenty-eight. He
fell headlong in love with her and head over heels. He endowed her with
stock and other movables to the amount of £500 a year, and when, at
the age of eighty, he made her his second wife he settled the whole of
that endowment upon herself. At his death, Mr. Coleridge tells us, her
private fortune could not have been less than £200,000. Notwithstanding
the estrangement and unconcealed disgust of "the ladies," as he always
called his daughters, she made him perfectly happy for nine years; and
when, at eighty-nine, he died, very reasonably, he left her practically
everything he possessed.
That in outline is the life-history of Thomas Coutts as Mr. Ernest
Coleridge pleasantly and ably narrates it in two portly volumes. The
book offers a view of eighteenth-century manners which is not often,
and seldom so well, illustrated. Coutts must have been, and he was,
a notable man of affairs; but he was a good deal better than that.
He knew, of course, everybody who was anybody. He was the friend and
correspondent of Lord Bute, the favourite of Lord Chatham, of William
Pitt. He lent, _mero motu ejus_, £10,000 to Charles Fox without
security of any kind. He lent large sums to the Duchess of Devonshire,
and forwent the interest until such time as her son was pleased to
pay it; for her husband never would. He lectured that great and gay
lady upon her follies with perfect freedom and no result. All the
royal rips, sons of George III., banked with him, or, in other words,
borrowed from him; and they dined with him too. Edward Duke of Kent,
the only one of them who was not a rip, made a friend of him as well
as a convenience. It is interesting to remark how Coutts deals with
these disreputable magnates. He is respectful of their degree in so far
as he is shopkeeper and they customers; but outside the bank-parlour
he stands on level terms. His children are to commence with their
children; his wife's table is as good as their tables. Servant-girl
or not, his wife, Mrs. Coutts, is the equal of their wives. There is
nothing of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in his letters, although, as a
trader, he continually has his eye upon business, and is never above
doing himself a good turn. Mr. Coleridge is to be congratulated upon
having presented so engaging a picture of the sound, cautious, and
upright Scots merchant, who kept his head and his balance through
the convulsions of the American and French wars, and cultivated the
domestic virtues in the same social set as Old Q. and the Duchess of
Gordon.
But, except for that sappy core of romance which twice betrayed itself
in act and once in word, Tom Coutts was a dry stick. While his views of
political affairs were sound and uncommonly independent, his expression
of them was not interesting. He was by inheritance a Tory, yet he was
staunch upon the American war. "The idea," he wrote in 1775 to Lord
Stair, "of reducing such a continent to obedience (especially after
letting them have so much time to unite) appears to me, so far as I am
capable of judging, to be absolutely impossible." So, too, he opposed
the war with revolutionary France. "The war made against their growth
seems to me to be exactly the way to encourage instead of destroying
them. There is no instance of opposition by force of arms subduing
opinions! which by such manners have always grown stronger and more
inveterate." One might be reading the present Dean of St. Paul's. The
same faculty of seeing things as they really were allowed him to have
no good opinion of Pitt's Reform proposals of 1784, and gave him as
early as 1785 a plan of dealing with Irish disaffection which was in
fact adopted in 1800, to our cost. "As to Ireland, I apprehend it is an
aristocracy of about thirty nobles, etc., who command two hundred votes
in the Lower House, and that these thirty may be bought and a union
accomplished more easily than that heap of nonsense called the Irish
propositions." They _were_ bought.
Mr. Coleridge prints a recently discovered bundle of his love-letters
to Harriot Mellon, from which, if one could feel love-letters to be
fair game, it would be tempting, and easy, to make extracts. They are
striking by their extraordinary difference from his other familiar
correspondence. Coutts becomes emotional, profuse, sentimental, and
occasionally ridiculous. Few love-letters, however, will stand the
test of examination in cold blood. It can be said of his at least that
there is nothing in them which is not intended to honour the recipient.
To Coutts his Harriot was a pattern of womanly virtue. It is Mr.
Coleridge's opinion, as it is our own, that she deserved it. That she
made him happy is obvious; that she returned him a grateful love let
this, which was written by herself five years after her wedding-day,
bear witness:
"I never lose my spirits." My blessed Tom said these words to me in a
dream. After he had kissed me and laid his dear head on my bosom, I
felt his tears on my cheek--I was so happy, but so melancholy happy.
He looked so well, tranquil and divine.... I see him at this moment,
upright, beautiful and composed, as in his long and immaculate life.
He looks just as I first saw his dear, blessed face upwards of twenty
years ago.
That is both tenderly and prettily said. Tom Coutts, in his marriage as
in other things, knew what he was about.
THE TURKS IN EUROPE. By W. E. D. ALLEN. Murray. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
"La Turquie est le pays classique du massacres," it has been truly
said.... "Son historie se résume à ceci: pillages, meurtres, vols,
concussions--sur toutes les échilles--révoltes, insurrections,
répercussions, guerres étrangères, guerres civiles, révolutions,
contre-révolutions, séditions, mutineries." All these things are the
theme of Mr. Allen's interesting and well-written sketch of the Turkish
power, from the rise of Osman in the thirteenth century down to the
Treaty of Bukarest in 1913. Mr. Allen does not, however, confine
himself to a mere record of horrors. He contrives throughout his book
to draw in a few lines the characters of the chief actors in the drama,
and, especially in the later chapters, to expose the policies, European
and Turkish, which have created and complicated the long nightmare
of the Near East. Many of our troubles of the last forty years are
attributed by him to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the triumph of Lord
Beaconsfield's policy. It was a treaty concluded, he says, "in a spirit
of shameless bargain, with a sublime disregard of elementary ethics,
and in open contempt of the right of civilised peoples to determine
their own future. It was essentially a temporary arrangement concluded
between rival Imperialist States." A few years later the "grim raw
races" in the Balkans were again in a savage ferment, and we could
enjoy "the spectacle of the heads of the civilised world, in their
palaces in the capitals of Europe, setting those same 'grim raw races'
to kill." Mr. Allen in his narrative of this later period does not
spare his criticism of the diabolic diplomacy of Berlin and Vienna,
of the brilliant cunning of their agents in Turkey--and notably Baron
Marschal von Bieberstein.
ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. By ALFRED W. POLLARD. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3_s._
net.
In this little volume, one of a series called _Messages of the Saints_,
Mr. Pollard has re-told the ever-fascinating story of St. Catherine,
Siena's fourteenth-century saint. "In the present sketch," says the
author, "there is nothing original, save possibly its point of view and
(I believe) the chapter on St. Catherine's book."
Its point of view is that of an ardent if critical admirer of St.
Catherine, and full justice is done to what after all are the qualities
which made of her not only the most lovable, but perhaps the most
amazing of saintly women. _Amor vincit omnia_ is the motto which
springs to the mind as most fit for Catherine of Siena. In an age of
cruelty she is love personified. It was love for her fellow-creatures,
concern for their immortal welfare, that led her, a poor ignorant
"little bit of a woman," to face with the simplicity of a child and
the wisdom born of simplicity princes and popes, and force them, not to
her own will, but to what she conceived to be the Will of God.
To all who have lived long enough in Siena, Catherine becomes a living
personality. So real indeed that it would scarcely be surprising to
meet her one evening at dusk in that long steep street--still the
street of the tanners--where six hundred years ago she walked with her
lantern on her way to the sick and dying during the plague. In Siena
one is apt to forget that St. Catherine was a figure in politics and
the composer of a book about which the learned dispute. Still, on the
day of her festival the townsfolk sing the "Praise of Catherine," to
them merely the tanner's daughter who, greatly to the glory of their
beautiful little city, somehow became a saint.
Mr. Pollard's chapter on the _Libro della Divina Dottrina_, the
treatise said to have been dictated by St. Catherine while in a trance,
is valuable because it summarises typical pronouncements of the mystic
upon the various stages of the soul in its pilgrimage towards a
spiritual goal.
As a revelation of the subconscious self, if for no other reason, St.
Catherine's book has its own intense interest. Those who are already
familiar with her story may, by the help of Mr. Pollard's pleasant
sketch, refresh their memory of its details, and to those who are not
it should, as he hopes, prove a stimulating introduction to the life of
a wonderful woman.
VICTORIAN RECOLLECTIONS. By J. H. BRIDGES. Bell. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Bridges deliberately adopts the attitude of the _laudator temporis
acti se puero_. The worst of this prose is that, just as it may
attract the sympathy of men of his own generation, it inevitably
repels slightly those of a younger. Nothing is more tiresome than to
listen to judgments on life and manners whose chief point lies in the
opening words, "Well, I tell you in 185--we did not," or "we did"--such
criticism automatically provokes the retort, "Well, this isn't 185--,"
whereat your ancient growls, "I would to God it were," and youth and
eld stand back to uncomfortable back, with no chance of doing any
useful work.
Fortunately Mr. Bridges, although angry at the modern depreciation of
things Victorian, is better than his threat. He is not too comparative,
and although overfond of censure, his blame has a humorous quality
which keeps it inoffensive. At times the humour is unconscious, as
in Mr. Bridges' charming suggestion that the beauty of the primrose
is more noticed and "more respected" because ardent Tory enthusiasm
associated Peter Bell's flower with the late Lord Beaconsfield: but
Mr. Bridges' essentially "pawky" quality of mind--we use the word in
an amiable sense--crops out not infrequently as, for instance, in his
grave statement that he would be "in favour of a law forbidding anyone
to own more than 150 newspapers."
Mr. Bridges gives an account of his schooldays under a flogging master,
which adds yet another count to the indictment against Victorian
methods of education. He does not tell us much that is unfamiliar,
either of Eton or Oxford, though many will be glad to have his
description of the old-time Don, and the Dean Gaisford's letter to a
noble father who enquired after his son's University progress:
"My Lord, Such letters give much trouble to
"Your humble servant,
"THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH."
In the late fifties Mr. Bridges visited Canada and the United States,
and he records his conviction that Senator Douglas was Lincoln's
"superior as speaker and politician," a verdict which makes one wonder
a little what his standards of oratory are, and how a politician,
obviously inferior in moral character, who also fails to keep his
country's confidence can be called the inferior of one who wins its
trust. Mr. Bridges abandoned his plan to settle in the New World, and
returned to England and started farming, first in the Eastern counties
and subsequently in Shropshire. In the chapters dealing with his life
in rural England he sketches some village types for the reader with a
genuine feeling for character. Particularly good is the final chapter,
"A Survival," with its touching picture of Old Tom, "the last survivor
hereabouts of the old-style agricultural labourer." Whatever one's
political colour, one cannot help sympathising with Mr. Bridges and Old
Tom in their lament at the decay of rural England, and at the growth
of conditions which made it possible for "more and more people to wax
rich in London and in the big towns, while no one can earn a living in
the country." Though the latter ceased to be true during the war, one
is yet uncertain how far the prosperity then enjoyed by the farmer will
continue as war conditions slowly depart.
THE LIFE OF LIZA LEHMANN. By HERSELF. T. Fisher Unwin. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
Born in London, daughter of a Scotswoman, educated in Italy, married to
an Englishman, Liza Lehmann's heart--and she was a woman who always let
her heart rule her head--was unconsciously fixed in England. Yet as we
turn the pages of her autobiography there is hardly one in which we do
not feel conscious that she belonged by unalterable temperament to the
land of _Die Gartenlaube_ and _Familie Buchholz_. Many English singers
and audiences in the happy days before the war have felt that for all
their devotion to Schumann, the domestic intimacies of _Frauenliebe und
Leben_ were too intensely German for an English sense of proportion
and sense of humour. Let them read _The Life of Liza Lehmann_ in
their own tongue, and they will turn with relief to the reticence and
dignity of Chamisso's lyrics. It is evident that she was a woman who
never did an act, never cherished a thought, that was not a kind one.
She collaborated in an opera with Mr. Laurence Housman; he considered
that she had wrecked his play, she thought that he had wrecked her
music; but she records the awkward incident without the least trace of
ill-will, nay, without the least supposition that he or anyone else in
the world could have borne ill-will to her. Liszt, Brahms, Browning,
and Verdi were among her acquaintances; but she has little to tell us
about them. They counted for far less in her life than Madame Clara
Butt, Mr. Kennerley Rumford, Mr. Arthur Boosey, and Mr. Landon Ronald;
and even these were unsubstantial shadows compared to her mother, her
husband, and her sons. A large proportion of her book is taken up with
newspaper criticisms and interviews, mostly American. They gave the
authoress no little pleasure, and they will give the reader no little
amusement; indeed, as studies of American literary style, they are most
instructive. The final chapter, dealing with the death of her elder
son, so shortly to be followed by her own, can hardly be touched upon
in a review; it seems an intrusion to read it.
THE GLORY OF THE COMING. By IRVIN S. COBB. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._
net.
THE 25TH DIVISION IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS. Harrison. 4_s._ net.
These two war books, extremely dissimilar, belong to two well-known
types. Mr. Cobb is an American journalist, and he gives a lively,
journalistic account of the coming and doing of the American armies in
France. The other book is a detailed and somewhat bare record of the
doings of the 25th Division, by Lieut.-Col. M. Kincaid-Smith. The 25th
Division made a great name for itself in the war; this book shows that
it was not unearned.
THE PARAVANE ADVENTURE. By L. COPE CORNFORD. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._
6_d._ net.
The story of the paravane, the remarkable anti-submarine contrivance
invented by Commander Burney and used by the Allied navies and also
by merchant ships during the later period of the war, is told by Mr.
Cope Cornford in a popular style and with considerable enthusiasm. It
is possible that he is over-enthusiastic, for in a prefatory note he
tells us that some naval officers and also the Admiralty consider that
he exaggerates the effects of the paravane. There is no doubt, however,
as the official figures themselves show, that paravanes and "Otters"
(as they were called when fitted to merchant vessels) did have an
enormous success. The total tonnage of H.M. ships and merchant ships
definitely saved by them comes to over a quarter of a million; and the
financial saving to the British Empire is estimated at approximately
£100,000,000. Mr. Cope Cornford has a good deal of criticism--some open
and more, we think, implied--to make against the Admiralty. Exactly
how far it is justified we cannot say; but there are certainly a good
many people with inside knowledge who assert that the Admiralty were
decidedly cold about the paravane, even if they did not actually
"crab" it. And the rewards and honours bestowed on the brilliant young
officers who devoted themselves to the paravane and Otter services were
not particularly generous.
SUBMARINES AND SEA POWER. By CHARLES DOMVILLE-FIFE. Bell. 10_s._ 6_d._
net.
Mr. Domville-Fife's purpose is to discuss the importance of the
submarine arm in naval warfare of the future. His treatment of the
subject is very balanced and his conclusions are cautious. He gives us
a great deal of interesting information about the history of submarine
craft (beginning as far back as 1578) and of the submarine explosive
mine. In dealing with the tactics of submarines and their influence in
naval strategy, he speaks as an expert; for not only has he devoted
many years to their study, but during the war he was in command of
anti-submarine craft and an instructor at H.M. School of Submarine
Mining. The economic influence of the submarine on this country, Mr.
Domville thinks, is summed up in the words of Lord Selborne in 1915:
"After the war the whole question of our agricultural and economic
policy of the food production at home will have to be revised in the
light of our submarine experience." But what of the League of Nations?
Are we not entitled to voice our views of the future of naval warfare
in the light of that? Here Mr. Domville-Fife is guarded. He looks
forward "steadfastly and even hopefully towards the vivid dawn of a new
era." But he is not for abandoning the old motto, _Si vis pacem para
bellum_.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
BEFORE THE WAR. By VISCOUNT HALDANE. Cassell. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE. By JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, C.B.,
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Macmillans. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.
These two books must rank among the most important documents yet
produced which bear upon the antecedents and the consequences of the
war in so far as British policy is involved. Lord Haldane was for many
years War Minister, and during the critical period of Anglo-German
relations he was also a sort of supplementary Foreign Secretary whose
influence over the most important department of Foreign Affairs was
very great, partly because of the weight his opinion carried with
Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith, and partly because of his special
knowledge of Germans and Germany. His book has a double subject as it
has a double object. He outlines the main elements and the principal
stages in our policy _versus_ Germany before the war, and he sketches
what was done during his administration to perfect the organisation
of our Army. He defends our national policy (there are interesting
sidelights thrown by his personal experiences with the Emperor and
among the governing classes of Prussia) on the ground that we did
the best we could when we combined an earnest effort to prevent war
with a resolution to be ready for it; and in his personal apologia he
argues, in effect, that in the circumstances (we must not forget that
the nation as a whole, and Parliament in particular, viewed military
expenditure with a very jealous eye) his régime did the utmost that
could have been expected. It is now commonly conceded, even by those
who distrusted Lord Haldane's views in foreign affairs, and those who
were bitterly against him because of his refusal to adopt universal
military service, that he did a great work at the War Office. What
he says about the efficiency of his Expeditionary Force ("If the
warrior looked slender he was at least as well prepared for the ring
as science could make him") must be universally admitted; and with
his great work in that department must be coupled the creation of the
Territorial Force. On the point of compulsory service Lord Haldane
defends himself by saying that in 1912 the General Staff was allowed
to investigate "the question whether we could or could not raise a
great army." "The outcome was embodied in a report made to me by Lord
Nicholson, himself a soldier who had a strong desire for compulsory
service and a large army. He reported, as the result of a prolonged and
careful investigation, that, alike as regarded officers and as regarded
buildings and equipment, the conclusion of the General Staff was that
it would be in a high degree unwise to try, during the period of unrest
on the Continent, to commence a new military system." We might have
become "seriously weaker before we had a chance of becoming stronger,"
and an enemy might have sprung on us. "I quite agreed, and not the less
because it was highly improbable that the country would have looked
at anything of the sort." We imagine that the one thing which should
(in the light of our subsequent experience) have been done and was not
done (though lack of money would have been a severe limitation to the
actual accumulation of large stores, whether of rifles or of clothing)
was to prepare a scheme whereunder the material for a greatly expanded
force would be easily and rapidly obtained immediately an emergency had
arisen.
Lord Haldane has many interesting _obiter dicta_. He insists on the
need (never more necessary than now) for politicians to understand the
meaning of the words they use, and the nature of the main conceptions
which are entertained by the nation, and those which dominate their own
minds. He says that his opinion of the German people remains unchanged.
"They were very much like our own people, except in one thing. This
was that they were trained simply to obey, and to carry out whatever
they were told by their rulers. I used, during numerous unofficial
tours in Germany, to wander about incognito, and to smoke and drink
beer with the peasants whenever I could get the chance. What impressed
me was the little part they had in directing their own government, and
the little they knew about what it was doing." Lord Haldane dates this
habit of mind back to the days of Frederick the Great; but is there not
something to be said for the view that it is to be traced back through
the period of the religious wars into the baronial Middle Ages?
Lord Haldane's conclusion is that "the question is not one simply
of the letter of a treaty, but is one of the spirit in which it is
made.... The foundations of a peace that is to be enduring must,
therefore, be sought in what is highest and most abiding in human
nature." These sentiments are eloquently supported by Mr. Maynard
Keynes, who resigned his position at the Peace Conference (where he
represented the Treasury) because he felt that the negotiations were
not being inspired by that spirit and by those high and abiding ideals.
His argument, which is supported by very acute reasoning, is that the
economic clauses of the Treaty threaten the ruin of our interlocked
economic civilisation; and, with the skill of an artist, he strengthens
the gloom of his tale by giving in introductory chapters a tragic
setting: a concourse of statesmen, oblivious of the greatness of the
issues involved, men of mechanical or cunning minds, men obstinate
and narrow, ruthless and cynical, adroit and cunning, intriguing,
hoodwinking, whilst their world was rolling towards the precipice.
The issues he considers, the arguments he advances, are far too
controversial to be entered into here: but it is a book which states
one point of view far more powerfully than it has been stated anywhere
else and, as such, should be read, if only to be answered. We take it
that beyond the public questions which engage the author's mind there
must have been a personal one (which is also, however, a public one)
which must have caused him much disquiet: the question how far a civil
servant, whilst the events under discussion are still in progress, is
morally entitled to divulge things he would not have seen save in his
official capacity. He may--this we suppose is beyond dispute--resign
and conduct argument on the basis of facts known to the public; but
should he watch statesmen at private assemblies, judge their characters
by what he sees there, and then come out and attempt to blow them
sky-high? We suppose that Mr. Keynes, who is no doubt convinced that
his estimates are sound and that the whole future of the world may
depend upon people realising what he believes to be the truth, would
say that there was a conflict of obligations, and that the larger one
had overcome the lesser. But we do think that there is room here for
investigation and definition by a political philosopher with some
practical experience. The problem is not a simple one.
A HANDBOOK OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS. By SIR GEOFFREY BUTLER. With an
Introduction by Lord Robert Cecil. Longmans. 5_s._ net.
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE LEAGUE. By EUSTACE PERCY. Hodder &
Stoughton. 6_s._ net.
It would hardly be possible to find two more different books on the
same subject than these two. Hence it is extraordinarily instructive to
read them together. Sir Geoffrey Butler is an academic international
lawyer, a lecturer in International Law and Diplomacy in the University
of Cambridge. He is therefore well qualified for the task which he has
undertaken, a short and elementary treatise, "which tries to place
the League in its historical perspective." He traces the history of
international relations and shows that the League is a development of
the idea of a Concert of Europe as opposed to the idea of a Balance of
Power. He then explains the constitution and machinery of the League
as it appears in the Paris Covenant, gives the text of the Covenant,
and adds a commentary or explanation of its various clauses. Sir
Geoffrey does not possess a light or facile pen, and occasionally his
meaning is singularly obscure. The book is academically cautious and
unoriginal, but it sticks to its object, which is to explain the kind
of international instrument which the victorious statesmen fashioned in
Paris. Hence it will be useful to those who do not possess technical
knowledge but wish to understand the significance of the clauses, or
bare bones, of the Covenant.
Lord Eustace Percy is not concerned with bare bones, but with the flesh
and blood which may or may not one day clothe the skeleton which the
victorious Powers produced at Paris. No one could call the author or
his book cautious; they are always trying to get back to fundamentals.
To Lord Eustace the Covenant of the League is a "revolution," and
he endeavours to show the revolution in British policy which it
implies--the ultimate, fundamental responsibilities which, with the
signature of the Covenant, the nation and its statesmen assumed.
In order to do this, he not only examines the League and Covenant;
he gives a most interesting account of the previous international
position and policy of Britain, the United States, and the chief
Continental Powers; he analyses and criticises the terms of the
Paris peace treaties; he deals with Labour unrest; the epidemic of
revolution, Bolshevism. The whole forms a restless, brilliant, and
often paradoxical essay on international relations. Its great merit is
that the natural reaction to it in the reader is thought. It is true
that the author's own political thinking is frequently much less deep
than it would appear to be on a cursory examination; but at least if
he cannot himself go to any great depths, he always tries to go as
deep as he can, and he carries his reader below the obvious surface of
political platitudes. His method is to appear at first to go almost to
the extreme limits of "progressiveness" and unorthodoxy, and then, by
the help of a paradox, to double on his tracks and to show that after
all the "progressives" are out of date, and nothing much could have
been done other than has been done. Thus he begins by writing about
such terms of the Peace as the Saar, the Balkans and Austria, Shantung,
the Adriatic, and the economic clauses, in language which we might
expect from the extreme Left, and then, when the reader is beginning to
feel that he has been robbed of his last illusion, he is headed back
from despair with the paradox that "in a sense, the strength of the
Treaty lies in its weakest parts--in those provisions which are the
least workable in practice."
For some tastes there will be too much of this kind of paradox in
this book. Lord Eustace is, perhaps, at his best when he is dealing
either with past history or with the immediate subject of his book,
the Responsibilities of the League. The League, in his view, is "the
one novel contribution made to the settlement by the Conference at
Paris"; it creates the conditions and machinery necessary if the
family of nations is to realise a "policy of joint responsibilities,"
and to deal continuously in a spirit of friendly co-operation with
"the standing common interests of nations." This thesis is explained,
worked out, and illustrated with very great ability. Lord Eustace
obviously considers that those who framed the Covenant produced the
best international framework and machinery which at the moment it was
possible for practical statesmanship to produce. Those who expected or
asked for more are, in his opinion, impractical idealists, or, what
is worse, they do not see that the whole object of the League is to
continue and develop the existing international system of absolutely
sovereign States. His treatment of this extremely difficult and
important question of sovereignty is the least satisfactory part of his
handling of the League. He holds that the doctrine of communal society
"applied to the League of Nations clearly rules out first of all any
encroachment upon the sovereignty of its members." But sovereignty
does not consist solely, as he seems to imply, in "the claim of the
State against any of its members," and surely the League might limit
or "encroach upon" the sovereignty of its members without necessarily
creating a Super-State. It is a pity that Lord Eustace has not dealt
more thoroughly with this question, for it is vital to another
important opinion held by him, namely, that the League must be the
enemy of and bulwark against Bolshevik or Communist Governments.
THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA. By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD. Swarthmore Press.
10_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is not a mere list of criticisms and reminiscences written by
a carpet-bagger. Mr. Macdonald was in India as a member of the last
Public Services Commission. He has studied numerous official and
unofficial books and documents, and has met and heard the views of
representatives of all classes and schools of political thought. He has
stayed with Provincial Governors, Indian leaders, district officers,
and heads of native institutions, such as the Gurukul of Hardwar and
the Rabindranath Tagore school at Bholpur.
The result is a book of great interest, written with an insight and
moderation which will commend it to many who do not agree with all
its conclusions. It was written, Mr. Macdonald tells us, before the
Montagu-Chelmsford Report was published; but it is none the worse
for this. References and comments on the Report have been added, and
every line may be read with profit alike by the extreme reformer, the
moderate constitutionalist and the firm conservative.
Mr. Macdonald begins with an account of the rise of Nationalism and a
sketch of the history of European penetration and the advance of the
East India Company in India. This enables the British reader at once to
understand the remainder of the book, and places him in possession of a
store of knowledge which may help to foster that interest in India and
her problems so lacking in British electors and politicians alike.
The pronouncement of August, 1917, the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, and
the passing of the Government of India Act of 1919 are first steps
towards the establishment of self-government for India; but the real
difficulty to be solved is the representation of the mass of the
people. Mr. Macdonald holds that "The democratic forms of the West are
not the only forms in which democracy can take shape.... India is not
a nation of equal citizens so much as an organisation of co-operating
social functions." The question of diversity of race and language
will remain even when primary education has become general, and Mr.
Macdonald might have made clearer his views of the lines on which
genuine popular representation can be secured. He does, indeed, in his
account of the 50,000,000 "outcastes" of India give us a dim vision of
his hopes that with education will come leaders of ability to represent
them; but this does not solve the main problem of ascertaining and
giving expression to the will of the people. With the Councils and
reformed administration India will be somewhat in the position of
England in 1832, and whether she is to develop under British tutelage,
or to be left to work out her own salvation under her own bourgeois
Government, is a question which statesmen will be called on to decide
in the near future.
The chapters on finance and on religion and Nationalism are among the
best in the book, while the pithy accounts of the ceaseless toil of
a Lieutenant-Governor and of a District Officer should disabuse the
minds of those who have been accustomed to regard Indian civilians as
comfortable overpaid loafers.
SCIENCE
THEORETICAL AND APPLIED COLLOID CHEMISTRY. By WOLFGANG OSTWALD. John
Wiley & Sons and Chapman & Hall. 11_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE CHEMISTRY OF COLLOIDS. By RICHARD ZSIGMONDY. John Wiley & Sons and
Chapman & Hall. 13_s._ 6_d._ net.
Colloid chemistry, for which Dr. Wolfgang Ostwald claims to have
established the right "to existence as a separate and independent
science," is a study of very recent development, which has come to its
own during the past twenty years. In many respects its development
offers a close parallel to that of catalysis, a branch of chemistry
recently noticed in these columns. In both cases we have a few
brilliant, isolated studies, succeeded by a long period during which
little attention was paid to the subject; in both cases this century
has seen a large body of chemists, especially the younger men,
attracted to the investigation, the phenomena in question, and results
have been rapidly attained which have proved of great theoretical
interest, and have already found wide application in industry. Just as
the old idea that there were a few special catalysts has been succeeded
by the belief now held that every substance can be made to act as a
catalyst in suitable circumstances, so it is now stated freely that,
instead of there being a small class of colloids, any substance can be
prepared in a colloid state. Incidentally, colloidal preparations are
widely used as catalysts.
Colloid chemistry may be said to have arisen some fifty years ago in
the researches of Thomas Graham, who showed that a large class of
liquids or semi-liquids would not diffuse through animal membranes,
as do ordinary solutions of salts. Because many of these substances
were sticky he gave to the whole class the name which they now hold,
colloid. Since then his conception has been extended, and it is now
realised that, strictly speaking, we should talk rather of a substance
in a colloidal state than of a colloid, since typically crystalline
substances, such as ordinary salt, can be prepared in colloidal
solution. The characteristic of such a solution is the fineness of
sub-division--the dispersion--of the "dissolved" substance. In a true
solution, in the ordinary sense, we have, in general, the substance
existing as separate molecules dispersed throughout the solvent. In
a mechanical suspension, such as may be prepared from exceedingly
fine sand and water, the suspended particles, which take some time
to settle, can be easily seen with a microscope, if not with the
naked eye. In between these two classes of dispersed systems we have
solutions in which the particles, while consisting, in general, of
a very large number of molecules, are small enough to pass through
filter-paper and escape the ordinary microscope, while at the same
time they do not diffuse through membranes and can be seen by special
optical arrangements, _i.e._, the so-called ultramicroscope. Such
dispersed systems are colloidal systems, which have only recently
been investigated in detail, although Faraday prepared colloidal
solutions of metallic gold which still exist. Colloidal chemistry
has been picturesquely called "the world of neglected dimensions,"
which is appropriate enough. Of course the exact degree of dispersion
which constitutes a colloidal solution is purely arbitrary, since,
as Wolfgang Ostwald--the son of Wilhelm Ostwald--insists in the book
before us, solutions are known which show all ranges of sub-division
of the dissolved substance, from molecular dimensions to visible
particles. Various distinguishing tests have led to solutions in which
the diameter of the particles lies anywhere between a millionth and a
thousandth of a millimetre being conventionally called colloids.
The scientific, industrial, and medical applications of colloid
chemistry increase in number daily--we are already confronted with
the word colloidotherapy--and there is a growing demand for books
on the subject. The two before us are each by authors who are
celebrated for their researches in the subject: Zsigmondy invented the
ultramicroscope, which has been responsible for the most important
recent advances in the study of colloidal solution, and Wolfgang
Ostwald has added clearness to nearly every branch of the subject.
Ostwald's book, adequately translated by Dr. Martin Fischer (although,
we may remark, the word "enormity" is not generally used as a synonym
for hugeness), is based on a series of lectures given by him in America
just before the war. Publication has been delayed by the war, and it is
interesting to note that in the preface, written in 1915 when Germany
was apparently in a good position, the author looks to science to form
the first bridge between the peoples then at war, and exclaims, "How
should I, for example, cease to admire, to adopt, and to develop the
labours of a W. B. Hardy, a W. M. Bayliss, a J. Perrin, a P. P. von
Weimarn, and others, just because they belong to a people hostile to my
own?" The book gives a most excellent sketch of the whole field, by one
who is an enthusiast in his subject, and may be thoroughly recommended
as an introduction for those who are beginners, even if their general
knowledge of chemistry is slight, while even the expert will find much
in it to interest him. As a detail we may mention that Ostwald gives a
quick receipt for the preparation of red colloidal gold with ordinary
distilled water, while other authors, including Zsigmondy, insist
that the preparation is a delicate undertaking, requiring specially
distilled water and the greatest care. The wonderful range of phenomena
now included in the subject is clearly brought out, and the pictures
of Liesegang rings and the ultramicroscopic photograph of a setting
cement are beautiful. The treatment of gels, the jelly-like form into
which certain colloidal solutions pass, is particularly good, and gives
much valuable information not hitherto available in popular form.
The last two chapters, or lectures, on scientific applications and
technical applications of colloid chemistry are of surpassing interest,
as indicating the practical importance which this young science has
attained. All life processes take place in a colloid system, and
the necessity to physiologists of the study of colloids is forcibly
emphasised. Rubber milk, or later, is a colloid, so that all the
problems of coagulation of rubber and its subsequent vulcanisation are
included in the subject. The setting of cements is a colloidal problem.
These, and many other questions, are briefly but clearly discussed. The
experiments which accompanied the lectures are described, and are most
suggestive.
Professor Zsigmondy's book is more technical, and deals mainly with
"hydrosols" and "hydrogels." The author's reputation in this field
vouches for the excellence of the treatment of the many expert problems
discussed. Naturally the subjects of ultramicroscopy and protective
colloids are discussed in detail--the author originated the "gold
figure" used to express the protective effect of a colloid. The
theoretical discussions are particularly valuable, and physiologists
will read with interest the long discussion of protein bodies. There
is an appendix on industrial colloid chemistry by the translator, Dr.
Ellwood Spear, in which the problems of rubber manufacture, tanning,
and other industrial processes are very briefly treated. There is in
this section a chapter on smoke abatement, but the methods mentioned
scarcely fall within the province of colloid chemistry as generally
understood. A final chapter, by Dr. J. F. Norton, deals with the
application of colloid chemistry to sanitation.
MODERN SCIENCE AND MATERIALISM. By HUGH ELLIOT. Longmans. Green & Co.
7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This book is an exposition of monism, the philosophic theory that
asserts the identical nature of mind and matter, as distinct from
the dualistic "superstition"--as our author terms it--of matter and
spirit. Sir Oliver Lodge, in a recent article, claims that three
fundamental things are required to explain our universe: viz., Mind,
with its rudiment Life; Matter, with its element the electric charge;
and Ether, with its fundamental properties equivalent to elasticity
and inertia. Mr. Elliot will have none of this. For him there is no
reason to postulate other things than those capable of investigation
by physical science--the ether and matter are essentially of the same
kind, while all the phenomena of life are, if not at present explained
on a physico-chemical basis, yet ultimately explicable in terms of the
exact sciences. Life is a name for certain properties of protoplasm,
and the chemical reactions of life are more complicated, but not more
mysterious, than those of the laboratory. As for "ghosts, gods, souls,
_et hoc genus omne_," our author holds that "these have long been
rejected from the belief of most advanced thinkers." He traverses the
assertion of Professors Mach and Karl Pearson, that while science can
explain "how" things occur it cannot explain "why" (the point under
discussion depends, of course, on Mr. Elliot's interpretations of the
words), he pours scorn upon Herbert Spencer, Bergson, and all the
vitalists. Altogether the book is one of the most pugnacious defences
of monism which we have read, and will delight the bitter opponents
of all spiritualistic philosophies. At the same time the author
maintains that his philosophy is not materialistic, in the ordinary
sense, but a form of idealism, and this, of course, is true, in a way,
of any form of monism, it being possible either to say that the atom
of matter is as full of mystery as life, or that life is as full of
mechanism as the atom. It is obviously impossible in the limited space
at our disposal to criticise the arguments put forward on a subject so
complicated and controversial, but we think that nobody will admit
Mr. Elliot to be as unbiassed as he appears to consider himself,
judging by his remarks on the bias of the vitalists. His claim for
the support of the physiologists reminds us that Dr. J. S. Haldane
recently opened a discussion on the question, "Are Physical, Biological
and Physiological Categories Irreducible?" by a pronouncement in the
affirmative; the physicists also are not all monists. The question is
more two-sided than our author will admit. His science is unfortunately
by no means beyond reproach: to say that the charge on the electron is
"inconceivably immense" is either extraordinary inaccuracy of phrase or
extraordinary error, while to state that the electron has weight is to
assert something of which we have no experimental evidence. That light
is a vibrating motion of the same character as sound is incorrect, and
such instances can be multiplied. These things are not of fundamental
importance to Mr. Elliot's argument, but they show, to say the least,
a deplorable looseness of expression. Nevertheless, the book is worth
reading to all interested, either as friends or enemies, in the
monistic philosophy, and may lead some of those who talk so freely of
souls and mind to be a little more precise as to what they mean by
these terms.
ACCOUNTS RENDERED OF WORK DONE AND THINGS SEEN. By J. Y. BUCHANAN.
Cambridge University Press. 21_s._ net.
Selections from the papers of the author have already appeared under
the titles of _Scientific Papers (Oceanographical)_ and _Comptes Rendus
of Observation and Reasoning_. This third volume, with an English
modification of the title of the latter work, continues the plan of
that book. The papers are very varied in character, including chemical
studies, accounts of physical determinations, addresses on geography
and oceanography, more technical geographical writings, and short
articles on topics of general interest, reprinted from _Nature_, the
_Times_, and other periodicals. Many of the latter recall events of our
generation important, but already half forgotten, such as the stranding
of the _Sultan_ and the wreck of _Santos Dumont 6_. An excellent
feature of the author's _Comptes Rendus_ was the detailed summary,
with page references, provided for every article, and the same plan
is followed in this work. The author's work on oceanography is too
well known to need commendation--he was chemist and physicist to the
_Challenger_ expedition. His "Retrospect," the second article in the
book, gives a fascinating summary of the work done on that expedition,
and the other papers on oceanographical subjects are of great general
interest, and incidentally recall the great services of the Prince of
Monaco to that science. His general outlook, which lends such freshness
to all his writings, cannot be better expressed than in his own words
in a former book: "It was conveyed to me through an old friend and
former colleague that this contribution ... had done much to retard the
standardisation of research. I took it as a compliment. To standardise
research is to limit its freedom and to impede discovery. Originality
and independence are the characteristics of genuine research, and it
is stultified by the acceptance of standards and by the recognition of
authority."
It throws much light on the recent increase in the expenses of
publishing that, whereas the _Comptes Rendus_ was published in 1917 at
7_s._ 6_d._, the present volume of similar size and form is published
at 21_s._
BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
The _Studio_ special number, "Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs, by
British and French Artists," with Commentary by M. C. Salaman, is the
first collection, with any claim to comprehensiveness, of the artistic
work of the present renaissance of the woodcut. The woodcut has a
twofold employment: it may be used for pictorial broadsides or for book
illustration. It concerns us here as a means--I wonder if I ought not
to write the means?--of book illustration. Notwithstanding the great
technical advances made in line and half-tone photo-process engraving,
there is a tendency to return to the use of the woodcut for certain
kinds of catalogue illustrations, and, to a still greater extent, for
book illustration and decoration.
The half-tone process involves the use of so-called "art" paper,
_i.e._, a wood pulp or grass pulp paper as a centre, coated over with
kaolin or china clay, with a high finish, the glazed polish of which
reflects the light very unpleasantly. This objectionable paper, apart
from the incongruity of wash drawings or photographs with typography,
relegates this method of book illustration to utilitarian ends. The
line process is far preferable for book illustration, but in itself
it has no pleasant quality, usually very much the reverse, and pen
drawings are no more directly suitable for book illustration than pen
lettering is for use with type. The woodcut modifies the character
of the drawing with a discipline which produces a character more
in sympathy with that which type has acquired at the hands of the
punch-cutter and type-founder in its passage from writing; and the
same discipline modifies the artist's vision as well as the drawing.
Material, too, has its own character, and when the user is not too
clever this character becomes active in the work, not merely passive.
The wood block itself can contribute a valuable quality, and either the
knife or the graver is a responsive tool. The corresponding elements
in line process work are the zinc plate and etching acid, and they do
contribute something of their quality to the work; but it is not an
attractive quality.
The rediscovered qualities of the wood block have attracted many
artists to its use. They are producing work of great variety of
interest, but it is rather in the pictorial direction than as book
illustration. The work of Valloton elsewhere, and of Jane Bouquet and
Brangwyn, of Sydney Lee and Verpilleux in this _Studio_ special number
are examples of this. The work of Lucien Pissaro, of Charles Shannon,
and Charles Ricketts shows the right use of the woodcut as decorative
illustration, but their work belongs to the early days of this revival.
Dürer, Holbein, and the Polyphilus printed by Aldus are the great
exemplars for a pre-Bewick Brotherhood of the decorative woodcut. Where
work of a freer quality is desirable, Miss Jackson's on page 13 shows
the texture that goes with type satisfactorily. Miss Gribble has given
the right degree of formal treatment to the pastoral motives she has
chosen for tail-pieces, and makes them decorative without letting them
lose their interest and so become vapid conventions. Both Miss Jackson
and Miss Gribble are pupils of Mr. Noel Rooke, who has done so much for
the right use of the woodcut for decorative illustration.
The lithographs suffer much more than the woodcuts by reproduction. To
begin with, they are very much reduced in size, and they are printed
by a letterpress method (_i.e._, from a relief surface) instead of
from the plain surface for which they were drawn. The loss which they
suffer by these changes can only be appreciated by those who know the
originals. Both Mr. and Mrs. Hartrick's fine examples suffer through
the loss of the rich lithographic black.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
G. K. CHESTERTON
_Verse_
GREYBEARDS AT PLAY. Brimley Johnson. 1900.
THE WILD KNIGHT. Grant Richards. 1900. Enlarged Edition. Dent. 1914.
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE. Methuen. 1911.
POEMS. Burns & Oates. 1915.
WINE, WATER, AND SONG. Methuen. 1915.
[A reprint of the songs from _The Flying Inn_.]
_Prose_
THE DEFENDANT. Brimley Johnson. 1901. Cheap Edition in Dent's
_Wayfarer's Library_, 1914.
TWELVE TYPES. A. L. Humphreys. 1902.
G. F. WATTS. Duckworth. 1902.
ROBERT BROWNING. Macmillan. (English Men of Letters Series.) 1903.
THE PATRIOTIC IDEA. Brimley Johnson. 1904.
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. John Lane. 1904.
THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES. Harper. 1905. Cheaper Edition. Hodder &
Stoughton. 1912.
HERETICS. John Lane. 1905.
CHARLES DICKENS. Methuen. 1906. Popular Edition. 1913.
THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. Arrowsmith. 1908.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Methuen. 1908.
ORTHODOXY. John Lane. 1908.
TREMENDOUS TRIFLES. Methuen. 1909.
ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS. Methuen. 1910.
FIVE TYPES. A. L. Humphreys. 1910. (Reprinted from _Twelve Types_.
1905.)
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? Cassell. 1910.
WILLIAM BLAKE. Duckworth. 1910.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. John Lane. 1910.
THE BALL AND THE CROSS. Wells Gardner, Darton. 1910.
APPRECIATIONS OF DICKENS. Dent. 1911. (Prefaces from Everyman Series of
Dickens reprinted.)
THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN. Cassell. 1911.
SIMPLICITY AND TOLSTOY. A. L. Humphreys. 1912.
A MISCELLANY OF MEN. Methuen. 1912.
MANALIVE. Nelson. 1912.
MAGIC: A PLAY. Martin Secker. 1913.
THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE. Williams & Norgate. 1913. (Home
University Library Series.)
THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN. Cassell. 1914.
THE FLYING INN. Methuen. 1914.
THE BARBARISM OF BERLIN. Cassell. 1914.
LETTERS TO AN OLD GARIBALDIAN. Methuen. 1914.
THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND. Palmer. 1915.
A SHILLING FOR MY THOUGHTS. Methuen. 1916.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Chatto & Windus. 1917.
IRISH IMPRESSIONS. Collins. 1919.
[He has also written prefaces to the following:--Carlyle's _Past and
Present_; Extracts from Boswell's _Life of Johnson_; _The Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table_; _Sartor Resartus_; _The Pilgrim's Progress_;
_Creatures that Once Were Men_, by Maxim Gorky; _Dickens's Works_;
_Essays_, by Matthew Arnold; _Literary London_; _The Book of Job_;
_From Workhouse to Westminster_; _Ruskin's Poems_; _The Cottage Homes
of England_; _A Vision of Life_; _Meadows of Play_; _Selections from
Thackeray_; _Eyes of Youth_ (an anthology); _Extracts from Samuel
Johnson_; _The Book of Snobs_; _Famous Paintings Reproduced in Colour_;
_The English Agricultural Labourer_; _Æsop's Fables_; _Dickens's
Christmas Carol_; _Bohemia's Claim for Freedom_.
He has also illustrated the following books:--_Nonsense Rhymes_; _The
Great Enquiry_; _Emmanuel Burden_; _Biography for Beginners_; _The
Green Overcoat_.]
JOHN FREEMAN
_Verse_
TWENTY POEMS. Gay & Hancock. 1909.
[Out of print.]
FIFTY POEMS. Herbert & Daniel. 1911. New Edition, Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
STONE TREES AND OTHER POEMS. Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
PRESAGE OF VICTORY AND OTHER POEMS OF THE TIME. Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD. Morland Press. 1918.
[No. 1 of _Green Pastures_ Series. Cover and frontispiece by James
Guthrie.]
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD AND OTHER POEMS. Selwyn & Blount. 1919.
[Includes the twelve poems published in the last-named.]
_Prose_
THE MODERNS. Robert Scott. 1916.
[Critical Studies of Robert Bridges, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, etc.]
DRAMA
CHILDREN'S PLAYS
The hold of the Pantomime on the affections of the public is possibly
as strong as ever it was, but the character of those entertainments
has been slowly changing and with it the character of the audience.
Professedly I suppose the Pantomimes are for children, but except that
almost any entertainment will amuse children, owing to their extreme
curiosity, there is little in the modern Pantomime that seems to have
been devised for them. In fact, the Christmas Pantomime has of late
years come to have a particularly sophisticated and adult savour, which
is to be noticed in the treatment of the old fairy-tales--one or other
of which, in name at least, still forms the basis of every Christmas
Pantomime, although in a shape that would scarcely be recognised by the
compilers of _Grimm's Fairy Tales_.
This is particularly noticeable in the metamorphosis of the Witch who,
fatigued by the possession of mysteriously terrible powers, dwindles
into the obscene-faced mother-in-law. The sere old woman who turned
the seven white-horsed princesses into low stones, over which the moss
crept slowly, has become a gin-inoculated Widow Twankey, who dances
like a man and gloats over the highly-successful love-affairs of her
son as leading to more and better drink.
Pantomimes have always been less concerned with the imaginative, the
more-than-human, than with the extraordinarily actual. Some will
remember the artillery bombardment which was introduced one Christmas
during the war into a Pantomime at Drury Lane, which was, if I remember
rightly, superficially the story of _The Sleeping Beauty_. It was
good fun that bombardment, much better fun than are the majority of
these topical excrescences, but one felt that it had been introduced
because the principal comedian had got bored with the comparative sober
quietness of that land of imagination in which the inhabitants of a
fairy-tale progress as if seen in a glass darkly. He had, therefore,
deliberately pulled the story out of its semi-supernatural country
into the limelight, and was rewarded by instant mirth and vociferous
applause from nine-tenths of the audience. Only a few children
hesitated, feeling the pangs of a violent up-rooting, a being torn out
of a land, through which they had been slowly but with intense delight
travelling, into a mass of gesticulating faces ranged in circles
watching the elaborate and apparently comic contortions of two small
grotesque figures on what was obviously the stage.
I have no doubt at all that the instincts and judgment of children in
these matters is far superior to that of the majority of their elders.
The steady vulgarisation in the theatre of fairy-tales originally
the inventions of adult minds of phantasy and sensibility superior
to the general is a record of the debasing influence of the mass of
the inhabitants of our large cities, who are dissatisfied with less
than an instant reaction to the efforts of those whom they pay to
amuse them. They are too restless to submit to sit quietly and by slow
degrees receive the heritage of beauty accumulated by the ambages of
minds whose devious and amazed wanderings are like the apparently
directionless perambulation of bees who are, without pause, gathering
honey.
_Sinbad the Sailor_, _Aladdin_, _Ali Baba_--whatever they be, the
essence of these Pantomimes is something grosser than any fairy-tale,
and, whether borrowed from the brothers Grimm, or Andersen, or
any other source, their fragile and mysterious beauty is roughly
obliterated to give place to an obvious rough-and-tumble humour and
crude topicality of the kind that not one in a million could miss.
Of course the somewhat "hearty" atmosphere of Christmas-time is not
conducive to fineness of vision. The subtler outlines in which resides
the beauty of a fairy-tale, a girl, or a mountain are not to be grasped
by eyes slightly dazzled with the inner glow of good feeding--that glow
which has more heat than light. It is a time when a joke has to be
obvious to be seen, and the propensity to enormous girth perceptible in
the most popular characters of Pantomime may have a similar origin; but
I speak from a painful experience when I declare that for a Christmas
Pantomime nothing can be too crude, too stale, too trivial to be funny,
and that the best condition in which to go to the Pantomime would be
that in which you could see simultaneously the largest number of Moons.
The Change in the Pantomime
The Pantomime has become a sort of Christmas Revue, and parents
in large numbers have ceased taking their children to these
entertainments, appealing as they almost exclusively do to the
"grown-up." In their place we have had of late years a large number of
children's plays, of which Sir James Barrie's _Peter Pan_ is the best
known. It is years since I saw _Peter Pan_, but I was, I remember,
greatly taken with it, and went during that season five or six times.
Part of the attraction it had for me lay in the charming personality
of Peter himself, as played by Miss Pauline Chase, whose postcard
portraits I bought in large numbers and gazed on adoringly for long
intervals in the seclusion of my own room. But the very fact that
the play gave scope to a young actress to embody a figure of such
originality and charm as Peter must be accounted as a virtue in the
author.
I know there are people who object to fairy-tales. They have lately
been greatly cheered by the public confession of Madame Montessori that
she belongs to them. Apparently the essence of their and also of her
objection to such seemingly innocent and delightful inventions of the
human brain is that the most desperate need of children is for a steady
inculcation of facts. Having schooled your child in facts--writes
in a letter to the _Observer_ the gentleman who knows the Secret of
Human Power--in the pleasantest manner possible up to the age of, say,
sixteen, then the lessons to be derived from fiction may be gently
and cautiously dealt with. The spectacle of an adult dealing "gently
and cautiously" with a fairy-tale is one of those which seem to have
been invented as a subject for a Max Beerbohm cartoon; but it is
curious that anyone should have such a narrow conception of reality
as to think that it is compassed in material facts. How one is to
present love, honour, bravery, beauty, virtue, daring, adventurousness,
and all the other qualities of the human mind except by imaginative
creation, when they are purely creations of men's minds, I cannot
see. Perhaps these deluded realists imagine that they are abstract
nouns. They would have us say: "Here, dear children, are a number of
abstract nouns; contemplate them as you would marbles, but remember
that they are not marbles or even peanuts but nouns. You cannot play
with them, you cannot eat them, and what good they are nobody knows,
but everybody is supposed to know their names, as there is no other way
of distinguishing them one from another." This same champion of Madame
Montessori's Anti-Fairy-Tale Campaign writes further in his letter to
the _Observer_ that Shakespeare's plays "were not written specially
for children, but as morality incentives distinctly for adults." This
is a pitiful notion for any intelligent adult to have, and one that no
child with a mind not distorted by unnatural virtue could be expected
to understand. It is most expressive of that horrible "seriousness"
which seizes some minds like a cramp until the sufferer drowns himself
in an ocean of blithering nonsense, refusing all the ropes which the
onlookers on _terra firma_ throw him, because their faces are convulsed
with laughter. "Morality incentives"--to cling to the shocking
expression of Madame Montessori's disciple--are of two kinds. They are
either negative or positive. The negative class is the only one that
an Anti-Fairy-Tale League could put in its syllabus. It consists of a
series of ejaculations: Do not drink! Do not swear! Do not tell lies!
etc. Drawn up in an amended form suitable for children, it might read
like this:
(1) Do not drink your brother's ginger-beer.
(2) and (3), etc. Do not imitate your parents.
It may appear excellent advice, but virtue--as many religious teachers
have suspected and modern science is proving--does not reside in
turning oneself into a van-load of inhibitions. Virtue is wholly
positive, it is an expression of the spirit. He that imagines virtue
is virtuous, and no other. It is a fairy-tale that men are trying to
live in the world, and it can only be expressed in art. There is no
virtue in a mere exhortation to be virtuous. Nobody takes any notice
of exhortations, and quite rightly; but men who have seen a vision
will try to capture it. What the creative artist does is to give men a
vision of virtue, of beauty (for beauty is virtue), and it is just this
vision which the Montessori teachers would have us put behind the backs
of children while they glue their eyes to material things.
Not only would this practice be pernicious, it would be impossible to
carry out, for, brought to its logical conclusion, the theory would
demand the abolition of the teaching of mathematics and of science, as
well as of poetry and of drama; or rather it would reduce mathematics
to the counting of beads, science to the naming of smells (a return to
"stinks" from which the schools are just escaping), poetry to this sort
of thing:
Last night in pulling off a sock
I gave my little nose a knock.
To-day in jumping to get up
I fell across my brindle pup.
That is to say, poetry would vanish, and as for drama, the only drama
we could have would be by taking a proscenium into the park and putting
it up in front of two lovers kissing on a seat; but the moment the
lovers saw us the "drama" would cease, and we could not pay them to go
on with it for our amusement, for that would be deception, that would
be make-believe.
Those of us who are not by infirmity of constitution natural victims
to every new fad that is advertised will take pleasure in anticipating
a great growth in the supply of and demand for children's plays. They
offer great scope for development, and will increasingly appeal to
authors who have no desire to write the conventional stage play--a
thing without imagination or beauty, a mere artificial contrivance to
enable actors to exhibit their charm and skill. There is no possibility
of getting literary men of the highest class to write the plays we
see succeeding in our London theatres during the greater part of
the year. They could not possibly have any interest in work of that
kind, and they could not do it well, but the children's play is a
much more elastic and adaptable dramatic form. To-day, for instance,
even verse is used in successful children's plays, and managers do
not demand for this purpose work so conventional and stereotyped as
they require ordinarily. This Christmas there were three children's
plays produced in the West End: _Peter Pan_, _Once Upon a Time_, and
_Where the Rainbow Ends_. Of these only _Once Upon a Time_ was new,
and it was rather a series of fairy-tales--connected by the device
of an elf telling the stories to a goblin who captured her--than an
original work; but it was cleverly done by the author, Miss Wildig,
and delightfully produced by Miss Edith Craig. I must confess to
having enjoyed _Once Upon a Time_ far more than most of the plays
I had seen during the preceding year, but it was a pastiche not a
homogeneous invention, and it contained an absurd and very irritating
pseudo-patriotic melodrama called _The Woman of the Black Mountain_, as
well as an extremely amusing and rather savage burlesque of certain
marriage customs which are not yet quite extinct entitled _The Bone of
Contention_. This latter would make an excellent sketch for a Revue, or
possibly Mr. Oscar Asche will introduce it into _Chu Chin Chow_.
Demand and Supply
It is a great pity that the Pantomime has so degenerated now when it
had got rid of much of the knock-about farcical element, of a great
deal of the tyranny of the spectacular, and of the "transformation
scene," because it is a form that offers great possibilities to the
author, and if a genius came along he could do something wonderful
with it. Even without a genius or without waiting for him a great deal
could be done. If only those responsible for the annual Pantomimes at
Drury Lane and the Lyceum would leave the beaten track for once and
get into touch with the younger generation of writers and commission
them to produce a Pantomime we might get a valuable addition to our
dramatic literature. It involves very little commercial risk, and
holds the possibility of an immense financial success, apart from
other considerations. It may be asked why do not these young men write
a Pantomime on their own initiative? But the answer is simple. Our
young writers have no time to spend on work which has no prospect of
ever being looked at, much less produced; besides, a Pantomime is
essentially a thing for collaboration between two or three of them,
and they are nearly all as busy as they can be with bread-and-butter
journalism and with individual projects in those few spare hours that
remain to them. There is, however, little doubt that they could produce
a Pantomime which would draw all London for months, just as there is
little doubt that the Pantomime and the children's play are the most
promising and flexible of the dramatic forms which confront our young
writers. The Revue may be thought to offer almost equal opportunities,
and to be capable of development out of its present chaotic state,
but it is rather more restricted by the fact that it has such a large
public. To have the largest public is to have the least hope of
commanding the attention of your audience sufficiently for them to
appreciate what is not obvious. Besides, the Revue supplies a definite
demand which does not change from year to year. It is a demand for
pretty girls, pretty dresses, dancing and humour, and if there suddenly
appeared among us a greater dramatic genius than any that has ever
lived he would not be able to satisfy that demand as well as Mr. C. B.
Cochran, Mr. André Charlot, or Sir Alfred Butt do. It is the minority
that is not catered for in drama as it is catered for in literature.
Where are the thirty-five thousand readers of the _Times Literary
Supplement_ in the land of theatres? They are scattered in twos and
threes here and there, always dissatisfied and disgruntled. Whether
at a Pantomime, at a Revue, at a Comedy, or at a Drama they find the
entertainment a hundred per cent. below the standard they demand,
and their only pleasure is an occasional Shakespearean production or
a children's play. But they could be mobilised and brought together
to support solidly and without the fickleness of the large public a
theatre that gave them what they wanted. If the experiment were made
with children's plays they would be reinforced by the thousands of
parents who will not submit their children to the vulgarities of the
latter-day Pantomime.
* * * * *
The next performance of the Phœnix Society will take place on February
8th and 9th, when Dryden's _Marriage à la Mode_ will be given.
* * * * *
It is rumoured that Mr. Henry Ainley's next production at the St.
James's will be Stephen Phillip's _Paolo and Francesca_, in which Mr.
Ainley made his first success.
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
PROBLEMS OF THE ACTOR. By LOUIS CALVERT. Simpkin. 7_s._
This is a book which can be thoroughly recommended not only to every
amateur but to every professional actor and theatre-lover. It is full
of the most uncommon sense, and although Mr. Calvert has decided
opinions on voice-training, gesture, team-work, scenery, dressing,
music, and producing, he does not lay down the law with the evidence
of inexperience, but reasons his position from point to point with a
quietness that is far more impressive and convincing. Mr. Calvert has
also done more than he probably set out to do. The book is, in the
first instance, a guide for the young actor or would-be actor, giving
him a good deal of wise advice on the technical side of his craft.
But in doing this Mr. Calvert has written a book which should be read
by every theatre-goer, since it will increase his appreciation of the
theatre enormously by opening his mind to detail of which he was, in
all probability, completely unaware, although more or less conscious of
its cumulative effect. After reading Mr. Calvert's book he will find
himself itching to go immediately to the nearest playhouse and regard
the drama being enacted there with what he will feel are new eyes;
and since the standard of acting and of drama generally is dependent
largely upon the level of intelligence of its audience, Mr. Calvert's
book will be as beneficial to the theatre when studied by the ordinary
public as when studied by the actor. Finally, this book is an attempt
to put the actor again in his proper position as the pillar of the
drama. On this point I am in absolute agreement with Mr. Calvert. Plays
are conceivable in which the actor may be no more than an instrument
in the orchestra. I think they will be written, but I have yet to see
them. But in the plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans the actor
is first in importance, and scenery, dressing, music, and everything
else must be used simply as a background and a subsidiary to him.
Moreover Mr. Calvert makes a claim--which is also made by the late Mr.
H. B. Irving in an introduction--to the consideration of the actor in
his highest moments as a creative artist. This claim, in my opinion,
Mr. Calvert makes good, and if there are any people to-day who still
cherish the old superstition that the actor is merely a sort of clever
but shallow showman, then unless they are bigoted beyond the reach of
intelligence this book will dispel it once for all.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
War-pictures at Burlington House
One would have hesitated to predict success for a set of commissioned
war pictures: meaning success in the sense of excellence. In
commissioning any painting or piece of sculpture with a dictated
subject there is always the danger that the subject will be uncongenial
to the artist, that it may have no connection with his own intimate
experience. This is one of the disadvantages of portrait painting. The
artist is supposed to be capable and desirous of depicting all kinds of
characters, not to speak of flattering them. The novelist and dramatist
are more fortunate. People are anxious to avoid and also tired of their
revelations. But Mr. Horatio Bottomley still expects the Poet Laureate
to boom out the appropriate ode.
Besides the general objection there was the further feeling that the
war was a sufficient preoccupation in itself, and a disagreeable one of
such a kind that deliberately to set out to make contemporaneous art
about it would be not only superfluous but almost profane. It would
amount to gloating. The war was a foul and dirty job that had to be
gone through with, and the experience of concentrating on this was
enough. It was not without good reason that immediately following the
war the most popular forms of art were the Revue and the Russian Ballet.
Again, one rather grudges the large sums of State money spent on
war-pictures when one thinks of the comparatively small expenditure
on art in peace-time. And those two rich and influential patrons who
started the ball rolling with large contributions, did they before
the war, will they now after the war, patronise art extensively
and seriously? The motive may have been sound, but it was in all
probability very mixed.
But doubt and scepticism tend to be quashed by the result, which must
be admitted to be a very considerable success. The field appears to
have been so wide that the artists have been able to select the themes
which had most significance for them, and there is a direct continuity
in their present with their past work. Even pure landscapes have not
been ruled out. It is, in fact, far the best modern exhibition that has
graced the walls of the Academy for some time, and the memory of it
will still be fresh in the spring.
It is not meant, however, that the Exhibition is full of masterpieces.
It contains work that is representative of much of the best English art
of to-day, but the keynote of that art is talent, accomplishment, and
not genius. And this judgment does not exclude such well-known painters
as Sargent, Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Francis Dodd, Clausen, Orpen,
Lavery.
I shall, no doubt, be accused of iconoclasm, of indulging in easy
destructive criticism; and the term Futurist will be hurled at me with
such a lot of prejudicial glue on it that, although it is inapplicable,
it will inevitably stick. And I shall be asked if I would consign the
whole of the past to the rubbish-heap and abolish all tradition, and
so on. The answer is, emphatically and vehemently, no! It is precisely
because the past looms so imposing and ever watchful that the late
twentieth-century English painters are dwarfed. Place a Muirhead Bone
beside a Meryon (the comparison is not irrelevant, because there are
definite similarities between the two) and the Muirhead Bone will
disappear into the Meryon. Two possible exceptions in the present
Exhibition are _The Great Crater_, _Athies_ (280) and _Deniecourt
Chateau_, _Estrées_(284). Place a Sargent beside a Manet, Courbet or
Velazquez and Sargent's horses beside those of Géricault, and the
Sargent loses all vitality. Or, again, neither Steer nor Clausen
will stand very prolonged comparison with Constable or even Monet.
Practically the whole of English late twentieth-century art is derived
from Constable and from the French Barbizon and Impressionist schools,
and is inferior to it. The latter is the significant point. This may
sound too sweeping, and indeed it probably does leave out of account
the few gems which a complete collection would reveal. Still, the
fact of it being necessary to hunt for these few gems and not rather
to eliminate the few failures would confirm the general judgment.
We have never had anything like the great constellation of French
nineteenth-century art.
In reaction against the tendency of English Impressionism to degenerate
into the pleasant but slipshod æstheticism of a Lavery there is
the crude Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis and W. P. Roberts. It had
once a negative, destructive, rebellious value, but as a permanent
constructive effort it surely is a _cul-de-sac_, a mere mechanical
formula. Before any theory comes into play the primary test is whether
a picture really moves us, appeals to us. If Vorticist or Futurist
art did this, then no amount of argument refuting their abstract
theory could condemn the actual art. But, at any rate, so far as I am
concerned, this art has no appeal to me in a picture-frame. Indeed, it
seems to me to be becoming increasingly stereotyped, and it is amazing
that Mr. Wyndham Lewis should honestly believe in it himself. Mr.
Wadsworth's Vorticist design for a house, which was recently exhibited
by the Arts League of Service, absurdly unpractical though it was, had
far larger possibilities in it.
The most interesting work exhibited by the younger painters is that
painted in the more traditional manner--that is to say it is not
abstractionist. It is possible that on seeing for the first time the
pictures of the Nash brothers, Meninsky, Schwabe, Elliott Seabrooke,
one might mistake them for "Futurist" efforts. This is, however, not
owing to any distortion or abstraction, but to the fact that they have
in common with the abstractionists a certain restlessness of design.
Even when allied to absolute truth in representation, this trait might
at first sight appear novel and revolutionary. It is, or tends to be,
expressive of a new outlook.
Paul Nash's large picture, _The Menin Road_, is a distinct achievement.
It grips one's attention. Yet it is overloaded, the incident, the drama
of the landscape is piled on too thickly. John Nash's _Over the Top_,
on the other hand, attracts attention because of its very bareness
and simplicity. On a small section of a snow-covered front men are
stumbling out of a jagged muddy trench into rolling fog cloud. Yet in
spite of its success in convincing us that that is exactly how it was,
the picture lacks intensity and depth. We are grateful to Mr. Nash, as
also to Mr. Sargent, for having spared us the harassing agonies of the
typical old-fashioned Academy war-picture. But neither has altogether
succeeded in providing the real substitute. What such a picture would
be like still remains to be seen. For it has not yet been painted.
The distinctive characteristics of the younger school, its sense of
actuality, of lively conflicting movement, its combination of realism
with rhythm, are summed up in Stanley Spencer's _Travoys Arriving
with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smoll, in Macedonia_. In spite
of certain possible faults of perspective, this is a thoroughly good
picture. But although about a scene in the war, it is not of the war.
It contains an inner civilian joyfulness expressed in unhampered,
rhythmical activity. Equal praise must be bestowed on Henry Lamb's
_Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment_,
which possesses the same sense of concrete (not abstract) dynamic form.
The New English Art Club
There are two large pictures by Stanley Spencer at the New English
Art Club Exhibition which confirm the impression that there is an
immense promise in his art and already considerable attainment. It
has such depth and breadth, such spontaneity and comprehensiveness.
Boggle as we may at certain neo-primitive tendencies in his figures,
at certain humorous irrelevancies in their occupations, overriding and
almost justifying these eccentricities there is the fact that these
two pictures do immediately and irresistibly heighten and intensify
our consciousness: they give us a "silent and instantaneous flash
of collusion with beauty." The picture _Swan Upping at Cookham_ is
freer from the static archaistic convention than the pseudo-Biblical
composition, _The Sacrifice of Zacharias_, which is, nevertheless,
because of the landscape background, equally fascinating. In the former
it is the rigid mask of the woman lifting the cushion out of the punt
and the distortion of the shoulders of the dark-faced gentleman that
provoke criticism: in the latter nearly all the figures are a little
inexplicable, except (and here the realist will demur strongly) the
gentleman who is footing it gently towards Zacharias and the Florentine
gentleman who is indulging in a graceful and somewhat reminiscent
dancing gesture. These two are an inevitable part of that luxuriant
and yet refreshing scenery. Pre-Raphaelite will doubtless be the
derogatory term applied to Mr. Stanley Spencer, and it is true that he
has affinities with that group which started with such promise and then
proceeded to develop its vices more fully than its virtues. But Spencer
has not got these particular vices, an inordinate love of photographic
detail and a languishing sentimentality. His work suggests, rather than
actually contains, an infinite wealth of detail, and it is swept with
fresh country air precluding any Pre-Raphaelite hothouse languor.
Nor must we fall into the error of demanding realistic character
studies from an artist who does not see people from that point of
view at all. His outlook is nearer to that of Blake: his people are
embodiments of universal emotions, they are penetrated with a sense of
religious awe and beauty. Or, rather, this is what they would be if his
expression were to reach its full maturity and get rid of its present
archaistic obsession. His figures might still be stiff and intense, but
we would not notice this because of their profound significance.
HOWARD HANNAY
MUSIC
MR. ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN'S RECITAL
During the last few months the Wigmore Hall has been the scene of
some very notable recitals given by pianists of the first rank. They
had several interesting points in common. Their audiences consisted
largely of professional musicians, their programmes were generally
of a severe and far from popular type. Yet in spite of the somewhat
exclusive character of both programmes and audiences, so well adapted,
one might think, to the intimate atmosphere of a small hall, intimacy
was exactly the quality that in all cases was entirely absent from the
performances. Both with Busoni and Cortôt, and lastly with Mr. Arthur
Rubinstein, it was impossible to avoid feeling that one was at much
too close quarters. The difference between such players as these and
the more intimate type of pianist is moral rather than physical. Some
players give the impression that they are playing for themselves alone,
and that it is by mere accident that we happen to overhear them; the
others seem almost to assume that their audience will not listen to
them unless its attention is gripped and consciously dominated by the
overmastering compulsion of a powerful personality. If we are soothed
and charmed by the intimate players, we may indeed be uplifted and
transported by the men of might, but there is at the same time the
chance that we may be crushed and exhausted.
Mr. Arthur Rubinstein is certainly to be counted among the great
pianists, but not yet among the greatest. He is a player of outstanding
ability, but not of outstanding personality. He lacks Cortôt's
inspiring animation, and, still more, the monumental intellectuality of
Busoni. A conventional programme, or an almost conventional one, was
the index of an almost conventional mind. The usual Bach-Somebody, the
usual heavy Chopin; no Beethoven (thank goodness!), some modern French
and Spanish, a Liszt Rhapsody to end up with. What saved the programme
were the Spanish pieces and Liszt's _Funérailles_. If Mr. Rubinstein
had had the courage to offer a programme as individual as those of
Busoni he might have given himself a better chance of asserting his own
individuality.
To begin with the two extremes: the Bach transcription at the beginning
and the Liszt Rhapsody at the end are long out of date. Liszt's
arrangements of Bach's organ works may have been very wonderful fifty
years ago or more when there were not many organs in England on which
the originals could be played, even if there were the organists to play
them. To-day they are familiar to all of us. Moreover, the modern big
pianists play them too easily. They seek to reproduce, as far as they
can, the effect of the organ, and sometimes achieve a very remarkable
uniformity of tone, as faultlessly regular as any given row of pipes
can produce. But this uniformity of the organ's tone-colour is just
the obvious deficiency of that instrument, and the exact reproduction
of it on the pianoforte very easily tends to reproduce no more than
the relentless accuracy of the mechanical piano-player. Mr. Rubinstein
played his Bach-Liszt with intelligence and skill, and even succeeded
in suggesting a certain organ-like effect of sonority by means of an
ingenious method of pedalling; but in these days we should prefer
either a more astounding miracle of transcription or, still better, the
direct simplicity of Bach unadorned. Again, if it is still necessary to
end a recital with a display of fireworks there are surely more showy
things available now than Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies; and if we want
Liszt for his own musical thoughts, we want something that represents
him in a more serious mood. For the _Funérailles_ Mr. Rubinstein
deserves sincere gratitude.
Liszt's Hungary is only less difficult to believe in than Chopin's
Poland. It is true that Hungary exists, and true that in Hungarian
_cafés_ one may still hear the tunes which Liszt embellished, but such
underlying truth as the Rhapsodies possess is completely disguised by
their tawdry romantic theatricality. As for Poland, "if she had not
existed, it would have been necessary to invent her," for Paris of
the eighteen-thirties. That Poland, populated entirely by devout and
amorous aristocrats, is the musician's Mrs. Harris--no, his Countess
Harricka. Certainly the robust vigour of Mr. Rubinstein's playing make
short work of the languor and swagger of the Scherzo in B flat minor
and the Polonaise in A flat. All pianists are expected to play Chopin;
but there are not many works of Chopin that will stand the strain of
interpretation in the modern virtuoso's manner. The Barcarole is one of
the few which by virtue of its serene and classical beauty has still
been able to survive it.
MODERN SPANISH MUSIC
One composer stood out with unexpected prominence from Mr. Rubinstein's
programme--Isaac Albeniz. Albeniz is hardly to be counted among the
moderns. His training as a composer was mainly German, and he came to
a certain extent under English influences as well. Like Chopin, he was
primarily a pianist and a composer for the pianoforte. His songs, a
few of which have been heard recently in London, are pianoforte pieces
with a voice thrown in. He lives almost entirely by virtue of the
volume of Spanish pictures entitled _Iberia_. Mr. Rubinstein has spent
a considerable time in Spain, and it is clear that he has succeeded
to a wonderful extent in absorbing the musical spirit of the country.
There was a depth of poetry and passion about his playing of the
_Evocation_ and _Triana_ which he never attained in any other item of
his programme. Spanish music has at last begun to come into its own. We
can trace its development clearly in the successive stages represented
by Albeniz, Granados, Turina, and De Falla. Granados, like Albeniz,
writes on a harmonic system that is predominantly German, in that
German influences are the foundation of almost all nineteenth-century
music. Turina, a pupil of Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum, has
affinities with the French intellectuals. He is the chief Spanish
representative of chamber music. De Falla is more definitely one of the
moderns. All four are pianists--Turina less obviously so than the other
three.
It is easy to see the Spanish element that is common to the whole
group. Anyone can recognise the rhythms and turns of phrase that are
derived from Spanish national song and dance, the more so as all four
have drawn their principal inspiration from popular sources. But it
is to us foreigners that the Spanish local colour is most insistently
obvious. In listening to the music of any particular school we may
approach it in two ways. At first we are conscious of the school as
a homogeneous group; we notice similarities and look out for more of
them. This may easily lead us into error, for we are tempted thus to
regard as essential characteristics things that in reality are only
tricks of manner or stereotyped conventions of a particular place or
period. If we are to form a reasonable judgment we must be prepared
to ignore these and keep our ears open for differences. We must note
not so much the local theme that is common to all the group as the
diverse treatment of it which each separate composer affects. If there
is anything really Spanish about these four composers that is of vital
importance, it should be not the mere choice of a Spanish melody or
rhythm as the foundation of their music, but the method on which the
complete structure is designed and built up.
Here begin the difficulties of understanding even Albeniz and Granados.
The Spanish themes appeal directly to the foreign ear, almost too
directly; we might even dismiss them as cheap and obvious. It is
the treatment of them that is individual. One's first impression
of _Iberia_ and the _Gozescas_ is that they are rambling and
incoherent--yet it would be strange if a Latin composer should lapse
into a Celtic indifference to form and logic. Mr. Rubinstein succeeded
in making the Albeniz pieces not only poetical but lyrical. They
tempt a pianist at first to play them at top speed; their style of
piano-forte-writing suggests the rattling brilliance of the virtuoso.
Mr. Rubinstein avoided the error; but it takes a very skilful pianist
to do so.
It is not the local colour about Spanish music that we must respect,
but its grave seriousness of intention. Spain has always remained
artistically somewhat behind other countries, just as England has
done; and Spain at the present moment, unlike England, is not anxious
to be in a hurry over progress. Hence even De Falla, the most modern
of the group, is possibly a little old-fashioned as compared with
the modern French and Italian composers. Yet he is modern, in the
sense that he is intellectual and anti-sentimental, as compared with
Albeniz. This was very evident in his ballet, _The Three-cornered Hat_,
which the Russians performed all too seldom. But his intellectuality
and anti-sentimentality are distinguished and serene. He makes no
experiments with the purely grotesque, he has no desire to make a
complete and irrevocable breach with the art of the past, as some of
the French and Italians appear to do. Even in a traditional idiom he
has something genuinely new to say.
A SCRIABIN RECITAL
If anyone could have converted me to Scriabin it should have been
Mr. Edward Mitchell, who gave a whole afternoon of his works on
January 17th at the Westminster Central Hall, ranging from Op. 8 to
Op. 72. Mr. Mitchell is a player of extraordinary persuasiveness. He
evidently understands Scriabin, and is determined to make his audience
understand him. He has a very efficient and vigorous technique, and
plays with remarkable accuracy and assurance. No one could listen to
his programme without learning a great deal about the composer to whom
it was devoted. Yet in spite of a very well-chosen selection of pieces,
in spite of considerable variety of touch and style, the concert left
only an impression of deadly and morbid monotony. An afternoon of
Scriabin recalled at once to memory the effect of a concert of Hugo
Wolf's songs, or of Elgar's _The Apostles_. It was morbid and narcotic,
a perpetual command to abrogate reason and abandon one's brain to
feeling, to emotion, to a mystical trance. The emotional force of
such music is at times undeniable; what it sets out to achieve, the
representation of moods and emotions, it achieves overwhelmingly.
Scriabin has in the main three moods, a mood of violence and pain, a
mood of comatose oppression, and a mood of struggle, the last of which
is well illustrated by _Vers la flamme_. Perhaps this is all that some
people require of music. Others demand a sense of dignity and nobility,
with a conscious beauty of formal design.
Technically Scriabin can be summed up in a few words. His outlook
on music is purely harmonic. Even in his early works he shows a
partiality for certain well-known discords which he gradually comes
to use so often that the resolution of them becomes superfluous. By
this road we lead on to Stravinsky, Casella, and Malipiero. Melodic
tone there is none. This melodic poverty is very apparent and easily
demonstrable in the early works. Here Scriabin is obviously building,
or trying to build, on Chopin. But while comparing Scriabin with
Chopin, compare Chopin with Field. Chopin is clearly an advance on
Field in every way--he has a much stronger melodic line, and a much
deeper sense of harmonic values. But Scriabin is no advance on Chopin,
only a retrogression from him. He can only imitate Chopin's emotional
climaxes. He appears to be more interesting harmonically, because he
keeps Chopin's discords and omits his concords, roughly speaking.
EDWARD J. DENT
SELECT LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
ANTHROPOLOGY
TOTEM AND TABOO. Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages
and Neurotics. By PROFESSOR SIGMUND FREUD. Authorised English
translation by A. A. BRILL. Routledge. 10_s._ 6_d._
AN INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY. By the REV. E. O. JAMES, Vicar of
St. Peter's, Limehouse. Macmillan. 7_s._ 6_d._
ART
THE GARDENS OF ITALY. By E. MARCH PHILLIPPS. Edited by ARTHUR T.
BOLTON. "Country Life." 63_s._
OUTLINES OF CHINESE ART. By JOHN C. FERGUSON. Chicago: University
Press. London: Cambridge University Press. $3.
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THE LONDON
MERCURY
_Editor_--J. C. SQUIRE _Assistant-Editor_--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 5 March 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
As we write a deputation is to wait upon Mr. Fisher, President of the
Board of Education, in order to press the claims of a National Theatre.
"Why Mr. Fisher?" it may be asked--a member of the deputation was, in
fact, asked the question. The Board of Education cannot establish a
National Theatre; the Treasury would scarcely allow Mr. Fisher to make
a grant to the National Theatre fund; and whatever the advantages of a
National Theatre and the elevating influence which might conceivably
be exercised by the drama, few people think of it _primarily_ as
educational in the narrow sense of the word. The answer given to
the question was: "Because he's the nearest approach we've got to a
Minister of Fine Arts."
* * * * *
We suppose that in this special connection the answer was a true one.
The President of the Board of Education may be supposed to stand in a
closer relation with the drama than other Ministers, though had other
arts been under consideration other Ministers would have been thought
of. Had domestic architecture been the deputation's concern it would
have addressed itself to the Minister of Health, and within a narrow
range Sir Alfred Mond at the Office of Works actually performs some
of the functions of a Minister of Fine Arts. The fabric of the Houses
of Parliament is under his care; his predecessors, Lord Harcourt and
Lord Beauchamp, left their marks upon it. It was the Office of Works
which commissioned and supervised the later frescoes on staircase and
corridor at Westminster, and it is its business to see that alterations
are made consonantly with the character of the structure. But this is a
very minor thing compared with the vast field in which the Government
does at present exercise functions in which æsthetic considerations are
largely involved.
Let us, for a moment, ignore the things which might be done--such as
the subsidisation of a National Theatre--and think of a few of the
things which have been done, or are habitually done. At this moment
a Government department is supervising, or preparing to supervise,
the erection of hundreds of thousands of houses. These houses will
materially affect the architectural landscape. Design, the suitability
of materials to local features and traditions, these things are of
immense importance; what is done depends upon the competence, the
information, the industry, the numerical sufficiency, and the domestic
influence within the Department of the Ministry of Health's experts.
Many departments build, or arrange for building to their own designs,
numerous large public structures, or exercise, or could exercise, a
determining pressure upon the design of buildings erected by local
authorities. You cannot go many miles along the English coast without
finding a barracks, and when you find it you will not like it. We
have a complex of public museums which are the particular care of no
Minister. We have an immense Government printing business which is
directly under the Treasury; it is no powerful person's concern to see
that its publications are well produced. Our Mint produces coins, our
Post Office produces stamps, our War Office produces medals. The most
important medal ever produced by the British Government is the large
memorial bronze plaque which is to be given to the next-of-kin of
nearly a million fallen. The last, word as to the nature of this, and
the process by which it should be made, rested first (we believe) with
the Contracts Branch of the War Office, which has been incorporated
in the Ministry of Munitions. We have mentioned but a few typical
illustrations of the confused, haphazard way in which the State is in
operative contact with the Arts; and even then we have not mentioned
the most recent and striking instances, the commissioning of a large
number of war pictures by a "Minister of Information" who happened
to want to see contemporary art well represented in the Imperial War
Museum, and the employment of both British plays and British drawings
as "propaganda abroad"--the _Salome_ incident may be recalled.
* * * * *
Is there not an overwhelmingly strong case for a Ministry of Fine
Arts? We know there are always those who, when the suggestion is made,
drop the curtain in their minds at once with contemptuous remarks
about "official art." What they ignore is that we are bound to have
"official art," that it could not conceivably be worse than it is, and
that proper organisation would at least give an occasional intelligent
Minister a chance. Design at present is everybody's business and
nobody's business. It is not to be expected that even the most æsthetic
of War Ministers should much preoccupy himself with the "elevations"
of barracks, that the best of Ministers for Education should devote
his days to the physical appearance of schools and training colleges,
that the First Lord of the Admiralty should mind what his Stores
look like, or that even new Government buildings in the middle of
London, though they do engage serious attention sometimes, should be
anything but bad. The Office of Works itself, which actually builds,
is principally concerned with seeing that So-and-so gets so many rooms
and So-and-so has his partition pulled down. There is no specialist
authority in engraving or metal work. Ministers and officials sometimes
consult experts, but it is a matter of chance what sort of experts
they will consult. In no capital, not even in Berlin, are there uglier
Public Offices than there are in Whitehall, or more pretentious
ones. As for the immense amount of War Office building, the Guards
Barracks at Chelsea may stand as a type. We commend them as a medicine
for anyone who suspects himself of exaggerated national vanity. Our
museums are starved. Readers will remember the ridiculous cheeseparing
at Bloomsbury early in the war which, combined with the ruthless
occupation and closing of museums and galleries, reduced many able and
devoted public servants almost to despair. Had these institutions been
under the control of a Minister whose prime concern they were, they
would have had a higher status in Whitehall and he could have fought
for them, as it was no one's interest or business to fight for them.
* * * * *
We believe that in many regards a Minister of Fine Arts would preserve
us from the worst infamies, and that a good Minister of Fine Arts
would have great opportunities of doing more than that. For certain
things he should be directly and solely responsible to Parliament:
the art galleries and those museums which are not first and foremost
technological. It should rest with his department at least to sanction
all designs for public buildings erected by the central authorities,
and it might act in consultative capacity to other authorities.
His staff should include men capable of originating, obtaining, or
vetoing designs for any other department doing work in which design is
important. For the Stationery Office, though it be primarily a (not
very well run) publishing business, we do not see why that should
not be bodily transferred to him. The "format" of most Government
publications is disgraceful, both from the point of view of appearance
and from that of convenience, and were they better produced they might
be better marketed. We are not under the illusion that any Minister
of Fine Arts would initiate great revolutions in Art, but he could
certainly greatly increase our facilities and add to the comfort of our
walks abroad. And, where a subsidy for some definite object such as
the National Theatre is wanted, he would be as the mouthpiece of the
State and a Minister amongst Ministers far more likely to be able to
do something than Mr. Fisher or any other existing Minister. We hope
shortly to return to the subject, one of the few at all impinging on
politics with which we feel entitled to deal.
Several correspondents have written drawing our attention to the prices
paid at the sale of Lord Foley's library and to _Truth's_ comments
on them. The facts in brief are these. The Ruxley Lodge library was
sold locally; there were few, if any, bidders for the important books,
except a number of London booksellers, and the sums fetched were
deplorably small. All four Shakespeare Folios (the third imperfect)
were there. They fetched £100, £46, £28, and £20 respectively.
