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diff --git a/78901-0.txt b/78901-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4048ab8 --- /dev/null +++ b/78901-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6035 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78901 *** + + + + +Books in General + + + + +_BOOKS OF ESSAYS_ + + + THE MERRY-GO-ROUND + _by Carl Van Vechten_ + + MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS + _by Carl Van Vechten_ + + A BOOK OF CALUMNY + _by H. L. Mencken_ + + A BOOK OF PREFACES + _by H. L. Mencken_ + + PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES + _by H. L. Mencken_ + + PAVANNES AND DIVISIONS + _by Ezra Pound_ + +ALFRED A. KNOPF, _Publisher_ + + + + + Books in General + + By Solomon Eagle + + [Illustration] + + Alfred A Knopf + New York Mcmxix + + COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY + ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. + + PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA + + _ARTURO WAUGH_ + + + + +Preface + + +These papers are selections from a series contributed weekly, without +intermission, to the _New Statesman_ since April 1913. I do not feel that +the responsibility for reprinting them rests on my shoulders; I trust +that where it does rest it will rest lightly. I shall have done all I +hope to do if I have produced the sort of book that one reads in, without +tedium, for ten minutes before one goes to sleep. + +The pseudonym “Solomon Eagle,” I may explain, is not intended to posit +any claim to unusual wisdom or abnormally keen sight. The original bearer +of the name was a poor maniac who, during the Great Plague of London, +used to run naked through the street, with a pan of coals of fire on his +head, crying “Repent, repent.” + + S. E. + + + + +Contents + + + Who’s Who, 13 + + Political Songs, 19 + + An Oriental on Albert the Good, 25 + + Epigrams, 31 + + An Eminent Baconian, 37 + + The Beauties of Badness, 42 + + More Badness, 54 + + A Mystery Solved, 58 + + Carrying the Alliance too far, 60 + + May 1914, 63 + + May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition, 69 + + The Mantle of Sir Edwin, 75 + + “The Cattle of the Boyne,” 81 + + August 1914, 83 + + Mrs. Barclay sees it through, 88 + + A Topic of Standing Interest, 94 + + Was Cromwell an Alligator?, 99 + + The Depressed Philanthropist, 105 + + A Polyphloisboisterous Critic, 111 + + “Another Century, and then ...,” 115 + + Herrick, 121 + + The Muse in Liquor, 127 + + £5 Misspent, 133 + + Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore, 137 + + Moving a Library, 143 + + Table-Talk and Jest Books, 146 + + Stephen Phillips, 150 + + Gray and Horace Walpole, 155 + + A Horrible Bookseller, 161 + + The Troubles of a Catholic, 166 + + The Bible as Raw Material, 168 + + How to avoid Bad English, 172 + + Woodland Creatures, 177 + + Other People’s Books, 183 + + Peacock, 187 + + Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness, 189 + + Henry James’s Obscurity, 195 + + The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade, 201 + + Music-Hall Songs, 207 + + More Music-Hall Songs, 213 + + Utopias, 218 + + Charles II in English Verse, 224 + + The Most Durable Books, 229 + + The Worst Style in the World, 234 + + The Reconstruction of Orthography, 240 + + Mr. James Joyce, 245 + + Tennessee, 251 + + Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George, 254 + + Stranded, 259 + + Mr. Ralph Hodgson, 264 + + Double Misprints, 268 + + The History of Earl Pumbles, 270 + + On Destroying Books, 276 + + + + +Who’s Who + + +Works of reference are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil’s +Hell in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to +escape from. Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with +it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass +and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain embedded until +sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the +Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere—things in +which normally he does not take the faintest interest. One may take up a +volume after lunch in order to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe; +but one does not put it down when one has satisfied one’s curiosity. One +turns over a few pages and becomes absorbed in the career of Napoleon. +Thence one drifts to the article on Napier, which sends one to that on +Logarithms in another volume; and when night closes in and (as we used to +construe it) sleep brings rest to weary mortals, one still sits in one’s +chair, bending heavy-eyed over the book, with a dozen pressing duties +left undone and the last post missed. By that time one has reached, +perhaps, the abnormally complex diagrams which illustrate the article on +Metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology—of which science, the reader +will remember, Voltaire was the father and Herr Doktor Pangloss the first +professor. + +_Who’s Who_ takes me in the same way. Ordinarily I have no particular +thirst for it. I should not dream of carrying it about in my waistcoat +pocket for perusal on the Underground Railway. But once I have allowed +myself to open it, I am a slave to it for hours. This has just happened +to me with the new volume, upon which I have wasted a valuable afternoon. +I began by looking up a man’s address; I then read the compressed +life-story of the gentleman next above him (a major-general), wondering, +somewhat idly, whether they read of each other’s performances and whether +either of them resented the possession by the other of a similar, and +unusual, surname. Then I was in the thick of it. There was nothing +especially exciting about most of the information that met my eye. +Generally speaking, the biographies were of people of whom I had never +previously heard, and whose doubtlessly reputable achievements had been +recorded in spheres as unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon. +What can it mean to me that Mr. J. Fitztimmins Gubb worked for five +years under Schmitt at Magdeburg and is now demonstrator in Comparative +Obstetrics at the Robson Institute? Or that the Bishop of the Cocos +Islands has been five times married and was educated at King Edward +VI Grammar School, Chipping Chester, and Pembroke College, Oxford? Yet +I read of some six or seven hundred such, and found it as difficult to +refrain from “Just one more” as would a wealthy dipsomaniac just parting +from an old friend in a public-house at five minutes before closing time. +I cannot easily account for the attraction. Something, I suppose, may +be put down to the fact that character comes out in a man’s account, +however bald, of himself; and that the _Who’s Who_ autobiographies, in +spite of their compression, exhibit many and diverse interesting traits +of character. But mainly, I think, it must be that we most of us have +collector’s mania in some form or another, and that one cannot resist the +temptation of collecting facts even when they are so irrelevant and of +so little importance to one that they slip through one’s fingers as soon +as one has gathered them. For I am sure that I do not know now whether +I have got the number of the Bishop’s wives right, or the sites of his +education, or even the name of his diocese. + +I suppose that no one ever tells an untruth in _Who’s Who_. There is not +much scope for it, though it is conceivable that there may have been +exaggerations of the truth. The compilers are extremely capable; and the +contributors seem to be as uniform in their veracity as they are various +in their loquacity. Only in rare circumstances could any one hope to +impose on _Who’s Who_ without very rapid detection. An opportunity of +that nature did once occur to me. There is a compilation called the +_American Who’s Who_, published (if I remember correctly) in Chicago. +By some curious accident, which I have never been able to explain, its +conductors got hold of my name—I don’t mean “Eagle,” but the other. By +some accident more curious still they got the impression that I was an +American settled in London; and with admirable enterprise they sent +me, for two or three years in succession, yellow forms on which I was +requested to inscribe my age, antecedents, and accomplishments. Each year +I was dazzled by the idea of a joke which, I felt, would immensely amuse +me, and which could (so the Devil argued) hurt nobody. On each occasion I +filled the form exhaustively. I put down my name and address correctly; +but beyond that not a word of truth did I tell. I invented for myself a +career, a career not imposing enough to arouse suspicions, but far more +picturesque than my actual career has been. I described my parents as +being Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, of St. Louis, Mo. I copied out of an +American minor poet’s autobiographical preface a list of academies at +which I had been educated; and then I launched out. + +I had, I stated, left America for Europe at the age of nineteen. I had +written (I was cunning enough to put down the names of one or two of +my actual works) such and such books, including a Manual (for Schools) +on Political Economy and a small brochure on Polycarp. I had travelled +over four continents; my recreations were “all forms of sport, especially +big-game hunting”; I had gone through the Balkan War as a volunteer with +the Greek Army; and I possessed several decorations, including the Blue +Boar of Rumania, the St. Miguel and All Angels of Portugal, and the +fourth class of the Turkish Medjidie. Notice the fourth class; no common +liar would have thought of so convincingly modest a claim as that. Each +year, as I say, I lived laborious days in the delineation of an imaginary +pedigree and a supposititious career. Then I broke down. There was no +risk of punishment attached, and, I take it, small risk of discovery. +But my softer self began telling me that it was a scandalous thing to +hoax foreigners; that the trick was unworthy of an Englishman, or, +indeed, an adult of any nationality, down to the most backward of Nicobar +Islanders; and that the only fitting punishment for a person addicted to +such practices would be to have pins put upon his chair by his children +or his back chalked by infants in the street. I weakened and broke; +sentiment overcame reason; my heart gained the victory over my head. And +each year, with reluctant deliberation, I tore up the well-filled sheet +and destroyed again my other self, my American self, the romantic self +who had done the things I had never done, who had stalked the bear in +the snowy fastnesses of the Caucasus and won the gratitude of exotic +potentates. The forms have stopped coming now; but the memory of my +vision still burns with a melancholy yet tender brightness; and those +mythical progenitors, Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, are to me all that his +Dream Children were to Charles Lamb. + + + + +Political Songs + + +If one goes up a mountain and surveys all the kingdoms of the world one +sees a good many horrible things. Few of them are worse, in their way, +than the modern political song. There have been bad political songs +in all ages. Cæsar’s soldiers used to sing some which were not merely +uninspiring but irrelevant, and _Lilli Burlero_ (or _Lillibulero_) +itself was no great shakes as a poem although its tune had a swing. +But there have never been any to equal in badness the kind of songs +that has been generated by the British party system. The only modern +politicians who ever manage to generate a good song are the Socialists. +Socialist song-books, in spite of their plenitude of hack phrases about +chains and freedom’s dawn, always have a good deal of tolerable poetry +in them. William Morris’s political songs are excellent, and some of +the modern foreign Socialist songs are really worthy expressions of the +movement. When their words are not good their tunes are: witness the +_Internationale_ and that stirring Italian labour song that is now, I +believe, prohibited by King Victor’s Government. But the kind of songs +that our good Liberals and Conservatives sing at their meetings are +gruesome. + +I hold in my hand—as the saying goes—the _Liberal Song Sheet_ now being +used at big party meetings. One or two of the more facetious ditties show +some ingenuity, and there is a certain go about the first line of “Stamp, +stamp, stamp upon Protection”; but for the rest the only song the writer +of which would not get a birching in any properly constituted society is +Ebenezer Elliott’s _God Save the People_, which is generations old. “Let +who will make a nation’s laws as long as I make its songs,” said some +writer. One might add: “Let who will make a nation’s songs as long as +they are not done by the people who make its laws.” Caucus-provided laws +may be all right, but caucus-provided songs, written by party agents and +under-secretaries, are not successful. + +The chief characteristic of the Liberal songs, apart from their metrical +and linguistic peculiarities, is their insistence upon incongruous +military image. Imagine Mr. Asquith donning bright armour and taking part +in the incidents depicted in these verses—to the tune of _Who will o’er +the Downs?_ + + _Our leaders, tried and trusted men,_ + _Still love the ancient faith,_ + _To Freedom and to Conscience true_ + _In danger and in death._ + _And they have donned their armour bright,_ + _Their courage all aglow,_ + _To lead the toilers of the land_ + _Against the Tory foe._ + + _For years we’ve suffered pain and loss,_ + _By privilege oppressed;_ + _Our birthright has been filched from us_ + _And left us sore distress’d._ + _But now our leaders—trusted, tried—_ + _Are keen to strike a blow,_ + _And wrest our stolen acres from_ + _The proud, disdainful foe._ + +It is not my business to discuss the justness of the judgments here +implied, but what on earth is the point of suggesting that Mr. Asquith, +Mr. George, Mr. Lulu Harcourt, Lord Haldane, and so on, are true “in +danger and in death”? They may have come unscathed through the fire of +Suffragette dog-whips, but nobody calls them to die for disestablishment. +There is here an utter lack of reality, a lack that must prevent these +songs from moving anybody to action, as good songs should do. They are as +conventionally false as the cheapest kind of leading article. + +Here are some more extracts from the same source: + + _We defend the right we won in ages past;_ + _We demand the measures by the Commons passed,_ + _Let no Lords presume to wreck the work at last,_ + _For we go marching on._ + _Freedom for our trade and nation_ + _From all insolent vexation._ + _For democracy’s salvation_ + _We all go marching on._ + + _Peers and Tories may to wreck the work unite,_ + _Britain’s sons for Britain’s freedom still shall fight;_ + _None shall hinder us till triumph is in sight,_ + _As we go marching on._ + + _Then up to the sky with your Hip-hip-Hooray!_ + _For the unbeaten leader, who leads us to-day._ + _For ASQUITH—to-day, after long, weary years,_ + _Our victorious Captain o’er Tories and Peers._ + _Then cheer with a will for the great deed is done;_ + _Attacking the Veto, we’ve fought and we’ve won;_ + _Henceforward these islands of ours are to be_ + _Not the Land of the Peers but the Land of the Free._ + + _Long, long in shameful slavery_ + _The emerald isle hath lain,_ + _The victim of past knavery,_ + _And Unionist disdain._ + _But Freedom’s day is coming—_ + _See how the foemen flee!_ + _Home Rule is just_ + _And come it must_ + _To set old Ireland free!_ + + _One blow will end the matter!_ + _Strike, strike it with a will!_ + _The enemy we’ll scatter_ + _And quickly pass our Bill._ + _Our leaders are determined,_ + _True followers are we,_ + _Our arms are strong_ + _To right the wrong_ + _And set old Ireland free._ + +A curious thing is that almost universally in these songs the virtues +and actions of the party leaders get almost as much attention as the +political questions at issue. This is the mark of the caucus. + +It is a very difficult thing to write a good propagandist song at all. +A first-rate tune will often cover up the most prosaic words, but +generally speaking political songs split on the rock of the specific. +It is the greatest mistake to expect to stir people with verses dealing +with a particular Bill. The spirit of freedom, the spirit of revolt, the +passion of love, or the passion of hate, may make good songs, but it is a +hopeless task to try to make poetry out of the taxation of land values or +an import duty on corn. A good Socialist song may deal with brotherhood +or service, but it cannot deal with “the nationalization of the means +of production, distribution, or exchange.” One should avoid the kind of +concrete details that produce a sense of anticlimax, and the kind of +personalities that sound false. The spirit of Liberty may appropriately +be depicted in a helmet, but it is silly to conjure up a picture of Mr. +Asquith with a suit of armour over his frock-coat. Even the fact that +a thing is glaringly true does not necessarily make it suitable for +metrical statement. It is true that there is an insufficient supply of +sanatoria and that the thought profoundly moves many people. But a song +emphasizing the fact must be a failure. Modern political songwriters fail +(1) because they are usually people who cannot write verse at all, (2) +because they try to make their songs like extra-rhetorical speeches or +articles. Probably the next Liberal song will deal with the ravages of +pheasants. + + + + +An Oriental on Albert the Good + + +The award of the Nobel Prize to Mr. Rabindranath Tagore is generally +approved. I do not entirely agree with those who think that Mr. Tagore’s +poems are masterpieces in English; for I find his English poetical +prose monotonous and without rhythmical beauty, although, in a sense, +immaculate. But those who know the Indian originals say that they are +really great, and that they have got a hold on the general population +unprecedented for centuries past. + +I have just acquired a book by an Indian poet who was not so wise in his +choice of subjects as is Mr. Tagore. The book is an English version (made +in 1864 by the tutor of Sir J. Jeejeebhoy’s sons, and published by the +Bombay Education Society) of an Epic on the Prince Consort by the Parsee +poet “Munsookh.” The poem is enlivening if not inspiring. + +It opens with the usual Oriental invocation to Heaven, ending “With +that remembrance alone will I fill the cup of my heart and sing new and +entertaining stories.” It then plunges straight _in medias res_ with a +first canto, “On the birth of Prince Albert, his education and arrival +at mature years; and his wish to marry Victoria.” + + “There is a country of the world called Germany, the eminence + of which is known everywhere. In its interior is a large + district called the Dukedom of Gotha, about thirty-seven miles + in area, and containing about one hundred and fifty thousand + inhabitants. The air of this district is pleasant, dry, and + cool; and the water refreshing and pure. The land is good and + very fertile, and every article of food and clothing is cheap + there. In its neighbourhood is the city of Coburg, where the + richest blessings of Providence display themselves, near which + flows the river Itz, and where is a magnificent ducal castle, + having the appropriate name of Rosina, with a garden entirely + surrounding it. Here the birth of Albert took place.” + +Prince Albert grew up wise and studious, and at last his preceptor +said to him: “My accomplished pupil, this is the one hope of my soul, +that thou make a hearty effort to be united to the worthy heiress +of the Kingdom of England, and if thou do this, thou wilt not be +disappointed.... Put in action therefore the effective dagger of +contrivance; engraft speedily the plant of love ... lose not thy time, +for if thou do thou wilt be considered a fool.” + +Queen Victoria’s portrait was sent to Albert, the bearer telling him +that he was searching the world for a worthy, loving, and religious +prince. “Thou hast administered the medicine for my secret pain,” was the +reply, and the Prince wrote a letter acknowledging the present. “When I +would write thee a letter,” he said, “the water of my eyes flows from my +pen instead of the black ink.... In my feeling of love for thee I am mad: +I am a moth flying around a candle.... Though I swim always in a flood +of tears, my body is burning to a cinder.” When Victoria’s mother heard +about this she was glad, but said that “the hearts of the English people +are intoxicated with haughtiness; they despise a stranger and a foreigner +... nor will they consider it honourable that thou should be united in +love to a child of Germany.” Various letters passed, but Albert’s father +was astonished at his rashness. “Foolish boy, heretofore engrossed in +eating, drinking, and learning. Where didst thou get this information and +these notions?... A nation proud and haughty like the English will think +thee thoroughly mad.” But letters from England convinced the Duke; he +admonished his son as to his future behaviour; and the party sailed for +the port of London, where “Victoria immediately went upon the terrace.” +The lovers met and sang, and the Prince returned home to complete his +studies. “A little time after this occurrence the Queen again remembered +Albert; she caused a letter, official, and according to rule, to be +written to his father.” + +“Albert’s father prepared himself at once, taking necessary provisions, +furniture, and money. Having sat in a boat Prince Albert went forward +accompanied by his family. The gallant vessel floated down the stream, +and did not leave her track on the way. From a distance she appeared +like an alligator, or like the moon of the second day sailing through +the heavens, or like a tree growing in the midst of deep waters, casting +its shadows as it moved in a hundred directions; or she was like a +horse leaping without feet, and bound only to the surface of the water, +so swift and lofty of mien that the sun from afar uttered a shout of +approbation. As a lover weeps on account of separation from his beloved, +so the ship beating her breast, filled her skirts with water. She +sometimes appeared from her motion tired and weary, and the bubbles about +her seemed like blisters on the feet. In body she was a strong negress, +but in speed lively; in her womb were hundreds of children, yet did she +never bear.” + +“Albert thought the waves were like an infuriated elephant,” but he +arrived safely, and the marriage was celebrated amid general rejoicings. + +“The voice of triumph arose from every side with guns and bells and +bands of music; in every house, too, arose the heart-charming sounds of +cornets, flutes, harps, pianos, and singing of various sorts; cannons +boomed from every fort—one making a whirring noise, another a noise +like thunder.... So pure became the waters of the Thames that one could +see in them the image even of the soul of his body. It was not a river, +but as it were a flower garden; and the bodies of the fishes glittered +like rose-leaves. Everywhere were clusters of variously decked boats; +the vessels were as shaking mountains, which made graceful motions like +peacocks coquetting in the garden of Paradise.” + +A great banquet followed, and when “the reign of wine” was finished +the music began. “Trombones sounded so impressively that letters were +imprinted upon the face of the air.” Then came the dancing. “What shall +I say of the Mendozas and Polkas? for the philosophic and the pious lost +their peace of mind through them.... The Polka was kept up with such zest +and excitement that there was a stir among the angels of heaven.... In +short, the ball was gracefulness itself which made the stars bite their +own bodies with jealousy.” The dead rose up from the ground enamoured +of the dancing, and the lamps put their hands over their eyes. The +festivities over the royal pair retired and sang to each other. + +Next year a princess was born, and all England was merry. Other children +followed, and for twenty years the royal pair lived in happiness. In 1843 +the Queen and the Prince revisited his native country in a ship furious +as a leopard, that broke through hundreds of whales. Home awoke tender +thoughts in the Prince. “Collecting himself he sang” a chant comparing +himself to Joseph, and his bride to Zuleika—which indicates a somewhat +different view of the Potiphar’s wife episode from that prevalent in +Occidental circles. The rest of the work is mainly taken up with the +Great Exhibition, the Prince’s death, and numerous maxims for the use of +his son, such as: + + “King must keep entirely aloof from several hurtful things as + ... chess. + + “A king’s country is like a beautiful woman, and the merchants + of that country are, as it were, the precious jewels and + ornaments of that woman; and the more these jewels and + ornaments are, the more heart-charming and beautiful she looks.” + +This last aphorism is disputable. + + + + +Epigrams + + +Any one who reads Mr. R. N. Leonard’s charming little anthology of +English epigrams in the Oxford Garlands Series will regret that the +practice of writing poetical epigrams has died out. Until the Victorian +age almost all professional writers, as well as many amateurs, tried +their hands at epigram. If you had anything especially offensive to say +about any one—and especially about politicians, doctors, and ladies +unduly addicted to cosmetics—it was the natural thing to put it into a +couplet or a quatrain. Ministers and Privy Councillors used to compose +epigrams about each other; but who can imagine Sir Henry Dalziel writing +witty quatrains about Sir Alfred Mond, or _vice versa_? Why the habit has +died out I don’t profess to say. There may be some significance in the +fact that the great age of epigrams was the eighteenth century—the prose +age _par excellence_. There is probably more in the decay of knowledge +of Greek and Latin. When almost every educated man was familiar with the +Greek Anthology and the works of Martial—whence all kinds of epigrams, +elegiac, amatory, and satirical, descend—it was perhaps natural that the +temptation to continue the good work should be generally felt. It may +even be that a form so small is incapable of infinite variety and grows +exhausted. Johnson wrote a ludicrous burlesque epigram— + + _If the man who turnips cries_ + _Cry not when his father dies,_ + _’Tis a proof that he had rather_ + _Have a turnip than his father._ + +—and there is undoubtedly sound criticism in it. After a certain time the +making of epigrams may proceed almost on a formula. At all events, the +decline of the epigram is obvious. The well-meant effusions which the +late Sir Wilfrid Lawson used to waft across the benches of the House of +Commons were scarcely equal to the old level of our political quips; it +is very rarely that a tolerable metrical epigram appears in the Press; +and the poets have almost all abandoned the habit of attempting to get +their thoughts into so small a compass. The custom of composing epigrams +for private albums is virtually extinct. Every schoolgirl writes in every +other schoolgirl’s album that there is nothing Original in her excepting +Original Sin; and even that not very splendid _mot_ was constructed by +Thomas Campbell nearly a hundred years ago. The rest is silence. + +The greater number of our epigrams are satirical, and Mr. Lennard’s +selection is mainly composed of these verses with stings in their tails. +One of the most taking of these is A. Evans’s on a Fat Man: + + _When Tadlow walks the streets, the paviours cry_ + _“God bless you, sir!” and lay their rammers by._ + +But that, perhaps, is not really stinging; if Mr. Tadlow was +good-tempered, he must have liked it himself. Good couplets like these +are few, but Coleridge’s on the Swan-Song is one: + + _Swans sing before they die—’twere no bad thing_ + _Should certain persons die before they sing._ + +The most brutal epigrams we have are Byron’s on Castlereagh’s suicide, +after that statesman had cut his throat. These are not very good, but +Mr. Lennard gives them; and, in fact, almost every famous epigram in the +language. He classifies them under headings: “Political,” “Professional +and Trading,” “Amatory,” and so on. Of the Literary epigrams one of the +best is Bishop Stubbs’s on two of his nineteenth-century contemporaries: + + _Froude informs the Scottish youth_ + _That parsons do not care for truth._ + _The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries_ + _History is a pack of lies._ + + _What cause for judgments so malign?_ + _A brief reflection solves the mystery—_ + _Froude believes Kingsley a divine,_ + _And Kingsley goes to Froude for history._ + +Lord Erskine’s on Scott’s Waterloo Poem is good: + + _On Waterloo’s ensanguined plain_ + _Lie tens of thousands of the slain,_ + _But none, by sabre or by shot,_ + _Fell half so flat as Walter Scott._ + +Theodore Hook’s epigram suggesting that it would be impossible to find a +reader who would pay for the binding of _Prometheus Unbound_ now falls as +flat as Scott, owing to the utter falsification of the prophecy. + +Mr. Lennard gives a fair number of epitaphs, including Evans’s well-known +one on Vanbrugh and Gay’s even better-known one on himself. But I don’t +think we have in English an epitaph so delightful as that written for his +own tomb by the obscene French poet Piron: + + _Ci-gît Piron_ + _Qui ne fut rien,_ + _Pas même_ + _Académicien._ + +Landor’s “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” however, +could not be surpassed by any serious epitaph. From Landor Mr. Lennard +has naturally had to draw freely for his more serious sections. Landor +came nearer than any English writers to rivalling the feats of the best +Greek epigrammatists. Many people would say that his _Dirce_ is the most +beautiful epigram in the language. + +Mr. Lennard’s selection is, as I have said, a very good one. The only old +one I miss is Richard Bentley’s on German scholarship: + + _The Germans in Greek_ + _Are sadly to seek;_ + _Not one in five score,_ + _But ninety-nine more._ + _All, all except Hermann—_ + _And Hermann’s a German._ + +The omission is the stranger in that Landor’s greatly inferior epigram +on Germans is included. About the longest poem admitted is Clough’s +revised version of the Ten Commandments: it is flat in places, but +contains one famous couplet. Only when he comes to the moderns might +Mr. Lennard have cast his net wider. Browning, who wrote some neat +versicles, is unrepresented; and so is Mr. Watson, who, in his earlier +days, wrote epigrams, some of which, if not masterpieces, were as good +as some of Mr. Lennard’s old ones. And it would have been worth while to +collect a few of the miscellaneous modern ones that float about. There +are Limericks—and some Limericks will satisfy the narrowest definition +of an epigram—which would be worth preserving; and then there are odd +fragments like the effort alleged to have been written on the blackboard +by a Cheltenham schoolgirl: + + _Miss Buss and Miss Beale_ + _Cupid’s darts do not feel._ + _How different from us_ + _Miss Beale and Miss Buss._ + +Tolerable modern epigrams are so few that it would be worth while saving +all there are. Unfortunately the pleasantest personal ones that one +hears privately, though they would have been printed in a franker day, +must mostly remain unprinted in an age when direct satire is considered +ungentlemanly, and the law of libel is so easily invoked. I remember Mr. +——’s epigram on Lady —— and Mr. ——’s on Sir —— ——. Mr. Lennard cannot be +expected to publish these. + + + + +An Eminent Baconian + + +A very curious chapter in the history of the Bacon-Shakespeare +controversy closes with the death of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence. Amid +all the strange multitude of retired judges, lawyers, astrologers, and +American ladies who have championed the cause of Lord Verulam there has +been no figure more singular than that of this affluent old ex-M.P., who, +after a lifetime spent in business, platform speaking, and the study of +modern mechanical improvements, suddenly plunged into the fight with +unprecedented enthusiasm and methods of argument never equalled in their +singularity. Setting out with the conviction that Shakespeare could not +possibly have written the plays, and that Bacon was the only man who +could have, Sir Edwin became so obsessed with the subject