Two months ago the Britwell copy of the first brought in £2300 at
Sotheby's. Thirteen first editions of Shelley fetched £52 the lot, and
Keats's _Endymion_ and _Lamia_ volumes produced £7 between them. Some
valuable books were lumped in with bundles of miscellaneous books and
went for a song; it is likely that, with such cataloguing, many rare
and valuable works may have escaped mention except as "and others": our
contemporary goes so far as to say that "there is every probability
that in this way old books worth hundreds, even thousands, of pounds
were disposed of for a few shillings."
* * * * *
It is really deplorable that owners, or their executors and legatees,
should suffer thus. Nobody grudges dealers their fair profits, nor
does any one deny that a dealer, like anybody else, is entitled to
pick up bargains because he knows what the other side doesn't know.
But for dealers to combine at an auction in order to prevent a vendor
from having more than a tithe of the known market value of his goods
is another matter. We make no direct allusion to this particular sale.
We did not see the catalogue or the goods, and it is--at any rate for
the purposes of argument--conceivable that the best books may have been
in very bad condition. Nor do we suggest that there are not dealers in
London who keep outside rings and do not take part in "knock-outs." But
everybody knows that there are rings in all the important collectors'
trades, and that these rings frequently put up at auctions--and the
country auction gives them their best chance--the merest simulacrum of
competition bidding and retire to share out the loot among themselves.
In the new volume of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's Diary there is an account of
the beginnings of the late Sir Hugh Lane's career, given to Mr. Blunt
by Sir Hugh's aunt, Lady Gregory:
She apprenticed him to Colnaghi at a hundred a year, where he learnt
his business of picture-dealing. He began his fortune, she tells me,
by an accident. He happened to hear of a picture which was for sale
in some remote country place, and travelled down to look at it, but,
having no money to buy, although there was almost no bidding, he was
obliged to let it go for a very small price. When the sale was over,
the bidders, who were all professional dealers, went to a public
house, and he with them, and it then turned out that they had been
standing in together not to bid, and they held a private sale of the
picture among themselves, dividing the price realised between them,
and as Lane was known to belong to Colnaghi's he was included in it,
and got £160 as his share.
We have heard, we remember, that the picture was a Hals; at all events
this illustrates the sort of thing that happens. Not long before the
war there was a considerable disturbance about the operations of an
alleged ring at Christie's; there were rumours of knock-outs in which
picture-dealers shared out enormous sums. It was widely argued that
this sort of operation should be legally defined as fraudulent and
legally punished. That nothing came of the agitation, in the light
of the fact that every honest man (which includes dealers who have
been forced into rings) sympathised with the agitators, suggests that
investigation opened up more difficulties than had been suspected.
* * * * *
People are again urging a legal remedy. It appears to us that it would
be impossible to enforce a law preventing rings and knock-out auctions.
Nobody can compel men to bid against each other if they have an
agreement--verbal and private--not to, and though large gatherings for
a knock-out might occasionally be detected (but proof of guilt would
be difficult), two or three are entitled innocently to gather together
and can easily do so for purposes not entirely innocent. An occasional
bad sale in London is bound to occur so long as rich private buyers
continue their modern practice of not attending sales. We don't think
anybody complained about prices when the Huth Library or Lord Vernon's
rarities were sold, and we have been to many quite ordinary sales in
Chancery Lane or Bond Street at which scarcely anything went for less
than the owners had probably paid for it a few years ago. There are
usually quite enough outsiders present to keep prices up, and it is
only by accident that an agreeable little collection sometimes goes at
a sacrifice. Moreover a private buyer, if he bids, is not harried as
he is in some minor rooms where other commodities are sold; and some
of the biggest dealers, if present, act entirely on their own. Such as
the conditions in London are we cannot see much hope of change, unless
and until (as we said) there is a return to the days when peers of the
realm bid against each other for the jewels of the Roxburgh Library
and their friends stood by them betting on the results. But the most
calamitous occurrences, those which take place away from London, might
easily be avoided if owners or executors would have a little sense. It
is hardly conceivable that Lord Foley took really expert advice about
his books; it is certain that if he knew anything about the market
in old books he would never have had his put up at a local auction.
Persons disposing wholesale of valuables, books, pictures, or china,
from country houses should never allow them to be sold in the country.
At Messrs. Sotheby's or Hodgson's, though a bad patch may now and then
be struck, books would never go for the prices fetched at Ruxley Park;
and when a really important collection comes up the big American buyers
are almost invariably present, and the only comment likely to be made
on prices is that there seems no end to their possible inflation.
* * * * *
Last month we stated in this place that we had recovered a few copies
of No. 1 of THE LONDON MERCURY. These are now exhausted. We shall have
no more copies, and if people send us money for No. 1 we shall only be
at the pains of returning it. We would advise those who are anxious to
get No. 1 to take steps to secure it privately, by advertisement or
through secondhand booksellers. We have still a certain stock of No. 2,
and new subscriptions may still begin as from that issue. We repeat our
invitation to readers who will be wanting binding cases for Vol. I. to
let us know.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
The death, recently reported from Germany, of Dr. Richard Dehmel at
the age of fifty-six removes after a long interval the second of the
two poets who were admiringly regarded by their contemporaries as
rivalling the literary partnership which once existed between Goethe
and Schiller. The Freiherr Detlev von Liliencron, who died in 1909,
was one of the initiators of a new movement in German literature; and
of this movement his much younger friend was often proclaimed the most
distinguished ornament. Dehmel was the son of a forest official in
the Mark of Brandenburg, and it has been speculated, without obvious
results, whether there was not some Slavonic admixture in his blood
which was reflected in his work. But there is little in his career
which requires further brought explanation than the conditions of its
time and place. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, where he
took his doctor's degree with a thesis on a point in the business of
insurance, and he worked for some years as secretary to an insurance
company, a period of his life which he regarded as having profitably
taught him discipline and orderliness of mind. He developed late
as a poet. He himself said that he wrote nothing worth having till
his twenty-sixth year, and many of the pieces in his first volume,
_Erlösungen_, published when he was twenty-eight, were afterwards
discarded or altered. His works consist of several collections of
poems, which he continually shuffled and regrouped with every new
edition (he was inclined to rebuff critics who wished to trace the
development of his powers); _Die Verwandlungen der Venus_, a series
of poetical visions of all types of love from the highest to the
lowest; _Zwei Menschen_, a novel in verse, describing the elopement
of a librarian with his employer's wife; _Der Mitmensch_, a modern
play in prose, to which he himself attached great importance; an
elaborate wordless play called _Lucifer; Michel-Michael_, a political
tract in dramatic form; a collection of short stories; a collection
of essays; and a collection of tales and verses for children. Like
most of his generation he was subject to many exotic influences,
ranging from Verlaine to Przybyszewski and from Shakespeare to Pierre
Louys; and his works contain many admirable translations, those from
Verlaine being among the best in the German language. His own poetry is
pre-eminently didactic and he preaches consistently, in allegory, in
direct narrative, and in direct precept, the doctrine of self-control
and of the full utilisation of all human faculties. He had passion and
vigour, a not always active power of psychological discernment and
an occasional perception of beauty. He is justly reproached with a
certain brutality and vulgarity and, one might add, with strange lapses
of humour. His courage and determination are beyond question; but in
his erotic, as well as in his mystical, rhapsodies (which are often
combined) there is too frequently a disagreeable element of frigid
calculation. His obscurity is sometimes tiresome and unnecessary,
and many of his allegories and symbols are incomprehensible without
an external key to their meaning. Some of his lyrics, however, are
extremely beautiful: there are passages of insight and dramatic force
in _Zwei Menschen_; some of his epigrams and aphorisms are wise
and terse; and a strain of earnest sincerity runs through all his
preaching. In August, 1914, though his class was not called up, he
volunteered for service, and, possibly as a reward for a great deal of
patriotic poetry, he received the Iron Cross. He died at Blankenese,
near Hamburg, where he had lived for several years before the war.
* * * * *
Those many who knew the late Edward Thomas, who fell in France in 1917,
will be glad to hear that a memorial is being prepared of an admirable
poet and essayist. It will take the form of a volume, biographical and
appreciative, of prose and verse, and the contributors will include,
amongst others, Messrs. W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, V. Locke
Ellis, Edward Garnett, James Guthrie, E. S. P. Haynes, and Edward Rhys.
Extracts are given from Thomas's letters to Mr. W. H. Hudson. The book
is being printed by Mr. Guthrie, whose beautiful work as draughtsman
and painter in _Root and Branch_ has not yet had the full recognition
it deserves. It will be a quarto, set in Caslon Old Face type, and
bound in dark green cloth, with a device in gold by Mr. Guthrie, who
has also designed a frontispiece, title-page, and initial letters. The
price is to be ten shillings, and prospective subscribers should apply
to the Secretary, Pear Tree Press, Flansham, Bognor.
* * * * *
Lady Burne-Jones, widow of the painter, died early last month. She was
the author of one of the most readable and delightful biographies in
the language. Her "Life" of her husband was written vivaciously rather
than brilliantly, and it revealed in Lady Burne-Jones no notable gift
for literary creation. But her two volumes contained no dull page, few
slipshod sentences, and a life-like portrait of one of the most lovable
of men.
* * * * *
The next number of THE LONDON MERCURY will contain the first of two
long contributions by Mr. Edmund Gosse embodying his reminiscences of
Henry James and an article by Sir George Henschel on Interpretation in
Singing. Either in that or the next number we hope also to publish a
first instalment of the last diary of the late W. N. P. Barbellion.
POETRY
_The Senses_
Lo, as a garden-wandering bee,
The soul seeks out her immortality
From all the growths and blossoms manifold
Which in this life men hold
As things material: plying busy rounds,
From the world's odours, sights, and sounds
To fill her honied stores.
From the perfume acrid-sweet of dead leaves burning
When autumn sunsets into dusk are turning:
From the breath of damp stone floors
And paraffin, pervading the cool porches
And aisles of village churches:
From the tepid, flat, mechanic exhalations
Of desolate tube-stations:
From woody savours stirred when children wrench
Tufts out of deep moss-beds: from the subtle stench
Of bad cigars and household slops, begetting
Delighted memory
Of sunny towns in France and Italy:
From the stronger, tawnier stink of dust and sweat
And camel-dung which haunts the glaring East;
And the heavy, sweet, heart-piercing odours breathed
From pale large lilies and narcissus wreathed
Round some dear head deceased.
Such smells as these, and of the sights,
The gleam on blue May nights
Of the young moon in high ancestral boughs
Among the scant young leaves:
And in the wake of the moving ploughs
The shining earth that, as the straight share cleaves,
Turns flowingly over: and the half-seen sweep
Of the high circles and the looming hollow
Of the dark opera-house, where through the leap
And lapse of the music unseen hundreds follow
The curtain's slow ascent:
And the rosy apple-blossom on the bent
And knotted bough, against the blue of heaven:
And the sudden rainbows riven
By the salt breeze from the billows many-leaping
In the sunny Mediterranean.
And of things heard,
The cooling whisper of summer breezes sweeping
The grey-green barley-fields: and the echoes stirred
By music interwoven in some dim-lighted
Cavernous cathedral: and the eighteen-pounders'
Buoyant drum-beats and hisses and whoops united
In a hurricane-barrage: and the clear laughter and shouting
Of girls in old green gardens playing rounders:
And the ripple of fountains spouting
Over marble nymphs and dolphins drenched and cool
To the sun-splashed fountain-pool,
Where golden in the Tuscan sun
The age-worn palace sleeps.
But deep in all the immortal Spirit leaps
Unquenchably, the Imperishable One
To whom through all this multiplicity
Of scattered universes longingly
The Soul, world-wandering mendicant, upreaches
Imploring hands, and as an alms beseeches
The humble coin which buys that one small treasure
Beyond all worldly measure.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
_The Coming of Green_
Here like flame and there like water leaping
Green life breaks out again; in sunlight gleaming,
Small bright emerald flames through grey twigs creeping,
Little freshets of leafage shyly streaming
Among dark tangles. And sunlight grows serener
Daily, and wider extends the leafy awning,
And the green undying lawn beneath grows greener--
Greener and lovelier with lights and shadows dawning
Alternate, many-toned, born of the trooping
Of clouds o'er sun. Assembled Planes are bending
Long festoons high-hung and heavily drooping
From domes of luminous greenness. Willows are sending
Their fountains live and many-shafted swooping
Skyward, and lazily backward coolly showering.
Like tongues of flame, like water showering, dripping,
Green life slides down the branch, from bushes shaking
A verdant dew, or, out on a long curve slipping,
At the far extreme to a shivering soft foam breaking.
A spring in the desert, a fire in the darkness leaping,
Greenness comes transparently roofing and walling
Garden ways with an indolent downward-sweeping,
Or mounded high ... aspiring ... airily falling,
Or leaning fan over fan. A green and golden
Lucent cave enfolds us, cunningly vaulted,
With delicate-screened high chambers to embolden
Birds to flutter and sing or nest exalted
In swaying sanctuaries, and the lime-tree's clustering
Flowers to blow that the leafy ways be fragrant.
A dancing flood, a wild fire strengthening, mustering,
Over the gardens the young green life runs vagrant.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
_The Modern Hippolytus_
Not, like poor monks, with fasting and the rod
To mortify the flesh for fear of God:
Not, like Sir Galahad, to run to waste
In sentimental worship of the chaste:
Not, like the Puritan, to hug disgust
And feast on others' sins to quench his lust:
Not, like the saint, with dreams of future bliss,
Lost in a fancied world, this world to miss.
But, like Hippolytus, in pride to make
The body servant for the body's sake;
Spurning the Cytheræan's toils, who craves
With servile heart the passion of her slaves,
Freely to render homage unto Her
Who, being free, desires no worshipper:
To render soul for soul, without pretence,
Not wooing sense through soul, nor soul through sense:
To shun the twilight of the world's mistrust
Where Lust for Love's mistaken, Love for Lust,
And seek Diana's cold and hueless light
That knows no difference save of dark and bright:--
There lay the man's will: but the unborn child
Cried in the darkness, and the old world smiled.
KENWORTH RUSHBY
_Nature's Fruitfulness_
This summer on our yard-wall there does swing
A groundsel-bush from one seed last year sown.
A burnet moth, sun-wakened in the Spring,
Flew out and laid its hundred eggs thereon.
An hundred seeds each blossom on it gives,
An hundred caterpillars eat its leaves.
Its plumed seeds scattered by the wind now fall
Into our yard on water and on stone.
Here too the caterpillars over blown
Gyrate and starve, for few can climb the wall.
Next year again there will be one of both:
One bush of groundsel and one burnet moth.
FRANCIS BURROWS
_Almswomen_
At Quincey's moat the squandering village ends,
And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
Of all the village, two old dames that cling
As close as any trueloves in the spring.
Long, long ago they passed three-score-and-ten,
And in this doll's house lived together then;
All things they have in common being so poor,
And their one fear, Death's shadow at the door.
Each sundown makes them mournful, each sunrise
Brings back the brightness in their failing eyes.
How happy go the rich fair-weather days
When on the roadside folk stare in amaze
At such a honeycomb of fruit and flowers
As mellows round their threshold; what long hours
They gloat upon their steepling hollyhocks,
Bee's balsams, feathery southernwood and stocks,
Fiery dragons'-mouths, great mallow leaves
For salves, and lemon plants in bushy sheaves,
Shagged Esau's Hands with five green finger-tips!
Such old sweet names are ever on their lips.
As pleased as little children where these grow
In cobbled pattens and worn gowns they go,
Proud of their wisdom when on gooseberry shoots
They stuck egg-shells to fright from coming fruits
The brisk-billed rascals; waiting still to see
Their neighbour owls saunter from tree to tree
Or in the hushing half-light mouse the lane
Long-winged and lordly.
But when those hours wane
Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm
Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm,
And listen for the mail to clatter past
And church clock's deep bay withering on the blast;
They feed the fire that flings a freakish light
On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright,
Platters and pitchers, faded calendars
And graceful hour-glass trim with lavenders.
Many a time they kiss and cry, and pray
Both may be summoned in the selfsame day,
And wiseman linnet tinkling in his cage
End too with them the friendship of old age,
And all together leave their treasured room
Some bell-like evening when the May's in bloom.
EDMUND BLUNDEN
1920.
_Intimacy_
Since I have seen you do those intimate things
That other men but dream of; lull asleep
The sinister dark forest of your hair
And tie those bows that stir on your calm breast
Faintly as leaves that shudder in their sleep:
Since I have seen your stocking swallow up,
A swift black wind, the pale flame of your foot
And deemed your slender limbs so meshed in silk
Sweet mermaid sisters drowned in their dark hair:
I have not troubled overmuch with food
And wine has seemed like water from a well;
Pavements are built of fire, grass of thin flames;
All other girls grow dull as painted flowers,
Or flutter harmlessly like coloured flies
Whose wings are tangled in the net of leaves
Spread by frail trees that grow behind the eyes.
EDGELL RICKWORD
_The Soldier Addresses His Body_
I shall be mad if you get smashed about,
We've had good times together, you and I;
Although you groused a bit when luck was out
And women passionless, and we went dry.
Yet there are many things we have not done;
Countries not seen, where people do strange things,
Eat fish alive, and mimic in the sun
The solemn gestures of their stone-grey kings.
I've heard of forests that are dim at noon,
Where snakes and creepers wrestle all day long;
Where vivid beasts grow pale with the full moon,
Gibber and cry, and wail a mad old song;
Because at the full moon the hippogriff
With ivory-pointed snout and agate feet,
With his green eye will glare them cold and stiff
For the coward wyvern to come down and eat.
Vodka and kvas, and bitter mountain wines
We have not drunk, nor snatched at bursting grapes
To pelt slim girls among Sicilian vines
Who'd flicker through the leaves, elusive shapes.
Yes, there are many things we have not done,
But it's a sweat to knock them into rhyme.
Let's have a drink, and give the cards a run
And leave dull verse to the dull peaceful time.
EDGELL RICKWORD
_Night Rapture_
_For Florence Lamont_
How beautiful it is to wake at night
When over all there reigns the ultimate spell
Of complete silence, darkness absolute,
To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree,
In slow gyration, with no sensible sound,
Unless to ears of unimagined beings,
Resident incorporeal or stretched
In vigilance of ecstasy among
Ethereal paths and the celestial maze,
The rumour of our onward course now brings
A steady rustle as of some strange ship,
Darkling with soundless sail all set and amply filled
By volume of an ever-constant air,
At fullest night, through seas for ever calm,
Swept lovely and unknown for ever on!
How beautiful it is to wake at night,
Embalmed in darkness, watchful, sweet, and still
As is the brain's mood flattered by the swim
Of currents circumvolent in the void,
To lie quite still and to become aware
Of the dim light cast by nocturnal skies
On a dim earth beyond the window-ledge,
So, isolate from the friendly company
Of the huge universe which turns without,
To brood apart in calm and joy awhile
Until the spirit sinks and scarcely knows
Whether self is or if self only is
For ever....
How beautiful to wake at night
Within the room grown strange and still and sweet
And live a century while in the dark
The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns,
To watch the window open on the night,
A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs,
And, lying thus, to feel dilate within
The press, the conflict and the heavy pulse
Of incommunicable sad ecstasy
Growing until the body seems outstretched
In perfect crucifixion on the arms
Of a cross pointing from last void to void
While the heart dies to a mere midway spark!
All happiness thou holdest, happy night,
For such as lie awake and feel dissolved
The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool
Breath hither blown from th' ethereal flowers
That mist thy fields! O happy, happy wounds,
Conditioned by existence in humanity,
That have such powers to heal them!--slow sweet sighs
Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth
Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes
Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes
Of midnight with ineffable purport charged.
How beautiful it is to wake at night,
Another night, in darkness yet more still
Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs,
Filled rather by the perfumes' wandering flood
Than by dispansion of the still sweet air,
Shall from the furthest utter silences
In glimmering secrecy have gathered up
An host of whisperings and scattered sighs
To loose at last a sound as of the plunge
And lapsing seeth of some Pacific wave
Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs,
Rolls in to wreath with languorous foam away
The flutter of the golden moths that haunt
The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands!
So beautiful it is to wake at night
Imagination, loudening with the surf
Of the midsummer wind among the boughs,
Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote
Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep
To bear me on the summit of her wave
Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge,
Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised
Above the frontiers of infinity,
To which in the full reflux of the wave
Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam,
Borne to those other shores--now never mine
Save for an hovering instant, short as this
Which now sustains me, ere I be drawn back,
To learn again and wholly learn I trust
How beautiful it is to wake at night.
ROBERT NICHOLS
The Black Mountains, 1919
_Elsie Inglis_
Who is it lies here
Betwixt the wind and the water,
Whom all Scotland mourns
As a mother for her daughter?
"I was Elsie Inglis
When I trod the ground;
Now I am lying here
In a long sleep and sound."
What did you do, Elsie Inglis,
To prove your heart's worth?
"I laboured all my life long
To serve women on earth."
And what was it you did
Earned you this requiem?
"When men went out to fight,
I went out with them."
What could a woman do
In such unholy revel?
"Men fought with each other,
And I fought with evil."
When men fought with men
What foe could you hold?
"The foe they left behind them.
Fever, Famine, and Cold."
Which was the bitterest
Of all you saw fight?
"My foe slew blindly,
But men in broad light.
"My foe slew blindly,
The children with the mother:
My foe slew men,
But men slew each other."
MAURICE HEWLETT
_Sorrowing for Childhood Departed_
Who is there among us who has found the key
Of the treasure that is locked in the hearts of men?
Only the poet lonely in his chamber
Or the man remembering his childhood again.
Hearing gay voices, my heart is hollow,
An empty room with bright colours on the walls;
The speech of my brother is no more than a traffic
That remote and coldly on my dull brain falls.
I am deaf to the song in the speech of my fellows,
I have outwitted my childhood's desires;
And where have I travelled that to the far horizon
Dead in the landscape are earth's bright fires?
Didst thou ever murder, Macbeth, thy sorrow,
Didst thou ever murder thy soul's young joy,
Thou hadst never flinched from the life of another,
Thou hadst but with laughter stol'n from him a toy!
Would that a Spirit had stolen from me
The glittering baubles of my cunning mind,
And left me the sweet forest of my wondering childhood,
Its transparent water in tall trees enshrined.
Then was I happy. Love was my companion;
I was in communion with star and stream;
With bird and with flower I was linked in rapture,
We stared at each other--the valley's dream.
Out of the mountains we were carven,
Birds and flowers, stream, rock and child--
O but I belong there! I am torn from my body,
In that far-away forest it lies exiled!
There falls the water transparently shining,
Hangs there a flower that blooms in my eyes.
Long have I been ready! let me go thither,
And unloosen my limbs to those dream-coloured skies.
O that it were possible! but that land has vanished;
The magic of that valley has crumbled away;
Bright crowds are there only, the mind's cold idola;
And my footprints on the dead ground startle the day.
W. J. TURNER
SERVANTS
By MAX BEERBOHM
It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his rise from
their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite
race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in
great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their
hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship; so
that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising
from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must
have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in,
must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in
human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example,
ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it;
and gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as
well as in France. But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so
nimble-witted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world
without powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not
vanish from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, "'Tis a
matter easy to settle. Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches
shall powder their hair henceforth." Whereat his Lady exclaimed in
wrath, "Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel
of Abigails flaunting about the house in powder--oh, preposterous!"
Whereat Sir John exclaimed "Zounds!" and hotly demonstrated that since
his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its assumption
by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked
how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in
powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper)
went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this
they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, "Let
Powder be taxed." And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was
still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine,
and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath
many lives. Nor was there an end to those things which the Nobility and
the Gentry had long since shed from their own persons--as, laced coats
and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without these powder
could not aptly be. And it came to pass that there was a great War. And
there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the French one. And
it may be that everything will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or
it may be merely that Sir John will say to his Lady, "My dear, I have
decided that the footmen shall not wear powder, and not wear livery,
any more," and that his Lady will say "Oh, all right." Then at length
will the Eighteenth Century vanish altogether from the face of the
earth.
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is
deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously
footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have
declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows
from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining
_tête-à-tête_ with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many
as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high
figure--higher than in Rogers' day, and higher far, I doubt not, than
in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has
caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced
on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their
subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by
that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel
that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When
the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first
Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his Study,
lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into
the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened
his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some
fifteen years later, he said to his heir, "Discharge two more." Such
enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so
eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the
number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age,
hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and
blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done
nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing
just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming
less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform
Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of
footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman
not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and
a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.
Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have
taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets,
whether of good or evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all.
It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian
Revolution, and the whole spirit of the age, have so worked on the
minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in
their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen
will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even
be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious
houses, will presently be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee.
Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were
going _on_, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally,
and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War
shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even
on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live
to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by
that term, as a curiosity of past days.
You have to look rather far behind you for the time when "the servant
question," as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find
servants collectively "knowing their place," as the phrase (not is,
but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria's
reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards
still stood in the London parks to announce that "Ladies and Gentlemen
are requested, and Servants are commanded" not to do this and that.
But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land:
servants received commands, not requests, and were not "obliging" but
obedient. As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the
great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the
(comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of
the rapidly-increasing middle-class, were very much for use, having
to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem
nominal. And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving
much for little, or that the likes of _them_ had any natural right to
a glimpse of liberty or to a moment's more leisure than was needed to
preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they
were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over
their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having
found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only
by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she
would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The
chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming
her station in life. By the rules of all households, "followers" were
fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was
not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time,
after giving a month's notice; and she did not work for no wages at
all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and
elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of
money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had
no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a
tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl
and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her
restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour
from the second or third generation of her owners. As in ancient Rome
and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much
good feeling on either side. "Poor Anne remained very servile in soul
all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen
to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own." Thus
wrote Ruskin, in _Praeterita_, of one who had been his nurse, and his
father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But
Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when,
in 1885, he wrote _Praeterita_. Long before that date, moreover, others
than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.
Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and cumulous clouds. It was
believed, however, that these would pass. _Punch_, our ever-quick
interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate
the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano!
_Punch_ and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very
merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite
ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her
soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the face of Nature?
Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some
should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive
in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were
many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian
Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It
is unlikely that no English ladies were so in 'sixties. Pity, after
all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the "some" a measure of the gulf
between themselves and the "others." Those others had now begun to show
signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.
Anthony Trollope was not, like _Punch_, a mere interpreter of what was
upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and
subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget
that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon
do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer
conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must
often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given _Orley
Farm_? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir
Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? "As she slowly made her
way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had
now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I
trust but few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering"--and
here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he
seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon
be plain, ask you not to skip a word--"we call on the mountains to fall
and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with
an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these
moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for
their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept
silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the
entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in
the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible
to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her
in. This was her burden, and she must," etc., etc.
You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't
any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when
_Orley Farm_ was published. Servants really were "most desolate" in
those days, and "their sufferings" were less acute only than those of
gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well,
it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust
Trollope.
Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to
be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a
servant girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other
words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time
than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this
amelioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim
that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep
till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly
aroused, nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to
make themselves thoroughly disagreeable; and not even then will it be
up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience
at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am
afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I
am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to
decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or
from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it
is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping
through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering
all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I
should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's _History of Trade Unionism_
the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem
that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not
have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere
Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked
wonders. There has been no servant's campaign, no strategy, nothing
but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in
isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are
not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they
glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other
forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic
service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing
itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to
read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief.
Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in
1872--But there is no use in repining. What's done can't be undone. On
the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone. Housework, for
example. What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes, will
be big enough hereafter to get that done?
Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually,
and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing
classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers,
male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human
happiness will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of
human dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any
scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of
conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in
every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of
the community. She would be twenty years old, having just finished
her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years
would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet,
her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised,
but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her
own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct,
and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be
penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand,
made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred
to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their licence
to employ. There would always be chances of friction. But these chances
would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of
system which survives to-day.
Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain
tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all
their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not
knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while
they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere.
Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock
to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their
demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems
almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said "Sarah,
your master wishes----" or Mr. Smith said "Sarah, go up and ask your
mistress whether----" I am well aware that the very title of this essay
jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more
explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the
survival of domestic service in its old form depends more and more on
our agreement not to mention it.
Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all,
worth saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly
so ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile of
yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid's light brisk tread in the
corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman's shoulders as he
noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander
to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good.
But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle
cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well
enough, no doubt. I myself am old enough to have known two or three
servants of the old school--later editions of Ruskin's Anne. With them
there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never
wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long
years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much--a fine mellowness,
the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of
staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing the same
things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from deep roots,
and where they were you had always the sense of standing under great
wide branches. One especially would I recall, who--no, personally I
admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much indeed, but
I never was of that kind, and it's too late to begin to be so now. For
a type of old-world servant I would recall rather some more public
worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to
stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout
old hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. He stands there no more, and the
hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort.
Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather
say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful
form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the
hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as indigenous as the pond
there--that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through
by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable
dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the
flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to Highgate.
It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking, and on
Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he wanted
to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very loyal
to that village. In the course of his life he had "bin down to London
a matter o' three or four times," he would tell me, "an' slep' there
once." He knew me to be a native of that city, and (for he was the
most respectful of men) did not make any adverse criticism of it. But
clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and--horses rather than cities
were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of
men. But he did--and this was a great thrill for me--did, after some
pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when
he was a boy, "a gen'leman with summut long hair, settin' in a small
cart, takin' a pictur'." To me Ford Madox Brown's "Work" is of all
modern pictur's the most delightful in composition and strongest in
conception, the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great
pride in having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend
himself set little store on anything that had befallen him in days
before he was "took on as stable-lad at the Castle." _His_ pride was in
the Castle, wholly.
Part of his charm, like Hampstead's, was in the surprise one had at
finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to
districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there
an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to
butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them
that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it
is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger;
and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and
stout. At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed
into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that
followed they were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming
willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of the past decades
was undone: butlers were suddenly as old and stout as ever they were,
and so they still are. But this, I take it, was only a temporary
set-back. Since peace came, butlers have reappeared as they were in
1915, and maybe will soon be losing height and weight too, till they
shall have become bright-eyed children, with pattering feet. Or will
their childhood be of a less gracious kind than that? I fear so. I
have seen, from time to time, butlers who had shed all semblance of
grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a manifesto of contempt for
their calling and of devotion to the Spirit of the Age. I have seen
a butler in a well-established household strolling around the diners
without the slightest droop, and pouring out wine in an off-hand and
quite obviously hostile manner. I have seen him, towards the end of the
meal, yawning. I remember another whom, positively, I heard humming--a
faint sound indeed, but menacing as the roll of tumbrils.
These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers
observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless
as their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern
though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was
"a flame of old-world fealty all bright." Were these but the finer
comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost
dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch in
a merely æsthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his movements
were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control. Baldness at the
temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth face. It is more
than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a long period I saw
him often, both in town and country. Against the background of either
house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be that. Brett's supremacy
was in the sense he gave one that he was, after all, human--that he
had a heart, in which he had taken the liberty to reserve a corner
for any true friend of his master and mistress. I remember well the
first time he overstepped sheer formality in relation to myself. It
was one morning in the country, when my entertainers and my fellow
guests had gone out in pursuit of some sport at which I was no good.
I was in the smoking room, reading a book. Suddenly--no, Brett never
appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett appeared, paused at precisely the
right speaking distance, and said in a low voice, "I thought it might
interest you to know, sir, that there's a white-tailed magpie out on
the lawn. Very rare, as you know, sir. If you look out of the window
you will see the little fellow hopping about on the lawn." I thanked
him effusively as I darted to the window, and simulated an intense
interest in "the little fellow." I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett,
having done his to perfection.
What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so
much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique
was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply
for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special
memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control
over himself--but did he _really_ lose it? There were only four people
at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for
drollery) and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had
turned on early marriages. "I," said the young man presently, "shall
not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of
seventeen." His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, "Oh, Tom, what a
perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn't _born_ yet!" "No," said the
young man, "but I have my eye on her mother." At this, Brett, who was
holding a light for his master's cigarette, turned away convulsively,
with a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His
breakdown touched and pleased all four beholders. But--was it a genuine
lapse? Or merely a feint to thrill us?--the feint of an equilibrist so
secure that he can pretend to lose his balance?
If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might
be in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that
he was gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one
glimpse of him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out
late to visit some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and
sound; for Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time.
Not so much horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the
populous quiet streets and squares. One square was less quiet than
others, because somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I
saw the whistler silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep
from an open door, and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he
bent out into the dark night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a
great tensity--even of agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate
evening cloak. Brett's back must have conveyed to her in every curve
his surprise, his shame, that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry
in her behalf was such as Burke's for Marie Antoinette--little had he
dreamed that he should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon
her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of
cavaliers. He had thought ten thousand taxis must have leaped from
their stands, etc. The whistle that at first sounded merely mechanical
and ear-piercing had become heart-rending and human when I saw from
whom it proceeded--a very heart-cry that still haunts me. But _was_ it
a heart-cry? Was Brett, is Brett, more than a mere virtuoso?
He is in any case what employers call a treasure, and to any one who
wishes to go forth and hunt for him I will supply a chart showing the
way to that doorstep on which last I saw him. But I myself, were I ever
so able to pay his wages, should never covet him--no, nor anything
like him. Perhaps we are not afraid of menservants if we looked out
at them from the cradle. None was visible from mine. Only in later
years and under external auspices did I come across any of them. And
I am as afraid of them as ever. Maidservants frighten me less, but
they also--except the two or three ancients aforesaid--have always
struck some degree of terror to my soul. The whole notion of domestic
service has never not seemed to me unnatural. I take no credit for
enlightenment. Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of
the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of
one jewel: the sense of order. When I became a schoolboy, I greatly
disliked being a monitor's fag. Other fags there were who took pride
in the quality of the toast they made for the breakfasts and suppers
of their superiors. My own feeling was that I would rather eat it
myself, and that if I mightn't eat it myself I would rather it were
not very good. Similarly, when I grew to have fags of my own, and by
morning and by evening one of them solemnly entered to me bearing a
plate on which those three traditional pieces of toast were solemnly
propped one against another, I cared not at all whether the toast were
good or bad, having no relish for it at best, but could have eaten
with gusto toast made by my own hand, not at all understanding why
that member should be accounted too august for such employment. Even
so in my later life. Loth to obey, loth to command. Convention (for
she too frightens me) has made me accept what servants would do for me
by rote. But I would liefer have it ill-done than ask even the least
mettlesome of them to do it better, and far liefer, if they would only
be off and not do it at all, do it for myself. In Italy--dear Italy,
where I have lived much--servants do still regard service somewhat in
the old way, as a sort of privilege; so that with Italian servants I
am comparatively at my ease. But oh, the delight when on the afternoon
of some local _festa_ there is no servant at all in the little house!
Oh, the reaction, the impulse to sing and dance, and the positive
quick obedience to that impulse! Convention alone has forced me to
be anywhere a master. Ariel and Caliban, had I been Prospero on that
island, would have had nothing to do and nothing to complain of; and
Man Friday on that other island would have bored me, had I been Crusoe.
When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave, I promptly
freed you.
Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather
lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go
about doing just as he pleased--short of altering any of the things to
which I have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those
things, and I should be glad were there no more of it.
W. N. P. BARBELLION[26]
[26] _The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Enjoying Life
and Other Essays._ By W. N. P. Barbellion. Chatto &
Windus. 6_s._ net each.
By EDWARD SHANKS
When _The Journal of a Disappointed Man_ was first published in March,
1919, the suspicious circumstances that it contained an introduction by
Mr. H. G. Wells, and purported to be written by a young assistant in
the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, immediately produced
the impression that it was a fictitious work, composed by Mr. Wells
himself. He was known at that time, from other books acknowledged to be
his, to be feeling a particular interest in the philosophical problem
of human suffering; he had done something of the kind before, and many
readers, it may be conjectured, unconsciously found it a relief to
suppose that this almost unbearably tragic history had been invented.
But the impression could not long survive a careful study of the book.
The author's identity was soon guessed at by a few persons who knew him
and suspected by some who had heard of him; and presently Mr. Wells
wrote to a newspaper to say that the only fictitious details in the
Journal were the author's name and the date of his death, there given
as December 31st, 1917. This date was in fact incorrect by nearly two
years. Bruce Frederick Cummings lived until October 30th, 1919, that is
to say for seven months after the publication of his diary.
Thus it comes about that the later part of it, which has not yet been
printed, contains many references to his critics, in whose opinions he
was deeply and frankly interested. He remarks again and again on the
ordinary incompetence of reviewers, the usual complaint of an author,
but especially poignant here. He mentions, once in a letter and once in
the diary, an imbecile who thought that he was "a social climber"; and
he welcomes with joy the first writer who seemed to him to have read
the book carefully. But among all these references to his work there is
none more illuminating than the last entry he ever made:
Friends and relatives say I have not drawn my true self. But that's
because I've taken my clothes off and they can't recognise me stark!
The Book is a self-portrait in the nude.
Thus, with this final self-explanation, he ends his work. The last
two words stand alone at the top of a left-hand page, and opposite
them in the book lies the blotting-paper he used. He had often before
said farewell to his Journal. Once it was in a fit of disgust with it
and himself, and he took it up again to record the discovery that
he was suffering from an incurable disease. Once again, owing to the
paralysis of his right hand, writing became too painful for him, and
he thought this the hardest and shrewdest stroke of fate to deprive
him of his secret consolation. Last, under the date May 25th, 1919, he
made an entry of four pages, chiefly supplementing earlier entries, and
concluded with the words, large and scrawled, but legible: "This is
the end. I am not going to keep a diary any more." Then on June 1st,
without explanation, he made a long entry, recalling an experience
of early life, and on June 3rd the very last, which I have quoted.
He desired that at the end should be written, "The rest is silence,"
for an inscription on the base of his "self-erected monument."
Genuine self-portraits in the nude occur very rarely in the history
of literature. This is a picture of a man of genius superbly drawn by
himself. It is an astonishing book about an astonishing man.
Barbellion was born on September 7th, 1889, and was the third son of
a reporter employed by a newspaper in a Devonshire town. He was able
to remember the first time a bird's nest was ever shown to him; but a
passion for natural history became very early the most important part
of his life. He was articled as a boy to his father's unattractive and
uncongenial profession. He nevertheless continued to pursue his passion
with an extraordinary energy and strength of will, and was determined
to secure somehow or other an entrance into the desired career. He was
otherwise and exactingly occupied and he was entirely self-taught;
and in 1910, just when by great good fortune he had been offered, and
had accepted, a post in the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, his father's
health broke down altogether, compelling him to renounce this dazzling
but ill-paid opportunity. But in the following year he won in open
competition an appointment in the Natural History Museum, which
justified the abandonment of journalism.
In 1909 there first appears in the diary the definite indication of a
theme which was soon to rival natural history in importance and at last
most horribly to overwhelm it.
Feeling ill--like a sloppy tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the
Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly
scan magazines in the Library and occasionally rink--with palpitation
of the heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness
and uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.
After this the subject of his health is rarely absent for many
pages together. The deaths of his father and mother deepened the
preoccupation, and Barbellion's symptoms and dreads were almost
infinite in their variety. He suffered from intermittent action of
the heart, from nervous weakness, and from dyspepsia; he feared now
paralysis, now blindness, now consumption. The thought of death
was constantly with him, but until the end he could not be sure in
what form it would come. Sometimes he longed for it to finish his
sufferings, sometimes he hoped it would linger enough to allow him to
complete the work he had in hand.
Meanwhile, amid the unescapable and agonising reflections which this
condition induced, another side of his nature was being developed.
In 1910 there is an entry which again is like the first tentative
introduction of a musical theme in a symphony:
I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the
Park, in the dark, kissing her, I was testing and experimenting with
a new experience.
He was not, of course, by any means so callous and inhuman as this
brief note might make him appear; but he was immensely curious
about himself and about other people, and immensely greedy for new
sensations. He dabbled a good deal in love-making, and his dabbling
was prompted partly by the natural pressure of the senses, partly by
curiosity. At last he fell in love, could not make up his mind whether
he wanted to marry, made it up and was rejected, felt relieved, then
unhappy, renewed his suit and was accepted. In September, 1915, he was
married. A few weeks before, during a holiday at Coniston, boisterously
prosecuted with his usual reckless disregard of his weak health, he
had fallen and jarred his spine, and this had brought on a partial
paralysis which filled him with the gloomiest thoughts and seemed to
suggest the cancellation of all his plans. But his doctor made light of
the matter and the marriage took place.
In the following November, having formally presented himself for
recruitment, he was led by curiosity to read the sealed certificate
written by his own doctor, not supposing that its being sealed had
any particular significance. Thus he discovered, while sitting in a
railway-carriage, that eighteen months before he had shown the first
symptoms of a terrible and incurable disease and that this had been
concealed from him, though it had been communicated to his relatives.
He found later that it had been known to his wife before their marriage
and also that his fall at Coniston had reawakened activity among the
bacteria and hastened the end. In 1916 his daughter was born, and in
July of the following year his rapidly failing strength compelled him,
after ineffectual periods of sick leave, to resign his appointment at
the Museum. His health varied; he grew worse and recovered a little,
but never recovered what he had lost. He prepared his diary for
publication, but the publishers who had accepted it became afraid of
it when it was partly set up in type and asked to be relieved of the
undertaking. Another publisher was found. The book appeared, and its
reception did something to soften the miseries of his last months.
How profound and unremitting were these miseries, and how he bore them,
is shown in the last section of the diary. His disease was painful and
the end certain. He had a wife, who was often fatigued and ill, and
a child, and he had next to no money. The strain of witnessing his
sufferings, as well as the necessity of earning her living, made it
imperative that his wife should spend long periods of time away from
him. In 1919 there was an idea that a certain prolonged and troublesome
treatment might possibly, though only possibly, effect an improvement.
But he did not care to be experimented with then. He was already
dead, he said, it was too late, he could not bear the burden of a
fresh hope. He continued to be tortured by the long-drawn-out agony of
his dissolution, by the defeat of all his ambitions, and by the black
prospects of his wife and child. But the success of his book brings a
curiously sweeter and gentler note into the diary, a note most poignant
to the reader who could understand his refusing to be grateful for
anything.
I am still miserable [he writes], especially on E.'s account--that
dear, brave woman. But I have suffered a _change_. My whole soul
is sweetened by the love of those near and dear to me, and by the
sympathy of those reading my book.
Grants were made to him out of various funds, and, just before his
death, a committee of distinguished literary men was formed to see that
his wife and child did not want. This in particular touched him to
gratitude, and he died proud and happy in the thought that those who
should have been dependent on him had so many good friends to serve
them instead. A few hours before the end he said to his brother, "You
will soon be able to blow the trumpets and bang the brasses"; but his
eyes were full of a pathetic desire to have it denied.
It is not difficult to understand the complaint made by his friends
and relatives that he had drawn a misleading portrait of himself, any
more than it is difficult to understand his own protest that he had
drawn himself with the clothes off. Both points of view are exceedingly
natural, and perhaps it is possible for a disinterested observer
to see in the diary the whole truth which could not be immediately
obvious either to himself or to those who were closely connected with
him. We need not involve ourselves very deeply in the theories of
psycho-analysis to make the point that a man who keeps a journal will
use it very largely to put down what he can say nowhere else, and to
express that side of him which cannot be expressed in the ordinary
world. Why else indeed should he keep a journal? It is thus that
arise apparent contradictions between the outward appearance and the
confession. On one occasion Barbellion says:
I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid
exterior. I quail often before stupid but overbearing persons who
consequently never realise my contempt of them.... Of course, to
intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world),
I can always give free vent to my feelings and I do so in privacy
with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some
compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint
in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude
of my existence, at my _double-facedness_, and the remarkable
contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my
friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially
constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate
behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part
in life--to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful
sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish
mumming--then this Journal would be quite unnecessary.
No man who is a hero to himself stands a very good chance of seeming
a hero to other people. But in this passage Barbellion not only shows
the difference between his appearance and his self-portraiture, but
also directs attention to one of the factors which make his diary so
extraordinary a document. He was aware of the contrast between what he
allowed the world to see and the rest of his nature; but this contrast
remained profoundly mysterious to himself. He understood himself
enough to be able to describe himself, but not so thoroughly that the
knowledge could remove all curiosity; and, in fact, while he knew much
of his own character that no one else knew, there was left something
over of which he was ignorant.
He once said:
I am apparently a triple personality: (1) The respectable youth. (2)
The foul-mouthed commentator and critic. (3) The real but unknown I.
Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same
tenement.
One might also say that the reader of the diary discovers another
triple personality: (1) Barbellion as he must have seemed to
others. (2) Barbellion as he thought he seemed to others. (3) The
real Barbellion, not fully known even to himself, yet, between his
appearance and his confessions, for ever unconsciously betraying
himself. In actual fact, he was, it is agreed by all who knew him, a
man of enormous, almost dæmonic force of character. I have already
alluded to the reckless vigour with which he drove his failing body
through all manner of tasks and difficulties, and this trait in him
gives a fair idea of his spirit. From boyhood onward he was weakened
by continual ill-health. The diary is full of medical observations and
forebodings, but no one, not even his family, realised how constantly
the fear of sickness and death attended him. He never mentioned his
health save in a tone of cheerful cynicism: he never pampered himself
or allowed himself to be pampered. In spite of his palpitating heart,
he exposed himself to fatigues and performed feats of endurance which a
sound man might well have avoided. He worked furiously and unceasingly.
He kept his balance and his courage under staggering blows of
ill-fortune. Never was there so impossible an ambition as that of this
sickly youth in a provincial town, already chained to the dreary work
of a reporter, who desired, without any help, without even any decent
opportunities for self-instruction, to obtain a scientific appointment.
Yet he overcame these obstacles and his ambition was fulfilled. And
when this was taken from him, when nothing was left but a few painful
months of life and his Journal, when it was infinite labour even to
trace a few words on the page, he continued the self-portrait which had
become his last ambition as long as he could hold a pen at all. The
straggling, irregularly-formed letters which sprawl across the paper
are the last witnesses of his invincible courage.
And to others this timid and cowardly young man seemed strong,
masterful, difficult to manage, frightening, sometimes savage and
bitter in conversation, but always magnetic and fascinating. "I know,"
he says, "I am not prepossessing in appearance--my nose is crooked
and my skin is blotched." In reality his height, his distinction
of bearing and fine hair produced an immediate effect of good
looks--which, with the emaciation of his final days, changed into an
austere and painful beauty. He had particularly beautiful hands, and
his photographs certainly represent him as being not only noticeable
but also attractive. The disparity between what he says of himself
and what others thought of him involves no real contradiction. He is
writing of the hidden and secret personality whom no one else knew, and
the fact that no one else could know this personality, save by his own
deliberate act of revelation, is another proof of his strength. He is
describing the other side of the moon.
His ambition was the one part of his secret life which was too great
and too violent for even him to hide altogether. He might doubt his own
qualities, but he could not conceal from himself or from others what he
desired to be and to do. His ambitions were, he thought, very soon and
very easily defeated, but the title he gave to his book, a catchpenny
title, as he owned, and something wanting in sincerity, confessed to
a graver defeat than he actually sustained. His achievements were not
great in bulk. His scientific triumph was the triumph of reaching a
self-proposed aim in spite of almost impossible obstacles; but it was
worth less in itself than as a witness to character. He might have
become one of the greatest of English biologists; but promise is only
promise, and this, besides, is promise of a kind with which we are not
concerned here. "In time," he once said, "I should have revolutionised
the study of Systematic Zoology." But he was not allowed time, and his
scientific observations will be amplified, superseded, heaped under at
last by an accumulation of the work of his successors. In literature
his position is very different.
When his book was being prepared for publication and while he was still
ignorant what reception it would have he remarked without hesitation
that he "liked to look at himself posthumously as a writer"; and it
appears from the introduction to _Enjoying Life_ that his friends had
long before expected him to turn his whole attention to literature.
Even here his work is comprised in small space. It consists of three
things: the published _Journal of a Disappointed Man_, containing
extracts from his diaries between 1903 and 1917, the posthumous volume,
_Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains_, containing, together with
a number of essays and articles, long passages omitted for the sake
of space from the previous book, and the still unpublished diary from
the beginning of 1918 onwards. Even from this certain deductions
must be made. The scientific articles in the second volume were only
just worth reprinting; and the essays on journal-writers and the two
short stories, though they are promising, are yet no more than the
experiments of a man who was considering giving himself formally to the
profession of literature. But when all these deductions are made there
is a residue which is unique in value.
In the introduction to the first volume Mr. Wells very comprehensively
lays stress on the circumstances of Barbellion's fate. He represents
the diarist as saying, "You shall have at least one specimen carefully
displayed and labelled. Here is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk
about life and the rewards of life and the justice of life and its
penalties, what you say must square with this." This is, of course, an
aspect of the matter which no reader could manage to overlook, even
if he desired (as he might conceivably desire) to do so. It would be
a pity, however, if we were to consider it to the exclusion of every
other aspect. Barbellion was not essentially a _specimen_ who by good
luck had the ability to display and label himself. If his circumstances
had been quite other than they were, he would still have been a
remarkable man and would almost certainly have done remarkable work.
His disease and death ought to play the same part in our conception of
him that they do in our conception of Keats, with whom, besides, he
had certain affinities which he half-consciously recognised. We do not
know what part disease played in creating or forcing or conditioning
Keats's genius; we only know that it infuses a poignancy and a colour
into our picture of his life. He does not appear to us as the diseased
poet, but as a poet who, as it happened, was stricken with disease.
So with Barbellion: he had a personality and a gift for describing
his experiences; and, since it fell out that his experiences were
tragic, therefore the story he tells is a tragedy. But the tragedy is
not interesting only as such. It is interesting because the principal
figure in it is Barbellion.
The comparison with Keats is natural, is suggestive, and can be
supported by a number of particulars, both accidental and essential.
"Since the fateful November 27th," says Barbellion, "my life has become
entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing
it with posthumous joys." Keats writes in his last letter, from Rome,
"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I
am leading a posthumous existence." But there is a closer similarity
between them than the superficial parallel suggested by their use of
the same word. Barbellion himself made the comparison more than once,
and once in a very significant context.
You can search all history [he exclaims] for an ambition more
powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor Wilhelm
II., nor Keats.
And this uncontrollable ambition in both of them was one manifestation
of the innermost ruling characteristic which they had in common, the
passion for life in all its shapes and forms, for all the sensations
life can bring, which inspires Barbellion's Journal as surely as it
inspires Keats's poetry and letters.
The title of Barbellion's second book was not, as it might seem,
intended in irony. He enjoyed life to a terrifying degree and could
abandon himself to the ecstasy which it produced in him.
As you say [he writes in a letter, referring to a review of the
Journal] the rest of the notice distinguishing Marie Bashkirtseff
from me by her zest for life is an astonishing and ludicrous
misreading. Why, even since I became bedridden, as you will see
one day, my zest for life took a devil of a lot of killing--like a
sectioned worm with all the parts still wriggling....
In the last part of the diary his assertion is amply proved. Here the
zest for life, in a man who could no longer indulge it save in memory,
is sublimated to a piercing but sweet lyrical cry, which is one of the
most moving utterances in literature. Before, when he was in possession
of all his faculties, when the shadow of illness could sometimes be
forgotten, it is a rapturous and boisterous expression of infinite
energy, high spirits and gusto. Almost any paragraph in the essay
called _Enjoying Life_ would serve to demonstrate this:
"Dans littérature," said M. Taine, "j'aime tout." I would shake
his hand for saying that, and add: "In life, Monsieur, as well."
All things attract me equally. I cannot concentrate. I am ready to
do anything, go anywhere, think anything, read anything. Wherever
I hitch my waggon I am confident of an adventurous ride. Somebody
says, "Come and hear some Wagner." I am ready to go. Another, "I
say, they are going to ring the bull"--and who wants to complete his
masterpiece or count his money when they are going to ring the bull?
I will go with you to Norway, Switzerland, Jericho, Timbuctoo. Talk
to me about the Rosicrucians or the stomach of a flea and I will
listen to you. Tell me that the Chelsea Power Station is as beautiful
as the Parthenon at Athens and I'll believe you. Everything is
beautiful, even the ugly--why did Whistler paint the squalor of the
London streets, or Brangwyn the gloom of a steam-crane? To subscribe
to any one particular profession, mode of life, doctrine, philosophy,
opinion, or enthusiasm, is to cut oneself off from all the rest--I
subscribe to all. With the whole world before you, beware lest the
machinery of education seizes hold of the equipotential of your youth
and grinds you out the finished product! You were a human being to
start with--_now_, you are only a soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor.
Leonardo da Vinci, racked with frustrate passion after the universal,
is reported to have declared that only to do one thing and only to
know one thing was a disgrace, no less.
_Crying for the Moon_, the essay which follows, also extracted from the
Journal, is the obverse of the same coin:
I am passing through the world swiftly and have only time to live my
own life. I am cut off by my own limitations and environment from
knowing much or understanding much. I know nothing of literature
and the drama; I have but little ear for music. I do not understand
art. All these things are closed to me. I am passing swiftly along
the course of my life with many others whom I shall never meet. How
many dear friends and kindred spirits remain undiscovered among that
number? There is no time for anything. Everything and everyone is
swept along in the hustling current. Oh! to sun ourselves awhile in
the water meadows before dropping over the falls! The real tragedies
in this world are not the things which happen to us, but the things
which don't happen.
There are critics who would trace the source of such outbursts as these
and of the joy in life that constantly appears in Keats to the effects
of bacterial disease. We cannot contradict the conclusion, which may
have a certain truth. We can only point out that the same cause does
not always produce the same effect, and we must therefore deduce a
particular genius in those in whom this spirit manifests itself.
Barbellion was, from one point of view, a case of pathology, but he
was not, any more than was Keats, nothing but that. He had a fine
temperament which he expressed very finely.
There is a temptation when one is considering the Journal, to which
Barbellion's work must eventually be reduced, to consider it as so
much raw material and to speculate how, if he had lived, he would
have used the many talents he displays in it. He began it as a record
of a naturalist's observations, and it developed only very gradually
into a self-portrait and a repository for all his reflections and
impressions. He was still, when his last illness overtook him, a
professional scientist, scribbling in his diary at night for a hobby.
But he was thinking of going over to literature; and one cannot help
asking whether, if he had done so, he would not have turned his genius
to some more formal and less miscellaneous method of expression. It is
easy to discern in him any number of capacities. He might have become
a critic--a statement which can be proved by a few examples taken at
random:
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his
sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his
rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives
them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute
strength.... All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what
stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes
be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo
rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.
It amuses me to discover the evident relish with which the author of
_The Daffodil Fields_ emphasises the blood and the flowers in the
attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up
together to Masefield's great excitement.... Still, to call Gallipoli
"bloody hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description.
You understand, tho', a very remarkable book--a work of genius.
... James Joyce's _Portrait of the Artist_--one of those books which
the mob will take fifty years to discover but once discovered will
again neglect.
He might have been a psychological or a satirical novelist, a
metaphysician, a casual essayist. He might have been a poet of nature.
His diaries are studded with the most exquisite descriptions of
landscapes and living things, which grow only more vivid and moving as
the end approaches and they become transcripts from memory instead of
recent impressions. The last long entry in the Journal is one of them,
and it is so good and so characteristic that it insists on being quoted:
Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with
the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing
in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun.
This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the
naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea
till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up!--rock
pools, gobies, Blennies, anemones (crassicon, dahlia--oh! I forget).
And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the
morning when I put some sanded opaque bits of jelly, lying on the
rim of the sea, into a glass collecting jar and to my amazement and
delight they turned into Ctenophors--alive, swimming, and iridescent!
You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with
four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap-bubble,
from its North or to its South Pole, and flashing spasmodically in
unison as they beat on the water.
But I think that this way of looking on Barbellion's work, excusable
as it might be, would nevertheless be mistaken. Every author writes
the book that it is given to him to write, and Barbellion's book was
the Journal. If, as seems very likely, he had developed altogether
into a writer, he might still not have abandoned this form which had
become by a gradual process peculiarly his own. Goethe said that all
his works were the fragments of a great confession, and this is true,
in a greater or lesser degree, of most authors. Barbellion would
have differed from the rest only in that his works would have been
ostensibly and formally, as well as actually, his confessions.
And this view is supported by the fact that up to the last he
was improving the flexible and accommodating method of literary
expression which his diary had become. The last eighteen months of
it seem to me to show an advance on the third part of the published
Journal almost as striking as the advance of that third part on
the first. The form fitted very closely to Barbellion's many-sided
and individual temperament; and, as time went on and he understood
better what he was doing, he made it fit more closely still. It was a
frame into which he could put with perfect ease all that his roving
perceptions picked up in life: an impression of a landscape or an
animal, a conversation overheard in the street, a suddenly flashing
truth about himself or some other person, a general reflection upon
humanity. As a journal-writer he is not, of course, alone; but, being a
strongly-marked personality, he is unique even among journal-writers.
His intense interest in his own consciousness does not, as it did with
Amiel, blind him to the actual outside world; he has more humour, more
gusto in concrete detail than Marie Bashkirtseff, a vein of sheer
poetry that we do not find in Pepys. This is not intended to rank him
above the writers with whom he loved to compare himself, but rather to
emphasise his individuality among them.
We find ourselves at last wondering not how he would have employed the
gifts he displays in the Journal, but to what pitch of excellence he
might have brought the Journal itself. The last entries are admirably
full of matter and admirably worded. The passage I have quoted on the
Ctenophors is of almost perfect lyrical beauty--not a random jotting,
but an impression seized and made permanent with all the proportion and
balance of a sonnet by Hérédia. Over against it there might be quoted
passages on the old village nurse who attended him for months, closely
and humorously observed and set down without the waste of a syllable.
Or there are pages of reflections like this:
_The Icons._
Every man has his own icon.
Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, the image of
himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably
with great respect, by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious,
sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself
therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and
subsists. In the self-righteous man's bosom, it is a molten image of
a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egotist's, an ideal
loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity
and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the
truth-seeker preserves his image in clay, covered in damp rags--a
working hypothesis.
A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a
little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered
its heart's treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image
and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare
refer to his own--it is bad form--so that in spite of the gossip and
criticism that swirls around each one's personality, a man remains
sound-tight and insulated.
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness,
in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person--as much
verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.
Heavens! what a toy shop it will be at the Last Day! When all our
little effigies are taken from their cupboards, undraped, and ranged
along beside us, nude and shivering. In that Day how few will be able
to say that they ever cried
"God be merciful to me a sinner," or "a fool," or "a humbug."
The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man's life
is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and
the real--the image (or the man's mistaken idea of himself)--like an
_ignis fatuus_ leading him through devious paths into the morass of
failure, or worse--of sheer, laughing-stock silliness. The moral is:
γνῶθι σεαυτόν {gnôthi seauton}
(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life.)
The mellowness and sweetness of these lines are worth noting as
characteristic of a transformation which is obviously taking place
through all the last pages of the diary. This transformation adds
something in the nature of a rounding and a completion to the whole
work, which might otherwise have been merely an interrupted record. It
enlarges too our conception of the author's character and capacities
and fills in, most graciously, our picture of him.
Barbellion was accustomed to accuse himself of being an egotist; but,
on his own definition, he was a truth-seeker. His portrait of himself
was not immutable. It grew clearer as he understood himself better and
it changed as he changed. It was not complete when he died because his
own development was not complete. But he carried it as far as he could
and made of it a singular picture. His Journal is a book of an enduring
sort, not merely because it is an accurate and candid self-portrait,
but also because of the inherent attractions of its subject. Barbellion
was a poet, a humorist, an observer, a philosopher, as well as a
truthful, passionate, and extraordinarily courageous man. In drawing a
picture of the last he also made a picture of the world as it seemed
to the first four and thus captured in it poetry, humour, observation,
and philosophy. The subject is still too fresh, and, by the vividness
of its presentment, too painful, for any attempt at a final valuation
to be made. A few months ago Barbellion was still alive, suffering and
hoping; and, with the best will in the world, no critic can avoid being
influenced by this fact. But his book is a fair topic for prophecy;
and it is not very rash to predict that, as it loses the sharpness
and painfulness of a record of fact, so its qualities as a work of
literature will come more into prominence and we shall realise that
Barbellion was not only a genius untimely overwhelmed by an evil
fate, but a genius who, before he was overwhelmed, had opportunity
to do some at least of his appointed work. Then, whatever may be the
theoretical views we hold on the connection between disease and genius,
we shall be able to think less of Barbellion as a "case" and more of
him as a writer. We shall, perhaps, not think that we have a complete
portrait of him in his Journal any more than we have a complete
portrait of Keats in the Odes or even in the Letters. The greatest of
artists cannot entirely disclose himself in his work. Barbellion did so
no more than others. But he was an artist, and, between what he wrote
of himself and what was otherwise revealed, it is possible to form a
picture of an extraordinary personality.
A LITTLE CLASSIC OF THE FUTURE[27]
[27] _Bibliographical Note_: _Principal Works by Edith Œ.
Somerville and Martin Ross: An Irish Cousin_, 1889;
_Naboth's Vineyard_, 1891; _Through Connemara in a
Governess Cart_, 1893; _The Real Charlotte_, 1895;
_The Silver Fox_, 1897; _Some Experiences of an Irish
R.M._, 1899; _All on the Irish Shore_, 1903; _Some
Irish Yesterdays_, 1906; _Further Experiences of an
Irish R.M._, 1908; _Dan Russell the Fox_, 1911; _In
Mr. Knox's Country_, 1915; _Irish Memories_, 1917;
_Mount Music_, 1919. All published by Longmans.
By ORLO WILLIAMS
The evanescence of laughter is most pathetic. Its bubbles vanish from
the sparkling wine that held it so soon after it has been uncorked,
leaving a sadly flat beverage to the critical palates of future
generations. Wit, being a subtler and less easily disintegrated
essence, does not so quickly pass away, but the buoyant bubbles of
laughter, except in some rare vintages, survive but a moment the
uncorking of their bottle. We may smile at the things that aroused the
laughter of our ancestors, bringing our intellect and our imagination
to the tasting, but it is seldom that we experience spontaneously the
"sudden glory" of bursting sides when we read the words which aroused
it. It is almost painful to look through the files of _Punch_ of some
sixty years ago, for it arouses that agonised shame with which one
witnesses the failure of an inferior joke injudiciously introduced into
superior society. One blushes for its pitiful exposure. Nor is it any
consolation to reflect that the laughter of our own day will, for the
most part, seem like the cracking of most unsubstantial thorns under
ghostly pots to those who come after us. Very little of the literature
of the past which truly survives is really provocative of hilarity.
The Falstaffian passages of Shakespeare at once leap up as if to deny
this statement; but, in the first place, Shakespeare brewed one of
those rarer vintages whose beaded bubbles wink ever at the brim, and,
in the second place, dramatic literature can always be revived by
the fresh infusion of a living actor's personality. It is the purely
written word of humour which will not give that sudden jerk to our
emotions which it gave on its first outpouring. We say that we can
appreciate Rabelais and the comic tales of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_;
we profess to revel in _Tristram Shandy_, and to find the _Pickwick
Papers_ delicious, and we are not wrong; but it is a soberer enjoyment
than that which these works of art gave to their first audiences. We
pick them up, certainly, when we wish to be entertained, but seldom
when we wish to laugh. There was a tutor at Oxford--there may be one
still--who was invariably annoyed when any of his pupils attributed a
historical phenomenon to "the spirit of the age," averring that there
was no such thing. But surely he was wrong in coupling this convenient
spirit with the ghosts of Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece,
for the peculiar changes undergone by laughter are there to prove
its existence. Laughter is compounded of the spirit of the age: it is
excited by peculiar and irrecoverable felicities and conjunctions of
temperament and environment, all of which are ingredients in that very
real but intangible spirit. We can guess at this spirit, but we cannot
recapture it, any more than we can recapture the light effervescence of
its laughter.
Further, laughter is not a lofty emotion. The beasts, they say, have
it not, but those who are little better than beasts laugh heartily.
We ourselves are not so proud of our laughter that we wish it to echo
through the ages, as we would have our high thoughts ring and our
tears, perhaps, drip. The heady wine that moves it is often an unworthy
vintage, more like the champagne which Murger's Schaunard christened
_coco épileptique_ than the true Hippocrene. So it has been in the
past. The shelves of libraries are full of these flat draughts from
which all the liveliness that alone gave them savour has departed.
Yet in all ages there have been nobler bins of these light literary
wines which, for all that they no longer catch at the throat, have a
more lasting quality and never entirely lose their gratefulness to
the tongue of the taster. They may not have sparkled in their prime
more brightly than their now neglected contemporaries, but they live
for certain finer essences in their composition, wit, style, finish,
colour, bouquet, or something even subtler than these, that indefinable
taste which distinguishes all that has been grown on a rich literary
soil, warmed by the sun of beauty and matured by a vintner who has
carefully and lovingly learned his trade. Such, after exciting the
laughter of the present in their youth, may in their ripeness, and even
in their decline, earn the humour of posterity. They may possibly be
numbered among the classics, that is to say, among the productions of
any age which deserve to live as models for the future or as peculiarly
happy expressions of a bygone time. The test of a classic is what men
and women of any age will always call its modernity, which means that
it possesses some of those timeless qualities of greatness or artistic
excellence which permeate the spirit of any age. Skill in construction
and delineation, accuracy of vision, fine rhythm, perfect choice of
language, happy adaptation of form to matter, sense of beauty, all
these, like beauty itself, do not die. The work which holds them, even
though thinly commingled, will outlive the evaporation of its bubbles,
and may by their preservative effect become, if not a great, at least a
little classic.
To have done, then, with the bush which no good wine needs, I would
like to taste again, in the company of the reader, what, if I may
prophesy in hope rather than in certainty, may become in English
literature a little classic of the future. The bush would not have
been so thick had it not been, on the face of it, unusual so to
greet a work that has moved so many thousands of us to hearty and
inextinguishable laughter. I mean the work of Miss Edith Somerville
and her mourned-for second self in letters who wrote under the name of
Martin Ross. Few humorists who write merely to catch the passing fancy
of the day can have been more successful or more popular: in the merely
temporary quality of effervescence they can compete with any of their
contemporaries. The sportsman who hates art and loathes poetry has the
_Irish R.M._ and its fellows in well-thumbed copies on his bookshelves;
the man who only reads for laughter and never for improvement praises
these authors as highly as the most discriminating, and those who would
faint at the suspicion of becoming in any way involved in classic
literature will joyfully immerse themselves in "Somerville and Ross,"
like thirsty bibbers quaffing a curious vintage for its exhilaration
rather than its quality. Appreciation has poured in upon them from all
sides, from those who know and delight in the comic sides of Irish
life, when treated observantly and not fantastically, from those to
whom hunting and horseflesh are almost the be-all and end-all of
existence, from those who treat their brains to a good story as to a
stimulative drug, as well as from those who bring more discrimination
to their appraisement. The devotees will often claim that they alone
can scent the subtler flavour from these hilarious pages. The Irishman,
unless he be of the kind that despises all light-heartedness in writing
of his country, will assert that none but he can get the exquisite
appreciation of comparing the work of art with the reality which
inspired it: the hunting fraternity will find it hard to suppose that
one who knows not what it is to be
Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Clearly rouse the slumbering morn
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill,
can possibly enjoy the skill shown by these authors in describing
the joy of horses and the thrill of hunting. Nevertheless, the books
of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross are heartily enjoyed by a host
of readers who are neither Irish nor hunting people, for the simple
reason that they are prompted to an explosion of laughter whenever
they take up one of these stories. The bulk of these readers would
wish to go no further in their appreciation: they embrace the givers
of present laughter with so full a measure of enjoyment that it would
seem to them unnecessary to probe any further into the chemistry of
such excellence, nor perhaps would they deem it possible that any
higher praise than their freely-expressed enjoyment could be looked
for by any authors. Yet to my mind it is possible. While including in
one's general testimony all that can be said by the most extravagant
of these admirers, the taster who is considering the cellar of English
literature which is being laid down for posterity may discern qualities
not so apparent to the quaffer for immediate exhilaration. It is hard
to conceive it, but the bubbles may vanish: if they do, the question
is, what will be left? My point is that the work of Miss Somerville and
Martin Ross has the qualities of a wine that will keep.
It cannot be a great wine, for the vineyard is too restricted. The
high winds of emotion have not swept over its soil, nor has the soft
rain of tenderness moistened it. It will always be bright and rather
dry like Vouvray, gay but with a little bite in it: posterity may
even call it "curious." But they will recognise that it holds the
authentic flavours that distinguish infallibly the finer products
of English literary bins. The authors have chosen a small field, but
they direct on it an accuracy of vision which is remarkable, and,
seeing that they were two, a unity of vision which is a miracle. In
the expression of this vision they display an unfailing sureness of
touch and a precision which is perfect in its admirable economy. They
handle our language with a deftness and flexibility which is a rarity
in itself, and their style, though always original, is nourished by
a recollection of great models both in prose and poetry. Theirs is a
literary equipment of the first class, solidly framed, well clothed,
attractive in appearance, and ornamented with taste. They touch nothing
that they do not embellish: events by their unflagging narrative power,
which goes as unfalteringly as one of their choicest hunters, character
by their sympathetic insight, scenery by their love of natural beauty,
dialogue by their dramatic sense. It is not all Ireland that they draw,
let that be admitted; they prefer to laugh, letting others weep. Yet,
if the whole heart of Ireland does not beat within their pages, a part
of it is there, pulsing with true Irish blood and throbbing with truly
Irish emotions. Their aspect is no more that of Mr. James Joyce or Mr.
Synge or Mr. Yeats than it is that of Mr. George Moore or Mr. Devlin,
but, if they are justly praised for their merits, that praise cannot be
diminished because they looked on Ireland with laughing eyes through a
West Carberry window. Their books are literature no less certainly than
_Castle Rackrent_ is literature, and for very similar reasons.
Well, let us taste. It is a bright dry wine, I have said. It is not,
perhaps, the quality which the authors would ascribe to what they
consider their best work, _The Real Charlotte_--an estimate in which
Mr. Stephen Gwynn agrees with them. This is a fine sombre story of
a middle-aged woman's jealousy, for Charlotte is a kind of Irish
Cousine Bette. But, if the subject is comparable to that of Balzac's
novel, the treatment is certainly not so, and that is my reason for
not regarding this as the work by which their achievement can best
be judged. It is the work in which they have aimed highest, and the
measure of their success is not small, but the theme of Charlotte's
jealousy and the havoc in other lives which it caused needed for its
convincing development all the powers of a great tragic artist. It is
with no want of recognition of the authors' artistic aims or want of
sympathy with their regret at abandoning them for others less lofty
that this is said: but the work of an artist can best be judged from
that part of it which most nearly reaches perfection. Miss Somerville
and Martin Ross most nearly reached perfection in their lighter stories
of Irish life, and it says much for their acumen that they saw the line
on which their talent could naturally reach its maturity, courageously
turning their backs on higher and more tragic paths likely to tax them
beyond their capabilities. At the same time, it would be unjust not to
point out that even in their best work comedy does not exclude the more
poignant feelings. It would be the greatest mistake to regard these two
writers as nothing more than jesters. Their humour is the true humour
which runs hand-in-hand with pity, and the sympathy mingled with their
laughter robs it of any taste of bitterness. There is a chapter in
_Some Irish Yesterdays_ which shows how their hearts were touched.[28]
It treats of marriage and love, death and birth among the peasantry in
the south-west of Ireland with a delicacy of feeling which is beyond
praise, and shows that the writers did not observe with the aloofness
of an explorer among savages, but that for them seeing and describing
alike were deeply-felt emotional experiences. The chapter opens with a
memory of a wedding in the little Roman Catholic chapel of the village,
a simple ceremony, after which the bridegroom hauled his wife up beside
him on to a shaggy horse and started for home at a lumbering gallop.
Then, in a brilliant transition by way of Tom Cashen's reflections on
marriage and a glimpse of his married life, we are introduced at Tom
Cashen's funeral to the bride of twenty-five years ago, "a middle-aged
stranger in a frilled cap and blue cloak, with handsome eyes full of
friendliness," with her ill-health, her profusion of children, and
"himself" whose "nose glowed portentously above a rusty grey beard and
beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tint." Then listen to the passage
which follows:
[28] In _Irish Memories_ Miss Somerville says that this
chapter is the reprint of an article by Martin Ross--a
fact which throws some light on the respective
contributions of the two collaborators. I should like
to mention another passage in which these writers
touch the pathetic with distinction. It is that
chapter in _Dan Russell the Fox_ in which, while
tending a poisoned hound, the Irish mother tries
vainly to persuade her younger son to propose to the
infatuated young lady. He rejects her suggestion as
an outrage on the lady, and sets his face towards
America. As the saved hound licks her hand, "It's no
good now, poor puppy," she says.
The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March lived again as she spoke, the
glare of the sunshine upon the bare country brimming with imminent
life, the scent of the furze, already muffling its spikes in bloom,
the daffodils hanging their lamps in shady places. How strangely, how
bleakly different was the life history summarised in the melancholy
October evening! Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on
roads that were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day,
with the large frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the
laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would
be a long and miry tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with
talk of guano and geese and pigs' food, and a perfect foreknowledge
of how he would complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the
glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation had been
well and truly laid at the funeral.
From the funeral we pass again to the cottage in which "the Triplets"
are holding their reception, the three day-old babes cradled in the
stuffy room, hazy with the smoke of the turf fire, the crowd in the
doorway, the old woman rocking the cradle:
Obscure corners harboured obscure masses, that might be family
raiment, or beds, or old women; somewhere among them the jubilant
cry of a hen proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in muffled tones
that suggested a lurking-place under a bed. Between the cradle
and the fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat, motionless
in the stupor of his great age; at his feet a boy wrangled with a
woolly puppy that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed, in a
delicious glance of humour, as it tugged at the red flannel shirt of
its playmate.
Such a passage in a Russian novelist would warrant ecstasies on the
part of our _illuminati_: let us no less highly praise our own art
when it is possible. The chapter concludes with some lights on the
commercial methods of matrimony practised by the peasant class: the
writers do not defend them, but call attention to the surprising bloom
that is apt to spring from them. "From them springs, like a flower from
a dust heap, the unsullied, uneventful home-life of Western Ireland."
"There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright;
no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable
common sense, and a profound awe for the sacrament of Marriage.
Marriage, humorous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act;
the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the
last is usually twilight and much faithfulness." The dialogue is a
masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour,
heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Of an elderly couple,
married by a happy thought some thirty years before, it was said, as
the authors' record, "their hearts were within in each other." This
chapter, through which breathes all the soft beauty and humour of the
soil, is a sufficient answer to those who would tax these writers with
a uniform attitude of rather heartless derision or with following--what
a blind criticism!--in the benighted footsteps of those who have given
us the dreary horror of the traditional stage Irishman.
Then, again, there is another spirit that breathes delicately
through these stories, tempering their outlines as the mists of the
Atlantic those of the craggy western hillside. It is the spirit of
natural beauty, which, to the hearts of Miss Somerville, herself an
accomplished draughtsman, and Martin Ross, makes ever the sharpest
appeal. They make the reader plainly feel that if the unconventional
dignity and penetrating wit of the Irish folk clutches powerfully at
their feelings, the inexhaustible beauty of its surroundings pierces
to their very marrow. Quotation after quotation might be given to show
their remarkable gift of rendering the scenery which has so moved their
imaginations. I can only choose a few, embarrassed at the richness of
the field of choice. The last chapter of _Some Irish Yesterdays_ opens
with an example which it is hard to surpass:
The road to Connemara lies white across the memory--white and very
quiet. In that far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure upon the
spacious country, away to where the Twelve Pins make a gallant line
against the northern sky. It comes in the heathery wind, it borrows
peace from the white cottage gables on the hillside, it is accented
by the creeping approach of a turf cart, rocking behind its thin grey
pony. Little else stirs save the ducks that sail on a wayside pool to
the push of their yellow propellers; away from the road, on a narrow
oasis of arable soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes; their
persistent voices are borne on the breeze that blows warm over the
blossoming boglands and pink heather.
Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of Irish air; the pureness
of bleak mountains is in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and
there is something more, inseparable from Ireland's green and grey
landscapes, wrought in with her bowed and patient cottages, her
ragged wails, and eager rivers, and intelligible only to the spirit.
Here is another landscape, the _Irish R. M.'s_ view of his own demesne:
Certainly the view from the roof was worth coming up to look at. It
was rough heathery country on one side, with a string of little blue
lakes running like a turquoise necklet round the base of a firry
hill, and patches of pale green pasture were set amidst the rocks and
heather. A silvery flash behind the undulations of the hills told
where the Atlantic lay in immense plains of sunlight.
What, again, could be a more delightful overture to the lifelike
description of the regatta on Lough Lonen than the short paragraph
which conveys in a few touches all the beauty of the scene?
A mountain towered steeply up from the lake's edge, dark with the
sad green of beech-trees in September; fir woods followed the curve
of the shore, and leaned far over the answering darkness of the
water; and above the trees rose the toppling steepnesses of the hill,
painted with the purple glow of heather. The lake was about a mile
long, and, tumbling from its farther end, a fierce and narrow river
fled away west to the sea, some four or five miles off.
In these descriptions there is no striving for elaborate effect: the
authors simply place the scene before our eyes with that aptness of
language which is like the unerring needle of a master etcher. To
travel on the wings of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross gives one
constant thrills of amazement at their hawk-like swoops after a
telling phrase: they catch an apt simile on the wing with an arresting
suddenness which adds moments of breathlessness to the already
exhilarating flight of their rapid narrative. Instances can be picked
out from any of the stories like plums from a pudding.
In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might be heard uttering those
singular little yelps of encouragement that to the irreverent suggest
a milkman in his dotage....
It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when everything was young and
tense, and thin and fit to run for its life, like a Derby horse....
I followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, and so did Miss M'Evoy;
we pooled our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening
of two foot by three steadily, as the great god Pan drew pith from
the reed....
Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not
unusual in small fathers of large families; it always struck me
that he understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected,
and pursued an unnoticed, peaceful and observant path of his own in
the background. I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied
manner, like a partly-chloroformed ferret....
Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that
summoned from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher
on the Order of the Medjidie.
Like smuts streaming out of a chimney the followers of the hunt
belched from the lane and spread themselves over the pale green
slopes....
Though the temptation is almost irresistible, I refrain here from
displaying this incisive power applied to character, notably to Irish
character. The success of our authors in this respect is so notorious
that further testimony is superfluous. If we have any appreciation of
their art at all, the Major and the gentle Philippa, his wife, Flurry
and Sally Knox, old Mrs. Knox looking as if she had robbed a scarecrow,
with her white woolly dog with sore eyes and a bark like a tin
trumpet, against the inimitable background of her ramshackle mansion
of Aussolas, scene of many wit-combats between her and Flurry, Miss
Bobbie Bennett, the McRory family, John Kane, Mrs. Knox's henchman, and
Michael the huntsman, all are as vivid to us as our dearest friends.
It is worth pointing out, however, that an almost diabolical power of
delineation is not the only compelling quality in these portraits.
There is in their introduction of their characters that natural
dramatic instinct which they have so humorously observed in their
Irish neighbours. I need only instance the ingenuity by which Mrs.
Knox is first heard "off," easily vanquishing in speech that doughty
antagonist, an Irish countrywoman: or the introduction of John Kane in
"the Aussolas Martin Cat," in two inimitable pages, which are followed
by another perfect passage of comic drama, the entry into the old
demesne of Aussolas of vulgar Mr. Tebbutts, the would-be tenant:
Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a
note of exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas;
the turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion,
and from further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally
instant in taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to
yell. Blended with these voices was another--a man's voice, in loud
harangue, advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden.
As it approached the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted
clappings of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which
they were wont to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the
fruit. We sat in silence. The latch of the garden gate clicked, and
the voice said in stentorian tones:
"My father 'e kept a splendid table."
Every gathering of their countrymen--the meet, the run, the horse show,
the races, the regatta, the auction--have an intensity of motion and
character which is achieved not by the tiresome enumerative methods of
some modern realists, but by the skilful selection of the practised
artist, and by a clever condensation of observations--their only form
of exaggeration--gathered over a wide range of times and places.
Finally--the word starts up all too soon--let us praise the powerful
sweep of their narrative, for it is this rapidity and staying power
which sets the crown on their achievement. When they are out with the
hunt, whatever be the quarry, they are as "crabbed leppers" as ever
moved the picturesque admiration of an Irish hunt following. They are
off at the first cry of the hounds and nothing stops them, they drop
over the slaty fences, change feet on the banks, thread the rocky
paths of steep ascents and career down the craggy hills, like Flurry
Knox's mounts to the discomfiture of staider Saxon hunters. With them,
moreover, there is never a check; they gallop hot on the scent from
first to last, and run the story to a triumphant death in an ecstasy
of unquenchable laughter. Their climaxes are marvellous, led up to as
they are by a brilliant and sustained crescendo. Think of the _mêlée_
at the end of "High Tea at McKeown's," or of the "Dane's Breechin',"
with its exquisite interlude of the search for the "pin" in the village
post-office; think of the finale to "Philippa's Foxhunt," with the
Irish clergy and Mrs. Knox pulling the small boy out of the drain; or
of Lady Knox's ominous arrival at the end of "Oh, Love! Oh, Fire!" and
the escape of Sally in Mrs. Knox's pony-chaise, or of the combined
catastrophe that fell upon the Major's household in "A Royal Command."
For pure art in narrative construction these finales are unexampled in
English literature of to-day, all the more because they are free from
all buffoonery. Here is one that starts a movement _con brio_:
A shout from the top of the hill interrupted the amenities of the
check. Flurry was out of the wood blowing shattering blasts upon his
horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the "gone away" note that
was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees
and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind, and jumped across
a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the hounds splashed and
struggled after him, and as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers
broke forth. In a moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful, and
soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped, and settled into line.
It is only one of many such. Let me send the reader to his shelf to
take down _In Mr. Knox's Country_, and read "Put Down Two and Carry
One," with its account of the events which led to Miss McRory's riding
pillion behind the Major into the scandalised sight of Lady Knox, or to
expire once more over the mingling of Mrs. McRory's golden butterfly
with Philippa's hat-trimming at the harvest festival ("The Bosom of the
McRorys"). I am compelled to quote, for its rendering of the purely
ludicrous, from the incident of Playboy's nocturnal rescue in "The
Conspiracy of Silence" (_Further Experiences of an I.R.M._). Major
Yeates, as deputy master in Flurry Knox's absence, has taken the hounds
over to hunt with Mr. Flynn, who, after a run full of incident, has
connived at the secretion of Playboy, a fine hound of the old Irish
breed, in a bedroom at the top of the house. The Major is warned of
this by the youngest boy, whose gratitude he has earned by giving him a
mount that day. The pair thereupon grope their way upstairs to raid the
bedroom in its owner's absence:
A dim skylight told that the roof was very near my head; I extended a
groping hand for the wall, and without any warning found my fingers
closing improbably, awfully, upon a warm human face.
[It was the servant, Maggie Kane, bringing up a drumstick of a goose
to pacify the hound. They open the door of the room, and Playboy is
revealed tied to the leg of a low wooden bedstead.] He was standing
up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as big as a calf.
He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of Eugene's bower,
and I failed to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in point
of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst of suspicion
that would waken the house once and for all. We held a council of
war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I think it
was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer him
the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded, almost
too well, in fact. Following the alluring drumstick, Playboy burst
into the passage, towing me after him on the rope. Still preceded by
the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic stairs at a
speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while Maggie Kane
held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's door I
was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too good to
inquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the darkness of
the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as if to give
the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think Playboy
must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of the
drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its
socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the
floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to
cuckoo with a jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was
not Playboy bumped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously
muffled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open.