that he found +proofs of his contention everywhere, and gradually came to the conclusion +that Bacon wrote almost all the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature that +is worth reading. We have heard of the devout mystic who sees “every +common bush afire with God”: to Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence every common +bush was afire with Bacon. His outlook being of this character, it is +scarcely to be wondered at that his methods of reasoning and of research +were most surprising. + +Most people who read his pamphlet, _The Shakespeare Myth_, must have +been astounded by the _naïveté_ of some of the “proofs” there contained. +The fact that Bacon was called Bacon—a name so easily interchangeable +with pig, hog, and rasher—was a great help; for where the application of +ciphers did not obtain one word it might obtain another. Bacon, according +to Sir Edwin, must have been at least as preoccupied with ensuring his +identification by posterity as with the writing of good verse, for he +would take great pains to work in such a word as “hang-hog,” or to +make three consecutive lines begin with words—such as Pompey, In, and +Got—out of the initials of which could be constructed the appellation +“pig.” Everything was pork that came to Sir Edwin’s net, and he would +by tortuous ratiocination get evidence from the most seemingly innocent +contemporary English and foreign engravings. For there was a secret +brotherhood at work carrying on the Baconian tradition, and the artist +who gave the portrait of Shakespeare two left sleeves (the confirmation +of this was, I think, obtained from the editor of the _Tailor & Cutter_) +had a subtle and profound intention. Sir Edwin collected a very large +library in connexion with his work, and the study of it was his passion; +but, save industry, he had none of the qualifications for his task. + +I myself obtained in a strange way an amusing insight into his looseness +of procedure. He had been writing letters maintaining his thesis in a +contemporary weekly. Wondering whether he could be hoaxed, I sent to +the paper a letter over what might have seemed, to a man with any real +detective faculty, the suspicious signature “P. O. R. Ker.” In this +letter I called Sir Edwin’s attention to a quotation (which I had myself +invented and written in Elizabethanese) which I ascribed to one of the +best-known works of Greene. My “quotation” (I forget its wording, but +it contained phrases about “Shakescene” and “the semblance of a hogg”) +made it perfectly clear that Shakespeare was merely Bacon’s dummy. Any +man with the slightest qualifications for his work would have looked up +Greene for reference—and would not have found it. Not so Sir Edwin. He +wrote in at once (the editor, in order to spare his feelings, did not +print the communication) to say that the fact that Mr. Ker’s important +and convincing reference had been ignored by the Shakespeareans showed +their utter incompetence. + +But the most striking thing about him was his detestation of Shakespeare. +There are people who hate Napoleon; there are people who object to +Torquemada; there are even people who feel a pronounced distaste for +Nero. But never has any one loathed and despised a dead man as the +really mild and amiable Sir Edwin despised and loathed Shakespeare. No +epithets were, he felt, too opprobrious for this rascal, who for three +hundred years had cheated another man out of his due fame. He denied +Shakespeare any virtue at all; he pointed out that there existed no proof +that Shakespeare could even read; and he habitually referred to him as +the “drunken, illiterate clown of Stratford,” “the sordid money-lender of +Stratford,” and “the mean, drunken, ignorant, and absolutely unlettered +rustic of Stratford.” So strong, indeed, were his feelings that when the +_Times_ says that “One cannot but feel that he was happy in not living +to see the celebrations which the British Academy and other friends of +literature are to hold in 1916, the third centenary of Shakespeare’s—not +Bacon’s—death,” it is not making a weak and untimely jest, but stating +the sober truth. + +Who will now take on Sir Edwin’s mantle as the most conspicuous +Baconian? Mr. George Greenwood is _hors concours_ because, though an +anti-Shakespearean, he has doubts about Bacon; and we have heard nothing +lately about that romantic American doctor who a year or two ago began +digging for evidence in the bed of the sylvan Wye. That another ardent +combatant will soon appear is pretty certain; in fact, there will +probably be a continual succession of such for all time unless—which +is unlikely—somebody discovers documentary proofs of Shakespeare’s +authorship so irrefutable that no one could dream of challenging them. +For the examination of a mystery—if you can persuade yourself that there +is a mystery—is always fascinating, and the search for and application +of ciphers and hidden meanings produces such entertaining results that +it would be almost worth while becoming a Baconian for the fun of it. +Almost, but not quite. + + + + +The Beauties of Badness + + +The collector of amusingly bad poetry has never had such splendid +opportunities as to-day. The world is all before him where to choose. +Modern cheap production has made it easy for any one who can raise £20 +to get a volume of poems printed; and of recent years the field has been +greatly enriched by the growing body of verse-writers in America and +the Colonies. There have always, of course, been poets who have given +unintentional rather than intentional pleasure. I have before me a volume +published (at Cambridge) in 1825, entitled _Original Poems in the Moral, +Heroic, Pathetic and other Styles, by a Traveller_, which contains poems +in the following style—amongst others: + + INGRATITUDE + + _My Muse, who oft recites on Love,_ + _Or Heavenly Beatitude,_ + _Her strains more melancholy move_ + _Devoted to ~INGRATITUDE~._ + + _With thee, Dark Demon—what can charm?_ + _Nor manners polish’d—chaste, or rude;_ + _Nor Friendship’s hand—nor Safety’s arm_ + _So vile art thou—~INGRATITUDE~!_ + + _Tho’ dear a Female’s face, or form;_ + _Tho’ elegant her attitude;_ + _We fly, as from the winged storm—_ + _If she pours forth ~INGRATITUDE~._ + +But it is seldom that the collector comes across one of these delightful +relics from an older day. The greater part of any collection must be +formed of books published within the last forty years. Our age may +be—indeed, it is—deficient in some respects, but in the production of +unintentionally amusing writers no age, not even the Renaissance or the +great ages of Greece and Rome, can vie with it. + +It might be possible for a man with the industry of a Herbert Spencer +exhaustively to classify the writers of whom I am speaking, and to +tabulate the qualities which give to their works their peculiar +virtues—incongruity of image, unfortunate use of colloquialisms, hopeless +slavery to the necessity of rhyme, and so on. I am no Spencer; indeed, +the only things I have in common with that philosopher are a taste for +billiards and the recollection of a single visit to the Derby. To me +there is a single broad division which connoisseurs may find useful in +arranging their collections: in one class we may put those poets who are +specifically cranky; in the other those (some silly, some quite sensible +people apart from their artistic proclivities) who (Macaulay’s Robert +Montgomery is the type) try to write poems like other people’s, but whose +total lack of poetic perception leads them into strange aberrations of +expression. + +The first kind are comparatively rare, but there are some good examples +still going strong. There is, for instance, a gentleman (at one time a +distinguished scholar of Balliol) who describes himself as “The Modern +Homer,” and has written a number of epics, including _The Human Epic_, +_The Epic of London_, _The Epic of Charlemagne_, and _The Epic of God and +the Devil_. Preoccupation with his matter leads him to such phrases as: + + _When Murder is on the ~tapis~_ + _Then the Devil is happy._ + +But he, perhaps, is not so interesting as Mr. William Nathan Stedman, +who used to live in London, and now, I believe, is settled in Australia. +This gentleman is addicted to prefaces proving that Mr. Gladstone, “this +DIRTY OLD DEVIL,” “this sly old wizard, a protoplasm from the abyss of +nowhere,” was the Beast of the Revelations, and he has an aversion from +Mr. R. J. Campbell, whom he calls “moo-cow, kid-gloved Campbell.” It +is well worth while buying his _Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics_. The poems +themselves are not so amusing, though we sometimes came across such +ambiguous phrases as: + + _And when upon your dainty breast I lay_ + _My wearied head—more soft than eiderdown._ + +But the illustrations—wood-blocks from eminent artists like Albert Dürer +and Louis Wain—are charmingly irrelevant, and the prose passages are +unique. The poet refers to the Laureateship—“an office I refused after +Tennyson’s death, though made with the offer of a premier’s daughter +and £30,000”—and he is violently down on critics who have failed to see +the merits of a certain novelist whom he calls “Queen Marie,” “a woman +who did you no wrong, nor envied ye your bones and offal, but gave Most +Interesting Books for your betterment and education. Are ye not dirty +dogs and devils? Eh?” “Bull-browed bastards” is one of the mildest terms +he applies to the critics. + +Difficult to place in either class are the poets who have some technical +faculty, who are not necessarily cranks, but who endeavour to put such +extraordinarily prosy things into verse that the result is as comic as +though they were. I have, for example, a book containing “a lyrical +romance in verse,” which tells a story, that might have gone quite well +in prose, of a man who falls in love with a girl and has long discussions +with her about politics. The author’s choice of a metrical form leads him +to pages and pages of this sort of thing: + + _I ceased, and somewhat eagerly she asked:_ + _“Then you would justify the Socialist,_ + _Or Anarchist, the brute assassin, masked_ + _As a reformer, him who has dismissed_ + _All scruples, and himself or others tasked_ + _To murder innocence? Can there exist_ + _A reason to excuse Luccheni’s action,_ + _Of life’s great rights most dastardly infraction?”_ + + _“Excuse it, no!” I said; “nor justify it;_ + _But understand it yes!—I find confusion_ + _In both your questions; and, your words imply it,_ + _They have their base in popular illusion._ + _In Socialism and Anarchism, deny it_ + _Who will, there’s no imperative inclusion_ + _Of violence. Each, aiming at reform,_ + _Would lay life’s ever-raging life and storm.”_ + +The growth of the Socialist and Suffragist movements has led to a great +increase in this kind of argumentative verse; but the bad poems in the +Conservative or Militarist interests are generally very much worse, a +type-specimen being this: + + _And so with foes about us_ + _Just waiting for their chance_ + _We must become a nation armed_ + _Like Germany and France._ + +Another example of Imperialist verse is: + + _I’m old John Bull of England,_ + _My triumphs are in song._ + _I’ve fought and won great victories_ + _Which did not take me long._ + + _I’ve fought in many a battle_ + _By sea as well as land._ + _I’ve fought in Russia, Belgium,_ + _Africa and India’s golden strand,_ + +which occurs in a work appealing for better treatment for British +Honduras. + +But most of the best bad verse is not propagandist. Amongst the classics +of the kind the Works of Johnston-Smith rank high. These have been +published complete in one volume, but the best of them are to be found in +a smaller book entitled _The Captain of the Dolphin_. Mr. Johnston-Smith +had a great vocabulary and peculiar gifts of metaphor and of abrupt +conclusion. Here are some typical passages: + + _A balminess the darkened hours had brought from out the South,_ + _Each breaker doffed its cap of white and shut its blatant mouth._ + + _Strike, strike your flag, Sidonia,_ + _And lessen death and pain;_ + _“Strike,” “Fight” are but synonyma_ + _For misery to Spain._ + + _On speedy wing the graceful sea-fowl follow fast—_ + _They seem to me the souls of seamen drowned,_ + _Who have for sailors, ships and ocean’s briny blast_ + _Dumb love which they are yearning to propound._ + + _O’er the sea’s edge the sun, a dazzling disc,_ + _In splendour hangs, preparing for his plunge;_ + _Upon the heaven’s bright page he stamps an asterisk_ + _Of yellow beams which Western things expunge._ + + _Reluctant I leave, like a lover who goes_ + _From the side of the maid of his choice,_ + _By whom he is held with a cord actuose_ + _Spun out of her beauty and voice._ + +“Actuose” is very characteristic of this poet, who uses enormous numbers +of astonishing words of which he does not tell us the meaning, although +he gives us a glossary containing such definitions as: + + _Derelict. An abandoned ship._ + + _Outward-bound. Sailing from home._ + + _Yo-heave-ho! A phrase used by sailors when two or more pull in + concert at the same rope._ + +One of his nicest surprises is the ending of: + + _Where the sun circles round for the half of the year_ + _And is cold—like a yellow balloon._ + +The kind of thrill produced by this unexpected ending is, of course, +common in verse. Some readers will be acquainted with the epitaph: + + _Here beneath this stone at rest_ + _Lies the dear dog who loved us best._ + _Within his heart was nothing mean,_ + _He seemed just like a human being._ + +But a University poet’s anticlimax on Actæon may not be so generally +known: + + _His hands were changed to feet, and he in short_ + _Became a stag...._ + +Nor this affecting stanza from a woman’s book recently published: + + _What o’ the wind?_ + _It hisses through a vessel’s spars._ + _What o’ the wind?_ + _It is in truth to mercy blind,_ + _It surely from all rest debars,_ + _And even frights the sturdy “tars.”_ + _What o’ the wind?_ + +An equal bathos is sometimes produced by inappropriate metaphor. The +worst instance I know is found in the poems of quite a well-known writer +who describes roses: + + _Aft before and fore behind_ + _Swung upon the summer wind._ + +But the author of a recent drama of the Near East came pretty near it with + + _... the diamond shaft of the fierce searchlight_ + _From the lens of the crystal moon._ + +The chase after the unusual almost always means disaster. This is another +recent example: + + _I have found thee, dear! on the edge of time,_ + _Just over the brink of the world of sense;_ + _In dream-life that’s ours, when with love intense_ + _We function above, in a fairer clime._ + + _I have found thee there, in a world of rest,_ + _In the fair sweet gardens of sunlit bliss,_ + _Where the sibilant sound of an Angel’s kiss_ + _Is the sanctioned seal of a Holy quest._ + +But nothing produced in this manner is so attractive as the merely +commonplace can be when carried to its farthest pitch. A year or two +ago a young American published a volume with a preface ending: “He was +apprised of the death of his invalid brother, whose remaining portion of +his grandfather’s legacy accruing to him facilitated the publication of +this book.” The epilogue ran as follows: + + _Oh, the rain, rain, rain!_ + _All the day it doth complain._ + _On the window-pane, just near me,_ + _How it sputters, oh, how dreary!_ + _One becomes so awful weary_ + _With the rain, rain, rain._ + +The difference between this and Verlaine’s _Il pleut sur la ville_ would +be hard to define, but there certainly is a marked difference. + +Most of the poets quoted above have, at any rate, the gift of moving +with some freedom within their metres. But some people who publish verse +cannot even do that, however simple the forms they choose. They struggle +through their poems like flies in treacle. A good example may be taken +from a book (excellently produced) issued only a year ago by one of the +foremost publishers. Apart from its other qualities, it shows a most +extraordinarily revolutionary conception of the way in which lines may be +ended: + + _A man’s home is a woman’s breast. There see_ + _Him in infancy, and later, seeks he_ + _Inspiration from the self-same source. ’Tis_ + _His home, t’wards which, from cradle to the grave,_ + _He doth gravitate, accomplishing his_ + _Greatest works by aid of it. Man on the_ + _Woman’s aid depends. Oft unconsciously_ + _’Tis given, oft loyally the truth’s in_ + _Loving breast safeguarded—less often ’tis_ + _In cruelty withheld._ + +This supplies the only case I know of in which the article “the” has been +used as a rhyme. But for sheer struggle the poem does not excel parts of +this other one, which was published in a recent anthology: + + _Along a marsh a hungry crane_ + _With patient steps, his way did take_ + _Each cranny of the rivage fain_ + _To ransack with his slender beak,_ + + _When, suddenly, his watchful eye,_ + _At but four paces distance, saw_ + _A worm, that back, as suddenly,_ + _To his subterranean hole did draw._ + + _Nathless the crane did, straight, begin_ + _His beak, and claw, alike, to ply_ + _And hoping the retreat be, in_ + _The end, of the insect might destroy,_ + + _The turf did tear up, and dispel_ + _The clods, and with such vigour strive_ + _That he, at last, perceives his bill_ + _At of the cave the depth arrive;_ + + _But lo! just when of all his toil,_ + _The object he was nigh to get,_ + _Beneath his very nib, a mole,_ + _Without ado, devoured it!_ + + _Thus often, lurchers, onward who_ + _Are prone by shady ways to creep_ + _May the reward to those that’s due_ + _Who, openly, have acted, reap._ + +This fable is called by the author _A Surreptitious Catch_; but it might +equally fitly have been entitled _The Apotheosis of the Comma_. + +I have, as I say, insufficient scientific talent to enter upon an +analytic criticism of this kind of poetry; and in this brief discourse I +have done little more than string quotations together. But that operation +is all that is needed to serve my present object—viz. the propagation of +the cult. Any one who has ever read the novel of Mrs. Amanda M’Kittrick +Ros knows how much sustenance the human spirit may derive from the byways +of literature; but it is very rarely that one meets, even amongst the +best-read of men, one who is conscious of the peculiar poetic treasures +that lie about in the publishers’ offices and on the second-hand +bookstalls simply imploring to be collected. + + + + +More Badness + + +My appeal for interesting specimens of bad verse has brought me a large +mass of material; but most of my correspondents seem not to realize that +merely feeble and meaningless verse is so common as not to be worth +preserving. The best single line I have received—sent me by a notorious +dramatist who has forgotten its place of origin—is: + + _The beetle booms adown the glooms and bumps among the clumps;_ + +and what promised to be the best whole poem is one that begins by rhyming +“Atlantic” to “blanket.” But when I had got through it I found that my +correspondent had got it out of a visitors’ book in an hotel. I really +cannot count anything that has not been properly published; although I +confess to being tempted by such lines as: + + _Farewell, farewell, bonny St. Ives,_ + _May I live to see you again,_ + _Your air preserves people’s lives_ + _And you have so little rain._ + +So really the best acquisition I have made is the following, the author +of which I should like to discover: + + _In this imperfect, gloomy scene_ + _Of complicated ill,_ + _How rarely is a day serene,_ + _The throbbing bosom still!_ + _Will not a beauteous landscape bright_ + _Or music’s soothing sound,_ + _Console the heart, afford delight,_ + _And throw sweet peace around?_ + _They may; but never comfort lend_ + _Like an accomplished female friend!_ + + _With such a friend the social hour_ + _In sweetest pleasure glides;_ + _There is, in female charms a power_ + _Which lastingly abides;_ + _The fragrance of the blushing rose,_ + _Its tints and splendid hue,_ + _Will, with the seasons, decompose,_ + _And pass as flitting dew;_ + _On firmer ties his joys depend_ + _Who has a faithful female friend!_ + + _As orbs revolve, and years recede,_ + _And seasons onward roll,_ + _The fancy may on beauties feed_ + _With discontented soul;_ + _A thousand objects bright and fair_ + _May for a moment shine,_ + _Yet many a sigh and many a tear_ + _But mark their swift decline;_ + _While lasting joys the man attend_ + _Who has a polished female friend!_ + +My correspondent says that he received this from a friend (perhaps a +polished female friend), who did not tell him whence it was extracted. +I myself have seen two lines of it before—the last two of the second +stanza. They occurred in a letter I received some time ago from a +clerical acquaintance who was apologizing for having got engaged. He, on +inquiry, pretended (with a mendacity very rare amongst clergymen) that he +had written the lines himself; but I did not believe him. The poem bears +the marks of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. Can it be by +Thomas Haynes Bayly? + +One interesting thing I should like to trace is a metrical version of +Holy Writ containing such lines as these on Jonah: + + _Three dreadful days beneath the deep,_ + _In fish’s belly dark lay he._ + _How terrible methinks his fate._ + _May no such torment fall on me._ + +The most ingenious writer who contributes the “Observator” column to the +_Observer_ offers me a couple of specimens, one of which is new to me. +The old one is the late Mr. Alfred Austin’s remark about Nature: + + _She sins upon a larger scale_ + _Because she is herself more large._ + +And the other, a touching narrative of a gipsy woman who fell ill, was a +discovery of Andrew Lang’s: + + _There we leave her,_ + _There we leave her,_ + _Far from where her swarthy kindred roam,_ + _In the Scarlet Fever,_ + _Scarlet Fever,_ + _Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home._ + + + + +A Mystery Solved + + +Apparently the poem about “a polished female friend” is to be found in +one of Mr. E. V. Lucas’s books. It was written, it seems, by a parson +named Whur or Whurr, who flourished in Norfolk about a century ago. Whur +delighted in all calamities, and described a father, on the birth of a +child with no arms, exclaiming: “This armless child will ruin me.” No +one has yet brought to my notice any whole volumes of bad verse worth +acquiring, though various choice fragments have reached me. There is an +epithalamium ending: + + _And never, never she’ll forget_ + _The happy, happy day,_ + _When in the church, before God’s priest,_ + _She gave herself away._ + +There is an _in memoriam_ poem beginning: + + _Dear Friends, we had a sudden Blast_ + _Which came to us unexpected._ + +And there is a loyal song to their present Majesties in which occur the +lines: + + _Our King and Queen are never proud_ + _They mingle with the densest crowd._ + +But the most attractive new specimen is a poem on the late monarch’s +death. It was printed and sold as a broadsheet in London, and runs: + + _The will of God we must obey._ + _Dreadful—our King taken away!_ + _The greatest friend of the nation,_ + _Mighty monarch and protection!_ + + _Heavenly Father, help in sorrow_ + _Queen Mother, and them to follow,_ + _What to do without him who has gone!_ + _Pray help! help! and do lead us on._ + + _Greatest sorrow England ever had_ + _When death took away our Dear Dad;_ + _A king was he from head to sole,_ + _Loved by his people one and all._ + + _His mighty work for the Nation,_ + _Making peace and strengthening union—_ + _Always at it since on the throne:_ + _Saved the country more than billion._ + +There are two more verses. Personally, I find this considerably more +interesting than any of Mr. Alfred Noyes’s various Coronation Odes. + + + + +Carrying the Alliance too far + + +Why is it that Japanese authors are allowed to write in English +newspapers any sort of barbarous jargon they like? Mr. Yoshio Markino +was the first to be licensed. To start with, one found his “delightfully +quaint” English amusing in a mild way, but with repetition his sedulously +cherished howlers became irritating. Still, he was only one; and +primarily a painter at that. But now Mr. Yone Noguchi has turned up, and +he is doing the same thing. Mr. Noguchi is considered in Japan—at least +so his friends tell us—the first poet of the day. Those who remembered +his last residence here assured us that on his return he would compel all +men—like Helen of Troy or Mr. Tagore. He comes. One is prepared to be +conquered. One turns to one’s _Westminster Gazette_ to read his works; +and one finds there columns of stuff, possibly inspired, but certainly +written in such pidgin-English that one cannot bother to read it. + +Mr. Noguchi’s pidgin-English is not of quite so curious a breed as Mr. +Markino’s, but it is sufficiently bad. One does not blame him for that. +He writes English a great deal better than I do Japanese. But why on +earth cannot the newspapers who print his works translate them into +normal English? Is it that their sub-editors shrink from the task? Is it +that they fondly believe that we are all so fascinated by English of the +Noguchi-Markinesque brand that we had much rather have it than any other +sort; or is it that a tradition has been established that Anglo-Japanese +articles are not to be altered? If this is true, it is a thousand pities +that, for all their charm, Mr. Markino’s early productions were not +unmercifully damned. What should we say if newspapers began printing in +all their native crudity articles by Frenchmen and Germans imperfectly +acquainted with the tongue of this country? Suppose some journal came out +next week with an essay beginning: + + “What sadly fall the leaves of automne! What of sadness tumble + on the heart because that the winter put his snows on all the + country. And sad also the spring, the spring who arouse the + love in the soul, and who make to think to all the springs of + the time past. My heart weep like a bird who have lose her + companion.” + +Or suppose a German were allowed by the _Westminster_ to present its +readers with a political article opening: + + “No Dutcher has the by Mr. Gamaliel Zoop, Amerikansh + postaltelegrafkommunikationdepartment minister on + politishekonomy famose lecture to a at Manchester + people-coming-together delivered recently without outerorderly + pleasure read.” + +Obviously we should not tolerate it. Can it be that, even after the +war with Russia, even after Japanese professors have written works on +sociology, the superstition lingers here that a thing cannot possibly be +truly Japanese unless it has the odour of an old curiosity shop? + +None of this, I may say, is meant to be discourteous to Mr. Noguchi. +I merely suggest that it would be better for him if he vetoed every +endeavour to print his English articles as he writes them. If he were +the Japanese Homer—indeed, he may be that for all I know—I should say +precisely the same thing. Can he be aware that even his faulty spelling +goes uncorrected? + + + + +May 1914 + + +I write “these lines” just after arriving in Berlin. Not that I have +anything to say about that. I merely mention the fact. It may explain +my difficulties. The journey is really very dull. All those hundreds of +miles over the Great Plain of Europe with never a hill except the ridge +of Minden, very little water, nothing but endless flat fields sprinkled +with trees, church spires, and red farm-houses. There is simply nothing +to look at. If you put your head out of the window at Osnabrück, you may +see some coal; and at Münster you may, if you choose, speculate as to +which of the people on the platform are Anabaptists. That is not much +during a twelve-hour run from Flushing. + +A pleasant travelling companion is an alleviation on such occasions. The +other occupant of my carriage had points about her. She was a young, +cheerful, and rather obese Jewess going home with a plethora of scarves +and wraps, several boxes, two lobsters (for her father), and a canary. +At Goch she was incensed to find that she had to pay a heavy duty on +the lobsters, so heavy that it would have paid her better to get the +creatures in Berlin and have a drink on the balance. This story might +make an illustration for one of Mr. Lloyd George’s homely speeches on +Free Trade. But there was no duty on the canary. In his little cage, +covered with a green curtain, the canary sat, non-dutiable but very +phlegmatic. At frequent intervals his mistress lifted the green curtain, +looked him in the eyes with a bewitching smile, and piped “Peep, Peep.” +The bird never replied, though perhaps he looked his response. The lady +then turned to me and said, “Is ’e not a nice bird? Is ’e not goot?” and +common politeness—leaving gallantry out of the question—compelled me to +reply always, “Yes, a beautiful little bird.” About twice an hour she +retired to the dining-car and came back exuding smiles and sighs “I half +joost ’ad a bifsteck. I dawn’t like steck.” How true it is that in life +we have to be content with second-bests! But I did not discuss the matter. + +In intervals of silence I finished Mrs. Russell Barrington’s _Life of +Walter Bagehot_ (Longmans, 12s. 6d. net). It is a strange thing—and +unfortunate, since so much material has disappeared with the passage +of time—that Bagehot should have had to wait nearly forty years for a +biography. But now it has come it is an interesting one. The author +being Bagehot’s sister-in-law (daughter of James Wilson, who founded the +_Economist_), the work has rather a family air. Bagehot’s more obvious +virtues are a little too much insisted upon, and excessive importance is +attributed to irrelevant details. The long description of his ancestry +and birthplace, for instance, might have been curtailed. But the _Life_ +is well written; it contains a great many interesting letters, and it +gives a really living picture of one whom Lord Bryce has called “the most +original mind of his generation.” + +One would wish, however, for a supplement giving a fuller analysis of +Bagehot’s literary work. Mrs. Barrington gives little more than a list +of the titles of his essays. It is true that to most people Bagehot +is still primarily the political and economic writer. There are few +intelligent Englishmen to-day who have not been influenced by _The +English Constitution_ and, in a lesser degree, by _Physics and Politics_. +His _Economic Studies_ make the rudiments of political economy as simple +and even as entertaining as a good fairy-tale, and those who have read +_Lombard Street_ speak of it as a masterpiece. But the most extraordinary +thing about it is that this man, who knew all about currency, who was in +the confidence of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and who invented Treasury +Bills, was also one of the most illuminating and sympathetic literary +critics that England has ever produced. Personally I find his literary +essays inferior to those of no other English critic who was not himself +a poet, and I think that in some respects, though not in all, they are +better than Arnold’s. + +Probably Bagehot’s celebrity as an economist militated for some years +after his death against the popularity of his literary work. Many +literary people, looking through the complete list of his works, and +seeing _Literary and Biographical Studies_ jostling shoulders with +works on money, may very pardonably have assumed that these Studies, +however able, must have been of a dry, hard character. They are very +far from that; no English criticism is more human than his, less coldly +intellectual; his temperament, naturally emotional and mystical, was most +valuably reinforced by the balance, the tolerance, the sanity that were +developed by his more mundane activities, but the temporal man in him +never overcame the eternal. Such essays as those on Hartley Coleridge, +on Shelley, on Dickens, on Cowper, on the _Edinburgh_ Reviewers, are +bound before long to be recognized as among the great classics of English +criticism. Naturally he was not impeccable; posterity may think, for +example, that he attached too much importance to his friend Clough. But +he is usually completely convincing. Take the following passage from the +comparison of Wordsworth and Jeffrey: + + “A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at + once from the symbolic, the unfounded, the