We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in
our midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its
protest from under Maggie Kane's shawl.
And now, if I may close with a recollection of what is, perhaps, the
most brilliant of all these brilliant narratives, I will call to the
reader's mind the story of "The Pug-nosed Fox," from the same volume.
Every gift of language, delineation, vigorous intensity, dramatic
gradation, and swiftness of progress over a series of crises to a
perfect culmination has been lavished by the authors on this story.
From the misguided efforts of the photographer to take a picture of
the hounds on a sweltering August day, all through the untimely chase
of the old fox to the discovery of Tomsy Flood sewn up in a feather
mattress in the loft of the McRorys' stable, and the raid of the hounds
upon the wedding breakfast at the moment of the entry of the guests,
there is not a moment in which to draw breath. It is life itself, with
all the added quickness to its revolutions and intensity to its vision
that art can give. With this memory I must leave this little classic to
its future, but so that art, rather than criticism, shall have the last
word, a typical passage, showing the authors' ease of transition from
beauty to comedy, shall close this grateful appreciation:
At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded us a
fine view of the Atlantic, also of the surrounding country and
all that was therein, with, however, the single exception of the
hounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of the
reaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and
the growl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing,
ghost-like, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man
in a straw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock
with a wooden rake, while a black-and-white cur slept in the young
after-grass beside him. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity
with a heated demand whether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill
glamour from the dog was at first the only reply; its owner took off
his hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.
"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to
look us up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more
than before, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the
heat of a summer's day.
"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut up
beside him.
"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain
does be whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the
say from it."
"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round.
FORGOTTEN SATIRISTS
By ALDOUS HUXLEY
All readers of the literary Press must often have noticed that the
most ardently contested and the most prolonged controversies, among
all those that fill correspondence columns with the rumour of inkpot
wars, turn almost invariably upon subjects remote from actuality and
of a nature profoundly trivial. Questions of philology and spelling,
questions of dates and names and little odd facts--it is on such
circumscribed arenas that month-long combats clash and sway and would
go on clashing and swaying for ever if it were not for the editor's
tyrannically-imposed peace. To the practical man, intent on the
immediate, as well as to the philosopher in his abstract world of
ideas, this preoccupation with facts that are irrelevant both to the
money-maker and the seeker after truth seems at first sight quite
incomprehensible. But the explanation is simple. We have leisure and
we hate being bored. We must find something that will keep our mind
busy without exhausting it. We might, to be sure, occupy ourselves by
studying the Einstein theory; but the effort, the agony of trying to
think abstractly! No, decidedly the Einstein theory is too much of a
good thing. So we fall back on stamp collecting or on what is more
absorbing even than stamp collecting--on the inexhaustible past. We
turn to history, not for any ambitious Wellsian ideas about humanity,
but for the anecdotes, the innumerable bits of Notes and Queryish
information which a little patience and curiosity can pick up like
shells on a dry beach. How pleasant it is and how restful, after an
effort of abstract reasoning (if one has been unwise enough to make
that effort), to turn to Disraeli's _Curiosities of Literature_ or
to the _Literary Recreations_ of Sir Edward Cook! We are amused,
absorbed, instructed, and all without the least expense of spirit.
What song the sirens sang, what were Mr. Gladstone's favourite Latin
quotations--these things we learn and a thousand more, pleasantly,
effortlessly, without tears.
This, then, is my excuse and justification for directing attention to
an incident so remote as the Popish Plot, to men so obscure as Settle
and Pordage and Flecknoe--their very names are absurd, Dickensian.
These long-dead days of controversy fairly bristle with curiosities
of literature. We catch glimpses of odd fantastic men performing odd
fantastic actions. We see, thrown up by the storm of political passion,
strange traits of human psychology that float on the surface like
grotesque fishes of the depths dislodged by a submarine earthquake.
And so, as we cannot all be Newtons or Empedocleses, let us content
ourselves with small things, finding the occupation and amusement we
desire in the anecdotes and old wives' tales of history, so pleasant,
so futile, so absorbingly human.
Our purpose is to do justice--a little more than justice, it may be--to
a few of the minor characters in the drama of the Popish Plot. But with
the best will in the world it is impossible not to mention the hero of
the piece; Dryden is the Prince of Denmark of the Plot, and without at
least a casual reference to his part the play has no sense at all.
Our curtain, then, goes up on the Autumn of 1681; for, in the approved
style, we plunge _in medias res_. The Earl of Shaftesbury is in the
Tower on a charge of High Treason. A Bill of Indictment is to be
presented against him. It was in anticipation of this event and with
the deliberate intention of turning public opinion against Shaftesbury
that, on November 17th, Dryden published _Absalom and Achitophel_.
This was not by any means the first time that Shaftesbury had been
attacked. For the past two years the Tory pamphleteers had made him
the target of their most envenomed shafts. One at least of these
anonymous satires, _A Modest Vindication of the Earl of Shaftesbury in
a Letter to a Friend concerning his being elected King of Poland_, is
worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Like almost every pamphleteer of
the time, the author of this Modest Vindication seizes on the story
that Shaftesbury had offered himself as a candidate for the throne
vacated by the death of John Sobieski. The pamphlet opens with an
admirable ironic eulogy of the Earl for "his unshaken obedience to
every government he has been concerned in or lived under; his steady
adherence to every religion that had but hopes to be established." We
are now shown the Polish Diet debating on the choice of a king, who
shall be capable not only of ruling Poland, but also of conquering and
converting the Turk. "Upon these considerations you may imagine the
eyes of the whole Diet were turned upon little England, and there upon
whom so soon as the little lord of Shaftesbury?" The new king, Anthony
I., draws up a list of the attendants whom he proposes to take with
him. There is, of course, "Prince Prettyman Perkinoski (Monmouth), to
cure the plica or King's evil of this country, in case our own majesty
should fail of that virtue"; and finally, at the end of the list, "Jean
Drydenurtzitz ... our Poet Laureate, for writing panegyrics upon Oliver
Cromwell and libels against his present master, King Charles II."; and
to be his deputy no less than Tom Shadworiski" (Shadwell). This tract,
it must be remembered, was written after the production of _The Spanish
Friar_ and before the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_. The
author of the "Protestant Play" might still be thought to be a Whig.
The pamphlet ends up with the account of a vision wherein the
king-elect sees first the figure of the Whore of Babylon, which changes
into that of a murdered Justice of the Peace (Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey),
"strangled by a crew of ruffians, who afterwards ran him through with
his own sword, that it might be thought he hanged himself." This gives
place to a troop of pilgrims armed with black bills (these pilgrims
were one of the happiest products of Oates's rich imagination); and
they in turn are followed by the hideous vision of the Doctor of
Salamanca, Oates himself. All this so deeply impresses King Anthony
that he gives up his imperial ambitions, preferring the task of
confounding the Pope at home to that of converting the Turks in Poland.
To this same Polish legend and to a certain physical peculiarity, which
was the delight of the Tory satirists, Shaftesbury owed one of his most
popular nicknames, "Tapski." The "ski" was Polish, but the "Tap" was
English and had a real existence. Shaftesbury suffered from an internal
abscess, which had to be kept drained by a silver tube let into his
side. For the Tories this tap represented all that was most loathsome,
most repulsive, most Whiggish. They exulted in descriptions of it. When
Shaftesbury wanted to make himself look important, so one pamphleteer
assures us, he had only to turn off the tap in order to swell up to
a prodigious size. Shaftesbury's Tap and that mysterious Black Box,
reputed to contain the certificate of a marriage between Charles
II. and Lucy Waters, were the two symbolic objects on which public
imagination most greedily seized.
Dryden's satire was issued anonymously. But its authorship was
evidently an open secret, for within three weeks of its publication
a reply, called _Towser the Second_, in which Dryden is named as the
author, made its appearance. The writer of this piece was the Whig
journalist, Henry Care, "whose breeding," says Anthony Wood, "was in
the nature of a petty Fogger, a little despicable Wretch, afterwards
much reflected upon for a poor snivelling Fellow in the Observators
published by Rog: L'Estrange." This person had been the writer of
a newspaper entitled _The Weekly Paquets of News from Rome_, an
anti-Catholic journal started in the height of the excitement caused
by Titus Oates's evidence. He had been tried in 1680 for libelling
Justice Scroggs. His later history is the sadly common tale of the poor
Grub Street hack: at the accession of James II. "for bread and Money
sake, and nothing else," he passed over to the side in power and turned
his pen against the Protestants. _Towser the Second_ is as little and
despicable as its author. Towser-Dryden, brother to the original bad
dog, Towser-L'Estrange, suffering from a worm "that of the Jebusites
smells very strong," runs mad, snarls and snaps at all he meets, treats
the whole world, the King included, "à la mode de Billingsgate."
Care's poem is only less stupid than the ponderous _Some Reflections
upon a late poem, by a Person of Honour_, which appeared a few days
later. The Person of Honour was Dryden's old enemy, the Duke of
Buckingham. Goaded to exasperation by the onslaught made upon him
in _Absalom and Achitophel_, Buckingham set out to overwhelm Dryden
under mountains of moral indignation. He succeeded only in proving
conclusively that his own share in _The Rehearsal_, in its own way a
masterpiece, must have been extremely small.
Early in 1682 _The Reflections_ were followed by Samuel Pordage's
_Azaria and Hushai_. Twenty years before Pordage had proved himself the
possessor of a certain ingenuity by his feat of turning the philosophy
of Jacob Boehme into English-rhymed couplets. There are even a few
passable passages in the _Mundorum Explicatio_. But in this satire
of his later years he seems to have lost such cunning as he may once
have possessed. The sole merit of the piece is a certain dull restraint
of language, an avoidance of the drosser scurrilities. He is very
temperate, for instance, in what he says of Dryden:
The falling glory of the Jewish stage.
Sweet was the Muse that did his wit inspire,
Had he not let his hackney Muse for hire.
Zimri, we know, he had no cause to praise,
Because he dubb'd him with the name of Bayes,
Because he durst with his proud wit engage,
And brought his follies on the public stage.
But the next Whig satire to appear has real merits. Settle's _Absalom
Senior_ is the one good thing produced by the Whigs in their battle
with Dryden. Dryden himself had grudgingly to admit that Settle was
something of a poet.
Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurred boldly on and dashed through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad
And in a word, heroically mad.
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
This is not altogether just. The verse of _Absalom Senior_ does
more than rhyme and rattle; it has a music of its own, and there
are passages that are curiously Elizabethan in their conception and
execution. Take, for example, this character of the Duke of York, the
Absalom Senior of the poem:
The mercy and the clemency divine,
Those sacred sparks, which in mild David shine,
Were all put out and left a starless night.
A long farewell to all that's good and brave!
Not cataracts more headstrong; as the grave
Inexorable; sullen and untuned
As Pride deposed; not Lucifer unthroned
More unforgiving.
It is hardly credible that this should have been written in 1682.
It reads like the work of some minor poet in the "giant age before
the flood," a contemporary of the grave Lord Brooke. Here again is
something no poet of the Restoration has any business to write, a
simile in which Settle compares the papist plotter to the alchemist:
Who though he see his bursting limbecks crack,
And at one blast, one fatal minute's wrack,
The forward hope of sweating years expire,
With sad, yet painful, hand new-lights the fire.
Pale, lean and wan, does health, wealth, all consume;
And for the great elixir yet to come
Toils and hopes on.
The poem opens with a history of the ceaseless Catholic efforts, ever
since the time of Henry VIII., to recapture England for the old faith.
This serves as a preface to the main body of the piece, which deals
with the Popish Plot. There is the usual portrait gallery, imitated
from _Absalom and Achitophel_, of the most important figures on either
side. This spirited description of Lauderdale is worth quoting:
Let not that hideous bulk of honour 'scape,
Nadab that sets the gazing crowds agape;
The old kirk-founder, whose hoarse croak could sing
The Saints, the Cause, no Bishop and no King.
By the triumphant Saul he was employed
A huge fang-tusk to gore poor David's side,
Like a proboscis in the tyrant's jaw
To rend and root through government and law.
Settle mentions Dryden in connection with Amiel, the Duke of
Buckingham. It is pleasant to note that, like Pordage, he pays tribute,
albeit a somewhat equivocal one, to Dryden's poetical genius:
But Amiel had, alas, the fate to hear
An angry poet play his chronicler;
A poet rais'd above oblivion's shade,
By his recorded verse immortal made.
No muse could more heroic deeds rehearse;
H' had with an equal, all-applauding verse
Great David's sceptre and Saul's javelin praised.
A pyramic to his saint Interest he rais'd.
The rest of the remarks about Dryden are not so edifying; they refer to
that subject, so fruitful of raillery, the poet's marriage with Lady
Howard, whom Settle, repeating scandal, describes as
Laura, in faithful constancy confined
To Ethiop's envoy and to all mankind.
The poem ends with a long list of eulogies addressed to the chiefs of
the Country Party, dull as such eulogies always are and are always
bound to be. For, while we listen to abuse and defamation of almost
any kind with pleasure, we are apt to find the recital of a man's
virtues extremely tedious; a fact well known to newspaper proprietors,
for whom moral indignation--or mud slinging, for the terms are
usually synonymous--is spiritual meat and drink, as well as material
bread-and-butter.
The publication of _Absalom Senior_ was the high-water mark of Settle's
life. In 1673, at the age of twenty-five, he had all the appearances
of a great man: he was the author of _The Empress of Morocco_. But he
was very definitely one of those who have had greatness thrust upon
them. The success of his fantastic tragedy, gravely judged by the most
advanced undergraduate opinion of the day to be superior to anything
Dryden had written, was wholly due to the prodigies of log-rolling
performed by that shifty and malicious patron of the arts, Wilmot,
Earl of Rochester. Rochester, who had for a time bestowed his favours
upon Dryden, suddenly threw him over and exalted Elkanah Settle in his
place. He had _The Empress of Morocco_ specially produced at Court
before its appearance on the public stage, and himself contributed
a Prologue. The "boom" was so well organised that the public for a
time actually took Elkanah seriously. The Empress and her infamous
gallant, Grimalhaz, stamped about the stage giving rhymed utterance to
sentiments of an unheard of turpitude.
GRIMALHAZ: Have you considered, madam, what you've done?
EMPRESS: Poisoned my husband, sir, and if you need
Examples to instruct you in the deed,
I'll make my actions plainer understood,
Copying his death on all the royal blood.
Loud and prolonged applause, bursting out again with redoubled fury
when the Empress hisses into the ear of this new Macbeth:
and your next step t'a throne
Must be, dear sir, the murder of my son.
The applause died away and with it the cat-calls of Settle's three
envious rivals, Dryden, Crowne, and Shadwell. Then came _Absalom
Senior_, and for its author the deserved laureateship of Whiggery. But
a year later things took an awkward turn for the Country Party; Settle
recanted and wrote a history of the Popish Plot, in which he gave
Oates his full due as a scoundrel. When James II. came to the throne
he wrote a fawning Coronation Ode in the hope of placating one whom he
had himself so short a time before called "inexorable as the grave."
He even went so far as to publish a panegyric of Judge Jefferies.
Inch by inch he was sinking deeper into the slough of Grub Street.
With the Revolution he gave up politics (they seemed altogether too
unsafe) and applied for the post of City Laureate. Lord Mayor's Shows
were now immortalised to the extent of "living in Settle's numbers one
day more." Grown old and very miserable, he was reduced to writing
puppet plays, better works of art--who knows?--than the proud Empress
of his youth; and we find him at last "hissing in his own dragon" at
Bartholomew Fair. He was seventy-six when he died in 1724, having
survived long enough to be the target of Pope's barbed malice.
_Absalom Senior_ closes the first act of the drama. The second opens
with Dryden's _Medal_. This personal attack on Shaftesbury roused
more fury among the Whigs than even _Absalom and Achitophel_. In a
single day Edmund Hickeringill wrote and sent to press a long retort
called _The Mushroom_. "... And if any man think or say that it is a
wonder if this book and verses were composed and writ in one day, and
sent to the press, since it would employ the pen of a ready writer to
copy this book in a day--it may be so. But it is a truth, as certain
as the sun in the firmament, and which, if need be, the bookseller,
printer, and other worthy citizens that are privy to it can avouch for
an infallible truth--_Deo soli gloria_--when a divine hand assists, one
of despicable, dull and inconsiderate parts may do wonders, which God
usually performs by most weak and unlikely instruments." Hickeringill
is a charming character; but he hardly comes within the scope of our
article. He is not so much a man of letters as a mental case.
Pordage once again stepped forward and dealt a perfectly ineffective
blow. He was followed by a new and more truculent champion, Shadwell.
Shadwell laid about him with a will. Of Dryden's poetical powers he
says condescendingly: "He has an easiness in rhyme and a knack of
versifying and can make a slight thing seem pretty and clinquant." On
the other hand, he is wholly lacking in originality, and even in his
satires has done nothing but "turn the Observator into rhyme." When he
is not writing in rhyme, "in which he has a kind of excellence," he is
completely insipid. He has no sense of comedy.
Thou never mak'st, but art a standing Jest.
So much for Dryden's literary reputation; now for his character. At
this point Shadwell throws the moral indignation about so freely that
we are forced to hold our noses and to avert our eyes.
Left scathless by the clumsy grossness of Shadwell's attack, Dryden
retorted murderously with _MacFlecknoe_.
But enough of Shadwell. He has his meed of fame and recognition. His
body lies in Westminster Abbey and his plays have been resurrected in
the "Mermaid" Edition. Who was Flecknoe? What manner of man was that
grandiose figure who
In Prose and Verse was own'd without dispute
Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute?
There must be many who, like myself, have cherished a sneaking hope
that this is an ungenerous judgment, that Flecknoe is not so bad
after all. Might one not even discover him, edit him, unearth buried
beauties? Alas, one has but to read a few of his many works to realise
that Dryden was only speaking the modest truth!
We catch our first glimpse of him at some date about the year 1645,
when Andrew Marvell, on his travels in Rome, climbed up three pair of
stairs and
found at last a chamber, as 'twas said,
But seemed a coffin set on the stair's head,
the lodgment of Richard Flecknoe, Irishman, priest, poet, and musician.
A strange figure:
as thin
He stands, as if he only fed had been
With consecrated wafers, and the Host
Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast;
This basso-relievo of a man--
Who, as a camel tall, yet easily can
The needle's eye thread through without any stitch.
No sooner is Marvell within the basso-relievo's clutches than
Straight, without further information
In hideous verse, he, in a dismal tone,
Begins to exorcise, as if I were
Possessed;
and so it goes on
Till the tyrant, weary to persecute,
Left off and tried to allure me with his lute.
Desperate measures have now to be taken; Marvell asks the man to dinner
and for a little time, at least, secures a respite. But not for long;
the poet,
Satisfied with eating, but not tame,
Turns to recite; though judges most severe,
After the assizes' dinner, mild appear
And on full stomach do condemn but few,
Yet he more strict my sentence doth renew,
And draws out of the black box of his breast
Ten quire of paper, in which he was dressed.
It is a sad example of that all too frequent inconsistency between a
man's art and life that the best poem Flecknoe ever wrote should be _To
Silence_:
Still-born Silence, thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart,
Offspring of a heavenly kind,
Frost oth' mouth and thaw oth' mind.
There is a certain absurd charm about this reckless mixture of
conceits, a charm which would have melted Marvell's heart, if he had
heard the piece, as it later melted Lamb's. For what is almost the
first and the last time, Flecknoe's poetic method, which is the method
of Marvell himself and of all the seventeenth-century metaphysicals
reduced to the absurd, actually comes off. Only once again was he ever
to produce anything faintly resembling poetry, and that is in this
stanza about the ant:
That small republique too, at home,
Where thou'rt perhaps some magistrate--
Little think'st thou, when thou dost come,
There's greater in the world than that.
But this is exceptional; his average poetic level is exemplified by
such lines as:
Now to the woodlands, now to th' champains, where
With subtile nets and pitfalls slyly made
She innocently silly fowls betrayed,
While the more lofty inhabitants oth' skies
Sh' allured to ground with brightness of her eyes,
or by that astonishing couplet on Phœbus, which runs:
From 's harnessing of 's horses in the East,
Unto 's unharnessing of them in the West.
From Rome Flecknoe carried his juvenile verses to Constantinople, to
Portugal, to Brazil, to Flanders. But no amount of travel could cure
him of his fatal habit of writing. Re-established in England after the
Restoration, he turned an unlimited leisure to the worst account. He
was the author of four plays, only one of which was put upon the stage,
and that was duly damned. He contented himself by printing the others
with a list of the actors he would have liked to see in the different
parts, if he had been able to get them performed--a touching piece of
naïveté which does much to endear him to us.
Of his prose works the most ambitious is a little collection of
_Enigmaticall Characters_, of which perhaps the choicest is this on
the Drunkard. The Drunkard's wit "is rather the hog's-head than his
own, savouring more of Heidelberg than of Helican and he being rather a
drunken than a good companion."
Flecknoe dies, like the lady on whose decease he wrote an ode, "died as
having nothing else to do," in the year 1678.
Such was Flecknoe. Shadwell's claim to being ranked as Flecknoe's son
is amply substantiated by his own protest that in _MacFlecknoe_ "he had
been represented as an Irishman, though Mr. Dryden knew very well that
he had not set eyes on the country till he was three and twenty and had
remained in it then only for four months."
Dryden followed up _MacFlecknoe_ with the character of Og in the Second
Part of _Absalom and Achitophel_. Shadwell was unable to reply; he
could only faintly complain.
With Part the Second of _Absalom and Achitophel_ the drama of the
Popish Plot comes to an end. The curtain falls on this last orgy
of murder. All the minor characters are now dead--for Doeg and
Mephibosheth lie bleeding by the side of the monstrous Og--and only the
hero remains alive. Turning with a bow to the audience, he delivers
the epilogue, in which he explains, with the best of good humour,
exactly why it is that he, Dryden, is still alive and all the rest lie
punctured about him.
"How easy it is," so runs the epilogue, "how easy it is to call rogue
and villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a man appear a
fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of these opprobrious
terms! There is still a vast difference between the slovenly butchering
of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the
body and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack
Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare
hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her
husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would be kind
enough to think it belongs to me."
ARCHITECTURE AS FORM IN CIVILISATION
By PROFESSOR W. R. LETHABY
Towns and Civilisation are two words for nearly one thing; the City is
the manifestation of the spirit and its population is the larger body
it builds for its soul. To build cities and live in them properly is
the great business of large associations of men. The outward and the
made must always be exact pictures of the mind and the makers. Not only
is this so at any given stage, but it is so all the more in a going
concern, for the outward is always reacting again on the inward, so
that the concrete becomes a mould for the spiritual. Man builds towns
so that the towns shall build his sons. As the old Greek said, "The
city teaches the man."
William Morris says somewhere that the religions of antiquity were the
worshipping of cities. It may seem strange this idea of city worship,
but it explains much in the history of art, and we need something of
similar sort even now: this and other worships besides and beyond.
Before the recognition of the universal and the national we require a
much deepened sense of the civic. _Here_ comes before the _Beyond_.
Almost the greatest question of the time is the one of finding wells
for the refreshment of our vitality--the inducing of national spirit,
town spirit, and home spirit. Such spirit is a very subtle essence,
and yet it dwells in houses and cities are its reservoirs. In the Army
it has always been recognised that the foundation of the whole vast
violent business is _spirit_. The children of war are wiser than the
children of peace. As an example take this scrap from the experience of
a new soldier: "The private is taught from the beginning that the first
duty of a soldier is obedience, the second cleanliness, and the third
may be gathered from this short dialogue between a drill sergeant and a
squad of recruits:
"What is the third duty of a soldier?" asks the sergeant. "Honesty,
sobriety, and self-respect," we reply. "And what is self-respect?"
"Keeping your buttons bright."
We know that Jerusalem was a sacred city, and so was Athens too in its
way. So indeed were all the cities of antiquity, each in its proper
status. In the later classical age every one had its impersonation
of sculptured image--the _Tyche_ of the City. Fragments of a figure
of Silchester were found in the Basilica of the old British town; an
image which stood for the genius of the place. London and York were
also sacred in those Roman days, and the figure on our pennies is a
similar Roman imagination for the whole country, _Britannia_. A fine
inscription from Ephesus in the Central Hall of the British Museum
is a delightful example of the forms and ceremonies observed by the
proud cities of antiquity--the ritual prescribed for their worship
in fact. This marble slab, about 7 feet by 3½ feet, bears in large
clear lettering the copy of a letter addressed by Antoninus Pius to
the Magistrates and People of Ephesus _c._ A.D. 140. The emperor
approved that the people of Pergamon had written letters to Ephesus
correctly addressed with the prescribed titles (First and Greatest
Metropolis of Asia, or the like). He thinks that the People of Smyrna
had accidentally omitted this from a decree about joint sacrifice, but
they will behave correctly in future provided that the Ephesians use
the approved titles in writing to Smyrna (pre-eminent in beauty or the
like). This is indeed politeness on a high plane.
One of the ways in which civic spirit, pride, and love must be
refounded is in the sense of historical continuity. Such a sense of
regional reverence is being cultivated in France on a definitely
psychological basis, and those alert Americans have already begun
to work the ground of their antiquities. A publication of a local
historical society, issued as far back as 1900, contains an account
of what they in America call "An Old Ipswich House." It begins with
some words which I must quote: "The extraordinary production and large
circulation of the historical novel is but one of the consequences
of the remarkable growth of patriotic societies in this country in
the last few years. One of the most admirable results of the movement
is the widespread interest in the establishment of local historical
societies in the old towns of New England. [Older towns of Old England,
please note and copy.] These societies have a very fascinating work
before them in the collection of local records, the preservation of old
buildings, in the marking of historic sites. This soil is fertile and
delving therein bears rich fruit of interest, love for the community,
heightened civic feeling, encouragement of local improvement, and a
care for the future of the town. In not a few places the local society
has taken some old house for its headquarters, adorning it with
attractive historical collections. Such a collection is that of the
Bostonian Society, to which the city long ago gave the use of the Old
State House." What might our English towns still do in this way! Or is
it to be that for authentic touch with antiquity we shall soon have to
go to America? In passing may I commend this idea to those who have the
destruction of the old Dean's House at Wolverhampton in their mind or
at least their power?
Germany has long consciously cultivated this field for spirit
production, and I remember an official tract on the psychological value
of Ancient Monuments in promoting national consciousness. It is in
Denmark, however, that an effort to promote national spirit has been
most systematically based on a common knowledge of national traditions,
arts, and music, and spread by means of their admirable "Folk Schools."
Monumental history is a stirring, vital thing: it can be touched. In
every town every child-citizen should know the story and antiquities of
that place. This has always been the way until now. "What mean these
stones?" the children say, and we answer, "I don't know." The history
that can be seen is a strong and stimulating soul-food, entirely
different from vague and wearying written history.
The historical starting-post is only one of many ways of approach to
fine forms of civilisation; we must not wait on the order of our going,
but go at once and from every point at once. Much is being thought and
said about Housing and Town Planning; they are both of the greatest
possible importance, but they are not all. We need at least a third
to go with them--that is a general cleaning, tidying, and smartening
movement, an effort to improve all our public and social arts, from
music to cooking and games. We must control and tax advertisements
to some order, bring pressure on the railway companies to sweep
the microbes out of their stations, and we must whitewash our own
backyards. The danger is to think of housing and planning as technical
matters for experts. It may almost be feared that current talk of town
planning and garden cities may harden with a jargon-like political
formulæ. Our arts and customs are indexes and pictures of our inner
life. Fine bridges, clean, smiling streets, liberal public buildings
are not merely shapes and nothing more. They are essential to our
sense of order, brightness, and efficiency, to our pride, confidence,
and content. A sore protesting slapped-in-the-face feeling cannot be
good for the temper and digestion. A civilised life cannot be lived in
undisciplined towns.
* * * * *
More and more we become the victims of our words and live frightened
by names. Such a name is Architecture. In its mystery vague and
vain pretensions may be shrouded, in its shadows hide many minor
superstitions about correct design, the right style, true proportions.
High priests arise who are supposed to know subtle doctrines and can
point the way to æsthetic safety. And yet all the time there are the
streets, Edgware Road and Euston Road, Oxford Street and Holborn;
there again are our cities, Leeds and Liverpool, Bristol and Plymouth.
Surely these potent and indeed blatant facts might raise doubts as to
the dogmas. The mystification about "architecture" has isolated the
intimate building art from the common interest and understanding of
ordinary men. To talk with a believing architect on his theories is
almost as hopeless as to chaff a cardinal. All the ancient arts of men
are subject to the diseases of pedantry and punditry--music, painting,
poetry all suffer from isolation.
Architecture is human skill and feeling shown in the great necessary
activity of building. It must be a living, progressive structural art,
always readjusting itself to changing conditions of time and place.
If it is true it must ever be new. This, however, not with a willed
novelty, which is as bad as or worse than trivial antiquarianism, but
by response to _force majeure_. The vivid interest and awe with which
men look on a ship or an engine, an old cottage or a haystack, come
from the sense of their reality. They were shaped so by a higher power
than whim, by a higher aim than snobbery. So must it again be with our
buildings: they must be founded fast on the rock of necessity.
Wordy claims are often made for "Architecture" that it is a "Fine Art,"
and chief of all the arts. These two claims are indeed incompatible
and contradictory. Any mastership in architecture depends on its
universality and its service. It is only chief in the sense that he who
serves is the greatest. But the "Fine Arts" are by definition free from
conditions of human need, and architecture was specially ruled out from
among them by Aristotle. Even so, this idea of fine art unconditioned
and free for delight was a heresy of the Hellenistic decline. To Plato
and the great masters even the "musical" arts were to be not only
healthy but health-giving; they were to be foods for the soul and not
æsthetic raptures and intoxications.
On the other side of the account it may be objected that bare utility
and convenience are not enough to form a base for a noble architecture.
Of course they are not if "bare utility" is interpreted in a mean and
skimping and profiteering way. All work of man bears the stamp of
the spirit with which it was done, but this stamp is not necessarily
"ornament." The unadorned indeed can never stand as low as that which
is falsely adorned in borrowed, brazen bedizenments. High utility
and liberal convenience for noble life are enough for architecture.
We confuse ourselves with these unreal and destructive oppositions
between the serviceable and the æsthetic, between science and art.
Consider any of the great forms of life activity--seamanship, farming,
housekeeping--can anyone say where utility ends and style, order,
clearness, precision begin? Up to a point, and indeed a long way on,
"style" is a utility. We have to begin again and look on architecture
as an art of service from the communal point of view. The faces of
buildings which are turned outwards towards the world are obviously
of interest to the public, and all citizens have a property in them.
The spectator is in fact part owner. No man builds to himself alone.
Let the proprietor do as he likes inside his building, for we need not
call on him. Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but
nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can
protect us from buildings in the street. It is to be feared that we are
learning to protect ourselves by the habit of not observing, that is by
sacrificing a faculty. General interest and intelligent appreciation of
public arts are a necessity of civilisation. Civic alertness, honest
pride, or firm protest are not matters of taste for a few; they are
essential activities of the urban mind. In cities buildings take the
place of fields, trees, and hedgerows. Buildings are an artificial
form of nature. We have a right to consideration and some politeness
in buildings. We claim protection from having our faces slapped
when we venture into the street. Our cities do not wholly belong to
profit-lords, railway companies, and advertisers.
Architecture, however "properly understood," not only concerns the
man in the street, it comes home to all householders and households.
While our eyes have been strained on the vacuity of correct style, the
weightier matters of construction and efficiency have necessarily been
neglected. We need grates which will warm, floors which may readily
be cleaned, and ceilings which do not crack. These and such as these
are the terms of the modern architectural problem, and in satisfying
them we should find the proper "style" for to-day. Architecture is a
current speech, it is not an art of classical quotation. As it is it
is as much burdened by its tags of rhetoric as Chinese literature. It
has become a dead language. The house of the future will be designed
as a ship is designed, as an organism which has to function properly
in all its parts. Does this not concern everyone, not only as economy
and comfort, but in the mind? Our houses must be made to fit us like
garments and to be larger projections of ourselves. A whole row of
ambiguous words, such as design, ornament, style, proportion, have come
between us and the immediately given data of architecture. Design is
not abstract power exercised by a genius, it is simply the arranging
how work shall be well done. The more necessary the work and the more
obvious, simple, and sound is the foresight the better the design.
It is not a question of captivating paper patterns, it is a question
of buildings which will work. Architecture is a pragmatical art. To
design in the Classic, Gothic, or Renaissance styles is as absurd as to
sculpture in the manner of Praxiteles, paint "like" Holbein, or write
sham Shakespeare. We do not really need a waxwork art by Wardour Street
professionals. We require an active art of building which will take its
"style" for granted, as does naval architecture. Modern building must
shake itself free from its own withered and cast-off skins.
It is commonly supposed, and architects themselves in older days
believed it, that an architect's business was to be an expert in style.
Why he should be so was never explained, except, perhaps, by Philibert
de l'Orme. According to this authority the Temple of Jerusalem was
built in the Classical style, and this work was designed in heaven;
therefore this was the only true or revealed style. An excellent
argument; modern practitioners have kept up a "battle of the styles"
without any such basis for their logic, or rather their eloquence. But
what is or was a style? It is a museum name for a phase of past art. As
a means of classifying what is dead and done the style labels are quite
useful. It has, however, to be kept in mind that these styles, while
they lived and moved, were processes which began, continued, and passed
into something else. They were only phases like those of the changing
moon. That which now professes to be designed in a style, or, as the
still more disgusting slang runs, to be "period work," has not the
essence of life. It is, therefore, not actually of the style which it
simulates but is only in the "style" of the style.
Indeed, the essence of all the old arts was in their vitality, their
response to the natural conditions and the psychology of their times.
The better we seem to reproduce their dead images the more we are
unlike their soul-selves. There is little more reason for an architect
to pretend to work in a style than there is for a chemist. Architects
are properly arrangers and directors of certain classes of structures.
I would like to say that they were building engineers, were it not
that our engineers have failed so shamefully in hiring themselves out
for any form of exploitation and in showing no care for orderliness
and decency. All the past of architecture, as of engineering and
shipbuilding, belongs to us, of course, as race experience, but only as
far as the same is true in all fields of science and literature.
The "Orders" of architecture are names for particular forms of ancient
Greek temple building. Style-names apply to all past fashions of
buildings, Orders only to three--Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The
names are useful as history, but that is all. Now that these Orders
have become shop advertisements, even the would-be correct may be more
ready to give them up.
Style in a modern and universal sense is equivalent rather to "stylish"
than to a style; it interpenetrates the whole texture of a work; it
is clearness, effectiveness, mastery, often it is simplification. We
have to conceive of it in the building art as we do in literature
or athletics. "The style is the man"--yes, and it is also the thing
itself. It is an informing spirit, the spirit of form, it is not a
varnish. We have become so accustomed to architecture looking "dressy"
that we have forgotten the logic of clothes and bury buildings good
enough in themselves under outgrown rags. It has been a true instinct
which calls sham architectural features "dressings."
Another word which the architecturally superstitious whisper with
great awe is proportion. In dealing with such a limited field as the
"Orders," old scholars examined existing examples by measuring them
very carefully to find out their proportions; but, if we had them,
Greek chairs and tables might be measured in exactly the same way. No
general rule of the Greeks has ever been found out by these measurings,
and if it had it would prove nothing for us. Proportion, of course,
rests properly on function, material, and size. There maybe a perfect
proportion, for instance, for a certain class of ships, but that will
only be discovered experimentally, and not by measuring Greek galleys.
* * * * *
I wish I could find some leverage of argument to bring a sense of
citizen responsibility for form in life into the minds and hearts of
all, but right and reason are hardy enough. We may, perhaps, hope more
in a sense of international rivalry in the works and evidences of life.
Civilisation is an Olympic contest in the arts and sciences, a sort of
international Eisteddfod. It is admitted that we must have literature
and we must have music: we must also have building skill, and we have
to aim at inducing a flowing tide in all the things of civilisation. Of
words and arguments I am rather hopeless. One thing only I would ask of
every benevolent reader: that he would take notice of what he sees in
the streets. Do not pass by in a contemplative dream, or suppose that
it is an architectural mystery, but look and judge. Is it tidy, is it
civilised, are these fit works for a proud nation? Look at Trafalgar
Square and Piccadilly Circus, and that terrible junction of Tottenham
Court Road with Oxford Street. Play a new game of seeing London. We
need a movement in the common mind, a longing to mitigate the vulgarity
and anarchy of our streets, and the smothering of the frontages with
vile advertisements, a desire to clean the streets better, to gather up
littered paper, to renew blistered plaster. Some order must be brought
into the arrangement of the untidy festoons of telegraph and telephone
wires hitched up to chimneys and parapets. These are the architectural
works which are needed as a beginning and a basis. The idea of beauty,
daily-bread beauty, not style pretences, must be brought back into
our life. Every town should set up an advisory committee on its
betterment. We must try to bring back the idea of town personality
and town worship; we must set up ceremonies and even rituals to bring
out a spirit of pride and emulation. If we can only stir up general
interest all will yet go well or at least better. By exalting our
towns we should make a platform for ourselves. As it is what can great
money fortunes buy beyond swine comfort and titles? Man is more than a
stomach moving about on legs. A mistake of modern education has been to
train for appreciation of the past rather than for present production.
Such merely critical learning comes at last to be actually sterilising.
As production fails, so even appreciation decays. Full understanding
depends on the power to do. Therefore, leaving the things of the past,
press forward to produce, to be, to live. Remember Lot's wife. There is
much talk of patriotism, but patriotism requires a ground on which to
subsist; it must be based on love of home, love of city, and love of
country. Let nothing deceive us, civilisation produces form, and where
noble form is attained there is civilisation. Life is a process, a flow
of being, and where there is this vital activity music, drama, and the
arts are necessarily thrown off. Living art comes on a tide of creative
intelligence.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
GENERAL NOTES
We have just received the catalogue of the library of the late Dr.
Daniel, Provost of Worcester, which was bought in its entirety by Mr.
Chaundy, of Oxford. Dr. Daniel, who died in the autumn of last year,
was born in 1836. From boyhood onwards his favourite hobby seems to
have been printing. "As early as 1846 a small hand press at Frome
Vicarage, in Somerset, painfully produced a little letter, and in 1852
at least three numbers of the Busy Bee, printed and published by H.
and W. E. Daniel, at their office, Trinity Parsonage, Frome." In 1856
two more substantial volumes (_Sonnets_, by C. J. C., and _The Seven
Epistles to the Churches_, in Greek) were issued from Frome.
* * * * *
So much for origins. The Daniel Press known to fame only came into
existence in 1874, when the little hand press from Frome was set up in
Worcester. The first book printed by the Daniel Press, at Oxford, was
_Notes from a Catalogue of Pamphlets in Worcester College Library_,
1874, of which five-and-twenty copies were issued. A copy of this
pamphlet is priced at 45_s._ in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue. _A New Sermon
of the Newest Fashion_, printed from a MS. found in the College
Library, appeared in 1877. In this volume Dr. Daniel first made use
of the fount of type which had been cast for Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ
Church, and which had lain forgotten in the Clarendon Press for a
century and a half. Henceforth Dr. Daniel was to make use of the Fell
type in all his publications.
* * * * *
The most treasured book of these earlier years is the _Garland of
Rachel_ (1881), which consists of poems offered to Miss Rachel Daniel
on her first birthday by, among others, Andrew Lang, Austen Dobson,
Robert Bridges, John Addington Symonds, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley,
T. Humphry Ward, and Margaret L. Woods. Only thirty-six copies were
printed, one of which is priced in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue at £40.
* * * * *
In 1882 the old press was replaced by a much more scientific machine,
and among the first books to be printed on the new press was
_Prometheus the Firegiver_ (1883), by Robert Bridges. A number of the
Poet Laureate's poems were to be issued from the Daniel Press. Of the
_Poems_ of 1884 one hundred and fifty copies were printed (£3 10_s._ in
Mr. Chaundy's catalogue). _The Feast of Bacchus_ (one hundred and five
copies) and _The Growth of Love_, published anonymously in an edition
of only twenty-two copies, appeared in 1889. The year 1903 witnessed
the publication of two more pieces from Mr. Bridges' pen, namely, _Now
in Wintry Delights_ and _Peace, an Ode written on Conclusion of the
Three Years' War_.
In 1884 Dr. Daniel made use for the first time of a number of fine
seventeenth-century woodcut ornaments. His printer's mark was a piece
of contemporary work, designed by Alfred Parsons, representing Daniel
in the lions' den, with the motto, _Misit Angelum Suum_.
* * * * *
Noteworthy volumes which issued from the Daniel Press in the nineties
were _Our Memories, Shades of Old Oxford_ (1893), a collection of
Oxford reminiscences by various hands; _The Child in the House_ (1894),
by Walter Pater, published only a month or two before his death; _Poems
of Laurence Binyon_ (1895); _Keble's Easter Day_, of which only twelve
copies were printed by Miss Rachel Daniel (1897). Eight years before
Miss Daniel had printed _The Lamb_, by W. Blake, in duodecimo (1889).
* * * * *
Besides those already mentioned, Dr. Daniel issued a number of reprints
of old books. _Sixe Idillia_, translated from Theocritus by E. D.
(possibly Dyer), was reprinted from the unique copy (1588) in the
Bodleian Library. _Love's Graduate_, a comedy, by John Webster, being
Mr. Gosse's distillation of what was Websterian in the Webster-Rowley
comedy of 1661, appeared in 1885. _The Muses Garden of Delights_, a
reprint of a unique Elizabethan volume, edited with an introduction
by William Barclay Squire, was printed by Dr. Daniel in 1901. Another
edition, printed by the Clarendon Press, was published in the same year.
* * * * *
We have mentioned only a few of the Daniel books. A complete
bibliography of the publications of the Press during its first thirty
years of activity may be found in an article by Mr. Madan, at that
time Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian, contributed to the _Times Literary
Supplement_ of February 20th, 1903. As we have already had occasion
to mention in these columns, the Daniel Press is now in the Bodleian,
together with specimens of the books produced on it.
* * * * *
Contemporary private presses are fairly numerous. The two which
produce what are, from a literary point of view at any rate, the most
interesting books are the Hogarth Press and the Ovid Press. From the
Ovid Press Mr. John Rodker has just issued a very handsome edition
of the poems of Mr. T. S. Eliot. Poems by Mr. Eliot have also been
published by the Hogarth Press, together with works in verse and prose
by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and J. Middleton
Murry.
* * * * *
Our French allies seem to be making a serious effort to break with
that tradition of bad printing which has for so long oppressed their
literature. Several new publishing houses have come into existence with
the avowed purpose of producing books that shall be handsome objects
in themselves. The directors of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ have
set a higher standard in their publications than most of their rivals.
But even in their editions the most horrible atrocities, such as the
omission of a whole sheet of sixteen pages in the middle of a book,
occasionally happen. But the books produced by _La Sirène_, by _La
Belle Edition_, and the _Société Littéraire de France_ are worthy of
all praise.
* * * * *
The selection of rare and valuable books from the Arbury Hall Library
which, as announced in the January number of THE LONDON MERCURY, was to
have been offered for sale by auction at Sotheby's on behalf of the
owner, Sir Francis Newdigate-Newdegate, K.C.M.G., has instead been sold
privately. Neither the name of the purchaser nor the destination of the
books has yet been made public. Since the collection contains editions
of Elizabethan books of the utmost rarity, and indeed some that are
apparently unique, it is to be hoped that it will not pass beyond the
reach of students of literature.
* * * * *
Collectors of Swinburniana will be interested in _A Catalogue of the
Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne in the Library of Mr. Edmund
Gosse_, London, privately printed at the Chiswick Press, 1919. Only
fifty copies of this catalogue have been issued, of which a few can
still be obtained from Mr. James Bain, bookseller, 14 King William
Street, Strand.
* * * * *
Many items of the greatest rarity are included in Mr. Gosse's
collection. Among them we would note one of the fifteen copies of
_The Devil's Due_ (1875), preserved by accident when the issue was
destroyed; _Laus Veneris_, Moxon, 1866, one of a few trial copies
issued before the poem was included in _Poems and Ballads_; the
essay on William Blake, Hotten, 1868, with the original title-page,
afterwards cancelled, ornamented by the vignette of Zamiel from the
Book of Job; _The Jubilee_, _The Question_, _Gathered Songs_, all three
published by Ottley in 1887, in editions of only twenty-five copies
each. Among the Swinburne MSS. in the possession of Mr. Gosse are the
holograph of _Pan and Thalassia_, and the holograph of the first draft
of _Anactoria_.
* * * * *
The new Public Libraries Bill, which received the Royal Assent in the
last days of 1919, should do much to assist the development of what
is already an important educative force. We look forward in time to a
national library system, with a central clearing house of books and a
free interchange between the individual libraries. It is surely only
in this way that the multifarious needs of an increasingly alert and
well-educated society can adequately be met.
* * * * *
Tuesday, March 23rd, is the date fixed for the sale of the second
portion of Mr. Henry Yates Thompson's collection of illuminated
manuscripts. Thirty-four lots are to be sold--twenty-six MSS. and
eight fifteenth-century books, printed on vellum and more or less
illuminated, "which mark the transition from writing to printing
... and are an indispensable addition to any complete collection of
medieval illumination."
* * * * *
The first fourteen lots are English manuscripts. A twelfth-century
book, _Hegesippus de excidio Judeorum_, is remarkable for its
contemporary binding, one of the very few of such bindings which have
come down to us. Lot XL. is a fourteenth-century Psalter, which appears
to have belonged to John of Gaunt, and subsequently to Henry VI. A
similar Psalter, evidently by the same hand, though of a rather later
date, exists in the library of Exeter College. These two Psalters
are, in Mr. Yates Thompson's opinion, the high-water mark of English
illumination, being perhaps second only to the St. Omer Psalter.
* * * * *
The eight printed books range in date from 1466 to 1498, and include a
copy of the excessively rare _Institutiones_ of Justinian, printed at
Mainz by P. Schöffer, 1468. The twelve MSS. which conclude the sale are
of French and Italian origin and have all belonged to famous owners.
Among them is an early fifteenth-century MS. of Boccaccio's _Des Cleres
et nobles femmes_, illustrated by miniatures of that Parisian school
of illuminators who "almost renounced the use of gold for backgrounds
and made use of bright and rich colours in broad masses." The book
belonged to the Admiral de Coëtivy, who was killed at the siege of
Cherbourg in 1450. Mr. Yates Thompson quotes an extract from one of the
Admiral's letters, which proves him to have been an ardent lover of his
books. "Envelopez bien mes livres," he writes to his servants, giving
directions for the packing and dispatching of his library, "et les
faites enfoncer en pippes (casks) en et par manière que s'ilz cheoient
en l'eaue, qu'ilz ne se puissent mouller ne gaster en aucune manière."
* * * * *
ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
An extremely elegant little catalogue of old editions of Greek
and Latin authors has been sent to us from the "Aedes Dunsteri,
Cantabrigiæ, Novang," or in other words the Dunster House Bookshop,
Cambridge, Mass. No word in the vulgar tongue is allowed to pollute
these classical pages, where everything, with the exception of the
dollar sign in the prices, is the choicest Latin.
* * * * *
We have already had occasion to speak of the Daniel and other private
Presses. We are reminded by Messrs. Maggs Brothers' catalogue, No. 385,
of the magnificent examples of typography and binding which have issued
from the Doves Press and Bindery. A copy of _Paradise Lost and Paradise
Regained_, two volumes, 1902-1905, printed at the Doves Press and bound
by Mr. Cobden Sanderson in tooled morocco, is priced at £120. None of
the fifteen Doves Press books mentioned in this catalogue is priced at
less than £8 8_s._ Collectors will remember the "boom" in Kelmscott
books.
* * * * *
Good prices were fetched at Messrs. Hodgson's sale on January 28th for
first editions of Stevenson. _An Inland Voyage_ (1878) was sold for
£22; _Travels with a Donkey_ (1879) and _Virginibus Puerisque_ (1881)
went for £16 10_s._ each. First editions of the _Ebb Tide_ (1894) and
_The Wrong Box_ (1889) may be bought for 12_s._ 6_d._ at Messrs. Davis
& Orioli.
* * * * *
Messrs. Sotheran's catalogue of the library of the late Sir Edward
Poynter, P.R.A., has just reached us. Out of the many items of the
greatest interest which this catalogue contains we can mention only
a few, notably a fine set of Piranesi etchings, a collection of 250
caricatures by such masters as Hogarth, Bunbury, Gilray, and Rowlandson
(£75), a copy of Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, presented by
Mrs. Opie to the French sculptor, David, with the inscription, "This
work, remarkable both for its genius and extravagance, is the gift of
Amelia Opie to her friend David, whose own genius will make him prize
the former, while his excellent taste makes it impossible for him to
imitate the latter." A complete set of the Kelmscott publications,
seventy volumes in all, is priced in this catalogue at £900. The main
bulk of the collection consists of books on the fine arts, and a
certain number of original drawings are included.
A. L. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
AMERICAN COPYRIGHT
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--In the second number of THE LONDON MERCURY I note a reference
in an Editorial Note to the status of the copyright relations between
America and Great Britain.
You emphasize the unsatisfactory status of the American copyright law.
It is the case, as you point out, that the provision inserted in the
original International Act which went into effect in 1891, and in the
amended Act which became law in 1909, makes it a condition that any
book, whether by an American or an English author, must, in order to
secure copyright protection in the United States, be published in an
edition "wholly manufactured" within this country. It has also been the
law up to within the past fortnight that the American edition must be
brought into the market within a term of not less than sixty days from
the date of publication in Great Britain.
This Act, as amended in 1912 and again in December, 1919, represents
the largest measure of copyright protection that it has thus far been
found practicable to secure for transatlantic authors. The fight to
secure any measure of recognition for the property rights of foreign
authors had continued from 1837 (when my father organised the first
Copyright League) to 1891, when a provision for international copyright
first found place in the American statute. I succeeded my father as the
Secretary and executive of the International Copyright League.
As a representative of this League (which at that time comprised
authors as well as publishers) I took to Washington in 1886 the draft
of a Bill which, if enacted, would have enabled the United States
to become a member of the Convention of Berne. After four years of
effort with two successive Congresses, I was obliged to report to the
Copyright League that there was no possibility of securing favourable
attention for any international copyright measure that did not make
provision for American manufacture.
The Book Manufacturing Union, comprising typesetters, printers,
binders, etc., had made clear to Congress that they would block the
enactment of any measure that did not include the manufacturing
requirement. In this position they were supported by the other unions
which had no direct interest in, and in fact no knowledge of, the
matter at issue. The unions have, wisely, probably for their own
interests, held increasingly to the policy of giving a general support
to a claim made by any one union or group.
Our League took the position that it was wiser to secure such measure
of recognition for literary property as was then practicable rather
than to leave without protection the books of transatlantic authors,
and the authors and publishers of Great Britain were in full accord
with this decision.
We are obliged to report that the unions have to-day a stronger
influence over Congress, and as a rule over the executive, than they
had in 1890. There is no possibility of securing the cancellation of
the manufacturing requirement unless, or until, the book manufacturing
unions can be persuaded to give their assent. There has been an
increasing effort to this end, and we hope yet to be able to make
clear to the book manufacturing trade that the American printers and
binders are now quite strong enough to secure their full share of the
work done, and that they do not need this special restriction in their
favour.
We have just succeeded in securing the enactment of an amendment, a
copy of which is enclosed.
This amendment has two purposes:
First:--The extension of the _ad interim_ term of copyright from sixty
to 120 days.
An English author now has four months' time within which to complete
the arrangements for his American edition, and there is no reason why
any book having value for American readers should not secure the full
protection of American copyright.
Second:--The Bill has the further purpose of giving protection to the
books of transatlantic authors which, under the special conditions
of the years of war and the dislocation of transatlantic mails, had
failed to fulfil the requirements of the copyright law. These books,
as far as they may not already have been appropriated, are now placed
in a position to meet these requirements and to secure copyright for
the full term. It is, however, a condition of this special protection
that the British authorities shall give reciprocal protection to books
by American authors which, under the same war conditions, have failed
to meet the requirements of the English statute and have, therefore,
forfeited the protection of the British Copyright Act.
The American authors have here a fair ground for complaint against
Great Britain.
The British Act of 1912 provides that copyright protection will be
accorded only to a book which has been brought into _bona-fide_
publication, and the Courts take the ground that this means placing
"adequate supplies" of the book in the market within the term
specified, fourteen days. This term is, you will note, very much
smaller than the sixty-day term granted in the earlier American Act, or
the 120 days which are now available.
In 1916 books were included under the heading of _luxuries_, the
importation of which into Great Britain was prohibited by the embargo
Act. Great Britain had, therefore, granted copyright with one hand
and with the other, under this embargo Act, had made it impossible
for American authors to meet the requirements of the Copyright Act.
The copyright arrangement between the United States and Great Britain
that went into effect in 1891, and that was confirmed by the Act of
1912, carried with it the obligations of a treaty, and the embargo Act
constituted, therefore, as far as copyright was concerned, a violation
of the treaty obligation.
I found, in bringing this matter in 1918 to the attention of the
Comptroller-General, that this consideration had not occurred to the
British authorities at the time of the embargo Act.
I pointed out to the Comptroller-General that as a result of this
embargo provision property rights had been lost not only for American
authors, but for a certain group of British authors who, not being
able under the manufacturing difficulties of the war period to secure
prompt publication of their books in Great Britain, had made first
publication in the United States. In so doing they had forfeited their
British copyright, although it had been their impression that they
would be able when the war had come to an end to secure protection for
British editions. The Comptroller-General agreed that the condition was
unsatisfactory, and agreed further that if the United States would do
what was now practicable to protect the publications of the war period
a similar protection of books of American authors would be arranged for
by the British authorities.
A fortnight back, on the day on which the President signed the Bill,
I cabled the report to the Comptroller-General that books by British
authors issued during the war period would be protected in America
as soon as the British authorities were prepared to grant reciprocal
protection. I hope to hear that prompt measures have been taken to
such effect. Lord Askwith has, I may mention, interested himself in
the matter and will, I understand, take prompt action to initiate the
necessary legislation.
I can but think that those who are critical of the present status of
the American copyright law should understand that the unsatisfactory
provisions in the law do not represent the opinion of the American
people, but the disproportioned influence of the manufacturing unions.
It would be in order also to give some measure of appreciation to the
American publishers and authors who have for many years been doing what
was in their power to secure adequate recognition for literary property
on both sides of the Atlantic.--Yours, etc.,
GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM.
The American Publishers' Copyright League,
Office of the Secretary, 2 West 45th Street, New York, January 3rd.
[Major Putnam's news, which we briefly recorded in our Editorial
Notes last month, is excellent hearing. In congratulating him on his
work in connection with copyright we must also mention the Authors'
League of America and our own Authors' Society, with their respective
indefatigable secretaries, Mr. Eric Schuler and Mr. G. Herbert
Thring.--EDITOR.]
MR. STURGE MOORE AND FLAUBERT
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--In the review of Mr. W. K. Seymour's _Miscellany of Poetry_--1919
(LONDON MERCURY, February) the best thing in the book is said to be "a
long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut
and vivid as those which made his _Micah_ so peculiarly rich a poem."
This is, of course, a very just remark, but it is a curious thing about
_Micah_ that the particular piece of imagery which struck one reader at
any rate can be paralleled almost verbatim from _Salammbo_. I intend no
discourtesy to Mr. Sturge Moore when I say that I consider the parallel
should have been acknowledged in the text. He has written much about
Flaubert and much also about the virtues of joint authorship, and I
think nothing but praise for what is apparently a verse translation
in _Micah_ would have resulted from the acknowledgment. As the matter
stands it seems that an explanation of some sort is wanting, and I
suggest that when _Micah_ is published in a collection of Mr. Moore's
poetry the point should surely not be overlooked.
The following are the lines referred to:
_Salammbo:_
"Le toit de la haute maison s'appuie sur de minces colonnettes,
rapprochées comme les bâtons d'une claire-voie, et par ces
intervalles le maître, étendu sur un long siége, aperçoit toutes ces
plaines autour de lui, avec les chasseurs entre les blés, le pressoir
où l'on vendange, les bœufs qui battent la paille."
Mr. Sturge Moore:
"The roof of that tall house lightly was raised
On slender colonnettes set nigh as close
As palings. Micah through these intervals
Had oft at leisure from his couch surveyed
The plain stretched round him; slingers in the corn
The wine-press whither they bring in his grapes.
Unmuzzled and well fed, slow oxen trod
The terrace threshing-floor."
Yours, etc.,
H. W. CRUNDELL.
PROSE AND MORTALITY
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--There is a good example of the recurrence of that "one music and
one speech" so richly instanced in your article "Prose and Mortality"
(January's LONDON MERCURY) in Keats's letter to Brown written on board
the _Maria Crowther_ off the Isle of Wight--good because, though
the music is not full nor the harmony flawless, it is yet heard
unmistakably in a familiar letter, where it rises from the midst of an
invalid's colloquial writing. Here it is:
"Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but Death is
the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed
through my mind I may say the bitterness of death is passed."--Yours,
etc.,
S. P. J.
Llangollen, February 8th.
[This is a perfect example, as it comes not from a set composition but
from a familiar letter.--EDITOR.]
TAMHTAB
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--There is an example of the "Moor Eeffocist" language which is not
open to "A. P.'s" very just objection.
When I was very young and had a vivid imagination I was taken into a
Chinese Restaurant, where I saw TUO YAW writ large on a glass door. For
a long time I thought I knew at least two words of Chinese.--Yours,
etc.,
DONALD J. WARDLEY.
25 Elgin Crescent, W.11, February 7th.
THE SONG OF THE MANDRAKE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Will you allow me to point out a curious slip in Mr. Walter de
la Mare's most wonderful little story, _The Creatures_, in the current
(January) number?
On page 281, eight lines from the bottom, he gives a list of
birds--"Gull, mandrake, plover, wagtail, finch, robin." Does Mr. de la
Mare really mean his readers to understand that the mandrake is a bird?
If so, surely the root must cry aloud as it is dragged from the ground
to be hurled into a different Natural Order.--Yours, etc.,
W. WALMESLEY WHITE.
Ellergarth, Budleigh Salterton, January 28th.
THE VERB TO DO
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Will no one protest against and endeavour to check the ugly and
quite unnecessary modernism of "as it does"? I give an example of a
sentence, adequate and harmonious as written, which would be spoiled
were the favourite journalese "as it does" inserted after the word
"embracing."
"The glorious view from this spot, embracing the valley of Ville
d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance, was a
delight to Balzac."--Martin, _Stones of Paris_, II., 69.--Yours, etc.,
R. OWEN.
Belmount Hall, Outgate, Ambleside, January 12th.
JOHN DONNE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Mr. Robert Lynd in his very readable essay on _Donne_ in your
last number has inadvertently fallen into the old error of saying
that Donne was in 1612 "making use of his legal knowledge in order to
help the infamous Countess of Essex to secure the annulment of her
first marriage." It is true that Donne wrote an Epithalamium for the
Countess's second marriage, and that is mortifying enough without any
further charge. But Professor Grierson pointed out some time since that
it was Dr. Daniel Donne (or Dun) who drew up the paper referred to
(Grierson's _Donne_, ii. 94). If further evidence were needed, it might
be supplied from MS. Rawlinson 1386 in the Bodleian. On page 201 is the
autograph _Daniel Dun_, and someone, probably Rawlinson, has added "Sr.
Daniel Dr of Civil Lawes concern'd in Somerset's Divorce."
Mr. Lynd very rightly insists that John Donne is "the supreme example
of a Platonic lover among the English poets." But he implies that
the impassioned logic of _The Ecstasy_ is not quite consistent with
Platonism. What is Platonism? It is customary to develop a system of
philosophy of love from a few famous pages of the _Symposium_, ignoring
the rest, and this more or less hypothetical or mythical Platonism has
caused many people to forget Plato's real teaching. A careful study of
the _Symposium_ will, I think, show Donne to be much more truly in the
genuine Platonic tradition than were some of the poetical Platonists
who preceded him. Mr. Lynd is quite right on this point, and I think he
might have put it even more strongly.--Yours, etc.,
BEN CROCKER CLOUGH.
Oxford, February 13th.
DOGS
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your reviewer in his notice of that interesting book _Seventeenth
Century Life in the Country Parish_, referring to the "dog-whipper,"
says, "But why did the dogs of those days show such a church-going
disposition?" I would remind him that the dog-whipper's office was not
created in the seventeenth century, but in those remoter times when no
gentleman appeared anywhere in public without his hawk on his wrist and
his hound at his heel. In Barclay's _Shippe of Fools_ (1509) he writes:
One time the hawkes bells jangleth hye
* * * * *
And now the houndes barking strikes the skye
* * * * *
They make of the Church for their hawkes a mewe,
And canell for their dogges, which they shall after rewe.
It was the custom to supply a pew (or pen) for the dogs of the Lord of
the Manor--the hall-dogs' "pew"--and as people worshipped (in their
hats) with the church doors standing open, I suppose the hounds of
the lesser gentry and inimitative yeomen would run in and fight and
distract attention.
Though in the seventeenth century the hawk had ceased to be an integral
part of a gentleman's equipage, the dogs had inherited the tradition
of taking their masters to church, maybe. And as the worshipper, even
in the seventeenth century, went from Divine service to a bull or
bear-baiting, he would like to have his dogs on the spot. And no doubt
all the curs of the village would want to follow them into church and
ask the news of high life.--Yours, etc.,
G. I. WHITHAM.
Lyneham Cottage, Chudleigh, S. Devon, February 13th.
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
Interest in the Near East is maintained, and a useful lead was given in
1913 by the Cyprus Government, who entrusted Professor Myres, assisted
by the Keeper of the Cyprus Museum and Mr. L. H. D. Buxton, with a
good round sum to conduct excavations in the island. The results were
described at length and illustrated on the screen, the most notable
discovery being a ruined sanctuary containing a collection of stone
statues with many of the painted surfaces in brilliant preservation,
ranging in date from the seventh century B.C. to Greco-Roman times.
Elsewhere many antiquities of the Bronze Age were brought to light, but
at present there are few, if any, traces of a Stone Age in the island.
The first stratified series of Cypriote pottery was provided by a
complete section of the Bamboula Hill at Larnaca, and the situation is
full of promise.
A marble statuette, now in the Ashmolean Museum, was the text of
Professor Langdon's discourse, and gave scope for surmise as well as
scholarship. It was found by the 14th Sikh Regiment when entrenching
before the battle of Istabalat, eight miles below Samara on the Tigris.
The object originally carried on the head has disappeared, but the
standing figure still holds a "boomerang" or sceptre, and the dress was
made in imitation of the fleece, a fashion to which Aristophanes is
supposed to refer in the _Wasps_, perhaps three thousand years later.
Various prehistoric specimens from England exhibited to the Society
have an interest of their own, but cannot compete with relics from the
cradle of civilisation, and at present the watch-word is _Ex oriente
lux_.
THE EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND
The third of a series of lectures arranged by the Egypt Exploration
Fund (to which we referred in our December number) was given at the
rooms of the Royal Society at Burlington House on January 23rd, by
Professor T. Eric Peet. The subject of the lecture was "El Amarna, the
City of Egypt's Heretic King." The lecturer said that from the evidence
of the mummy generally supposed to be his, Amenhotep IV. appears to
have been little more than a boy when his father died. Nevertheless,
as early as the fourth year of his reign, he introduced the worship of
the Aton, the Disk of the Sun, and did his utmost to establish it as
the State religion, and to suppress the worship of Amon and all other
Egyptian gods. The new religion was purely monotheistic in character,
for the Aton was regarded as the creator, not of Egypt only, but of
the world. The new deity was represented in the art of the period by a
picture of the disk of the sun, from which emanated numerous rays, each
terminating in human hands, some of which are holding out the sign of
life to the worshippers. The king changed his own name from Amenhotep
("Amon is content") to Akhenaton ("The Disk is pleased"), and he
shifted his capital from Thebes to El Amarna.
Excavations at El Amarna have brought to light remains of a temple
dedicated to the Aton, and a palace erected for the use of the king,
with beautifully painted floor, fragments of which show a freedom of
drawing and lack of convention which distinguish this period from most
other Egyptian art. The remains of many private houses have also been
discovered, and from these it is comparatively easy to gather the
size, design, and general construction of the houses of the nobles of
that time. Most of them seem to have been built on the same plan, and
comprise a central hall, with small apartments surrounding and leading
from it. Some of these smaller rooms were used as workrooms, and in
one house excavated a number of plaster casts were found, obviously
taken from living models, proving that the Egyptians of this period
were experts in this work. There were also many finished and unfinished
statues of the Royal family, some of which were in very natural
positions, quite unlike the usual Egyptian statues of other sites.
The tombs of the officials of the Court were discovered in the cliffs
behind the town, their walls being covered with sculptured scenes
depicting the everyday life of the capital.
At the close of the lecture the Chairman, Colonel H. G. Lyons, F.R.S.,
pointed out the extreme importance of systematic and scientific
excavations in Egypt and other countries, and the gains which might
accrue to science.
THE GEOLOGISTS' ASSOCIATION
At the meeting held at University College, Gower Street, W.C.1, on
Friday, December 5th, 1919, the following lecture was delivered:
"Geological Work on the Western Front," by W. B. R. King, B.A., F.G.S.
A short description was given of the geology of that part of Belgium
and France over which military operations were conducted by the British
Armies between 1915 and the summer of 1918. It was mainly confined to
the lithological divisions and did not deal with the palæontological
side of the subject. The main physical features were taken, showing
how they are connected with the geological structure. The effect of
the geology and geological structure on certain questions of military
operations was dealt with, notably with regard to water supply and
military mining and dug-out construction. Particular attention was
paid to the problem of obtaining water from boreholes in the Landenien
(Thanet) sands, the causes and effect of the seasonal variation of
water-level in the chalk, and the problem of the military mines near
Messines, Givenchy-les-la-Bassée, and Souchez. The lecture ended with
a description of certain maps which were prepared for the armies in
France, and notes on several other problems which had to be dealt with
by the geologists attached to General Headquarters.
On Friday, January 2nd, 1920, Dr. A. E. Trueman, F.G.S., read a paper
on "The Liassic Rocks of the Cardiff District." The author said that
the greater part of South Glamorganshire, from Cardiff westwards to
beyond Bridgend, consists of lower Liassic rocks (Hettangian and Lower
Sinemurian), which are well seen in some 20 miles of magnificent cliff
sections. Only meagre descriptions of these rocks have been hitherto
published. A detailed study has been undertaken, first because nowhere
else in this country are such continuous sections of these rocks
available, and, secondly, because the normal deposits consisting of
limestones and shales seen near Cardiff, when traced westwards, pass
into a littoral facies of massive limestones and conglomerates. In
the present communication an account of the normal Liassic rocks of
the Cardiff district is given, as this will form a basis for the
correlation of the modified deposits further west. The lecture was
illustrated by lantern-slides and specimens.
THE MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
The January number of the _Bulletin_ of the Modern Humanities Research
Association contains a summary of the Presidential Address delivered
in October, 1919, by M. Gustave Lanson, the famous French scholar and
critic. The Association, which, though founded only in June, 1918,
numbers nearly 500 members, is now penetrating to some of the remoter
quarters of the globe; among the last candidates to be elected were
some from Czecho-Slovakia, the Malay States, New Zealand, and Western
Canada, and most of these were at once put into touch with members
at home belonging to subject groups representing their particular
interests. The Hon. Secretary (Mr. E. Allison Peers, 24 Beaufort Road,
Kingston-on-Thames) writes in the _Bulletin_ of proposals submitted to
the Association that it should produce a comprehensive Bibliographical
Annual, a task which a body with so wide a membership seems peculiarly
fitted to attempt.
The Modern Humanities Research Association is fulfilling another
obligation which rests upon all who speak the English language in its
efforts to bridge the Atlantic and unite those on both sides who are
engaged in higher studies in Modern Languages and Literatures. Its
membership is growing in the United States so rapidly that an American
Secretary (Professor M. Blakemore Evans, of the Ohio State University)
has been appointed. At its most recent London meeting, on January 6th,
too, Professor Carleton Brown, of Minnesota, was among the speakers
on "Conditions of Postgraduate Study." Such interchange of help and
information as the Association brings about between England and America
can have none but good effects.
Among the Vice-Presidents of the Association, prominent names are those
of Sir Sidney Lee (its first President), Dr. Walter Leaf, Sir A. W.
Ward, M. Jusserand, Signor Farinelli, Professor Jespersen, Professor
Oliver Emerson, and Sr. Menéndez Pidal.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
At the January meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society the Rev. E. A.
Sydenham read a paper on the "Coinages of Augustus." He began by giving
a chronological summary of the various series and groups of coins under
Augustus. There were seven species of mints: (_a_) the Senatorial Mint
of Rome; (_b_) Military Mints; (_c_) Mints in Senatorial Provinces;
(_d_) Mints in Imperial Provinces; (_e_) Autonomous Mints (issuing
bronze only); (_f_) the "Imperatorial Mint"; (_g_) the Imperial Mint.
After brief notes on the Senatorial Mint (43-36 B.C.), the military
coinage of Octavius in Gaul and Italy (41-39 B.C.), incidentally
attributing the S.C. coins to camp mints of Northern Italy, Mr.
Sydenham proceeded to discuss the Asiatic coinages (28-15 B.C.) and
the Imperatorial Mint (21-15 B.C.). Besides coins generally attributed
to Asiatic mints the reader proposed to give the undated silver and
gold with CAESAR DIVI F to Asia rather than Rome, and criticised
Laffranchi's attribution of certain coins to Phrygia and Gabrici's to
Athens. The CA bronze coins he attributed to Asia reading the CA as
_Commune Asiæ_. The coins attributed to the "Imperatorial" Mint are
very distinctive in style and were probably issued under direct control
of Augustus. These coins had been attributed by Grueber to Rome and by
Laffranchi to Spain. Mr. Sydenham gave cogent arguments against these
views and added reasons for considering them a distinct Imperatorial
issue. A theory on which a good deal of the argument turns is that
in 28 B.C. Augustus made a formal surrender of his triumviral office
and the extraordinary powers pertaining to it. Included in the powers
was probably the right of coinage. The surrender of this right was
merely an act of policy which Augustus did not regard as permanently
binding. But he held to it to this extent that for five or six years
he issued no coins of any sort on his own authority, and even down to
the end of his reign he issued no coins in Rome. After an experimental
coinage through P. Carisius in Spain (24-22 B.C.) he inaugurated his
"Imperatorial" Mint, but confined its operations to the provinces.
Finally he fixed the Imperial Mint at Lugdunum (14 B.C.).
THE SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS OF LONDON
The Society of Genealogists of London is collecting lists of books,
articles, deeds, MSS., and documents generally in reference to
specific families and places. It has many such lists and references
to documents, as well as collections of documents themselves, and
wishes to add to them to facilitate research. Readers kindly supplying
such lists, long or short, are assured that they are filed at once
by the Society in such a manner that they are immediately available
for reference. An excellent example of the form such lists might take
is provided in Mr. Walter Rye's _Norfolk Topography_. Communications
should be addressed to 5 Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
MANSOUL, OR THE RIDDLE OF THE WORLD. By CHARLES M. DOUGHTY. Selwyn &
Blount. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
We imagine that there is no difference of opinion, amongst those who
have read it, about Mr. Doughty's prose book, now a generation old,
_Wanderings in Arabia Deserta_. It was one of the great prose works of
the nineteenth century, a book which (the geographers assure us) was
astonishingly accurate as a record of exploration, and which repeatedly
soared into passages of description and meditation unsurpassed for
muscularity and grandeur. Even that book, however, was the work of a
man odd in temperament and outlook and possessing peculiar ideas as to
the use of the English language. In the volumes of poetry which he has
been producing so rapidly in his old age his eccentricities have been
projected very much farther. We should not be surprised to hear that he
had never read (barring perhaps Shakespeare and Milton) any poet later
than Spenser; we are certain that he habitually reads no one later than
Spenser, and the poet with whom a comparison most frequently leaps to
the mind is someone earlier still, namely, Langland. There are those, a
very few, who swallow Mr. Doughty whole, who enjoy his archaisms, real
and "pseudo," who think _The Dawn in Britain_ the greatest poetical
work of our time, and will hear nothing against even the topical
passages of his poem about the German war. There are more who find him
frankly unreadable in bulk, but are willing to turn over his pages for
the sake of the occasionally lovely passages of description that they
find on them; whilst the average intelligent reader would probably run
from any page of any of his poetical works, so stony is the way that
the disciple must tread and so vigorous the discipline to which he must
subject himself.
For ourselves, we read Mr. Doughty through as in duty bound, and we
perceive even in his knottiest and even in his naïvest passages the
workings of a powerful and original mind, the observations of an eye
which looks at history and the material world as though they had never
been looked at before, the strivings of a heart that has always been
acutely aware of the world behind the seen. Nevertheless, not even
this compensates us fully for a cumbrousness of style, a malformation
of shape, and a guttural obscurity of speech hard to equal in all the
annals of literature; and we are, we fear, to be most sympathetic
to that second class of readers who look to Mr. Doughty only for
occasional flowers and remember, out of all they have read of his,
only stray images, as of a shepherd on a hill or swallows circling
over the fresh meadows in the dawn of the world. _Mansoul_ is all of a
piece with the others; we almost think that in a few months it will,
in our own memories, have amalgamated with the others. It opens in the
familiar mode, the "grand manner," but just a little awry:
As chanced I sate on terrace of an house,
In summer season, after sickness past;
And fell, surprised my sense, into deep trance;
Wherein meseemed, much musing in my thought,
I cogitations heard, of many hearts;
That came and went, in MANTOWN'S market-place
Whereon I looked. And in my spirit I asked;
What were indeed right paths of a man's feet;
That lacking light, wont stumble in world's murk.
There can be heard the grave voice, there seen the something like
majesty of port, there noticed a little of Mr. Doughty's obscurity and
some of his, we daresay even unconscious, fads such as the avoidance of
particles and the refusal to use the apostrophe 's. Thus it continues
for two hundred pages of contortion and clouds with flashes of sunshine
coming through them. At one moment we are wondering why on earth Mr.
Doughty should call Tigris and Euphrates "Digla" and "Frat" if he
has to translate these terms in a footnote; at another we are giving
up an unusually dark passage in despair; at another we are wondering
whether perhaps his best things do not actually gain something from the
mannerisms that normally make our heads ache. The narrative is very
hard to follow. The singer, accompanied by Mansoul and one Minimus,
peregrinates through the under world, surveys past civilisations, and
converses with (amongst others) Nebo, Zoroaster, Socrates, and St.
Stephen. The Kaiser (we conceive) is, in anticipation, interviewed:
One crowned, cast lately down unto this place
a Warmonger and a coxcomb whose "werewolfs face" is now blotted by
"a loathly leprosy"; and there is a pagan to the soul of all things
at the end, the Muse of Britain and Colin (presumed Spenser) being
intermittently in mind throughout. Yet at any time Mr. Doughty is
liable to break, without the least awareness of writing a purple patch,
into a packed passage full of feeling and sweet to the memory. Take one
such:
I stayed, where pleasant grassy holms depart;
Those streaming waters, bordered all along;
With daphne and willow herb, sweep sedge, laughing robin;
With woodbind garlanded and sweet eglantine,
And azure-hewed in creeky shallows still
Forget-me-nots lift our frail thoughts to heaven.
Broods o'er those thymy eyots drowsy hum;
Bourdon of glistering bees, in mails of gold.
Labouring from sweet to sweet, in the long hours
Of sunny heat; they sound their shrill small clarions.
And hurl by booming doors, gross bee-fly kin;
(Broadgirded, diverse hewed, in their long pelts;)
That solitary, whiles there light endureth,
In summer skies, each becking clover-tuft haunt.
We do not think that Mr. Doughty should be ignored by anyone who wishes
to be familiar with all the good work done in poetry in our time.
But, in recommending him, we warn readers that they should approach
him almost as they would approach _Piers Plowman_ itself; Chaucer is
distinctly more easy and modern.
IMAGES OF WAR. By RICHARD ALDINGTON. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
WORMS AND EPITAPHS. By H. W. GARROD. Blackwell. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
The first of these small books seems to have been written on active
service, the second on return to Oxford after active service. That Mr.
Richard Aldington's verse should have a larger content than before is
natural; his pre-war verse, to the non-Imagist eye, consisted largely
of sweet nothings starred with Greek names. We have here emotional
experiences of a less tenuous kind; the poet is coming nearer a
comprehension of Keats' remark that poets should express what all men
feel. This in _Trench Idyll_, _Time's Changes_, _Reverie_, and other
poems he does; and sometimes he conveys the emotion through the medium
of a careful picture, as clear in its way as one of Mr. Kennington's
drawings. Here is _Picket_:
Dusk and deep silence ...
Three soldiers huddled on a bench
Over a red-hot brazier,
And a fourth who stands apart
Watching the cold rainy dawn.
Then the familiar sound of birds--
Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks,
Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches,
And over all the lark
Outpiercing even the robin....
Wearily the sentry moves
Muttering the one word: "Peace."
Here there is more of a rhythm than usual. But the defect of Mr.
Aldington and his Imagist friends is that, although they are quite
right, though not original, in emphasising the need for concrete
language, they do for the most part lack that rhythm that makes poetry
what it is and rememberable. It is not that they write in free verse.
Rhyme is no necessary part of verse, and nobody in the world ever
contended that all the lines of a poem should be of standard lengths.
But a poem in free verse--it is this which chiefly distinguishes
Whitman's good from his bad poems--should have a continuous rhythm
other than that of prose, and _will_ have it if it is written by a
man who is strongly moved and has the gift of musical expression. Mr.
Aldington may have that gift, but if so he represses it.
Mr. Garrod's volume bears a picture of a graveyard: therein the
tombstones of Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour, Lords Haldane,
Northcliffe and Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Carson. This looks sweeping,
but on reference to his epigrammatic epitaphs, one finds that he
admires the Old "Gang" and deplores the New. His verses are neat but
slight. The best are those on Rupert Brooke, on the new invaders of
Oxford who vainly attempt to emulate the dead, and on Reconstruction:
O soon you'll build the world again
With other and with better men;
And I and plenty more will sit,
And sit, and see you doing it.
In a large West-end hotel
Rich non-combatants will dwell;
Well-paid hands will ply the art
Of binding up the broken heart,
A special sub-department deal
With the wounds that never heal,
Deputy-Controllers pour
Government oil on every sore,
And a civilian Soldier's Friend
Furnish us forms world-without-end
God! does a man like me want _tape_?
I've wounds, man, here, that gape, that gape.
We note that Lord Derby is described as _vir teres atque rotundus_.
SELECTED POEMS. By LADY MARGARET SACKVILLE. Constable. 6_s._ net.
VERSES. By VIOLA MEYNELL. Secker. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, in a lively introduction to the first of these
volumes--in the course of which he suggests, provocatively, that blank
verse is merely "a dignified kind of prose, pompous in recitation and
for common reading dull"--says that "Lady Margaret Sackville is the
best, in my opinion, of our English poetesses, at least of the younger
generation." It is a good thing that he added the qualification, for,
apart from the fact that Mrs. Woods has written poems better than
anything that Lady Margaret has yet done, there is Mrs. Meynell, whose
too exiguous volume of verse competes for quality with the best work of
her generation. If there are scarcely any more exceptions to make we
feel that the deduction is that women are at present doing very little
in poetry, though there are vast numbers of them who write it. In the
Victorian age when Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Browning, both of whom
did immortal work, were writing together there was a general impression
that these were the first fruits of women's emancipation and that
future ages would see women becoming more and more prominent in poetry.
But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the fact that, at a time
when an unusually large number of young men are writing sincerely and
strongly, not one young poetess should have won prominence has now led
to a general opinion that the peculiar qualities of passion and thought
that make poets are, and will always be, more normal in men than in
women. Lady Margaret Sackville has a reasonable technical equipment:
a fair vocabulary, facility with metre. She never says quite stupid
things, she sometimes says pretty things, and at times (as in her war
poems) she reveals a certain depth of feeling. But usually she is first
and foremost derivative; sometimes from Swinburne direct, more often
generally derivative. You feel that she is giving a thin version of
something else, even when you cannot say exactly what; and her poems,
whether dramatic poems about Dionysus and Pan, or dreams, streams,
Springs and things, are just saved from being ordinary verse by the
fact that she has a brain and a heart which infuse the bare minimum of
reality into them. The only things to be said in her favour is that she
is young and that her latest verses are her best.
Something of what we lack in Lady Margaret is present, if
intermittently, in the small, charmingly-produced book by Miss Viola
Meynell. Her work is uneven, and her handling sometimes awkward, but
she has, sometimes, force; she sees vividly, thinks strongly, feels
strongly, imagines strongly. The point of view of the whale that
swallowed strongly was a remarkable thing to try to adopt, but her poem
on this subject, despite a weak ending, contains verses with more bite
in them than any in Lady Margaret's book; if she has read Donne she has
not read him to her hurt. _The Maid in the Rice Fields_ is charming,
and _Poppy-seeds sent from the East_ is more than that:
Travelled here in winter sleep
The young wild Eastern poppies keep
Their eyelids closed. They nothing know
Where is this land they lie in now.
The opening is delightful, and the theme is developed with craft and
passion.
DUCKS AND OTHER VERSES. By F. W. HARVEY. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3_s._ net.
Mr. Harvey's first book, _A Gloucestershire Lad_, appeared when he was
in France; his second when he was a prisoner in Germany; this is his
third. The sequence has been too rapid to show much development; both
his merits and his faults are what they were. He is only occasionally
a good workman, and he has not yet succeeded in getting himself
naturally and forcibly into his work. This is explicable. He loves his
country; he wants to celebrate the old traditional simplicities of a
healthy country life and (as propagandist) to restore what we have lost
of them; he stands, he says, for Romance, Laughter, and the capacity
for innocent Wonder. There is no pretence about this, but when a man
feels that he must defend the natural there is comprehensibly an air of
awkwardness and self-consciousness about him. The drinking-songs (Mr.
Harvey also praises ale) of modern singers are examples: the roysterers
always have an eye on the neighbouring teetotaller who they know is
watching them and whose opposed philosophy they wish to unseat in the
affections of their fellows. Mr. Harvey is best when he is forgetting
the general principles for which he stands and simply enjoying himself;
and the superiority of his more whimsical verses suggests that his
bent, like that of Mr. Graves (with whom he has much else in common),
lies more in that direction than towards large utterance or solemnity.
The title of his book suggests that he realises this: the poem from
which it is taken is certainly his most successful. It is really a
close study of ducks made with infinite relish of their quaintness:
From troubles of the world
I turn to ducks,
Beautiful comical things,
Sleeping or curled,
Their heads beneath white wings
By water cool.
Or finding curious things
To eat in various mucks
Beneath the pool,
Tail uppermost, or waddling
Sailor-like on the shores
Of ponds, or paddling.
He sketches the main outlines of a duck's varied life by barn, stable,
and stack:
They wander at their will,
But if you go too near
They look at you through black
Small topaz-tinted eyes
And wish you ill.
On the whole, he thinks the duck was the best of God's jokes:
And he's probably laughing still at the sound that came out of his
bill.
Of the more serious poems some are a trifle stale; the glorification
of one's county, with place-names rhymed, might be given a rest.