indefinite. The + misfortune is that mysticism is true. There certainly are + kinds of truths, borne in as it were instinctively on the + human intellect, most influential on the character and the + heart, yet hardly capable of stringent statement, difficult + to limit by an elaborate definition. Their course is shadowy; + the mind seems rather to have seen than to see them, more + to feel after than definitely apprehend them. They commonly + involve an infinite element which, of course, cannot be stated + precisely, or else a first principle—an original tendency + of our intellectual constitution, which it is impossible + not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms + and words. Of this latter kind is what has been called the + religion of Nature, or more exactly, perhaps, the religion + of the imagination. This is an interpretation of the world. + Accordingly, to it the beauty of the universe has a meaning, + its grandeur a soul, and its sublimity an expression. As we + gaze on the faces of those whom we love; as we watch the light + of life in the dawning of their eyes, and the play of their + features, and the wildness of their animation; as we trace in + changing lineaments a varying sign; as a charm and a thrill + seem to run along the tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a + mere word; as a tone seems to roar in the ear; as a trembling + fancy hears words that are unspoken; so in Nature the mystical + sense finds a motion in the mountain, and a power in the + waves, and a meaning in the long white line of the shore, and + a thought in the blue of heaven, and a gushing soul in the + buoyant light, an unbounded being in the vast void of air, and + + _Wakeful watching in the pointed stars_ + + “There is a philosophy in this which might be explained, if + explaining were to our purpose. It might be advanced that there + are original sources of expression in the essential grandeur + and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though fainter kind + to those familiar, inexplicable signs by which we trace in + the very face and outward lineaments of man the existence + and working of the mind within. But be this as it may, it is + certain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind of religion and + that Lord Jeffrey did not believe a word of it.” + +The visionary and the epigrammatist are near allied, and both the +practical and the ideal in Bagehot are illustrated in his own phrase: +“If you would vanquish Earth, you must invent Heaven.” Bagehot, as he +appeared to ordinary people every day, is portrayed in another sentence. +“He left many,” it is said, “with the idea that he was a good fellow, yet +with no idea that he was a great man.” A great man can have no better +epitaph. + + + + +May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition + + +Any one who imagines that the English can, or at all events do, compete +with the Germans in beauty of book-production had better go to Leipzig +this summer and visit the Buchgewerbe und Graphik Exhibition—or “Bugra,” +as it is universally called in Germany. The new railway station—the +finest in the world—is also worth going to see; but that, presumably, +will last after this year. In many respects the exhibition is like +all other big exhibitions. It is much too enormous to be capable of +thorough inspection. Leaving out of account the huge buildings devoted +to the mechanics of printing and so on, there are a palace (“The Hall +of _Kultur_,” of course), filled with engravings and photographs; a +colossal structure containing the exhibits of German publishers of books +and music; and pavilions for most of the other nations of the earth. +Even Corea has a building—though I did not see it—and Siam is well to +the fore. The exhibition grounds are very extensive; they contain (need +I say?) a “Street of Nations,” many fountains, and countless cafés. +There is a reproduction of Heidelberg Castle, full of drinking-cups and +the weapons with which German students put a little interest into each +other’s faces. There is a Bavarian Hall, where real peasant maidens bring +your beer and the latest and cheapest musical-comedy tunes are played +by real peasant musicians, with feathered hats and costume complete +down to the bare knees that they insist on retaining in the face of a +proclamation by the local Catholic hierarchs to the effect that such a +display of naked charms is grossly indecent. There is no wiggle-woggle, +but there is a waterchute and a shooting-gallery whose proprietors invite +you to come in and try your skill at “live objects.” The man who was +with me—he is a person who, like Mr. Galsworthy, would not touch a fly +“save” (as the old verse has it) “in the way of kindness,”—refused to +come in. Naïvely distrustful of aliens he was afraid, he said, that the +targets might be dogs. But he need not have been alarmed, for we were +afterwards informed that they were merely big game thrown on a screen by +a cinematograph. When you hit an animal it did not drop, but a red light +showed. + +Naturally comparisons between the exhibits should be made very +cautiously; the exhibition is being held on German soil and the German +display is much larger than any other. In many respects England shows up +very well. The English section in the _Halle der Kultur_ is certainly as +good as any, and the etchings shown by Mr. Muirhead Bone, Mr. Charles +Shannon, Sir Charles Holroyd, and other British artists are possibly +the very best things in the place. The main English exhibit is housed +in a pleasant Tudor building with some beautiful rooms. The Shakespeare +exhibit of editions and portraits is most interesting for those who +like that sort of thing; a fine collection of original Beardsley +drawings has been lent by Mr. Lane; the Caxtons are coming; there are +admirable specimens of the works of the Kelmscott, Riccardi, Florence, +and other presses; there is a gallery of Medici prints unsurpassed by +any colour-reproductions in the exhibition (the print of the Dresden +Van Eyck triptych is the most completely satisfying colour-print I +have ever seen); and the elaborate bindings by Riviere’s, the Oxford +Press, and other establishments are not inferior even to the exquisite +leather bindings by Noulhac and R. Kieffer shown in the French building. +Everything our officials could have done has been done to perfection; +and the special exhibits have been very well chosen. Where we fall sadly +short is in the ordinary book of commerce. + +I cannot but think that the English publishers who have taken +stalls—and, of course, the selection of exhibits here had to be left +to the publishers themselves—could have brought together a more +attractive-looking lot of books than they have done. Most of them—I +mention no names—seem to have bundled together their books without +any consideration either of the contents or of the appearance of the +volumes. Of course there are English publishers who have no fine books +and few decent-looking books on their lists; but some of the specimens +at Leipzig look almost like remnants which it is hoped to sell off to +visitors. But even if all the English publishers had shown all their +best books, and none of their worst, they would still have been put in +the shade by the Germans. Even the French publishers—whose achievements +in typography and in illustration have been great—are not now fit to be +mentioned in the same breath as the Germans. + +The German exhibits are a revelation. The mid-Victorian tradition in +print and design—which was so tenacious in Germany—has now been almost +completely abandoned. I don’t suggest that all German books are more +presentable than English ones. Scientific works, theology, and shilling +fiction are equally ugly in both countries. But there are to-day in +Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich at least a dozen firms publishing for the +ordinary market books whose average of beauty is far higher than that +reached by the books of any considerable English publishing firm. Many +thousands of really beautiful new books are now being produced every +year in Germany; and of what can be done, especially in the way of +making cheap books look presentable, our own publishers have no idea. +There is, of course, a much larger educated reading public in Germany +than in England. In every bookshop you are confronted by volumes of +Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, and other writers who, were they Englishmen, would +never reach large circles of readers in their lifetimes. Anthologies of +contemporary German poets sell literally by tens of thousands; and you +can even get an infinite variety of doses of classical and modern authors +by dropping pennies into automatic machines on the stations. This much +may be admitted: that there is a larger literary public and more interest +in contemporary art, literary and pictorial. But, even granting all that, +the German publishers in meeting the market have shown a taste, and above +all an enterprise (sometimes reaching audacity, no doubt), which most of +our own publishers have never revealed in the slightest degree. + +To give a full account of the show is beyond my ability, desire, +and space. But in looking at the latest products of commercial +colour-printing in the French pavilion I was struck by the extraordinary +divorce between craftsmanship and taste in modern industry. Here were +some of the vilest pictures (I don’t mean morally) ever moulded by the +mind of man; yet the experts were raving over them as being the last word +in their own kind of colour-process. Needless to say, the exhibition, +not being half over, is not yet completely ready. The Italian pavilion, +when I was at the exhibition, could not be entered at all, and there were +other lacunæ all over the place. This is the kind of thing that makes +the whole world kin. + +Amongst the German authors whose portraits grace the walls of the +exhibition is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. They have naturalized him, like +Shakespeare, and the next thing will certainly be a statue at Weimar. + + + + +The Mantle of Sir Edwin + + +I have just spent three days reading Mr. E. G. Harman’s _Edmund Spenser +and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon_, published by the firm of +Constable. There are books which he who runs may read; there are also +books from which he who reads will run. This to me comes into neither +category. It is very large and crowded with most complicated detail; +it is, though quite competently written, devoid of literary grace; +and it supports a monstrous thesis with arguments many of which are +of staggering absurdity. Yet in point of deadly fascination it vies +with the basilisk. It is a monument of the “scientific method.” The +author’s learning and industry are terrifying; his tone seems completely +dispassionate; he proceeds from discovery to discovery with mild +ruthlessness; and not the most uncompromising of Wospolus was ever more +sternly resolved to embrace logical conclusions. His chief fault is +that his premises are usually arbitrary or quite insufficient; but the +objective charm of his massive progress, as of a steam-roller, from stage +to stage, is not affected by this. + +Mr. Harman does not in this volume discuss in detail Bacon’s authorship +of Shakespeare’s plays. He assumes that. He assumes also that +Bacon did publish literature under the rose and that he did employ +impersonators; his reasons being that he had to express his feelings +and that acknowledgement of authorship would have damaged his prospects +of political promotion. This much granted, Mr. Harman looks around for +writings in which he thinks he can detect traces of Bacon and examines +the evidence for their reputed authorships. He does not descend to the +puerile level of the late Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, with his “Hic, +Hæc, Hog.” He says nothing of cryptogram. But in case after case he +finds (1) that there are marks of Baconian thought and language, (2) +that allegorical references to Bacon’s political disappointments may be +found, (3) that documentary evidence supporting accepted authorships is +very slight. Nothing stops him. Where there is a real resemblance in +style things are easy. Where there are marked differences we are asked +to note the fact that Bacon’s method enabled him to write in a variety +of styles—as though serious writers expressing their inmost selves could +put on styles like trousers. If somebody has borne witness that an +Elizabethan wrote his own works, then that somebody was in the plot too. + +As to Spenser, with whom Mr. Harman chiefly deals, one is certainly +struck with the paucity of the evidence for him. We know less about +him than we know about Shakespeare; and his biographers have had to +rely almost entirely upon “internal evidence” drawn from his works. +But personally I must say that I prefer their methods to Mr. Harman’s. +He, analysing exhaustively the plot of the _Faerie Queene_, with its +Britomarts, Arthegalls, and Blatant Beasts, finds a knowledge of court +life that could not be possessed by Spenser, who lived in Ireland and +was (according to him) an ex-Board School boy in a small Civil Service +job—which is at any rate politer than “drunken, illiterate clown.” +This is question-begging; but what shall we say of the assumption that +if Spenser had written the poem the rivers of Ireland would have been +described as fully as the rivers of England? Why should the emigrant +Civil servant know anything about the rivers of Ireland? As far as that +goes, there is one slip in the description of the rivers of England which +indicates to my mind that the author relied on some inaccurate map for +his information about them. The Baconian authorship forces Mr. Harman to +the conclusion that some of Spenser’s sonnets were written by Bacon when +he was eight or nine years old. But Mr. Harman is a strong man. After +all, Mozart was a precocious child, so why not Bacon? He does not shrink +from this any more than he shrinks from arguing that any book or letter +which favourably mentions one of Bacon’s cryptic works must also have +been written or instigated by him. They _must_ have been written by him, +and, this granted, internal corroboration must be sought for. Anything +is good enough for this purpose. Mr. Harman even finds evidence in the +occurrence in several “Baconian” works of the phrase “golden wyres” as +applied to the Queen’s hair. If he would read the body of Elizabethan +lyrics, or even extracts of them in such a contemporary anthology as +_England’s Parnassus_, he would find that an Elizabethan poet could no +more help comparing a lady’s Hayre to Golden Wyres than he could help +likening her Teares to Pearles or her Brests to Iuorie. + +But there is no space here for detailed examination. It is enough to +yield oneself to the pleasure of following the Harmanian trail. I have +noted the works which in the course of his narrative or in footnotes he +ascribes to Bacon. The Authorized Version of the Bible is not mentioned. +But, apart from his voluminous acknowledged writings, Bacon wrote the +works of Spenser (including the _Faerie Queene_, the longest poem in +the world, which Bacon published before he was out of his twenties); +the works of Shakespeare; practically the whole body of Elizabethan +poetical criticism (including Webbe’s _Discourse of Poesie_, Puttenham’s +_Art of Poesie_, Sidney’s _Apologie_, Daniel’s _A Defence of Ryme_, and +Meres’s _Palladis Tamia_); many of the poems of Gascoigne (written by +Bacon before he was twelve); certain works imputed to Nashe, Greene, and +Gabriel Harvey; the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh and the _Last Fight of +the “Revenge”_; the works of Essex; Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and _Astrophel +and Stella_ (with this key Bacon unlocked his heart); Lyly’s _Euphues_ +(a long book); Bryskett’s _Discourse of Civil Life_; Sir Humphrey +Gilbert’s _Discourses_ and the account of his last voyage; _Leicester’s +Commonwealth_ and _Leicester’s Ghost_; and other minor scraps. If this be +all correct, we shall have to revise our opinion of the Elizabethan time +as a time replete with various genius. All we shall be able to refer to +now will be “the spacious Bacon of great Elizabeth.” + +An enormous number of people—including supposed writers and their +relations—must have been in the secret. Sometimes they must have +marvelled at Bacon’s extraordinary behaviour, as for instance when he +wrote for Raleigh a laudatory poem on the Queen: + + “Bacon (who, in my opinion, is the author of the poem) makes + use of the opportunity in taking up the personality of Ralegh + to express his own feelings. He was undoubtedly most unhappy at + his exclusion from access and the waning of all his hopes of + advancement. This is what is reflected under the disguise of + Ralegh’s loss of favour in the poem.” + +They must have wondered how on earth Bacon expected his grievances to be +remedied if his complaints were published over another man’s name, and +why, if Raleigh could address poems to the Queen _in propria persona_ +without loss of caste, Bacon could not do the same. But no doubt most of +them, for many were impecunious, did not allow such questions to bother +them much. They were content to take Bacon’s bribes for the use of their +names. What he must have spent in subsidies to sham authors one gasps to +contemplate. No wonder that for years he was in such financial straits, +and that at one point things came to such a pass with him that he was +arrested for debt. + + + + +“The Cattle of the Boyne” + + +I have referred before to the frequency of misprints in the penny +_Times_. It does seem a pity that the conductors of the paper cannot keep +it up to its old traditions in this respect. Last week there was a more +curious instance than usual. These words appeared: + + “The anniversary of the Cattle of the Boyne was celebrated with + unusual enthusiasm throughout Canada.” + +I was so moved by the report of these zoological novelties that I made a +little poem about them, full of Celtic twilight. It runs thus: + + THE SANDS OF BOYNE + + _Och, Geoffrey, go and call the Cattle home,_ + _And call the Cattle home,_ + _And call the Cattle home,_ + _Acrost the sands of Boyne._ + _Shure, ye’re the bhoy that’s got inured to foam,_ + _So come, bring in the koine._ + + _Och, are they fish, flesh, fowl or good red herrings?