_Requiescat_ is a moving poem, and the tenuity and familiarity of the
idea does not prevent _Song_ from lingering in the memory more than
anything else in the volume:
Sweetness of birdsong shall fall upon my heart,
Shall fall upon my heart;
Nor will I strive to mimic
The beauty that I find,
But lie in a dream and open wide my heart
And let the song of the birds sink down into my mind.
This song is all of a piece, a musical sigh.
NOVELS
THE CLINTONS AND OTHERS. By ARCHIBALD MARSHALL. Collins. 7_s._ net.
PETER JACKSON, CIGAR MERCHANT. By GILBERT FRANKAU. Hutchinson. 7_s._
6_d._ net.
PRELUDE. By BEVERLEY NICHOLS. Chatto & Windus. 7_s._ net.
LIMBO. By ALDOUS HUXLEY. Chatto & Windus. 5_s._ net.
Mr. Archibald Marshall is, we dare to say, one of the good writers
most neglected by contemporary critics. He has brought nothing new to
the development of the novel. If a general description were necessary,
he might be most briefly and accurately classified as a descendant of
Anthony Trollope. But his talent in his own generation is unique; and
no person who enjoys or studies the fiction of this age can afford
to neglect it. In some ways his latest volume is the climax of his
performance and displays at their height his peculiar method and
gifts. It consists of six stories. One, perhaps the least interesting,
describes how John Clinton, a prosperous city merchant in the time
of the Regency, rescued the family estates from his elder brother,
the prodigal Beau Clinton. The second deals with a scientific peer,
innocent and absorbed, who very nearly married a woman scientist, of
origin much lower than his own, who was attracted to him only by his
wealth and position. The hero of the third is a speculative builder.
The fifth narrates the misfortunes of a patient and gentle clerk. The
sixth is a story of old Squire Clinton's reactions to the war and
of how he was reconciled to the different reactions of those about
him. The fourth, which we have removed from its place, tells how Ann
Sinclair, a day-pupil at Miss Sutor's school, was sent to Coventry by
her companions because she was unjustly suspected of having damaged
in malice Mary Polegate's illuminated chart of the kings of Juda and
Israel. This is the longest story in the book, occupying over one
hundred pages. The principal characters are all school-girls of various
ages, and no extraneous interests are introduced. It seems almost
impossible with this material to hold a reader's keen attention for
twenty odd thousand words, and yet this is what Mr. Marshall has done.
All the persons are vividly alive and convincing; and there is a whole
range of them, each individualised and given a real personality. The
story is an especially good example of what Mr. Marshall can do and how
he does it. His narrative is extraordinarily quiet and unemphasised,
and shows by its restraint the author's complete confidence in the
interest of his subject and in the adequacy of his method. In all these
tales events more or less moving take place or are referred to; but the
teller never raises his voice or gesticulates. He has no tricks. His
characters reveal themselves in speech or action; but if they do not
he has no modern prejudices against telling the reader what are their
motives and what is going on in their minds. His explanations are so
quiet and so straightforward that they immediately carry conviction.
When old Squire Clinton was passing through Paris with his daughter to
see her husband, wounded and interned in Switzerland, he was displeased
that his other daughter should take them to lunch in a restaurant:
He would not have objected to exactly the same meal served in her
apartment. He would have eaten and drunk whatever had been set
before him, and enjoyed it in spite of his always strongly expressed
preference for English food and English cooking. The wine he might
have noticed and commented on, because he knew about wines, and
because you pleased your host by approving of his taste in them.
But this ordering of your meal in public, in consultation with your
guests, with a _maître d'hôtel_ standing at your elbow and booking
your orders, not without advice of his own, struck him as very like
taking part in a mistress's consultation with her servants--almost
an indecency. The restaurant habit was, in fact, entirely unknown to
him. In his expansive youth it had been unheard of. The nearest he
had ever come to it had been in giving luncheons or dinners at one of
his clubs--meals as elaborate as this and as carefully arranged, but
arranged beforehand, so that the guests should get the right flavour
of hospitality, and accept the good things set before them as they
would have accepted them at his own table. Neither Joan nor Nancy
divined that half his displeasure, which he could not hide, was at
being obliged, under Inverell's hospitable pressure, to express his
preference for this or that luxury, with the price of it staring him
in the face on the menu, when indulgence in any sort of luxury was so
far from his mood.
So delicate and exact and truthful is this delineation of a small
tract in the old man's character that it would be almost possible to
reconstruct the whole without any other guide, as is done in the case
of louder roaring monsters than Mr. Marshall's creations.
Mr. Gilbert Frankau's _Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant_, presents
a curious contrast to the method of Mr. Marshall. Mr. Marshall's
virtues are so quiet and unobtrusive that it is possible to overlook
them altogether. Mr. Frankau's defects are so vociferous that they
tend to obscure his real merits. He paints in violent colours. He
paints his sentimental passages with a yard broom. His style, as Mr.
Arnold Bennett once observed of somebody else, is such that even in
Carmelite Street the sub-editors would yearn to correct it. He has
almost entirely eliminated the conjunction from his own version of the
English language: the "ands" and "buts" omitted from this book would,
if they were restored, increase its length by a hundred pages or so.
Their absence gives the reader the impression that Mr. Frankau is in
an enormous hurry and is very short of breath. All these defects are
closely woven into the texture of one of the most strident novels ever
written; and it is quite impossible to escape from them. Nevertheless
this tale of a business man who became a gunner is one of the most
lively and credible pictures of the war which we have yet had. It
matters little in the end that, whether he is describing the purchase
of a cigarette-factory or a love-scene or the battle of the Somme,
the author scores exclusively for brass and big drums. This method
certainly eliminates the love-scene, but it is not inappropriate to
the other subjects; and in his accounts both of war and of business
Mr. Frankau produces a huge, crowded chaotic picture which stuns and
bewilders the reader, but at the same time convinces him that he is
seeing at least one aspect of the truth. Mr. Frankau's high level of
verisimilitude and interest in such passages as the description of the
Battle of Loos depends to a very great extent on his peculiar power of
packing much detail into a small space; and it is to this perhaps that
we owe the somewhat regrettable lack of "the smaller parts of speech."
Mr. Beverley Nichols's book is another of the triumphs of precocity--a
novel describing the Public School system by a writer with very
recent experience of it. And, like other novels on this subject, it
is a novel with a thesis. Mr. Nichols is far from disapproving of the
system. He sets out, on the other hand, to show that it is capable
of receiving and making comfortable the most eccentric of boys if he
will only make the least effort of adjustment to his environment that
can be reasonably expected of a human being in any circumstances. His
hero, Paul Trevelyan, has in an extreme form all the characteristics
of the heroes of such books. He has been coddled, he has unusual
tastes, he cares nothing for games. But, very refreshingly, Mr. Nichols
treats with a firm hand both his characteristics and his sufferings.
Paul undergoes just such discomforts as are required to rid him of
effeminacy and priggishness, and mould him into a boy capable of
taking a place in human society with satisfaction to himself and his
companions. The thesis of the book appears to be that the Public School
system does not necessarily deprive those who come under it of their
individuality, does not necessarily crush or torture those who depart
from the normal, does act as a civilising agent on those who are in
need of it. As a piece of evidence, the book is interesting and useful.
As a novel it is less remarkable than Mr. Waugh's _Loom of Youth_.
That book was not only a contribution to a dispute; it was also a work
of fiction astonishingly well put together for its author's years and
experience. Its characters and many of its incidents were extremely
well observed and drawn. Mr. Nichols fails as a writer of fiction.
His characters are vague and unconvincing: they have no fundamental
individuality. The construction of his novel is extremely loose and
uneven; and the passages of reflection are introduced with a very
clumsy hand. Whether he will succeed in correcting these faults it is
impossible to predict; but he clearly has gifts which ought to come to
something. Precocity in the things he lacks is not always a certain
indication of success in maturity.
Mr. Huxley, alone among these writers, betrays traces of exotic
influence. The last story in his book, _The Death of Lully_, might
have come from the _Contes Cruels_, perhaps, in one way, has come
thence. Others of the collection show less definite resemblances to
French models and are less evenly and carefully composed; but there are
in most of them traces of an alien exactitude and an alien wit. Mr.
Huxley, as we know already from his verse, can _write_ brilliantly.
His defect here, as there, lies in a deficiency of feeling caused by
an excess of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness does not
make him awkward or effusive. He is far too clever to betray it thus
rudely. As in the behaviour of some persons, it manifests itself in
his work by an iron rigidity of attitude, an immovable equability of
tone. When he invents characters he does not so much describe their
actions or let them act as criticise them; he is led to adopt the pose
of the satirist more consistently than perhaps he intends. Reaction
follows fast on action; and the springs of his writing are laid bare in
an extraordinarily ingenious dialogue, called _Happy Families_, where
he exposes the triple personalities, inciting, betraying, checking
one another, of a young man and a young woman sitting out together
at a dance. This piece, which seems to have unnecessarily puzzled a
number of Mr. Huxley's critics, means nothing if it does not express
his opinion that in every human being there is a stratum of the animal
which is to be distrusted and restrained. But, here and elsewhere,
one wonders whether his watchfulness over this stratum has not led
him into exaggerating its extent and distrusting things which, to a
less suspicious eye, do not look in the least like it. And in another
story, so fast are his reactions, we find him mocking the shuddering
and ascetic revulsion from the purely animal in man. This is the
behaviour not merely of the critic dominant over the artist, but of the
critic who leads towards Nihilism by discrediting all human impulses,
instead of arranging them in order. Mr. Huxley has, however, too much
of the poet for this to be fundamental in him, too much appreciation of
bright and vivid things and bright and vivid phrases. And it would be
gravely unjust to convey the impression that it spoils his book. _The
Farcical History of Richard Greenow_ is an admirable invention, full
of possibilities for bitter comedy, most, if not all, of which have
been worked out; _Cynthia_ is a good joke, though its title betrays
the climax a little too early; and _The Bookshop_ is more human in
feeling than its companions. But the important point to notice is that,
whatever may be the perversities or the affectations of his thought,
Mr. Huxley always writes well, with a style that is never shabby or
shoddy, never flamboyant or flat.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE MEASURES OF THE POETS. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A. Cambridge University
Press. 5_s._ net.
A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE'S VERSIFICATION. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A.
Cambridge University Press. 16_s._ net.
LESSONS IN VERSE-CRAFT. By S. GERTRUDE FORD. Daniel. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Bayfield's _Measures of the Poets_ is meant to be revolutionary.
He finds existing systems of prosody neither complete nor sound, and
would sweep them away in order to install his own trochaic scheme.
Practically every work of a predecessor is ignored, and the author
himself regrets that Lanier's _Science of English Verse_, published
forty years ago, did not come to his notice until the present book
was written. He does not mention Professor Saintsbury's _History_ or
_Manual of English Prosody_, nor (among other writings, by recent or
living metrists) the essays of Patmore and Mr. Robert Bridges. A great
deal of contention is thus avoided, but the probabilities of conversion
are also reduced. He asserts that the normal foot of English verse is
trochaic, and that the iambus cannot form a metrical foot, because
the stressed syllable does not come first; while Professor Saintsbury
declares that the iambic is the staple foot of English verse and is
common to almost all prosodies.
How, then, let us ask the challenger, is the application of the
trochaic system justified? In Mr. Bayfield's scheme the plain norm of
the "full blank" verse line is an eleven-syllable arrangement of which
the first is a "short," followed by five trochees; and the following
line (quoted in his second book, which takes up the subject anew) is
given as specimen:
I ⁝ come to | bury | Cæsar, | not to | praise him.‖
But the full line does not happen to be the common form, owing to its
feminine ending, and so he admits that the prevailing type is the
"checked" form:
To ⁝ sleep; per | chance to | dream: ay | there's the | rub.∧‖
The anacrusis or up-beat, marked off by ⁝, is an integral part of the
new system; in reality it is the device by which the author changes
iambic to trochaic movement. Here, indeed, is the crucial point of the
dispute between iambic and trochaic. Under the first, this up-beat or
take-off is neither very frequent nor very rare; under the second, it
is common. Mr. Bayfield's idiosyncratic use of it is illustrated by
himself thus:
My ⁝ heart | aches, and a | drowsy numbness pains,
and--
Or emptied some dull | opiate | to the drains,
and by--
But ⁝ being too | happy in thine happiness;
the reader being left to discover for himself the reason for the
difference of prosodic interpretation. If the ear should be satisfied
with this difference (and Mr. Bayfield admits that the ear is judge
and jury), what might its verdict be as to the validity of a double
up-beat, leaving only semi-syllables for the rest of the line?
And thy ⁝ mouth | shúddering | like a | shót | bírd.‖
Here let it be remarked that his system acknowledges monosyllabic feet,
but he is not well informed in denying them a place in the iambic
system. He complains of "ragtime scansions," in referring to the fact
that the iambic system admits trochees whenever it would break down by
refusing them, and seems to deplore a resulting loss of "continuity of
rhythm." Yet he himself does not scruple to write of one of his own
illustrations: "A striking contrast in _rhythm_ may be noted here. That
of the first line and a half ... is markedly trochaic; the other line
and a half fall into an equally marked iambic rhythm." He has not, in
fact, escaped from the difficulties and inconsistencies which beset the
prosodist. He does little more than prove that the music of the poets
cannot be defeated or disguised by either system. He gives this as
containing a quinquesyllabic foot:
Well, ∧ | Juliet, I will | lie with thee to-night,
and dubiously suggests "hire" as a disyllable in:
And ⁝ hire | post-horses; | I will hence to-night.
He is aware that an alternative scansion may in some cases be correct,
but does not sufficiently realise that any prosodic system is but an
artificiality, formed to explain, and not dictate, the infinitely
variable rhythms of poetry. His own particular system, for all its
ingenuities, appears more artificial and arbitrary than the iambic.
It is interesting to note that his examples are largely drawn from
Shakespeare, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, all fruitful ground;
while Milton and Coleridge, Campion and Keats are much less used
or left alone altogether. Might not these fascinating and delusive
excursions into the mysteries of rhythm be extended to certain living
poets--at least to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Bridges?
_Shakespeare's Versification_ is a larger book, in which Mr. Bayfield
inquires into the validity of the early texts. His purpose is:
First to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure
and characteristic features of his dramatic verse, the essential
principles of which appear to have been wholly misconceived hitherto,
and secondly to show that there are many thousands of lines of it
that are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to
be delivered, but clipped and trimmed to a featureless uniformity
that he would have abhorred.
He finds in _Antony and Cleopatra_ the ideal of verse at which
Shakespeare was always aiming, and denounces the depravity of the
text as it stands--in this as in many other of the plays. The book
has a cumulative, even a dramatic interest, for setting out to prove
one thing, Mr. Bayfield frankly ends by proving another. With immense
care and patience he has examined and compared Quartos and First
Folio, and noted quite innumerable places at which the contraction and
condensation of words and lines have distorted or ruined the rhythm;
and he contends that if the verse is to be presented as the author
meant it to be delivered, these must be expanded into their full forms.
He begins by considering Shakespeare's use of the "resolved" foot--that
is, a foot of more than two syllables--and discovers a constant
tendency to reduce these "resolutions" by abbreviation; the result
being, for example, that violent becomes vi'lent, desolate des'late,
Demetrius Demetr'us, etc. He contends that from the outset Shakespeare
employed resolved rhythms more freely than his contemporaries, and
gradually increased the proportion with his later plays; and it is,
of course, perfectly true that the growing liberation of style which
in Shakespeare expresses a psychological development, is equally
noticeable in later poets.
Now in comparing the Quartos with the First Folio Mr. Bayfield finds
that of all the differences the most conspicuous is the elimination
of resolutions, the tendency shown by the Quartos in this direction
being aggravated in the Folio. The position is made clear in a Table
relating to fourteen Quarto plays, which shows, _e.g._, that in
_Othello_ the Folio eliminates eighty-six resolutions found in the
Quarto, and the latter eliminates fourteen which the Folio displays;
while a third figure, 84, "_enumerates cases where, guided by the
whole investigations and the revelations afforded by the first two
columns_ [figures], I believe that a resolution should be restored."
His deduction is that the Folio is a metrical reactionary; if it is
unsound to prefer its revision to the Quartos, it is equally unsound
to rely upon the Folio for the plays not included in the Quartos. He
strengthens his argument by showing that the prose (of _Julius Cæsar_,
for instance), which has no metrical obligations, is far more immune
from illicit contractions, although prose, being nearer to ordinary
speech, might be expected to show very free colloquial abbreviations.
We are not prepared to follow Mr. Bayfield blindly; his trochaic
passions, hitched to his resolution to "resolve," do not compel
unquestioning obedience; we are not convinced by a line like, "From ⁝
Syria to Lydia and to Ionia," when the received text reads:
From Syria
To Lydia and to Ionia, whilst----
and his resort to "Cross Accent" for the scansion of such lines as
Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen
is yet farther from persuading us, and seems, like so many of his
arguments and instances, to be the mere expression of his hatred of
the iambic. Nevertheless, his abundant recital of divergencies from
the Quartos' resolved lines--to consider only that which is a matter
of simple enumeration--can be taken quite apart from the soundness or
unsoundness of his metrical prepossessions; and what we have called
the cumulative interest of this treatise is most plainly felt in the
development of this theme as play after play is examined.
It is in the chapter called "Conclusions" that the interest suddenly
becomes dramatic. Mr. Bayfield has been arguing that Shakespeare is
not printed as he should be printed--that is, with "the clear and
uncramped enunciation of trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic feet"--and
that the mangling of these was done for and by the players in order
to reduce the verse to the common disyllabic type which alone they
could comfortably manage. But now he derives a "flood of light" from
the 1616 Jonson folio, the proofs of which are presumed to have been
corrected by Jonson himself. From the printing of _Sejanus_ he finds
that Jonson's resolutions are abridged even where the line makes their
full enunciation essential to the rhythm. Space will not permit the
tracing of the new argument here, but Mr. Bayfield at length concludes
that what he has supposed in the first three hundred pages of his book
to be attributable to the perversities of the Press, are after all
merely recognised contractions which were never meant to suggest the
clipped pronunciations given to them. His charge, in fact, is no longer
levelled against the early texts from which his affluence of instances
is drawn, but against the interpretation of them; the very apostrophe
(with division) being in reality but a signal calling attention to the
resolution which generations of editors, readers, and players have
supposed it was meant to abolish. The dramatic interest is complete.
Mr. Bayfield claims for his books the authority justly due from
forty-five years' application of prosodic principles to English verse.
We can but conclude with wishing _Shakespeare's Versification_ a fuller
index and a wide study, and suggest to the author that those who are
concerned with verse as writers and not as teachers have not always
failed to give the full syllabic value to the common abbreviations of
the text.
Miss Ford's book is a "practical" treatise and might have been a
valuable one. The first sentence tells us that many of her examples of
verse-forms are from her own pen, while Mr. Bayfield has at any rate
been content with Shakespeare. Why should she write four stanzas in
imitation of _Love in the Valley_? She thinks it too well known to make
quotation advisable, yet gives us the commonest things of Wordsworth
and Shelley and Coleridge. She misprints Shakespeare and Wordsworth
shamefully, thinks that Professor Saintsbury is dead, and, sparing
only four pages for "the lyric," devotes twenty-seven to such forms as
roundel, ballade, etc. Her book, we think, has been spoiled by haste;
yet she has such enthusiasm and brightness as tempt us to regret that
haste and to hope for better work.
ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM. By IRVING BABBITT. Houghton Mifflin Company.
17_s._ net.
Metaphysicians have been forced by the impossibility of obtaining from
observed nature either confirmation or disproof of their theories
to develop a technique the principal aim of which is coherence. So
admirable indeed has this technique become in its logic and complexity
that it has been adopted by many workers in other fields, on the whole
with disastrous results. In this book Professor Babbitt applies it to
literature, although he appears quite able to follow more empirical
methods. His reading has been extensive, and his judgments are precise.
Unfortunately he is not much interested in or amused by books save as
the symptoms of moral and metaphysical observations. He eats nothing
out of them. He only covers them with his cobwebs.
Like most metaphysicians, Professor Babbitt thinks in twos. The trick
is familiar. Define A. Call not-A B. One is very bad, one very good,
and the history of life, or of whatever else is under discussion, is
the history of their conflict. For this professor, A is an emotional
and naturalistic romanticism, and is very bad indeed. Rousseau is its
high prophet, the great war its issue, and "smart young radicals" its
dupes. We are invited back to ancient Greece, where A is absent, and
B, that is to say classicism, has neither artifice nor formality, back
to Socrates, back to Aristotle, back apparently to anyone who is a
philosopher and not a poet.
Now there is an essential fallacy in grouping writers like politicians,
in ringing a division bell for ever in their ears and furthermore doing
their voting for them. This talk of schools and of influences and of
disciples is extremely prevalent among the academic critics in America.
It may safely be said that they have illuminated nothing thereby.
Writers may use the language of their times and their friends, but
it is as a vestment and not as a foundation. Of course, the romantic
revolution, like the spluttering rebellions of our own day, may have
induced some subordinates to produce manifestos and call them works
of art. Some young men may be so excited by the eccentricity of their
form as to forget the necessity of any content. But such works do
not usually occupy the critic for long, and valuable appreciation of
literature will not be content with a quasi-botanical classification.
What are we to do, for example, with Charles Lamb? Is he a classicist
or a romanticist? Professor Babbitt has no qualms in affixing the
latter label. Lamb is as romantic as Wordsworth is, he says, but about
towns instead of about the country, and as a proof he refers the reader
to a letter in which Lamb, writing to Wordsworth, says: "In London
I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you
mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the
Strand ... the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses,
steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes," and so on. Little can
be gained for the appreciation of Elia or of the "Lake School" by
saying classic or romantic about this, and if this is indeed a child of
Rousseau, we may be certain that he would have dropped it with the rest
at the door of the foundling hospital.
Probably, however, the professor does not want to foster appreciation.
His incursion into literature is a border foray, and he is off at
once with his plunder to his ethical highlands. We remain to count
our losses. Milton, who "on the whole is highly serious," is not
much injured. But Keats is unwise. Browning is only half-educated.
Wordsworth, until he began the _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, was betrayed
by his "penchant for paradox." Shelley was an emotional sophist, with
a nympholeptic imagination, who fell into sheer unreality. These
judgments contain truth, but a very little of truth. To write thus is
too plainly to adopt the methods of a political opponent. Professor
Babbitt warns us that if he had attempted rounded estimates these would
have been more favourable, but that as it is he is severe because he
is laying down principles, principles of discipline and authority as
against the unrestrained individualism of the modern.
One wonders, too, whether this massive series--the present volume is
the fourth--will contribute much more to ethics than to literature;
whether an intensive study of the West European literature of 1790 to
1850 will indeed, as Professor Babbitt may expect, dissuade readers
from surrendering to the emotions; whether the indecorum of Rousseau
does threaten civilisation with breakdown; and whether the imitation of
Sophocles and Dante would morally improve the character.
It is, in short, not very obvious why this book was written, nor
who will take pleasure in reading it, except for the enjoyment of a
first-class mind, even when it works in a vacuum.
SPRINGTIME AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Sir FRANCIS DARWIN. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._
net.
This is an amiable book of gossipy essays, mostly in the key popular
at University Extension meetings. Some of them are reviews and rely
a little too much on extracts for any one familiar with the books
noticed to derive much excitement from them. The title-essay, however,
together with that on a _Procession of Flowers_, and the paper entitled
_Recollections_ are both worth attention. The essay on his boyhood and
youth shows that Sir Francis has an eye for character, and no little
gift for expressing himself neatly about his friends and acquaintances.
Here is an admirable vignette of Parslow, the butler:
He had what may be called a baronial nature: he idealised everything
about our modest household, and would draw a glass of beer for a
postman with the air of a seneschal bestowing a cup of malvoisie on
a troubadour. He would not, I think, have disgraced Charles Lamb's
friend Captain Burney, who welcomed his guests in the grand manner
to the simplest of feasts. It was good to see him on Christmas Day;
with how great an air would he enter the breakfast-room and address
us: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a happy Christmas," etc. I am
afraid he got but a sheepish response from us.
It has something of the air of those charming pictures of Christmas
in the country which Randolph Caldecott used to contribute to the
_Graphic_ Special Numbers. Sir Francis's paper on _Names of Characters
in Fiction_ does not seem to us an adequate treatment of a really
fascinating subject. He just touches the fringe of it, but he appears
to us over-lenient to the bad old habit of naming characters after
their vices, virtues, or idiosyncrasies. That is tolerable in purely
allegorical work, such as Bunyan's, but becomes very tiresome in
Thackeray--whom Sir Francis rates far too highly--and frequently
absurd both in him and minor authors. Women novelists have here shown
more sense; you do not meet such terrible monstrosities as Mantrap,
Lollypop, Fitzoof, Portansherry, or Nockemorf in the novels of Jane
Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Mrs. Gaskell. A character's name is not
perfect if one can imagine it different, and most of the "typical"
names are mere labels which have no real, organic connection with their
wearers, as have the names of Flaubert's characters, of Balzac's, or of
Henry James's.
DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS, SENSATION NOVELISTS: A STUDY IN THE
CONDITION AND THEORIES OF NOVEL WRITING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. By WALTER
C. PHILLIPS, Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Phillips is rather a pathologist of fiction than a critic. His
thesis here, broadly speaking, is that Dickens, and after him Wilkie
Collins and Charles Reade, were drawn into melodramatic invention by
the demands of the public and the conditions of publication of their
day. His diagnosis is indisputable, though his premises are not. It
is not to be denied that Dickens wrote melodrama. He liked that kind
of thing, and so did his public. Where Mr. Phillips goes astray is in
assuming that Dickens was a tradesman who supplied a craving public.
The truth is otherwise. Dickens gained his public with the _Pickwick
Papers_, and after that could do what he pleased. It is quite another
thing to say that he was of like mind with his public, and took in
melodrama through the pores. It had been in the air for fifty years.
But Mr. Phillips sees little else in Dickens, and thereby does his
subject and himself injustice. For one false note which that great man
struck, the trained ear will detect two dozen true. If some of his
monsters--Quilp in particular--are pantomime monsters, and some of
his angels pantomime angels, others of them, monstrous or not, have
been added to the inhabitants of English-speaking lands, and still
walk in our midst. No writer has ever increased the population to the
same extent. Mrs. Gamp may be more than woman, or less; she may be
a living proverb. It does not matter, since she lives. Dickens, in
fact, was a genius. He did what he chose, or what he must, sometimes
superlatively well, sometimes incredibly ill. We bolt the bad for
the sake of the good. There is no concealment possible of the fact
that he had unfortunate and occasionally unwholesome tastes. The
worst of them was his pleasure in cruelty. Quilp and his wife, Jonas
Chuzzlewit and his, Creakle and his boys, Squeers and his: there is a
gloating over such relations which, to our mind, is the worst blot upon
Dickens's fame. But Mr. Phillips, absorbed in the commercial aspect
of literature, counting the words in the huge novels of that day,
calculating circulation, and examining into profits, has not had time
for such points. He had been better employed there than in amassing
statistics for "The Novelist as Wage-earner." Too much attention has
been paid already to the finance of the business. Money-getting did not
affect Dickens in the first flights of his genius, when his direction
for good and all was determined. It may have stimulated Wilkie Collins
and Charles Reade--a very different pair of men. Mr. Phillips is in
the right when he hits them off as "virtuosos." "Not even Stevenson,"
he shrewdly says, "was more exclusively and hopelessly a writer of
story-books" than Charles Reade.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
A GALLOPER AT YPRES. By Lieut.-Col. P. R. BUTLER, D.S.O. Unwin. 15_s._
net.
A KUT PRISONER. By H. C. W. BISHOP. Lane. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE ROMANCE OF THE BATTLE LINE IN FRANCE. By J. E. C. BODLEY.
Constable. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Here are three new additions to the colossal pile of "war books"--two
of them the personal records of soldiers, the third a more pretentious
effort by a civilian. Colonel Butler went out in 1914 with the Seventh
Division to Belgium, was engaged in the first battle of Ypres, came
home wounded, returned to Flanders, went thence to the Somme (in
the days before the Somme became hell), and leaves us finally at
Marseilles on his way to "some other theatre of war." The book
contains nothing very remarkable, but it is agreeably written, and
should give pleasure to the author's friends and to others who care to
be reminded again of "Somewhere in France," where they have marched and
fought and billeted.
Mr. Bishop's is a modestly told and mildly exciting story of an escape
from the Turks. He was an Indian Army subaltern captured at Kut, and
interned at Kastamuni. Thence with two companions he got away to the
Black Sea coast, was recaptured and rescued again. The rescuers were a
handful of diverting brigands, with whose help Mr. Bishop eventually
crossed the Black Sea and made his way home _viâ_ Russia. There is no
attempt to generalise either about military matters or prison life. We
gather, however, that Mr. Bishop and his friends were not on the whole
badly treated by the Turks. And there was a time, in 1916, when they
lived well--eggs at halfpenny a piece, good white flour at sixpence a
pound, and fruit practically gratis! O blessed Kastamuni!
Mr. Bodley is more sophisticated. In the first half of his book he
takes us over the battlefields of France, and discourses of the
captains and the kings, the priests and politicians of past centuries
who fought and played and intrigued there, of the glories and beauties
of the old towns and villages of the Somme and the Marne, of Rheims
and Verdun and a hundred other places. But he completely changes the
angle of his attack in the second half of his volume, which he calls,
"An additional chapter on the results of the late war as affecting our
national life and imperial interests." His main theme appears to be
the necessity or desirability of continuing hostility to Germany. The
Germans, he thinks, are still a fundamentally evil race whose worst
faults we imitate and whose few virtues we eschew. These virtues are
their commercial enterprise, their zest for town-planning and housing,
and the comparatively small amount of money they waste in paying
lawyers. Lawyers, it appears, are Mr. Bodley's _bête noire_; he regards
them, and especially the political barristers and the overpaid judges
and law officers, as the curse of our unhappy country. But what chiefly
raises his ire are the abominations which we are said to have copied
from Prussia of bureaucracy and the system of "honours"--peerages,
baronetcies, knighthoods, Orders of Merit, Orders of the British
Empire, poured out in bucketfuls on a motley crowd of corrupt or
undistinguished individuals. This is, of course, an indictment which
any writer is entitled to make, though some may think that Mr. Bodley
occasionally lets himself be carried rather far by his indignation. But
the connection with the faults of Germany seems a little far-fetched.
There are times, too, in the course of his special pleading when he
verges on the ridiculous. Is it not absurd, for example, to say that
"the formidable machinery of state socialism" (meaning chiefly Old Age
Pensions and National Insurance) is "incompatible with representative
government"? And who wants a long argument to prove that Queen Victoria
was not responsible for the plague of Germanism which Mr. Bodley thinks
has infected English society? The whole of this "additional chapter"
is a melancholy illustration of the effect of the war in causing an
educated Englishman to lose his sense of proportion.
RECORDS. By Admiral of the Fleet LORD FISHER. Hodder & Stoughton. £1
1_s._ net.
The plain man who walks in the trim garden of literature must feel,
in coming upon Lord Fisher in print, as we imagine the shade of Bach
might feel confronted by a jazz band, or an elementary drawing mistress
before a canvas of Mr. Wyndham Lewis. Lord Fisher has for many months
been "the talk of the town"; the respectable reviewer feels that
only in the talk of the town can the appropriate comments be found.
_Records_ begins thus: "Of all the curious fables I've ever come
across, I quite think the idea that my mother was a Cingalese Princess
of exalted rank is the oddest! One can't see the foundation of it!"
And it ends with a letter from a fellow-Admiral suggesting that Lord
Fisher, like Jesus Christ, is an Enigma. Between those two passages
there is a roaring torrent of anecdote, of quotations and exclamation
marks and capital letters, of criticism (often highly "indiscreet"), of
apologia, of confident prediction, of everything that is diverting and
irritating and arresting and astoundingly human--a torrent that sweeps
the reader off his feet and leaves him gasping and incredulous. The
book is a monument of magnificent egoism. One can only use its author's
own word of a sermon by Dean Inge and say it is "splendiferous." We
are told, in parenthesis, that he got into the Navy by writing out
the Lord's Prayer, doing a Rule of Three sum, and drinking a glass of
sherry. We are told that he looks like a Christmas-tree when he wears
his decorations. We have stories of how, in his shirt-sleeves and with
a boot in each hand, he entertained King Edward VII. in his bedroom,
and of a comic postcard sent to him by Queen Alexandra. There is one
chapter devoted to his views on the Bible, and another containing
a reprint of four speeches which he made: one at the Royal Academy
Banquet, a second at the Mansion House, the other two (and these would
both go on a postcard) in the House of Lords. There are numerous
photographs of him standing on his quarter-deck with Kings and Tsars,
and gentlemen grotesquely clad in top hats and frock coats; there is a
long appendix containing a list of Lord Fisher's "Great Naval Reforms."
His style beggars description. He throws epithets such as "lovely"
about like a high-spirited schoolgirl. He tells us, with the candour of
a schoolboy, that Sir William Harcourt was "a genial ruffian" and Sir
Michael Hicks-Beach "a perfect beast." The whole book is ablaze with
these bright flowers. And let us not be misunderstood: we say nothing
in disparagement of them. Would that more biographies were written so!
But Lord Fisher, we suspect, has suffered, and will suffer, from
the defects--or should one say the excess?--of his qualities. It
is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
an Englishman--and above all an official Englishman--to take a man
seriously who writes and talks and thinks like this. _Hinc illæ
lacrimæ!_ as our author might say (for he loves his tags). And yet
there is serious stuff in this book--discussions of the conduct of the
war, of naval tactics and education, of submarines and oil-engines
and guns, and "Admiralty limpets." He has quarrelled on all these
matters--and on a thousand more, no doubt--with many of his colleagues.
It is not for us to take sides in such Homeric contests. Even now he
is trailing his coat again before the respectable public with a hectic
chapter entitled "Democracy." "Democracy," he says, "means 'equal
opportunity for all.'" A real Democracy in England would not have
permitted secret treaties nor flouted the Russian Revolution, nor "kept
true Labour leaders waiting on the doormat." "Hereditary titles," he
cries, "are ludicrously out of date ... and the sooner we sweep away
all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better." And, in short,
this old warrior of seventy-nine, a Peer of the Realm, dressed like a
Christmas-tree in his decorations, the intimate of Kings and Emperors,
declares himself a Republican, and wants to "sack the lot"! Words fail
us; we can only lay the book down and pant for the next!
HENRY FOX, FIRST LORD HOLLAND, HIS FAMILY AND RELATIONS. By the EARL OF
ILCHESTER. In two volumes. Murray. 32_s._ net.
The deeplier we study eighteenth-century political history the more
satisfied we become that there were but two figures in it with the
gleam of statesmanship upon them, and but one with the light of genius.
Sir Robert Walpole deserves his son's boast: He did "maintain this
country in the enjoyment of the twenty happiest years that England
ever enjoyed." Writing when he did, and so far as it goes, that is
true. If his methods draw us to a cynical conclusion, the material to
his hand--a German King, a discredited opposition, and a horde of
rapacious place-hunters to keep fed--must be remembered and allowed
for. Pitt was a much more scrupulous man, and a much more gifted man,
but he was less successful for those very reasons. He had the honest
man's scorn of iniquity, and he had less hold of himself. Sir Robert
could keep his temper; Pitt never could. He knew the Duke of Newcastle
to be a liar and an old fool, and as good as told him so. "Fewer words,
if you please, my lord, for your words have long lost all weight with
me." There is not much accommodation about that. Sir Robert suffered
fools gladly: he could work with them better. Pitt was fastidious, and
would not soil his fingers with the only things they wanted of him. As
for all the rest they were a venal crew, timid as rats and greedy as
dogs. A month or two ago there came under review in these pages the
life of one of them, George Bubb Dodington--remarkable only because, a
thorough-paced rogue, he turned himself inside out for the admiration
of posterity. Here, at much greater length, done with conspicuous
judgment and ability, is the life, in two volumes, of another, Henry
Fox, the founder of Holland House and its line of peers.
If a word were needed to explain the rise of the brothers Stephen
and Henry Fox, the sons of a creature (whom Horace Walpole called
"a footman") of Charles II.'s, it would be the word which explains
the whole of eighteenth-century statecraft, the word Patronage. From
the King, fountain of honours, this sacred river ran to the Peers,
disposers of places, and from them broadened out into a pool where swam
the borough-mongers and jobbers, owners of the House of Commons. As for
the electorate, wherever there was one, "the business of the people
is to choose Us," said young Charles Fox, while he was yet under the
influence of his father; and although the capital letter is ours, and
not upon record, we may be sure that it was not wanting in delivery. It
is indeed but an echo of Henry Fox himself.
Our elections, thank God! do not depend upon the giddy mob. They
are generally governed by men of fortune and understanding, and of
such our ministers, for this twenty years past, have been so happy
as to have a majority in their favour. Therefore, when we talk of
people with regard to elections, we ought to think only of those of
the better sort, without comprehending the mob or mere dregs of the
people.
Such was the nursery-ground of the hero of Lord Ilchester's volumes,
from which that hero's son was able to lift himself.
By sitting still and stolidly manipulating his boroughs Stephen Fox
served himself better than his more able brother. He did not become
so rich, though he never lacked. He had money, he married money, and
became an earl. He suffered none of the mortifications and humiliations
of the active politician, who made himself the most unpopular man in
England, and, after serving his King at the expense of his country,
was thrown out and thrown over. To be sure he was Paymaster for eight
years, during which time a sum of £46,000,000 passed through his hands
to his immeasurable profit; but to do justice to Fox, his riches
weighed as nothing beside his sense of the ingratitude of the Rigbys
and others of the sort whom he had loved and tried to serve. Though he
did not begin so well off as his elder brother, he cannot be said to
have been badly off. At twenty-one he dropped into a sinecure office
of £450 a year and a capital sum which brought his whole income to
something like £900. His first political acquaintance of note was Lord
Hervey, and his next, from whom, to his credit, he never swerved, was
Sir Robert Walpole. "Fox really loved that man," was said of him, and
truly said; and when Sir Robert fell and he was handed over to Henry
Pelham he was found faithful again. In all this he differed widely
from Bubb Dodington, having a heart as well as a stomach, and if not
principles, at least passions. Dodington was merely a merchant of
himself, but Fox suffered his feelings to act and react, often to
his temporal detriment. As Lord Ilchester shows, he was not wise in
his attachments, nor always temperate in his actions. He alienated
Scottish sympathies by his vehemence after the Porteous riot; he
made an enemy of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke by his opposition to the
Clandestine Marriages Act--an opposition which may have been grounded
upon the fact that his own marriage had been of that order; he became
the friend and ally of the Duke of Cumberland, and obnoxious on that
account to Leicester House and the heir-apparent. When George III.
succeeded, and Lord Bute became the all-powerful minister, he attached
himself there, just in time to lose the friendship of the Duke and to
share in the hatred and distrust which the whole nation turned upon
the administration. In these mischances his heart rather than his head
played him false. Yet, for all his pains, neither of his masters liked
him. George II. owned that Fox had never told him a lie, and added that
he was the only man who had not. But he never trusted him in spite of
that. George III., having after much hesitation given him a barony,
steadily refused to advance him higher, though no man had worked harder
in his service or, it must be added, more discreditably. It was Henry
Fox who set to work, by methods which can only be called flagrant, to
form a party in Parliament to be known as "the King's friends." That he
did not succeed was not his fault.
Fox directly attacked two separate members of the House of Commons,
and with so little decorum on the part of either buyer or seller
that a shop was publicly opened at the Pay Office, whither members
flocked, and received the wages of their venality in bank bills, even
to so low a sum as two hundred pounds for their votes on the treaty.
Twenty-five thousand pounds, as Martin, Secretary of the Treasury,
afterwards owned, were issued in one morning; and in a single
fortnight a vast majority was purchased to approve the peace.
It is perhaps going far to say that nothing more disgraceful was ever
done in Parliament, but it is not too much to affirm that no greater
act of treachery was ever attempted against the theory of popular
representation by a member of the supposed popular House. But he had
his barony, and received it three years later than Bubb Dodington
obtained his.
It is not Lord Ilchester's fault that much of the intrigue he
elucidates is rueful reading. The wonder is that he has found the
spirit with which to achieve it. When one's native country, its
neighbour states and colonial dependencies, when King, Lords, Commons,
Army, Navy, and Church are all seen to have been counters in a great
game of grab; when patriotism is as much an unknown quantity as even a
rudimentary civic sense, and the only certainty is that of one's own
and one's rivals' common dishonesty, it is no wonder that the accidents
of his book count for more than the substance. What we get of Charles
Fox makes amends for Henry. Everything that Lord Ilchester has to tell
us of Charles is good. We have him first as a baby. "He is weakly,
but likely to live. His skin hangs all shrivell'd about him, his eyes
stare, he has a black head of hair, and 'tis incredible how like a
monkey he look'd before he was dress'd." Then he is at a preparatory
school, in 1757, where it seems that Charles has more emulation than
any boy almost ever had; next at Eton, where he and his brother Stephen
entertained their father at a dinner "bespoke from the Christopher:
... boil'd mutton and broth, three large fowls, and a leg of mutton
roasted." It was at Eton in 1758, when he was nine years old, that he
thus announced his philosophy of life. The father is writing to the
mother:
That odd dog Charles said, with a smile, he wish'd his life was at an
end. I asked the reason. "Why," says he, "it is a troublesome affair,
and one wishes one had this thing or that thing, and then one is not
the happier; and then one wishes for another thing, and one's very
sorry if one can't get it, and it does not make one happier if one
does."
We can follow him to Oxford, and wish we had room for his letter to his
father explaining with elaborate pains how he came to knock the bottom
out of £150, or for another which announces the loss of eighty guineas
at cards, and registers the first of a series of vows that it shall
never happen again. All this will be found in Volume II., together with
some account of the stormy opening of his parliamentary career--at
nineteen; but there or thereabouts we regretfully leave him, the best
thing by far that Henry Fox ever made.
If it were asked what this man had done in his days to deserve two
biographies on the scale of Mr. Riker's and Lord Ilchester's, the
answer would be long in coming. Henry Fox was a man of good but
moderate abilities, a bad speaker, a fair debater, one of the few, at
any rate, who ever stood up to William Pitt the first. He conducted
his War Secretaryship with diligence, his Paymastership with what must
be called legal honesty. He robbed his country, but no more than any
other Paymaster had done. He enriched himself by trading with the huge
balances left on his hands, sometimes lending of them to the country
which found them at twenty per cent! Every Paymaster except Pitt, who
would have none of it, had done as much, and most of them did worse.
But one searches Lord Ilchester's pages in vain for anything definitely
_done_ by Fox, except, to be sure, the infamous attempt to betray the
constitution by making the third estate of the realm a creature of the
first. Even that he did not succeed in doing. It was Lord North who
reaped for King George what Fox had sown. And that is about all that
one can say, and very much what Lord Ilchester himself says of Henry
Fox. What should be added to that is that the book is admirable both
for lucidity of style and arrangement, for gallantry of attack, and
gaiety in action.
RECOLLECTIONS OF LADY GEORGIANA PEEL. Compiled by her Daughter, ETHEL
PEEL. London: Lane. 1920. 16_s._ net.
Lady Georgiana was born in 1836 and is daughter of Lord John Russell.
She should have memorable things to tell, and perhaps she has. But
Providence, which has given her length of days and illustrious
descent, has not conferred the garnering eye or the gift of tongues.
It is a pity, for she has seen so much: Holland House and Pembroke
Lodge, Bowood in the days of its greatness, Sir Robert Peel and Lord
Palmerston, the Duke and Disraeli, Rogers, Tom Moore and his wife,
Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, the whole Victorian galaxy. She has
danced with the Prince Consort, and found him rather cross; she has
heard Tom Moore sing, and seen him weep at his own music; she has
helped entertain Garibaldi, and dined with Macaulay. She was not,
however, impressed by that pundit, found his monologue a bore, and
agreed with Sydney Smith when he said, "very gravely, towards the end
of dinner, 'Macaulay, when I'm dead, you'll be sorry you never heard
me talk.'" That is something; and here is another thing equally good.
When Lord John was about to take John Bright down to stay at Woburn, "a
candid friend" wrote to the Duke of Bedford, "Hope you'll count your
spoons." Here, once more, is a glimpse into the manners of that stately
place, about 1840:
Many were the happy Christmases we spent at Woburn. I remember, to
our huge delight, we were allowed to help throw mutton chops out of
the dining-room window for whoever cared to pick them up. I think
that custom died out. When I was a child each guest was provided with
a piece of paper in which to wrap up an eatable for people waiting
outside.
God bless the Squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations!
No doubt that was as good a way of doing it as any. But such flowers
grow rarely in Lady Georgiana's garden, which is indeed something of
a _hortus siccus_ where names and dates have to stand for more than
they will bear. "I remember Mr. Kingslake coming down to Pembroke Lodge
sometimes; I don't think he had then begun his _History_. He was always
very agreeable." So much for _Eothen_. "In connection with William
Warburton, I remember Mr. Matthew Arnold, for he was a great friend of
my brother-in-law's, and a comrade in the inspection of schools." And
so much for him. Of Dickens we get something more. "In the evening,
I remember, he was conspicuous, owing to wearing a pink shirt front
embroidered with white." Disraeli, too, expatiated in shirts. "Though
he talked incessantly, I remember best his shirt front, which was made
of white book-muslin over a very bright rose-coloured foundation, which
shone through it." The temptation to stick pins into it must have been
severe.
With these grains the reader must be satisfied, and with such powers
of evolution as he possesses may extract, no doubt, some more. Here
is one of Lady Holland, too good to be passed over. She proposed
leaving to Lord John Russell, and did in fact leave him, an estate in
Kennington--where the Oval now is. Lord John would only accept it for
life, urging the claims of the son and daughter of the house. "I hate
my son; I don't like my daughter," said the great lady, and settled it.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM. (Revised Edition, Extended to 1920.) By
SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB. Longmans. 21_s._
Twenty-five years ago Trade Unionism was vaguely apprehended in
the polite world as a growing force in industry, useful to the
working-class and even legitimate if kept within proper bounds. Wise
employers recognised its value and treated with it; the unenlightened
fought against it or accepted it with a bad grace. Many even of its
friends and allies, the Socialists--and not a few of these were
themselves Trade Unionists--rated it very low, as being, in fact,
a mere "palliative of the Capitalist system." To-day it is safe to
assert that there is no institution in the country which bulks larger
in the public eye than the Trade Union movement. In numbers, wealth,
solidarity, and power it has developed out of all recognition. Its
leaders sit and bargain on equal terms with Ministers of the Crown,
take their places on public committees and Royal Commissions as of
right, even threaten, amid the angry protests of adversaries who were
once their masters, to destroy the foundations of the established
social order. The aims and activities of the Trade Unions vie with the
"crime wave" for first place in the columns of the newspapers; they are
discussed in trains and clubs and drawing-rooms. And, in short, the
organisation, which but a few years since was regarded as a more or
less private affair of workmen and their employers, now appears as the
biggest problem that the State has to face--as something that may even,
as many will have it, supersede the State itself.
It is hardly necessary, in these circumstances, to dilate on the
importance of a new edition, containing an account of the developments
during the last thirty years, of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's _History
of Trade Unionism_. When the book appeared in 1894 it was welcomed not
only by intelligent minds in the working-class, but by all students
of social history, abroad as well as in this country, as a remarkable
piece of work; it took its place, and has kept its place, as a classic.
Yet it had a far smaller public than it deserved; by 1911 under 10,000
copies had been sold. Of this new volume no less than 19,000 copies
in a special edition have been bought by Trade Unionists before
publication--a notable sign of the times. We have called this edition
a new volume--and that it certainly is, for not only have Mr. and Mrs.
Webb revised the work throughout and at some points slightly amplified
it, but they have added three chapters, covering actually some two
hundred and fifty pages.
The increase of Trade Union membership has been, as everyone knows,
enormous. In 1892, after more than two centuries of growth, the number
of Trade Unionists in the United Kingdom was not much over a million
and a half. At the outbreak of the war it was under four millions; at
the present moment it is above six millions--perhaps nearer seven than
six--and includes "probably as many as 60 per cent. of all the adult
manual working wage-earners." But what is of peculiar interest to note
is the increase in certain industries and among certain sections of
the community. The organisation of "unskilled labour" has in the last
few years been prodigious, and so also has that of women of all sorts
from the "braincombers in the learned professions" to domestic servants
and the chief "hands" in the sweated trades. The female membership of
Trade Unions, which in the year before the war was in round figures
361,000, has risen now to over three-quarters of a million, and it
is still rising. Very remarkable also is the increasing organisation
of the "black-coated proletariat"--civil servants, clerks, managers,
supervisors, technicians, and the rest. This, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb
rightly insist, is an important indication of the lines on which
industry is likely to be shaped in the future. But with this vast
growth of numbers, and a corresponding growth of amalgamation and
federation, there has been singularly little change in the central
machinery of the movement. The weakest point, indeed, is at the top.
The Trades Union Congress, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb put it, "remains, as
we have described it in its early years, rather a parade of the Trade
Union forces than a genuine Parliament of Labour." Its executive body,
the Parliamentary Committee, does not provide that "general staff"
which the movement badly needs, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb's criticism both
of this and of the whole question of what may be called the Trade
Unions' "civil service" is very much to the front.
The history of Trade Unionism in this century, however, is by no means
exhausted by the records of its membership and organisation. Side
by side with this it has won an enhanced status, and not the least
interesting of the three new chapters is devoted to an account of this
achievement. Mr. and Mrs. Webb give us an elaborate criticism of the
famous Taff Vale judgment; they discuss the Osborne case and the Trade
Union Act of 1913, the relations of the Unions and the Government
during and after the war. And last, but not least, they describe the
"revolution in thought," the influence of Syndicalist and of Guild
Socialist theories in shaping the demand for "self-government in
industry" and in determining the attitude of the workman to strikes and
Parliamentary action.
The final chapter deals with the political side--the rise of the
Labour Party, from its stormy birth just over twenty years ago, to
the new era which opened for it at the election of 1918. Mr. and Mrs.
Webb have much friendly criticism to offer on the subject of the
present political organisation of the Labour movement. It suffers,
they observe, not merely from a lack of "Party loyalty" on the part of
Trade Unionists, but also from a confusion of central machinery. It
suffers too (some say these are its chief shortcomings) from a failure
to develop a staff of trained political officers and from a scarcity
of trained Parliamentary representatives. But these weaknesses, we
suppose, are on the way to be remedied, if the Party as a whole, as
well as its leaders, is alive to them.
The reader is not to look in this history, as its authors remark,
for any argued judgment on the validity of Trade Union assumptions
or ultimate ideals. Nevertheless, what little they have to say on
this hand is of profound interest. "The object and purpose of the
workers, organised vocationally in Trade Unions and Professional
Associations, and politically in the Labour Party," they warn us, "is
no mere increase of wages or reduction of hours. It comprises nothing
less than a reconstruction of Society, by the elimination, from the
nation's industries and services, of the Capitalist profit-maker, and
the consequent shrinking up of the class of functionless persons who
live merely by owning." What form in that reconstructed Society is
the organisation of industry to take? Mr. and Mrs. Webb expect to see
"the supreme authority in each industry or service vested, not in the
workers as such, but in the community as a whole.... The management
of industry ... will not be the sole sphere of either producers or
consumers, but is clearly destined to be distributed between them--the
actual direction and decision being shared between the representatives
of the Trade Union or Professional Society on the one hand and those
of the community in Co-operative Society, Municipality, or National
Government on the other." They do not see eye to eye in every detail
with the Guild Socialist. But still less do they see eye to eye with
that fabulous monster who stalks through the writings and speeches both
of Revolutionaries and Conservatives--the bureaucratic Fabian Webb,
harbinger of the Servile State! There may be some, we suppose, who will
find a less "detached" outlook in this volume than in the original
edition. If there is a difference of outlook, it is natural enough,
for Mr. and Mrs. Webb are more "inside" the Labour movement now than
they were in 1894, and their judgments and criticisms must inevitably
show a subtle difference of tone. But this is not to accuse them of
undue partiality. No man can write an "impartial" history that is worth
reading of his own time and his own friends. And we need not regret
that Mr. and Mrs. Webb, in their detailed descriptions, for example,
of the great railway strike or the miners' dispute of last year, put
the workmen's case confidently and strongly since they see it as their
own case also and that of the nation. The appearance of these three
new chapters, we do not hesitate to say, constitutes an event in the
world of politics and of letters. The _History of Trade Unionism_ will
remain, as it has been, a work which every student of industry and
every man of affairs must read and re-read and inwardly digest.
MY SECOND COUNTRY (FRANCE). By ROBERT DELL. Lane. 7_s._ 6_d._
This study of the people and institutions and spirit of France is in
a class apart from the volumes of "impressions" of foreign lands with
which "week-enders" and passing travellers are prone to favour us.
"France," says Mr. Dell, "has been my home for more than twelve years,
but it was already my second country long before I went to live there.
Indeed I cannot remember a time when France had not a large place in my
affections." It is with an intimate knowledge, therefore, as well as
with a profound sympathy that he discusses the many phases of French
life. But his book is by no means a mere panegyric. He is throughout
candid and critical--often bitterly critical. He exposes ruthlessly
the undemocratic character of the "Democratic Administration," the
impotence of Parliament, the demoralising influence of small property,
the evils of the _petit bourgeois_ spirit, the avarice and egotism of
the _grande bourgeoisie_. How far his view of all these things is a
just one will be a matter of controversy. Some may say he is violently
prejudiced; no one, after reading this book, could deny that many
of his judgments are biased. In the final chapters there is really
no pretence of impartiality; he argues his case and "maintains his
propositions," like Doctor Pancrace in the play, _Pugnis et calcibus,
unguibus et rostro_. Mr. Dell is a Socialist, but not an "Etatiste";
he is a "libertine" and a revolutionary, with an equal dislike of
bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie. And his feelings in this matter are
so strong that we may venture to doubt his predictions as to how
the Revolution will come. For the rest, Mr. Dell is a determined
Rationalist. "La France de Voltaire et de Montesquieu," he says with
M. Anatole France, "celle-là est la grande, la vraie France." For
"religious" France he has no use--neither for "irreligious" orthodoxy,
nor political Catholicism, nor Modernism. Bergsonism, too, he holds
to be a baneful influence, as reactionary as the Church which eschews
it. But the old superstitions and the new philosophies, he believes,
are losing their hold; "the spirit of the true France is coming into
its own again, and the young intellect of France is returning to the
rationalism of Voltaire." In all this, and much else, he may be wrong,
but he has given us a book that is at any rate profoundly interesting.
RUSSIA IN RULE AND MISRULE. By Brigadier C. R. BALLARD, C.B., C.M.G.,
with a Foreword by General SIR WILLIAM ROBERTSON. Murray. 6_s._ net.
This is a curious and nondescript book. Beginning as a history of
Russia from the earliest times, it ends rather as the impressions
of a soldier who, attached to the Eastern front during the war, saw
something of the Russian revolution. It is a soldier's book, breezy,
untrammelled by literary and historical conventions, and distinguished
by a direct simplicity which disarms criticism. The General gives an
interesting account of what happened subsequently to the revolution;
but his account often gives only one out of many views of the facts.
Thus his chapter on the Kornilov incident is, as he states, merely a
summary of Kerenski's book, and cannot therefore be accepted without
considerable reserves. On pages 214-216 he gives ten outstanding facts
about the Bolshevik _régime_ "which can be proved over and over again
if proof be required." We should like to see the General's proof of
the first sentence in his tenth "fact," namely, that "there are no
elections of any kind...." The General has also succeeded in adding a
new complication to the already complicated problem of the spelling of
Russian names. The gentleman whose name we have seen spelt variously by
other writers Cheidze, Chheidze, and Tshcheidze appears in his book as
Cheidsi.
THE PEACE IN THE MAKING. By H. WILSON HARRIS. Swarthmore Press. 6_s._
net.
It would be unfair to compare Mr. Harris's book with Mr. Keynes's,
though it covers something of the same ground. Mr. Keynes is analytic
and, in the end, constructive, and his subject is the rebuilding of
a ruined Europe. Mr. Harris is historical and reminiscent. Like a
good journalist--and it is unnecessary to say how good a journalist
he is--he tells us how they made the peace rather than what kind of
a peace they made and should have made. It is true that in telling
us the story of peace-making at Paris he does tell us also what kind
of peace they made. In fact his book has a distinct value as a clear
summary of the terms eventually hammered out by the three Great Powers
and accepted by Germany. But the angle of Mr. Harris's approach to his
subject is that of the journalistic historian. The result is a very
readable and interesting book. Putting ourselves into Mr. Harris's
skilful hands, we are enabled to see, through the various journalistic
spectroscopes, something of what took place behind the shuttered and
curtained council chamber of the Big Four, which in effect was a Big
Three.
LEAGUES OF NATIONS. By ELIZABETH YORK. Swarthmore Press. 8_s._ 6_d._
net.
This is a useful book for those who wish to study the long and slow
development of the idea of a League of Nations. The author begins with
the idea of a League in ancient Greece and traces it through Dante,
the "Grand Design," Grotius, Penn, Saint Pierre, Rousseau, Kant, and
Bentham to Alexander I. of Russia and the Holy Alliance. The value of
the book is considerably enhanced by its careful documentation, and
by the fact that it gives us a translation of the text of many of the
schemes and "covenants" which are not easily obtainable by the ordinary
reader.
THE NEW OUTLOOK. By LORD ROBERT CECIL, M.P. Allen & Unwin. 1_s._ net.
This brochure has a double claim to interest all who concern themselves
with politics. In the first place it is a remarkable revelation of
the advancing spirit of democracy, of the new social conscience and
widening outlook of our time. For here we have a Cecil, the type of the
grand seigneurial family of high Tory traditions, calmly--or rather
enthusiastically--offering us a political programme that a few years
ago would have been greeted as wildly Jacobin. In the second place the
views of Lord Robert derive a peculiar importance from the position
which he occupies to-day in the public estimation. His high personal
character, his idealism, and his ability single him out among the
members of his Party--if indeed he can be said in the present political
confusion to be of a Party. He gives us here half-a-dozen short essays
dealing with the League of Nations, the industrial problem, finance,
the reform of Parliament, and the Irish question. His practical
proposals under each of these heads will not commend themselves to
everyone in all their details, but none will fail to admire the
generous and constructive spirit which underlies them. Those who are
pessimistic about foreign affairs may well wish that we had more men
of this stamp to put Europe on its feet again. Those who are exercised
about the situation at home will look anxiously for the next step of
this aristocrat among the democrats.
EMPIRE AND COMMERCE IN AFRICA. By L. WOOLF. Labour Research Department
and Allen & Unwin. 20_s._ net.
Mr. Woolf's object in this work is to answer the question: "What
has been the result and what the lessons of the application of the
power and machinery of the European State to Africa?" He examines
very carefully and critically the history of the organisation of the
British, French, and German Colonies in North and East Africa, as well
as the Belgian Congo. The results both for Europe and for the natives
he finds on the whole to be evil. The future, if we are to continue the
old policy of economic imperialism, offers no better prospect. There
is hope in the League of Nations, but for the mandatory system, as
proposed, Mr. Woolf has no enthusiasm. To make the League effective and
beneficent its forms and duties must be restated and clearly defined.
The book is one which ought to be read by all who are interested not
merely in African affairs but in the Colonial policies of the European
Powers.
ANTHROPOLOGY
ARCHAIC ENGLAND. By HAROLD BAYLEY. London: Chapman & Hall. 1919. Medium
8vo. pp. 894. 25_s._ net.
The publishers' announcement informs us that "Mr. Harold Bayley by
his graduated studies in Elizabethan Literature, Symbolism, and the
Renaissance has established his position as an original and interesting
thinker." Again, on its paper wrapper the present work is styled,
"this profound and far-reaching contribution to English Archæology."
If a pill were to be puffed in this way the inference might be drawn
that the interested party did not belong to the medical profession.
By parity of reasoning one conjectured before opening the book that
Mr. Bayley was not versed in the gentle tradition of the archæological
fraternity. But to read the introduction almost disarms the critic.
Mr. Bayley cannot, he confesses, afford to emulate the Oxford tutor,
described in a novel of Mr. Stephen McKenna, who set himself to write
a history of the Third French Republic, and thirty years later had
satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of
Kingship. He complains that his literary hobbies have necessarily to
be indulged more or less furtively in restaurants and railway-trains.
Nevertheless he tries "to keep on as good terms as may be with
the exacting Muses of History, Mythology, Archæology, Philosophy,
Religion, Romance, Symbolism, Numismatics, Folklore, and Etymology."
Thus circumstances have forced him to become a literary "hustler";
and, since self-advertisement is germane to the hustling temper, and
moreover in this case is quite undisguised and naïve, it may almost be
forgiven.
Not that Mr. Bayley wants to be forgiven. It would seem that the
hustling and the hard-hitting tendencies are naturally akin. For
the philologists have attacked him on account of another book.
Consequently, in this book he pulverises the philologists one and
all; there is nothing left of them. Nor do the anthropologists come
off any better. Even sex does not protect them. Miss Jane Harrison,
for instance, was rash enough to say that gods evolve from choral
dances and similar ceremonies, herein but following the common opinion
that in the development of religion ritual is prior to dogma. Mr.
Bayley will have none of it. "The theory here assumed," he exclaims,
"grossly defies the elementary laws of logic, for every act of ritual
must essentially have been preceded by a thought: Act is the outcome
and offspring of Thought: Idea was never the idiot-child of Act. The
assumption that the first idea of God evolved from the personation
of the Sun God in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or
fundamentally a mental tracking of that God right home, but rather an
inane confession that the idea of God cannot be traced further backward
than the ritual of ancient festivals." How can a reviewer proceed to
deal with Mr. Bayley's views without trepidation? _Fænum habet in
cornu._
"To me," says Mr. Bayley, "the divinities of antiquity are not mere
dolls to be patted superciliously on the head and then remitted to
the dustbin. Our own ideals of to-day are but the idols or dolls
of to-morrow, and even a golliwog if it has comforted a child is
entitled to sympathetic treatment." It would have certainly been more
sympathetic if Miss Harrison had called Apollo or Dionysus a gollywog,
and let it go at that. Mr. Bayley goes on to moralise--and the passage
illustrates at once his discursive manner and the methods of the
symbolistic philology--as follows: "The words _doll_, _idol_, _ideal_,
and _idyll_, which are all one and the same, are probably due to the
island of Idea, which was one of the ancient names of Crete. Not only
was Crete known as Idæa, but was also entitled Doliche, which may be
spelled to-day Idyllic.... We shall also see as we proceed that the
mystic philosophy known to history as the Gnosis was in all probability
the philosophy taught in prehistoric times at Gnossus, the far-famed
capital of Crete. From Gnossus, whence the Greeks drew all their
laws and sciences, came probably the Greek word _gnossis_, meaning
_knowledge_." Why "probably"?
But to proceed to Mr. Bayley's main contention. He would have
us take less pride in any connection we may have had with the
Anglo-Saxons--were they not Huns?--and, contrariwise, think more of
our far more worthy ancestors the ancient Britons. Theirs was a wisdom
ultimately derived from the culture-lands of the East. Are not the
identities between Welsh and Hebrew "close and pressing." Is it not
the fact that "entire sentences of archaic Hebraisms are similarly
to be found in the now obsolete Cornish language." Unfortunately the
Phœnicians have left no literature. The Greeks have, however, and we
are thus able to connect Achill in Ireland with Achilles, and so on.
Similarly philology proves the truth of the tale that Brutus with his
Trojans landed at Totnes and thence marched to Troynovant or New Troy,
now known as London. Not that the Trojans on their arrival found it any
easier than it is now to obtain decent lodgings in London. For _tre_
(which is obviously Troy) means in Cornish dwelling, and in French
_trou_ means hole. So the earliest Troys "were maybe caves," though
they ultimately became towers or _tors_; witness the number of the
same in the West of England. It is likewise obvious that Troy, Tyre,
and Etruria are from the same root. So it follows that "the men of
Tarshish, Tyre, Troy, or Etruria, towed, trekked, travelled, tramped,
traded, and trafficked far and wide." Indeed, it might almost seem
that the language in which these culture-heroes were wont to express
themselves consisted entirely in the word Troy and its derivatives. But
no. Britain was called Albion, and "Albion suggests Albania." Moreover,
"by the present-day Turk the Albanians are termed Arnaouts. Whether
this name has any connection with _argonauts_ is immaterial." So it
evidently is, seeing that "many shiploads of young argonauts from one
or another Troy reached the coast of Cornwall." But the proof of this
is the fact that so many of the Cornish names begin with _tre_. So even
the Albanians called themselves Troy for short.
There are nearly nine hundred pages composed in this vein, and if
the reader wants more he can find it there. Mr. Bayley will not bore
him; he wields a facile pen. Again, he has read all manner of books,
good bad and indifferent, and may provide useful material for anyone
whose critical faculty is sufficiently alert. But Troy and the rest of
it--can this punning philology be seriously meant? Mr. Bayley would
connect our word pun "with the Hebrew _pun_, meaning _dubious_." No
doubt pundit comes from the same root; and, if so, Mr. Bayley is
welcome to the title.
SCIENCE
IONS, ELECTRONS, AND IONISING RADIATIONS. By J. A. CROWTHER. Arnold.
12_s._ 6_d._ net.
In spite of the subject of his book, Dr. Crowther's index is free from
the names of Wien, Lenard, Elster and Geitel, and Stark, to mention a
few omissions which are somewhat surprising. It is true that subsequent
reading shows that one of these names is casually mentioned, but
the pages on positive rays, for instance, are happily free from all
reference to the hated Hun and his works--and, in consequence, are
somewhat misleading. In the first flush we attributed these omissions
to Dr. Crowther's intense patriotism, but further investigation, and a
rough classification of other peculiarities, has convinced us that the
misfortune of these men lies not in being German, but in not having
worked at Cambridge. If the book before us had as a sub-title, "Being
the Work of Cambridge Physicists," a source of misunderstanding would
be removed. It consists of an account of the work of the Cavendish
school, enriched by free borrowings from Sir J. J. Thomson's famous
_Conduction of Electricity through Gases_, with occasional references
to the work of "outsiders," not usually acknowledged by name. The
chapter on Photo-electricity will illustrate to those familiar with
the subject the peculiarities to which we allude. We doubt if many
physicists will be disposed to admit the author's claim that the book
furnishes "a reasonably complete account of the present state of the
subject."
ENGINES OF THE HUMAN BODY. By ARTHUR KEITH, F.R.S. Williams & Norgate.
12_s._ 6_d._ net.
It is a commonplace to talk of the machinery of the body, but it is not
widely realised how close are the analogies which can be drawn between
every detail of our physical structure and some feature or process of
modern mechanical engineering. Professor Keith, realising how very much
more most of us know of the working of an engine which comparatively
few of us possess, an internal combustion engine, than of the working
of the engines which we all possess in our muscles, has written a
most informing and entertaining book, in which the mechanism and
functions of our bones, muscles, heart, lungs, joints, brain, and other
structures are considered in terms of their engineering analogies. It
is hard to imagine a clearer or more charming exposition of elementary
physiology. The book is based on a course of Christmas Lectures given
at the Royal Institution, lectures primarily intended, as every one
knows, for children. While there is little in the book which cannot
be understood by any intelligent boy--that we do not add "or girl" is
due to no reactionary denial of the full equality of the sexes, but
to a belief that, at present, girls take less interest in, and so are
less conversant with, the working of motor-car engines than boys--few
grown-ups, even medical men, will read it without lively interest or
without learning much. There is hardly any function or structure in
our bodies for which Professor Keith does not find a counterpart in
iron or steel--the internal texture of a bone is likened to Fairbairn's
crane, a diagram of a force pump compared part by part with the diagram
of the left ventricular pump of the heart. The varying length of heel
found in different races is considered from the point of view of its
mechanical usefulness in different circumstances, the superiority of
the ape type of arm to the human type for the tasks which confront an
ape is made clear in a few words. A short historical sketch of what
Harvey was taught concerning the blood, contrasted with the wonderful
new knowledge which he himself discovered, and the road by which he
arrived at it, affords an admirable example of scientific method.
These are citations at random; the whole book is full of commendable
things. The bearings of recent research, such as the work of Haldane on
Respiration, Cannon on Adrenalin, Starling on Hormones, are skilfully
indicated in simple language. We congratulate Professor Keith on the
production of a book of popular science which in clearness, depth of
knowledge, and charm of style challenges comparison with the books
which his great predecessor, Faraday, founded on his "Christmas
Lectures."
PROBLEMS OF COSMOGONY AND STELLAR DYNAMICS. By J. H. JEANS. Cambridge
University Press. 21_s._ net.
We welcome the appearance of this book, which is the essay to which
the Adams Prize was adjudged in the year 1917. With the exception of
Poincaré's well-known _Leçons sur les Hypothéses Cosmogoniques_ there
is, we think, no other book of recent date dealing authoritatively
with the attractive subject of cosmogony, and in certain respects Mr.
Jeans's book is a considerable advance on Poincaré's. The treatment is
more systematic, and the author's own extensive contributions to the
subject add to its value.
The introductory chapter gives a survey of the scientific problem of
the origin of the universe, and points out the various uniformities
which we have to explain. It also includes a brief historical sketch
of the various theories of cosmogony put forward, from the famous
nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace up to modern times. This
chapter and the concluding chapter, on the Origin and Evolution of
the Solar System, are accessible to the non-mathematical reader, and
enable him to put himself in touch with the latest observations and
speculations on these fascinating themes. The remainder of the book
is highly mathematical, yet the author has presented his analysis so
skilfully that a moderate knowledge of the calculus and dynamical
principles suffice for the following of all the deductions. The general
dynamics and criteria of stability and instability are first developed,
and then the classical configurations of equilibrium of a rotating
homogeneous mass--Maclaurin's spheroids and Jacobi's ellipsoids--are
handled. Further systematic investigation leads up to the study of the
oft-attacked, formidable problem of pear-shaped figures of equilibrium,
which occupied the attention of Poincaré, G. Darwin, and Liapounoff. So
far there has been question of stable configurations of equilibrium:
the author now passes to the dynamical problems presented when there
is no stable equilibrium, remarking that "a statical problem may or
may not admit of solution, but a dynamical problem must always have
a solution." Poincaré's "cataclysm" is for him merely a passage from
a statical to a dynamical investigation. Soon, after summarising the
results for a mass of fluid which is incompressible and homogeneous, he
proceeds to consider the case when neither of these conditions pertain.
Here we are presented chiefly with the important advances made by Mr.
Jeans himself. The evolution of rotating nebulæ and of star clusters,
of double and of multiple stars (particular attention being given to
the process of fission and the subsequent motion), come up in turn for
consideration, and from these gigantic voyages through space we return,
at the end of the book, to our relatively minute solar system and its
evolution. The book is illustrated with beautiful reproductions of
photographs of nebulæ, taken at the Mount Wilson Observatory, and is in
every way worthy of its author and its Press.
ARCHIVES OF RADIOLOGY AND ELECTROTHERAPY FOR DECEMBER. Heinemann.
The December number of the _Archives of Radiology and Electrotherapy_
contains an interesting article on the work of the British
Association of Radiology and Physiotherapy. One of the first fruits
of its activities is that, at its instigation, the University of
Cambridge has decided to institute a Diploma in Medical Radiology and
Electrology. A knowledge of the properties of the various radiations
of electrical origin on nature, of direct and alternating currents,
and of electrotechnics in general, is of such importance in modern
medicine that we heartily welcome the institution of a Diploma which
will guarantee that its possessor has a thorough knowledge of the new
and special technique required for the various electric treatments of
to-day. The syllabus of subjects and the regulations governing the
award, which provide, among other things, that the candidate must
hold a recognised medical qualification, are published in full in
the number of the _Archives_ under notice. A study of the syllabus
of the course of studies provided at Cambridge emphasises the range
of physical phenomena, which have a therapeutic value--radiant heat,
X-rays, the rays from radioactive substances, electrolysis, direct
and high frequency currents, and static electricity, to name some of
the most important. Obviously it is time for adequate provision to be
made for instructing the medical man in the theory and manipulation
of the machines and devices peculiar to this side of his art, since
the average M.D. has not a very deep knowledge of physics. The only
suggestion we would offer is that some attempt might be made to
simplify or standardise the nomenclature of the subject. A glance at
this short notice will show the variety of titles given to the new
therapeutics, and of these the word "electrology," for instance, is
given in Webster as "obsolete or rare." Surely there are sufficient
terms already without reviving it.
BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
"Modern" type is the name by which the design that came into general
use in this country between 1800 and 1808 is designated. (It is
the type face still used in Blue Books.) To quote Luckombe in his
_Printer's Grammar_, of 1808, "The great improvement which has taken
place of late years in the form of printing types has completely
superseded the Elzevir shape introduced from Holland by the celebrated
Caslon. Everyone must observe, with increasing admiration, the numerous
and elegant founts of every size which have with rapid succession been
lately presented to the public." And then follow specimens from the
Fry Type Foundry, the "Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia,
mostra?" so affected by the older founders that it almost became a
proverb for "type specimen."
Well, modern opinion has gone strongly back to Luckombe, and with good
reason. The only definite quality--not very definite either--which
calls forth his admiration is the elegance of the design. I think we
may concede this without damaging the case for the old-style types. The
letters are well drawn, carefully and finely drawn, and show a good
sense of proportion and of colour contrast in the thicks and thins
and hair-lines in the size shown, called the Luckombe "French Canon,"
equivalent to forty-eight point (about two-thirds of an inch). But is
elegant drawing the desirable point in type? It is not. It tends to
keep the single letters distinct units instead of their coalescing
into word, phrase, or even sentence units. For the mind of the reader
is partly formed by the mind of the writer, by his own experience in
the manipulation of the pen, and feels for the onward flow of the pen
in the letter design. And this is found at its best in the Italian
writing that developed the Caroline minuscule and formed the model for
the early Venetian types. The letter takes its character from the pen
in the hands of a master of his instrument, and the ink and paper or
vellum play their part--it is not deliberately drawn and passed on,
but arrives in the continuous flow that strives to keep _pari flumine_
with the stream of thought. The serifs or finishing strokes, _e.g._,
of the capital C or T in "modern," are perpendicular palings that shut
off relations with their neighbours; in old style they reach towards
their neighbours, as though to join hands with them. The onward flow is
felt in the curves, _e.g._, of the small m of old-style type, but in
modern it stands almost coldly self-centred, the elegance strikes us as
primness. The fine lines too are unsuitable for letterpress printing
as they are easily damaged and then the type becomes unsightly. In
engraver's lettering on copperplates, of course, this does not happen,
as the fine line is printed from a sunken scratch, not a knife-like
edge in relief. The engraver as a rule only used small groups of words,
not pages of continuous text. (I do not forget Pine--his Horace dates
1733--but of him another time.) I cannot help thinking that modern
type is the outcome of a mistaken standard, that of the engraver; as
if the finish of delicate gold-smithing were adopted for carving in
sandstone. To the engraver the hair-line is perfectly simple, to the
typefounder it is a _tour-de-force_. The old-style design continued the
manuscript tradition of form, with only such changes as the process of
typefounding involved, such as the elimination of ligatures or tied
letters. It continued in use till the end of the eighteenth century,
when "elegance" displaced it. In forty years (a short time compared
with the three-and-a-half centuries of old style) old style was revived
in the Chiswick Press _Juvenal_ and _Lady Willoughby's Diary_, and was
enthusiastically received. New versions of the old-style design were
cut, and it has continued in favour ever since.
A LETTER FROM FRANCE
THE YOUNG REVIEWS
_Paris, February, 1920._
When among us a reader of literary tastes wishes to obtain a bird's-eye
view of the literature of the moment, to see it mapped out with
all its currents, he thinks of the reviews. I mean by that not the
old-established reviews, which after all are no more than magazines of
the first class, but the living, active, combative reviews, which are
the organs of groups, of literary and intellectual parties.
While the old reviews, in France as in England or in Germany,
continued faithfully during the war to provide their usual articles on
contemporary affairs, all the young French reviews found themselves cut
off, the greater part of their staffs having been mobilised. Since the
war they have reappeared, new reviews have been born, and important
additions are announced for the spring. But, taken as a whole, the
complexion of the world of the new reviews shows an aspect sufficiently
different from what it had before the war and above all from what it
had twenty years ago.
* * * * *
The _Nouvelle Revue Française_ has begun publication again since June
1st. The members of its pre-war staff meet again intact, because for
the most part they belonged to a generation which reached, or had just
passed, its fortieth year in 1914. The most important among them, the
figure round whom the group was first assembled, was André Gide, and,
like Gide, most of them had gone through the Symbolist Movement between
1890 and 1900. But they were no longer at the age of enthusiastic and
violent prejudices; they cared much for analysis and intelligence and
sought above all to see clear. Hence came their taste for psychological
detail and for the literature of introspection, of which Jean
Schlumberger produced poignant examples and which made the _Nouvelle
Revue Française_ the natural country of Marcel Proust. Hence also,
and above all, the importance of its critical work, and that state of
attentive and impartial clairvoyance which it has constantly striven
to preserve. This clairvoyance did not exclude ardour or passion; the
influence of Péguy, still more that of Claudel, was obvious in the
fiery intellect of Jacques Rivière, now the editor of the review.
Unlike other reviews with an æsthetic bent, the _Nouvelle Revue
Française_ did not confine itself to the defence and the illustration
of some definite artistic method. It welcomed, like the _Mercure_
and the _Revue Blanche_ of old days, everything which seemed to
it interesting, original, and bearing the marks of authentic art.
Obviously, for it, the centre of the artistic landscape was filled
by the most illustrious of the whilom Symbolists, those who devoted
themselves in solitude to build according to those mysterious ideal
diagrams, drawn by Mallarmé upon a heroic and legendary sand: Gide,
Claudel, Valéry. But the review became the home also of Charles Louis
Philippe, that master of sorrowful tenderness and rending pity--of
Pierre Hamp, who, in his stories of industrial life, has drawn the
world of labour with a power frequently humorous and sometimes as
original as Constantin Meunier's; of Jules Romains, the picturesque and
powerful creator of "Unanimist" prose and poetry.
The _Nouvelle Revue Française_ has emerged from its five years'
concealment with the same characteristics. It still attempts to be a
milieu of pure art and disinterested literature. But it is almost
impossible, in France, for artists to-day to divest themselves of
political preoccupations. They are divided, often fiercely, over
this problem: "Should French thought to-day preserve or abandon its
war attitude? Should it remain defiant towards the foreigner and
subordinate everything to the continuance of the intellectual struggle
against Germanism?" The editors of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_,
who are divided on that question, endeavour in their review itself to
elucidate it by discussions amongst themselves.
* * * * *
The _Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres_ has also just reappeared.
It was the organ of a younger generation than that of the _Nouvelle
Revue Française_, and that is why the majority of its old conductors
no longer respond to the call. More than twenty of them, and notably
Pierre Gilbert, who was the heart and soul of them, were killed in
action. As its name indicates, this review is above all concerned with
criticism. You find in it few poems and no novels. The young men who
united around it aimed at restoring to French literature a classic
discipline, and fighting all the remains of romanticism from democracy
to symbolism. That is why the review published special numbers
dedicated to Richelieu, to Stendhal, to Mistral, and on the occasion
of Rousseau's centenary a special number of another kind, remarkably
violent, devoting to execration the Genevese whom they held to be the
father of French romanticism and the Æolus of all the storms.
The _Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres_ was profoundly influenced
by Charles Maurras. It was the literary organ of the ardent, patriotic
generation aroused in France by his influence and that of Maurice
Barrès. Nevertheless, some months before the war it broke away from
_L'Action Française_; or rather it was that paper, the organ of M.
Maurras, which declared itself unable any longer to commend without
reserve the tendencies of the _Revue Critique_. This cleavage arose out
of some articles in the _Revue Critique_ which praised the philosophy
of M. Bergson. Now _L'Action Française_ had opened war long before on
Bergsonism for reasons which were not philosophic. That is why the
_Revue Critique_, although still benevolently watched by M. Maurras,
was considered by him as a lapse from orthodoxy.
In its resurrected form it has kept its classical tendencies, its
taste for pure criticism, the intellectual discipline which made it
subordinate everything to the national point of view. But on the other
hand it shows an inclination to broaden, to become more elastic, to
take a less rigid and combative attitude than of old. Although most
of its editors are friends of M. Maurras and _L'Action Française_, it
preserves its intellectual autonomy intact and is no longer attached
to a political party. Its rôle seems to be to revive the old tradition
of French classicism. It maintains especially those discussions on the
problems of the day and the eternal problems, those intelligent and
passionate debates which have always given so much animation to young
French reviews.
* * * * *
A new review, the work of which will often be in accord with that
of the _Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres_, is announced for
the month of March, and that announcement has already aroused much
interest. This is the _Revue Universelle_, the organ of the "Parti de
l'Intelligence." This party, which might well have found a less naïve
title, is a nationalist group which proposes to keep the intellect of
France in the channels of national tradition and civic vigilance. It
includes almost all the monarchists of the _Action Française_, but also
a certain number of patriotic writers who are not royalists, including
Camille Mauclair, Daniel Halévy, Edmond Jaloux, Henri Ghéon, and Henri
Massis. It has been founded in opposition to the "Clarté" group of
Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Georges Duhamel, and Pierre Hamp, which
unites intellectuals with socialist and pacifist leanings. It is, in
the world of letters, a resurrection of the old leagues of the "Patrie
Française" and the "Droits de l'Homme," which flourished at the time
of the Dreyfus affair. But up to the present the majority of French
writers have not enrolled themselves in either body.
The title of the _Revue Universelle_ is based on the desire of the
"Parti de l'Intelligence" to make it an organ for propagating French
intellectual influence abroad, for ensuring the dissemination and
establishing the primacy of the classic culture which is bound up
with the French genius. The _Revue Universelle_ will attempt to give
to French nationalism, which has hitherto confined its propaganda
to France, an influence over the world. It is patently a difficult
enterprise and one essentially a little paradoxical. But it will
certainly be very interesting and will deserve to be closely watched
abroad. The _Revue Universelle_ will be directed by the clearest
and strongest head amongst contemporary French students of foreign
politics, M. Jacques Bainville. The names of the chief members of the
"Parti de l'Intelligence" assure from the start a staff of the first
order. The "Clarté" group has not yet announced its intention of
founding a similar organ.
In the spring there will appear a review in French which will fill a
place at present empty: the _Revue de Genève_, whose editor will be
M. Robert de Traz. This will be a review essentially European, which
will aim at giving an exact picture of intellectual Europe to-day, and
will examine objectively æsthetic, political, religious and moral,
national and international tendencies. Its founders believe that an
authoritative position is assured.
* * * * *
Most of these reviews are or will be reviews of ideas. In contrast to
what was the case twenty years ago the reviews which are devoted to new
and bold artistic manifestations remain on a lower level. Before the
war the _Phalange_ was a very live and picturesque review around which
were grouped a number of the old-time Symbolists and newer writers,
from Francis Viélé-Griffin to Guillaume Apollinaire. Almost all the
young made their débuts in the _Phalange_. It is regrettable that its
director, M. Jean Royère, has decided not to revive it after the war.
The literature which is attached to Futurist and Cubist art has for
organ the review _Littérature_, rather slender but curious. During the
war there began to appear a very sumptuous Cubist review of literature
and art, _L'Elan_, which was very interesting but did not survive its
fourth number.
* * * * *
It does not come within my present scope to refer to the old reviews,
which are well enough known to English readers. But I must mention
that in the last year a new one has been added to these, the _Minerve
Française_, classical and traditional in tenets and of an excellent
literary standard. Finally, as for the weekly papers, half way between
the dailies and the reviews properly so called, they are not so
important in France as in England. _L'Opinion_ and _L'Europe Nouvelle_
are at present the most alive; those and the _Revue Hebdomadaire_,
which is in another category.
In fine, the young French reviews to-day are preoccupied with ideas
first and art second. It is difficult for them, even when they are
willing, to avoid a definite orientation towards politics and the
problems of politics. They are the natural voices of a generation which
is prevented by actual events from indulging in detached speculations.
But that period of transition will pass and will no doubt soon
help forward a movement in France for the recovery of the precious
privileges of spiritual liberty.
ALBERT THIBAUDET
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
MAURICE HEWLETT
_Verse_
A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES. Dent. 1895.
SONGS AND MEDITATIONS. Constable. 1896.
ARTEMISION, IDYLLS AND SONGS. Elkin Mathews. 1909.
THE AGONISTS--A TRILOGY OF GOD AND MAN--MINOS, KING OF CRETE, ARIADNE
IN NAXOS, THE DEATH OF HIPPOLYTUS. Macmillan. 1911.
HELEN REDEEMED AND OTHER POEMS. Macmillan. 1913.
SINGSONGS OF THE WAR. Poetry Bookshop. 1914.
THE SONG OF THE PLOW: BEING THE ENGLISH CHRONICLE. Heinemann. 1916.
GAI SABER: TALES AND SONGS. A Collection of Poems. Elkin Mathews. 1916.
THE LOVING STORY OF PERIDORE AND PERIVALE. A Poem. Collins. 1917.
THE VILLAGE WIFE'S LAMENT. A Poem. Secker. 1918.
_Prose_
EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY. Being Impressions and Translations. Dent.
1895.
THE FOREST LOVERS. A Romance. Macmillan. 1898.
PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD. A Pastoral. Lane. 1898.
LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY. Chapman & Hall. 1899.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RICHARD YEA-AND-NAY. Macmillan. 1900.
NEW CANTERBURY TALES. Constable. 1901.
THE QUEEN'S QUAIR, OR THE SIX YEARS' TRAGEDY. Macmillan. 1904.
THE ROAD IN TUSCANY. Macmillan. 1904.
QUATTROCENTISTERIA: HOW SANDRO BOTTICELLI SAW SIMONETTA IN THE SPRING.
Mosher, Portland, Maine. 1904.
[Taken from _Earthwork out of Tuscany_.]
FOND ADVENTURES. Tales of the Youth of the World. Macmillan. 1905.
THE FOOL ERRANT. Heinemann. 1905.
THE STOOPING LADY. Macmillan. 1907.
THE SPANISH JADE. Cassell. 1908.
HALFWAY HOUSE. A Comedy of Degrees. Chapman & Hall. 1908.
OPEN COUNTRY. A Comedy with a Sting. Macmillan. 1909.
LETTERS TO SANCHIA UPON THINGS AS THEY ARE. Macmillan. 1910.
[Reprinted from _Open Country_.]
REST HARROW. A Comedy of Resolution. Macmillan. 1910.
BRAZENHEAD THE GREAT. Smith, Elder. 1911.
THE SONG OF RENNY. Macmillan. 1911.
MRS. LANCELOT. A Comedy of Assumptions. Macmillan. 1912.
LOVE OF PROSERPINE. Macmillan. 1913.
BENDISH: A STUDY IN PRODIGALITY. Macmillan. 1913.
THE LITTLE ILIAD. A Novel. Heinemann. 1915.
A LOVERS' TALE. Ward, Lock. 1915.
LOVE AND LUCY. Macmillan. 1916.
FREY AND HIS WIFE. Ward, Lock. 1916.
THORGILS OF TREADHOLT. Ward, Lock. 1917.
GUDRID THE FAIR. Constable. 1918.
THE OUTLAW. Constable. 1919.
He has also written introductions to Bidder's _In the Shadow of the
Crown_ (1899); to _Cynthia_ (1918); to _Twelfth Night_ (Vol. 2,
Renaissance Edition of Shakespeare); to Stendhal's _The Chartreuse of
Parma_; and to Wilfred Thorley's _Confessional and other Poems_.
MAX BEERBOHM
THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE. A Fairy Tale for tired men. Bodley Booklets. 1897.
[In 1918 Mr. Lane published a new edition with coloured drawings by
GEORGE SHERINGHAM.]
THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM. Lane. 1898.
MORE. (Essays.) Lane. 1899.
THE POET'S CORNER. (Caricatures.) Heinemann. 1904.
YET AGAIN. (Essays.) Chapman & Hall. 1909.
ZULEIKA DOBSON, OR AN OXFORD LOVE STORY. Heinemann. 1911.
A XMAS GARLAND. (Parodies.) Heinemann. 1912.
FIFTY CARICATURES. Plates. Heinemann. 1913.
THE SECOND CHILDHOOD OF JOHN BULL. (Cartoons.) Swift. 1912.
CATALOGUE OF AN EXHIBITION OF CARTOONS BY M.B. (Leicester Galleries.)
1913.
SEVEN MEN. Heinemann. 1919.
DRAMA
MARRIAGE À LA MODE
It was impossible to know from the reception of _Marriage à la Mode_
at the Phœnix Society's production last month whether the numerous
complaints of the behaviour of the audience when _The Duchess of
Malfi_ was performed had had effect or not, for Dryden's comedy puts
no strain of any sort on the audience. It is a sign both of Dryden's
greatness and of his weakness. For that "superhuman craftsmanship"
of which Professor Saintsbury speaks is the privilege of a writer
whose imagination does not outrun his powers. There is nothing in his
mind that he finds difficult to express. And the difference in merit
between one Dryden play and another is not a difference of degree in
technical accomplishment--of success in expression--as it is with
greater poets, but a difference in the value of the subject-matter.
When Dryden gets hold of a good dramatic idea he writes a good play,
when his material is deficient in interest his play is inferior. There
are no violent ups and downs in any one play, whereas a poet of more
passion and imagination does more mixed work. Some of Shakespeare's
finest scenes and passages are in his least satisfactory plays, and
though Shakespeare's natural genius for language was immeasurably
greater than Dryden's so that it was impossible for him to write at any
length without writing here and there wonderfully, yet he had, almost
necessarily, less absolute command of it. Dryden's was an intellectual
mastery that practically never failed him either in prose or verse.
He is not considered to have had any natural gift for comedy. Hazlitt
says: "Dryden's comedies have all the point that there is in ribaldry,
and all the humour that there is in extravagance. I am sorry that I
can say nothing better of them. He was not at home in this kind of
writing, of which he was himself conscious. His play was _horse-play_.
His wit (what there is of it) is ingenious and scholar-like, rather
than natural and dramatic," and more recent critics have suggested that
Dryden was unfitted for the new comedy that became universal after the
Restoration--the comedy that held a mirror up to Society rather than to
Nature--since Dryden "was not much a man of society."
It seems to me that this last criticism is largely true, but if he is
not witty in the sense that Congreve and Sheridan are witty, he is
often quite as amusing, and I cannot altogether agree with Hazlitt's
pronouncement that his wit was "ingenious and scholar-like rather than
natural and dramatic." Nothing could be more natural, for example,
than the Epilogue to _Marriage à la Mode_, spoken by Rhodophil, which
convulsed the house at the Lyric Theatre, and I doubt if it would be
possible to find among all the Restoration Comedies an Epilogue so
"dramatic"--revealing such insight into the feelings aroused by the
play in the audience, and making such effective use of that knowledge.
When Rhodophil says:
There are more Rhodophils in this theatre,
More Palamedes, and some few wives, I fear:
But yet too far our poet would not run;
Though 'twas well offered, there was nothing done.
He would not quite the women's frailty bare,
But stript them to the waist, and left them there:
And the men's faults are less severely shown,
For he considers that himself is one--
Some stabbing wits, to bloody satire bent,
Would treat both sexes with less compliment;
Would lay the scene at home; of husbands tell,
For wenches taking up their wives i' the Mall;
And a brisk bout, which each of them did want
Made by mistake of mistress and gallant.
Our modest author thought it was enough
To cut you off a sample of the stuff:
He spared my shame, which you, I'm sure, would not.
For you were all for driving on the plot:
You sighed when I came in to break the sport,
And set your teeth when each design fell short.
The audience at the Phœnix Society rose with uproarious laughter to
each hit, it was so palpable. Again I find all the comedy scenes, the
scenes between Palamede, Doralice, Rhodophil, and Melantha wholly
admirable and exhilarating to a degree. I would almost gladly give
up the whole of Congreve and Sheridan for this poetical, extravagant
and romantic humour. The name of poet still clung to dramatic wits
in the time of Congreve, and Congreve had perhaps some slight excuse
for calling himself a poet, but when the eighteenth century had
really arrived, when the abominable Sheridan came we had got into a
prose age indeed. And yet I have no wish to call Sheridan--and still
less Congreve--abominable, except by comparison with Dryden. We also
have to acknowledge that the cultivation of verbal wit, of repartee,
of elaborate social rococo, was the expression of the poetic fire
instinctively preserving itself in an age so spiritually unfavourable
to romance that it had to make itself externally romantic. Having lost
imagination it fell back on decoration. A whole elaborate social ritual
was built up to provide stimulants to the imprisoned senses. When in
_The Way of the World_ Mrs. Millamant says to Mirabell:
Good Mirabell, don't let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before
folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis: nor go to Hyde Park
together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and
whispers, and then never to be seen there together again; as if we
were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one another
ever after. Let us never visit together nor go to a play together;
but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as strange as if
we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not
married at all.
It is a _cri-de-cœur_. It is of the very essence of poetry in a narrow
and worldly age. It is such passages in Congreve that justify Hazlitt
in declaring--by comparison--that Dryden's wit was scholar-like rather
than natural, for there is not a passage in Dryden's comedies so real,
in the sense of being so local an expression of that passion for
beauty which haunts the human heart and which in a society of the kind
in which Mrs. Millamant moved will find such odd embodiment and be
to ordinary eyes so completely disguised. In such a passage Congreve
proves his right to be called a poet. What poetry there is in the
society with which he is dealing he has expressed; for that appeal of
the fine lady to Mirabell was a clutching at straws, a last despairing
attempt at the preservation of some particle of beauty, of romance in
the sordid life in which the married woman of fashion was about to be
engulfed.
The poetry of this scene reaches back to the beautiful scene in
_Marriage à la Mode_ between Palmyra and Leonidas, though, as I have
said, Dryden is more romantic, and so neither Palmyra nor Leonidas
are of any age, they are merely the youth of all time. But surely no
one can read the following passage without being moved to admiration
of its beautiful ease, its romantic simplicity as contrasted with the
romantic luxuriousness of the Elizabethans:
LEON.: How precious are the hours of love in courts!
In cottages, when love has all the day,
Full, and at ease, he throws it half away.
Time gives himself, and is not valued, there;
But sells at mighty rates, each minute, here:
There, he is lazy, unemployed, and slow;
Here he's more swift; and yet has more to do.
So many of his hours in public move,
That few are left for privacy and love.
PALM.: The sun, methinks, shines faint and dimly, here;
Light is not half so long, nor half so clear:
But oh! when every day was yours or mine,
How early up! what haste he made to shine!
LEON.: Such golden days a prince must hope to see,
Whose every subject is more blessed than he.
PALM.: Do you remember when their tasks were done,
How all the youth did to our cottage run?
While winter-winds were whistling loud without,
Our cheerful hearth was circled round about:
With strokes in ashes, maids their lovers drew;
And still you fell to me, and I to you.
LEON.: When love did of my heart possession take,
I was so young my soul was scarce awake:
I cannot tell when first I thought you fair;
But sucked in love, insensibly as air.
PALM.: I know too well when first my love began,
When at our wake you for the chaplet ran:
Then I was made the Lady of the May,
And, with the garland, at its goal did stay:
Still as you ran, I kept you full in view;
I hoped, and wished, and ran, methought, for you.
As you came near, I hastily did rise,
And stretched my arm outright, that held the prize.
The custom was to kiss whom I should crown;
You kneeled, and in my lap your head laid down:
I blushed, and blushed, and did the kiss delay;
At last my subjects forced me to obey:
But, when I gave the crown, and then the kiss,
I scarce had breath to say, Take that--and this.
The whole of this beautiful scene was delightful on the stage, and by
Palmyra (Miss Rita Thom), in particular, the verse was exquisitely
spoken. One had that experience, rare indeed in the modern theatre, of
subconsciously feeling that the whole audience was hanging on the words.
Again, what could be finer in its way than the scene--greatly
helped by the stage-production at the Lyric Theatre, and by Mr.
Norman Wilkinson's setting giving it an appropriate atmosphere of
masquerade--where Doralice and Melantha are in boys' habits? Here
Melantha's French affectation is used with the greatest skill to bring
about a scene which is the very essence of romantic swagger. There are
few scenes, if any, in Congreve or Sheridan that equal in wit this
repartee between the pretended boys, Doralice and Melantha, egged on
by Palamede and Rhodophil, leading up to Melantha's final extravagance:
I'll sacrifice my life for French poetry,
and the audience rocked with laughter at Miss Athene Seyler (Melantha)
and Miss Cathleen Nesbitt (Doralice), who were superb in their
representation of the parts.
Whenever these old comedies are revived there is always bound to
spring up from somewhere a demand that they should be bowdlerized.
Really the misplaced squeamishness of some men and women is something
to marvel at! I have seen nearly every revue, musical comedy, and
play that has been produced in London during the last two years, and
I declare unhesitatingly that there is something radically wrong
with the mentality of the people who can go habitually to the London
theatres and music-halls and yet find that there is anything "filthy"
about Dryden. Certainly there is no innuendo in Dryden, he is frankly
outspoken. But filthy! Shade of Charles Lamb! What is to be done with
such people? Not once during the whole performance of _Marriage à la
Mode_ was there an occasion when the most sensitive of young girls
could have felt even momentarily uncomfortable. Such was far from being
the case with a play that had quite a long run at a London theatre not
long ago, to which, as far as I know, no one objected!
But I do not want to resist any attempt to make the Phœnix Society
bowdlerize Dryden on that ground. Dryden--even more than Congreve--is
inoffensive. There are dramatists with dirty minds; we often have had
their works performed in London--adapted from the French or in their
native English--but even these no one, I hope, would suppress. Dryden
emphatically is not one of this class. A cleaner, more wholesome writer
never put pen to paper, and the morbid squeamishness that objects
to Dryden is the squeamishness of ill-health. It is a case for the
doctor, for it is expressive of a pathological malady. On the subject
as a whole it would seem an apt occasion to quote some sentences of
Lamb's celebrated defence of Congreve, Farquhar, and Wycherley, as
there appear to be people who have not heard of it. Lamb explains that
these comedies have disappeared from the stage of his day--and he
lived at the beginning of the age of Mrs. Grundy--because "the times
cannot bear them." It is not alone, he adds, the occasional licence
of the dialogue, it is that they will not stand the moral test that
is so ridiculously applied to them. The age screws everything up to
that. "Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of
an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications
of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent
or a guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests
left." Pursuing this idea, he adds: "We carry our fireside concerns
to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors,
to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our
experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate.
We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful
privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades." Here Lamb with
the extraordinary penetration characteristic of that rare mind hit
upon one of the principal causes of the bankruptcy of the theatre
during the hundred years that were to follow him. We are, even at this
moment, struggling to get free from that literal-mindedness which is
the soul of materialism and which would fetter us down to what it
calls realism and will have no extravagance of thought or language,
and for whom an escape into the free speech of the theatre--an escape
most necessary and most salutary--is, if you please, filth! "All that
neutral ground of character," laments Lamb, "that happy breathing-place
from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning--the sanctuary and
quiet Alsatia of hunted Casuistry--is broken up and disenfranchised, as
injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are
taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong.
We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the
scenic representation of disorder and fear a painted pustule. In our
anxiety that our morality should not take cold we wrap it up in a great
blanket just out of precaution against the breeze and the sunshine. I
confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I
am glad of a reason to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict
conscience--not to live always in the precincts of the law courts--but
now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no
meddling restrictions--to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot
follow me." And concludes Lamb, with fine common sense, "I come back
to my cage and my restraint, the fresher and more healthy for it. I
wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an
imaginary freedom."
It is not often given to any one man to have said the last word on
a subject, but I think that on this question Charles Lamb has said
the last word. Modern science lends its support to his judgment. The
psycho-analyst is beginning to realise that the damage inflicted by
socially necessary inhibitions can only be cured by art. It is to be
hoped that we will hear less and less of this canting nonsense of
"filth" applied to such noble and beautiful work as Dryden's. It is
also to be hoped that the Phœnix Society may have a long life, for in
the two productions it has so far given us it has more justified its
existence than has any society I know of founded in the last dozen
years.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
The National Gallery
The National Gallery nowadays is a constant source of novelty. The
familiar pictures which have been hidden so long are reappearing in
brighter and more deliberate surroundings, and we are compelled to see
them anew instead of merely battening on our past impressions. Not all
the rooms are equally successful in their mural decoration, but nearly
everywhere an improvement has been effected on the old gloomy colours.
The function of decorations in a gallery is unostentatiously to show
the works of art in the best contemporary light. For it is one of the
paradoxes of classical art that, although its beauty is immortal,
each generation sees this beauty from its own point of view. In fact,
the immortality consists precisely in the possibility of continual
recreation, and the environment is an outward assistance to such a
process. Mr. C. J. Holmes is only obeying the spirit of the period
in introducing the clear colours of full daylight. It is to be hoped
that the British Museum authorities will follow suit and make their
sculpture rooms slightly more exhilarating.
Among the most interesting recent additions are the purchases made
at the sale of the Degas Collection in 1918. Many of them have been
exhibited already for some time, but a few have only appeared lately,
and several are still in the background. The later appearances include
the large and rather prosaic study of soldiers, by Manet, and a
finely-drawn but photographically-painted portrait by Ingres. In the
neighbourhood of the Manet is an interesting comparison between two
Corots, one painted in Italy early in his career, the other in his
later, more typical period. The early landscape reveals an aspect of
Corot that is little known in England. The conception has a clearness
and thoroughness that is often lacking in his twilight fantasies, which
are inclined to be stereotyped. From the Studd Bequest we have two
interesting but oversweet figure and landscape sketches by Puvis de
Chavannes.
Our collection of French paintings is growing, but we want many
more--if not permanently, then on loan; why not?
The most notable English additions during 1919 are the three Whistlers
from the Studd Bequest. The _Lady with the Fan_ is inclined to be
sentimental; the _River Nocturne_ has considerable charm, but it is
on too large a scale for so slender a theme. The _Nocturne_ with the
fireworks is the most nearly perfect.
When the rearrangement of the Gallery is complete many pictures may
have to be kept downstairs. There are several at present on view in
the English rooms which one hopes will be reserved for the curious and
the importunate. There is also a large and unfortunate compilation
by Holman Hunt hung in one of the approaches which might be better
elsewhere.
The new El Greco is a very important acquisition, although it was
probably not a quarter the price of the family group by Romney. It
contains the quintessence of El Greco's nervously hard and dramatically
intense vision (no, Mr. Roger Fry,[29] not melodramatic!), and it is
not subject to exotic Venetian influences, as is his other composition
on the same wall. It has been carefully cleaned, and the result is
a triumph. Apparently under the old blackened varnish the colours
were preserved with all their original purity and poignancy. The
picture looks as though it were painted yesterday. In another sense
too it is very modern. I say this reluctantly because I am opposed
to an arbitrary division into ancient and modern, which implies an
unwarranted depreciation of the "ancient." Obviously the "modern" is
a mere passing phase, a torch which is hurried through the darkened
rooms of the past, lighting up now this room, now that. It is in fact a
question of temporary interest and relevancy, not of objective merit,
although the latter may only be fully understood through the medium of
the former.
[29] Mr. Fry is compelled to admit a dramatic content. But,
he says, it is "melodramatic" (implying it should not
be there). This is a subtle evasion. For what if it
were not melodramatic?
Recent Sculpture by Jacob Epstein: Leicester Galleries
Mr. Epstein is a great portrait sculptor. He has a wonderful power of
"living into" his models. He produces not only a likeness, but also
that kind of likeness which we can enjoy without knowing the original,
and in a certain sense even more than the original when known. For
he sees what we should scarcely be able to see without his vigorous
assistance. Standing before one of his portrait heads we have the
consciousness of some magnetising influence, evoking all kinds of
subterranean thoughts and emotions; we are drawn out of ourselves into
our external objective vortex.
It is objective and yet essentially the creation of Mr. Epstein's
"realistic" vision. Realistic is a difficult and dangerous word, but we
know what is meant by it, although often when we try to explicate that
knowledge still further we arrive at something which the word does not,
or should not, or need not, mean. It should not mean, for instance,
photographic, or immoral, or ugly. It may contain a consciousness of
all these elements without being them, for to be conscious of them
surely means to supersede and dominate them. "Realistic," of course,
might be extended so as to cover everything, but in the present
instance of ordinary usage it is limited to one particular aspect of
things, which, curiously enough, is rather a negative than a positive
one. It is the positive consciousness of negatives such as difficulty,
failure, struggle, pain: it is the intense and overpowering desire to
know them fully, to drain the imaginative experience of them to the
dregs, because once they have taken a hold on our awareness, only by
that means can we triumph over them.
Not only does Mr. Epstein endeavour to bring home to himself and to us
in his character studies a sense of individualised conflict (though
he is never gloomy), he often approves of sternness and ruggedness as
good in themselves; he enjoys the titanic groping of life. And it is
perfectly true that without some sort of a fight existence would be
hopelessly inert and hyper-æsthetic; but we do want sometimes the calm
and untroubled pleasure of attainment. Indeed only the complete process
conjoining the two opposites is completely good, yet we inevitably
stress now the one, now the other facet, placing in the centre of our
consciousness either the fact of struggle and failure or the fact of
success: for art is itself part of the process. And Mr. Epstein's art
stresses the "realistic" side, not only in the sense that he is in
desire revolting from it, but also that he appreciates it, enjoying
the process as much as the arrival at the goal. For instance, he has
made several studies of his own baby, over whom he has kept his head
severely. Indeed he seems to have been too ferociously interested in
the animalism and precocious ugliness of a small baby to have been at
all tempted to idealise; at the same time he is impressed with the
baby's vigour and vitality.
Sometimes it seems to me he loses sight of the whole in the elaboration
of expressive detail. In the bust of Lord Fisher in the War Museum
Exhibition he has obviously attempted to produce the leathery, wrinkled
texture of an old man's skin, because he saw it as a significant
feature. But in the effort to get this difficult effect he has lost
sight of the significance and produced a mere verisimilitude of
wrinkledness. Similarly in his _Christ_, the feature which arrests
us most is the clay-like gruesomeness of the loosened wrappings. We
shudder at the faint suggestion of decomposition and we are wounded
by the slit in the opened palm of the hand. But practically the whole
force of the composition has spent itself in these subsidiary details.
Paintings by Duncan Grant: Wm. B. Paterson and Carfax & Co. Ltd., 5 Old
Bond Street
This is a very important exhibition, and confirms the report which
has been current for some time that Mr. Duncan Grant is an artist of
unusual originality. I am deliberately emphatic, not only because I
am very enthusiastic about some of these pictures, but also because
I feel sure that many people will have been "put off" from the first
by a few of them, in which Mr. Duncan Grant, under the influence of
the modern abstractionist and pattern-making theories, has taken
undue liberties with the human body. Even in these pictures there is
much that is very fine, but it is quite independent of the stupid
distortions which only have a marring or comic effect. But consider,
for instance, the Still Life No. 23, _Bowl, Skull, and Jar_. Whatever
other criticism may be levelled against it, it is immune from the
charge of arbitrariness. Personally, I have nothing but praise for it,
as being a magnificent piece of lyrical painting. There are several
other pictures--landscapes, still lives, interiors--possessing the same
exquisite qualities, notably Nos. 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 21. The last named,
styled _Juggler and Tight Rope Walker_, which is in many ways the most
brilliant of the whole collection, does evince here and there a certain
exaggeration. This, however, can be overlooked because it does not
rivet our attention.
On the other hand, in No. 29, _Venus and Adonis_, the placing of the
lady's neck on her left-hand shoulder, with the consequent elongation
of the right-hand shoulder, stirs up in our minds a whole swarm of
general reflections, so that our æsthetic enjoyment of other real
values in the picture is practically swamped. It is true that in
caricatures we allow without cavil all sorts of liberties. But only
because the result is expressive, and actually where we appreciate
the caricature we do not notice any distortion, we see the work as
convincingly _true_.
The Black Country. Drawings by Edward Wadsworth: The Leicester
Galleries. (January.)
Mr. Wadsworth has almost found himself in his Black Country pictures,
or better he has found a real object which coincides with his
particular "vorticist" predilection. Continually is he obsessed with a
certain forked-lightning pattern which zigzags over the world. Where
it does not he often puts it there and, partially removing the world,
leaves a pattern. However, in the slag heaps and belching chimneys
and curved canals and splintered roofs of the Black Country, at any
rate sometimes, this pattern comes back to earth, and the result is a
striking picture. Vorticism and Futurism, in so far as they are art
tendencies, represent the scientist and business man of the nineteenth
century emerging painfully into emotional expression. Mr. Wadsworth
and the "Futurists" have not been the first to discover science and
industry artistically, but hitherto stress has been laid on the general
impressiveness, the mystery and atmospheric volume of the subject. Mr.
Wadsworth's particular contribution concerns the sheer joy in brutal
mechanical movement and in the deadly bulk and solidity of industrial
products and by-products. His best drawings are of ladle slag heaps,
consisting of metallic-looking boulders hurled out into a desolation
that yet teems with the energy that made and discarded them.
* * * * *
We have to congratulate Mr. D. Y. Cameron and Mr. George Henry on their
election as Associates of the Royal Academy.
HOWARD HANNAY
MUSIC
THE RESURRECTION OF AN OPERA
It was Dr. Vaughan Williams who, sometime about 1912 or 1913, suggested
Purcell's opera _The Fairy Queen_ for performance at Cambridge. In
1911 Mr. Clive Carey and a few others had organised at Cambridge a
performance of _The Magic Flute_. Mozart's last and greatest work for
the stage was in those days not so familiar to English audiences as it
is now. It had not been seen in this country, as far as I am aware,
since it was given by the students of the Royal College of Music about
twenty years ago. That it should be attempted by Cambridge amateurs
was regarded as preposterous--even Covent Garden had shied at it. But
the promoters of the Cambridge opera were less nervous. If they had
confidence, it was a confidence in Mozart and in the opera rather than
in themselves. They knew the opera intimately enough to have convinced
themselves that the chief difficulty of _The Magic Flute_ lay not in
the extreme compass of the two parts of Sarastro and the Queen of
Night, but first in the necessity for a clear and logical exposition of
the story, secondly in the complication of the ensemble numbers, and
thirdly perhaps in the psychology of what is really the most difficult
part of all, the Orator (Der Sprecher). If singers could be found
who were prepared to sing the parts of Gabriel and Raphael in _The
Creation_, they could make at least a decent show of Sarastro and the
Queen. Ensemble singing was merely a matter of musicianship and hard
work; the personality of the Orator was of necessity a question largely
of luck in finding the right man and coaching him intelligently. The
producers of the Cambridge performance were guided by two principles,
to aim at clearness and unity of style rather than at magnificence, and
to pin their faith to a great dramatic composer rather than to a star
cast.
The reception given to _The Magic Flute_ encouraged them to consider
the possibility of performing another opera in 1914. Several operas
had been passed in review when Dr. Vaughan Williams made his brilliant
suggestion, a suggestion which was very quickly adopted. The opera was
prepared for performance and put into rehearsal in the summer of 1914,
with a view to bringing it out in December of that year. The musical
portions of the first three acts were well in hand and most of the
dresses designed at the moment when war was declared. As soon as the
war was definitely over, and Cambridge had begun to resume something of
its normal aspect, the opera was resumed, although a bare half-dozen of
the original cast remained, and _The Fairy Queen_ was finally presented
for the first time to a modern audience on February 10th of this year.
Purcell and Shakespeare
It may be of interest to those who witnessed the performance to learn
something of the peculiar problems which confronted the producers and
of the principles on which they tried to solve them. The only material
available at that time was the Purcell Society's full score and a
copy of the original libretto of 1692. The British Museum possessed
also the second edition of the libretto (1693). The first thing to
do was to prepare and print an acting version and a vocal score. It
must not be supposed that _The Fairy Queen_ is an opera in the modern
sense, like _Dido and Æneas_. It is an abridged and altered version
of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, into each act of which is introduced
a sort of _ballet-divertissement_ with songs and choruses. These
musical episodes have practically nothing to do with the play. In Act
I. Titania enters with her fairies and orders music to entertain the
Indian Boy. This is interrupted by the appearance of a drunken poet,
who is blindfolded and pinched by the fairies. In Act II., instead of
"Ye Spotted Snakes," there is a long allegorical scene introducing
Night, Secrecy, Mystery, and Sleep. In Act III. a _divertissement_ of
a broadly comic character is commanded by Titania for the amusement of
Bottom. In Act IV. Oberon summons up a pageant of Phœbus and the Four
Seasons in honour of his reconciliation with Titania, and lastly the
fairies provide in Act V. the most magnificent and extravagant show of
all to celebrate the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta. It will be seen
that there is a certain amount of dramatic reason and also of artistic
unity and contrast about these musical episodes. The first, for the
Indian Boy, is fantastic and childlike; the second, for Titania,
voluptuous and mysterious; the third, for Bottom, half-comic and
half-erotic; the fourth, for Oberon, is a sort of Sun-God's festival;
the last, for Theseus and Hippolyta, an epithalamium.
The first difficulty to be faced was that of the Shakespeare dialogue,
which is all spoken, not sung. Should the librettist's textual
alterations be kept, or the original restored? Had the textual
alterations been violent enough to stamp the whole play as belonging
definitely and unmistakably to the age of Dryden we should have had
no hesitation in sticking to them. We were quite clear from the start
that we meant to produce Purcell's opera and not Shakespeare's play.
But the alterations to the text of Shakespeare were just enough to
be irritating to an audience whom we assumed to be familiar with
Shakespeare, and troublesome to actors who were probably in the same
case. The chances were that the actors would forget the alterations
here and there and return unconsciously to the original, and that
the audience would merely suppose that they had not learnt their
parts properly. Besides, the opera was so long that drastic cuts
were imperative. Here again we at once decided that as far as was
practicable it should be Shakespeare and not Purcell that was to be
cut. We therefore started by restoring the original text of Shakespeare
in all the scenes which had not been cut altogether by the librettist,
and then proceeded to prune the Shakespeare down until we had reached
either our time-limit or the limit of intelligibility. The latter was
reached first, and on that we proceeded to cut down Purcell. An obvious
course was to adopt the version of 1692, rejecting the scene of the
Drunken Poet, and the two songs, _Ye Gentle Spirits_ and _The Plaint_,
which were added in 1693. But the scene of the Drunken Poet was too
good to throw away. The two songs we abandoned with some reluctance
on account of their singular beauty; but they could easily be spared
from the point of view of the stage. Indeed _The Plaint_ would have
been impossible to accept; it is dragged in for no reason by special
request of Oberon, and is not only extremely long, but profoundly
melancholy and totally inappropriate to the cheerful atmosphere of the
Epithalamium.
One of the librettist's alterations was to transfer the whole of
_Pyramus and Thisbe_ to the rehearsal scene in the wood. The players
act it "in our habits as we shall play it before the Duke," and the
interruptions of Theseus and the rest are assigned to Puck. Here again
we restored the original, if only to save time. The idea then occurred
to us to save the play by having it acted in dumb show during the
_Entry Dance_ of Act V. This solved the problem of what to do with
this particular dance-tune; it gave us additional time to prepare
the Chinese scene behind the tableau-curtain, it saved the time
occupied by the play, and spared us the very tedious mirth of all the
knockabout business which in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ has now become
traditional. Further, it brought the clowns in again at the appropriate
moment, and, what was more important, it associated Shakespeare more
closely with Purcell's music. The little pantomime was worked out at
rehearsal entirely by the actors themselves. They first walked through
the directions of the _Pyramus and Thisbe_ play; then the music was
played and the action tried with it. No further alteration was needed
at subsequent rehearsals, for it so happened that every one of the
actors was musical, and they stepped and moved to Purcell's notes by
natural instinct.
There remained still a few bits of music to be disposed of. In the
seventeenth century people had to sit in the theatre for a long time
before the play began, and to pass the time a concert was provided,
consisting of a _First Musick_, or _Second Musick_, and lastly the
_Overture_. Under modern conditions it would have been more in
accordance with the spirit of Purcell to send our orchestra out into
the street to play the First and Second Musick to the queue that was
waiting to enter the pit and gallery, but since we could not imagine
that police regulations would permit this, we utilised the four little
pieces at different points as incidental music to the play. In so doing
we knew that we were untrue to the strict traditions of Purcell's day;
but we did not wish to cut these pieces out altogether, and we further
thought that they would help to Purcellize the Shakespeare. We were
somewhat surprised to find that several of the audience seemed to
expect _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ in its entirety, once the play had
started. Our assumption, which apparently was wrong, was that everybody
knew Shakespeare's play practically by heart, and that we need do no
more than just indicate its outlines, leaving the rest to be filled up
by the imagination under the inspiration of Purcell's music.
Purcell and His Orchestra
The opera is scored for the usual Purcell band. In the big instrumental
numbers two trumpets, kettle-drums, and two hautboys are added to the
string. A few numbers have two flutes, but flutes and hautboys never
occur simultaneously, which leads me to think that in Purcell's days
the flutes and hautboys were generally played by the same players. The
solos are accompanied sometimes by violins and bass in three parts,
more often by the harpsichord and bass alone, the other instruments
playing no more than the _ritornelli_. On the question of orchestration
we never had a moment's hesitation. We were determined from the very
first that we would not add a single note to Purcell's score. This
meant, of course, that a very serious responsibility would be thrown on
the harpsichord. We had experimented once with a harpsichord in a Bach
Concerto at a concert, with the very embarrassing discovery that the
harpsichord player could hardly hear a note that he played, while the
unfortunate conductor could hear nothing else but the harpsichord. To
the audience, as a matter of fact, the result was quite satisfactory.
The harpsichord in the theatre was a more perilous problem, especially
as we were not able to have any rehearsal of any kind in the theatre
until the day before the first performance. Would the harpsichord be
audible in the audience? Would it be audible on the stage? Would it
stay in tune under the very variable conditions of temperature? Would
one harpsichord be enough, or ought we to have two, as Hasse had at
the Dresden Opera House? Would the harpsichord be monotonous as well
as inadequate? Ought we to have in addition a pianoforte or possibly
a harp? We decided to do the very best we could with one harpsichord
and chance it. In view of the probability that the harpsichord might
become amazingly monotonous, the harpsichord part was considered with
the greatest possible care and no pains spared to make it as varied,
as effective, and as expressive as possible. Once in the theatre, the
instrument was tried in various positions until the right place for
it was found. It was clearly audible both on the stage and in all
parts of the house without ever becoming too insistent. Here I must
say how deeply we were indebted to the sensitive musicianship of the
player, an undergraduate in his first year, who, although he had never
placed his fingers on a harpsichord until about a fortnight before the
performance, was gifted with exactly that fine sense of scholarship in
music which is the first essential of the complete _maestro al cembalo_.
EDWARD J. DENT
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_Editor_--J. C. SQUIRE _Assistant-Editor_--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 6 April 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
Last month we referred here to the fact that a deputation was to wait
on Mr. Fisher to press the claim of the drama to State encouragement.
The deputation, which included critics, actors, and representatives
of all the most important societies concerned, was received on March
13th. Whatever may or may not come of it, its mere reception in
Whitehall is an event which marks an important step in the evolution
of the official attitude towards the drama, which, until recently, was
conceived as a thing with which the State had no relations save that
of blue-penciller. For this we may chiefly thank the new and vigorous
British Drama League and its secretary, Mr. Geoffrey Whitworth. Several
resolutions were laid before the Minister. With some of the proposals
commended to him he had, as Minister of Education, nothing to do; but
his reply to the deputation was very sympathetic in tone and showed
full cognisance of the part that dramatic representation might play in
national life.
* * * * *
We do not propose to dwell at length upon all the suggestions which,
tentatively or confidently, were made by the deputation or the
Conference which instructed it. One of them we frankly dislike, and
that is the proposal that the Universities should recognise the new
status of the drama by establishing faculties of the drama. Those who
propose this cannot mean merely that our dramatic inheritance should be
studied as literature; for the encouragement of such study falls within
the scope of the English schools, which are becoming more important
and more intelligently conducted every year. They cannot mean, either,
we suppose, that dramatic representation should be encouraged; that
is not the job of a faculty unless a Doctorate or Baccalaureate of
Histrionics be contemplated. They can only intend that a theoretical
and practical training in the dramatist's art should be given, that a
scientific study of the principles--technics or some such thing would
be the word--of dramatic writing, based on the analysis of admitted
masterpieces and (perhaps) admitted failures, should be followed, or
accompanied, by the writing, under surveillance, of new dramatic works.
It is conceivable. We met recently a lady who had won the Doctorate of
Philosophy in an American University. She had nothing about her of the
grey sobriety of the metaphysician or the ethicist; and, questioned,
she stated that she had taken her degree in the School of Short-Story
Writing. Well, we know those American academic treatises on short-story
writing: champion instruments for taking the bloom off any work of
art and killing the artistic impulses of any student simple enough to
surrender himself to them. And though we do not know, and we don't
think posterity will know, the plays written by those graduates of
American Universities who have gone out into the world as dramatic
writers of approved competence, we have seen some of the manuals on
which they also have pastured: manuals admirable only as subjects
for burlesque. In the teaching of literature criticism of the drama,
examination (if you like) of the elements of dramatic construction,
has its place with other forms of criticism; the history of the drama
with other sorts of history. There is no harm done, and a certain
stimulus may be given to the talented, if students are encouraged to
write "original" works, and if a certain amount of academic credit
is given for such works. But a school of dramatic production, or
of novel-writing, or of poetical composition ... may we be saved
from that! The way in which teachers may develop dramatic, as other
literary, talent is by encouraging the intelligent reading of good
literature, and by demonstrating the grand truth that its roots lie in
life fearlessly observed and passionately felt.
* * * * *
The more amateur dramatic performance--of works which have some
imaginative quality in them--the better. If the Board of Education,
which has already (we think) done a good deal to encourage both music
and mimetics in the schools, can still further humanise the curriculum,
all the richer will be the community, all the more amusing will be the
lives of the children, and, in the end, all the richer will be our
art. The Universities may probably be left to take care of themselves.
Very likely a word of encouragement from a Minister of Education, a
Prime Minister, or an Archbishop of Canterbury might in some places
remove obscurantist opposition or secure facilities which have not been
forthcoming. But young men are not children. They can arrange things
for themselves, with the assistance of sympathetic and not necessarily
official elders. And that the junior members of the Universities,
since the war, have been taking with a new zest to dramatic production
is a matter of common observation. If we go no farther than Oxford
and Cambridge we have seen during the present term--eight weeks old
as we write--the successful production of Mr. Hardy's _Dynasts_ by
the O.U.D.S., and at Cambridge the Marlowe Society's production of
_The White Devil_ and the revival of Purcell's _Faerie Queene_,
organised by Dr. Rootham, Mr. Clive Carey, and Mr. Dent. This last was
an imposing operation: a large acting cast, a ballet, an orchestra,
dresses and scenery were supplied by junior members of the University
and local ladies. Next term the A.D.C. are performing a modern
comedy, and _Comus_ is amongst the other things mooted for May Week.
Organisation from above is nothing as good as this, especially if it
takes the form of organisation of an academic course.
* * * * *
But the place of the drama in education is too large and difficult a
subject to be dealt with in detail here: what we do wish to say a few
words about is what, after all, was the main object of the deputation's
visit to Whitehall, though it had little to do with the Minister of
Education, as such--we mean the National Theatre. It was to this that
the speakers for the deputation, particularly Dr. Courtney and Sir
Sidney Lee, chiefly addressed themselves. Here also we have a subject
which invites extended treatment if we begin to contemplate the
possible relations between public authorities generally and the drama.
It is reported that in South London a Town Council desires to give help
out of the rates to the new operatic venture at the Surrey Theatre;
and before long we shall probably hear suggestions that where local
authorities wish to maintain theatrical enterprises they should obtain
grants-in-aid from the Government. That is a large and a complicated,
not to say a controversial, matter. But the National Theatre question
can be strictly localised. All we need ask is: Ought there, or ought
there not, to be a permanently endowed institution in London where the
best English plays should be produced regardless of commercial risks,
and ought, or ought not, the State to lend its moral and financial
support to such an institution? And since there exists already a
National Theatre Fund, which has acquired a site for a playhouse, we
are faced ultimately with the question whether the Government should
take a direct financial and administrative interest in that scheme.
* * * * *
The National Theatre scheme grew out of the preparations for
commemorating the Tercentenary of Shakespeare's death--which fell in
1916, during the war. In 1904 a committee was organised, and in 1905
it was resolved, at a Mansion House meeting, to collect funds for an
architectural memorial and, if possible, for a small theatre in which
Elizabethan and other plays could be performed. In 1908 another Mansion
House meeting was held, at which it was proposed to erect a statue in
Portland Place (so convenient because it is very wide and nobody ever
goes there) at a cost of not less than £100,000. Such an expenditure on
such an object horrified a great many people. For some time--notably
after the publication of an admirable book by Messrs. Granville Barker
and William Archer--interest had been growing in the proposal for a
National Theatre. The £100,000 statue scheme naturally led to the
suggestion that a theatre would be a better memorial than a statue,
and that two birds could be killed with one stone if the National
Theatre were to be the Shakespeare Memorial. The notion was accepted;
the two movements were amalgamated; and a fund for a Shakespeare
Memorial Theatre was opened by a committee of which Lord Plymouth was
chairman and Sir Israel Gollancz secretary. The public appeal was not
so successful as it might have been. By 1910 the sum of £90,000 had
been collected, of which £70,000 came from a single donor, Sir Carl
Meyer. The committee spent £61,000 on a site in Gower Street, from
which a certain revenue has since been received. Then came the war. The
collection of money stopped, and it has not (so far as we are aware)
been made clear to the public what the committee has been doing since
the Armistice, what it proposes to do in the near future, and when it
intends to make a bid for the rest of the four or five or (it may now
be) six or seven hundred thousand that is required for the erection and
endowment of a theatre.
* * * * *
Now it is evident that sooner or later the project must be resumed and
a further appeal made to the public. It is possible that this appeal
will be more successful than the last. After all, we hear of twenty new
millionaires in Bradford alone, and any one of these could contribute
a large portion of the whole sum required, thereby earning fame and,
very likely, a public honour better deserved than some. It is obvious
on the face of it that if the Government is known to look on the scheme
with a benevolent eye its chances of success will be brighter. Is
it impossible that, should the whole sum not be raised from private
persons, the Government should guarantee a subsidy? This would, of
course, involve some measure of Government control, and the presence
of Government representatives on the permanent body of Trustees,
who would sit there precisely as do the two Government directors
recently appointed to the Board of a Cellulose Company. We say this
without prejudice to the general question of the relations between the
community and the theatre. The idea has been mooted that municipalities
should subsidise theatres and that the Government should assist them
with grants-in-aid. It is attractive, and a Whitehall Committee
might well be appointed to explore it. But the National Theatre is a
distinct and peculiar proposal. What we desire is that there should
be in the capital one house with a position resembling that of the
Comédie Française, or the Old Imperial Opera House in Petrograd, a
house devoted to the production of good plays, provided with a stock
company, and guaranteed against all the fluctuations of fortune. In
brief, the revival of the English classic plays should be systematised.
It should not be left to chance whether an Englishman should live and
die without having an opportunity of seeing a competent, or indeed
any, performance of _Troilus and Cressida_, of Marlowe's _Faustus_, of
_The Duchess of Malfi_, of _The Critic_, of _The Knight of the Burning
Pestle_, of _The Way of the World_, of _The Broken Heart_: to mention
but a few of the interesting plays that ordinary managers can scarcely
ever be expected to put on. For the ordinary manager must almost always
build on hopes of a long run. These plays probably would not hold
the stage for long runs; and if one of them did have a long run, it
would only mean that during that run no other play would be visible at
the theatre where it was being produced. Some of Shakespeare's plays
have scarcely any prospect of being produced in our time in a London
theatre, save only at the "Old Vic.," which has so finely struggled for
existence, and so gloriously (though how far does its permanence rest
on the continuance of a single life?) succeeded. Theatres are limited
in number. They have become the subjects of violent speculation. Even
if a private man with the most ambitious of plans obtained a theatre
we should have no guarantee that he would not pass his theatre on next
day to somebody who was willing to give him a handsome profit for his
lease and hoped to recoup himself by a year's run of revue or American
melodrama. We conceive that if publishing houses were like theatres,
and could issue only one work at a time, Messrs. Methuen (we hope
they will allow us to use their name as an illustration) might well
be excused if, as between Shakespeare (of whom they publish admirable
editions) and _Tarzan of the Apes_ they chose, at this moment, the
latter. There is a public for both kinds, but the smaller at any given
moment (though over a long period the larger) is very badly catered
for in the theatrical world, where everybody is bidding for the great
rewards that the larger public can bestow, and is, at present, under
the necessity of paying a "shortage" rent, which will not go down
unless some prodigiously rich and adventurous syndicate starts building
new theatres wholesale.
* * * * *
How far a National Theatre, especially a State-assisted National
Theatre, can be expected, or will consider it its duty, to produce new
plays of merit is doubtful. If that is one of its functions it will
not be its chief function; were it so its work would be the centre of
perpetual tempests of controversy, and its controllers would learn what
lobbying means. It will have quite enough to do if it concentrates
on the systematic revival, on repertory lines, of the best classic
plays, with occasional production of foreign plays and of old plays of
historical interest. That, surely, is a thing which should be done, a
work which should be continually maintained and developed, a work which
should as certainly be maintained at the public expense (if necessary)
as should, say, the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ or the _Dictionary
of National Biography_, should there ever come a time when no
publisher felt able to spare the capital required to keep those great
compilations going. After all, what is there to differentiate the cases
of these enterprises from that of the British Museum, which nobody,
whatever his opinion about public undertakings generally, suggests
should be, or ever could be, stablished and maintained on its present
scale by private enterprise?
* * * * *
The binding-case for Vol. I. of THE LONDON MERCURY will be ready
early in April. The case is of black cloth, with a white label in a
sunk panel. It is designed to hold the six numbers plus an eight-page
index (which will also be ready early in the month) and minus the six
wrappers and the advertisement pages. Binding-cases will be supplied
from this office at 3_s._ 6_d._ post free. If readers prefer that we
should bind their numbers for them, they may send them here and pay an
inclusive 6_s._, which will cover the cost of the case, the work of
binding, and the return postage. The volume will be rather a fat one,
but we felt that readers would think that twice a year was quite often
enough to have this labour imposed on them.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
Arthur Henry Bullen died suddenly on February 29th, 1920, in his
sixty-third year, at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had lived since 1906.
He used to say that in his boyhood, as the son of Dr. George Bullen,
Keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum, he ran about the
Library and browsed at pleasure, cultivating in his teens a taste (no
doubt inherited) not only for the best in literature, but for the best
in books too. He went to the City of London School and to Worcester
College, Oxford, as a scholar; but, to judge from his mature habits,
he must have been almost completely self-educated. A pleasant glimpse
of him at Oxford may be seen in Professor Poulton's _Viriamu Jones_.
He was already a man of very wide reading; within a few years of
going down from Oxford he began to make himself known as an editor of
Elizabethan drama and anthologies. _Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books_
and its sequels no doubt are the most popular of his books; he
rediscovered Thomas Campion, and poured out reprints of _Old English
Plays_ (two series), and the works of John Day, Marlowe, Marston,
Middleton, and Peele. To edit a book, however, did not suffice him. For
the last decade of the nineteenth century the firm of Lawrence & Bullen
published a large number of remarkable works, ancient and modern,
including not only familiar successes like Miss Harraden's _Ships that
Pass in the Night_ and Mr. W. W. Jacobs' _Many Cargoes_, half-a-dozen
of the novels of George Gissing (a close friend of Bullen's), and early
works of Mr. H. G. Wells, Moira O'Neill, and the authors of the _Irish
R.M_., but also sumptuous and beautiful books, such as Botticelli's
_Illustrations to Dante_, William Strang's _Death and the Ploughman's
Wife_, and illustrated translations of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Straparola,
Masuccio, and Ser Giovanni. Bullen's special taste was shown in the
"Muses' Library," which began with Herrick, and included Keats (with an
incomparable introduction by Robert Bridges) and William Blake (edited
by W. B. Yeats).
* * * * *
Early in the present century he left the firm to continue publishing
under his own name. To this period belong the Irish Plays and _Ideas of
Good and Evil_ of Mr. Yeats, whose _Celtic Twilight_ and _Secret Rose_
Bullen took over, with other books, from Lawrence & Bullen Ltd.; and
such characteristic contributions to Elizabethan research as Dr. W. W.
Greg's edition of _Henslowe's Diary_ and Mr. R. B. McKerrow's _Works of
Thomas Nashe_. In 1903 he dreamed one night that some one offered him
a Shakespeare "printed at Stratford-on-Avon"; and within a year he had
started the Shakespeare Head Press in order to realise the dream, which
resulted in the "Stratford Town" Shakespeare in ten finely-printed
volumes. Settling in Stratford, he devoted himself to printing and
publishing, chiefly scholarly works of Shakespearean lore; but he
also printed the handsome Collected Edition of the works of W. B.
Yeats. About 1906, in addition to his other labours, he made a gallant
effort as editor of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ to revive its ancient
glories, and managed to collect a wide variety of excellent articles.
The best memorial to Bullen would be the realisation of a scheme long
planned and fostered by him to make the Shakespeare Head Press at
Stratford-on-Avon a properly subsidised centre of British Shakespearean
scholarship.
* * * * *
In person he bore, especially in later years, a striking resemblance
to Mark Twain; indeed, at the time of Mark's last visit to London,
Bullen humorously complained of the awkwardness of being publicly
recognised as someone else. He loved tramping and rambling--not exactly
walking--whether in country or town; and as a young man had acquired a
knowledge of the high-roads and antiquities of England and Wales that
was outdone only by his extensive and peculiar knowledge of various
brewages obtainable along the road. Here is a characteristic piece of
Bullen's writing--an Editorial Note in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ in
1906:
Sylvanus Urban, then but a boy, had started from Chepstow on a
solitary walking tour, and was soon caught in a rattling thunderstorm
on the Wyndcliff. Tintern Abbey and Raglan Castle are fresh in
his memory to-day. A mile or two out of Monmouth he came upon
some excellent nutty-hearted ale that George Borrow would have
immortalised. As he pursued his way to Raglan Castle he pondered
on the ale--"this way and that dividing the swift mind"--until at
length, in despair of meeting an equal brew, he turned back again
and had another tankard. Heavens, what days were those! In his pack
he carried the _Essays of Elia_ and read them in an old inn at
Llandovery, where the gracious hostess lighted in his honour tall
wax candles fit to stand before an altar. After leaving Llandovery,
he lost his way among the Caermarthenshire hills, and was in very
poor plight with hunger and fatigue when he reached the white-washed
walls of Tregaron. At Harlech he rested for a couple of days, and
then covered the way to Beddgelert--twenty miles, if he remembers
rightly--at a spanking pace; proceeding in the late afternoon to
climb Snowdon, and arriving at Llanberis an hour or so before
midnight. Back to London, every inch of the way, walked the young
Sylvanus. He indulges the hope that he may yet shoulder his pack
again.
He read and re-read unendingly; he loved to talk of men and books with
a boon companion, pacing to and fro, ruffling his grey mane and smoking
continuously. On such occasions he would stagger his friends with an
unexpected display of familiarity with recondite literature, or charm
them with impromptu quotations, often at great length, declaimed with
a loving appreciation of sound and rhythm. Everything that was old and
ripe with goodness he loved, whether literature or furniture; in poetry
above all his instinct for the best was infallible. In English, from
1550 to his own day, he seemed to have read and judged everything;
but the atmosphere of antiquity that he breathed shut him off from
appreciating many contemporary writers. He would keep Epictetus by
his bedside, and chant Mrs. Browning's _Pan_ while he dressed; he
championed Coventry Patmore and could not admire Meredith. His very
craftsmanship was antique; he could not ride a bicycle, infinitely
preferring to walk; a typewriter was offensive to one who wrote
innumerable letters all in his own hand; he did not even shave himself,
finding, no doubt, a daily pleasure in visiting the barber. He was
equally sound in his judgments on mezzotints or mutton, and preferred
old English fare, with beer, to "Frenchified fuss." A chivalrous and
generous scholar and gentleman; those who knew him will call to mind
the phrase in which Bullen would refer to a dead friend--"now with God."
* * * * *
Mr. G. D. Smith, the prince of book-dealers, died suddenly in America
early in the month. He had but recently been in England, and a few
days before his death was cabling to England offers for an important
library, which he had tracked down just before leaving. It was he who
purchased the famous _Venus and Adonis_ for £15,100 in the winter; he
bought largely for the Huntingdon Library, and when he, or one of his
millionaire clients, really wanted a book in the English salerooms the
prices might break records, but there was no doubt about the book's
destination. Mr. Smith was not, to put it mildly, a reading man, but
he had a wonderful nose for a good thing, and he was an agreeable man
to deal with--a good business man, but not one who attempted to trade
unduly upon people's ignorance.
POETRY
_"Skindle's" in Poperinghe_
(_The Salient_, 1917)
Shut the door, Jameson, shut the blasted door--
The whole road's blocked as far as Elverdinghe.
Four Bridge would hold you up an hour or more
So don't go crashing up to-night, old thing--
What weather! Hall-marked Flanders wind and rain!
Come on inside. My groom will take your mare
Round to the smithy on the Market Square.
Let's have a dekko at the carte again.
It's a posh lunch to-day, Suzanne's a vision,
And the room's lousy with the old Division.
Just now MacMartin stopped me on the street
With news from Amiens. (And Marguerite
Sends you her love. Oh, it's a bonzer war
In cushy billets at the Poisson D'Or!)
Mac is the same old swinger--he "mistook"
His indicated route, and lost his bunch,
Jumped on a tender down from Hazebrouck
And blew in here with Willy Braid for lunch.
They're in the bar with Tupper, back from Blighty,
Capping his yarns of Baths and Aphrodite.
Yes--I go back at dawn. We're on the ridge
Over the Steenbeek by the corduroy bridge,
Past the big pill-box with the double cleft
To the main route stumps on the sky-line--then half-left.
It's about an hour from the lorry-stand, unless
You take the duckboards near the R.E. shaft.
Quicker that way, of course, but badly strafed.
You'll see a stranded tank there--that's the Mess.
What is it like now? Smelly, Jim, and muddy--
Under restraint, I call it fairly bloody.
Nothing like Nieuport. Why, it seems an age--
And yet the year is barely four months older,
Since we got rounds up on the narrow-gauge
And visited Belgian outposts in the polder.
That was the life, old Jimmy! Now it's a black
And gory business, slogging away by pack--
Most of it salvage--while the five-nines crump
Our half-drowned hairies staggering from the dump.
(Well, here's luck, Jim! Gone dry? Why, I'd forgotten--
Another brand, Suzanne! This sweet stuff's rotten.)
There's a new mob to-night about the town--
The whole back area's stiff with guns and troops,
And Proven road's chock-full with "heavy groups"
From six-inch up. They've put the tape-lines down
And moved the forward dumps to Poelcapelle.
Battle-headquarters' somewhere near the Bower,
All day and night we're brassing off like hell--
It's going to be a "Brock's" at zero hour!
The Hun's not loafing though--he's getting windy,
Listen! Even from here you can hear the shindy.
Two nights ago we caught it hell-for-leather.
The new relief had just gone on ahead,
Leaving the altered signal "green-over-red."
There was a little mist, and some soft weather--
All quiet at nine o'clock. Hardly a sound.
I took my gum-boots for a last look round.
Nothing was doing beside the usual cracks
Of long-range shrapnel on the duckboard tracks,
And a crooning eight-inch, humping along a load
Meant for the siding on the Pilkem road.
Clusters of Very lights along the line
Flickered and plunged. They helped my eyes to mark
Our barrage-lines across the battery-arc.
The pools were hoared with silver in the shine.
Peaceful it was. I strolled and smoked and stared--
There came a quickened rumble in the East,
Down the battalion front the lights increased.
Machine guns raved and stuttered. A rocket flared--
Scarlet and golden-rain spouted and spread,
Flares and skysigns and stars, and
_Green-over-red!_
_Watch for it, Sentry! There again. Yes!
Battery-Action! S.O.S.!
Shadowy man after man leaps to a gun.
Flash from the centre--five then flash as one.
All round are flashes, lighting the livid
Faces of straining gun-crews.
Vicious and vivid
Fire spirals and cataracts--knives, spikes
Of fire stabbing the dark. Batters and strikes
On the ears the unutterable, profound
Debauchery of sound--
The roar and clutter and whinny--sustained, obscene
As if the dead beasts of the Pleistocene,
Spawned of the essence
Of ravaged earth's womb and her churned putrescence
Were howling over the mud their lusts unclean._
Then--well, when every hollow's a belching mass
Of wrangling guns, guns bellowing to guns--
You cannot tell a burst of ours from the Huns'--
Suddenly through the cordite I smelt the gas.
Down went the warning through the roar and screech--
The spitting splinters ploughed us like a squall,
Half-blinded gunners wrestled with the breech,
Gas-helmeted, smoke-drenched--you know it all--
Then the five-nines began. A salvo came,
And Number Four went up in a gust of flame.
I thought the whole of the line was smashed and finished--
And then, through the reek of the fog and the dropping mire,
From the right flank, steady and undiminished,
Came the assuring crashes of section-fire,
Timed and checked and re-laid. We groped and plunged
To pull the stricken out. Still droned the steady
Voice of the sergeants at the "set and ready."
_Number One, fire!_ The muzzle flamed and lunged.
_Number Two, fire!_
By God, those chaps are stunners!
Search France, you'll find no better than my gunners.
But some good men went West--some of the best.
Horses or men, the best must always go--
Jim, it's a mad-blind, lunatic, filthy show--
Destiny's pitch-and-toss made manifest.
I'm sick to death of it.
And yet--and yet
There's a hold somehow in this crazed eclipse
Of the normal orient--a hold that grips--
Nothing in life, I suppose, lacks credit and debt--
The battered brain may hanker for surcease,
But under the brain--its curious--there is _peace_.
Hold on a bit. Last leave I met a fellow
Who cornered me at the club and hiccupped crude
Optimist zeal and tub-worn platitude--
You know the sort. Slug-bellied, slushy, mellow.
He winked, and wagged his tubby hands, and spouted--
"Break through next time, old boy!" He knew, _he_ knew--
The final trap was laid--the Hun was outed--
He'd had it straight from Jones at G.H.Q.--
And--"Then we'll see you sportsmen back at Dover
Covered with glory--_sorry it's all over_."
So I let fly. I fed the blaze with faggots--
Hinted that on the whole we _liked_ the Hun--
Roughed out a sketch of charnel-heaps and maggots--
The side of war that isn't sport nor fun;
Flung a few phrases chosen from the camps
At itch-struck females dashing about in cars
To pose in sketchy frills at snide bazaars--
At fat old profiteers and statesmen's ramps--
Oh, yes! I piled it on. He loathed the pill,
And barged his way out, rosy round the gill.
But was the swine half-right? It _sounds_ like bliss
To sleep serene o' nights without surmise
Of S.O.S. lights screaming to the skies,
Deep in the warmth of Blighty out of this--
It sounds like bliss to forget the dug-out's reeking,
The bitter fog in the eyes, the life on a thread,
The crazed crescendo of the mortars seeking
Half-callous living and the unheeding dead,
And drowse in everlasting furloughs, under
The placid roofs of peace-time.
Well, I wonder!
If we get through it--if the Immortals choose
To grant a span again, when this be ended,
Of ordered life, impenetrably fended
By small restraints and sanctions and taboos--
Shall the recovered cares and leisures grip
The flabbier soul, or shall desire return
Back to the dug-out's care-free comradeship
And battle-time's magnificent unconcern
For dim to-morrows? Shall we find, once more,
Peace has its surfeits too as well as War?
Not the drab shadows only we'll remember,
But all the colour there was--the browns and blues
Down the deep shaft of Flemish avenues;
The swaying harvests gold-drenched with September;
And frosty mornings in the Spring retreat
When the scrap opened out, and it was good
To choose a gun-park in the greening wheat
And pitch a hidden tent in Holnon Wood--
Jimmy, old son, it made the pulses dance
To see those Devon daffodils in France!
We shall recall the eager clank and jingle
Of gun-teams on the pavé, moving South,
The long off-saddle in the midday drouth,
"Feed" in the cowslips by the wayside dingle;
The journey's welcome end amid the cool
Clutter of sun-warmed barns and straggling pines;
The urgent fuss around the wagon-lines;
Sweat-roughened horses drinking at the pool--
And then the morning start, with head-chains ringing
Swinging along at ease, the drivers' singing....
And moments better still. I thank the gods
For one white, perfect hour at Conteville,
With Bosches massing on the nearer hill,
And open sights as near as makes no odds.
Young Grant was with us then. The boy was daft,
Blind to the snipers, yelling like the damned:
_Oh, good! Oh, bloody good!_ at every waft
Of three-rounds-gunfire. Then left section jammed,
And back the buzzers' private signal rolled:
_Sweat on it, chum! We've got the bastards cold!_
Such memories blaze their imprint under the traces
Of darker records on the palimpsest.
The blacker the time the deeper bites the zest
Of sudden sunshine on the open spaces.
There's a rough justice fingering the scale
Where greater guerdons risk the longer price--
Hazard your neck, and savour your cakes and ale--
Seek Eden-fruit, and stake your Paradise.
For though smooth road's good going, Jim--a kiss
Snatched at the edge of Hell is tenfold bliss.
One thing is sure. This crazy round-about
Destroys the introspective attitude.
Action uproots the dreamy Hamlet-mood,
And blithely cuts the yellow throat of Doubt.
Your job is clear before you, catalogued
From dawn to dawn. You cannot miss the greens,
Slice as you will--the fairway lies undogged
By furtive may-be-sos and might-have-beens--
Flank unto flank no hesitation ghosts
The crude commands of Corps Direction-Posts.
Leave it at that, then. On your toes, old son!
Still with a grin for plagues we can't abolish--
The super-fatted Staff; the wily Hun;
The Army's tribal god of Spit-and-Polish.
Blight seize 'em all!
I'll wander now and borrow
A couple of blankets from the R.T.O.,
You can doss down with me an hour or so.
We'll trek together to the guns to-morrow.
Finish your swipes, old Jimmy, while you can--
Walk--March! The blooming ride! Bonne chance,
Suzanne!
L. M. HASTINGS
_Nobis cum Pereant_
_Nobis cum pereant amorum
Et dulcedines et decor,
Tu nostrorum præteritorum,
Anima mundi, sis memor._
On the mind's lonely hill-top lying
I saw man's life go by like a breath,
And Love that longs to be love undying,
Bowed with fear of the void of death.
"If Time be master," I heard her weeping,
"How shall I save the loves I bore?
They are gone, they are gone beyond my keeping--
_Anima mundi, sis memor!_
"Soul of the World, thou seest them failing--
Childhood's loveliness, child's delight--
Lost as stars in the daylight paling,
Trodden to earth as flowers in fight.
Surely in these thou hast thy pleasure--
Yea! they are thine and born therefor:
Shall they not be with thy hid treasure?--
_Anima mundi, sis memor!_
"Only a moment we can fold them
Here in the home whose life they are:
Only a moment more behold them
As in a picture, small and far.
Oh, in the years when even this seeming
Lightens the eyes of Love no more,
Dream them still in thy timeless dreaming
_Anima mundi, sis memor!"_
HENRY NEWBOLT
_Beechwood._
Hear me, O beeches! You
That have with ageless anguish slowly risen
From earth's still secret prison
Into the ampler prison of aery blue.
Your voice I hear, flowing the valleys through
After the wind that tramples from the west.
After the wind your boughs in new unrest
Shake, and your voice--one voice uniting voices
A thousand or a thousand thousand--flows
Like the wind's moody; glad when he rejoices
In swift-succeeding and diminishing blows,
And drooping when declines death's ardour in his breast;
Then over him exhausted weaving the soft fan-like noises
Of gentlest creaking stems and soothing leaves
Until he rest,
And silent too your easied bosom heaves.
That high and noble wind is rootless nor
From stable earth sucks nurture, but roams on
Childless as fatherless, wild, unconfined,
So that men say, "As homeless as the wind!"
Rising and falling and rising evermore
With years like ticks, æons as centuries gone;
Only within impalpable ether bound
And blindly with the green globe spinning round.
He, noble wind,
Most ancient creature of imprisoned Time,
From high to low may fall, and low to high may climb,
Andean peak to deep-caved southern sea,
With lifted hand and voice of gathered sound,
And echoes in his tossing quiver bound
And loosed from height into immensity,
Yet of his freedom tires, remaining free.
--Moulding and remoulding imponderable cloud,
Uplifting skyey archipelagian isles
Sunnier than ocean's, blue seas and white isles
Aflush with blossom where late sunlight glowed--
Still of his freedom tiring yet still free,
Homelessly roaming between sky, earth and sea.
But you, O beeches, even as men, have root
Deep in apparent and substantial things--
Earth, sun, air, water, and the chemic fruit
Wise Time of these has made. What laughing Springs
Your branches sprinkle young leaf-shadows o'er
That wanting the leaf-shadows were no Springs
Of seasonable sweet and freshness! nor
If Summer of your murmur gathered not
Increase of music as your leaves grow dense,
Might even kine and birds and general noise of wings
Of summer make full Summer, but the hot
Slow moons would pass and leave unsatisfied the sense.
Nor Autumn's waste were dear if your gold snow
Of leaves whirled not upon the gold below;
Nor Winter's snow were loveliness complete
Wanting the white drifts round your breasts and feet.
To hills how many has your tossed green given
Likeness of an inverted cloudy heaven;
How many English hills enlarge their pride
Of shape and solitude
By beechwoods darkening the steepest side!
I know a Mount--let there my longing brood
Again, as oft my eyes--a Mount I know
Where beeches stand arrested in the throe
Of that last onslaught when the gods swept low
Against the gods inhabiting the wood.
Gods into trees did pass and disappear,
Gigantic beeches opened and received,
Then closing, body and huge members heaved
With energy and agony and fear.
See how the thighs were strained, how tortured here.
See, limb from limb sprung, pain too sore to bear.
Eyes once looked from those sockets that no eyes
Have worn since--oh, with what desperate surprise!
These arms, uplifted still, were raised in vain
Against alien triumph and the inward pain.
Unlock your arms, and be no more distressed,
Let the wind glide over you easily again.
It is a dream you fight, a memory
Of battle lost. And how should dreaming be
Still a renewed agony?
But O, when that wind comes up out of the west
New-winged with Autumn from the distant sea
And springs upon you, how should not dreaming be
A remembered and renewing agony?
Then are your breasts, O unleaved beeches, again
Torn, and your thighs and arms with the old strain
Stretched past endurance; and your groans I hear
Low bent beneath the hoofs by that fierce charioteer
Driven clashing over; till even dreaming is
Less of a present agony than this.
Fall gentler sleep upon you now, while soft
Airs circle swallow-like from hedge to croft
Below your lowest naked-rooted troop.
Let evening slowly droop
Into the middle of your boughs and stoop
Quiet breathing down to your scarce-quivering side
And rest there satisfied.
Yet sleep herself may wake
And through your heavy unlit dome, O Mount of beeches, shake.
Then shall your massy columns yield
Again the company all day concealed....
Is it their shapes that sweep
Serene within the ambit of the Moon
Sentinel'd by shades slow-marching with moss-footed hours that
creep
From dusk of night to dusk of day--slow-marching, yet too soon
Approaching morn? Are these their grave
Remembering ghosts?
... Already your full-foliaged branches wave,
And the thin failing hosts
Into your secrecies are swift withdrawn
Before the certain footsteps of the dawn.
But you, O beeches, even as men have root
Deep in apparent and substantial things.
Birds on your branches leap and shake their wings,
Long ere night falls the soft owl loosens her slow hoot
From the unfathomed fountains of your gloom.
Late western sunbeams on your broad trunks bloom,
Levelled from the low opposing hill, and fold
Your inmost conclave with a burning gold.
... Than those night-ghosts awhile more solid, men
Pass within your sharp shade that makes an arctic night
Of common light,
And pause, swift measuring tree by tree; and then
Paint their vivid mark,
Ciphering fatality on each unwrinkled bark
Across the sunken stain
That every season's gathered streaming rain
Has deepened to a darker grain.
You of this fatal sign unconscious lift
Your branches still, each tree her lofty tent;
Still light and twilight drift
Between, and lie in wan pools silver sprent.
But comes a day, a step, a voice, and now
The repeated stroke, the noosed and tethered bough,
The sundered trunk upon the enormous wain
Bound kinglike with chain over chain,
New wounded and exposed with each old stain.
And here small pools of doubtful light are lakes
Shadowless and no more that rude bough-music wakes.
So on men too the indifferent woodman, Time,
Servant of unseen Master, nearing sets
His unread symbol--or who reads forgets;
And suns and seasons fall and climb,
Leaves fall, snows fall, Spring flutters after Spring,
A generation a generation begets.
But comes a day--though dearly the tough roots cling
To common earth, branches with branches sing--
And that obscure sign's read, or swift misread,
By the indifferent woodman or his slave
Disease, night-wandered from a fever-dripping cave.
No chain's then needed for no fearful king,
But light earth-fall on foot and hand and head.
Now, thick as stars leaves shake within the dome
Of faintly-glinting dusking monochrome;
And stars thick hung as leaves shake unseen in the round
Of darkening blue: the heavenly branches wave without a sound,
Only betrayed by fine vibration of thin air.
Gleam now the nearer stars and ghosts of farther stars that bare,
Trembling and gradual, brightness everywhere....
When leaves fall wildly and your beechen dome is thinned,
Showered glittering down under the sudden wind;
And when you, crowded stars, are shaken from your tree,
In time's late season stripped, and each bough nakedly
Rocks in those gleamless shallows of infinity;
When star-fall follows leaf-fall, will long Winter pass away
And new stars as new leaves dance through their hasty May?
But as a leaf falls so falls weightless thought
Eddying, and with a myriad dead leaves lies
Bewildered, or in a little air awhile is caught
Idly, then drops and dies.
Look at the stars, the stars? But in this wood
All I can understand is understood.
Gentler than stars your beeches speak; I hear
Syllables more simple and intimately clear
To earth-taught sense, than the heaven-singing word
Of that intemperate wisdom which the sky
Shakes down upon each unregarding century,
There lying like snow unstirred,
Unmelting, on the loftiest peak
Above our human and green valley ways.
Lowlier and friendlier your beechen branches speak
To men of mortal days
With hearts too fond, too weak
For solitude or converse with that starry race.
Their shaken lights,
Their lonely splendours and uncomprehended
Dream-distance and long circlings 'mid the heights
And deeps remotely neighboured and attended
By spheres that spill their fire through these estranging
nights:--
Ah, were they less dismaying, or less splendid!
But as one deaf and mute sees the lips shape
And quiver as men talk, or marks the throat
Of rising song that he can never hear,
Though in the singer's eyes her joy may dimly peer,
And song and word his hopeless sense escape--
Sweet common word and lifted heavenly note--
So, beneath that bright rain,
While stars rise, soar, and stoop,
Dazzled and dismayed I look and droop
And, blinded, look again.
"Return, return!" O beeches sing you then.
I like a tree wave all my thoughts with you,
As your boughs wave to other tossed boughs when
First in the windy east the dawn looks through
Night's soon-dissolving bars.
Return, return? But I have never strayed:
Hush, thoughts, that for a moment played
In that enchanted forest of the stars
Where the mind grows numb.
Return, return?
Back, thoughts, from heights that freeze and deeps that burn,
Where sight fails and song's dumb.
And as, after long absence, a child stands
In each familiar room
And with fond hands
Touches the table, casement, bed,
Anon, each sleeping, half-forgotten toy;
So I to your sharp light and friendly gloom
Returning, with first pale leaves round me shed,
Recover the old joy
Since here the long-acquainted hill-path lies,
Steeps I have clambered up, and spaces where
The Mount opens her bosom to the air
And all around gigantic beeches rise.
JOHN FREEMAN
_Shobeensho_
(_From the Irish Gaelic_)
_For my Granddaughter Jenny_
O not as the wife of a churl would wrap you,
In coarse country woollens so roughly to hap you;
Between two sheets of the silk I'll lay you,
A cradle of gold in the wind to sway you.
I'd rock you to rest, my bright new-comer,
One dreamy day in the height of summer,
Under the eaves of whispering leaves,
Drowsed by the drone of the wee bee-drummer.
May a dream of delight steal into your slumber;
Till evening makes way for the Starry Number,
And with God's bright angels around to mind you,
No finger of death I pray may find you!
ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES
_Storm and Stars_
Naked night; black elms, pallid and streaming sky?
Alone with the passion of the wind,
In a hollow of stormy sound lost and alone am I,
On beaten earth a lost, unmated mind,
Marvelling at the stars, few, strange and bright,
That all this dark assault of surging air,
Wrenching the rooted wood, hunting the cloud of night,
As if it would tear all and nothing spare,
Leaves supreme in the height.
Against what laws, what laws, what powers invisible,
Sought not, yet always found,
Cries this dumb passion, strains this wrestle of wild will,
With tiger-leaps that seem to shake the ground?
Is it the baffled, homeless, rebel wind's crying,
Or storm from a profounder passion wrung?
Ah, heart of man, is it you, the old powers defying,
By far desires, by terrible beauty stung,
Broken on laws unseen, in a starry world dying,
Ignorant, tameless, young?
LAURENCE BINYON
THE FORESHORE OF LONDON
By H. M. TOMLINSON
It begins on the north side of the City, at Poverty Corner. It begins
imperceptibly, and very likely is no more than what a native knows is
there. It does not look like a foreshore. It looks like another of the
byways of the capital. There is nothing to distinguish it from the rest
of Fenchurch Street. You will not find it in the directory, for its
name is only a familiar bearing used by seamen among themselves. If
a wayfarer came upon it from the west, he might stop to light a pipe
(as well there as anywhere) and pass on, guessing nothing of what it
is and of its memories. And why should he? London is built of such old
shadows; and while we are here casting our own there is not much time
to turn and question what they fall upon. Yet if some unreasonable
doubt, a suspicion that he was being watched, made a stranger hesitate
at that corner, he might begin to feel that London there was as
different from Bayswater and Clapham as though deep water intervened.
In a sense deep water does; and not only the sea, but legends of ships
that have gone, and of the men who knew them, and traditions of a
service older than anything Whitehall knows, though still as lively as
enterprise itself, and as recent as the ships which moved on to-day's
high water.
In a frame outside one of its shops hangs a photograph of a sailing
ship. The portrait is so large and the beauty of the subject so evident
that it might have been the cause of the stranger stopping there to
fill his pipe. Yet how could he know that to those groups of men
loitering about the name of that ship is as familiar as Suez or Rio,
even though they have never seen her? They know her as well as they
know their business. They know her house-flag--it is indistinguishable
in the picture--and her master, and it is possible the oldest of them
remembers the Clippers of that fleet of which she alone now carries the
emblem; for this is not only another year, but another era. But they do
not look at her portrait. They spit into the road, or stare across it,
and rarely move from where they stand, except to pace up and down as
though keeping a watch. At one time, perhaps thirty years ago, it was
usual to see gold rings in their ears. It is said that if you wanted
a bunch of men to run a little river steamer, with a freeboard of six
inches, out to Delagoa Bay, you could engage them all at this corner,
or at the taverns just up the turning. The suggestion of such a voyage,
in such a ship, would turn us to look on these men in wonder, for it is
the way of all but the wise to expect appearance to betray admirable
qualities. These fellows, though, are not significant, except that you
might think of some of them that their ease and indifference were
assumed, and that, when trying not to look so, they were very conscious
of the haste and importance of this great city into which that corner
jutted far enough for them. They have just landed or they are about to
sail again, and they might be standing on the shore eyeing the town
beyond, in which the fate of ships is known by those they never see,
but who are inimical to them, and whose ways are inscrutable.
If there are any inland shops which can hold one longer than the place
where that ship's portrait hangs, then I do not know them. That comes
from no more, of course, than the usual fault of an early impression.
That fault gives a mould to the mind, and our latest thoughts, which
we try to make reasonable, betray that accidental shape. It may be
said that I looked into this window while still soft. The consequence,
everybody knows, would be incurable in a boy who saw sextants for the
first time, compasses, patent logs, sounding-machines, signalling-gear,
and the other secrets of navigators. Not only those things, either.
There was a section given to books, with classics like Stevens on
_Stowage_, and Norie's _Navigation_, volumes never seen west of
Gracechurch Street. The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and
were sorted by chance. _Knots and Splices_, _Typee_, _Know Your Own
Ship_, the _South Pacific Directory_, and _Castaway on the Auckland
Islands_. There were many of them, and they were in that fortuitous and
attractive order. The back of every volume had to be read, though the
light was bad. On one wall between the windows a specimen chart was
framed. Maps are good; but how much better are charts, especially when
you cannot read them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering!
About the coast line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to
sea in lines which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart
is blank, being beyond soundings. At the Capes are red dots, with arcs
on the seaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real
lights at night. Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and
mates' receipts in their pockets, being on errands to ship-owners, look
outward, and only seem to look inward. Where are the confines of London?
Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or there used to be, an archway
into a courtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with
half-models of sailing ships. I remember the name of one, the
_Winifred_. Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on
each. There was a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand,
desks made secret with high screens, and a silence that might have
been the reproof to intruders of a repute remembered in silence and
dignity behind the screens by those who kept waiting so unimportant
a visitor as a boy. On the counter was a stand displaying sailing
cards, announcing, among other events in London river, "the fine ship
_Blackadder_ for immediate dispatch, having most of her cargo engaged,
to Brisbane." And in those days, just round the corner in Billiter
Street, one of the East India Company's warehouses still remained, a
sombre relic among the new limestone and red granite offices, a massive
archway in its centre leading, it could be believed, to an enclosure
of night left by the eighteenth century and forgotten. I never saw
anybody go into it, nor come out. How could they? It was of another
time and place. The familiar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly
as well, the Cathedral which certainly existed, for it could often be
seen in the distance, and the Abbey that was little more than something
we had heard named, they were but the scenery close to the 'buses. Yet
London was more wonderful than anything they could make it appear.
About Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street waggons could be seen
going east, bearing bales and cases, and the packages were portmarked
for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo, and Santos--names like those. They had
to be seen to be believed. One could stand there, forced to think that
the sun never did more than make the floor of asphalted streets glow
like polished brass, and that the evening light was full of glittering
motes and smelt of dust, and that life worked itself out with ink in
cupboards made of glass and mahogany; and suddenly you learned, while
smelling the dust, that Acapulco was more than a portent in a book and
held only by an act of faith. Yet that astonishing revelation, enough
to make any youthful messenger forget where he himself was bound,
through turning to follow with his eyes so casual an acceptance by a
carrier's cart of the verity of a fable, is nowhere mentioned, I have
found since, in any guide to our capital, though you may learn how
Cornhill got its name.
For though Londoners understand the Guildhall pigeons have as much
right to the place as the Aldermen, they look upon the seabirds by
London Bridge as vagrant strangers. They do not know where their city
ends on the east side. Their river descends from Oxford in more than
one sense, and ceases to lose their respect in the neighbourhood of
Westminster. It has little history worth mentioning below that. To
the poets the river fails them, it becomes flat and songless where at
Richmond the sea's remote influence just moves it; and there they leave
it. The Thames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, a featureless
monotony where men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and
goes out through fogs to nowhere in particular. But there is a hilltop
at Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our river, the
burden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York and Sydney, can
be seen for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the
ships upon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of
the City. And surely some surmise of what our river is comes to a few
of that multitude which crosses London Bridge every day? They favour
the east side of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a
pause to stare overside to the Pool. Why do they? Ships are there, it
is true, but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up
which their cargo is hauled piecemeal to vanish instantly into mid-air
caverns; London absorbs all they have as morsels. Anyhow, it is the
business of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below,
with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of
steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing,
though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a
winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory
of a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the
wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by
the frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some moods,
they are merely remembered. Only the men busy on the deck of the ship
below are real. Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out
noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you
feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow and that all you people
there are being drawn down resistlessly into that lower world of
shades. You release yourself from this spell with an effort and look at
the faces of those who are beside you at the parapet. What are their
thoughts? Do they know? Have they also seen the ghosts? Have they felt
stirring a secret and forgotten desire, old memories, and tales that
were told? They move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in
the suburbs. A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the
Tower Bridge gates to be opened for her. She is going. We watch the
eastern mists which take her from us. For we never are so passive and
well disciplined to the routine of the things which compel us, but
rebellion comes at times--misgiving that there is a world beyond the
one we know, regret that we never ventured and made no discovery, and
that our time has been saved and not spent. The bascules descend again.
There, where that ship vanished, is the highway which brought those
unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere. It is
our oldest road, and now has many by-paths. Near Poverty Corner is a
building which recently was dismissed with a brief humorous reference
in a new guide to our City--a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a
brick-front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond
its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is
the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would
guess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wilderness of
tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and
scored as though by a withering heat. Nothing grows there; nothing
could live there. Smoke still pours from it, as though it were
volcanic, from numberless vents. The region is without sap. Above its
plains project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapours dissolving
great areas. When the train descends slightly, then holes appear in
that cliff which runs parallel with your track. The desert is actually
burrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation. Something does
live there. That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunnelled and
inhabited; the unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke moving
over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen. It is the
beginning of Dockland. That the life is in upright beings, each with
independent volition and a soul; that it is not an amorphous movement,
flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the idea of height,
of rising, is difficult to believe. It has not been believed. If
life, you protest, is really there, has any sense which is better than
that of extending worm-like through the underground, then why, at
intervals, is there not an upheaval, a geyser-like burst, a plain hint
from a power usually pent, but liable to go skywards? But that is for
the desert to answer. As by mocking chance the desert itself almost
instantly shows what possibilities are hidden within it. The train
roars unexpectedly over a viaduct, and below is a deep hollow filled
with light, with a floor of water, and a surprise of ships. How did
that white schooner get into such an enclosure? Is freedom nearer here
than we thought?
The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of
gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which the long spokes
of cabbage-fields radiate from the train and revolve, and what is the
grotesque suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps
in a nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The
journey ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on
the far side by the rigging and smoke-stacks of great liners. There is
no doubt about it now. At the corner of one shed, sheltering from the
weather, is a group of brown men in coloured rags, first seen in the
gloom because of the whites of their eyes. What we remember of such a
day is that it was half of night, and the wind played castanets with
the sheet iron, hummed in the cordage, and swayed wildly the loose gear
aloft. Towering hulls were ranged down each side of a lagoon that ended
in vacancy. The rigging and funnels of the fleet were unrelated; those
ships were phantom and monstrous. They seemed on too great a scale
to be within human control. We felt diminished and a little fearful,
as among the looming urgencies of a dream. The forms were gigantic
but vague, and they were seen in a smother of the elements; and their
sounds, sonorous, melancholy, and prolonged, were like the warning of
something alien, yet without form, which we knew was adverse, but could
not recall when awake again. We remember, that day, a few watchers
insecure on an exposed dockhead that projected into a sullen dreariness
of river and mud which could have been the finish of the land. At the
end of a creaking hawser was a steamer canting as she backed to head
down stream--she was obviously exposed now to a great adventure--the
tide, rapid and noisy on her plates, the reek from her funnel sinking
over the water. And from the dockhead, in the fuddle of a rain-squall,
we were waving a handkerchief, probably to the wrong man, till the
vessel went out where all was one, rain, river, mud, and sky, and the
future.