_ + _Perhaps they are red herrings,_ + _Forlorn and wildered herrings,_ + _Strayed from their native broine,_ + _This hapless party which has lost its bearings_ + _Fornint the sands of Boyne._ + + _No, no, they have no herring for their father._ + _The proof-reader’s their father,_ + _A most prolific father_ + _By mishap or desoign._ + _If this is what wan penny means, I’d rather_ + _Stump up the ancient coin_ + + _Than daily find—Och tempora, Och ~Times~!—_ + _Bad grammar in my ~Times~_ + _And misprints in my ~Times~_ + _In ivry other loine,_ + _Capped by this worst of typographic crimes_ + _“The ~CATTLE~ of the Boyne”!_ + +But perhaps one ought not really to complain of misprints, even in the +_Times_, when they are funny. + + + + +August 1914 + + +And it is less than three months since I was writing complacently about +the Leipzig book exhibition! I wrote about the exquisite collections +of bindings and drawings, the bands, the parading crowds of peaceful +Germans, the pavilions of all nations from Holland to Siam, and the +charming Tudor structure erected by Britain, with its long low halls +containing cases of Shakespeare folios and editions from the Kelmscott +Press. Enormous crowds from all over Europe would, it was hoped, visit +the exhibition as the summer wore on. “August, of course,” said the +officials to me, “will be _the_ month.” + +The buildings in the wide Street of Nations are still there, no doubt. +The flags, perhaps, have been hauled down, but those files of white wood +and plaster palaces still stand behind their flower-beds along the broad +avenues. The crowds are dispersed. The officials in charge of the various +buildings have fled to their respective domiciles. The cheerful male +members of the Bavarian Peasants’ Band have taken off their green hats +and put on helmets, left the women behind, and gone off to burn villages +like their own, and disembowel sunburnt French peasants as naturally +amiable as themselves. Memories so recent make the pit of one’s stomach +sink. In May last a German barber in Berlin had his razor at my throat, +and when he scratched my skin he was most concerned and apologetic. +“Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus.” The remark was +made by a Swedish statesman in the eighteenth century. Voltaire, looking +down from heaven—if one may risk his displeasure by presuming his +presence in so uncongenial a place—must feel that since the eighteenth +century there has been no great change, and that the human race is as +horribly ridiculous an institution as ever it was. + +But here we are.[1] Like most other inhabitants of the “civilized” world, +I have for the last week read no books, but only newspapers. Fourteen +a day is about my average, which means nearly a hundred a week. And +nine-tenths of them contain nothing that one did not know before. There +never was a war, since telegraphs were invented, about which news was +so scarce. Almost every rumour that comes through is dubious, and it is +invariably contradicted. In successive issues and even in the same issue +of a journal one reads that troops have and have not entered a certain +village, that somebody’s neutrality has and has not been violated, +and that a naval engagement has and has not taken place. If you go +over the eight pages of “war news” in a daily and make a summary of +the unquestionable facts contained therein, as distinguished from the +doubtful reports and the office-written padding, you find it could all +be got into a paragraph. We have frequently heard that the day of the +war correspondent was over. We heard it during the Russo-Japanese War—of +which we certainly got very little news—and we heard it during the Balkan +campaign. But at the moment of writing I have scarcely seen a single item +regarding a single encounter which looked indisputable or which appeared +to come direct from an eye-witness. Almost all the information we have +been getting has come either from rumour travelling across many tongues +or from official sources. Both these founts of news are great liars, the +former excelling in the _suggestio falsi_, and the latter both in that +and in the _suppressio veri_. + +The desperate straits in which we have been for news could be gathered +(if in no other way) from the outlandish places of origin ascribed to +reports that get into print. Stockholm informs one that advices from +Teheran report a conflict at Toul; and we hear that the _Mercure de +Bruxelles_ states “on excellent authority” that something has happened at +Basle. Deliberate fabrication has been at work all over the place. Our +good old friend the doctor, with the cholera microbes which he puts into +wells, even turned up at the very start. This mythical gentleman is at +least as old as the Franco-German War of 1870, and his last appearance +was in the Balkans. No sooner does a war start than one of the combatants +hastens to describe his diabolical activities in the hope, presumably, +of making the world’s blood boil at the thought of an “outrage against +humanity.” + +The papers cannot be blamed for printing rumours, but they might give the +clearest indication, whenever possible, of the value of their sources. +Rumours before they get into print presumably travel in much the same +way as after they get into print. Of how rapidly “news” develops I had +an experience in a club on Tuesday night. A late evening paper printed a +brief report, stating that Aberdeen doctors had gone to attend to wounded +who were being landed at Cromarty. Five minutes after I had seen this, I +was told by a member that single British and German destroyers had had +a brush off the Scottish coast. Five minutes after that the vessels had +expanded into flotillas, and within the hour a club servant, with very +gloomy face, remarked to me, “I don’t know if you’ve heard it, sir, but +there’s been a great naval battle in the North Sea and the British Fleet +has met with an awful disaster.” With correspondents kept out of the area +of hostilities, it is no wonder that by the time reports of occurrences +reach the persons who send them to our newspapers they bear very little +relation to the events (if any) which have originally generated them. +War correspondents in Europe to-day seem to be able to do little more +than sit in friendly foreign capitals and send home little bits of news +out of the local papers. And if we want a really accurate and full +description of the big battles, especially the big naval battles, of the +future we shall usually have to wait until peace allows combatants to +publish such books as the Japanese _Human Bullets_, describing the attack +on Port Arthur, and those vivid Russian books which told the story of +Rozhdestvensky’s voyage to the China Sea with his mouldy squadron and the +magnificent and pitiful end of it at Tsushima. But of no great modern war +will the whole truth ever be properly known. Forces work over such vast +areas that full information is impossible to collect. + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] I have left all this as I wrote it.—S. E. + + + + +Mrs. Barclay sees it through + + + _Over the turmoil of a world in arms_ + _There floats a rich indomitable coo ..._ + _’Tis Barclay.... Though excursions and alarms_ + _Torture the firmament, though Wilhelm II_ + _In shining armour waits his Waterloo,_ + _Though on all sides the blood rains down in torrents_ + _Love’s interests still are in safe hands with Florence._ + + _What though the rest of us are turning tail,_ + _Assured by those who have a right to speak_ + _That only Patriotism has a sale?_ + _~She~ knows Love’s drawing-power remains unique;_ + _~Her~ books need never be postponed a week;_ + _Sure of her subject, certain of her vogue,_ + _She has no need to adjourn, much less prorogue._ + + _Business as usual. Yet who knows, who knows_ + _Whether she has not chosen the better part,_ + _Swelling the proud full sail of her great prose_ + _Still with the gentler zephyrs of the heart,_ + _Rather than seize an Amazonian dart,_ + _Leaping into the middle of the fray_ + _Like certain other poets of the day._ + + _Has Robert Bridges’ success with fighting_ + _Been such as to encourage emulation?_ + _Or Dr. Watson’s “bit them in the Bight”-ing?_ + _Or the same author’s other lucubration_ + _(Yet one more blow for a disthressful nation)_ + _In which, dead gravelled for a rhyme for “Ireland,”_ + _He struggled out with “motherland and sireland”?_ + + _Did even the voice from Rudyard Kipling’s shelf_ + _Say anything it had not said before?_ + _And was not Stephen Phillips just himself?_ + _And was not Newbolt’s effort on the war_ + _Distinctly less effective than of yore?_ + _And would not German shrapnel in the leg be_ + _Less lacerating than the verse of Begbie?_ + +When the Muse seized me, in this manner, by the hair, it was three +o’clock in the morning, and I had just finished the new novel by the +author of _The Rosary_. Had it been earlier I should have written +more. But next day the mouse of inspiration had fled to its hole; the +spell of the book had been dissipated; my vision had faded into the +light of common day; and I resumed my consideration of the position of +Przemysl, a place of which, until this week, I had never heard. But what +a fascination the book exercised while one was reading it! I can well +understand why Mrs. Barclay commands a greater audience than perhaps any +other living writer. She can beat the basilisk at its own game. + +The reader is swept away with a rush of strong emotion at the very start. +A tall, reticent, bronzed man arrives by the boat train at Charing Cross. +Thrown over by a woman, he has been abroad for ten years, nursing his +grief and creating a reputation as a novelist. No sooner does he get to +the station than he extracts from the coy bookstall clerk a confession +that to him the books of Rodney Steele are the best in the world. Lump +in the throat number one; and a sovereign in the pocket of the clerk. +Steele leaves the station to drive to a flat a friend has left him. Oh, +the fragrance and glitter of dear old smoky London! Oh, the beauty of the +Queen Victoria Memorial! + + “Mysterious through the gloom, he saw the nation’s fine + memorial to a deathless memory. The gush of green waters, the + golden figure at the summit, needed sunlight for their better + seeing. But clear through the orange darkness gleamed the white + marble majesty of England’s Great Queen. + + “Rodney Steele lifted his hand in reverent salute as he + passed.... + + “‘Lest we forget!’ quoted Rodney Steele as he looked at the + majestic marble figure, throned outside the palace above the + rushing waters. ‘Yet—could we, who really remember, ever + forget?’” + +The rest of the book tells how he was wooed and won by his old love, now +a widow. She had deserted him under a misapprehension and was resolved +to recover him. She therefore took the next flat to his—or rather to her +brother’s, which Steele was occupying. She had heard that owing to a +change of telephone numbers her brother was constantly being rung up by +mistake for a Hospital. One night therefore Steele was rung up and a Kind +Voice asked for the Matron. The voice reminded him of Madge. He began to +feel so lonely that he willed, with all his will, that the unknown Kind +Voice should ring him up again. + + “‘Speak to me again,’ he said, ‘you, you spoke to me last + night. Speak to me again. What wait I for? I wait for you! Just + now—in my utter loneliness, in my empty solitude—I wait for + you.’... + + “The distant clock slowly chimed a quarter past the hour of + ten; and—as that sound died away—the bell of the telephone + rang.” + +This time he made the Kind Voice promise to ring him up nightly in order +to console him in his loneliness. The Kind Voice consented. Ultimately on +the telephone they discussed (he not revealing his identity or knowing +hers) his novels. This is the kind of thing they say over the telephone: + + “‘The thing of first importance is to uplift your readers; to + raise their ideals; to leave them with a sense of hopefulness, + which shall arouse within them a brave optimism such as + inspired Browning’s oft-quoted noble lines.’” + +When finally he confesses to the Kind Voice that his life has been ruined +by a girl with whom he is still in love, Madge thinks the time ripe for +an appointment. They meet. He finds that the Kind Voice has been Madge +all the time and he steels his breast against the woman who has added +deception to her previous crime. But her “gracious gracefulness” and +other qualities win in the end, and we finish at Christmas with Herald +Angels and wedding-bells. + +Mrs. Barclay certainly has skill. Nobody else can write a silly story +half so well as she. Her English is fluent and vivid, although loose; her +humour is genuine if not subtle; and she handles her dialogue, such as it +is, very cleverly. But, above all, she knows how to serve out the glamour +and the pathos with a ladle. The hero of this book is as generous as he +is clever. He can conjure; he can make seagulls settle on his shoulder; +and he does kind actions to widows. There are also an heroic ex-soldier +who saved a man’s life at Spion Kop; a bishop’s window brimming over with +love and reminiscences; and an honest, stupid Englishman with no thoughts +of self. The only bad character dies, and the end is a pæan of joy. As +long as she can keep this up Mrs. Barclay will never lose her hold. In +spite of the war, this book, I should think, will sell in millions and +millions. + +_Vorwärts_ reports that Dr. Ludwig Frank, a member of the Reichstag, has +been killed in battle near Lunéville. Dr. Frank, who sat for Mannheim, +was one of the leaders of the Southern Revisionists. I had tea with him +at the Reichstag last May. He took me into the Strangers’ Gallery of +the House, where I heard Dr. Liebknecht makes one of his anti-armament +speeches, the one in which he incidentally accused a Prussian general of +negotiating sales of decorations. It seems very remote now. Dr. Frank was +barrister; a big Jew with a heavy, handsome