It is afterwards that so strange an ending to a brief journey from
a city station is seen to have had more in it than the time-table,
hurriedly scanned, gave away. Or it would be remembered as strange, if
the one who had to make that journey so much as thought of it again;
for perhaps to a stranger occupied with more important matters it was
passed as being quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and rather
dismal, the usual boredom of a duty. Its strangeness depends, very
likely, as much on an idle and squandering mind as on the ships, the
river, and the gasometers. Yet suppose you first saw the river from
Blackwall Stairs, in the days when the windows of the Artichoke Tavern,
an ancient weather-boarded house with benches outside, still looked
towards the ships coming in! And how if then, one evening, you had
seen a Blackwall liner haul out for the Antipodes while her crew sang
a chanty! It might put another light on the river; but a light, I will
admit, which others should not be expected to see, and if they looked
for it now might not discover, for it is possible that it has vanished,
like the old tavern. It is easy to persuade ourselves that a matter is
made plain by the light in which we prefer to see it, for it is our
light. One day, I remember, a boy had to take a sheaf of documents to
a vessel loading in the London Dock. She was sailing that tide. It was
a hot July noon. It is unlucky to send a boy, who is marked by all the
omens for a city prisoner, to that dock, for it is one of the best
of its kind. He had not been there before. There was an astonishing
vista, once inside the gates, of sherry butts and port casks. On the
flagstones were pools of wine lees. There was an unforgettable smell.
It was of wine, spices, oakum, wool, and hides. The sun made it worse,
but the boy, I think, preferred it strong. After wandering along many
old quays, and through dark sheds with wide doors that, on such a sunny
day, were stored with cool night and cubes and planks of gold, he found
his ship, the _Mulatto Girl_. She was for the Brazils. Now it is clear
that one even wiser in shipping affairs than a boy would have expected
to see a craft that was haughty and portentous when bound for the
Brazils, a ship that looked equal to making a coast of that kind. There
she was, her flush deck well below the quay wall. A ladder went down to
her, for she was no more than a schooner of a little over 100 tons. If
that did not look like the beginning of one of those voyages that are
reputed to have ended with the Elizabethans, then I am trying to convey
a wrong impression. On the deck of the _Mulatto Girl_ was her master,
in shirt and trousers and a remarkable straw hat more like a canopy,
bending over to discharge some weighty words into the hatch. He rose
and looked up at the boy on the quay, showing then a taut black beard
and formidable eyes. With his hands on his hips, he surveyed for a few
seconds the messenger above without speaking. Then he talked business,
and more than legitimate business. "Do you want to come?" he asked,
and smiled. "Eh?" He stroked his beard. The Brazils and all! A ship
like that! "There's a berth for you. Come along, my son." And observe
what we may lose through that habit of ours of uncritical obedience to
duty; see what may leave us for ever in that fatal pause, caused by
the surprise of the challenge to our narrow experience and knowledge,
the pause in which we miserably allow habit to overcome adventurous
instinct! I never heard again of the _Mulatto Girl_. I could not expect
to. Something, though, was gained that day. It cannot be named. It is
of no value. It is, you may have guessed, that very light which it has
been admitted may since have gone out.
Well, nobody who has ever surprised that light in Dockland will be
persuaded that it is not there still, and will remain. What the
foreshore of London is to some of us, and what those lights are which
we see as reflections coming down the waters from a far adventure, to
others would be what they are. The foreshore to them is the unending
monotony of grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always
reticent and sullen, that might never have seen the stars or heard of
good luck; and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a
high gas bracket on a dank brick wall in solitude, its glass broken,
and the flame within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned
and crippled moth trying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and
the wind. The narrow and forbidden by-way under that glim, a path
intermittent, and depending on the weight of the night which is trying
to blot it out altogether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs. Prince Rupert
once went that way. The ketch _Nonsuch_, Captain Zachary Gillam, was
then lying just off, about to make the voyage which established the
Hudson's Bay Company.
It is a path, like all those stairs and ways that go down to the
river, which began when human footsteps first originated London with
rough tracks. It is a path by which the successors of those primitives
went out of London, when projecting the original enterprise of their
ancestors from Wapping to the Guinea Coast and Manitoba. Why should we
believe it is different to-day? The sea does not change, and seamen
are what they were, if their ships are not those we admired many years
ago in the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to
see those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow
the river, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to
the Deptford Docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to
Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. What could
they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, pawnshops, neglected and obscure
churches, and houses that might know nothing but ill-fortune.
So they are; but those ways hold more than the visible shades. The
warehouses of that meandering chasm which is Wapping High Street are
like weathered and unequal cliffs. It is hard to believe sunlight ever
falls there. It could not get down. It is not easy to believe the river
is near. It seldom shows. You think at times you hear the distant call
of a ship. But what would that be? Something in the mind. It happened
long ago. You, too, are a ghost left by the vanished past. There is a
man above at a high loophole, the topmost cave of a warehouse which
you can see has been exposed to commerce and the elements for ages; he
pulls in a bale pendulous from the cable of a derrick. Below him one
of the horses of a van tosses its nosebag. There is no other movement.
A carman leans against an iron post, and cuts bread and cheese with a
clasp knife. It was curious to hear that steamer call, but we know what
it was. It was from a ship that went down, we have lately heard, in the
war, and her spectre reminds us, from a voyage which is over, of men
who have gone. But the call comes again just where the Stairs, like a
shining wedge of day, holds the black warehouses asunder, and shows the
light of the river and a release to the outer world. And there, moving
swiftly across the brightness, goes a steamer outward bound.
That was what we wanted to know. She confirms it, and her signal,
to whomever it was made, carries farther than she would guess. It
is understood. The past for some of us now is our only populous and
habitable world, invisible to others, but alive with whispers for us.
Yet the sea still moves daily along the old foreshore, and ships still
go and come, and do not, like us, run aground on what now is not there.
OF PROSE
A FRAGMENT[30]
[30] Translated from the Dutch by Alexander Teixeira de
Mattos.
By LODEWIJK VAN DEIJSSEL
I love the prose that comes towards me like a man, with sparkling eyes,
with a loud voice, breathing hard and with great gestures of the hands.
I want to hear the writer laugh and cry in it, to hear him whisper and
shout, to feel him sigh and pant. I want his language to loom up before
me like a tangible and resounding organism; I want him, when I read him
in my room, to reveal to me, from the characters that shimmer before my
eyes, a spirit that enters into me and seems to ascend within me from
out of his pages.
I love the prose that comes rolling up from the infinity of the
artist's soul, like a sea of sound, flowing calmly with its wide
waves, drawing nearer, nearer, ever nearer, smooth and broad, suddenly
illumined by intense gleams of light.
I love the prose that clashes towards me, rushes up to me, thunders
down upon me in a raging torrent of passion.
I love the prose that is motionless and awful as mountain ridges.
I love the prose that plays and rejoices like a waving forest filled
with birds in summer.
I love the prose which I see standing there before me, with its
sentences, like a city of marble.
I love the prose that descends upon me like a golden shower of words.
I love the sentences that march like troops of broad-backed men,
walking abreast, shoulder to shoulder, following one on the other
in ever-widening ranks, up hill, down dale, with the tramp of their
footsteps and the heavy movement of their strides. I love sentences
that sound like voices underground, but come rising, rising, louder and
in greater numbers, and pass and rise and ring and echo in the heavens.
I love words that arrive suddenly, as though from very far, shooting
forth in golden brilliancy from a rift in the blue sky, or toppling
high in the air, like dark rocks discharged from a straining volcano.
I love words that bang down upon me like falling rafters, or words that
hiss past me like bullets.
I love words which I see standing there unexpectedly, like poppies or
blue cornflowers in a field.
I love words that suddenly waft a perfume to me from the course of
the style, like incense from a church-door or scent from a woman's
handkerchief in the street.
I love words that in a moment rise softly, like a child's murmuring
voice, from under the droning style.
I love words that just gurgle, like little stifled sobs.
I love the prose that blazes its joy and its rapture like stars above
me, that lights glowing suns of love, that carries me over the thin
ice of its disdain, through the rough black nights of its hatred,
that clangs down upon me the green, copper voice of its irony and its
laughter.
If you would please me, then stretch over my head a rainbow of language
in which I shall see red anger raging, blue gladness rejoicing and
yellow mockery laughing.
Take me up and carry me where you will: I crave for nothing more than
to be powerless against the power of your Word.
Strike me with your Word, torture me with your Word and then let your
Word fall down upon me like a rain of kisses....
HENRY JAMES
By EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
I
Voluminous as had been the writings of Henry James[31] since 1875,
it was not until he approached the end of his career that he began
to throw any light on the practical events and social adventures
of his own life. He had occasionally shown that he could turn from
the psychology of imaginary characters to the record of real lives
without losing any part of his delicate penetration or his charm of
portraiture. He had, in particular, written the _Life of Hawthorne_
in 1879, between _Daisy Miller_ and _An International Episode_; and
again in 1903, at the height of his latest period, he had produced
a specimen of that period in his elusive and parenthetical but very
beautiful so-called _Life of W. W. Story_. But these biographies threw
no more light upon his own adventures than did his successive volumes
of critical and topographical essays, in which the reader may seek long
before he detects the sparkle of a crumb of personal fact. Henry James,
at the age of seventy, had not begun to reveal himself behind the mask
which spoke in the tones of a world of imaginary characters.
[31] Messrs. Macmillan are about to publish Mr. Lubbock's
edition of James's Letters.
So saying, I do not forget that in the general edition of his
collected, or rather selected, novels and tales, published from
1908 onwards, Henry James prefixed to each volume an introduction
which assumed to be wholly biographical. He yielded, he said, "to
the pleasure of placing on record the circumstances" in which each
successive tale was written. I well recollect the terms in which he
spoke of these prefaces before he began to write them. They were to be
full and confidential, they were to throw to the winds all restraints
of conventional reticence, they were to take us, with eyes unbandaged,
into the inmost sanctum of his soul. They appeared at last, in small
print, and they were extremely extensive, but truth obliges me to
say that I found them highly disappointing. Constitutionally fitted
to take pleasure in the accent of almost everything that Henry James
ever wrote, I have to confess that these prefaces constantly baffle my
eagerness. Not for a moment would I deny that they throw interesting
light on the technical craft of a self-respecting novelist, but they
are dry, remote, and impersonal to a strange degree. It is as though
the author felt a burning desire to confide in the reader, whom he
positively button-holes in the endeavour, but that the experience
itself evades him, fails to find expression, and falls still-born,
while other matters, less personal and less important, press in and
take their place against the author's wish. Henry James proposed, in
each instance, to disclose "the contributive value of the accessory
facts in a given artistic case." This is, indeed, what we require
in the history or the autobiography of an artist, whether painter
or musician or man of letters. But this includes the production of
anecdotes, of salient facts, of direct historical statements, which
Henry James seemed in 1908 to be completely incapacitated from giving,
so that really, in the introductions to some of these novels in the
Collected Edition, it is difficult to know what the beloved novelist
is endeavouring to divulge. He becomes almost chimæra bombinating in a
vacuum.
Had we lost him soon after the appearance of the latest of these
prefaces--that prefixed to _The Golden Bowl_, in which the effort to
reveal something which is not revealed amounts almost to an agony--it
would have been impossible to reconstruct the life of Henry James
by the closest examination of his published writings. Ingenious
commentators would have pieced together conjectures from such tales
as _The Altar of the Dead_ and _The Lesson of the Master_, and have
insisted, more or less plausibly, on their accordance with what the
author _must_ have thought or done, endured or attempted. But, after
all, these would have been "conjectures," not more definitely based
than what bold spirits use when they construct lives of Shakespeare,
or, for that matter, of Homer. Fortunately, in 1913, the desire to
place some particulars of the career of his marvellous brother William
in the setting of his "immediate native and domestic air," led Henry
James to contemplate, with minuteness, the fading memories of his own
childhood. Starting with a biographical study of William James, he
found it impossible to treat the family development at all adequately
without extending the survey to his own growth as well, and thus,
at the age of seventy, Henry became for the first time, and almost
unconsciously, an autobiographer.
He had completed two large volumes of _Memories_, and was deep in a
third, when death took him from us. _A Small Boy and Others_ deals
with such extreme discursiveness as is suitable in a collection of
the fleeting impressions of infancy, from his birth in 1843 to his
all but fatal attack of typhus fever at Boulogne-sur-Mer in (perhaps)
1857. I say "perhaps" because the wanton evasion of any sort of help
in the way of dates is characteristic of the narrative, as it would
be of childish memories. The next instalment was _Notes of a Son and
Brother_, which opens in 1860, a doubtful period of three years being
leaped over lightly, and closes--as I guess from an allusion to George
Eliot's _Spanish Gypsy_--in 1868. The third instalment, dictated in
the autumn of 1914 and laid aside unfinished, is the posthumous _The
Middle Years_, faultlessly edited by the piety of Mr. Percy Lubbock in
1917. Here the tale is taken up in 1869, and is occupied, without much
attempt at chronological order, with memories of two years in London.
As Henry James did not revise, or perhaps even re-read, these pages,
we are free to form our conclusion as to whether he would or would not
have vouchsafed to put their disjected parts into some more anatomical
order.
Probably he would not have done so. The tendency of his genius had
never been, and at the end was less than ever, in the direction of
concinnity. He repudiated arrangement, he wilfully neglected the
precise adjustment of parts. The three autobiographical volumes will
always be documents precious in the eyes of his admirers. They are
full of beauty and nobility, they exhibit with delicacy, and sometimes
even with splendour, the qualities of his character. But it would be
absurd to speak of them as easy to read, or as fulfilling what is
demanded from an ordinary biographer. They have the tone of Veronese,
but nothing of his definition. A broad canvas is spread before us,
containing many figures in social conjuncture. But the plot, the single
"story" which is being told, is drowned in misty radiance. Out of this
_chiaroscuro_ there leap suddenly to our vision a sumptuous head and
throat, a handful of roses, the glitter of a satin sleeve, but it is
only when we shut our eyes and think over what we have looked at that
any coherent plan is revealed to us, or that we detect any species of
composition. It is a case which calls for editorial help, and I hope
that when the three fragments of autobiography are reprinted as a
single composition, no prudery of hesitation to touch the sacred ark
will prevent the editor from prefixing a skeleton chronicle of actual
dates and facts. It will take nothing from the dignity of the luminous
reveries in their original shape.
Such a skeleton will tell us that Henry James was born at 2 Washington
Place, New York, on April 15th, 1843, and that he was the second
child of his parents, the elder by one year being William, who grew
up to be the most eminent philosopher whom America has produced.
Their father, Henry James the elder, was himself a philosopher, whose
ideas, which the younger Henry frankly admitted to be beyond his
grasp, were expounded by William James in 1884, in a preface to their
father's posthumous papers. Henry was only one year old when the family
paid a long visit to Paris, but his earliest recollections were of
Albany, whence the Jameses migrated to New York until 1855. They then
transferred their home to Europe for three years, during which time the
child Henry imbibed what he afterwards called "the European virus." In
1855 he was sent to Geneva for purposes of education, which were soon
abandoned, and the whole family began an aimless wandering through
London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Newport, Geneva, and America again,
nothing but the Civil War sufficing to root this fugitive household in
one abiding home.
Henry James's health forced him to be a spectator of the war, in which
his younger brothers fought. He went to Harvard in 1862 to study
law, but was now beginning to feel a more and more irresistible call
to take up letters as a profession, and the Harvard Law School left
little or no direct impression upon him. He formed a close and valuable
friendship with Mr. Howells, seven years his senior, and the pages
of the _Atlantic Monthly_, of which Mr. Howells was then assistant
editor, were open to him from 1865. He lived for the next four years
in very poor health, and with no great encouragement from himself or
others, always excepting Mr. Howells, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Early in 1869 he ventured to return to Europe, where he spent fifteen
months in elegant but fruitful vagabondage. There was much literary
work done, most of which he carefully suppressed in later life. The
reader will, however, discover, tucked away in the thirteenth volume
of the Collected Edition, a single waif from this rejected epoch, the
tale called _A Passionate Pilgrim_, written on his return to America
in 1870. This visit to Europe absolutely determined his situation; his
arrival in New York stimulated and tortured his nostalgia for the old
world, and in May, 1872, he flew back here once more to the European
enchantment.
Here, practically, the biographical information respecting Henry
James which has hitherto been given to the world ceases, for the
fragment of _The Middle Years_, so far as can be gathered, contains
few recollections which can be dated later than his thirtieth year.
It was said of Marivaux that he cultivated no faculty but that _de ne
vivre que pour voir et pour entendre_. In a similar spirit Henry James
took up his dwelling in fashionable London lodgings in March, 1869.
He had come from America with the settled design of making a profound
study of English manners, and there were two aspects of the subject
which stood out for him above all others. One of these was the rural
beauty of ancient country places, the other was the magnitude--"the
inconceivable immensity," as he put it--of London. He told his sister,
"The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet
of its myriad bipeds and quadrupeds." From his lodgings in Half Moon
Street, quiet enough in themselves, he had the turmoil of the West End
at his elbow, Piccadilly, Park Lane, St. James's Street, all within
the range of a five minutes' stroll. He plunged into the vortex with
incredible gusto, "knocking about in a quiet way and deeply enjoying my
little adventures." This was his first mature experience of London, of
which he remained until the end of his life perhaps the most infatuated
student, the most "passionate pilgrim" that America has ever sent us.
But his health was still poor, and for his constitution's sake he
went in the summer of 1869 to Great Malvern. He went alone, and it is
to be remarked of him that, social as he was, and inclined to a deep
indulgence in the company of his friends, his habit of life was always
in the main a solitary one. He had no constant associates, and he did
not shrink from long periods of isolation, which he spent in reading
and writing, but also in a concentrated contemplation of the passing
scene, whatever it might be. It was alone that he now made a tour of
the principal English cathedral and university towns, expatiating to
himself on the perfection of the weather--"the dozen exquisite days of
the English year, days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where
fine weather is cheap." It was alone that he made acquaintance with
Oxford, of which city he became at once the impassioned lover which he
continued to be to the end, raving from Boston in 1870 of the supreme
gratifications of Oxford as "the most dignified and most educated" of
the cradles of our race. It was alone that during these enchanting
weeks he made himself acquainted with the unimagined loveliness of
English hamlets buried in immemorial leafage and whispered to by
meandering rivulets in the warm recesses of antiquity. These, too,
found in Henry James a worshipper more ardent, it may almost be
averred, than any other who had crossed the Atlantic to their shrine.
Having formed this basis for the main predilection of his English
studies, Henry James passed over to the Continent, and conducted a
similar pilgrimage of entranced obsession through Switzerland and
Italy. His wanderings, "rapturous and solitary," were, as in England,
hampered by no social engagement; "I see no people to speak of," he
wrote, "or for that matter to speak to." He returned to America in
April, 1870, at the close of a year which proved critical in his
career, and which laid its stamp on the whole of his future work. He
had been kindly received in artistic and literary circles in London;
he had conversed with Ruskin, with William Morris, with Aubrey de
Vere, but it is plain that while he observed the peculiarities of
these eminent men with the closest avidity, he made no impression
whatever upon them. The time for Henry James to "make an impression"
on others was not come yet; he was simply the well-bred, rather shy,
young American invalid, with excellent introductions, who crossed the
path of English activities, almost without casting a shadow. He had
published no book; he had no distinct calling; he was a deprecating
and punctilious young stranger from somewhere in Massachusetts,
immature-looking for all his seven-and-twenty years.
Some further uneventful seasons, mainly spent in America but
diversified by tours in Germany and Italy, bring us to 1875, when
Henry James came over from Cambridge with the definite project, at
last, of staying in Europe "for good." He took rooms in Paris, at 29
Rue de Luxembourg, and he penetrated easily into the very exclusive
literary society which at that time revolved around Flaubert and Edmond
de Goncourt. This year in Paris was another highly critical period in
Henry James's intellectual history. He was still, at the mature age of
thirty-two, almost an amateur in literature, having been content, up to
that time, to produce scarcely anything which his mature taste did not
afterwards repudiate. _The Passionate Pilgrim_ (1870), of which I have
spoken above, is the only waif and stray of the pre-1873 years which he
has permitted to survive. The first edition of this short story is now
not easy of reference, and I have not seen it; the reprint of 1908 is
obviously, and is doubtless vigorously, re-handled. Enough, however,
remains of what must be original to show that, in a rather crude, and
indeed almost hysterical form, the qualities of Henry James's genius
were, in 1869, what they continued to be in 1909. He has conquered,
however, in _A Passionate Pilgrim_, no command yet over his enthusiasm,
his delicate sense of beauty, his apprehension of the exquisite colour
of antiquity.
From the French associates of this time he derived practical help
in his profession, though without their being aware of what they
gave him. He was warmly attracted to Gustave Flaubert, who had just
published _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, a dazzled admiration of
which was the excuse which threw the young American at the feet of
the Rouen giant. This particular admiration dwindled with the passage
of time, but Henry James continued faithful to the author of _Madame
Bovary_. It was Turgenev who introduced him to Flaubert, from whom he
passed to Guy de Maupassant, then an athlete of four-and-twenty, and
still scintillating in that blaze of juvenile virility which always
fascinated Henry James. In the train of Edmond de Goncourt came Zola,
vociferous over his late tribulation of having _L'Assommoir_ stopped in
its serial issue; Alphonse Daudet, whose recent _Jack_ was exercising
over tens of thousands of readers the tyranny of tears; and François
Coppée, the almost exact coeval of Henry James, and now author of a
_Luthier de Cremone_, which had placed him high among French poets.
That the young American, with no apparent claim to attention except
the laborious perfection of his French speech, was welcomed and
ultimately received on terms of intimacy in this the most exclusive of
European intellectual circles is curious. Henry James was accustomed to
deprecate the notion that these Frenchmen took the least interest in
him: "they have never read a line of me, they have never even persuaded
themselves that there was a line of me which anyone could read," he
once said to me. How should they, poor charming creatures, in their
self-sufficing Latin intensity, know what or whether some barbarian had
remotely "written"? But this does not end the marvel, because, read or
not read, there was Henry James among them, affectionately welcomed,
talked to familiarly about "technique," and even about "sales," like
a fellow-craftsman. There must evidently have developed by this time
something modestly "impressive" about him, and I cannot doubt that
these Parisian masters of language more or less dimly divined that he
too was, in some medium not by them to be penetrated, a master.
After this fruitful year in Paris, the first result of which was the
publication in London of his earliest surviving novel, _Roderick
Hudson_, and the completion of _The American_, Henry James left
his "glittering, charming, civilised Paris" and settled in London.
He submitted himself, as he wrote to his brother William in 1878,
"without reserve to that Londonising process of which the effect
is to convince you that, having lived here, you may, if need be,
abjure civilisation and bury yourself in the country, but may not,
in pursuit of civilisation, live in any smaller town." He plunged
deeply into the study of London, externally and socially, and into
the production of literature, in which he was now as steadily active
as he was elegantly proficient. These novels of his earliest period
have neither the profundity nor the originality of those of his middle
and final periods, but they have an exquisite freshness of their own,
and a workmanship the lucidity and logic of which he owed in no small
measure to his conversations with Daudet and Maupassant, and to his, at
that time almost exclusive, reading of the finest French fiction. He
published _The American_ in 1877, _The Europeans_ and _Daisy Miller_
in 1878, and _An International Episode_ in 1879. He might advance in
stature and breadth; he might come to disdain the exiguous beauty of
these comparatively juvenile books, but now at all events were clearly
revealed all the qualities which were to develop later, and to make
Henry James unique among writers of Anglo-Saxon race.
His welcome into English society was remarkable if we reflect that he
seemed to have little to give in return for what it offered except
his social adaptability, his pleasant and still formal amenity,
and his admirable capacity for listening. It cannot be repeated too
clearly that the Henry James of those early days had very little of
the impressiveness of his later manner. He went everywhere, sedately,
watchfully, graciously, but never prominently. In the winter of 1878-79
it is recorded that he dined out in London 107 times, but it is highly
questionable whether this amazing assiduity at the best dinner-tables
will be found to have impressed itself on any Greville or Crabb
Robinson who was taking notes at the time. He was strenuously living
up to his standard, "my charming little standard of wit, of grace, of
good manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what makes
an easy and natural style of intercourse." He was watching the rather
gross and unironic, but honest and vigorous, English upper-middle-class
of that day with mingled feelings, in which curiosity and a sort of
remote sympathy took a main part. At 107 London dinners he observed
the ever-shifting pieces of the general kaleidoscope with tremendous
acuteness, and although he thought their reds and yellows would have
been improved by a slight infusion of the Florentine harmony, on the
whole he was never weary of watching their evolutions. In this way the
years slipped by, while he made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen
durable friendships. It is a matter of pride and happiness to me that I
am able to touch on one of the latter.
It is often curiously difficult for intimate friends, who have the
impression in later years that they must always have known one another,
to recall the occasion and the place where they first met. That was
the case with Henry James and me. Several times we languidly tried to
recover those particulars, but without success. I think, however, that
it was at some dinner-party that we first met, and as the incident is
dubiously connected with the publication of the _Hawthorne_ in 1879,
and with Mr. (now Lord) Morley, whom we both frequently saw at that
epoch, I am pretty sure that the event took place early in 1880. The
acquaintance, however, did not "ripen," as people say, until the summer
of 1882, when in connection with an article on the drawings of George
du Maurier, which I was anxious Henry James should write--having heard
him express himself with high enthusiasm regarding these works of
art--he invited me to go to see him and to talk over the project. I
found him, one sunshiny afternoon, in his lodgings on the first floor
of No. 3 Bolton Street, at the Piccadilly end of the street, where the
houses look askew into Green Park. Here he had been living ever since
he came over from France in 1876, and the situation was eminently
characteristic of the impassioned student of London life and haunter of
London society which he had now become.
Stretched on the sofa and apologising for not rising to greet me, his
appearance gave me a little shock, for I had not thought of him as an
invalid. He hurriedly and rather evasively declared that he was not
that, but that a muscular weakness of his spine obliged him, as he
said, "to assume the horizontal posture" during some hours of every day
in order to bear the almost unbroken routine of evening engagements.
I think that this weakness gradually passed away, but certainly for
many years it handicapped his activity. I recall his appearance, seen
then for the first time by daylight; there was something shadowy
about it, the face framed in dark brown hair cut short in the Paris
fashion, and in equally dark beard, rather loose and "fluffy." He was
in deep mourning, his mother having died five or six months earlier,
and he himself having but recently returned from a melancholy visit
to America, where he had unwillingly left his father, who seemed far
from well. His manner was grave, extremely courteous, but a little
formal and frightened, which seemed strange in a man living in constant
communication with the world. Our business regarding Du Maurier was
soon concluded, and James talked with increasing ease, but always
with a punctilious hesitancy, about Paris, where he seemed, to my
dazzlement, to know even a larger number of persons of distinction than
he did in London.
He promised, before I left, to return my visit, but news of the
alarming illness of his father called him suddenly to America. He wrote
to me from Boston in April, 1883, but he did not return to London
until the autumn that year. Our intercourse was then resumed, and,
immediately, on the familiar footing which it preserved, without an
hour's abatement, until the sad moment of his fatal illness. When he
returned to Bolton Street--this was in August, 1883--he had broken
all the ties which held him to residence in America, a country which,
as it turned out, he was not destined to revisit for more than twenty
years. By this means Henry James became a homeless man in a peculiar
sense, for he continued to be looked upon as a foreigner in London,
while he seemed to have lost citizenship in the United States. It
was a little later than this that that somewhat acidulated patriot,
Colonel Higginson, in reply to some one who said that Henry James was
a cosmopolitan, remarked, "Hardly! for a cosmopolitan is at home even
in his own country!" This condition made James, although superficially
gregarious, essentially isolated, and though his books were numerous
and were greatly admired, they were tacitly ignored alike in summaries
of English and of American current literature. There was no escape from
this dilemma. Henry James was equally determined not to lay down his
American birthright and not to reside in America. Every year of his
exile, therefore, emphasised the fact of his separation from all other
Anglo-Saxons, and he endured, in the world of letters, the singular
fate of being a man without a country.
The collection of his private letters, therefore, which is announced
as immediately forthcoming under the sympathetic editorship of Mr.
Percy Lubbock, will reveal the adventures of an author who, long
excluded from two literatures, is now eagerly claimed by both of them,
and it will display those movements of a character of great energy
and singular originality which circumstances have hitherto concealed
from curiosity. There was very little on the surface of his existence
to bear evidence to the passionate intensity of the stream beneath.
This those who have had the privilege of seeing his letters know
is marvellously revealed in his private correspondence. A certain
change in his life was brought about by the arrival in 1885 of his
sister Alice, who, in now confirmed ill-health, was persuaded to make
Bournemouth and afterwards Leamington her home. He could not share
her life, but at all events he could assiduously diversify it by his
visits, and Bournemouth had a second attraction for him in the presence
of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he had by this time formed one of
the closest of his friendships. Stevenson's side of the correspondence
has long been known, and it is one of the main attractions which
Mr. Lubbock holds out to his readers that Henry James's letters to
Stevenson will now be published. No episode of the literary history of
the time is more fascinating than the interchange of feeling between
these two great artists. The death of Stevenson, nine years later than
their first meeting, though long anticipated, fell upon Henry James
with a shock which he found at first scarcely endurable. For a long
time afterwards he could not bring himself to mention the name of R. L.
S. without a distressing agitation.
In 1886 the publication of _The Bostonians_, a novel which showed an
advance in direct or, as it was then styled, "realistic" painting
of modern society, increased the cleft which now divided him from
his native country, for _The Bostonians_ was angrily regarded as
satirising not merely certain types, but certain recognisable
figures in Massachusetts, and that with a suggestive daring which
was unusual. Henry James, intent upon making a vivid picture, and
already perhaps a little out of touch with American sentiment, was
indignant at the reception of this book, which he ultimately, to my
great disappointment, omitted from his Collected Edition, for reasons
which he gave in a long letter to myself. Hence, as his works now
appear, _The Princess Casamassima_, of 1886, an essentially London
adventure-story, takes its place as the earliest of the novels of his
second period, although preceded by admirable short tales in that
manner, the most characteristic of which is doubtless _The Author of
Beltraffio_ (1885). This exemplifies the custom he had now adopted
of seizing an incident reported to him, often a very slight and bald
affair, and weaving round it a thick and glittering web of silken
fancy, just as the worm winds round the unsightly chrysalis its
graceful robe of gold. I speak of _The Author of Beltraffio_, and after
thirty-five years I may confess that this extraordinarily vivid story
was woven around a dark incident in the private life of an eminent
author known to us both, which I, having told Henry James in a moment
of levity, was presently horrified and even sensibly alarmed to see
thus pinnacled in the broad light of day.
After exhausting at last the not very shining amenities of his lodgings
in Bolton Street, where all was old and dingy, he went westward in
1886 into Kensington, and settled in a flat which was both new and
bright, at 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where he began a novel
called _The Tragic Muse_, on which he expended an immense amount of
pains. He was greatly wearied by the effort, and not entirely satisfied
with the result. He determined, as he said, "to do nothing but short
lengths" for the future, and he devoted himself to the execution of
_contes_. But even the art of the short story presently yielded to a
new and, it must be confessed, a deleterious fascination, that of
the stage. He was disappointed--he made no secret to his friends of
his disillusion--in the commercial success of his novels, which was
inadequate to his needs. I believe that he greatly over-estimated
these needs, and that at no time he was really pressed by the want of
money. But he thought that he was, and in his anxiety he turned to the
theatre as a market in which to earn a fortune. Little has hitherto
been revealed with regard to this "sawdust and orange-peel phase"
(as he called it) in Henry James's career, but it cannot be ignored
any longer. The memories of his intimate friends are stored with its
incidents, his letters will be found to be full of it.
Henry James wrote, between 1889 and 1894, seven or eight plays, on
each of which he expended an infinitude of pains and mental distress.
At the end of this period, unwillingly persuaded at last that all his
agony was in vain, and that he could never secure fame and fortune, or
even a patient hearing from the theatre-going public by his dramatic
work, he abandoned the hopeless struggle. He was by temperament little
fitted to endure the disappointments and delays which must always
attend the course of a dramatist who has not conquered a position which
enables him to browbeat the tyrants behind the stage. Henry James
was punctilious, ceremonious, and precise; it is not to be denied
that he was apt to be hasty in taking offence, and not very ready to
overlook an impertinence. The whole existence of the actor is lax and
casual; the manager is the capricious leader of an irresponsible band
of egotists. Henry James lost no occasion of dwelling, in private
conversation, on this aspect of an amiable and entertaining profession.
He was not prepared to accept young actresses at their own valuation,
and the happy-go-lucky democracy of the "mimes," as he bracketed both
sexes, irritated him to the verge of frenzy.
It was, however, with a determination to curb his impatience, and
with a conviction that he could submit his idiosyncrasies to what he
called the "passionate economy" of play-writing, that he began, in
1889, to dedicate himself to the drama, excluding for the time being
all other considerations. He went over to Paris in the winter of
that year, largely to talk over the stage with Alphonse Daudet and
Edmond de Goncourt, and he returned to put the finishing-touches on
_The American_, a dramatic version of one of his earliest novels. He
finished this play at the Palazzo Barbaro, the beautiful home of his
friends, the Daniel Curtises, in Venice, in June, 1890, thereupon
taking a long holiday, one of the latest of his extended Italian
tours, through Venetia and Tuscany. Edward Compton had by this time
accepted _The American_, being attracted by his own chances in the
part of Christopher Newman. When Henry James reappeared in London, and
particularly when the rehearsals began, we all noticed how deeply the
theatrical virus had penetrated his nature. His excitement swelled
until the evening of January 3rd, 1891, when _The American_ was acted
at Southport by Compton's company in anticipation of its appearance
in London. Henry James was kind enough to wish me to go down on this
occasion with him to Southport, but it was not possible. On the
afternoon of the ordeal he wrote to me from the local hotel: "After
eleven o'clock to-night I _may_ be the world's--you know--and I may be
the undertaker's. I count upon you and your wife both to spend this
evening in fasting, silence, and supplication. I will send you a word
in the morning, a wire if I can." He was "so nervous that I miswrite
and misspell."
The result, in the provinces, of this first experiment was not
decisive. It is true that he told Robert Louis Stevenson that he was
enjoying a success which made him blush. But the final result in
London, where _The American_ was not played until September, 1891, was
only partly encouraging. Henry James was now cast down as unreasonably
as he had been uplifted. He told me that "the strain, the anxiety,
the peculiar form and colour of the ordeal (not to be divined in the
least in advance)" had "sickened him to _death_." He used language
of the most picturesque extravagance about the "purgatory" of the
performances, which ran at the Opera Comique for two months. There was
nothing in the mediocre fortunes of this play to decide the questions
whether Henry James was or was not justified in abandoning all other
forms of art for the drama. We endeavoured to persuade him that, on the
whole, he was not justified, but he swept our arguments aside, and he
devoted himself wholly to the infatuation of his sterile task.
_The American_ had been dramatised from a published novel. Henry James
now thought that he should do better with original plots, and he wrote
two comedies, the one named _Tenants_ and the other _Disengaged_, of
each of which he formed high expectations. But, although they were
submitted to several managers, who gave them their customary loitering
and fluctuating attention, they were in every case ultimately refused.
Each refusal plunged the dramatist into the lowest pit of furious
depression, from which he presently emerged with freshly-kindled hopes.
Like the moralist, he never was but always to be blest. _The Album_
and _The Reprobate_--there is a melancholy satisfaction in giving life
to the mere names of these stillborn children of his brain--started
with wild hopes and suffered from the same complete failure to satisfy
the caprice of the managers. At the close of 1893, after one of these
"sordid developments," he made up his mind to abandon the struggle.
But George Alexander promised that, if he would but persevere, he
really and truly would produce him infallibly at no distant date, and
poor Henry James could not but persevere. "I mean to wage this war
ferociously for one year more," and he composed, with infinite agony
and deliberation the comedy of _Guy Domvile_.
The night of January 5th, 1895, was the most tragical in Henry James's
career. His hopes and fears had been strung up to the most excruciating
point, and I think that I have never witnessed such agonies of
parturition. _Guy Domvile_--which has never been printed--was a
delicate and picturesque play, of which the only disadvantage that I
could discover was that instead of having a last scene which tied up
all the threads in a neat conclusion, it left all those threads loose
as they would be in life. George Alexander was sanguine of success,
and to do Henry James honour such a galaxy of artistic, literary, and
scientific celebrity gathered in the stalls of the St. James's Theatre
as perhaps were never seen in a playhouse before or since. Henry James
was positively storm-ridden with emotion before the fatal night, and
full of fantastic plans. I recall that one was that he should hide in
the bar of a little public-house down an alley close to the theatre,
whither I should slip forth at the end of the second act and report
"how it was going." This was not carried out, and fortunately Henry
James resisted the temptation of being present in the theatre during
the performance. All seemed to be going fairly well until the close,
when Henry James appeared and was called before the curtain only to be
subjected--to our unspeakable horror and shame--to a storm of hoots and
jeers and catcalls from the gallery, answered by loud and sustained
applause from the stalls, the whole producing an effect of hell broke
loose, in the midst of which the author, as white as chalk, bowed
and spread forth deprecating hands and finally vanished. It was said
at the time, and confirmed later, that this horrible performance was
not intended to humiliate Henry James, but was the result of a cabal
against George Alexander.
Early next morning I called at 34 De Vere Gardens, hardly daring
to press the bell for fear of the worst of news, so shattered with
excitement had the playwright been on the previous evening. I was
astonished to find him perfectly calm; he had slept well and was
breakfasting with appetite. The theatrical bubble in which he had lived
a tormented existence for five years was wholly and finally broken, and
he returned, even in that earliest conversation, to the discussion of
the work which he had so long and so sadly neglected, the art of direct
prose narrative. And now a remarkable thing happened. The discipline of
toiling for the caprices of the theatre had amounted, for so redundant
an imaginative writer, to the putting on of a mental strait-jacket.
He saw now that he need stoop no longer to what he called "a meek and
lowly review of the right ways to keep on the right side of a body
of people who have paid money to be amused at a particular hour and
place." Henry James was not released from this system of vigorous
renunciation without a very singular result. To write for the theatre
the qualities of brevity and directness, of an elaborate plainness, had
been perceived by him to be absolutely necessary, and he had tried to
cultivate them with dogged patience for five years. But when he broke
with the theatre, the rebound was excessive. I recall his saying to
me, after the fiasco of _Guy Domvile_, "At all events, I have escaped
for ever from the foul fiend Excision!" He vibrated with the sense of
liberation, and he began to enjoy, physically and intellectually, a
freedom which had hitherto been foreign to his nature.
(_To be concluded_)
A CASE FOR RECORDS
By HILARY JENKINSON
It has long been a commonplace of depreciation to say that England
possesses more valuable collections of historical documents than any
other country, and displays more indifference to them. "_En Angleterre
tout est en désordre_," says an eminent French critic: and the _Times
Literary Supplement_ quotes him.[32] Since the middle of last century
the declared classes of public records in this country (those of the
Central Government) have, it is true, had a settled habitation, a staff
to look after them, and a good deal of attention from a small section
of the public; also a considerable, though relatively small, number
of publications has been devoted to them and some of the clamorous
interests, the genealogist's, for example, fed if not sated. The same
amount of good fortune, except by the hazard of their coming into the
hands of an enthusiast, has not in many cases befallen the records
belonging to local bodies; still less has it come to the enormous
private collections originally accumulated in connection with the
descent of real property, and now, since the invention of "short
title," no longer in any demand for their primary purpose. If the
public records of the past may in our day be considered to have found
safety, it is still possible to witness in this country the unedifying
spectacle of the museum or the rich collector buying up the pretty
specimen from a collection of manorial records, while the remainder, of
which it should form an integral part, after the lesser lights of the
collecting world have taken gradual toll of it, goes without protest
from any one to the tambourine-maker or the glue merchant. It is as
though an anatomist, having exhumed his great-grandfather, should add
to that injury the insult of preserving an interesting metacarpal in
his cabinet, while he distributes the rest of the body to various
colleagues, with remainder to the manufacturer of fertilisers: one is
tempted to send science to blazes and wish the poor old gentleman might
have been left intact, if useless, underground.
[32] November 27th, 1919.
I have spoken in this first paragraph of the unhappy state of the small
collections in England because that state is an obvious and striking
result of the same cause which has produced most of our mistakes in the
preservation, sorting and editing of documents in the past; because
the distinction at present existing between the public and the private
collections is so symptomatic of our worst failure in this field: in
effect, in all these years during which historical documents have met
with a certain amount of appreciation, it has apparently never occurred
to us to make definite search for the essential features common to all
records, high or low, and to apply to all records a treatment based
on the examination of those features. But the most interesting archive
question of the present time seems to me to be the question of the
records we ourselves are producing. If our shortcomings as owners of
archives have affected adversely our treatment of what the past has
left to us, are they not capable of doing quite as much harm to that
which we ourselves are to bequeath to the future? And, further, if
England, owing to its wealth of records, provides a particularly large
number of examples of things to be avoided, is it not possible that the
application of the warning derived from these may prove to be common to
other countries? It is, indeed, no new criticism of the French School,
the acknowledged leader of the world in this matter, to say that the
circumstances under which the French national collections were put
together have led it sometimes to consider the isolated _document_
rather to the exclusion of that _record_ which forms only a single link
in a long chain.
We are led, therefore, to inquire how far certain generalisations,
based on the character of our existing English records, maybe applied
as criteria to the treatment of those records which are accumulating in
our own time in England and perhaps in other countries.
A record, if we may venture here to give definition to a loosely-used
word, is a document drawn up, or at any rate made use of, in the
course of an administrative process, of which itself forms a part,
and subsequently preserved in his own custody for his own reference
by the administrator concerned or his successors. The process and the
administration may be as important or unimportant as you please; the
result may be the Rolls of Chancery or the deed-box of a manor: the
essential features are the same in both cases--the administrative
origin, the administrative reason for preservation, the preservation
in administrative custody: so also are the results the same from the
point of view of the subsequent 'ologist--the two priceless qualities
of authenticity and impartiality; the first proceeding from the fact
that the records have been always in custody,[33] and in a certain
relationship one with another, the second derived from the fact that
they were not drawn up for the information of posterity,[34] and,
therefore, have no bias to one side or the other of posterity's
problems. Any number of interesting instances[35] might be adduced
from the records of the past, both of the value of these qualities
and of the ease with which they may be flawed; but let us here leave
for the time consideration of the records the past has bequeathed to
us and inquire how far the qualities which, with all its historical
faults, it gave us in most of its documents are going to be found by
our descendants in those we leave to them. The unprecedented mass of
documents which the various executive departments must have accumulated
during the war may well frighten us into a serious consideration of
this subject at the present moment.
[33] The licence of high officials has sometimes violated
this, a practice much to be deprecated. I refer to
this again below.
[34] This fact may, of course, lead in ignorant times, such
as was the early nineteenth century, to destruction.
[35] A well-known case is the volume, belonging to the
records of the Master of the Revels, which, if
it is genuine, dates one of Shakespeare's plays:
unfortunately it was for a considerable time out of
official custody, and doubts have been cast on the
authenticity of the most important page.
Now, the rules for safe preservation and custody are simple things,
matters of proved experience, a number of which are set out in a
small book recently published in England, and at more length in the
well-known Continental treatise;[36] and though the standard of
archive-keeping by local authorities is at present very uneven, we may,
for the shortening of this article, dismiss that side of the question
with pious hopes. Assuming, then, that the documents of our own time,
when they come to the state of archives, will be preserved in suitable
places and under proper rules of custody, assuming further that we
are able to drill archivists into leaving their charges as far as
possible in the physical order and state in which they find them (so
as to preserve the old association of document with document), we have
to face as our chief danger a threat not so much to the authenticity
of the record as to its impartiality--the most important of all its
qualities and one which, once damaged, cannot be restored. Interference
with impartiality may occur at two points: in the first place it may
occur, as indeed it has sometimes done in the past, at or near the time
of the document's making; the administrator who makes it may himself
have an eye on posterity. We shall have to recur to this again, but
for the moment let us turn to the second, which is the more serious
because it brings us up against the great modern record problem, bulk:
impartiality may be--rather, is--impugned when we come to the selection
of documents for preservation.
[36] C. Johnson: _The Care of Documents_ (S.P.C.K. Helps
for Students of History); and Muller, Feith, and
Fruin: _Manuel pour le Classement des Archives_.
The obvious remedy for this is not to select--to preserve everything;
but this is in practice an equally obvious impossibility: the instance
already quoted of the accumulation of our war records[37] would no
doubt supply apt illustration, but the custodian of county records is
faced on his small scale with exactly the same difficulty: we are all
confronted, in fact, with this main problem--how are we to reconcile
our desire to preserve in our records certain qualities which have
accompanied in the past an uncontrolled accumulation with the necessity
of our own day for restriction? Up to now, in face of this problem, and
in face of the system of selection, or destruction, which is actually
in use, no one (not even the Royal Commission, which has obviously
devoted much attention to the subject) has really gone further than to
tell the selectors that they must be very careful. But can they? Let
us take a case of public records, an imaginary class of, say, 200,000
pieces to be dealt with in a limited space of time by a limited number
of people who have probably other work waiting to be done: how can
they possibly say (since they have not the time to make a detailed
comparison) that all the information contained in certain documents
which they propose to condemn is to be found elsewhere? Or, taking
another criterion, how can they say that certain documents are going to
be without interest for the future? There are classes of documents in
the Public Record Office now frequently used and highly valued which
little more than fifty years ago might well have been destroyed as
having no interest for any branch of human study then known.
[37] Records so vast that in its last report (1919) the
Royal Commission has found it necessary to alter
its original (1914) recommendations regarding the
provision of new repository accommodation.
At this point the natural thing is to seek the advice of the historian,
who is indeed, being an enthusiast, anxious to give it. Now, the
historian may fairly claim to have done much for records in the past.
He is mainly responsible for the recognition of public records as
things valuable and to be kept carefully for other reasons than that of
mere antiquity; and he has done something in England (one always hopes
that he will do more presently) for local and private collections.
But he cannot predict the needs of future research workers (who may
not be historians at all) any more than he was able to predict in the
time of the old Record Commission the needs of our own day: witness
the indexes, quite useless to an economic historian, of the very
important Chancery Rolls of King John, published about 1830. Even if
we grant that he may make a better guess than other men, we are met by
a still graver objection in the fact that we cannot rule out at least
the possibility (since he is human and an historian) of his having a
predilection for the evidence which will establish a certain view or
emphasise a certain line of inquiry. The use of an historian, or of
any other person who uses records for research purposes, as a selector
seems to me incompatible with the preservation of their characteristic
impartiality: there will be a possibility--and the mere possibility is
enough--of _suppressio veri_, if not of _suggestio falsi_; and what
should have been a record, preserved by circumstances which do not
affect its value as evidence, will become no more than the narrative
or at most the _pièce justificative_ of a specialist; you might as
well allow a botanist to produce a hybrid in order to prove not its
possibility but its existence as a natural form.
But if we cannot use the historian for our purposes we may perhaps call
in the trained archivist. I am afraid that here again we shall find
no help. The archivist may take an interest in any of the subjects
upon which his collections furnish evidence; but such interests have
nothing to do with (indeed they sometimes impede) the duties that are
his of safeguarding, arranging, and making accessible and of basing
himself for all these duties on the internal structure of the classes
of documents in his charge: with the possible exception of the last
there is nothing in these qualifications to make him more fit than the
historian for the work of selection--and destruction.
Is there, then, no possible way--we will not say of dealing with our
present accumulations; they, it may be, on account of their sheer bulk
must be dealt with by such _ad hoc_ methods as the circumstances
admit of; and into those methods it is not our province here to
enter--but merely for our guidance in the future, is there no chance
of reconciling the requirements of ourselves and posterity (so far as
these can be foreseen) with the intrinsic interests of the records
themselves--the external with the internal--or rather perhaps of
finding some method of treatment which will give to our records a
reasonable bulk while preserving their important characteristics, and
at the same time will at least not sacrifice unduly the interests of
the research-worker? Perhaps an indication of such a possibility is
to be found in the words "our present accumulations" which we used
above. How would it be if we set ourselves in the future to prevent
accumulations?
A certain amount of contemporary destruction of the more obviously
ephemeral papers--notes from one department of an office to another
saying, "Passed to you, please," and perhaps documents of a more
advanced type--does, of course, in our own days sometimes take place in
large offices. And there are not wanting indications that a perception
of the need of something more, especially in regard to public offices,
has been growing since the Act of 1877, provided that the Master of
the Rolls might make rules respecting the disposal by destruction or
otherwise of documents which are deposited in or can be removed to the
Public Record Office (note the lack of any distinction between the
two classes) and which are not of sufficient public value to justify
their preservation in the Public Record Office. Such an indication is
seen in the desire expressed by the late Royal Commission on Public
Records[38] for the substitution in Government offices of destruction
and preservation of documents according to well-considered principles
for destruction founded on arbitrary, varying opinions; and for the
relief of the Public Record Office Repository from a cumbersome mass
of useless or unnecessary documents. But no one, so far as I am aware,
has yet summed up and balanced, for the benefit of all records and
record-keepers, whether public or private, the merits and demerits
of the various systems of destruction, either in the light of the
intrinsic character of records themselves or in that of the experience
gained from a study of our ancestors' methods. And the accumulations of
documents, many of which are subsequently judged not to be material,
continue.
[38] First report, p. 41; cp.: second report, p. 71, etc.
Now we may assume, indeed we know, that from the earliest times not
only selections of subjects for representation in permanent records
but also actual destruction of documents has been practised by the
administrators who have left us their collections. Only--and here
is the distinction--since the question of bulk did not trouble them
as it does us, they were able to act solely on the ground that the
record in question was not required for their current administrative
purposes. Note that in this their impartiality was not affected by
the external considerations of either this world or the next, neither
by any interest in the history-writing of the future, nor by the
exigencies of floor-space in the present. Any subsequent destruction,
direct or indirect, by our ancestors was quite a different matter:
such destruction has invariably been the subject ultimately of adverse
criticism, though no doubt the person responsible saw no particular
harm in it. For example, take the case of the burning of the Exchequer
tallies in 1834. The position of contemporaries is probably represented
tolerably by that of Charles Dickens, who criticised the proceeding on
the ground not only that it burned down the Houses of Parliament, but
also that it was a wanton waste of firewood which might have been given
to the poor: yet already we, not a hundred years after, are regretting
it. On the other hand, though historians are in the habit of saying
vaguely that much which was of incalculable value must have been lost,
they refer always to the losses due to various forms of carelessness. I
have never heard anyone venture to criticise the Chancery, for example,
because it did not preserve full copies of non-returnable writs or the
Exchequer because certain draft accounts were destroyed.
What, in fact, are the principal gaps in old records which affect us
moderns? If we take two of the documents which have thrown light on
the personal history of Shakespeare (not a matter of much moment to
his contemporaries) we shall arrive at a clear distinction between
two different kinds of destruction, or shall we say failure to
preserve? On the one hand, we have a document signed by Shakespeare
as a witness: all that mattered to the court here was that certain
evidence had been given by some indifferent person and accepted. Could
we have blamed it if it had failed to preserve this signature which
we find so intriguing, or had allowed it (as was sometimes done) to
be written in by the scribe who took down the deposition? Or if it
had preserved the whole document only in the form of a summary? Most
certainly we could not: how was the court to know that we should be
interested in Shakespeare's life and handwriting? On the other hand,
take the case where Shakespeare himself was party to a fine: had the
court of Common Pleas failed to preserve the "foot" of that fine, which
was a recognised form of evidence of its own transactions, we should
legitimately criticise its carelessness.
It appears, therefore, that the only criticism posterity will be able
to pass on us, if we adhere to the practice of our ancestors, will be
one based on the extent to which we leave record behind us of the work
of the various administrations; and our further queries then resolve
themselves into two:
(1) Can we train our administrator so to keep his records _at the time
they are made_ that they will give a fair picture of the activities of
his office, and this without desiring him to do it for the benefit of
posterity, without making an historian of him?
(2) Can this be done so economically as to get rid of the bulk
difficulty in connection with preservation?
If the answer to each of these questions is "Yes," then our problem is
solved.
It is not, of course, possible to answer them in detail here, because
to do so would involve inserting a detailed scheme for the keeping of
archives in a modern office; it would also involve going into such
highly technical, and in some cases controversial, matters as the
use and abuse of flimsies, the whole position of the typewriter in
record-making (with an excursus on carbons and inks), the comparative
merits of various filing systems, and, as regards this country at
least, liaison between Government departments. But we may perhaps try
in the most general terms to lay down a few first principles and see
how far they indicate the possibility of an answer. We may premise that
while no two accountants differ radically in their methods, the name
of the various filing systems and practices is legion; while we have
had double-entry for three or four hundred years, no one has yet hit on
a system of filing correspondence and the like which commands general
approval; from which we may draw the corollary that almost everywhere
there are large redundancies.
If, then, we are to educate our administrator we should begin
(1) By explaining the trouble that has been caused by accumulations of
records in the past and the impossibility of dealing with them reliably
and satisfactorily in the present. This trouble we require him to
prevent in the future by a system of personal attention and studied
economy. (He would, of course, say at once that this could not be done;
the reply is "Have you tried?")
(2) The next point is concerned also with authenticity, but it is in
every way of primary importance.[39]
[39] How important may be judged from the perusal of
more than one modern volume of more than one great
statesman's "Private Papers"--many of them public
records which have been taken out of custody. Perhaps
the new diplomacy may do something to remedy this evil.
Every office, no matter how small, must have a registry;[40] _i.e._,
must be divided up, _qua_ records, into two branches, administrative
and executive; it must have a small branch which keeps and controls,
distinct from the large which makes and uses, documents. Registry, the
keeper and controller of office papers, is to lay down the way in which
letters are to be written and whether copies are to be made. When they
are made (or received, if they come from without) all office documents
are the property of registry, which is responsible for destruction
or preservation (with, of course, the advantage of advice from the
executive side in a large office) and for safeguarding and methods of
arrangement.
[40] I hope I shall not be accused of ignorance of the fact
that registries do exist in some offices. The point
is, first, that their existence is not universal;
second, that they have not yet been turned towards
those functions which it is here suggested they should
fulfil.
(3) The golden rule for administrators is: in preserving and arranging
documents keep in view a single purpose, that of enabling an ignorant
successor by their means to carry on if you and the whole of your staff
were blotted out. We depend largely on this rule for an answer to the
historian's objection that the administrator if left to himself will
destroy all the valuable things--lose the Shakespeare fine, in fact.
It is not, however, inserted here for that purpose, but because it is
obviously sound.
(4) Apart from this rule the first principle should be economy; and
economy, if registry is not to be overburdened with work, must consist
largely in rules carefully thought out concerning not the documents
which are to be destroyed, but the documents which are never to be
made: for example, probably at least 50 per cent. of the copies of
out-letters which are preserved in a big office record nothing more
than despatch, which could be done in two words or less in a general
register.
(5) The ideal subject index, it has been said, would have only one
entry and any quantity of cross-references; similarly there is an ideal
of a single master series in records: being an ideal, neither of these
things is realisable, but it is possible to get near to them. For
example, registry can and should have a record of its own, a single
general register, and a properly made entry in this would be amply
sufficient record of many transactions which are at present dignified
with a _dossier_.
(6) In this connection we may refer to the necessity for the
intelligent use of mechanical devices: many duplicates and unnecessary
documents are habitually kept owing to a failure to appreciate the
merits as distinguishing features of a red pencil and a blue, the
opposition of left to right, the possibilities of the first and the
second column, not to mention the third, fourth, and fifth....
(7) Registry should have a clear conception of the nature of
records--that there are only three kinds: In-letters, out-letters,
and memoranda (including accounts). A realisation of this and of the
way in which records work into each other means economy in internal
arrangement, and in the case of Government offices might, if liaison
were close and a single system of record-keeping in general use, make
new economies possible as between departments.
(8) So far we have been considering the possibilities of an economy
which consists in not making documents; but we have, of course, to
consider also actual destruction, of which there are three kinds: (_a_)
First, there is what we may call _posthumous destruction_, the kind
which is now most in vogue, and which we want to stop altogether: that
is the destruction which deals with an accumulation formed perhaps
years before--destruction for its own sake, because of over-great
bulk. Then (_b_) there is _immediate destruction_, which gives effect
to the judgment passed at the earliest possible moment on a document:
you wait only until a letter (let us say perhaps a letter making an
appointment) is acknowledged, and then, since its actual terms concern
only the person addressed, and for your office's purposes you have
sufficient evidence in your registry, you destroy. (_c_) Finally, there
is _deferred destruction_, the kind which comes into operation where
a document, already condemned, so far as concerns the purposes of the
office, is temporarily preserved for some purely external reason;
for example, in connection with the provisions of the Statute of
Limitations.
(9) A primary rule of destruction is that no letter-in, copy of
letter-out, or draft of office memoranda shall be kept which does
not mean a stage in advance for the office's business. But it is
particularly necessary that this destruction should take place at the
earliest possible moment, while the business is fresh in the minds of
those concerned; because there are documents which, though they have no
direct result themselves, yet by that very fact mark an advance in the
policy (let us say) of a department, and delay in the consideration of
these might conceivably be dangerous.
(10) For the purposes of _deferred destruction_ some system of
automatic working will be necessary; for instance, if large masses of
papers, valueless otherwise to the office, have to be kept, say, for
six years for legal reasons, there should be a regular system by which
every day the register of six years back should be examined and the
papers there marked (let us say) D.D., for deferred destruction, should
be at once drawn, disposed of, and marked off. It is possible that some
system might be introduced to cover doubtful cases, which could be
given a short lease of life--some statutory number of months, pending
a decision by circumstances upon their value. This would be a good
safeguard against careless destruction, though that should never occur.
(11) Finally, lest this compromise should let in abuses, there must be
a short time of probation for documents fixed, perhaps not more than a
year; and, as soon as any document has passed through that, it should
automatically go to the record class, where no further destruction
is permitted; it would probably in practice be subjected to a final
scrutiny a few days before it reached this happy state. As many such
documents might still be needed for reference, they would possibly
remain with those still on probation or go only to some intermediate
muniment-room, not to the final record repository, but they would be
records, full-fledged.
The above suggestions are offered only as suggestions, susceptible of
much revision and needing much more expansion. The only claim made for
them is that they do face the real difficulty of the record situation,
and do sketch lines along which the reasonable requirements of the
historian, or any other worker who may be destined in the future to
pursue strange learning along unthought-of paths, are adequately met;
the question of bulk is met, and the present system of dealing in a
hopeless kind of way with accumulations already formed and hardened is
got rid of; and violence is not done to the structure of the records
themselves.
Criticism of the proposed system will probably be divided between
statements that it does too much and that it does too little. We may
reply that there is no inherent impossibility in the _via media_, that
all alternative systems are destructive of the most essential qualities
of records, and that ours is, therefore, at least worth a trial.
Attempts are from time to time made in most large offices to secure
the keeping of documents in a manner convenient to those who use them
for official purposes. But why not something longer sighted, a little
care for the records themselves? Why not a _Manual of Record Making and
Keeping for Clerks in Government and other Offices_?
ON INTERPRETATION IN MUSIC
By SIR GEORGE HENSCHEL, Mus.Doc.
The question of interpretation, especially in the field of music,
and more particularly as regards song, has been prominent of late.
Lectures on interpretation, books on the subject have been announced
in the papers under more or less attractive titles, but I fear I
have never read the latter, nor gone to any of the former. Indeed I
confess that throughout my life I have given little, if any, thought
to interpretation: a fact not easily accounted for, unless it be
that when I was young, people must have been more unsophisticated.
Interpretation in music was a thing rarely spoken of. If, for instance,
there was a Beethoven symphony on the programme of a concert, people
went because they wanted to hear the symphony, not how a conductor
interpreted it. It evidently sufficed these good people to have
confidence in the musicianship and skill of the members of an orchestra
and in the loyalty of their conductor as regards carrying out the
composer's wishes as to _tempo_ and expression, confidence altogether
in the efficiency of any artist ready to brave the test of publicity.
Moreover, conductors were then stationary; the fashion of prima-donna
conductors, travelling from one place to another, each trying to outdo
his rival in so-called originality, had not come into being, and there
was little opportunity for a comparison.
Of course, I had read or heard of points in law being capable of
different interpretation by different lawyers, also was aware of the
fact that interpreters are persons who, being masters of several
languages, act between two people ignorant of each other's tongue,
or whose office it is to translate orally in their presence the
words of parties speaking different languages, but I never connected
the term with music, which, I thought, being a language spoken and
understood all the world over, did not require the services of an
interpreter. This, of course, was a very youthful notion. But even in
later years the question did not interest me very much, and it was
not until three or four years ago the editor of an American musical
magazine asked me to write for his paper an article which he wished
to be entitled "Some Elementary Truths on Song-Interpretation" that
the matter attracted my serious attention. I remember answering the
gentleman: "My dear sir,--Since we are still waiting for a satisfactory
answer to the ancient question 'What is truth?' I must confess myself
utterly incompetent to gratify your flattering desire; indeed, without
immodesty, I hope, should be reluctant to accept any mortal's opinion
regarding a question of art as truth." Somehow or other, however, the
thing got hold of me and I began to be curious to see what could be
said, or at any rate what I might be able to say on the subject. So,
first of all, I consulted the Oxford Dictionary to see whether among
the various definitions of the word "Interpretation," which that
wonderfully complete book was sure to offer, there might not be one
applicable to music, or altogether to art. And there I found that "To
interpret" may mean:
Expound the meaning of, bring out, make out the meaning of, explain,
understand, render by artistic representation or performance.
Well, this was something to start from, anyhow. Let us see: "Expound
the meaning of."
From the oracles of old, not infrequently more obscure on purpose to
give them greater importance, down to a speech from the front benches,
utterances in _words_ may, and indeed often do, need expounding
the meaning of, but it seems to me in music, and, perhaps, in art
altogether, the necessity for explanation nearly always indicates a
certain degree of inferiority. I cannot imagine anyone looking at a
Velasquez, or Titian, or Rembrandt, or Michelangelo asking "What _does_
it mean?" but I am sure we all have heard that question, very likely
emphasised by the addition of two little words, like "on earth," or
something stronger, at exhibitions of Futurist art.
So in a piece of absolute music, _i.e._, music without words, for an
orchestra or a solo instrument, any attempt at expounding the meaning
of, make out the meaning of, must, in my humble opinion, always be
more or less of a failure, whilst, of course, there can be no need
of such an attempt at all if the music be programme music, or if, by
the title given to it, like, for instance, Elegy, Reverie, Humoreske,
Nocturne, Barcarolle, and so on, the composer clearly has indicated his
intention. There is no need asking what Bach, Beethoven, Brahms meant
by their symphonies, their fugues.
You might as well ask what the meaning of a cathedral. These things
are there for us to wonder at the greatness and power of the human
mind, to lose ourselves in admiration of the various forms of beauty
in which they reveal themselves, to bow down, to worship. On the other
hand, in music with words, the poems chosen by the composer are rarely
sufficiently obscure or eccentric to require "expounding the meaning
of."
It seems to me, therefore, that the only definition of the word
interpretation with which we need concern ourselves is "Render by
artistic representation or performance." And that would seem simple
enough were it not that when it comes to a song we have to deal with
a compound of poetry and music which complicates matters inasmuch as
there is art required for reciting a poem as well as for singing the
music.
That the music of a song, as such, may be beautifully rendered by an
instrument other than the voice we all know. Who--to quote only one
example--has not heard Schubert's _Ave Maria_ played on a 'cello?
And the words of a song detached from the music may find an ideal
interpreter in the person of a talented reciter, who, as regards music,
may not know one note from another. The perfect interpreter of a song,
therefore, would have to combine in him or herself the talents and
qualities of both a reciter and a singer, and it will be seen at once
that, as in song the music is of the first importance, not only should
an intending singer make a point of studying music as well as singing,
but the study of theory, harmony, counterpoint, etc., that is to say,
of music as a _creative_ art should always be made the foundation on
which all special studies for expressing that art should rest.
I have just said that in a song the music is first in importance.
Should, therefore, by any chance a composer have failed, as some of
the best have been known to now and then, to make the music fit the
words completely, it would be the duty of the singer to consider the
_musical_ phrase in the first instance and fit in the words as well as
possible under the circumstances, even at the risk of breaking between
two words which otherwise it would be better not to separate.
The question of breathing is altogether one which puzzles a great many
singers. Take, for instance, a Bach or Handel aria, with semiquaver
runs, often extending over half-a-dozen bars or more. There are singers
who deem it beneath their dignity to breathe during such a run, and
go on until they are red in the face, or else, if they see they must
after all, put in additional words. This is quite unnecessary. Such
occasions should be treated instrumentally. Give such a run to, say,
an oboe player and you will find that he now and then will take an
instantaneous little breath which enables him to do justice to every
note and carry the thing through successfully and without exhaustion.
It is generally the childish fear of being thought lacking in physical
strength which induces some singers to delay breathing until the
thought of their bursting a blood vessel remains the only one left
in the poor listener, rendering anything like interpretation and,
therefore, artistic enjoyment of such a performance utterly impossible.
If you know _how_ to breathe, _i.e._, how to replenish your lungs in
the twinkling of an eye and imperceptibly, you cannot really breathe
too often, for by such judicious breathing you are infinitely better
able to satisfactorily accomplish the task before you. I remember being
asked, years ago, to hear, with a view to giving my opinion on her
talent and voice, a young singer, now quite famous, and being horrified
at her utterly mistaken idea as to breathing. Disregarding all thought
of intelligent phrasing, she actually never breathed unless positively
obliged to do so. I stood it as long as I could and then got really
angry. I stopped her short and said, "My dear young lady, do you wish
to show the people what wonderful lungs you have, or what a beautiful
song it is you are singing?" You can only do one of the two things at
a time. Supposing even your breathing be good, which, being neither
inaudible nor invisible, I am sorry to say it is not; you will have
to learn that an accomplishment, be it ever so great, in anything
pertaining to a detail in the mere _technique_ of an art becomes a
fault the moment attention is drawn to it. A singer who after the
singing of a beautiful song is complimented on the excellent management
of his breath or the wonderful articulation of his words should go home
and resolve to do better next time, and not rest satisfied until he
feels that the singer's highest aim should be the full appreciation and
enjoyment on the part of the listener of the work interpreted. That
aim being achieved he need wish for no greater praise.
For an intelligent and thoroughly satisfactory rendering of a song it
is absolutely imperative that the vocal technique of the singer--and
the breathing is as important a part of it as the actual singing--be
developed to a state of efficiency, such as to need no more thought
than, for instance, a pianist interpreting a Beethoven sonata should
have to give to the fingering. All technical difficulties should have
been overcome once for all and technique itself become a matter of
course before an attempt at interpretation is made.
The two principal factors in the technique of singing are
vocalisation and articulation, the one referring to music, the
other--articulation--to speech, each complementing the other, though I
hold that of the two articulation is the more important, since it is
not the vowels but the consonants which enable a singer to "bring out
the meaning of," _i.e._, to interpret a word. You may sing the vowel,
for instance, of the word "soul" ever so beautifully, it is not until
you add the "l" with the same intensity of purpose that the word puts
on flesh and blood, as it were, and becomes a living thing. Or take the
word "remember." No actor, impersonating, for instance, the ghost of
Hamlet's father, could make an impression with the word by dwelling on
the vowel "Reme-e-e----," but leaving the vowel quickly and continuing
to sound the "m" a good actor could walk almost across the whole stage
holding on to that consonant without exaggeration--"Remem-m-m-ber."
It is the consonants, as I said before, which convey the meaning of
a word, and they should be made the subject of special study. If you
wish to interpret you should, in the first place, strive to make
yourself understood, and that, with the best vocalisation in the world,
you can do only by a mastery of the consonants, _i.e._, by a perfect
articulation. You all know that delicious story of the dear old lady
coming home from a village concert, where the hit of the evening had
been made by a girl singing, "Wae's me for Prince Charlie." Being
asked whether she had enjoyed the concert, she said, "Not very much;
I couldn't understand half the people who sang, except one girl who
sang a nice funny song." "Do you remember the title?" "No, but she kept
on asking 'Where's me fourpence, Charlie?'" This singer evidently had
_not_ made a special study of consonants.
In vocalisation, too, there are certain details which often fail to
receive, on the part of the singer, the attention which should be
paid to them. One of them, and, in my opinion, a very important one,
because of its great help towards interpretation, is the _colouring_
of the tone. I have heard many an otherwise good singer whose singing
became exceedingly monotonous after a while by reason of a lack of
variety in tone-colour, and I remember one lady in particular, the
possessor of a beautiful rich contralto voice, from whose singing--had
it not been for the words--you could not possibly have told whether
what she sang was sad or cheerful. And yet our five vowels A, E, I, O,
U being what we may call the primary colours of the voice, a singer
should be able, by skilful and judicious mixing of these colours,
to produce as many different shades of, let us say, the vowel A as a
painter of the colour, say, of red. I have in my long experience of
a teacher found it of the utmost value to make a pupil sing even a
whole song on nothing but the vowels of the words, with the object of
expressing the character of the music by mere vocalisation. We all
love that glorious aria in the _Messiah_, "He was despised." Well, let
a student try to convey its sadness, its deeply religious feeling in
that way, _i.e._, without words, by the instrument of the voice alone,
and, if after a while she succeeds, she will have taken a very big
step toward realising, _i.e._, toward interpreting, the full beauty of
that exquisite blending of words and music. For a thoroughly artistic
rendering of emotional songs of that kind or of songs of dramatic
character, such as ballads in which the singer has to impersonate
character and run up and down the gamut of passion, it is of the
greatest importance that the singer should have under perfect control
not only his technique, but his feelings too. If your feelings get
the better of you before the public, you are apt temporarily, and for
physical reasons, to lose the mastery of your technique. There is a
story told of the famous American actor, Edwin Booth, whose daughter,
his severest critic, always, at his request, had to be in the stage-box
where and whenever he acted. On one occasion the play was Victor Hugo's
_The King's Jester_, known to us all from Verdi's _Rigoletto_. The
part of the Jester was considered one of the best of Booth's many fine
impersonations. When the harrowing scene came in which the poor man
finds the body of his murdered daughter in the sack, Booth on that
night for some reason or other was so overcome by the situation that
actual tears ran down his cheeks, and he thought he had never acted
that scene better or with greater feeling. The first thing his daughter
said to him as they met in his dressing-room after the play was, "Were
you quite well, father?" "Quite. Why?" "Because that scene with Gilda's
body never made so little impression on me and on the people, as far as
I could see."
And naturally. When you lose control of yourself you must not expect to
be able to control your audience.
On the other hand, there was a great singer, Wilhelmina
Schroeder-Devrient, the greatest exponent of the part of Leonora in
Beethoven's _Fidelio_. In that wonderful scene in the underground
prison when, disguised as the jailor's boy, and unrecognised by her
unfortunate husband, the chained prisoner Florestan, she hands the
starving man a crust of bread, singing to Beethoven's touchingly
appealing notes, and in a voice choked with emotion, "There, take this
bread, thou poor, poor man," that great singer was often known to
actually crack a little aside joke with old Rocco, the jailor, whilst
the front of the house was in tears. That is what I call art. Very
likely she had cried herself many a time over that same scene when
studying it.
Of course the actor--and by that I mean the operatic-singer as
well--has a not inconsiderable advantage over the concert-singer, in
that he possesses in facial expression and gesture two additional aids
to interpretation, both important and powerful. I say two, although
facial expression is available to the concert-singer as well, but
whilst that and gesture form an essential part in the training of
the actor, facial expression is hardly ever systematically studied
by the singer of songs who, in this respect, is left to his own
resources with often rather curious results. I have listened to many
a singer--I am sorry to say mostly of the fair sex--who, very likely
for fear of making grimaces, maintained throughout a whole song,
and heedless of the varying moods and sentiments expressed in it, a
sickly, inane, apologetic sort of a smile, whilst, on the other hand,
I remember hearing a famous singer who, in Schubert's great song,
_Der Doppelgänger_, allowed his features already during the short
prelude to the song to assume a most ghastly expression of pain and
terror which, quite apart from such a proceeding being apt to have
the opposite effect, was in this case quite the wrong thing to do,
for the opening of the song is merely a sad recollection, on the part
of the unfortunate lover, of happier times when his beloved was still
inhabiting the house he is passing. "The night is still, the streets
are silent, 'twas in this house my true love lived." The tragedy and
horror only commence with "There too stands a man and gazes up on high,
and wrings his hands in agony of pain," reaching the climax with the
words, "I shudder when I behold his face, the moon reveals to me my
own image." But when this climax came it was robbed of much of its
impressiveness by the singer having anticipated it. He evidently took
it for granted that his listeners knew Heine's poem and Schubert's
song, or had made themselves acquainted with the words beforehand by
looking into the book of words. That is a great mistake. You should
always sing as if the song you are interpreting had never been known
or sung before, and you were the first to make it public. Every one of
you, I am sure, has at one time or other told a little fairy-story to
a child. You know how deliberately such a story should be told, how
distinctly the pronunciation of every syllable, every consonant, in
order that the little ones may grasp the meaning of what you are saying
the very moment you are saying it, so as not to lose the thread of the
tale, to break the spell. Well, that's the way you should sing. Even if
you _know_ that what you are singing is the most well-known, popular,
hackneyed thing, always imagine one person in your audience--sitting
in the very last row--to whom it is something absolutely new, and that
imaginary person should be the child to whom you are telling a story.
So you see all these little details have to be thought out. The singer
should even be careful in the selection of his songs. (When I speak
of "him" and "his" I, of course, mean "her" and "hers" as well.) The
greater the singer's art the more will he be able to force his hearers
into forgetfulness of a possible discrepancy between, for instance, his
personal appearance and the sentiment or character he is endeavouring
to represent. But here, too, some discretion should be exercised. A
lady, for instance, weighing fourteen stone and a half should not, as
I have heard one do, put the audience's capacity for self-control to
too severe a test by singing baby-songs like, "Put me in my little bed,
mother," or "If nobody ever marries me and I don't know why he should."
Yes, even the time of day, and the scene and the occasion should find
a place among the questions to be considered by a singer when choosing
a song for performance, as under circumstances the best interpretation
may not only fail to be appreciated, but even produce an effect utterly
unlooked for.
It was many years ago, two or three nights after Gilbert and Sullivan's
incomparable _Mikado_ had been launched on its triumphal career at the
Savoy, that there was a big evening party at Sullivan's flat, to have
the honour of meeting the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh.
An excellent little programme of music had been gone through, and just
after midnight, supper being over, the whole party once more repaired
to the drawing-room for some jollier things. Nearly all the principal
singers from the Savoy had come over in their _Mikado_ costumes and,
with the composer at the piano, delighted the guests with excerpts like
"Three little Maids from School" and "The flowers that bloom in the
Spring, tra-la," doubly fascinating then on account of the novelty of
the thing.
Everybody, and none the least so the two Royal guests, who occupied
two armchairs in front, with the programme in their hands, enjoyed
the entertainment to the utmost, and the fun was at its height when
one of the guests, a celebrated contralto, famous for her rendering
of ballads--I mean the style of ballads in vogue thirty-five years
ago--was asked if she wouldn't sing one of them. She, of course,
readily consented, solemnly mounted the little platform, and there
was a hush as she stood there, motionless like a statue, her face
expressing a seriousness so strangely in contrast with the mirth and
laughter that had pervaded the room but a few minutes before, that I
noticed the two Royal programmes being brought somewhat nearer the
Royal faces. Then the accompanist struck the first chords of the
introduction and--could we really believe our ears?--the lady began to
sing--you'll never guess--"_The Three Fishers!_" Higher and higher up
went the Royal programmes, a dead silence reigned in the room until
it came to the "Three Corpses," when, little by little, small noises
like half-suppressed sneezes or sobs could be heard here and there,
increasing in frequency and volume, and when it came to the refrain--it
was now a little after 1 a.m.--"The sooner it's over the sooner to
sleep," the last "moa-oa-oa-ning" was drowned in a vociferous applause
of a character such as I am sure that ballad had never before evoked.
And now I should like to mention another factor in the rendering
of music, the importance of which is often underrated, and that is
the _tempo_. Good music, I have found, not only does not lose but
rather gains by the _tempo_, whatever it might be, being taken with
deliberation. There are degrees in any designation of time, and one is
apt to forget that the Italian words in common for that purpose may
refer, not only to the metronomic measure, but also to the character,
the mood of a piece. Allegro means lively. But there are degrees of
liveliness. An elephant may be lively, but I take his liveliness to be
of a somewhat different kind from that, for instance, of the frisky
little chap whose antics are so deliciously and humorously described
in Goethe and Berlioz's immortal "Song of the Flea" in _Faust_. I
remember once hearing Schubert's _Erlking_ taken at such a break-neck
speed that I wondered both father and child were not killed before the
end of the first stanza. It reminded me of a rather amusing series of
telegraphic versions of celebrated poems, which many years ago appeared
in the _Fliegende Blätter_--the Continental _Punch_--and of which that
of the _Erlking_ might be rendered in English by something like this:
"Night wild--Father and child--Ride through the dark--Erlking out for a
lark--Boy frightened--Father's grip tightened--Father, ride on--Yes, my
son--Reach home in fear and dread--Father alive, child dead."
When we recall the definition of the word Interpretation as it refers
to music and poetry, viz., Rendering by artistic representation or
performance, we shall find that that little qualification "artistic"
makes all the difference in the world, inasmuch as it clearly shows
that a mere representation or performance may not necessarily be an
interpretation and that it requires an artist to make it such. And it
follows that there must be any amount of variety in the interpretation
of one and the same thing. An old Latin proverb says: "Duo si faciunt
idem, non est idem." When two people do the same thing, it isn't the
same thing. Well, if that be true in any undertaking, how infinitely
great must be the possibility of such variety when the two people
of the proverb are artists! For though we speak of the artistic
temperament as if it were something absolute and definable, we know in
how many different ways such a temperament may manifest itself.
There are no two painters who, put before the same landscape, would
paint it, _i.e._, interpret it, in the same way. Neither, I maintain,
are there two actors who would interpret Hamlet, or two singers who
would sing the same song exactly alike. They each have, when they have
attained maturity, their own style, and style, as an eminent painter
of the last century has admirably expressed it, is the leaving out of
everything superfluous, a definition which fits our subject equally
well. No two artists will think the same thing superfluous; indeed,
what the one considers so, the other may deem essential. Here, too,
the actor--to come back to poetry and music--is better off than the
musician. He has a far greater scope, _i.e._, a far wider outlet for
his imagination. He is given the words to do what he likes with. One
actor--to keep to Hamlet--might after long study have come to the
conclusion that, for instance, the last lines of that fine monologue at
the end of the second act should be triumphantly exclaimed in a loud
voice:
The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.
Whilst another, equally eminent, would make an equally great impression
by almost whispering the words to himself, as if afraid of betraying
the secret: "The play's the thing...." Who could say of the one or
the other interpretation "This is right," or "This is wrong"? In this
case the same result is arrived at by different means. On the other
hand, I remember a little story my father told me when I was a boy,
of a man who had been made very angry by a letter from his son at
the University asking him for money. In that mood he is met by an
old friend who asks him, "What's the matter? Why are you thus out of
sorts?" "Well," says the other, "look at this impertinent letter I've
just got from my son, 'Father, please send me money!'"--reading out the
words in a quick, impatient, commanding voice. "Of course," he adds, "I
shan't do anything of the kind."
"Let me see the letter," the benevolent friend asks--he was very
fond of the boy--and, reading the words with a gentle, pleading,
affectionate inflexion of the voice, he says, "Why, my dear fellow,
it's a very charming letter. He writes, 'Father, _please_ send me
money.'" "Ah," says the father, "if he writes like that, he shall have
it!" Here, without doubt, the different interpretation had a different
result. Certainly the son will have thought so.
Varieties such as just quoted are, however, quite impossible in music.
Here we are faced by absolute orders given by the composer who says:
"This is to be _forte_, this _piano_; here you must increase, there
decrease; here hurry, there retard." But this apparent clipping of
the interpreter's wings is only a blessing in disguise, for it makes
it possible for even a singer of inferior intelligence to render by
artistic representation or performance, _i.e._, to interpret a song; so
that, whilst we would not listen to a representation of the character
of Hamlet by a stupid or uneducated man, we may thoroughly enjoy the
rendering of a song by a singer with a fine voice, even if he be a most
uninteresting, commonplace person otherwise, _as long as he masters
the technique of his art and loyally and conscientiously follows the
directions given by the composer_.
A loyal, reverent attitude to the author is a thing on which too
great stress cannot be laid. A work deemed worth performing should be
rendered as the author wrote it. By this I do, of course, not mean that
an orchestral work or an organ fugue or a string quartet should not be
played on the pianoforte. Quite the contrary. Skilful transcriptions
and arrangements are indeed as great a boon as are reproductions
of the famous masterpieces of painting or sculpture, without which
our knowledge of the art would be lamentably defective. There have
also been cases where one great master has thought it desirable to
complement the work of another, either by writing accompaniments to
originally unaccompanied instrumental works, as Schumann did to Bach,
or by strengthening the accompanying orchestra in a choral work, as
Mozart did to Handel's _Messiah_. As far as I know the original text
has in all such cases been allowed to remain intact; and works thus
treated being obtainable in the original as well as in the complemented
version, the choice is left to the personal taste of the musicians
responsible for the performance. What I mean is that the _text_ of the
composer should not be tampered with. There have now and then attempts
been made at improving Beethoven's scores on the plea that some
instruments employed by the master--like, for instance, the flute--have
been developed so as to allow notes to be played on them now which
were impossible at the time Beethoven wrote, and that very likely, had
these notes been at the master's disposal, he would have made use
of them. This may or may not be so, but it seems to me a dangerous
theory to work upon, for once you commence meddling with a master work
it would be difficult to know where to draw the line, and there is
no saying whither it would lead. Besides, every great period in the
history of art has its own characteristics. A so-called full orchestra
in Beethoven's time was a very different thing from what we are
accustomed to consider one to-day, when woodwind, brass, percussion,
harps, and what not often alone outnumber the entire personnel of a
grand orchestra a century ago. Moreover, if you leave Beethoven's
scores untouched, his mastery of orchestration becomes all the more
wonderful. There are instances--just think of that glorious climax in
the Third _Leonora_ Overture, or the end of that to _Egmont_--where,
even considering only the mere physical power of sound, he gets results
from his orchestration that no modern writer has as yet surpassed.
It is hardly credible that, arrogant enough as such attempts at
improving Beethoven's orchestration are, there exist people who go
further still and actually alter a great composer's directions as
to expression. Most of us know how particularly fond Beethoven was
of interrupting a seemingly increasing _fortissimo_ by a sudden
_pianissimo_. You will recall that splendid _scherzo_ in the "Seventh
Symphony," where he commences with an exultant _fortissimo_, evidently
meaning to continue in that vein, when all of a sudden the _ft_ on the
last crotchet of the second bar is followed by a _pp_ on the first
crotchet of the third, the result is simply marvellous.
Well, some years ago I had to conduct that symphony as a deputy for
the regular conductor, who was prevented from being at his post on
that occasion. Can you imagine my surprise and disgust when, at the
rehearsal, commencing with the Scherzo, and looking forward to that
sudden _pp_ on the first note of the third bar, that _pp_ appeared
already on the last note of the second bar, which should have still
been _ft_. Stopping the orchestra indignantly, I asked, "What on earth
are you doing, gentlemen?"
"We have got it so in our parts," was the answer. "Impossible," I said.
"Let me see!" The leader handed me the part, and there, to be sure, I
was flabbergasted to find the mark of _pp_ on the first note of the
third bar actually transferred in blue pencil to the preceding note,
thus not only completely spoiling Beethoven's fun, but altering and
weakening the subject, which, as anybody might see, commences with
the down, not the up beat. I wonder if one should envy a man or pity
him for a degree of self-estimation which could render him capable of
blue-pencilling Beethoven!
He certainly has arrived at what a witty American friend of mine would
call the "Shoehorn stage." To my enquiries about a mutual acquaintance,
that gentleman answered, "He? Why, he's that big now he has to _use a
shoehorn to put on his hat_!"
But this is by no means an isolated example of the lamentable lack of
reverence in this country toward the works of the great masters of
music. However much one might be horrified at the utterly mistaken
_tempi_ one often has to listen to in the rendering of the classics,
especially Mozart and Beethoven, that, after all, sad and deplorable
as it is, may only be the consequence of ignorance or the result of
insufficient musical training on the part of the performer. It is
the wanton, deliberate tampering with the _text_ of a great composer
which is unpardonable. No one among the classics was more explicit
or exacting as to the way he wished his works to be rendered than
Beethoven. Take once more that surpassingly beautiful _Leonora_
Overture No. III. Who has not been thrilled to the innermost depths
of his soul by those distant trumpet-calls, each ending with a long
pause on the last note, and followed immediately, _i.e._, _without
any further pause and whilst that last note still lingers in one's
ears_, by one of the most divinely inspired phrases ever penned by
even that great master? After the first call the orchestra plays it,
in a mysterious _pianissimo_, in the same key as the call itself--B
flat; after the second, more impressive still, a third lower, in G
flat. Well, at a recent performance of that great work the conductor,
according to the papers an "acknowledged authority" on Beethoven,
coolly added a "general pause" on to each of those two pauses on the
last note of the trumpet-call; that after the second call lasting
for fully ten seconds. No words can express my disappointment, my
indignation, for, of course, the sublime beauty of that low G flat with
which the double-basses and 'celli enter _whilst the high B flat of the
trumpet-call is slowly dying away_ in the distance was lost completely.
Indeed it would have mattered little now in _what_ key the orchestra
had come in--the thing was irretrievably spoiled.
Anywhere on the Continent the audience would have given unmistakable
signs of their disapproval, and the Press been unanimous in the
condemnation of such practices on the part of the conductor. Here
that gentleman was vociferously applauded by the audience and--with,
I think, one solitary exception--lauded to the skies by the Press,
the one or two papers which were bold enough to timidly admit his
"occasionally taking liberties with Beethoven" declaring such liberties
to be those of "an intimate, an adept."
Intimate indeed! If a hundred years ago an intimate of Beethoven's
had dared to do such a thing in Beethoven's presence, the master, as
we know him from his letters, would have flung the score at his head,
thundering, "Knave, canst thou not read? Dost thou think if I had
wanted those two general pauses, I did not know how to put them in my
score?"
What are we coming to? Irreverence, contempt of traditions, breaking
with a glorious past, disregard of law, of form--are they also in the
realm of music a sign of the times, a sort of Bolshevism?
Fancy an actor, tired of that everlasting "To be or not to be," and
thinking it too hackneyed, surprising the audience by commencing the
great monologue for a change with "To exist or not to exist"; or
another, going one better, and considering the absence of rhyme in that
monologue rather a mistake of Shakespeare's, hitting on the happy and
original idea of correcting it into something like:
To be or not to be--
That is what staggers me.
And yet that would not be one whit less of a sacrilege.
And take a song or an aria; how often does one not hear even good
singers change a note into a higher one, with the object of showing the
voice to better advantage, or of making a phrase, generally the final
cadence, more effective, so as to get a few more handfuls of applause,
or perhaps even an additional recall at the end?
"That's villainous," says Hamlet, "and shows a most pitiful ambition."
This altering of notes brings me upon a question which has ever been
the subject of much controversy among musicians: Are there any rules as
to the singing of recitatives or, rather, to the substituting now and
then, in the singing of recitatives of notes other than those written
by the composer? Should, for instance, the phrase in the _Messiah_
[Illustration: Music]
My answer as regards the first of these two examples is as decided a
"No" as my "Yes" is in regard to the second. This may, perhaps, be
considered somewhat arbitrary and entirely a matter of taste, but I
venture to hope that after what I have to say on the subject it will
be found to be only partly a matter of taste, and of arbitrariness not
at all. I base my objection to the alteration in the first, and my
approval of that in the second example on a theory which seems to me to
commend itself by its simplicity, and may be explained in the shape of
a rule something like this:
Take the note as to the changing of which into a higher or lower you
are in doubt, and look first at the note _preceding_ and then at the
note _following_ that doubtful note. Then see if the note you wish to
substitute for the printed note lies on the way from the preceding to
the following note. If it does, you are justified in making the change;
if not, leave it alone. Here is our first example:
[Illustration: Music]
The doubtful note is the C on "shep," the preceding one is the G below,
the following is the C. Now, does the D you wish to substitute for the
C on "shep" lie between that "G" and that "C" on the second syllable of
shepherd? No, let the phrase therefore remain as written. In the second
example:
[Illustration: Music]
The questionable note is the A on "Da" and _does_ lie on the way from
the C sharp to the A on the second syllable of David; it is, therefore,
not only perfectly legitimate, but even good to make the change, and
the phrase should be sung:
[Illustration: Music]
The question of taste enters when it comes to the exception to the
rule. According to that it would be legitimate, taking yet a third
example from the _Messiah_:
[Illustration: Music]
In this case, however, it would be decidedly better to leave the phrase
unchanged, for we have had four B flats already in that short sentence,
and the A, coming pat on the F major chord, is rather relieving and
refreshing. Here, as in many other cases, "let your own discretion
be your tutor." Of an exception to the rule as regards the first of
these three examples being either justifiable or advisable I know no
instance. Of course, all I have said on this subject refers to the
slow, deliberate, serious recitative in oratorio and other sacred music
only, and not at all to what is called "secco" recitative in opera,
which is practically no more than speech somewhat rapidly delivered in
specified musical terms. There you should change the doubtful note into
one above or below it at every opportunity, for by doing so you impart
a certain spontaneity and freedom to the sentences, emphasising their
resemblance to the spoken word. Here is an example in the style of
Mozart:
[Illustration: Music]
But I am reaching the limit of the space allowed for this article and
fear my chat has been on "kindred topics" rather than on the alleged
main theme of interpretation. But surely none of my readers expected
me to answer the question "How to Interpret"? If so, I should be as
truly sorry for having disappointed them as I was some years ago to
have been obliged to disillusion the organist of the little Parish
Church of Alvie. I don't mean myself, for I only officiated there in
that capacity during the summer months, when I was at home. I mean the
regular, appointed, salaried, real organist. She was a young girl of
sixteen, a native of the parish, who, fond of music, like all Scots
people, could strum two or three tunes on the piano, and to whom I
had given a few lessons in the managing of the American organ in the
church. At the request of my old friend, the Rev. James Anderson, our
late and much lamented minister, I had introduced the playing of a
voluntary during collection, always, of course, improvising on the
Psalm or hymn tunes of the day's service, or on whatever came into my
head. Well, a week after I had left Alvie for London, the first year of
that innovation, I received a letter from the young lady, consisting of
the following five lines: "Dear Mr. Henschel--Mr. Anderson wishes me to
play voluntaries during collection, just as you did. Would you please
let me know how you do it?"
I was touched by so much faith and innocence. The playing of an
instrument--and singing, as such, is but playing on the vocal
instrument in our throats--may be taught and, with patience and
perseverance, brought to as near a degree of perfection as humanly
possible; that is a matter of craft, of physical, I may say muscular,
skill. The mystery of what is best, imperishable in any art, lies in
the soul and in the brain. If dormant, it may be awakened and fostered;
if absent, it cannot be acquired by teaching. Interpretation, though
but recreative, certainly is an art, or at least part of one. And art
is long and life is short, and of learning there is no end.
To have a chance of becoming an artist in the true sense of the word,
the student, fortunate in the possession of the heavenly gift of
talent, should from the outset resolve to strive for none but the
highest ideals, refuse to be satisfied, both in taking and giving, with
anything but the best and purest, and last, though by no means least,
resist the temptations which the prospect of popularity and its worldly
advantages, frequently the result of lowering that high standard, may
place in his way.
ROBERT BRIDGES'S LYRICAL POEMS[41]
[41] _October and Other Poems_. By Robert Bridges.
Heinemann. 1920. 5_s._ net. Poetical_ Works, Excluding
the Eight Dramas_. By Robert Bridges. 1912. Oxford
University Press. For other works see "Bibliography"
in current issue.
By J. C. SQUIRE
I
Mr. Bridges's new volume of poems (the first that he has published
since he became Poet Laureate) must be read for what it is, the work
of a man seventy-five years of age. This statement is not made as
an excuse: there are weak--occasional and patriotic--poems in the
book, but some also which are beautiful additions to his canon. But
some of his critics, so inadequate is still the recognition of what
he has done, have treated the book as though his claim to be a great
poet rested partly upon it, failing to read it, as they should, in
the light of all that has gone before it. Properly regarded, it
awakes not disappointment, but wonder that a poet so old should still
sometimes have the genuine impulse, should still keep his spirit fresh,
and should still be capable of ingenious and fruitful experiments
in technique--experiments moreover in which the content is never
subordinated to the form, however exacting and interesting the form may
be. _October_, _Noel_, _Our Lady_, _Flycatchers_, _The West Front_,
_Trafalgar Square_, and _Fortunatus Nimium_ are all poems that any man
might be proud to write in his prime; and beyond these there is the
delicious invention of _The Flowering Tree_:
What Fairy fann'd my dreams
while I slept in the sun?
As if a flowering tree
were standing over me:
Its young stem strong and lithe
went branching overhead,
And willowy sprays around
fell tasselling to the ground
All with wild blossom gay
as is the cherry in May ...
The sunlight was enmesh'd
in the shifting splendour
And I saw through on high
to soft lakes of blue sky:...
So I slept enchanted
under my loving tree
Till from his late resting
the sweet songster of night,
Rousing, awakened me:
Then! this--the birdis note--
Was the voice of thy throat
which thou gav'st me to kiss.
The occasion may suitably be seized to make a few notes on Mr.
Bridges's shorter--never mind the title and the word "lyrical"--poems
as a whole.
II
Mr. Bridges is often written of as though he were primarily a
technician. He has always taken a keen interest in prosody; he has
written books, and formulated theories, about it; his experiments
in classical metres and his notions about English spelling have, to
those who have not troubled to discover the intellectual strength and
the strong common sense which commonly marks his linguistic writings,
given him something of the air of a pedant. But the theoriser and the
innovator of the "shorter poems" has nothing to do with pedantry. There
are poems in which the scrutinous eye may detect very elaborate pains.
_April_ 1885 is a fabric of internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration
which it would be hard to parallel in English:
Wanton with long delay the gay Spring leaping cometh;
The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:
All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:
The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.
Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower
At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth:
On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower
In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.
That may be called a _tour-de-force_; as a rule, though Mr. Bridges's
variety of stanza and rhythm is immense, the craftsman never intrudes.
His ingenuities merely serve their purpose; his music cannot be
separated from his sense; his rhythms are sought, and found, as the
only suitable rhythms for the words and the scenes that are being
expressed and described. How otherwise than in the beautiful movement
used can we imagine the picture of _A Passer By_?--the fresh blue day,
the crowded sail, the vision of a queenly progress across the world to
a far harbour in the south? It is one of fifty such feats, triumphs of
fastidious art, never completely understood until the poems are read
aloud. His power of music has developed steadily throughout his career,
but scarcely a poem of any period can be quoted without illustrating
his surpassing technical gifts. We shall come to many presently; here,
when we are thinking primarily of the skill with which he weaves a
close-fitting garment of sound for his thought, we may take as a single
example, _London Snow_:
When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof, and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven....
The accuracy of the description is extraordinary and continues as the
town awakes, and boys go snowballing to school, a few carts creak
along, and the pale sun rises to awake the noisier day. But the
observation, the accuracy, the response of the heart to the beauty of
the scene, might have been found elsewhere: the astonishing management
of the rhythms, which, even when divorced from the meaning of the
words, translate the steady falling, the wayward criss-crossing,
the lightness and crispness, and soothing persistence of snow in an
almost windless air, is peculiar to Mr. Bridges. Words and music are
with him always inseparable: he is at the opposite pole from the man,
often not unintelligent in other ways, who forces his material into a
strait-jacket of jingle. In this respect his taste is as flawless, his
subtlety as unfailing, as any in the records of literature.
III
It is possible, and it has often been stated, that Mr. Bridges will
chiefly live as a poet of the English landscape. Certainly he would
live if only his landscape poetry were preserved. It may seem a large
assertion, but no Englishman has written so large a body of good
landscape poetry. There are two obvious things to be said about it.
The first is that his landscape is the landscape of the South of
England, more particularly of the Thames Valley and the downs by the
sea--two regions which he significantly chooses as typical, when,
in _The Voice of Nature_, he wishes to point an argument. He never
describes foreign or remote scenes; and--it may be regarded as symbolic
of his attitude to the more violent things of life--he never leaves
the land for the sea. Even British territorial waters he never sails;
there is much of the sea in his work, but it is the sea as seen from
the shore, blue and smiling and dancing, or whipped by the wind, caught
in a narrow peep between shoulders of the downs or watched from a hill
through a telescope:
There many an hour I have sat to watch; nay, now
The brazen disk is cold against my brow,
And in my sight a circle of the sea
Enlarged to swiftness, where the salt waves flee,
And ships in stately motion pass so near
That what I see is speaking to my ear.
Mr. Bridges's landscape is bounded by the English Channel; his hills
are the Downs; his rivers are clear and gentle streams; his trees oak
and beech, elm and larch; he is as surely of the South of England as
Wordsworth is of the North. And the second obvious thing is that,
being a true landscape poet and not a romantic who exploits nature to
find backgrounds for his passions, it is of ordinary landscapes that
he writes. Tennyson, too, was an observer, but many of his best-known
landscapes are of the selected kind. It is one thing to write of the
sort of natural scene traditionally approved as remarkable: sunset on
a marsh, sunrise on the Alps, stupendous cliffs, high cataracts, and
breakers in the moon. It is another to describe, giving the breath
of life to your description, what any man, going out on any day in
any season, will see when he looks over a five-barred gate or takes
a footpath through the woods. Mr. Bridges writes of nature like a
countryman. His abnormal scenes are rare; he sees the beauty in the
normal. He sings of nightingales when he hears them, but rooks are
far more frequent in his verse; his suns seldom go down in flaming
splendour, but drop red into the grey or die invisibly. One by one
scenes from his familiar landscape have moved him to verse, until his
books contain a complete catalogue of the English rural year, all its
ordinary recurrent colours, and scents and sounds, trees, flowers,
birds, skies and waters.
Spring. A village in the downs, and men winnowing in a barn. The
palm-willows and hazels. The first flowers, primroses and green
hyacinth spikes, shooting up amid moss and withered undergrowth. Brisk
ploughmen. Birds happily courting in the jocund sun.
Summer. The garden, with bees on the flowers and in the overhanging
limes, and rooks cawing in the elms. The hayfields in the sun; fields
green with waves of rustling wheat; the hum of insects and the song
of larks in a sky pure blue, or heaped with "slow pavilions of
caverned snow," "sunshot palaces of cloud"; the downs, starred with
small flowers, where rabbits nibble the grass; the noise of scythes.
The river: still water, the dip of oars, a boat that glides with its
reflection past flowering islets and dipping branches and meadows,
where "the lazy cows wrench many a scented flower"; bathers; fish
leaping in the pools; the peace of evening as it falls over water and
trees; moonlight on the flashing weir. There are storms that blacken
the sea and beat down the corn, but they pass and the sun comes out
again, gathering strength.
Autumn. The garden in September, with late flowers. The ripe orchards
and fields where "the sun spots the deserted gleanings with decay." The
winds of October that come and fill ruts and pools with golden leaves.
The later storms that mingle the leaves with snow.
Winter. The short days and the infrequent sun on lonely songless lands.
Rooks after the plough, the team against the skyline. A rough sea and
snow on the beach. Robin on the leafless bough. Dark afternoons and
evenings by the fire, companioned or alone.
All those signs of the seasons and hundreds more could be illustrated
from Mr. Bridges. One cannot do more here than huddle together a few
characteristic fragments from which the whole may be deduced. If the
first three are records of the shape, colour and movement of clouds,
it is fitting: all Mr. Bridges's landscapes have skies, and most of his
skies (being English) have clouds:
From distant hills their shadows creep,
Arrive in turn and mount the lea,
And flit across the downs and leap
Sheer off the cliff upon the sea;
And sail and sail far out of sight.
But still I watch their fleecy trains,
That piling all the south with light,
Dapple in France the fertile plains.
And o'er the treetops, scattered in mid-air,
The exhausted clouds laden with crimson light
Floated, or seemed to sleep; and, highest there,
One planet broke the lingering ranks of night.
The upper skies are palest blue
Mottled with pearl and fretted snow:
With tattered fleece of inky hue
Close overhead the storm-clouds go.
Their shadows fly along the hill
And o'er the crest mount one by one:
The whitened planking of the mill
Is now in shade and now in sun.
With gentle flaws the western breeze
Into the garden saileth,
Scarce here and there stirring the single trees,
For his sharpness he vaileth:
So long a comrade of the bearded corn
Now from the stubbles whence the shocks are borne,
O'er dewy lawns he turns to stray,
As mindful of the kisses and soft play
Wherewith he enamoured the light-hearted May,
Ere he deserted her;
Lover of fragrance, and too late repents;
Nor more of heavy hyacinth now may drink,
Nor spicy pink,
Nor summer's rose, nor garnered lavender,
But the few lingering scents
Of streakèd pea, and gillyflower and stocks
Of courtly purple and aromatic phlox.
And at all times to hear are drowsy tones
Of dizzy flies, and humming drones,
With sudden flap of pigeon wings in the sky,
Or the wild cry
Of thirsty rooks, that scour ascare
The distant blue, to watering as they fare
With creaking pinions, or--on business bent,
If aught their ancient polity displease--
Come gathering to their colony, and there
Settling in ragged parliament,
Some stormy council hold in the high trees.
In the golden glade the chestnuts are falling all;
From the sered boughs of the oak the acorns fall;
The beech scatters her ruddy fire;
The lime has stripped to the cold,
And standeth naked above her yellow attire;
The larch thinneth her spire
To lay the ways of the wood with cloth of gold.
Out of the golden-green and white
Of the brake the fir-trees stand upright
In the forest of flame, and wave aloft
To the blue of heaven their blue-green tuftings soft.
Out by the ricks the mantled engine stands
Crestfallen, deserted--for now all hands
Are told to the plough--and ere it is dawn appear
The teams following and crossing far and near,
As hour by hour they broaden the brown bands
Of the striped fields; and behind them firk and prance
The heavy rooks, and daws grey-pated dance:
As awhile, surmounting a crest, in sharp outline
(A miniature of toil, a gem's design)
They are pictured, horses and men, or now near by
Above the lane they shout lifting the share,
By the trim hedgerow bloom'd with purple air;
The long dark night, that lengthens slow,
Deepening with Winter to starve grass and tree,
And soon to bury in snow
The Earth, that, sleeping 'neath her frozen stole,
Shall dream a dream crept from the sunless pole
Of how her end shall be.
The best of all (such as _The Downs_ and _The Storm is Over_) cannot be
quoted except entirely; they are landscapes complete, earth and sky.
But let it not be supposed that Mr. Bridges is ever a mere describer
who sits down mechanically in front of any scene with his little box
of water-colours. We have known such, and sometimes they have been
learned in botany; their exactitude of detail is dull, their serried
statements useless; only the man who is touched by the beauty in a
scene, or aroused by a scene to an awareness of beauty behind it, will
fuse the several things he sees into a whole. The writer who has felt
no emotion communicates none, and the greatness of Mr. Bridges's poems
of landscape is derived not solely from his knowledge of landscape, the
wary eye, but from his feeling for it, the eye of love. His scenes are
precise, but they are never photographs; there is no doubt about the
sentiment that he felt when he saw them.
IV
And Mr. Bridges, even when at his best, is not only a landscape poet,
but a poet cunning in the experiences of the heart. Very many of his
poems are love poems and many of them are beautiful: if the fact
has not been widely observed it must be because they are happy love
poems, or at least because they are not excessive in expression. The
proclivity that makes him, in another sphere, write not about storms
but about calms after storms, is seen always: he has no violence,
no vehement abandonment. But there is little of that in Wordsworth
and other poets the depth of whose affections, the reality of whose
suffering, cannot be doubted. Mr. Bridges's love-poetry makes no brutal
assault on us. His constant reference to Virgil, Mozart and the old
composers is significant. He never declaims, never raves, despairs, or
burns in print: but he knows the ways of lovers' hearts, and his quiet
stanzas, whether their subject be the pain of doubt, or separation, or
the joy of union, or calm affection by the warm domestic hearth, have
a truth and strength which outwear the ardours of many poets. In _When
My Love was Away_, _My Spirit sang all day_, _I will not let thee go_,
and twenty more he lover's calendar is written as that of the seasons
elsewhere, and if his praise is soft and measured like the old music in
which he so constantly delights, love's fine extravagance is, for all
the tempered sound, nevertheless there:
Her beauty would surprise
Gazers on Autumn eves,
Who watched the broad moon rise
Upon the scattered sheaves.
He is self-controlled and never shouts; he does not hunt the universe
for new and strange sorrows nor harrow himself overmuch with the
problems of existence; but those griefs that fall to the common lot
of mankind have come to him and drawn beautiful poetry from him. Many
poets have written habitually of Death; few have said as little about
Death as Mr. Bridges; but he has said all he has to say and need say
about death, loss, and sorrow in two poems, the poem which begins:
I never shall love the snow again
Since Maurice died,
and the other _On a Dead Child_: "Perfect little body, without fault or
stain on thee...."
So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing--
Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed--
Propping thy wise, sad head,
Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.
So quiet! doth the change content thee?--Death, whither hath he
taken thee?
To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?
The vision of which I miss,
Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee?
Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us
To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail
us.
In _Winter Nightfall_ there is all the complaint of ailing old age, in
_Pater Filio_ the passionate anxiety of parent for child; the normal,
inevitable griefs and dejections are all here, expressed with gravity,
yet always with poignancy. But normal and inevitable they are. One gets
the impression that, beyond the "common lot," the poet has had few
distresses. Intense joy--nobody has given it better definition than
he--is as rare as intense sadness, but ordinarily he is happy, or at
worst not uncomfortably melancholy, and the happiness has become more
pervasive as he has grown older. He is the poet of a leisured country
life, led by a sensitive physically healthy man, with whom the major
things of life have gone well and who, in those circumstances, is
temperamentally inclined to a grateful contentment.
V
Mr. Bridges has not made the easy appeal by violence of expression; and
he has not made the easy appeal by violence of doctrine. If he has been
less discussed than many inferior writers, it is not so much that he
is without doctrine as that he is without novel doctrine and has never
been a doctrinaire. Any noisy demonstrator with a new lie may attract
attention, if it is only the attention of those who wish to dispute
with him; and it is easier to dispute (or agree) with the man whose
"views" are explicit than with him who leaves them implicit. The mere
fact that Mr. Bridges's practical philosophy has been held by hundreds
of millions of ordinary people in many ages does not prove that he has
no philosophy. He is a Christian, but he says little about that. He is
politically sceptical of systems, but he says little about that. He
accepts life, with its pains and pleasures, and he is happy that his
life has been cast in an ordered traditional civilisation. He sees life
in proportion, with the greater goods clear: childhood, the love of a
woman and of children, the beauty of the earth, days of peace, joyful
work, friendship. He does not proclaim a way of life, but it will be
easy for his critics to deduce one from his poetry: if he does not
tell people how to enjoy life it is because he is too busy enjoying
it himself, and if he does not expound his religion, it is because
he probably holds it to be "the religion of all sensible men." He
never loses hold of his settled philosophy. In depression he does not
imaginatively revel in the gloom of a Universe gone black, but consoles
himself out of his knowledge:
O soul, be patient: thou shalt find
A little matter mend all this,
Some strain of music to thy mind,
Some praise for skill not spent amiss.
In the peace of a churchyard he can write:
Nay, were my last hope quenched, I here would sit
And praise the annihilation of the pit.
He lives through the moments of dejection and awaits, with sure hope,
those moments when
Life and joy are one--we know not why--
As though our very blood long breathless lain
Had tasted of the breath of God again.
There are times when he is at almost that pitch of bliss for days
together, and he says with each evening:
That I have known no day
In all my life like this.
And with any dawn may come the exhilaration and the resolve
I too will something make
And joy in the making.
Very rarely some slight dogmatic statement is actually present, the
affirmation of something which is not necessarily false because it
is as old as man, and modestly put. "For howso'er man hug his care,
The best of his art is gay." He sees Spring in Winter more often than
Winter in Spring:
And God the Maker doth my heart make bold
To praise for writing works not understood,
Who all the worlds and ages doth behold,
Evil and good as one, and all as good.
It may by some be called an easy acceptance; by others the answer will
be made that the refusal to accept does not get us much further. Mr.
Bridges's own answer would perhaps be Lycomedes':
men who would live well
Weigh not these riddles, but unfold their life
From day to day.
No attempt has been made in these brief notes to do more than indicate
the artistic virtues and the outlook of Mr. Bridges: the elucidation
is scant enough, and there was no space for reasoned criticism or
for discussion of the qualities which he lacks and which other poets
have possessed. But it may, in conclusion, be repeated that he
is, as an artist, as careful and skilful as any poet who has ever
written, and that as a man he has never lied, never posed, never
assumed a factitious mood because it might impress or a factitious
opinion because it might startle. He _is_ sensible, and he is (in
the best sense) commonplace in his outlook and in his affections
and admirations; the changing conditions of our times have affected
him little; he thinks more of the "man harrowing clods" than of the
"breaking of nations"; the river, the cornfields, the village church,
the domestic fireside, do obscure for him the mental and physical
struggles of our world; he has his ideal of the sound mind in the
sound body, and he cannot see why anything should modify it. But his
philosophy will not stale when many of our controversialists have
gone the way of Godwin and Malthus; and a reader who went to him for
knowledge of how to live would certainly not be led on the rocks,
little as Mr. Bridges may directly say on the subject. Nobody could be
less like an apostle, but serenity, delight, cleanliness, and honesty
are in him--and courage. The thought of death does not appal him, it
braces him to work and joy. "Man hath his life," says Thetis in one of
his dramas, "that it must end condemns it not for naught." The same
certainty is in the lyrics:
Daily thy life shortens, the grave's dark peace
Draweth surely nigh,
When good-night is good-bye;
For the sleeping shall not cease.
Fight, to be found fighting: nor far away
Deem, nor strange thy doom.
Like this sorrow 'twill come,
And the day will be to-day.
The greatest of practical truths could not be put more stoutly, nor
with a finer imaginative touch.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
MR. YATES THOMPSON'S ILLUMINATED BOOKS
These lines are written before the date at which the second portion of
Mr. Yates Thompson's illuminated books are to be sold at Sotheby's.
They have no reference therefore to the relative value of the books
as realised under the hammer. The intrinsic value of books, however,
should not be measured merely by their market price. Splendid as are
the French and Italian manuscripts and the eight printed books which
are included in the sale, the greatest interest of all has its centre
in the fourteen books which show the gay piety of English illumination
between the last quarter of the twelfth century and the middle of the
fifteenth. Indeed, no other group in all the hundred books to which
Mr. Yates Thompson definitely limited his famous collection has quite
the same claims of artistic and historical interest as these. They
do not, of course, cover the whole range of English illumination.
There is no example of the art of outline drawing, which flourished
with amazing vigour in England for a century and a half before the
Norman Conquest, convicting Mr. G. K. Chesterton of inexactitude when,
in a recent number of THE LONDON MERCURY, he suggests that mediæval
illuminators used their paints before they had learned how to draw.
The vivacity and grace shown in those early drawings, chastened but
not subdued by Continental and Byzantine influences, left traces in
English books, and continued to afford a firm groundwork for English
illumination for more than three centuries. There are but few examples
of them in private hands. Neither has Mr. Yates Thompson any example
of the great Winchester School, represented in the tenth century by
the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, now the property of the Duke
of Devonshire, and in the twelfth by the great Bible at Winchester
Cathedral. But English art had its flowering time in the fourteenth
century, and its late summer in the fifteenth; and amongst the books
offered for sale at Sotheby's are brilliant examples of both these
periods.
* * * * *
Taking the more important of these English books in the order of their
date, we have first the _Life of St. Cuthbert_, with its series of
fifty-six lovely full-page miniatures, probably painted at Durham about
1180, a delightful example of a rare type of book. _The Apocalypse_
has an important chapter to itself in the history of painted books,
and the late thirteenth-century copy in the collection is one of the
finest surviving copies of that favourite picture-book of the Middle
Ages. It has much in common with the copy at Lambeth, and Dr. M. R.
James traces them both to the same birthplace, probably St. Augustine's
at Canterbury. The copy in the sale has no less than 152 miniatures,
some of which seem to have been painted in Italy, whence more than six
centuries later Mr. Yates Thompson brought it back to England.
* * * * *
The three fourteenth-century manuscripts in the group are a Psalter of
Northern origin, probably written for a member of the Yorkshire family
of de la Twyere; an early Sarum Missal, with historiated initials, in
which some of the figure-drawing recalls that of Queen Mary's _Psalter_
in the British Museum; and the _Psalter_ of John of Gaunt, to whom it
is believed to have been given, perhaps on his marriage with Blanche
of Lancaster in 1359. Many of the miniatures in this splendid book are
enshrined in Gothic canopies and painted in gold and silver; and the
silver, so apt to turn black through oxydization, has on most of these
pages kept its lustre. This _Psalter_ is one of the finest examples of
English work which has survived from the second half of the fourteenth
century. Mr. Yates Thompson confesses that it cost him a bigger price
than any other of his books.
* * * * *
The _Hours of Elisabeth y^e Quene_, so called from the signature of the
Queen of Henry VII. written at the foot of one of the pages, is a very
rich and beautiful example of that new spirit in English illumination
which has been connected with the marriage of Queen Anne of Bohemia
to King Richard II. in 1382. Dating from that event, English work
for almost the first time takes a character which is quite distinct
from contemporary French or Flemish illumination, and the change is
attributed to the work and influence of the artists whom the Bohemian
princess brought in her train. The strong, clear outline, made by pen
or pencil, which had been a tradition from the beginning of English
pictorial art, now yields place to soft brushwork. The human figure,
which has hitherto been represented by types, assumes individuality and
realism. There is found, too, a new character in portraiture, with the
features carefully and delicately moulded. The rich borders of books of
this period have details unknown in the French work, which, hitherto,
has been so nearly akin to that done in England. The kinship can be
traced rather to contemporary books painted in Italy and Southern
Germany. These English borders are apt to have a certain heaviness in
design, especially when compared with the graceful ivy-leaf pattern in
French illumination of the same date. Thanks, however, to the greater
brilliancy and gaiety of the colouring, which is also a note of the new
English style, this heaviness in design is hardly felt. In this _Book
of Hours_ the colours, which for the most part are delicate shades of
red and blue, heightened with white, and richly gilt, are especially
brilliant. The class of illumination which it represents belongs to a
limited and distinct period of English art which has yet to be fully
explored.
* * * * *
The group of eight books printed on vellum which follows the English
books in the order of lots, and in the catalogue is sandwiched
between them and the French and Italian manuscripts, is quite worthy
of such good company. These printed books show how deliberately and
how successfully the first printers sought to copy the manner and
also the special beauty of the finest manuscripts of their own age.
Amongst these fine volumes are the Mainz _de Officiis_ of 1466; Peter
Schoeffer's _Justinian_ of 1468; an illuminated copy of Jenson's
_Pliny_ of 1472--the type of which had so notable an influence on the
work of the Kelmscott and Doves Presses; John of Verona's _Valturius_
of 1472, the earliest book to be printed in Italy with Italian
woodcuts--and this copy is illuminated too. The group shows how far
from vain even in an artistic sense was the boast made in the colophon
of one of the earliest Venetian printers that already by his new craft
"Calami superaverat artem."
B. H. N.
GENERAL NOTES
Messrs. Dobell's catalogue for March, 1920, contains mention of a very
curious and beautiful book of designs made exclusively of feathers.
There are about one hundred and fifty of these designs, which were
made, according to the inscription on the title-page, by "Dionisio
Minaggio Giardinero Di s^a e^a Guobernator Del Stat di Milano.
Inventor et Feccit Lano Del 1618." His Excellency the Governor of the
State of Milan was fortunate in possessing so talented a gardener.
Dionisio Minaggio was, in his way, a remarkable artist. His feather
pictures, which include a beautiful series of birds portrayed in their
own plumage, a series of hunting scenes, illustrations of musical
instruments, and a number of charming figures from the Old Comedy, are
often quite enchanting. The designs are reminiscent of the best sampler
work, while the feathers give a richness, variety, and unexpectedness
of colouring such as no sampler has ever possessed. Feather work of a
much later period is not uncommon; but we should imagine that so large
a series of such an early date is something quite unique. The book is
priced at £200.
* * * * *
The catalogue of the library of Mr. Walter Thomas Wallace, which is
to be sold in the last days of March by the American Art Association,
in New York, has just reached us. Mr. Wallace's astonishingly rich
collection includes copies of the four Folios of Shakespeare and of
several of the Quartos. Among the Elizabethan rarities are _The Palace
of Pleasure_, Sidney's _Arcadia_, _The Faerie Queene_, and other poems
of Spenser. Among the eighteenth-century treasures is to be found one
of the two known copies of Goldsmith's _Threnodia Augustalis_. Keats
and Shelley are well represented. There is a very complete collection
of Tennyson first editions and an almost unique series of Lamb books,
including a copy in the original binding of the almost extinct first
edition of _Poems for Children_ (1809). There are also remarkably
complete sets of first editions of such American authors as Poe,
Bryant, Longfellow. We anticipate some new records in the way of prices.
* * * * *
As we go to press the first reports of the beginning of the Buxton
Forman sale at the Anderson Galleries, New York, reach us. They
emphasize the present flourishing condition of what the late owner of
the books in question once, in an unguarded moment, called "The Keats
and Shelley" business. Two copies of books by Keats, which belonged to
Fanny Braune (afterwards Mrs. Lindon), were included in the first day's
sale. The _Poems_ (1817), inscribed with her name, "Frances Lindon,"
and presumed to be a presentation copy from the poet, and a first
edition of _Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St. Agnes_, etc. (1820),
inscribed on the title-page "to F. B. from J. K." These two books
fetched $1750 and $4000, and, at the normal rate of exchange, £350
and £800 respectively. Even a series of eighteen letters from George
Keats sold for $1800. Apparently it is better to be a poet's brother
than oneself a poet, for an eight-page autograph manuscript of William
Blake's poem _Genesis_, which is still unpublished, was bought by the
Rosenbach Company, of Philadelphia, for $1350.
* * * * *
Other items in this sale were Browning's _Pauline_, first edition
(1833), an uncut copy with the original boards and paper label intact
($2560) and the MS. of _Colombe's Birthday_, title and fifty-nine folio
pages ($1200). Eight hundred dollars, normally the equivalent of £160,
was the price paid for a copy of the first edition of _Adam Bede_
(1859), presented by George Eliot to Thackeray.
A. L. H. and I. A. W.
CORRESPONDENCE
AMERICAN COPYRIGHT
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--I trust you will find room to insert this letter after the space
you have given to Mr. G. H. Putnam. We are all grateful for the work
that Mr. Putnam has done, but--to use an American phrase, which no
doubt he will appreciate--"there are others" who have worked equally
hard, and not infrequently with a more satisfactory result. We must
thank you, therefore, for your brief Editorial Note in the March issue.
The real reason, however, for this letter is to correct some of the
statements made by Mr. Putnam. He glorifies the new American Act
because of its liberal allowance of 120 days' "interim" copyright.
He has understated his own case. The Act gives sixty days from the
publication abroad in which to deposit a copy at Washington, and four
months from the date of deposit in which to take up the copyright,
subject to the numerous harassing technicalities of the Act. An author,
therefore, has 180 instead of 120 days.
In Mr. Putnam's second statement he tries to score a point against
Great Britain. As in the former paragraph he understated his case, in
this he would overstate it.
He complains that American authors have to make a _bona-fide_
publication in Great Britain within fourteen days of the publication in
the United States. He italicises _bona fide_. He must have overlooked
the fact that _publication_ is an essential part of copyright in the
States just as much as it is in Great Britain. This item then can be
ruled out.
He contrasts, however, the meagre allowance of fourteen days under the
British Act against the liberal allowance of 180 (not 120) days under
the American Act. It must be pointed out with due emphasis that when
the author is not hampered by typesetting clauses, printed copyright
notices, and filing difficulties, time in the matter of publication is
really of little account. The American publisher has merely to ship off
a consignment before he publishes the book in the States and to await
instructions from the London house that the consignment has arrived.
There is no difficulty in this step. So long as the technicalities of
United States Act still stand we are sick of these counter-irritants,
which, now the war is over, "cut no ice."
We have heard that the Typesetters' Union--of which Mr. Putnam seems
unduly alarmed--could be made to understand from statistics supplied
that they are standing in their own light. But, perhaps, if they are
still obdurate on the practical side, they might be influenced by
the argument of the idealist "that it is a disgrace to a civilised
nation to stand outside the intellectual Union of other civilised
Nations." The Americans have had the opportunity of joining the revised
Convention of Berne for many years, but have neglected to do so.
It is not astonishing, therefore, that President Wilson cannot
influence them to follow him into the League of Nations under the Peace
Treaty.
For the last paragraph of Mr. Putnam's letter--his ἀπολογία {apologia}
for American authors and publishers--all authors in Great Britain are
grateful. If British authors have not followed with appreciation the
efforts of their brothers in the States, they should have done so. We
gladly now pay tribute to the work of those who so long and earnestly,
yet unsuccessfully, have struggled to bring the United States to join
the ranks of other civilised nations.--Yours, etc.,
G. HERBERT THRING.
March 11th.
[Perhaps Major Putnam will reply.--EDITOR.]
FLAUBERT AND MR. STURGE MOORE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Mr. H. W. Crundell thinks that I should explain the absence of
a note to my poem _Micah_; the presence of the one he suggests would
have appeared to me an impertinence. Did Gray and Arnold call attention
by notes when they adapted a few lines from Pindar? Did Tennyson thus
docket what he owed to Homer and Virgil? To me the explanation seems
rather due from Mr. Crundell: why he wrote his letter, and from you,
why you printed it. However, obviously you think differently, so this
occasion may as well serve me to allay an innocent curiosity that I
neither intended to provoke nor to baffle. Besides Mr. Crundell's find
there is a longer passage from _Salammbo_ in my _Mariamne_. I put a
line from Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_ into my _Rout of the
Amazons_, a phrase from Myers' translation of Pindar into _At Bethel_,
and a phrase from Milton into _Love's First Communion_. Excepting the
usual array from the Bible, I believe these to be all my verbal and
literal appropriations.--Yours, etc.,
T. STURGE MOORE.
P.S.--I have forgotten an unintentional one, a line from Keats in
_Mariamne_.
[By printing Mr. Crundell's letter we didn't mean to suggest that we
agreed with his argument; we were merely interested in the derivation
of a beautiful passage in a beautiful poem.--EDITOR.]
* * * * *
"MANSOUL"
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your review of Mr. Doughty's _Mansoul_ reveals an attitude
somewhat similar to that of Jeffrey towards Wordsworth. May a humble
reader hesitatingly retort the phrase--This will never do? Your
reviewer does not think Mr. Doughty should be ignored, but he finds
Chaucer easier and more modern, and considers this poetry at best a
thing of tough shreds and purple patches.
With this opinion I do not contend, for I do not clearly understand
upon what principle of criticism your reviewer is acting; but I should
like to suggest that his opinion springs from a misconception which
ought not to be nourished by the LONDON MERCURY. He seems to think that
Mr. Doughty's "guttural obscurity of speech," his style in general,
is a vital fault. I submit that he assumes rather than proves such
a degree of obscurity, and that he puts an excessive value upon the
merely formal and conventional graces of English blank verse. He does
not recognise that Mr. Doughty is making not only his own poem, but his
own style, and that the poetry is to be judged not exclusively by its
conformity with traditional verse--the false standard of the eighteenth
century--but by the success with which its style empowers and lucidly
presents the author's conception. Casual wrynesses, unaccustomed
inversions, idiosyncratic punctuation (forgive, dear Cobbett, the long
words) do not affect this central question. Your reviewer admits the
greatness of the poet's conception, admits that it has the substantial
elements of noble poetry--I mean such elements as we find in _Paradise
Lost_ and _The Dynasts_--but is unwilling to admit that his form is his
natural form, the form that expresses not only his explicit intention
but his implicit character, and, therefore, a good form. I submit that
Mr. Doughty's style in poetry is the inevitable expression of his mind
at work upon imaginative themes. I submit that a true poet does not
and cannot choose his style, and that the test of his style is not
its degree of conformity with Chaucer's simplicity, Milton's lofty
sweetness, Tennyson's effusive delicacy, but the fullness with which
it expresses his own imaginative vision. Mr. Doughty has written,
not a few miscellaneous lyrics, but a vast body of poetry in which
a perfectly clear apprehension of past and future is presented. His
themes are unfolded with such fullness as enables us to judge whether
the expression of them, unusual as it may seem, ruins them or preserves
them unspoiled, sustains or dulls their brightness. With extreme
diffidence I suggest that your reviewer has not addressed himself to
this proposition, and that this proposition remains an elementary
principle of criticism. And I would remark that Mr. Doughty's own
observations upon his style (note to _The Dawn in Britain_, Volume 6)
might suitably be referred to for a precise statement of his attitude
towards the English language.
The principles of criticism do not change, but may be eclipsed
or clouded. They are familiar, yet need constant reassertion and
illustration. Difficult as it may be to reduce these abstractions to
clear and useful formulæ, I think it would be a service to letters
if you, Sir, would state and clarify them afresh. Wanting definition
and illustration, creation and criticism may become discordant, with
unhappy results for each. It is my suspicion of a faint discord that
must form the apology for the length of this letter.--Yours, etc.,
S. E.
[We did not dispute that Mr. Doughty's style is natural to him. We
merely said that that is his and our misfortune.--EDITOR.]
* * * * *
JOHN DONNE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--After reading the most interesting paper on _John Donne_ in the
last number of THE LONDON MERCURY, I wonder whether Browning had not
him in mind when he wrote _The Grammarian's Funeral_. "An hydroptic
immoderate desire of human learning and languages" consumed the "soul
by-droptic" grammarian no less than Donne; like Donne even to the
crumbs he'd "fain eat up the feast, Aye, nor feel quaesy." He knew
nothing, it is true, of "the quaesy pain Of being beloved and loving";
his was a passion of mind only, though, like Donne, he knew the
sickness of the body overwrought. The analogy could be traced further.
For more reasons than the tracing of remembrance of Donne in one poem
it would be interesting to know how "longe" Browning "hadde ygo" to the
earlier poet.--Yours, etc.,
J. R. RACKHAM.
Queen Mary High School for Girls, Anfield Road, Liverpool, February
13th.
* * * * *
A POINT IN SHERIDAN
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--In one of the scenes of Sheridan's _School for Scandal_ occurs
the following passage: "You may see her on a little squat pony _with
her hair plaited up behind like a drummer's_...." (Act 2, sc. 2.)
I presume that the underlined words, which have often puzzled me, are
an allusion to the manners of the time, with which I am insufficiently
acquainted. As none of the editions I have been able to consult give
any explanation on the point, perhaps one of your readers would oblige
me by throwing some light on the matter.--Yours, etc.,
F. PELLISIER.
Remiremont, Vosges, February 16th.
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
Vandalism in Egypt is deplored in London, but in the present
circumstances we cannot throw stones. Rubbish-heaps are often romantic,
and those of Fostât (Old Cairo) contain masses of mediæval pottery
and other treasures well worth preserving; but the local authorities
propose to create a new suburb by erecting workmen's dwellings all over
them. Systematic excavation cannot be hurried, and careful search might
throw light on the origin of maiolica.
For the first time perhaps in its long history, the Society has devoted
an ordinary meeting to the discussion of Ways and Means. The following
are the principal alternatives: (i) To raise the subscription and
invite donations; (ii) to extend the franchise and popularise the
Society; and (iii) to economise further and lower the output. The
argument that thousands are waiting to join in the work of the Society
is not convincing; and as about ninety per cent. of the Fellows do
not attend the meetings, the publications are their only tangible
reward. If the standard is to be maintained, few would expect the same
return for half the subscription they paid on joining, but to double
the annual levy would be a drastic reform; yet the Society is further
committed to field-work of considerable public interest. The rich we
have always with us, but their presence is not felt so much here as in
America.
THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS
During the last few weeks the restoration of the Lady Chapel of
Worksop Priory has been in progress. It was a roofless ruin, retaining
much fine thirteenth-century work. It is being re-roofed, the fallen
portions rebuilt, and missing parts renewed in the style of the
original building, the new work being made to resemble as nearly as may
be what the old is believed to have been.
This on the face of it _sounds_ reasonable enough, but experience has
shown that in practice the result of such treatment is the reverse of
satisfactory. It is exactly what the restorers of the last century
did, and what people with any knowledge or love of old buildings
deplore to-day, whenever it comes to their notice. It is just such a
case as this which goes to the root of the matter in which the Society
interests itself, and its customary ruling thereon may be stated in the
following way:
1. The ruin should be subjected only to repairs needed for its upkeep.
2. If the site is absolutely necessary to the community for the
purposes of its daily life, it has a right to use such ruins and even
in extremity to demolish them.
3. Confronted by a similar necessity it may be justifiable to
incorporate an old building in a new one. The danger in this case
lies, however, in the fact that the desire to restore for the sake of
restoration may outrun the actual need of a new building designed to
fulfil some special purpose.
Having made this concession to a genuine demand, the Society still
stands out against restoration. The new work should be good and in
harmony with the old, but it should also be living architecture and not
a study in dead style.
As Professor Lethaby expressed it, "Architecture is a current speech,
it is not an art of classical quotation."
But the Lady Chapel of Worksop Priory is actually being restored.
So, though much more might be said, the case ends here, save for the
thought that with better guidance different conclusions would have been
reached.
The promoters of the scheme, having so far determined to make
use of the ruin, might have asked the advice of a selected group
representative of our best men--a group which should include within it
one real authority versed in the building methods of the same period as
that of the ruin, an acknowledged authority on modern architecture, a
representative both of the Society of Antiquaries and the Society for
the Protection of Ancient Buildings. To these one would add a local
architect or builder conversant with the local conditions and material.
To such an advisory board would be committed the task of choosing an
architect, whose plans would be submitted for approval before being
recommended to the promoters.
The scheme may seem to savour too much of the ideal which has no part
in actual life, yet it is worth consideration, for from it, one might
say almost inevitably, good work must result.
As a matter of fact the Committee does comprise within itself the
qualities of such an advisory board, but the above suggestion is made
for those who may prefer, for one reason or another, to ask advice
elsewhere.
THE EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND
The work of this Society has two main branches: the first is the
excavation of Egypt's buried treasures and the publication of careful
records of the finds; the second is the preservation and translation
of the inscriptions, including papyri found in the course of
excavation. The Society has already published hundreds of papyri, the
most important being included in the _Oxyrhynchus Papyri_ edited by
Professors Grenfell and Hunt.
In a lecture given at the rooms of the Royal Society, Burlington House,
on Friday, February 20th, on "The Historical Value of Greek Papyri,"
Mr. H. Idris Bell, a member of the staff of the British Museum, gave
a scholarly review of the work already done in the publication of
papyri, both in this and in other countries, and laid stress on the
necessity for further work in this direction. He pointed out that,
although this country was holding its own in the matter of publication
of fresh material, it was falling behind other countries in the work of
comparing and computing results and the tabulation of the information
thus obtained.
The lecturer said papyri help to correct the false perspective in which
we see history. We tend to see it as a succession of dramatic events
and of great personalities, and economic processes attain a precision
and clearness which is not obvious to contemporaries. But this is not
our attitude towards our own time, and documents show us that it was
not that of our predecessors. Great events of history occur but seldom,
and when they do they are recorded from the purely personal point of
view. The historian cannot chronicle minor interests, but the papyri
serve as the "acid test" of the objectivity of his narrative, and for
this reason it is well that the student should supplement his reading
of history by some study of documents, and for no department of ancient
history have we a body of documentary evidence comparable to the papyri.
Papyri make us acquainted with the ordinary man, his style of living,
his domestic relations, and his family life; it thus becomes possible
to study the popular psychology of Græco-Roman Egypt, and so, by
analogy, to some extent, the Græco-Roman world.
With regard to administration papyri show us the actual working, not
the theory, of administration, and the two rarely exactly coincide. So
too with law; the practice of the law usually differs from the theory
of law, and papyri reveal the practice and show us the applied law.
Turning to religion, papyri mostly illustrate the popular attitude
towards religion; there is not much on mystery cults, but they show
the attitude of the individual towards the deity. It is also possible
from them to trace the borrowings of Christianity from Paganism and to
contrast the Christian and the pagan attitude.
The lecturer gave many interesting illustrations from papyri, including
letters from parents to children and children to parents, letters of
condolence, letters from men engaged upon business or war to their
wives and families, which give a vivid picture of the life of the time.
Sir Frederic Kenyon, K.C.B., who was in the chair, in thanking the
lecturer emphasised the importance of the study of papyri and the
scope this branch of research opened for original work. Here is a vast
field of labour, at present only superficially worked; the harvest is
plentiful, but the labourers are few; certainly they are indefatigable,
but more workers are needed if the full value is to be extracted from
these papyri. Other countries are alive to the importance of the work,
but our own Universities are somewhat apathetic and need arousing.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
At the monthly meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society on February
19th, Mr. Percy H. Webb exhibited a portion of a find of late Roman
coins from Egypt. The find covered the period A.D. 298-313, Domitius
Domitianus--Maximinus Daza, and was, said to have comprised nearly two
bushels of coins. The coins which Mr. Webb had been able to examine
belonged to the last five years of the period, and were of three
rulers only, Galerius Maximian, Galeria Valeria, and Daza. The bulk
of the coins were of the Alexandria mint, although Antioch, Cyzicus,
and Nicomedia were also represented. The find presented a number of
interesting features and afforded an interesting opportunity of testing
M. Jules Maurice's work, which it supported in every detail.
Mr. G. C. Brooke read a paper by Mr. R. C. Lockett on "The Coinage of
Offa." The most reasonable suggestion for the date of the beginning
of the Mercian coinage was after the battle of Otford in 774, but it
might be as late as the Council of Chelsea, 786. The mint was probably
Canterbury, as seven of his moneyers struck coins for Coenwulf, and
three of these worked for Eadberht, Cuthred, and Baldred. Coins bearing
the name Eadberht were probably to be attributed to Eadberht, Bishop
of London, 772-787. Another penny with the name hitherto not read
satisfactorily should probably be attributed to Higberht, Bishop of
Lichfield, who was made Archbishop in 787. Cynethrith's coinage was
evidently struck in Offa's lifetime, either as a complimentary issue,
or in a period of regency during Offa's absence. A classification
of the pennies of Offa was proposed, based on their affinity to the
coinage of Jaenberht and Æthilheard.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
FLOWERS IN THE GRASS. By MAURICE HEWLETT. Constable. 5_s._ net.
In recent years Mr. Hewlett, who earned his first fame as a romancer,
has been devoting himself most seriously to verse. And he has done a
very remarkable thing. Two or three years ago, with perhaps twenty
novels and several books of poems behind him, he brought out a long
poem--_The Song of the Plow_--which was a new thing in poetry,
and which was indisputably the finest thing he had done in either
"harmony," an epical poem, which was as easy to read as an excellent
novel, and as good to read the third time as the first. There were
lovely detachable things in it, but it was most striking when taken as
a whole, racy, muscular, original. He followed it with _The Village
Wife's Lament_, a tragedy of the war, only less striking in so far as
it was less long. We have here a collection of his recent lyrics. They
have not the outstanding merit of those works on the larger canvas, but
they are far superior to his early lyrics, and bear new witness after
their manner to his late poetic flowering.
The poems are all rural: mainly Wiltshire, the ancient downs, the
valleys, the villages, the spire of Salisbury. But, save for a few
delicious fancies about flowers, they all contain the human too.
Landscape for Mr. Hewlett, however beautiful, however forbidding,
is always a background for human character and human history. On
that great hill the ledges were planted with corn by primitive men;
on that other the Roman sentries stood; in that field there is a
ploughman whose eyes and hair and thews are Saxon. Quotation from him
is difficult, because of the very largeness of his imagination; his
details are so subordinate that, though he usually gets the phrase
right in its context, he seldom gets the phrase arresting out of its
context. Now and then he is gentler, his language more honeyed, his
rhythms less rugged, and in poems like _Summer Night_ he falls into a
beautiful and a very "contemporary" music.
That, and _Jacob's Ladder_, and _The Cedar_, and the uncanny and
impressive _Chelsbury_ are among the best things in the book; the last
two show his historic imagination at its best, economical though the
expression is. But the best of all, we think, is _In the Fire_.
The fire burns low;
Now the dying embers
Twinkle and glow
Like village lights,
Seen from the heights
In dark Decembers.
There's the foggy gleam
From the Horse and Groom,
Where topers dream
In front of their liquor,
And candles flicker
As pipes allume ...
The whole village passes across the vision: the smithy, a pair in
a farm, an amber blind with girls' shadows on it, a candle and one
reading in a loft: the lights go out one by one till all is dark. It is
a charming picture, and the stanza is beautifully suited to it. It is a
pity that Mr. Hewlett mars it in places with a stumbling-block word or
rhyme.
COUNTRY SENTIMENT. By ROBERT GRAVES. Martin Secker. 5_s._
It must be confessed that the very title of Mr. Graves's new book
awakes in us a feeling of pleasure. Mr. Graves has a _flair_ for
titles. We remember his _Beside the Brazier_ and _Fairies and
Fusiliers_ with a sense that the author has always succeeded in getting
a suggestion of his individual quality into the names of his books. In
the volume before us Mr. Graves repeats some of his former successes.
The poem _A Frosty Night_ is a good example of that dialogue form which
Mr. Graves uses with great skill, and in which we may see the influence
of the old ballads:
MOTHER.
Alice, dear, what ails you,
Dazed and white and shaken?
Has the chill night numbed you?
Is it fright you have taken?
ALICE.
Mother, I am very well,
I felt never better.
Mother, do not hold me so,
Let me write my letter.
It is a quiet beginning, and it looks very easy to do, but that
appearance is deceptive. To write with economy and in an almost
conversational tone without becoming flat and banal is extremely
difficult, but Mr. Graves's hand rarely loses its cunning in those
awkward passages of low emotional pitch which are unavoidable in any
sort of narrative verse. When the pitch rises he has a remarkably sure
touch and can give us a vivid picture without any of the elaborate,
detailed word-painting which is the bane of so much modern poetry. What
could be finer, for example, than the stanzas that follow those already
quoted:
MOTHER.
Sweet, my dear, what ails you?
ALICE.
No, but I am well;
The night was cold and frosty,
There's no more to tell.
MOTHER.
Ay, the night was frosty,
Coldly gaped the moon,
Yet the birds seemed twittering
Through green boughs of June.
Soft and thick the snow lay,
Stars danced in the sky.
Not all the lambs of May-day
Skip so bold and high.
Your feet were dancing, Alice,
Seemed to dance on air,
You looked a ghost or angel
In the starlight there.
Your eyes were frosted starlight,
Your heart fire and snow.
Who was it said, "I love you"?
ALICE.
Mother, let me go!
Mr. Graves resembles Mr. W. H. Davies in the quiet freshness of his
best work. If he has a fault it is that he is rather too apt to point
a moral. He may have caught this--along with much of his rhythmic
subtlety--from his study of nursery rhymes, but there is very little
of it in the present book, which is full of the most charming fancy.
Perhaps Mr. Graves's most characteristic work is to be found in such a
poem as _Vain and Careless_, which begins:
Lady, lovely lady,
Careless and gay!
Once when a beggar called
She gave her child away,
and which continues in a quaint fantasy of thought and expression that
is entirely Mr. Graves's own, and is an original contribution to modern
poetry. One of the best poems in the book is called _Thunder at Night_,
and it describes two children into whose dreams the real thunderstorm
outside their house enters. The boy is dreaming of a bear, the girl of
monkeys and snakes. The hot, confused feeling of the night is vividly
suggested and then the poem suddenly ends with a stanza that is a
complete change in temperature and beautifully suggests the approaching
dawn:
They cannot guess, could not be told
How soon comes careless day,
With birds and dandelions gold,
Wet grass, cool scents of May.
The book is well named _Country Sentiment_, for it has much of the
beauty and the fragrance of the countryside.
LINES OF LIFE. By HENRY W. NEVINSON. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._
THE PEDLAR, AND OTHER POEMS. By RUTH MANNING-SANDERS. Selwyn & Blount.
3_s._ 6_d._
SKYLARK AND SWALLOW. By R. L. GALES. Erskine Macdonald. 5_s._
Of the authors of these three books of verse Mr. Henry W. Nevinson is
the only one who has made a reputation as a prose-writer, and it is not
surprising that his work should show the widest range of thought and
expression. His poems maintain a high level of accomplishment; here,
for example, is a sonnet:
A GERMAN WINTER.
On leagues of solid land the snow lies deep,
The snow falls crumbling from the leaden sky;
All but the fir is white; with timorous eye
Strange little birds in at the window peep,
From frozen forests come; black rivers creep,
Shrunk with the cold till half their bed is dry,
Along the ice-hung ozier reeds, and by
The wooden villages with gables steep,
Huddled around their spires.
Oh, far away
A purple mountain rises from the sand
The golden sand beneath the golden day;
Down the bright steep the waterfall plunges free
From ledge to radiant ledge, and on the strand
Sounds the long murmur of the eternal sea!
But it is the accomplishment of a sensitive and highly-trained mind,
accustomed to literary expression rather than the work of an original
poet; none the less it reveals sympathies and perceptions which the
author has not been able to put into his prose.
Mr. R. L. Gales is an old hand who has written a great deal of charming
verse, which has been widely enjoyed by those who can appreciate
smoothness and sweetness better than music, colour, and imaginative
power. Mr. Gales has a genuine vein of feeling and real skill, as the
following extract will show:
Long ago
In their towers
The clocks struck
Old hours
That went so slow
Long ago
In George Hubert's parsonage
The wood-fire of old apple-trees
It flamed and flared and flickered so.
Long ago
At Hampton Court in the mild sun
In the tall limes great clumps were hung
Of mistletoe
* * * * *
Long ago
Peace has fallen upon the pain
The grief, the madness of these twain,
Lovely lovers by Love slain,
Long ago.
In some ways Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders' work is more ambitious than
Mr. Nevinson's or Mr. Gales'; but if she essays more, she performs, if
anything, less. There is evident in her work an ardent searching of
the spirit and a philosophical tendency that are worthy of praise, but
nowhere are her emotions and thoughts transmuted into poetry's gold by
any magical touch. We have, in other words, much of the raw material
of poetry spread out before us, but not poetry itself. Nevertheless,
there is a distinctive quality in her work which has affinities with
some seventeenth-century poems; it is present in the poem entitled
_Emotions_, which begins thus:
Spirits to whom my lady's little world
Is but a tree of rest,
Whence birdlike free, ye rise and soar
Each on your several quest
Above the heavy hills that close around
My strip of ground,
but does not keep at that level.
It may be that Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders will achieve considerably more
than she has so far succeeded in doing.
KOSSOVO: HEROIC SONGS OF THE SERBS. Translated from the original by
HELEN ROOTHAM. Introduction by MAURICE BARING. Historical Preface by
JANKO LAVRIN. Frontispiece by TOMA ROSANDIĆ. Blackwell. 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
The frontispiece of this volume is as crowded with names as a modern
theatre programme; we looked at the top for "licensee" and "lessee."
But, unlike the plays, the book is good. Serbia, which has several
great cycles of epic-ballads, is the one country where the creation
of poetry on primitive lines still flourishes; a cycle seems to be
developing out of the retreat through Albania. The greatest group of
all, however, is the group which grew out of the defeat (in 1389)
by the Turks on the "Field of Blackbirds." The originals (and Miss
Rootham's versions) are all in trochaic decasyllabics. They deal with
one group of figures: the Tsar Lazar, who was killed; his wife Militsa;
the hero Milosh Obilish, who stabbed the victorious Sultan in his tent;
Jug Bogdan, his ten sons, and the traitor Vuk Brankovitch. The warriors
march off, they are defeated, they die: ravens or other messengers
carry the news to the stricken Tsaritsa in her tower: teamsters
years after find the Tsar's head, still preserved in a well, and it
miraculously joins the body. All a nation's sorrow is in these songs,
all the great memories and defiant resolve, that kept the race alive
and proud, and led the recapturers of Kossovo, in our own day, to fall
to their knees on the sacred ground. The translation seems very good;
the fire remains in the whole, but the magic has inevitably escaped
from the parts. We can only quote a specimen at random:
To his feet leaps Milosh, that great warrior,
To the black earth bows himself, and answers:
"Tsar Lazar, for this thy toast I thank thee,
Thank thee for the toast and for the goblet,
But for those thy words I do not thank thee.
For--else may the truth be my undoing--Never,
Tsar Lazar, was I unfaithful,
Never have I been, and never will be.
And to-morrow I go to Kossovo
For the Christian faith to fight and perish.
FLEURS-DE-LYS. A Book of French Poetry freely translated into English
verse. By WILFRID THORLEY. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
We may heartily congratulate Mr. Thorley upon his ambition and his
industry. He conceived the prodigious idea of giving English versions
of poems by all the representative French poets from the earliest
age until our own time. He has translated three hundred, and he has
increased his labours by doing the earlier ones into archaic English.
For example, his first specimen (twelfth century) is entitled _The Twa
Systres_, and begins:
The mirk did fa' lang syne, lang syne,
When twa fond systres wi' hands that twine
Went down to bathe whaur the waters shine.
And Villon's most famous ballade opens:
O tell me where and in what lande
Is Flora and the Roman lass?
He knows his ground, and his selection of originals is admirable. But
his versions usually take the bloom off. Baudelaire's
O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps, levez l'ancre
becomes
Haul up the anchor, captain old, O Death, for it is time:
which is the same thing with a difference. Sometimes he even fails to
get essential parts of the sense. In recommending his book, therefore,
to those many to whom such a survey in English would be useful, we
warn them that the translations at best are graceful versifying. Mr.
Thorley, happily, is usually on his own highest level, and the book can
be read with very little annoyance and a certain amount of edification.
THE PATHS OF GLORY. A Collection of Poems written during the War,
1914-1919. Edited by BERTRAM LLOYD. Allen & Unwin. 4_s._ 6_d._ and 3_s._
The title of this anthology is presumably ironical. He who would have
a comprehensive selection of war poems reflecting the sentiments of
the mass of our people, and most of the British soldiers, must go to
Miss Jacqueline Trotter's _Vision and Valour_ (Longmans'), which we
shall review in our next issue. This collection is a collection with an
avowedly propagandist aim. It contains poems exposing the cruelty and
filth of War in general, which were inspired by the late War. It is not
yet complete. For instance, Major Brett-Young's _Bête Humaine_ might
suitably have been included. But most of the poems included are genuine
and well written. Amongst the authors "covered" are "A. E.," Paul
Bewsher, Geoffrey Dearmer, Walter de la Mare, Wilfrid Gibson, Laurence
Housman, Margaret Sackville, Siegfried Sassoon, Dora Sigerson, and Alec
Waugh.
NOVELS
AN IMPERFECT MOTHER. By J. D. BERESFORD. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
ELI OF THE DOWNS. By C. M. A. PEAKE. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.
THE BANNER. By HUGH F. SPENDER. Collins. 7_s._ net.
ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM. By EDNA FERBER. Methuen. 6_s._ net.
In _An Imperfect Mother_ Mr. J. D. Beresford has set himself the
extraordinarily difficult and delicate task of describing a mother's
unorthodoxy as seen by her grown-up children. Of Mr. Beresford it
can generally be said that he is quite fearless of the troubles he
makes for himself. Yet in this particular instance some doubt might
be left in the reader's mind as to whether his designing of the book
was hurried or certain obvious issues deliberately shirked. Some
compromise may be arrived at between the two alternatives when we
consider the overwhelming evidence of this author's sincerity and his
inflexible allegiance to his art. Here the reader cannot fail to ask
himself--what would I do--what could I say, if my mother had run off
with someone?--well knowing that in an enormous preponderance of cases
such a question is comfortably absurd. It is even indecent to put such
a question to yourself, is it not? It is the defilement of a sacred
place? Exactly. So is the book condemned at the very outset because its
theme is "disagreeable" or "delicate" or "unusually unpleasant"? That
is where one's first doubts of Mr. Beresford's complete fearlessness
are bred. In his treatment of that disagreeable idea there is nothing
disagreeable. You feel that there should be. Mr. Beresford has gilded
his pill with a sugar of a too vigorous refinement. He has been at
pains too great to disguise the fact of its nastiness.
What did these children think and do? The boy Stephen, just leaving
school, is the only one that counts for much, though his two sisters,
sketchy as is their appearance in the story, are excellently
considered. Before the actual crash comes they whisper together about
their mother's goings on, try to make their father speak of what
they believe should be uppermost in his mind, and insist on a full
discussion with Stephen. One of them was a school teacher, the other
subsequently married an elderly chemist. In a way they enjoy the
scandal; you feel that some excitement has come into their dull lives,
with the piquancy of self-righteousness added to outraged innocence.
They want to make the most of it. They are not genuinely ashamed.
Emily turned the embarrassment of her steady gaze immovably upon her
father.
"I don't know what's come to mother lately," she said.
Mr. Kirkwood began to fidget with his sparse little beard. "She's a
little out of sorts, perhaps," he hazarded feebly.
"Well, oughtn't we to _do_ something, father?" Emily continued, still
pinning him with her stare.
"Oh! What _can_ you _do_?" put in Stephen irritably....
Emily turned herself about and focused her attention upon her
brother. "If she's out of sorts she ought to see a doctor," she said.
"_That_ wouldn't be any good," Stephen returned without hesitation.
"Well, but why wouldn't it?" Emily inquired, with a meaning in her
tone that could not be mistaken.
"No good asking me," was Stephen's evasion.
"Well, I think it's time something was done," Emily said, sharpening
the point of her now obvious intention.
"I don't know what you mean, Emily," little Kirkwood put in nervously.
Emily knew, they all three knew, that their father's remark had
been intended as a reminder that any open discussion of a mother's
failings was impossible between father and children; but Emily had
made up her mind that the time had come when they must, in her own
phrase, "face the facts."
"I don't think it's _right_ for us to let things go on and not make
any effort to stop them," she said in a low but determined voice.
"I don't see the good of our going on pretending, when we all know
perfectly well what's happening. Do you, Hilda?"
"No, I don't," Hilda emphatically agreed.
But with Stephen it is different. He really cares very little about
appearances, though he dreads facing his schoolfellows. He is wounded
because his mother prefers another man to his father and himself. And
there is an occasion when he might have changed his mother's decision
had he known. Does he really want her, does he need her? she asks
herself. And just on that very day Stephen had been smiled upon by
the little daughter of his headmaster. She is fourteen, he seventeen.
Impossible dreams fill his mind. He has said nothing to his mother, but
she knows. As though she had seen the whole of the little trifling play
enacted--for it was no more than one bright smile cast over a dainty
shoulder; no word had been spoken--she knew that another interest
had come, since yesterday, into the boy's life. He doesn't need her
any more. His protestations would have been passionate had they been
genuine. She goes.
The view of the children towards the problem must depend entirely upon
their upbringing and the degree of sensitiveness in their relation to
their mother. In regard to Cecilia Kirkwood's family, Mr. Beresford has
expected a good deal of our faith in him. They were born and bred in a
small cathedral town, their father was a bookseller, their degree was
humble but respectable. Yet from beginning to end Stephen can only find
it in his heart to think of his mother's flight as a callous desertion.
He appears to be completely oblivious of the moral involved and of
all that is implied by his mother's running away with the handsome
organist. A closer scrutiny would have been horrible! Yes: but would
not Stephen have made it, and, unpleasant or not, should there not be
in the story some indication that he did make it?
To speak of a "handsome organist" is, in passing, liable to
misconstruction, for Dr. Threlfall was not only good-looking but clever
and accomplished in manner; not only an organist, for when he left
Medboro' he gave up playing the organ for the composition of light
opera, and became an emphatic success. Taking Cecilia for granted, we
can well imagine that she would run away with Threlfall, and would do
all the other things that Mr. Beresford makes her do, and talk as she
does. But it is hard for the reader to take her for granted, just as
it was hard for her neighbours in Medboro'. Cecilia's father was a
philosophic tuner of pianos. He had been against her marriage in the
first instance, but he rather approves of her adultery ... but it is
understood that the nature of piano-tuners is warped.
Cecilia was an amazing wife for a country bookseller, and she tries,
one sometimes thinks, to be _grande dame_ in conversation, setting the
whole of the little provincial town by the ears with her outlandish
brilliance and daring, making it grovel at her feet because of her
beauty and amiability.
Can a lady kiss her toe?
Yes; she might--she might do so--sang another novelist, who indulged in
rhyme. So it is with Cecilia; she might, she might have done so, but
Mr. Beresford has failed to make it inevitable of her.
Old Kirkwood, the father, dies insane, and Stephen, adopted by a
rich builder who was sympathetic because his own wife was a little
difficult, works hard and finally superintends the erection of a big
newspaper office in London. There he falls in with his mother once
more, and with the schoolmaster's daughter who had smiled upon him
long ago. The old tussle is re-enacted. The mother is jealous of the
girl. She sees her son blundering in his courtship, and she only has to
hold her tongue to keep him by her side, a devoted slave. She is not
happy. Her organist-composer is jovial, but unfaithful. She longs for
the fealty of Stephen. At this point Mr. Beresford introduces a little
Freudian interest in the explanation of what was, for all he says about
it, a matter of secondary importance to Stephen--his disgust at his
mother's hysterical and untimely laughter, and we feel that, whilst he
was about it, he might have examined Cecilia's psyche a little more
thoroughly. There were one or two dark places in her character and
disposition upon which a more searching light might, with some profit
to the story, have been thrown. There is much enjoyable reading in _An
Imperfect Mother_, but on the whole, coming from Mr. Beresford, it is a
little disappointing.
In _Eli of the Downs_ Mr. C. M. A. Peake introduces himself to the
public with a distinguished piece of work. He has been content to
make his own variation of the archetype of great stories--the joys
and sorrows at home, the adventures, and, finally, the return of the
wanderer. This is the story of Eli Buckle, as gleaned by the teller
from Eli himself, and from his old friend and neighbour Anne Brown, and
it is the story of a perfectly simple and sincere man, a shepherd, who
is perfectly happy in the remote solitudes which his calling entails
upon him, with the wild flowers which arouse feelings his creator does
not try to make him express. He is proud and happy when as a boy of
twenty-one he has saved five pounds. These facts are simply stated,
and yet there is not the least hint of sentimentality or of bathos. He
marries the girl of his heart, and unexpectedly the knowledge comes
to him of what he has been in need. "Oh, Mary, my dear, my dear!" he
whispered. "You won't never know how lonely I've a-been." A little
while goes by and he is lonely again, for while he is out in the night
in the lambing season Mary falls from a chair, and by the time Eli gets
home she and the child that should have been born to them are dead.
After that, in sheer desperation, Eli leaves his old home and goes away
to sea. His is the old quest of a wounded man for the purpose which
lies behind all events. Once before, when Mary had told him that he
could be a preacher if he had the ambition, he had for a moment found
his voice.
"... I believe I could study fast enough, and I know I could preach.
I could make them listen to me; aye, have 'em all gaping after me
like a nest of young thrushes, if I chose. But I'd have to tell 'em
what they wanted to hear, an' dress it up the way they likes, which
is what they mean by the Gospel and the Truth. But that I won't do,
for I'm not sure that their Gospel is my Gospel, or their Truth any
Truth at all for the matter o' that. And about God, my dear. Whether
He is, or whether He isn't, what folks say, I can't testify till I
know, know of my own knowledge, and not because I read it in a book
or someone told me."
Occasionally the narrator of the story makes a little confidence to
the reader which, apart from its humorous candour, serves a definitely
useful purpose.
Now the scenes of Eli's childhood were the scenes I lived among when
I too was a child, and the land where he spent the years of his
middle age I knew and loved, as youth and man, but though I have
crossed many waters, I am no sailor, and I cannot see the ocean as a
mariner sees it.
In the course of his life as a sailor Eli has many adventures, which
are wonderfully told, dramatic without one word of melodrama. Here
the author who can lovingly describe the wild flowers in the lost
corners of the Downs excels again, for in a few words he can truthfully
describe how a particular species of liar describes himself, or how
nervousness passes into wild terror in the eyes of a San Francisco
crimp who is discovered trying to drug his victims. But well as Mr.
Peake describes the rascalities of the adventurous life, he is more at
home with the kindlinesses of the countryside and the gentle wisdom of
Cathay. This is a novel, uneven in quality to be sure, but touching at
certain points real beauty.
Mr. Hugh F. Spender in _The Banner_ describes a revolution in England,
organised by the League of Youth, backed by the People's Army, and
inspired by Helen Hart, daughter of a millionaire, who has a bias
against the landed gentry. Most elderly people in the book come in
for a good deal of facetiousness directed against their ponderously
old-fashioned views. One young lordling, deaf and dumb from shell
shock, has his senses restored by the mere sight of the new Joan of
Arc, and falls in love with her. She refuses him at first because she
is vowed to The Cause.... "For a moment she resisted, resisted almost
fiercely, and then she lay passively like a child in his arms." Mr.
Spender has invented a young man who willingly throws up both title and
title-deeds at the call of the People and becomes plain Citizen; but it
is a pity that the author in creating another peer should have given
him an existing name. Regarded either as fiction or as propaganda this
is a poor book.
_Roast Beef, Medium_ is the curious title that Miss Edna Ferber has
given to the Business Adventures of Emma McChesney. This American
authoress, who writes vivaciously in her own language, gives bright and
cheerful expression to her belief that people should be earnest and
good and that Roast Beef (not too underdone is conveyed by "medium")
should as a staple diet take precedence of flaked crab meat with
Russian sauce. These business adventures are certainly not _caviare_.
Emma McChesney is a bagwoman, representing T. A. Buck's Featherloom
Petticoats. Rivals make love to her and try to get the better of her
alternately, and she has a young cub of a son to support. Very sick of
hotel life, she longs for a house of her own--especially a kitchen.
In the last chapter she gets them. The book is full of homely advice.
Emma was fresh and wholesome in appearance, though not so young as the
picture on the wrapper deceitfully indicates. But she was a good sort
and refused to Marry T. A. Buck himself because she didn't love him.
She was, in fact, a "worth-while" woman.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
AN INTERPRETATION OF KEATS'S "ENDYMION." By H. CLEMENT NOTCUTT. Printed
for the Author by the S.A. Printing Co., Capetown.
Mr. Notcutt, who is professor of English in the University of
Stellenbosch, believes that _Endymion_ enshrines an allegory, or
at least that it contains, in a clear unbroken stream beneath the
surface, a meaning that corresponds with the ideas that filled the
poet's mind. The alternative can hardly be impugned; it is as true
of Keats as of most poets, and in the interpretation of Professor
Notcutt it appears to mean little more than that there is a general
reflection of the ardour of the poet's mind and his desire of beauty
and beauty's immortality. If it is a question of allegorising to a
greater extent than that vague generality, then Keats is surely the
last poet who can be taxed with it. Professor Notcutt recognises some
of the objections and says that the reason why Keats did not explain
his allegory was that he was dissatisfied with the poem and discouraged
by its reception; but that does not explain why, in the intimacy of his
letters (many of which allude to _Endymion_) he did not give a hint to
anybody that there was an allegory to explain. The letters, indeed,
with which Professor Notcutt shows an excellent familiarity, speak
freely of imagination and invention, in reference to _Endymion_, but
of recondite suggestions and esoteric gospelling there is nothing. Nor
can we regret this. A heavenly meaning attached to the earthly story
would not have made _Endymion_ a better but a worse poem. It is one of
the most beautiful, if one of the most faulty, poems in the language.
It was Keats's privilege to see and create beauty and present it as a
finer reality in the midst of the crude and half-unreal realities of
common life. Had he lived he might have enlarged even this office in
fulfilling it, but it is sufficient that _Endymion_ shows that he could
fulfil it.
CERVANTES. BY RUDOLPH SCHEVILL. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
TOLSTOY. By G. RAPALL NOYES. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
For most of us Cervantes is Don Quixote: even if we are familiar with
_The Exemplary Novels_ and the _Journey to Parnassus_, we do not get
from them any idea of personality which infringes on the overwhelming
effect produced by the Knight of La Mancha. Even Mr. Schevill, who is
a Professor of Spanish Literature in the University of California, in
his effort to give us an idea of Cervantes only succeeds in producing
an idealised portrait of Don Quixote. How odd this is can be realised
if we try to think of other imaginative authors in the terms of their
characters. If we are tempted to think of Shakespeare as Hamlet,
we immediately correct ourselves by recollections of Falstaff, of
Prospero, of Coriolanus, or Juliet. No one, however much he may be
persuaded that the _Papers of the Club_ are the author's best book,
begins to compare Dickens with Pickwick; nor, to take an author nearer
Cervantes in time, has one any inclination to identify Rabelais with
_Pantagruel_.
Two explanations of this odd fact about Cervantes are possible: one
is that he had exhausted his capacity for creative, imaginative work
in the writing of _Don Quixote_--but this view cannot be upheld by
anyone who loves the _Exemplary Novels_. The other is the simple one
that Cervantes was Don Quixote. It is a commonplace of psychology,
especially of Catholic psychology, that men of fine temperament will
always be severer on faults which are their own. Cervantes found in
himself the exaggerated chivalry which he starts to mock, but still
loves in Don Quixote. He had the Crusader's heart, but he lived in a
time when--_pace_ Mr. Chesterton--the Crusading spirit was dead, or
knew the uglier ends. So in his immortal story Cervantes presents the
last knight with tonic humour and loving laughter. Ultimately nothing
can make anyone ridiculous but success and prosperity; and from these
Cervantes preserves his hero. Mr. Schevill's book is not very lively
reading. He gives us the facts of Cervantes' life, and his treatment
of Cervantes' art in comparison with other Spanish popular works of
the period has no like value for English readers. At one time Spanish
literature was well known in England, but to-day we have no doubt that
Mr. Schevill's detailed accounts of _La Lazarillo_ and _La Celestino_
are necessary.
Tolstoy himself might have been imagined by Cervantes. That is the
thought that occurs in reading Mr. Noyes's book directly after Mr.
Schevill's. Apart from that, no two great artists could be more
dissimilar. Tolstoy is always uneasy. It is his uneasiness which
caused his quarrel with Turgenev. It is his uneasiness which makes
it impossible for him to remain steadfast to his own convictions.
For years there was a false idea of Tolstoy, which is only gradually
yielding to the facts. He was neither saint nor prophet; but an
ordinary man with a capacity for self-analysis enormously magnified--so
magnified that he seems a giant. It is this huge quality which
makes so many critics, as Mr. Noyes, class him far beyond Turgenev
and Dostoevsky, and put him in a position which he is willing to
occupy in the future. Of direct personal criticism Mr. Noyes gives
us little. He is overcome by the amount of his material, and is too
fond of approaching his subject through the books of other critics.
For instance, he quotes Mereshkovsky's comment on the end of _War and
Peace_, as if it was a _locus classicus_ on _Natasha's_ psychology,
instead of a piece of ill-natured criticism on a great artist by a
showman. The end of _War and Peace_, which shows us Natasha absorbed
in Cervantes' life, is the same criticism on wars, grandeurs, and
world-spooks as is made by Hardy's poem on _The Breaking of Nations_;
and neither has any cynicism in it. Mr. Noyes's picture of Tolstoy
the man adds nothing to Aylmer Maude's exhaustive volumes; and he
values too seriously and literally a great deal of Tolstoy's detailed
religious writing. His book is, however, worth having, even if only for
the superb lines written by Tolstoy to some abject person who objected
to _Resurrection_ as "smutty." We will not give his name, but he was,
alas! English. Tolstoy, writing in English, defends himself and then
says:
When I wrote the book I abhorred with all my heart the lust, and to
express this abhorrence was one of the chief aims of the book. If I
have failed in it I am very sorry, and I am pleading guilty if I was
so inconsiderate in the scene of which you write that I could have
produced such a bad impression on your mind. I think that we will
be judged by our consciences and by God, not for the results of our
ideas, which we cannot know, but for our intentions, and I hope my
intentions were not bad.
Did ever great artist humble himself so generously? His attacker, with
his unpleasant mind, will be numbered with the excellent Mr. Hyde, who
inspired Stevenson to his defence of Damien.
BOOKS IN THE WAR. By THEODORE WESLEY KOCH. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company.
VILLAGE LIBRARIES. By A. SAYLE. Richards. 5_s._
Mr. Koch's amply illustrated book is, in the main, a record of the
achievements in the war of the American Library Association. As such
it is exhaustive, if rather wanting in variety. The soldiers' demand
for books, after all, and gratitude for their bestowal, were much
the same in America as in France, in the trenches as in hospitals,
so that by the time he has finished this book the reader is somewhat
wearied by the repetition of feats of distribution, surveys of the
vast literary field covered, instances of literary recalcitrance
overcome by deft suggestion and so forth. Nevertheless, it is a book
of considerable interest and will bear permanent witness to the fact
that, in all future wars, libraries will have to be mobilised with
the armies. Over and over again the fact, which we have all learned,
is insisted on that food for the mind is one of the most important
sustainers of moral. Not only is reading an anodyne, but it is a
disinfectant and a prophylactic, as necessary in war as chloroform,
lysol, and anti-typhoid vaccine. In all that vast organisation of
intense welfare--work which, spasmodic and fragmentary in peace, was by
a supreme irony perfected in war--the supplying of books to soldiers
and sailors held a high place. Every taste had to be catered for, every
degree of education given its appropriate food. To some the Army was
an elementary school, to others it almost fulfilled the functions of a
university, especially after the Armistice, when ambitious educational
schemes were set on foot to calm idle and chafing warriors, and when
our own War Office deluged France and Germany with piles of lofty
literature, very little of which, we believe, was read.
The belligerent nations learned at last that it was just as worth while
to tempt a soldier to read as to teach him to shoot. The question
now remains what fruit this discovery is going to bear in peace,
where the problem, apparently simpler, is really harder. Soldiers at
war had not the opportunity of using their leisure as they wished;
they were circumscribed in place and opportunity. The free citizen
is less fettered, and, being more scattered, is less amenable to
propaganda. Yet for citizens at peace, no less than for soldiers at
war, propaganda, tactful and patient, is necessary if they are to be
induced to apply the medicine of reading to their minds. From a quite
different point of view this truth is made clear by Miss Sayle's
little book, which is a development of an attractive article in the
_New Statesman_ describing the beginning and development of a library
in a small Hampshire village. It is a book which all who have similar
ambitions for their villages should read, for it will save them many
natural and fatal errors, besides telling them all they need know about
organisation, finance, book-buying and book-housing, in plain words
with plenty of humour.