face—sallow skin, aquiline +nose, black moustache, strong chin, dominating eyes. His romantic air—he +was supposed to resemble Lassalle—made him very popular in the rich +Jewish salons of Berlin. He was a strong man, and one would have said an +ambitious one. But a middle-class man who enters the German Socialist +Party sacrifices so much that he _ipso facto_ clears himself of the +suspicion of mere ambition. + + + + +A Topic of Standing Interest + + +The Oxford University Press has just issued a beautiful little edition of +Erasmus’s _Praise of Folly_, with a good reproduction of Quentin Matsys’ +portrait of Erasmus as a frontispiece. The last edition of the _Encomium +Moriæ_ with which I am familiar is that issued in 1887 by the firm of +Hamilton, Adams. It had a binding which did not please, but contained +Holbein’s interesting illustrations. Whether any considerable sale of +the book is likely nowadays I very much doubt. Erasmus’s humour was an +improvement on mediæval humour, which, except in a few cases, cannot +make a modern man laugh save sometimes through the brazenness of its +indecency. Erasmus was a child of the Renaissance, a wit, a scholar, a +questioner of all things, a man of the world, a revolutionary conformist. +But there are long dull passages in his most famous book, and many +remarks that seemed most daring to the men of his own time are to us +platitudinous; whilst he often labours some obvious joke in the worst +mediæval way. + +At the same time, any one who cares to go through the book will find +occasional amusement. Erasmus had a mild theory of the satirist’s +rights. “Wits,” said he, “have always been allowed this privilege, +that they might be smart upon any transactions of life, if so be their +liberty did not extend to railing”; and he disclaimed a desire to imitate +Juvenal by “raking into the sink of vices to procure a laughter.” With +these qualifications, he let out all around him with some vigour. The +personification of Folly is rather feebly sustained, though the character +is pleasantly introduced with the sentence: “I was born neither in the +floating Delos nor on the frothy sea, nor in any of the privacies where +too forward mothers are wont to retire for undiscovered delivery.” But +the _obiter dicta_ on various classes of men who have often been the +butts of satirists since his day are still entertaining and must in his +own time have been shocking. He refers to priests as “wisely foreseeing +that the people, like cows, which never give down their milk so well as +when they are gently stroked, would part with less if they knew more, +their bounty proceeding only from a mistake of charity.” He speaks of +“The Carthusians, which order alone keeps honesty and piety among them, +but really keeps them so close that nobody ever yet could see them,” and +he is especially down on the scholastic theologians. Sterne, it will be +remembered, described a dispute “as to whether God could make a nose as +big as the steeple of Strasburg.” This is scarcely a caricature of the +kind of discussion ridiculed by Erasmus: + + “Whether this proposition is possible to be true; that the + first person of the Trinity hated the second? + + “Whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a + man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, a beast, an + herb, or a stone. And were it possible that the Godhead had + appeared in the shape of an inanimate substance, how he then + should have preached his gospel? Or how have been nailed to the + cross? Whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the + same time our Saviour was hanging on the cross, the consecrated + bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that + remained on the tree?” + +Word-spinning he detested, and he refers the Nominalists, the Realists, +the Thomists, the Albertists, the Scotists, etc., to the primitive +disciples who were “well acquainted with the Virgin Mary, yet none of +them undertook to prove that she was preserved immaculate from original +sin.” + + “The disciples baptized all nations, and yet never taught + what was the formal, material, efficient, and final cause of + baptism, and certainly never dreamt of distinguishing between a + delible and an indelible character in this sacrament.” + +Chaucer, with his observations about relics and “pigges bones,” and the +novelists who never hesitated to put friars in the most ignominious +positions (e. g. in chimneys and under tables) had made sport of the +clergy, but Erasmus’s particular method of battering current theology +had not been so devastatingly employed since Lucian. He showed, like +Rabelais, that it is possible to reconcile the profession of Christianity +with something of what a recent writer calls “the old Voltairean love of +humanity.” + +Erasmus made the familiar sport of lawyers and pedantic critics. He would +have agreed with Sterne: “Of all the cants which are canted in this +canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of +criticism is the most tormenting.” “When any of them,” he says, + + “has found out who was the mother of Anchises, or has lighted + upon some old unusual word, such as bubsequa, bovinator, + manticulator, or other like obsolete cramp terms, or can, + after a great deal of poring, spell out the inscription of + some battered monument: Lord! what joy, what triumph, what + congratulating their success, as if they had conquered Africa, + or taken Babylon the Great!” + +It was for such people’s benefit that he must have made his irritating +final remark: “I hate a hearer that will carry anything away with him.” + +Erasmus was the mildest of the famous satirists, but he has his place +in the great succession, though his works cannot now compete for +readableness with those of Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Voltaire. +Satirists have usually been considerable plagiarists, and _The Praise of +Folly_ has an important historical place in the development of this kind +of literature. Richard Burton cribbed a good deal from it, in spite of +his own drastic remark about persons who “lard their lean bookes with fat +of others’ workes” and his question: “If that severe doom of Synesius +be true it is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labours than their +cloaths, what shall become of most writers?” But Burton has an account on +the other side, for Sterne later on reprinted chunks of his work almost +literally without any acknowledgement whatever. + +The new Oxford edition gives a modernized reprint of the Caroline +Version by John Wilson. In the introduction Mrs. P. S. Allen gives some +interesting bibliographical particulars. Over forty editions of the +_Encomium Moriæ_ were published in the author’s lifetime; within forty +years of its first Latin issue French, Italian, and English translations +had been published; and later versions have appeared in (amongst other +languages) Swedish, Czech, Polish, and Modern Greek. + + + + +Was Cromwell an Alligator? + + +Some people—who at least avoid the error of ascribing the invention to +Steele or Addison—say that Abraham Cowley was the Father of the English +Essay. It might alternatively be suggested that Q. Horatius Flaccus was +one of its parents and Montaigne the other; Bacon having, so to speak, a +watching brief at the birth. But the other statement is true in a sense: +for though in patches Bacon (and Burton) anticipated the tone and method +of that type of writing which was brought to its fullest perfection by +Charles Lamb, Cowley was the man who fixed the type. His essays have +just been republished in a beautiful little edition of the Collected +Prose Works, issued by the Oxford University Press, and edited by Mr. +A. B. Gough. Mr. Gough is a most painstaking editor, and his notes are +abnormally full. They are so full that one feels that most people who are +likely to acquire such a book will find nine-tenths of them unnecessary; +but one ought not to grumble at that, since they have the complementary +advantage of always supplying information when one looks for it. + +The edition is especially to be welcomed as there are many persons +capable of appreciating Cowley who have never come into contact with +him. “Who now reads Cowley?” Pope asked in 1737; if the question were +repeated to-day you certainly would not get a forest of hands raised, +even in an audience replete with pince-nez and bulging brows. It was +Cowley’s misfortune, as it was his ambition, to be known in his own days +as one of the greatest poets of his time; when men discovered that he +was not that, they at once concluded that he was nothing else. Not that +his poems are as negligible as some critics assert; his mere skill and +neatness make him worth reading. Even if he had, as Mr. Gough remarks, +“too little passion and spontaneity to be a great lyric poet,” he was at +any rate a good metrist and a most admirable phrasemaker. But his prose +writings are certainly superior to the others; and this is true not only +of the Essays. His _Vision Concerning Oliver Cromwell_, for example, is +full of witty and whimsical things. Occasionally he employs very drastic +language, as when he refers to the Protector as an “alligator” and when +he abuses him for meditating the calling in of the Jews. This is how +Cowley disports himself. The italics are mine: + + “From which he was rebuked by the universal outcry of the + Divines, and even of the Citizens too, _who took it ill that a + considerable number at least among themselves were not thought + Jews enough by their own Herod_. And for this design, they say, + he invented ... to sell St. Pauls to them for a synagogue, if + their purses and devotions could have reacht to the purchase. + And this indeed if he had done onely to reward that Nation + which had given the first noble example of crucifying their + King, _it might have had some appearance of gratitude_, but + he did it onely for love of their Mammon; and would have + sold afterwards for as much more St. Peters (even at his own + Westminster) to the Turks for a Mosquito [Mosque]. Such was + his extraordinary Piety to God, that he desired he might be + worshipped in all manners, excepting only that heathenish way + of the Common Prayer Book.” + +But this strong language is not the strong language of a man whose +breast is a burning fiery furnace; it is the invective of a man who is +amused by his opponents and who regards them chiefly as pegs for cunning +sentences. His hard words would certainly have broken no bones; and one +can even imagine that, in the secrecy of their chambers, the Puritans +themselves—at all events, the less ironsided of them—may have shaken +their sides over his character-sketch of the man whom they doubtless +referred to in public as “our great leader.” + +But if such qualities are defects when a man is writing political tracts +or attempting the higher flights of poetry, they are invaluable to him if +he is writing essays. Cowley’s Essays—and his Prefaces are as good—are +most delightful, and they have as personal a turn as Lamb’s. They all, +virtually, have one text: the Sabine Farm text; the retired _Urbs in +Rure_ text. They speak of the country’s charms in the ex-townsman’s way; +they gibe at the turmoil and press of cities in a manner which attests +a still lively interest in these contemptible things; they praise the +pleasures of horticulture, solitary meditation, and à Kempis’s “little +book in a corner.” Their learning is lightly worn; their language +natural; their arguments not so serious as to stand in the way of any +jest that offers itself; and many passages in them might almost as well +have been written in 1720 or 1820 as in 1660. These, for instance: + + “There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear + often that a man does not know how to pass his Time. ’Twould + have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred + sixty ninth year of his Life. + + “I have been drawn twice or thrice by company to go to Bedlam, + and have seen others very much delighted with the fantastical + extravagancie of so many various madnesses, which upon me + wrought so contrary an effect, that I always returned, not only + melancholy, but e’en sick with the sight. My compassion there + was perhaps too tender, for I meet a thousand Madmen abroad, + without any perturbation; though, to weigh the matter justly, + the total loss of Reason is less deplorable than the total + depravation of it. + + “I thought when I went first to dwell in the country, that + without doubt I should have met there with the simplicity + of the old Poetical Golden Age: I thought to have found no + inhabitants there, but such as the Shepherds of Sir Phil. + Sydney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d’Urfé upon the Banks of + Lignon; and began to consider with myself, which way I might + recommend no less to Posterity the Happiness and Innocence of + the Men of Chertsea; but to confess the truth, I perceived + quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old + England. + + “The civilest, methinks, of all Nations, are those whom we + account the most barbarous. There is some moderation and + good Nature in the Toupinamhaltians who eat no men but their + Enemies, whilst we learned and polite and Christian Europeans, + like as many Pikes or Sharks prey upon everything we can + swallow.” + +The last sentence reads, perhaps, more like a certain living writer than +like, say, Charles Lamb. + +The best of Cowley’s Essays are _Of My Self_ and _Of Greatness_. I have +no room to quote them at length. The first—in which he is writing of +poetry and of his childhood’s memories—is more full of feeling than +is usual with him. The other is one of the most picturesque pieces of +light moralizing in the language, full of what we all call the Playful +Irony of the Gentle Elia, as in sentences like: “The Ancient Roman +Emperours, who had the Riches of the whole world for their Revenue, had +wherewithal to live (one would have thought) pretty well at ease, and to +have been exempt from the pressures of extream Poverty”; and it describes +the pleasures of littleness most alluringly. But somehow, in spite of +his assertions, one never quite believes in the genuineness of his +middle-aged preference for “Prettiness,” as against “Majestical Beauty.” +One suspects the existence in him of a disappointed ambition, a hankering +after action, which frequently afflict men who are constitutionally +fitted for nothing but looking on and making charming comments. But he +had certainly been very badly treated by the Stuart family, which he had +faithfully served. The Restoration gave him neither employment nor money. +It gave him, however, a very fine funeral. Evelyn says that his coffin +was followed to the Abbey by a hundred noblemen’s coaches and large +numbers of wits, bishops, and clergymen. + + + + +The Depressed Philanthropist + + +I do not see why any one but myself should be interested in the mere +fact that, except in the way of casual reference, I have always avoided +writing a line about Mr. John Galsworthy. But as one’s feelings commonly +typify those of some section or other of one’s fellows it may be relevant +to one’s purpose. I frequently begin writing something about Mr. +Galsworthy and then tear it up. I constantly feel like abusing him, and +am then checked by the thought that after all he is too good a man to +go for. He is a sensitive and humane man of very great intelligence. He +is a conscientious writer and an acute observer. He has a great respect +for truth and a desire to state it at all costs. He detests pettinesses, +hypocrisies, and shams. On almost every issue that might arise I am sure +I should find myself voting on the same side as he, though perhaps we +might differ in our views of the relative importance to be attached to +the problem of World Peace and that of the hardships inflicted by mankind +on ants, wasps, and bees. And yet as I read his books I feel as if I were +in some cheerless seaside lodging-house on a wet day. + +I have just been reading his new miscellany _The Little Man_. The book +does not show his qualities at their best, but it shows his defects at +their worst. The principal contents are _The Little Man_ and _Studies +in Extravagance_. The first is a short play