Miss Sayle very strongly insists on it that a village library must
be simply and solely a circulating library, stocking the books which
its members want to read _and no others_. More ambitious efforts may
be made wherever the Public Libraries Act is applied, but a village
library will almost always be supported by voluntary subscriptions,
and can only afford books which pay their way. She shows how much
propaganda is needed to start even such a library and to keep it
going--a library from which practically every book that was not
agreeable fiction had to be ruthlessly weeded. In twelve years the one
visible sign of progress has been the tendency of Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
to replace Mrs. Henry Wood as the favourite. Yet she holds that it has
been worth while, and we agree. A small agricultural community has
been induced to own, manage, and take a pride in a library, and even
the fact that "father went less often to the 'Anchor' as the result"
is a solid testimony to its value. If life of villages in the future
regains its old vigour without becoming entirely urban in character,
enterprises of this kind will be a duty incumbent on their more
enlightened members. And they will only be successful if Miss Sayle's
maxims are followed. Her "dont's" are admirable, and the biggest one of
all is "don't get slack." She might have added the lesson of Mr. Koch's
book and of the whole war: "don't forget that any reading is better
than a vacant mind."
FROM FRIEND TO FRIEND. By LADY RITCHIE. Murray. 6_s._ net.
Perhaps the most distinguishing of the pleasant Victorian
characteristics was the combination of dignity with charm, and few of
the artists of the period had that combination to a greater degree than
Thackeray's daughter. This last volume of hers is entirely civilised
and urbane in its appeal, and yet has, with its urbanity, a warmth of
affection and a genuine love for and interest in others which are often
lacking in the better, more highly-coloured works of contemporary art.
It is a book of memories, and what Lady Ritchie remembers is not mere
gossip, not what can be had by observation, but the deeper things of
friendly intercourse, and the light thrown on character by circumstance
and intimacy. The title-essay is mainly concerned with that remarkable
woman, Julia Margaret Cameron, who was the friend of all the great
men of her day, and the first woman to attempt artistic portraiture
in photography. In telling of her Lady Ritchie cannot avoid a certain
kindly humour; but the Victorians' laughter was not cruel, and though
Mrs. Cameron must have been at times rather a burden, one can feel sure
no one of her friends let her guess it. Certainly worse fates might
overcome one than to be nursed by her. Mr. Cameron was ill and his wife
gave him "home care and comforts." During the crisis he had "strong
beef-tea thickened with arrowroot six times a day," and when he was
convalescent,
The patient has poached eggs at night, gets up at eleven, has his
dinner (gravy soup and curry) at one, mulligatawny soup and meat at
five, a free allowance of port wine, averaging a bottle a day. Ten
drops of Jereme's opiate every morning, a dose of creosote zinc and
gum arabic before his meals, and a dose of quinine after each meal.
There are essays on Mrs. Sartoris and Mrs. Kemble, a brief
note on a Roman Christmas, when she saw Lockhart driving with
Frederic Leighton, a few slighter pieces, and then, last of all, a
tale--_Binnie_--belonging to the Mrs. Williamson series. Not many
people, one supposes, now read _Old Kensington_ or "Miss Thackeray's"
other novels, but there should be something of a demand for them by
those who first meet her lucid, gentle narrative talent in the story of
_Binnie_.
ONE HUNDRED PICTURES FROM EDEN PHILLPOTTS. Selected by L. H. BREWITT.
Methuen. 6_s._ net.
The snare of descriptive writing in novels is as the snare of
decorative passages in an imaginative painting; the descriptions may
fail to combine, remain detached from the meaning and purpose of the
novel, and finally the novelist may be tempted by his skill in such
writing to indulge in it at the expense of his proper task. French
novels, the worst of which have as a rule a composition too often
absent from ours, rarely abound in purple passages--certainly with no
French novelist of equal standing could an admirer do what Mr. Brewitt
has done with Mr. Phillpotts. Here are a hundred of Mr. Phillpotts's
best decorations, full of observation, sensitive at times to another
beauty than the merely observed, but rarely fused by that imaginative
ardour which makes some of Mr. Hardy's and Mr. Conrad's descriptive
passages an essential part of the novel. Sometimes, especially in his
description of violence, Mr. Phillpotts's meaning is obscure: for
instance, in the account of the Flood from one book you have a simile
which is of no assistance to the picture--"Yelling, like some incarnate
and insane manifestation of the elements massed in one, the hurricane
launched itself upon the valley." He is more successful as a rule when
he catches nature in softer moods, quick with spring or flushed with
summer: there is a genuine charm of fancy, if no imaginative depth, in
this pastel of a sleeping forest:
The trees indeed sleep, but they also dream. In the heart of every
leafless oak a dryad whispers that the days are fleeting; that the
icy-footed winter hours are drawing into the snow-wreaths away in
their chill processions; that the fountain of the sap will soon rise
again to spring's unsealing; that swiftly will the bud-sheath swell
and pale and shimmer silkily down, like a cast-off veil at the feet
of the vernal beeches.
Mr. Phillpotts rarely drops into that snare of the writer of
picturesque prose, the rhythm of blank verse; but his style is not
always equal to the demands he makes upon it. It never has the sombre,
heavy-hearted gravity of Hardy's, nor the gloomy colour and triumphant
ecstasy of Ruskin's. This is indeed a photograph album rather than a
book of pictures.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE STORY OF PURTON. A Collection of Notes and Hearsay gathered by
ETHEL M. RICHARDSON. Bristol: Arrowsmith. 1919. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mrs. Richardson, something of a new-comer to Purton, as it would
appear, makes no pretensions to original research, and has contented
herself so far with giving rather a guide to Purton than a history of
the village, a pleasant, ample, and leisurely place in North Wilts,
with a fine church and an unusually fine stone-built manor house to
its name. Her explanatory sub-title, "Notes and Hearsay," prevents the
expectation of anything exhaustive. The notes, though excellent as far
as they go, might have been considerably extended with advantage to the
book; and as to the hearsay, it must be owned that, so far, she has not
heard of much--nothing, we will engage, to what she will hear if she
lives in Purton long enough to be accepted by the natives. There is
abundant material in every old village in England for a good and useful
contribution to history, and, if Mrs. Richardson looks forward (as it
is to be hoped she may) to a new edition of her little book, we would
recommend to her notice _Kingham Old and New_, by W. Warde Fowler,
which was published by Mr. Blackwell, of Oxford, in 1913, and is a
model for any such work. Another which might help her is _How to Write
the History of a Parish_, by the Reverend John Charles Cox, of which a
fifth edition was published in 1909. Her first care should be to get
hold of the Enclosure Award and Tithe Commutation Map, which ought to
be in the vestry. One will give her the names of the Common Fields;
the other, compared with the large-scale Ordnance map and helped by
local knowledge, should enable her to find them all. Then, with the
Parish Registers and, with luck, some Court Rolls, she should be able
to get well back in the centuries, and might then make arrangements for
a prolonged stay in London and daily attendance at the Public Record
Office. What she might find there, or fail to find, there's no telling.
If she were fortunate she would light upon some great old Chancery or
Exchequer suit--better than the one in the Star-chamber, good as that
is, which concerns the adventures of the image of Saint George, and
is one of her happiest discoveries--in which the pleadings would be
written in pure Shakesperean prose, and the depositions of witnesses
record very often the _ipsissima verba_ of the peasantry of its time.
Behind all that--since Purton belonged to Malmesbury Abbey--she would
find very much more than she has found so far concerning the economy,
temporal and spiritual, of her parish and manor. She should undoubtedly
find Subsidy Rolls which would record the names and status of the
villagers back to the day of the Poll Tax. Some of the early Court
Rolls may be there, and possibly also a Survey or Extent, which would
give her the services and "boon-works" due from the bondsmen to their
lords. There is no limit to be set to what diligence, and help from
Mrs. Story-Maskelyne (whose chapter on Braden Forest and the parish
boundaries is the best in the book), may recover from the Mausoleum in
Fetter Lane. To that adventure we heartily commend Mrs. Richardson,
that of a good book she may make a better.
THE MANNERS OF MY TIME. By C. L. HAWKINS DEMPSTER. Richards. 1920.
10_s._ 6_d._
Miss Dempster, who died in 1913, was authoress in her day of certain
novels, of which one, called _Vera_, was translated into Russian, and
another, _Blue Roses_, was to be found on every bookstall in America.
It met, she tells us here, with the favour of the late Duke of Albany.
"Ah," said his Royal Highness, "_that_ is a wonderful book! But why
_did_ you make it so sad? Please to make your next one end well." "The
next one will be all right, sir. It is a Scotch story, and it does end
well." That was at Cannes, where Miss Dempster lived and moved in
a society of exiled kings, Russian grand dukes, princes, statesmen,
high ladies and clergymen. The manners of such folk are without doubt
as worthy of record as those of any other people whomsoever; but
Miss Dempster, in the letters to an unnamed uncle, of which her book
chiefly consists, contents herself for the most part with recording
their names, entrances and exits upon the scene of the Riviera. We are
irresistibly reminded of Captain Sumph in _Pendennis_.
"I remember poor Byron, Hobhouse, Trelawny, and myself dining with
Cardinal Mezzocado at Rome," Captain Sumph began, "and we had some
Orvieto wine for dinner, which Byron liked very much. And I remember
how the Cardinal regretted that he was a single man. We went to
Aix-la-Vecchia two days afterwards, where Byron's yacht was--and, by
Jove, the Cardinal died within three weeks; and Byron was very sorry,
for he rather liked him."
Incidentally, one may call attention to the letterpress. On page 148 a
lady is referred to in a note as "a grandchild of Mr. Nassau, senior,
now married to Mr. St. Loe Strachey." It is not, we believe, even true
of that particular grandchild of Nassau senior's. We read of "the great
_coups de logis_" of a castle in Normandy, of "the _causus belli_ of
the Franco-Prussian War." On page 213 we have an epitaph which is worth
preservation:
LIC JACIT
CASPARUS HAÜSER
ÆNIGMA
PIÙ LEMPORIS
IGNOTO NATIVITAS
OCCULTA MORS
1883.
_Sic_, or _lic_, at any rate _jacit_, or lies, the record of the
unfortunate Caspar in this work.
THE BRITISH ACADEMY: SEALS AND DOCUMENTS. By REGINALD L. POOLE. Oxford
University Press, 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
Recently an important transaction was nearly stopped because one of the
parties saw on an official document what he took to be the initials
of a particular person. The letters were, however, only an indication
where the seal should be affixed. Dr. Poole's _Seals and Documents_,
an offprint from the _Transactions of the British Academy_, deals
with earlier days, and may induce similar ignorance. It is but twenty
odd pages long, but full of matter which the judicious reader will
value as from a master of diplomatic. It summarises much learning, and
suggests, by the way, several inquiries, _e.g._, as to the displacement
of papyrus by parchment; the period at which a seal to close a secret
letter--like our modern sealing-wax--went out of fashion; and the
use of the diminutive _sigillum_ instead of the classical _signum_
for seal. Dr. Poole shows how easy it was for a seal to be lost, and
mentions that a unique document in the Bodleian has been "irreparably
mutilated" under the direction of the late Librarian. When parchment
was used, thin pieces of the actual material could be stripped from it
to tie it up with a seal affixed. It is odd that this simple practice
has not been carried further back. Much of interest is given concerning
the Papal bull, a _bulla_ of lead used in warm countries where wax
would not retain its distinctness. Bulls employed by the universal
"Papa" remind us of the classical "bulla" worn by boys. The most
ancient in existence is that of Pope Deusdedit (615-8). In England the
bull is earlier than the wax seal, but the double-pendent seal which
led to the Great Seal is an English invention. The whole subject is
confused by the existence of forgeries, which need erudition like Dr.
Poole's to dismiss.
THE STONES AND STORY OF JESUS CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE. Traced and told by
IRIS and GERDA MORGAN. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 21_s._ net.
Jesus College, Cambridge, has a unique beginning, as it grew out of
a Benedictine Nunnery, and Bishop Alcock, of Ely, its founder, when
he did away with the discredited sisterhood, adapted their ruined
buildings instead of destroying them. The college was erected to the
honour of the Blessed Virgin, St. John, and St. Radegund, but Alcock
added the new title which it still bears. The names of Prioresses
are preserved from Letitia, _circa_ 1213, to Joan Fulbourne, 1493.
Though we do not know precisely when the nuns began, there is an
unusual amount of records left concerning them which tend to show that
they were distinguished in family rather than learning, and given to
hospitality as well as good works. They owed their butcher £21 at a
time when a sheep cost a shilling. Let us hope that the good man's
daughters learnt something as boarders in the St. Radegund Guest
House. What can be gathered concerning early days is told pleasantly.
It may seem odd that a nunnery should exist in Cambridge, quite near
the site of the famous Sturbridge Fair; but the ladies started before
the colleges began, and they were some way off the nucleus of academic
buildings. The excellent sketches are a great addition to the book.
The beautiful piscina figured on page 286 has long been familiar to
lovers of Cambridge architecture, but new discoveries have been made
since Le Keux published his _Memorials_ in 1845. Jesus has been lucky
in its antiquaries and historians, also in escaping the full fervour
of that debased Gothic which flourished in the nineteenth century.
The discovery of the Chapter Arches by the Rev. Osmond Fisher in 1893
is quite a romance. He was able to supplement many years earlier the
indolence of a Master and save the Tower from falling.
The notes, other than architectural, chronicle the varying fortunes
of the foundation, with details of the plague, plays in English and
Latin, militant and destructive commissioners, and worthies like Tobias
Rustat, Yeoman of the Robes to Charles II. Cranmer's is the first name
in the college lists, and it has always been distinguished in theology,
though for most people its main modern reputation is for athletics.
This side of the college is, however, not touched by the authors, who
deal with reverend signiors and men famous in literature.
The college can boast of Sterne, whose grandfather was one of its
masters; but nothing is known of his academic behaviour. This is just
as well, since his associate Hall-Stevenson can hardly have been a
model young man. Coleridge, the only poet, we think, who ever won an
academic prize for a Greek Ode, was decidedly eccentric, and had a
reputation for saying good things, as we learn from the lively pages of
Gunning. He was treated with great leniency by the dons of Jesus, and
left through his own perversity. His poetry at this time is negligible,
and his lines "to a young Jackass on Jesus Piece," whom he wished to
take with him,
in the Dell
Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell,
reveal the coming exponent of Pantisocracy. We do not think that his
rowdiness at the trial of Frend in the Senate House is to his credit,
in spite of his explanations.
The work of both writer and artist shows a genuine enthusiasm for the
college and its memories. Both illustrations and print gain by the
ample page; but a book weighing well over two-and-a-half pounds will
hardly do as a "handbook."
COMRADES IN CAPTIVITY. By F. W. HARVEY. Sidgwick & Jackson. 10_s._
6_d._ net.
Mr. Harvey's book strikes one immediately as amazingly truthful. He not
only gives one facts about his prison life in Germany, he avoids giving
too many facts. Deliberately he refuses to be preoccupied with the mere
horrors, or the beastliness of some of his captors, or the nervous
strain on the prisoners. And this surely is artistically right, if one
is to get a picture of what prison life meant to the average normal
prisoner. The men who wished to retain sanity had to keep out of their
minds, so far as they could, the things which Mr. Harvey leaves out of
his book. They endeavoured by work, by lectures, by concerts, by games,
by theatrical performances to recall continuously to themselves that
normal life still prescribed in spite of their untoward fate. And nobly
most of them succeeded. Perhaps some of their efforts were a little
uncalled-for. For instance, Mr. Harvey tells us that on their first
arrival at Guterslob new prisoners were treated quite formally by their
fellow-countrymen:
New arrivals were not ignored by the British. There was a system
whereby they even fed (German food being totally inadequate) until
their own parcels began to arrive. Clothes, too, were served out to
those who seemed in need. And there were invitations to tea with
senior officers and officials. Such preliminaries accomplished,
however, one was dropped like a hot coal--for a time, that is, until
one had proved oneself.
And he also states that when at Crefeld all prisoners other than
British were turned out. "We thought it damnable." The truth is our
Allies had been, far more than we realised, an interest and diversion
in captivity. Certainly it must have seemed odd to be made welcome
by Russians and French rather than by one's fellow-countrymen, and
we think it is due not, as Mr. Harvey, "to the national tradition,"
but to the public school and university tradition of the new boy
and the freshman. Mr. Harvey enlivens his book with specimen
lectures--including an excellent one of his own on Shaw--poems and
anecdotes; and there are amusingly rough sketches by Mr. C. G. B.
Bernard.
WILLIAM SMITH, POTTER AND FARMER, 1790-1858. By GEORGE BOURNE. Chatto.
1920. 6_s._ net.
Mr. Bourne has written a beautiful and sensitive little book about his
grandfather, and his own memories of his grandfather's village. It has
in it that deep and still appreciation of English country and of the
ways of English peasants, which is so common to all who know and love
them, and so very rarely expressed. It has the quality of Jefferies
at his best, and of Mr. Hudson too. The scenes which he evokes--the
broad green spaces, the silence, the interminable round of tasks, the
handling of the earth and its store--will never come again in the
places of which he tells us. Farnborough, Frimley, Camberley, Yateley
are suburbs of London, over-run by the spawn of Aldershot and the
railway. Nowadays one must go further afield to realise the presence of
Saint Use; and a term seems to be set even there. It is not that, in
the Roman poet's phrase, _Nos patriæ fines et dulcia linquimus arva_:
rather that those fair fields are flying further from us--as well they
may, seeing what we make of them. Such a book as Mr. Bourne's will be
treasured hereafter for the sake of the quiet beauty and homely virtues
which it records, but very much also for the tenderness and fidelity
with which it does its work.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
COAL MINING AND THE COAL MINER. By H. F. BULMAN, M.I.Min.E., Assoc. M.
Inst. C.E., F.G.S. Methuen. 15_s._
NATIONALISATION OF THE MINES. By FRANK HODGES, Secretary of the Miners'
Federation of Great Britain. With Foreword by the Right Hon. J. R.
CLYNES, M.P. Leonard Parsons. 4_s._ 6_d._
Mr. Bulman is a mining engineer who has been a colliery manager and
a director of colliery companies, and he has a wide knowledge of the
subject. He has much of interest and value to say about the getting
of coal, the technical processes and the machinery, the work of the
miners and their dangers. But he does not confine himself to these
matters; he deals with many of the controversial questions that
are exercising the public mind at the moment. His book was written
unfortunately--or fortunately--before the Coal Commission, as he
puts it, "commenced its novel proceedings," and his allusions to the
evidence it took and the reports it issued are confined to a note or
two here and there. There is no doubt, however, which side he is on.
Though sympathetic enough to the miners, he has plenty of hard words
to say of their Trade Unions. He deplores the prevalence of ca'canny,
of absenteeism, of the aggressive spirit shown towards the employers.
Over Government interference he waxes very bitter; many of the rules
and regulations imposed on the management for the safety of the miners
rouse his ire, whilst the Minimum Wage Act he regards as utterly
mischievous, since it "encourages the indolence which is so prominent
a characteristic of human nature." The longest chapter in the book
discusses in considerable detail--and with many attractive plans and
pictures--the housing of the miners. Mr. Bulman thinks that it is very
unfair to throw the blame for bad housing conditions on the colliery
owners, who, he says, have done more than most employers to provide
houses for those they employ. But many, we think, who have read the
evidence given to the Royal Commission, whatever may be their views on
the proper method of running the coal industry, will find themselves at
issue with Mr. Bulman on that point.
Mr. Hodges makes a direct and ably-reasoned appeal for the
nationalisation of the mines. He is, we think, at rather needless pains
to disclaim "politics" in his book. His main emphasis is certainly
on the economic aspect of the problem; but he cannot avoid being
"political" in the largest sense. He exposes, with a good deal more
stress than Mr. Bulman, the wasteful methods of coal production by the
3300 British collieries operated by 1452 companies, and subject to the
"dead-hand" of 4000 royalty owners, as well as its wasteful methods
of consumption at the collieries and further afield. He discusses the
decrease of output, the main reason for which he will by no means admit
to be the naughtiness of the miners. And he directs the notice of
the unhappy general public to the fact that we are faced at the same
time with a decline in production and a large increase in profits.
What, then, does Mr. Hodges want? He sees "no other remedy except that
of National ownership of the entire industry, with joint control by
the full personnel of the industry and representatives of the whole
community." The miners, he avers, are as much opposed to bureaucracy
as the most extreme of "anti-nationalisers." Both the Sankey scheme
and the original scheme of the miners ("The Nationalisation of Mines
and Minerals Bill," which is printed as an Appendix to the book) guard
against this. The State is to own the industry, but the machinery
of Pit and District Committees and a National Mining Council would
mean management by those engaged in the industry, together with
representatives of the consumers. This last part is important, for
the Syndicalist idea of the "Mines for the Miners" is, in Mr. Hodges'
view, antisocial and "repugnant to our communal instincts." Nor will
he allow that there is any substance in the fear that the initiative
secured by private ownership will be lost. If this initiative really
exists to-day, it will be increased a hundredfold, he argues, when
scope is given to the brain-workers who are responsible for the running
of the industry. Altogether the book is one which is worthy of the most
careful study by nationalisers and anti-nationalisers alike.
SOCIAL THEORY. By G. D. H. COLE. Methuen. 5_s._
It is a commonplace of our sceptical and disillusioned age that all our
cherished institutions are in the melting-pot. The old economic order
is tottering; the finger of scorn is pointed at the hollowed principle
of Parliamentary Government. Eager reformers preach Democracy and yet
more Democracy. But the discontented citizen finds himself getting
ever a larger portion of the shadow of Democracy and ever less of the
substance. To him in his perplexity comes Mr. Cole, offering a new
social theory, to explain the causes of the evil and its true remedy.
What is wrong, he asserts, is the false doctrine that endows the State
with sovereign attributes and makes it supreme in every sphere. His
treatment of Leviathan is drastic. He is not merely for curbing it,
nor, on the other hand, for its complete destruction. What he wants is
to deflate the monster, so to speak, and reduce it to the status of a
decent domestic animal with a carefully limited sphere of usefulness.
The democratic society which Mr. Cole foresees will be a co-ordinated
system of functional associations, guilds of producers, co-operative
societies of consumers, and many others. The State will no longer be
sovereign, it will merely be one of those associations, confined to
its own specific functions. For each function in society there must
be found an association and method of representation, and for each
association and body of representatives a function. "Representative
democracy," as we see it to-day in a "single omnicompetent Parliament,"
is a mockery; for "no man can represent another man, and no man's will
can be treated as a substitute for, or representative of, the wills of
others." This does not mean that Mr. Cole denies the validity of all
representative government, only that he wants it put in a truer form.
And that form is functional representation. The elected representatives
of the future, of whom clearly there will be many--and "Why not?" says
Mr. Cole--are not to be mere delegates, but each will have a more
limited rôle, subject to more constant and closer criticism and advice
from their constituents and, in the last resort, to "recall" by them.
It is in this functional organisation that Mr. Cole centres his hopes
of social and economic peace and progress, of political justice, of
liberty and happiness for the individual. It is a theory that is open
to criticism at several points, and no final judgment of it can, of
course, be passed on the basis of this book. But Mr. Cole at least
argues his case very clearly and trenchantly, and he has made a notable
contribution to political science.
THEOLOGY
FIRST CHRISTIAN IDEAS. By E. C. SELWYN. Murray, 9_s._ net.
The late Dr. Murray was of that type of scholar which England
produces to perfection, and of whom Dr. Abbott is our most notable
and distinguished example. An untiring patience, a close attention to
detail, a rather over-dogmatic manner, and at times a simple felicity
are the chief marks of the school. In this posthumous volume Dr. Selwyn
continues his argument, advocated in previous books, that the writers
of the New Testament were familiar with the Septuagint rather than the
Hebrew, and that a great deal of the New Testament is _Midrash_--that
is, hortatory comment--on Old Testament stories. That he proves this
thesis it would be too much to affirm; but he certainly strengthens
his case by the careful handling he gives here to selected passages,
especially the narratives of the Infancy and the Temptation. At
times one meets sentences in which one recognises the old headmaster
rather than the student. For instance, "The origin of the term Mass
is Mazzoth, the cakes of unleavened bread, and no other etymology is
worth a moment's consideration"; but generally Dr. Selwyn's points are
made carefully, modestly, and carry conviction. This is especially true
of a really startling piece of exegetical translation in Chapter III.
The upholders of the Helvidian view that the brethren of Jesus were
the children of Mary are fond of quoting the phrase of St. Luke, "She
brought forth her first-born son." Dr. Selwyn, with a simplicity that
seems unaware of its force, removes this argument in the following
passage:
Here we may notice two points which show his [Luke's] close
observance of Scripture. The first is one that opens a just complaint
against R.V., which renders "She brought forth her first-born son"
(τὸν υἱὸν αὐτῆς τὸν Πρωτότοκον {ton huion autês ton Prôtotokon}).
Luke is not speaking of uterine children of Mary, but he is declaring
a solemn title, on which St. Paul had already dwelt. The title is
based upon Ps. 89--"I will make him my First-born, higher than the
sons of the earth." Which renders the Greek best, the R.V. or "She
brought forth her son, the First-born"? There can be no question.
It is unfortunate that Dr. Selwyn wrote an extremely unattractive
style, and is singularly unmethodical in the arrangement of his
material. We have little doubt that this and his other books will be
pillaged by popular preachers and theologians who have none of his
scholarship. After all, such a fact is not an unworthy conclusion to
the life of a great schoolmaster, who belongs to a profession which is
fated to give ideas to those who will but rarely admit or even remember
their source.
PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS. By EDWARD CARPENTER. Allen & Unwin. 10_s._
6_d._ net.
No one would deny the correspondence between much of the theology
and ceremonial of the Christian religion and previous creeds. What
significance is to be attached to that correspondence will depend on
the bias of the student. The Christian historian will see in the facts
of anthropology evidence that Christianity is a natural as well as a
revealed religion, and that its claims are greatly strengthened just
because of pagan premonitions. The sceptic may be inclined to dismiss
all Christian refinement of older myths as so much rubbish, of which
the world must be rid before it can live coldly in the bleak light of a
scientific materialism. Anyhow, there seems little advantage in anyone
writing elaborately on the subject who is not a scholar. Mr. Carpenter
is amiable, occasionally interesting, more often merely garrulous, but
he seems to have no claims to scholarship, nor, what is ever fatal, to
be able to estimate the value of previous scholars' works. One instance
will suffice. He names the few eccentrics, Drews, Robertson, Bossi,
Jensen, who deny the historicity of Jesus Christ; calls it a "large
and learned body of opinion," and adds that "a still larger (but less
learned) body fights desperately for the actual historicity of Jesus."
The statement is really absurd. Not to mention orthodox scholars,
Harnack alone could swallow his "learned body" without feeling
discomfort.
His own method shows too great an eagerness to produce parallels at
all costs. He notes that many gods, Dionysus, Mithra, Osiris were born
in caves; Jesus Christ was born in a stable. But why call a stable an
underground chamber? The facts are twisted to suit his theory; indeed,
the whole book reminds one of those strained allegorical treatises
which were common in the Middle Ages. The principal flaw in his book,
as in all similar essays, is that he never approaches the records of
the different religions, to which he is comparing Christianity, with a
hundredth part of the severity he applies to Christian documents. He
does not even discuss the age of manuscripts, a question of the first
importance in the problem of religious origins. How many religions
can show pre-Christian manuscript authority for the traits which, in
the absence of that evidence, we may have believed were borrowed from
Christianity itself?
ANTHROPOLOGY
MAN--PAST AND PRESENT. By A. H. KEANE. Revised and largely rewritten by
A. HINGSTON QUIGGIN and A. C. HADDON. Cambridge University Press. 36_s._
What are the chief natural divisions of mankind, and how did they come
to be formed? Such is the specific problem of ethnology, and it is one
on which the whole body of the anthropological sciences may be said
to converge. In a sense physical anthropology--that is to say, the
study of the bodily characters of man--has the most direct bearing
on the subject. The members of the human family are distinguished by
marked differences of physique, which are clearly to a large extent
the product of heredity. On the other hand, adaptation to environment
must tend to confine each variety to the most suitable area; so that
geography, in the specialised form known as anthropo-geography, will be
required to help the argument out. Moreover, the history of culture, as
variously comprising ideas, institutions, arts, and languages, provides
important evidence of those movements and clashings of peoples whereby
our ever-shifting balance has been maintained between the forces making
severally for a differentiation and for a fusion of types. Nor is
it enough for the ethnologist to keep his eye fixed on the existing
distribution of these types over the wide surface of the globe. His
outlook as it turns towards the past must embrace a tract of time even
more formidably wide, inasmuch as we can never hope to explore it as
thoroughly. Altogether, the speculative problem is as baffling as it
is alluring. On the practical side, too, there is the question to be
faced how far civilisation can afford to experiment in the direction of
race-amalgamation--whether, in short, physical diversity is or is not
compatible with moral unity within the kingdom of man.
Dr. A. H. Keane, for some time Professor of Hindustani at University
College, London, was born in 1833 and died in 1912. He was the only
Englishman in post-Darwinian times to attempt a grand synthesis of
the facts relating to the origin and interrelation of the main human
groups. In _Ethnology_ (1896) and _Man--Past and Present_ (1899) he put
forward what is in effect the same theory--one to which he adhered for
the rest of his days, as may be gathered from his article on Ethnology
in Hastings' _Dictionary of Religion and Ethics_, published in the year
of his death. This theory amounted to a vindication on evolutionary
grounds of Linnæus' genealogical tree of the human family, with its
four branches, the Æthiopian, Mongolian, American, and Caucasian. Keane
postulated that these primary groups were independently derived from a
common primeval ancestry, first the negro family branching off, then
somewhat later the Caucasian and Mongolo-American splitting out of the
main stem. Thereupon he brought geography into play, supposing each
type to develop in an isolated "cradle-land" where its fundamental
characters became fixed, so that no subsequent intermingling could
wholly obliterate them. Nor is it for him simply a question of physical
differentiation. There are mental and moral peculiarities likewise
that go with the race, and these are reflected in markedly divergent
outgrowths of culture. On the strength of these assumptions it was
possible to construct a highly systematic account of mankind in the
mass. For the big differences were taken as established at the outset
once for all; whereas the myriad smaller differences that actually
distinguish the peoples of the earth were regarded as mere aberrations
from these primary norms.
Twenty-one years, however, of further discovery do not confirm this
bold explanation of the genesis of human diversity, but even militate
against it in a negative way, in so far as some of Keane's most trusted
proofs are shown to be invalid. The great antiquity, for instance, of
certain fossil men found in America turns out to be by no means so
certain as he was ready to believe, and the claim of the New World
to rank as an area of primary characterisation is correspondingly
weakened. Again, a great deal more is now known about the racial types
of Pleistocene Europe, and their multiplicity is hard to reconcile with
the view that in early times a given geographical province would foster
a single well-marked variety. Thus, so far as regards the prehistoric
evidence, the bottom is pretty well knocked out of the theory; and
thereupon the genetic significance of the attempted classification of
types disappears, unless a new theory of origin can be substituted.
Now to attempt such a reconstruction of the whole argument is a
task which no editor as such could well undertake, for he must in
that case assume responsibility for every word that appears, the
original author being reduced to a mute shade in the background.
On the other hand, if the explanation of the present heterogeneity
of mankind has become more difficult than ever, the description of
it may be improved by incorporating the results of the latest field
work. Hence the questionable pedigree is withdrawn; but the list
of the surviving members of the human family is carefully revised.
A systematic appearance is imparted to the catalogue by dividing
up the groups according to the nature of their hair. This leaves
Keane's classification almost unaltered in its surface appearance,
since his Æthiopians form the woolly-haired division, his Caucasians
the wavy-haired, the only difference being that the Australians who
count as wavy-haired must now come across from the negroids, of whose
characters they otherwise appear to possess a share. As for the
Mongolians and Americans, since both alike are straight-haired, they
need no longer be kept apart. It is a clever feat of substitution,
yet is one that is of little use to the student of the evolutionary
problem. The systematist gets on very well with hair as his differentia
until the question of development is raised. He thereupon finds,
first, that to relate present types to former ones is impossible by
this means, since prehistoric skulls have lost their hair entirely;
secondly, that the interrelations of present types are not made any
clearer, since no one has worked out the effects of cross-breeding
on the hair of the offspring. Thus it is a scandalous fact that
despite the copious interbreeding of whites with woolly-haired negroes
and straight-haired aborigines in America, no trustworthy data are
available from this or any other quarter in regard to the physical
results of such miscegenation. Is waviness of hair a pure or a mixed
form, or sometimes one and sometimes the other? Our authorities do
not seem to know; yet, so long as the matter is left undecided,
relationships based on similarity of hair can have no genetic
significance.
Another consequence of the suppression of the theory of a radical
division of the human stocks brought about by their development in
isolation is that the assignment of a special kind of mentality to
the different races loses most of its point. This never was a very
convincing side of Keane's work, for he seemed to lack the delicacy of
touch needed in order to bring out the subtler shades of meaning in
primitive religion, and hence could hardly do justice to the surest
diagnostic of the mental life. As it is, one is inclined to smile
at the drastic characterisations of peoples that survive, without
the excuse of a genetic explanation, in the revised text. Thus the
former edition summed up the Papuasian as "even more cruel than the
African Negro." This goes out in the present edition; but as we read
immediately below that the Tasmanian, another branch of the stock,
was "far less cruel," we have lingering doubts about the Papuasian
character as regards the habit of "seeing red." Without altogether
denying the possibility of an ethnic psychology, one may ask what
scientific basis is provided for one here. Whether Keane was right or
wrong, he did mean that temperament went with ancestry. But the present
work does not intend us to deduce a man's morality from his hair; so
that the bearing of mental traits on the problem of classification can
no longer be regarded as essential.
In conclusion, it is only fair to state that no pains have been
spared to secure the utmost accuracy in the statement of facts. As
an ethnology the book may be disappointing, because it amounts to an
admission that Keane's original attempt to construct a genealogy of the
human race outran the evidence. On the other hand, as an ethnographic
conspectus it will be very serviceable to the student. The idealist,
too, who is in a hurry to establish a uniform civilisation for all may
here come upon a useful reminder of the actual diversity of mankind,
though he may console himself with the thought that, as Heracleitus
long ago observed, "opposite friction knits the world together."
SCIENCE
SCIENCE AND LIFE. By FREDERICK SODDY. Murray. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is a collection of addresses and articles indicative of the
author's activities as a chemist and as one of the leading figures
of Aberdeen University. A proportion of the addresses may be grouped
together as representing successive expressions of one leading thought,
the social advantages which may accrue from an intelligent application
of the method and results of scientific research to the utilisation of
natural sources of energy. "Scientific research is capable of raising
the general standard of life, without limit, by the solution it affords
of the material and physical problems that prevent progress"--this
is one of Professor Soddy's chief themes. The disadvantage, largely
inherent in a collection of such addresses, delivered to different
types of audience, is that, instead of having before us a clearly
reasoned and cumulative treatment of the problems involved, we take up
the matter afresh, from a slightly different aspect, in each separate
address and run over very much the same ground, at one time as a member
of the Independent Labour Party, at another as a member of the Aberdeen
Chamber of Commerce, and so on.
There is much overlapping, and a certain feeling is aroused that we are
not much further than we were in the preceding address. Nevertheless,
the problems which Professor Soddy handles are of such importance that,
while we regret that he has not judged fit to embody the matter of
several of his separate addresses in one consecutive essay, we believe
that it is right that his opinion should be placed permanently on
record. Besides these addresses on the place of science in society,
we have two popular expositions of the march of science, in which
Professor Soddy has himself made such notable advances--one on the
Evolution of Matter and one on _Radioactive Change_. The views on the
transmutations of the elements, which attracted much attention in the
daily Press, are not, of course, new, but the account is remarkably
clear and affords an excellent summary of the present state of the
science of radioactivity, which can be understood by the average
reader. Elsewhere in the book, both in separate articles and in
addresses, there is much criticism, of more or less parochial interest,
of the administration of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of
Scotland.
A TEXT-BOOK OF HYGIENE FOR TRAINING COLLEGES. By MARGARET AVERY.
Methuen. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This little book has apparently been written chiefly to help students
at training colleges through their examinations, and suffers from many
of the usual faults of cram books. The information is scrappy, and
the style so condensed that in many parts the book reads more like a
series of notes than a connected treatise. A more serious fault is that
the scientific information is not always correct--for instance, the
examination of recruits and pensioners during the war has disproved the
common assertion that the cause of short sight is reading small print,
doing fine sewing, and so on, and has tended to show that excessive
physical exertion of certain types, such as lifting heavy weights, is
in many cases the inducing cause. This is a point of importance to
school teachers, as short sight is aggravated by many of the physical
exercises now in vogue. In other cases, the most recent work is not
quoted. But the book is largely redeemed by the very sane way in which
wide social topics, such as temperance and eugenics, are discussed. The
latter subject is handled with a desire to get at the facts, uncoloured
by prejudice, which is to be commended, and Miss Avery seems for the
time to get away from the haunting thought of the examination syllabus.
The book will appeal to all interested in primary school education,
for it contains a good deal of information as to actual conditions in
various centres.
HERSCHEL. By HECTOR MACPHERSON. Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge. 2_s._ net.
This short biography is the latest addition to the "Men of Science"
section of the series "Pioneers of Progress" now being published by
the S.P.C.K. It gives an excellent little account of the life of the
older Herschel, and, necessarily, tells us something of his devoted
sister Caroline, probably the first woman to do work of importance
in the exact sciences. A poor German musician, who left--some say
deserted from--the band of the Hanoverian Guards to come to England,
Herschel built up for himself a considerable position in the English
musical world before he turned his attention to the science in every
branch of which he made magnificent advances. His theory of the
stellar system opened a fresh field for observation and speculation;
his studies of Saturn and Mars gave us our first detailed information
about these planets; he discovered Uranus--loyally named "Georgium
Sidus"--and binary stars, and contributed important observations in
every department of observational astronomy then known. His theory of
the sun, if ludicrous in the light of our present knowledge, was the
first attempt at a general treatment of solar problems. Considering
the small size of the book, Mr. Macpherson's treatment is remarkably
comprehensive, and provides a graphic and sympathetic sketch of the
life and works of the great astronomer.
DISCOVERY. A Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge. No. 1. January,
1920. 6_d._ net. No. 2. February. John Murray.
This new periodical appears under distinguished auspices, the trustees
of the deed by which it is maintained being Sir J. J. Thomson, Sir F.
G. Kenyon, Professor A. C. Seward, and Professor R. S. Conway. The
object is to give a popular presentation of advances made "in the
chief subjects in which investigation is being actively pursued," and
it is announced that the articles will be written in plain, simple
language. An imposing list of writers who have made or promised
contributions assures us that they will be authoritative. The purpose
of the promoters of this journal is worthy of all praise, and the
articles in the first number range over a wide field of interest, and
include _The Secret of Philæ_ (Professor Conway), _The Modern Study of
Dreams_ (Professor T. H. Pear), and _Discovery and Education_, written
by the Master of Balliol, with his usual forcefulness and insight.
While paying tribute to the spirit of the undertaking, we venture, with
some diffidence, to offer the opinion that in many points the paper
might be much improved by more informed editing. In the first place
it does not seem that any clear idea has been formulated as to the
class of reader to whom appeal is to be made; every author appears to
have a different standard of erudition in view. For instance, is it
assumed that to the average reader of the _Times_, say, the vocabulary
of Dr. Slater Price's article on _Smoke Screens at Sea_--chlorinated
hydrocarbons, kieselguhr, thermite, oleum, and so on, offered without a
word of explanation--is plain, simple language? This article might have
been written for professional chemists who want to know what chemicals
have proved suitable for producing smoke screens; that on _Sound
Ranging_, on the other hand, with its forced breeziness, reads as if
intended for a school magazine. The make-up is not very attractive,
not vastly superior to that of the average parish magazine. The
single illustration which adorns the pages is a crude and amateurish
pen-drawing far better omitted, if nothing better could be found. In
short, the paper seems to suffer, at present, from lack of policy as
regards public, and lack of high standards as regards production and
illustration. We have no doubt that experience will rapidly rectify
these minor points, and we sincerely hope that the paper will find its
public and develop its sphere of usefulness.
BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
The _Gazette du Bon Ton_, now beginning its third year, is so
extraordinarily clever that it sets one thinking about the
typographical importance of magazines. It is in them that typography
is seen at its liveliest, and it is a pity that after a comet-like
career we frequently lose sight of them. Why do not British publishers
and printers establish an exhibition hall on the lines of that at the
Buchgewerbehaus in Leipzig? The exhibitions should be varied, not
permanent, although there should always be an exhibition connected
with this all-important group of trades. The book-production of one
nation after another, their magazines, their book illustration, their
types and posters, their paper, their colour printing and newspapers
would provide ample material. Printing in its many forms is an almost
omnipresent element of our lives, and for this reason the forms it
takes are more important than the much-canvassed forms of modern
pictorial art. In the series of exhibitions there should be one of
magazines, particular care being taken to include those with a limited
circulation, or those which were experimental and ran only for a
short period. Gordon Craig's _Mask_, the _Neolith_, the _Hobbyhorse_,
the _Manchester Playgoer_, the Russian _Apollon_, the _Imprint_,
the _Game_, are just a few that occur to me as certainly not well
known, and yet they are all suggestive attempts to deal with magazine
typography, format, paper, and illustration.
The _Gazette du Bon Ton_ would certainly be included in such an
exhibition or section of an exhibition. Its two most important features
typographically are its type, a revived old style based on a design of
Nicolas Cochin, and its coloured illustrations. Three sizes of type
are used, in the _Avant-Propos_ a large 18-point, and in the body of
the magazine 14-point and 10-point (I give the nearest equivalents in
British sizes). The 14-point is an excellent choice, both in point of
weight and scale. I should prefer using it all through the magazine
to form a stable background to the very varied illustrations and the
capricious choice of initials and captions. The fine line illustrations
of page 10 are too light to keep the page together as they are meant to
do. The drawings were probably made without being tested by comparison
with the strong line of the type. The illustrations, in black with one
or two flat tints or full colours, give a real colour value that is
never obtained by the three-colour process. Take any book illustrated
by this process and test it by comparison with these _Bon Ton_ colours,
and if the colour sense has not been vitiated by a wrong standard
for coloured letterpress illustrations--such as oil paintings--the
superiority of the flat colour will be obvious. Even the chiaroscuro
block prints are capable of very pleasing effects, a hint of them
appearing in the tail-piece on page 4.
The "_Gazette du Bon Ton_ continuera d'être ... le lieu où les
couturiers et les peintres collaborent pour composer la silhouette de
leur temps." That sentence from the _Avant-Propos_ sums up what I have
to say of the type, the illustration, and the work as a whole. The
large type attracts attention at once, it spreads itself a little--a
shade wide--it slightly emphasises its idiosyncrasies (see the y with
its terminal serif, or the s, or the capital G, they have the very
accent of our own time); it is elegant, but not content with elegance;
it is on a good model, but perfection, the golden mediocrity, is felt
as constraint; it attains--reaches something a little _outré_.
NOTE.--Last month I inadvertently wrote Luckombe for Stower, although
the latter's _Printer's Grammar_ was on my table at the time.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
ROBERT SEYMOUR BRIDGES (Poet Laureate)
_Verse_
POEMS. Pickering. 1873.
THE GROWTH OF LOVE. Poem in Twenty-four Sonnets. 1876. [Reprinted with
omissions and additions, 1890.]
CARMEN ELEGIACUM ROBERTI BRIDGES: IMPENSIS EDUARDI BUMPUS. 1877.
POEMS. By the Author of _The Growth of Love_. Bumpus. 1879.
POEMS. By the Author of _The Growth of Love_. 3rd Series. Bumpus. 1880.
PROMETHEUS, THE FIREGIVER. Drama in Verse. Daniel Press. 1883.
[Reprinted by Bell, 1884.]
PLAYS: NERO, PALICIO, ULYSSES, CAPTIVES, ACHILLES, HUMOURS OF THE
COURT, FEAST OF BACCHUS, Second Part of NERO. Bumpus. 1885-94.
EROS AND PSYCHE. Poem in twelve measures. From Apuleius. Bell. 1885.
Again Revised 1894.
THE FEAST OF BACCHUS. A Poem. Privately printed, Oxford. 1889.
THE SHORTER POEMS OF ROBERT BRIDGES. Four books. Bell. 1890. [Frequent
reissues, the later have five books.]
SELECTIONS OF THE SHORTER POEMS OF ROBERT BRIDGES. Contemporary Poets.
1891. (Edited by A. H. Miles.)
ACHILLES IN SCYROS. Reprinted. Bell. 1892.
HUMOURS OF THE COURT. A Comedy and other Poems. Bell and Macmillan.
Copyright for America. 1893.
ODE FOR THE BICENTENARY COMMEMORATION OF HENRY PURCELL AND OTHER POEMS.
_The Shilling Garland._ Elkin Mathews. 1896.
POETICAL WORKS. Smith, Elder. 1898.
HYMNS FROM THE YATTENDON HYMNAL. Daniel's Private Press. 1899.
NOW IN WINTRY DELIGHTS. A Poem with a Note on Prosody. Daniel Press.
1903.
DEMETER, A MASQUE. Clarendon Press. 1905.
AN INVITATION TO THE PAGEANT. Ode. The Oxford Pageant Book. 1907.
POETICAL WORKS, excluding the Eight Dramas. Clarendon Press. 1912.
POEMS WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1913. Privately printed by St. John Hornby.
Ashendene Press. 1914.
IBANT OBSCURI. An experiment in the classical hexameter. Oxford.
Clarendon Press. 1916.
ODE ON THE TERCENTENARY COMMEMORATION OF SHAKESPEARE. 1916.
_Prose_
ON THE ELEMENTS OF MILTON'S BLANK VERSE IN _PARADISE LOST_. Clarendon
Press. 1887. (Revised, with additions, 1893.)
ON THE PROSODY OF _PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_. Clarendon
Press. 1889.
JOHN KEATS. A Critical Essay. Privately printed. 1895. [Originally
published as Introduction to the _Muses' Library_ Keats.]
MILTON'S PROSODY AND CLASSICAL METRES IN ENGLISH VERSE. W. J. Stone.
Oxford. 1901.
ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE AUDIENCE. Vol. 10, Shakespeare's Works. 1907.
ON THE PRESENT STATE OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. English Association.
1910. (Reprinted, with three plates, 1913.)
ESSAY ON KEATS. Revised in _Poetical Works of John Keats_. Hodder and
Stoughton. 1916.
POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN KEATS, with Critical Essay. Clarendon Press.
1916.
AN ADDRESS TO THE SWINDON BRANCH OF THE WORKERS' EDUCATIONAL
ASSOCIATION. Clarendon Press. 1918.
THE NECESSITY OF POETRY. An Address. Clarendon Press. 1918.
ON ENGLISH HOMOPHONES. Oxford. 1919. (S.P.E. Tract No. 2.)
He has also edited the Poems of R. W. Dixon, Digby Dolben (with
Memoirs), and Gerard Hopkins.
ALICE MEYNELL
_Verse_
PRELUDES. 1875. H. S. King.
POEMS. 1893. Lane.
OTHER POEMS. 1900. Privately Printed.
LATER POEMS. 1902. (Printed in U.S.A.)
POEMS. Burns & Oates. 1913. [A Collected Edition.]
POEMS ON THE WAR. 1915. Privately Printed.
A FATHER OF WOMEN AND OTHER POEMS. Burns & Oates. 1917.
_Prose_
THE POOR SISTERS OF NAZARETH. 1889. Burns & Oates.
THE RHYTHM OF LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1893. Lane.
THE COLOUR OF LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1896. Lane.
THE CHILDREN. 1896. Lane.
LONDON IMPRESSIONS. 1898. Constable.
JOHN RUSKIN. 1899. (Modern English Writers.) Blackwood.
THE SPIRIT OF PLACE AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1899. Lane.
CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS. 1903. Duckworth.
CERES' RUNAWAY AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1909. Constable.
MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 1912. Medici Society.
ESSAYS. Burns & Oates. 1914. [A "Collected-Selected" edition.]
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY. Burns & Oates. 1917.
She has also written Introductions to numerous reprints.
She has also selected or edited the following: Poems of _T. G. Hake_;
_Extracts from Samuel Johnson_ (with G. K. Chesterton); _Poems of J. B.
Tabb_; _The Flower of the Mind_.
DRAMA
THE THREE SISTERS (_Tchekhov_) COURT THEATRE
MEDEA (_Euripides_); CANDIDA (_Shaw_) HOLBORN EMPIRE
PYGMALION (_Shaw_) ALDWYCH THEATRE
THE YOUNG VISITERS (_Daisy Ashford_) COURT THEATRE
JOHN FERGUSON (_St. John Ervine_) LYRIC THEATRE, HAMMERSMITH
MINIATURE BALLET--RUSSIAN MINIATURE
THEATRE DUKE OF YORK'S
GRIERSON'S WAY (_H. V. Esmond_) AMBASSADORS
The list of plays which I have selected from those I have seen during
the last month is not without interest. It contains one play which
is not Tchekhov's finest work, but which nevertheless has no rival
among the others on the list, and it was performed for exactly one
afternoon by the Art Theatre under Madame Donnet. The plays next in
merit--Euripides' _Medea_ and Shaw's _Candida_--were given by Mr. Lewis
Casson and Mr. Bruce Winston at _matinées_ at the Holborn Empire for
exactly one week each. Shaw's _Pygmalion_ and Daisy Ashford's _The
Young Visiters_ may be expected to run--the former in proportion to its
merits, the latter in no equality at all, either with its notoriety or
its charm--for a couple of months. At a considerable distance comes
Mr. Ervine's _John Ferguson_, a play which, if considered by the
side of those I have already named, must be ranked very low, but if
considered with all those I have not named--now being played at London
theatres--must be ranked as respectably good, neither very much better
nor very much worse than the average West-End theatrical entertainment.
For _John Ferguson_, like _Tea for Three_ at the Haymarket, is an
entertainment, only it does not make you laugh; it entertains you as a
street accident does--a very bloody street accident. Finally--leaving
out the Russian Miniature Theatre, which is really Ballet--we come to
_Grierson's Way_, the resuscitated by-product of Mr. H. V. Esmond. Here
we come to a play that--if, as our tabulation almost suggests, plays
run in inverse proportion to their merit--should run for ever.
Of Tchekhov's _The Three Sisters_ I shall not attempt to say much. Like
all Tchekhov's plays, it must be extraordinarily difficult to act, and
I did not think that, on the whole, it was acted very well, although
Miss Dorothy Massingham (Irina), Miss Helena Millais (Natasha), Mr.
Tom Nesbitt (Audrey), Mr. Leyton Cancellor (Chebutikin), Mr. William
Armstrong (Kuligin), and others made praiseworthy and not altogether
unsuccessful efforts to present the characters they were playing.
There was also something very plausible and real about Mr. Harcourt
Williams's Vershinin, and Mr. Williams has a great advantage in his
voice. It was the production rather than the acting that was at
fault, but, inadequate as it may have been, it could not prevent the
extraordinary force of the play making itself felt.
There are some people who would call Tchekhov a realist and _The Three
Sisters_ realism, but it is Mr. Ervine in _John Ferguson_ who is the
realist, if by that one means reproducing on the stage as closely
as practicable what might be happening off it, with the action and
language rendered as faithfully as possible. It was probably Mr.
Ervine's knowledge of this fact, and the serious deficiency which it
indicates, that made him introduce the village idiot to talk about
"wee" stars, and give the audience what is always the realist's idea
of a little poetry. As a man of letters, and not a mere theatrical
hack, he knows of the utter barrenness of the photographic reproduction
method in art. He probably knows also that it is not even enough to
select, that the artist must create. Unfortunately this is just what
the mere intellectual, the merely clever man can never do, and when he
is clever enough to know that he must make an attempt at it he produces
something like Mr. Ervine's village idiot, something that is borrowed
and extraneous to the real matter power of the play. The poetry, the
creative power of Tchekhov, on the other hand, is immanent and infuses
the whole conception of _The Three Sisters_. So true is this that when
we saw the play in the auditorium of the Court Theatre we felt that it
was our lives we were watching, our destinies we were seeing played
out; and this in spite of the fact that every detail of the scene was
strange, every custom unfamiliar, and the wealth of local colour such
as to produce a sensuous impression as strong as music.
Nothing extraordinary happens in Tchekhov's play. The characters
meet, talk, fall in love, part, die in the casual way in which we
all do these things--the actual events in Mr. Ervine's play are far
less usual, just as a street accident is an occurrence less frequent
than afternoon tea; but the whole play is an imaginative expression
of the inner feelings of three human beings--the three sisters. It is
extraordinarily imaginative, that is the point I want to make, and
it is useless to ask me why it is imaginative--that is Tchekhov's
secret. You never feel this is what actually happened three hundred
miles from Moscow in the year 1892; you feel, on the contrary, that
this never happened at all, but that it is what goes on inside us,
millions of us, all the years of our lives, although it may never or
very rarely come up to the surface of our consciousness and fill us
with the spiritual agony of _The Three Sisters_. In Mr. Ervine's play,
on the other hand, although, as I have said, the actual events are in
themselves of less common occurrence, we meet with something that we
feel certain must have happened yesterday and will happen to-morrow,
and its significance, somehow, seems to be _nil_. What artistic or
spiritual significance has a collision in the Strand between a taxi-cab
and a lamp-post? Whatever significance it has, it is that kind of
significance that Mr. Ervine's play possesses.
If _The Young Visitors_ had been produced by that Russian Society
called Zahda, or by the Russian Miniature Theatre, it would have been
hailed as a wonderful masterpiece of bizarre and original art, and all
the young freaks of London who frequent the Russian Ballet and sneer
at Gilbert and Sullivan would have flocked to see it and talked of
nothing else for months. As it is a product, however, of the despised
English--the English who have produced the greatest imaginative
literature of the world--and as also it has the misfortune to have been
in its book form enormously popular, there is little likelihood of its
being adequately appreciated. I must confess, however, that by the side
of Mr. J. V. Bryant's production of Miss Daisy Ashford's _The Young
Visiters_, the productions I have so far seen of the Zahda Art Council,
which includes men of ambitious mind, and of the Russian Miniature
Theatre have been distinctly _jejune_ and unexhilarating. _The Young
Visiters_ is the later Victorian world looked at from the eyes of a
child. It is, therefore, a fantasy, and the note of fantasy has been
admirably struck in the stage production. Those who have read the book
will naturally imagine that it is spoiled upon the stage, but they will
be wrong. It is even conceivable that some--there are such people--who
have not liked the book will enjoy the play immensely. They should,
at all events, not let any distaste of the book's vogue prevent their
seeing the play, if they have the opportunity. They will be rewarded
by Mr. Harold Anstruther's marvellous presentment of that wonderful
creation Bernard Clark. He is a masterpiece in costume, voice, gesture,
and make-up, and I expect I shall have to wait a good many years before
our Russian friends give us anything comparable for excellence with
him. Another perfect--the word perfect is accurate--presentment is
Mr. John Deverell's Earl of Clincham--the earl who thought that the
glories of this world were but "piffle before the wind." Mr. Lawrence
Hanray's Procurio is also perfect. I have never used the word perfect
about any acting before, so there is obviously some magic about _The
Young Visiters_ to have three parts played perfectly. I wish I could
say the same of that delightful person Mr. Salteena. Mr. Ben Field's
effort is by no means without merit, but he does not satisfy our
preconceived notion of what Mr. Salteena ought to be, as the others
do for Bernard Clark, Clincham, and Procurio. Nevertheless, as we get
more used to Mr. Field's Salteena we get more satisfied with him. We
never, unfortunately, became satisfied with Miss Edyth Goodall's Ethel
Morticue, clever as Miss Goodall undeniably is. Miss Goodall's Ethel
is sophisticated, Ethel was not. The Prince of Wales at the Levee was
excellent, and the Duchess's singing of _Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_ superb.
It was an inspiration to think of it.
Of Mr. Esmond's play, _Grierson's Way_, I should say no more if it were
not that it has been praised by the same critics who have written of
the "filth" of Dryden's _Marriage à la Mode_. Those of us who pride
ourselves on a somewhat catholic taste, who can see the good points of
a revue, a musical comedy, a melodrama, a farce, and a tragedy, who
find that, although we may prefer Webster, Dryden, and Tchekhov to
Shaw, and Shaw to Arnold Bennett, and Arnold Bennett to Oscar Asche, we
are none the less able to be amused by the Pounds sisters in _Pretty
Peggy_, and to enjoy Alfred Lester in _The Eclipse_--those of us,
let me add, who do not turn scarlet at the sight of a bare back are
still--strange as it may appear to the pharisaical and the prudish--not
without moral sense. And _Grierson's Way_ is a play that offends
_our_ moral sense. It is, I would venture to add--using the word with
its true but not its current popular meaning--a thoroughly immoral
play. That is to say its ideas are false, its sentiment slobbery,
and thoroughly rotten with the rottenness of bad fruit. It is worth
discussing the play because so few people know a bad thing when they
see it. They judge by externals, not by the spirit, for the simple
reason that it is so very much easier. Their idea of morality is like
that of the old lady who overheard her gardener say "Damn" and said
"What a bad wicked man!" and dismissed him, although he was an honest,
good-hearted fellow, to put in his place a smooth-tongued, insincere
rogue who cheated her for the rest of her life. Of course it served her
right; men and women have no excuse to throw up the task of feeling and
thinking after real righteousness and beauty in Art or Life for the
easy rule-of-thumb method of judging everything by rote or formula.
No doubt it is terribly difficult for many of them to feel either
beauty or ugliness, good or evil, but without that sensitiveness of the
intelligence they can never hope to criticise the productions of the
human mind. The foot-rule, whether it is a rule for measuring "damns"
or split infinitives, or rapes or murders, or the number of bare backs
in a play, is useless for measuring its artistic quality, and a play
can have no other quality, provided its murders are not real and its
indecencies not practised before our eyes.
In _Grierson's Way_ we have the story of a girl who is loved by a
middle-aged bachelor who has a maundering delight in bad music, and
also by a once famous violinist, who has lost an arm in an accident,
and now is a doddering drunkard, who talks of Art and his soul in the
approved manner of the sentimentalist who does not realise what an
offence his sickly, insincere slobber is to any profoundly-feeling,
austere, and clear-brained artist. The girl has fallen in love with an
Army man of the conventional novelette type, who is already married;
she is about to have a child by him when she gets a letter from him to
say that he is going away and will never see her again. The middle-aged
bachelor offers to marry her as a way out of the difficulty; she
accepts. The man she loves returns, his wife having died, and the
husband, at the instigation of the violinist, commits suicide. The
curtain falls leaving this creature expressing with sickly gusto his
opinion that the dead husband will now stand for ever between her
and her happiness. This account of the play's theme can give no idea
of the false sentiment, the maudlin splutter of fine words, and the
melodramatic rant with which the play is loaded. Miss Cathleen Nesbitt
strove to preserve some personal dignity in the foul mush of words that
flowed from the invertebrate jelly-fish around her, but nothing she
could do could redeem the play, which is, frankly, disgusting.
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
PROBLEMS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT. By CLAYTON HAMILTON. Allen & Unwin. 7_s._
6_d._
This is a book by an American critic, and it ranges over almost the
whole field of dramatic art. Although it consists mainly of articles
reprinted from American magazines, it is on a much higher general
level of intelligence and taste than we are accustomed to expect from
work of this kind. Mr. Hamilton discusses all the modern English
dramatists, and, although he is not free from his countrymen's tendency
to exaggerated praise--for instance, few English critics of reputation
would endorse his opinion that _Hindle Wakes_ is "a great work"--yet
he is far from being undiscriminating, and his criticism of Mr. Shaw
and Mr. Galsworthy is penetrating and fresh. Mr. Hamilton has the great
merit of thinking for himself instead of merely repeating the current
catchwords of the day. He is not afraid to argue that Henry Arthur
Jones and Pinero are finer dramatists than Mr. Bernard Shaw, but, on
the other hand, he can appreciate Mr. Chesterton and Lord Dunsany.
Again, he is full of ingenious suggestions on the subject of dramatic
construction, but he is far more conscious of the foolishness of
dogmatising and laying down hard-and-fast rules than such a good critic
even as Mr. William Archer, to whom his book is dedicated. On the
subject of American plays, as represented by the work of Mr. George M.
Cohan, he is scathingly severe, and that is a good omen for the future
of the drama in America.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
AUGUSTE RENOIR
Renoir is admired by almost all schools of taste, both conservative
and radical, and naturally each school endeavours to claim him as
its own. The impressionists, for instance, emphasise his adoption of
the impressionist palette, his studies in the manner of Monet and
Pisarro, his general preoccupation with atmosphere and sunlight;
the anti-impressionists point out his deviation from the stippled
technique, with its juxtaposition of the colours of the spectrum,
his increasing interest in form and composition as contrasted with
atmosphere, and his own disclaimer of adherence to the naturalistic
principle: "Avec la Nature on fait ce qu'on veut et on aboutit
necessairement a l'isolement. Moi, je reste dans le rang"; also the
famous reply to the question, where one should learn painting: "Au
musée, parbleu!"
The reflections upon art of even the greatest artist are not
necessarily correct, and though an artist preaches one theory he may
actually practise another. Nor are these brief and pithy utterances
of Renoir's altogether unambiguous. In order to appreciate the real
meaning of any statement of theory it is necessary to bear in mind the
opposite view which it is combating. We cannot infer from Renoir's
objection to the indiscriminate realism of the later impressionist
doctrine that he was in favour of Cubism, for Cubism was not at the
time under discussion. Nor does his reference of students to the
old masters (_au musée_) imply in the least that he would abolish
painting from nature. There is, in fact, not the slightest need to
read into Renoir's simple, somewhat irritated replies any abstruse
semi-metaphysical meaning. They will bear a very normal interpretation,
which seems to me to be not only the true one, but also the truth.
Renoir did not believe in the chaotic and uninspired painting of
anything and everything, nor in the pretended complete severance with
tradition and the past. He knew that the study of the old masters had
assisted him in giving expression to his emotion, and he left the
matter at that. Actually all his life long he painted from nature, and
it is said that he hardly ever worked without a model. Indeed many of
the intellectualists have been compelled to class Renoir as a "naïf,"
who was content with the unmediated charms of the external world, and
never aspired to more deliberate abstract construction.
The Meaning of Impressionism
This distinction, however, between the realistic impressionist (Monet),
the naïf (Renoir and the _douanier_ Rousseau), and the intellectually
constructive artist, such as Cézanne, is apt to be thoroughly
misleading. It is true that the theory of impressionism, in its later
developments, was a scientific formula calculated to fetter rather
than help the artist, but it does not follow, nor is it by any means
true, that Monet and Pisarro were not sometimes very fine artists.
They elaborated a style which expressed admirably their own brisk
and vivacious sentiment, and the result was neither photographic nor
discontinuous with the past. Surely nothing but prejudice and the new
pedantry of hybrid abstract design could deny æsthetic value to Monet's
"Gare St. Lazare," and Pisarro's "Red Roofs," in the Luxembourg. Often,
however, Monet's work is distinctly laboured and only differentiated
from a photograph by the worried surface of the paint. He is more
monotonous and uninspired than his contemporaries, but he is none the
less the author of some remarkably good prose descriptions.
In short, impressionism has come to stand for two quite distinct
things: one a genuine attempt to articulate an emotion connected
with light and atmosphere, the other a scientific theory of colour
and light. With the latter, few of the important impressionists were
concerned. Seurat is the only one who seems to have been influenced to
any noticeable extent and yet to have remained an artist. But with the
former the whole group were more or less concerned, including Renoir
and Cézanne. They all revolted from the old sombre colours, expressive
of the worship of hoary antiquity, and astonished their contemporaries
by plunging into the brightness of the present. Their different modes
of reacting to this general tendency were the natural result of
eminently desirable differences in temperament. This is the essence of
the divergence between, say, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne. For the very
reason that they each possessed a personal vision their work differed,
both technically and in its content. It simply is a misrepresentation
to say that Cézanne indulged in Cubist deformations. To quote a
biographer of Cézanne:--"Ce sont ses disciples, ses plagiaires qui
raconte qu'il deforme. Ses deformations, que des cuistres voient si
bien, eux qui ne sont pas peintres, ce sont des gestes, des attitudes,
des contours _vrais_ pour Cézanne. Il ne voyait pas autrement."
Of course it is possible to soak oneself in Cézanne to such an extent
that almost everything else will seem uninteresting. But this is
not a magnetism peculiar to Cézanne; it is common to all artists of
any comprehensive range, not excepting Renoir. Pass quickly after
enjoying a collection of Renoir's completest and most lucid work to
some of Cézanne's paintings. Most probably they will appear wooden
and unattractive. But this will be a psychological illusion, due to
a sudden contrast and the fact that the whole of one's emotional
consciousness has been shaped to a certain form, and will not
immediately reshape itself. Our minds at any single moment are unable
to contain more than a few powerful conceptions and impressions, and
there must therefore be times of clashing and transition.
But there is a sense in which Renoir might very well be described as
naïf and ingenuous. This would refer not to his method or technique,
but to the spiritual content of his work, what he means and has to say.
The centre of his enjoyment lay always in something charming, radiant,
opulent, and, if you like, sensuous. And so those who are ascetically
disposed, if not in their life, in their tastes, condemn Renoir as
pretty and sentimental. But often they go further and conclude that
he was facile, that he painted without difficulty or trouble, as the
birds sing. It may, however, have been as difficult for him to attain
a satisfactory expression of his emotion, which was _of_ facility,
as it was for Cézanne to express his intense consciousness of beauty
struck out of conflicting opposites. Indeed, very often there are
distinct indications of a struggle in Renoir, of inability to get
exactly what he was aiming at. A superficial glance might put this
down to bad elementary draughtsmanship. But one has only to consider
the technical proficiency of his earlier work (see "Le Cabaret de la
Mere Antony, Diane Chasseresse") to realise that the cause of this
apparent ineptitude must be deeper. It is the honesty of the artist who
is always developing and refuses to overcome difficulties by resort to
the camouflage of the obvious and the hackneyed. Consequently the very
failure has its appeal.
Different Periods
There is a great deal of difference of opinion as to the respective
value of Renoir's earlier and his later work, and this has afforded
an excellent opportunity for the conflicting schools, who all join
in admiring Renoir, to set up within this ostensible "union sacrée"
their old party divisions. The conservatives adhere, of course, to the
first great period from 1870-1881; that is to say between Renoir's
thirtieth and fortieth years. In the rest they see a gradual decline of
inspiration, an increasing predilection for rotund and almost coarse
sensuousness, a pathetic loss of technical power until, when tortured
by gout and hopelessly paralysed, the old master could only apply
chaotic dabs of hot and hotter colour, his work became worthless.
The extremists, on the other hand, see a steady, though uneven,
development. They admit readily the enchantment of the period of early
maturity when Renoir was at the height of his physical powers, but
they have an uncomfortable feeling that this kind of art is a trifle
too normal, it is something that practically anyone can enjoy with a
little effort. The later work is more difficult. Renoir never lost his
peculiar charm, even when painting the fattest of models (his model, I
think, just grew fatter), but he experimented in different directions,
passing from the study of light more and more to that of form.
Latterly, when an invalid, he was compelled to confine himself within
narrower bounds, and the appeal of his work has less volume in it.
Nevertheless, it is maintained these last are the two greatest periods,
if not in positive achievement, at any rate in intention.
I am disposed, if anything, to favour the work done in the first two
phases, between his thirtieth and sixtieth years, and I am not sure
that some of his most perfect pictures do not belong to the earlier of
the two. For he did not produce many perfect pictures; it is nearly
always possible to trace some defect. For instance, there has recently
been exhibited at the Eldar Gallery one of the remarkable series of
"Baigneuses." This particular canvas was painted in 1888. There is a
great deal that is very beautiful in it, but it is not a whole. It
is a "studio" picture, the nude and the landscape have no inevitable
connection, and little interest is displayed in the face. Further,
the body is cut off, or rather smoothed off, from its environment by
a swish of paint, which signifies nothing, except that Renoir became
too excited by the actual touch and feel and putting on of the paint,
and also that he had an _idée fixe_ about the gradual merging of
the outline into its surroundings. This was the sentimental echo of
his former genuine enthusiasm for _plein-air_ effects. In many of
his otherwise admirable figure studies this spongy film (especially
affecting the hands) spoils the precision of his rendering. Sometimes,
however, it is appropriate; for instance, in the famous picture, "La
Moulin de la Galette" (1876). Here the flowing atmospheric technique
and the significance coincide. The radiant coolness of the dappled
light and shade is expressed with a freedom and spontaneity which is
often lacking in Monet and Pisarro. Yet in spite of the unalloyed
delight of this dancing scene I always feel a lurking criticism. This
is not because of the kind of sentiment which might be mistaken for
sentimentality; it is due to something else, a sameness and repetition.
There is an absence of diversity in these light-hearted revellers; in
fact they are just one man and one woman duplicated many times over,
and flushed with exactly the same translucent emotion. Renoir did not
possess great constructive imaginative power, and he had very little
interest in character. This general limitation, however, only became
a concrete limitation (that is to say, a defect observable inside a
picture, instead of one of the infinite things that the picture is not)
when he was actually portraying some scene necessitating a variety of
individual characters.
It is in some of his landscapes, or in portrait heads such as that of
Madame Charpentier, or studies such as "La Loge," and some of the later
nudes that there is the completest fusion of the content and the form,
of the technique and the emotion. It is frequently said that Renoir
was not a landscape painter, but was _par excellence_ a painter of
women or of woman. The latter statement undoubtedly has some truth in
it, although the interest was not so much in woman as in a particular
roseate emotion, more evident in women than in men. But he was also
a very considerable landscape painter, and his figures of women are
usually placed in the open air, amid scenery possessing the same soft
and sweeping texture. Even when an invalid he still painted out of
doors, in a specially constructed glass house, while his model posed,
often naked, in his garden.
About 1881 he seems to have exhausted his direct interest in the
_plein-air_ movement. Incidentally, he took a journey to Italy, but
there is no evidence of any influence of this visit upon his work,
except that it may have served to throw into stronger relief the
peculiarities of the French school and his own kinship with it--that
school which (in his own phrase) "est si gentille, si clair, de si
bonne compagnie."
This, however, is least applicable to the artist towards whom his own
inner development seems to have guided him, namely Ingres. To put
it in the usual superficial and rather unsatisfactory way, he was
passing from the study of light to that of two dimensional form. The
actual result was a synthesis in which brilliant colour and light
played a part never dreamt of by Ingres. At first his work showed an
unusual hardness and lack of skill. He never possessed the sureness
of touch of Manet, which often was mere virtuosity; nor does one ever
feel behind his hand the overwhelming impetuosity of Van Gogh. He
feels his way gradually, producing a great deal, in fact too much,
and succeeding only in certain moments. The culmination was reached
in the large composition of the four bathers (which I have not seen)
in the collection of M. J. E. Blanche. Opinion seems to differ as to
its value, but, whatever defects it may possess, it is clearly of
a monumental character, and probably represents the highest point
that Renoir was able to attain in the attempt to bring together the
sculpturesque qualities of one of his first large compositions, "Diane
Chasseresse," and the luminosity and richness of the "Moulin de la
Galette."
Between the years 1885 and 1897 there followed a whole succession of
remarkable pictures, including "Les Enfants Benard," "Mère et Enfant,"
"Les Filles de Catulle Mendès," "Les Parapluies," and "Au Piano," of
which there are two examples, one being at the Luxembourg. Although
Renoir was moving away from his former softness and mistiness, as if in
dissatisfaction with the youthful joy in mere sensation, he never left
it right behind, he remained on the borderland and looked back on it,
contemplating it with maturer insight.
About 1900 to 1919
The last stage constituted a partial return to the first; he reverted
to his former freedom and suppleness of touch. But the method is more
direct and the content more realistic and crude, although there is
still the same lyrical tenderness. His colours are bolder and hotter,
and it is alleged that he strengthened them purposely with a view to
their being modified by time. This appears to me a most dangerous
doctrine. How could one ever be certain that the present wrong tones
would be altered by exposure to exactly the correct tones? And why
put oneself to such pain in the present for the sake of an uncertain
future? For it must be very painful to a sensitive artist to create
something out of tone, even on purpose. For these reasons (and
without the backing of any authority) I rather doubt whether there is
much truth in this intended excuse. And I doubt whether any excuse
is necessary. I believe that in the majority of cases Renoir meant
something by this hotter colour, and that in this respect the pictures
are their own justification. It is impossible to hail all of them as
masterpieces. Many definitely betray loss of vitality and imagination.
But I cannot agree that the work of this period is that of an invalided
old man who is living sentimentally on his past.
There has recently been on view, at the Chelsea Book Club, a collection
of oil paintings and pastels by Renoir. Some of them were relatively
unimportant earlier works, but the majority belonged to the later
period. None of them, with the exception, perhaps, of a flower piece
and a small head of a woman, can be ranked very high; but they indicate
the limits and at the same time the mellow charm of the work of this
time. This charm is not perhaps immediately felt; it grows upon one,
but it is quite real. In his old age Renoir remained as much as ever a
poet, only his poetry is thinner and more fragile.
Renoir was born in 1841 and died in 1919. Of his famous contemporaries
only Claude Monet is still alive.
HOWARD HANNAY
MUSIC
THE NATURALIZATION OF OPERA IN ENGLAND
In Italy opera is a tree which has sprung from a seed and grown swiftly
in the course of centuries to an exuberant, perhaps an over-exuberant,
maturity. It has been fertilised from other countries, but its
trunk has kept one firm straight line by its own perfectly natural
development. In England that tree has not flourished. Various attempts
have been made to naturalize it, but for the most part the English
cultivators never produced more than stunted and distorted growths.
Even when they seemed to do well for a time they bore curiously little
resemblance to their original parent. Other gardeners, observing how
meagrely the tree prospered in the open ground, transplanted opera
full-grown from Italy, and did their best to provide it artificially
with its own soil and its own climate. It was an expensive amusement,
and the more expensive it was the more successful its promoters
proclaimed it to be. But it could not be called naturalization. The
only course which has shown any signs of being practicable was to graft
the foreign shoot on to a sturdy native growth, if a suitable stock
could be found. But it is a process requiring careful handling and
careful watching, for the tree takes a long time to become thoroughly
acclimatized.
It is pretty generally agreed that English opera must be preceded by
opera in English. Our public--our real public, that is to say, not the
handful of people who concentrate a special attention on opera, both
English and foreign--will not be ready to take new native operas to
their hearts until they have got thoroughly into the habit of enjoying
those popular works which form the international repertory. Those
operas--_Faust_, _Carmen_, _Il Trovatore_, and the rest--are popular in
England already, it will be said. Yes, as operas go, they are indeed
popular; but only among those people, in whatever section of society,
who have developed the opera habit. For even in what are called the
popular theatres, where they are played in English to cheap and crowded
audiences, they are almost always exotic still. If it were not that a
large majority of operas are called by the names of their principal
characters, we should see more significance in the fact that we speak
of the others in nearly every case by their native titles, and do not
translate them. We have learnt to talk of _The Magic Flute_ and _The
Flying Dutchman_; but even at the "Old Vic." they keep the names of _Il
Trovatore_, _La Traviata_, and _Cavalleria Rusticana_.
Wherever they are played by English singers in English theatres they
remain, as it were, extra-territorial. To begin with, the translations
of nearly all popular operas are abominable. This has been said many
times before. But what has not been said so often is that, abominable
as they are, there is hardly an opera-singer who is willing to learn
a new translation, even when it is candidly admitted that the new
translation is easier to sing than the old one. There are plenty of
sound reasons for this apparent obstinacy. It is not due merely to
laziness or to the vested interests of publishers. What is far more
important is that a new translation, if it is really good, involves
a new style of singing, a new style of acting, a new scheme for the
entire production of the opera. The average opera-singer learns his
parts in a spirit of routine. He cannot waste time over trying to
find out the plot of the opera or to analyse the personalities of the
characters. He learns the traditions and is ready to step into his part
without rehearsal in any operatic company that may happen to engage
him. It may sound very shocking to the reader that operas should be
put on the stage without any rehearsal whatever; but it is nothing
unusual in the world of actual fact. After all, it is not much more
unreasonable that an opera company should sing _Maritana_ without
rehearsing than that an orchestra of professionals should give an
unrehearsed performance of the overture to _William Tell_ or the ballet
music from _Rosamunde_.
The Function of the Audience
Sir Thomas Beecham, when he first formed his opera company, sought out
youth, intelligence and enthusiasm. He began in a brave and gallant
spirit, and in his company there is still something of that spirit
left. At the beginning it was hardly expected that he would do much
better than the well-known provincial companies which used occasionally
to give a season in London. But he aimed at storming Covent Garden.
Covent Garden was inaccessible during the war, partly because no
foreign singers were available to fill it, and partly because it was
already filled with furniture. The war ended, the old Covent Garden
exotic opera reappeared. Sir Thomas, however, did not leave its
territory inviolate, and he is now in complete possession. But Covent
Garden has been too strong for the invaders. Like the barbarians who
invaded Italy, they are becoming Romanised. At Covent Garden there are
boxes and box-holders who adore Melba, Caruso, and the rest. There is
a splendid orchestra, there are fine singers, there is magnificent
scenery. But the longer the company stays there the less chance there
seems to be of their preparing the way for the real English opera of
the future.
What English opera wants is an audience. And the best audience that I
have ever seen in any opera-house in Europe is the audience at the "Old
Vic." Italian audiences are reputed to be appreciative; but they are
interested primarily in singing and in little else. They are critical
of this only, and they have a certain tendency to be cruel. The "Old
Vic." audience, if it is bored, lets the actors know it; but it is
never cruel, and it is ready to appreciate other things besides mere
singing. Once its attention has been secured there is no audience to
equal it for quick intelligence and responsiveness to both tragedy and
comedy. But Covent Garden has no pit, and its gallery is too small and
too distant to assert itself.
Half-way between the "Old Vic." and Covent Garden stands the new
enterprise of Messrs. Miln and Fairbairn, at the Surrey. The Surrey has
secured its audience. It has begun with the old familiar favourites,
but it has also included in its repertory _The Flying Dutchman_ and
_Don Giovanni_, both of which have drawn full houses. Very wisely the
management has not wasted its money on elaborate scenery, though it
is in a position to stage the _Flying Dutchman_ quite adequately, and
that is no small matter. There is an orchestra which, if not large, is
at least complete. It began by being rather rough, and even in _Don
Giovanni_, for which it is just exactly balanced in proportion of
wind and strings, it only too forcibly recalled the criticisms made
by Mozart's contemporaries on his overpowering orchestration. It is
in their singers that Messrs. Miln and Fairbairn have been peculiarly
successful. Youth, intelligence, and enthusiasm are certainly well
represented here.
The Surrey's Opportunity
Mr. Fairbairn, who is responsible for the production of the operas, has
in this company a wonderful opportunity, if he will only seize it. Here
is a splendid house that combines the dignity of an eighteenth-century
design with the practical convenience of an interior recently
remodelled; an audience with no critical and social pretensions to keep
up, but unsophisticated, appreciative, and alert; and a company of
young singers keen to learn and ready to throw themselves generously
into their work. Starting on such a basis, the Surrey has every chance
to develop into a great and flourishing school of English opera. But
to develop such a school needs more than average courage, initiative,
intelligence, and hard work. It means that gradually, one by one, the
translations of all the standard operas must be thoroughly revised.
Along with this revision there must be a thorough-going revision and
reconsideration from the beginning of the system on which each opera
is produced. Tradition must be abandoned if it cannot be justified by
common sense. Each opera must be worked out afresh from the beginning,
as if it had never been put on the stage before. And the director of
such a school must be prepared to face possible hostility towards his
revisions. There will always be some among his audience who prefer the
old tradition, good or bad, simply because they like to hear what they
have always heard. Such people have got to be convinced and converted.
That is not impossible. Even operatic audiences have a certain amount
of common sense, and it is to common sense that an operatic producer
must not be afraid of appealing. The plots of most operas are generally
admitted to be nonsense, but that is no reason why one should not make
a vigorous effort to put sense into them. Few plots could be more
absurd than that of _Il Trovatore_; but if Verdi succeeded in writing
music that, by virtue of its persistent directness, its unswerving
pursuit of its dramatic end, has made _Il Trovatore_ one of the
greatest operas ever composed, surely it is worth a producer's while
to concentrate attention on making the libretto as clear and as sure
of its dramatic intention as the music is. The translator of an opera
must not rest satisfied with merely translating each line as singably
and as reasonably as he can, just as it happens to come along. He must
regard the libretto as a literary whole, must endeavour to attain
some unity of style, and still more to achieve a cumulative dramatic
effect by little touches, significant phrases to fit important musical
phrases; he must in each recitative or aria see at once where the
climax is and fit it with a telling point, to which the rest of the
movement will lead up. He must differentiate his characters, giving
each its own literary individuality. If his original text is a bad one
he must improve upon it. There are many cases in which a librettist has
had a good idea but has failed to express it adequately. Sometimes the
composer has understood the idea and has clothed the wretched words
with music that lifts them on to a higher plane. The translator here
finds his opportunity, and must do his best to find English words which
may express the poet's intention rather than his actual achievement.
The singer who meets with a good translation is no longer
uncomfortable, nervous, and ashamed about his part. He finds that he
can bring home his songs to his audience in a way that he never could
before; he learns to realise his part as a personality, he may even get
as far as beginning to imagine what the character in question might
have said or done when he was not on the stage. In this way the double
appeal to the audience can be made, the appeal that is irresistible,
the appeal to their own common sense, coupled with the overwhelming
appeal of real personality in the actor.
If all operatic directors insisted resolutely on good translations and
insisted that their singers should sing them like real natural English,
we might develop a really English school of opera. Our own poets and
composers could watch and listen, and possibly learn something which
would guide them in the construction of their own original librettos
and music. They would gradually come to find out what even our
song-writers have only very partially discovered, namely, what are the
true dramatic possibilities of English voices singing English poetry.
EDWARD J. DENT
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Transcribers' Notes:
Greek transliterations provided by transcribers are enclosed in {curly
braces}. Greek letters and special symbols that cannot be displayed
with simple text have been omitted from some versions of this eBook,
and may be displayed as question marks on some mobile devices.
Footnotes have been moved to immediately follow the paragraphs or
headings that refer to them.
Since this eBook contains text written by many authors, inconsistencies
in spelling and punctuation have not been changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.
Inconsistent hyphenation and ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines
were retained.
Text uses both "Newdigate" and "Newdegate".
Page 53: "God bless your Majesty" is missing ending punctuation.
Page 65: "the corn of the crocus" perhaps should be "corm".
Page 201: "rallying-point or the new" perhaps should be "of".
Page 202: "an" was added by Transcribers to "a familiar thing from an
unfamiliar angle", as there was empty space where a short word belonged.
Page 243: "Les Précieuses Ridicules" was printed without the acute
accent.
Page 262: "Keatsiam" probably should be "Keatsian".
Page 367: Unclear whether the punctuation after "Ramsay Macdonald" is a
comma or period.
Page 388: "rake-hells" was printed that way.
Page 388: "with a priceless gift" had blank space where the "a" has
been added in this eBook.
Page 560: "as the authors' record" was printed with the apostrophe.
Page 608: "deeplier" was printed that way.
Page 714: The printing of "twenty more he lover's" was defective.
Page 719: "^e" represents the superscript "e".
Page 720: "^a" represents the superscript "a".
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920" ***
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