showing how a German, an +American full of altruistic platitudes, and two self-contained and +“proper” English people shrink in the most selfish and cowardly way from +a forlorn baby suspected (falsely, of course, for the sake of the extra +irony) of typhus. The “studies” are examinations of various “types” such +as “The Artist,” “The Plain Man,” “The Housewife,” “The Preceptor,” and +“The Latest Thing.” And there is none of them good—no, not one. Mr. Max +Beerbohm once did a cartoon of Mr. Galsworthy Looking upon Life and +Finding it Foul, Life being represented as a fat and ferocious goblin +with horns, a forked tail, and teeth like a wild boar’s. It was just a +little wrong. Mr. Galsworthy’s vision should not have had so much of +the positive about it. He does not find Life vigorously diabolical, but +meanly cruel and pallidly contemptible. Many great men have been gloomy +or pessimistic. Mr. Hardy is not exactly a merry grig, Schopenhauer was +consistently disgruntled, and the man who would look for _joie de vivre_ +in Leopardi would look in vain. And as Mr. Galsworthy suggests himself—it +is a commonplace—it is often the duty of a serious contemporary writer to +be horrifying, unpleasant, and shocking. The regeneration of mankind—to +continue the commonplace—is not possible if we hold the view that things +may be done that may not be discussed, and that the failings of man and +the diseases of society should, as far as possible, be stowed away in +the cupboard, where the skeletons are. What is wrong with Mr. Galsworthy +is that one cannot quite believe him. One suspects him of cooking the +evidence. One does not mind a man presenting a black view of life if +(_a_) he is temperamentally inclined to it and can be melancholy with +a certain gusto, or (_b_) if, being a professed realist, he appears to +have taken cognizance of every aspect that has presented itself to him. +But Mr. Galsworthy presents so one-sided a case that we at once suspect +his _bona fides_ and react against his views. It would be unfair to +classify him with that school of novelists who give their books titles +like _Dull Monotony_ and live up to their titles by giving a photographic +reproduction of an intolerable tedium peculiar to, and comprehensible by, +the households which they themselves afflict. He usually escapes being +thoroughly boring partly because of his gift for occasionally happy and +incisive phrase and partly because here and there, behind the grey brow +of the dejected Hanging Judge, one catches a gleam of something more +exhilarating than his expressed sentiments. But he is often very nearly +dull, all the same: for his realism is often bogus. He starts with an +intention to paint a caricature in greys, and a caricature which is not +amusing. Even in his very well-made plays the characters are not, to my +mind, usually interesting in themselves. One does not believe in them as +persons. They are just a set of types, as stagy and unreal as the old +stage figures of melodrama, though they are called charwomen, clerks, +magistrates, and company directors instead of being called Irishmen, +highwaymen, and wicked baronets. His plays argue cases, but they do not +present life as we know it. I find the same sort of unreality about his +prose; and, since the unreality takes the form of making mankind look +utterly paltry and uninteresting, one wonders why on earth a man who has +such an opinion of it bothers about it at all. + +So in _The Little Man_ and in these studies. All these average people +do not get a dog’s chance; we have all sinned and fall short of the +glory of God, but we really are not quite so dull, feeble, and silly +as all this. Some characteristics—as those of the Plain Man—are very +cleverly recorded, but the whole of the man is not here, nor even the +most important parts of him. As an illustration of Mr. Galsworthy’s +pseudo-realistic method take him on the ground most favourable to +him—that of the beef-and-whisky-fed sportsman: + + “What led to him was anything that ministered to the coatings + of the stomach and the thickness of the skin ... to be ‘hard’ + was his ambition, and he moved through life hitting things, + especially balls—whether they reposed on little inverted tubs + of sand or moved swiftly towards him, he almost always hit + them, and told people how he did it afterwards. He hit things, + too, at a distance, through a tube, with a certain noise....” + +Now, apart from the fact that a full and accurate description of a +sportsman would put in many things Mr. Galsworthy leaves out (e. g. some +indication that he was a human being, as we know the species), this is +not good, though it is superficially plausible description, even so +far as it goes. The plain statement that the gentleman played golf and +cricket and shot a good deal would convey a better idea of him than +this specious circumlocution. To say that a man is smoking a cigarette +positively contains a greater measure of suggestion than to say that he +is inhaling grey fumes through a cylinder of paper filled with dried +herbs. Much of Mr. Galsworthy’s attack upon all kinds of men and women, +self-centred authors, idealists who oppress their wives, worldly women +who have never found their souls, cultured people who chase the new, +and Philistines who run away from the new, has the same sort of defect. +It is really “guying” which passes for photography merely because it +is heavy-footed and unamusing. I object to Mr. Galsworthy’s ostensible +view of life partly because I don’t believe he takes it, and partly +because if he did I should think it an absurdly unjust view. At heart +a humanitarian, he has got into a dismal and costive kind of literary +method which makes him look like a fretful and dyspeptic man who curls +his discontented nostrils at life as though it were an unpleasing smell. +As Ibsen used so often to remark, there is a great deal wrong with the +drains; but after all there are other parts of the edifice. + + + + +A Polyphloisboisterous Critic + + +I remember—that is to say, I wish I remembered, for I have forgotten +most of it—a poem that I used to recite at my mother’s knee. Its subject +was an antediluvian man of sesquipedalian height, who let out the blood +of an ichthyosaurus with a polyphloisboisterous shout; and its claim to +attention was a plethora of polysyllables very embarrassing to an infant, +and indeed to any, tongue. It was of that poem that I was reminded whilst +reading _European Dramatists_, by Archibald Henderson. + +Mr. Henderson, an American professor, is not a stranger to the British +public. It was he who produced, a few years ago, a biographical +study of Mr. Bernard Shaw so vast that a single copy might well have +served—were not Mr. Shaw still happily with us—as Mr. Shaw’s tombstone. +The work, indeed (to use the phrase Mr. Henderson himself applies to +a play of Strindberg’s), was “colossal in its incommensurability.” +It was the kind of book one had thought could only be produced by a +large committee of Chinese scholars; and although it did not lead one +to respect the author’s powers of judging the relative importance of +his various facts, it at least compelled one to admire his colossal +energy and his incommensurable supply of these facts. From _European +Dramatists_ one gets precisely the same feeling. Parts of the book have +appeared in journals published in Boston and in Berlin, in Stuttgart +and in Stockholm, in Helsingfors, Paris, New York, and Ghent. And one +may be sure that Mr. Henderson could have talked to the editors of all +these papers and beaten all of them hollow in knowledge of the modern +literature of their respective countries. The actual subjects of his +papers are familiar enough: Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, +Granville Barker, and Wilde. But in discussing them he shows an amazing +acquaintance with everybody who has recently written anything in any +country. He can refer you to the December 1913 issue of the _Przemysl +Review_; he can tell you what the Servian critic, Ivan Peckitch, thinks +of the Finnish poet, D. D. Bilius. He knows all about everything, though +one is not quite sure that he knows anything else. But what chiefly +pleases one about him is not so much what he says as the charming +way he says it. Like Hudibras, he cannot ope his mouth but out there +flies a trope. Everything happens with him in metaphors; people are +always digging into soils, moulding things in fires or clothing them in +vestures. And above all he is polysyllabic and rotund of speech. + +He begins well with Strindberg, of whose first married years he +observes that they “were undoubtedly happy—certainly in the passional +sense, if not in the restful consciousness of hallowed union.” “In +1886,” he proceeds, “Strindberg began to be obsessed with the monomania +of animadversion against the female sex.” Later, “goaded by titanic +ambition, he cast off the shackles of provinciality for the freedom +of cosmopolitanism”—i. e. he travelled. Ibsen and Strindberg were “so +antipodal in temperament, yet so cognate in the faculties of intuitive +perception and searching introspectiveness.” One of Strindberg’s works +blurs the vision of the average spectator, “with its kinetoscopic +heterogeneity of spiritual films”: Peer Gynt (on the other hand, shall I +say?) stood for “the disciplinary bankruptcy of laxity.” “Concretizes” +and “inscenation” are the kind of words he rejoices in, but perhaps two +or three longer extracts will better illustrate the quality of his style: + + “To peep into the workshop of the great master’s brain and + assist at the precise balancing of the arguments _pro_ and + _con_, to observe how an idea first finds lodgment in the + brain, and to note the gradual symmetrical accretion of the + fundamental nuclei for the final creation—this is a privilege + that has perhaps [_sic_] never fully been realized by an + observer. + + “America is young and hopeful, at least; it is not peopled, we + are confidently assured, with soul-sick tragedians mouthing + their futile protests against the iron vice of environment, + the ineradicable scar of heredity, the fell clutch of + circumstance. + + “Yet the reiterant ejaculations, the hyper-ethereal imaginings + of the symbolist manner, are the symptoms of a tentative + talent, not of an authoritative art.” + +I don’t think Professor Henderson’s remarks are ever quite meaningless, +but I suspect that the most elephantine of them, if reduced to +essentials, would be as commonplace as his more comprehensible statements +that “Social criticism is the sign manual of the age,” and that “the +emancipation of woman, in the completest sense, is on the way”—which last +gets a whole paragraph to itself. But it is pleasant to read it all; to +see “Ibsen, Pinero, or Phillips” thus bracketed; to learn that Wilde’s +father was also “the father of modern otology,” and to be told that +Maeterlinck’s “eternal prayer” is, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh +would melt”! That is on page 203; but the effect is somewhat marred by +the fact that precisely the same “cry” has been, on page 37, attributed +to Strindberg. Personally I plump for Maeterlinck. + + + + +“Another Century, and then ...” + + +There is a certain sort of dull criticism which Dr. Johnson admirably +stigmatized when he said that “there is no great merit in telling +how many plays have ghosts in them and how this ghost is better than +that.” A great deal of American (not to speak of German) academic +criticism belongs to this category; and especially those theses which +are written by postgraduate students and candidates for the doctor’s +degree. These persons, when they are not exhuming dead reputations +from well-deserved sepulchres, show an uncanny ingenuity in inventing +original classifications and instituting unnecessary comparisons. But +now and again such students manage to produce some enlightening piece +of “research” work, and _The French Revolution and the English Novel_ +(Putnams) is one of the best of its kind. It is by Allene Gregory; and as +I cannot tell from the name whether she is a gentleman or a lady, I shall +call him Miss. + +“This study in the _tendenz_ novel was begun with the idea of paralleling +Dr. Hancock’s book, _The French Revolution and the English Poets_.” That +is the first sentence of the preface, and it has a strictly academic +flavour about it. The book is a “scientific” treatise; it would not +have been written, so to say, either by a French Revolutionary or by an +English novelist. If it dealt with the purely literary merits, which are +few, of its subjects, it would be a useless sort of book. But its real +purpose is to supply a chapter to the history of ideas, and especially +Liberal political and social ideas. Many people talk as though they +thought that the novel which canvasses the “problems” of sex, property, +and religion were an invention of the last thirty years; and many others +are under the impression that Charles Dickens was the first person to use +fiction—though not, of course, the first person to employ fictions—for +the promotion of legislation. Books about Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft +are occasionally written; and quite recently Thomas Holcroft, one of the +chief of our Revolutionary novelists, was given considerable notice in +Mr. Brailsford’s excellent little book in the Home University Library. +But, as far as my experience goes, there seem to be very few who know +that England produced a century ago a whole group of novelists whose +principal aim was not to “tell a straightforward story” or make the flesh +creep, but to blow up the foundations of society with the gunpowder in +the jam. + +Miss Gregory’s book is very comprehensive. Her principal figures are +Holcroft, Godwin, and Robert Bage; and she gives synopses of all their +novels, with extracts illustrating their doctrines. Holcroft, one of +the most lovable figures in the history of English democracy, was the +sort of man who is regarded as an obscure crank in his lifetime, then +forgotten for a time, and ultimately recognized as a person of historical +importance. He lived a long life, and harmed nobody in the course of it. +As a stable-boy in a racing stable he read Addison, Bunyan, and Swift +(whose tribute to the Houyhnhnms must have had a local colour for him); +he was afterwards a strolling actor, a hack writer, translator, novelist, +and playwright, one of his plays being _The Road to Ruin_. When the +Society for Constitutional Reformation was raided Holcroft was arrested +with Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke, and it was alleged against him, as +justification for a charge of high treason, that he had extolled moral +as against physical force. His associates being acquitted, he was never +brought to trial: there comes a point at which even a Government begins +to feel it is making an ass of itself. Holcroft’s courage never weakened +“when Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and even Blake had recanted, and +Godwin and Paine had fallen silent, and all the world seemed to have +forgotten its vision of democracy.” He himself stated in terms: “Whenever +I have undertaken to write a novel I have proposed to myself a specific +moral purpose.” His best novels are _Hugh Trevor_ and _Anna St. Ives_. +In the latter the hero, Frank Henley, who shocks the orthodox by taking +service rather than self-interest as his guiding principle, remarks: + + “Let men look around and deny if they can that the present + wretched system of each providing for himself instead of the + whole for the whole does not inspire suspicion, fear, and + hatred. Well, well!—another century, and then....” + +Just a century has passed. + +Of Godwin’s novels _Caleb Williams_ is the only one that is at all read +nowadays. In spite of its impossibilities of character and action, it is +a very good tract, especially where it deals with the prison system. Miss +Gregory’s extracts from _Caleb Williams_ might have been more profuse; +but she gives interesting accounts of _St. Leon_ and _Fleetwood_. In +the first of these a gentleman who possesses the philosopher’s stone +breaks into long reflections on “gold _versus_ actual wealth”; in the +other there are eloquent passages about the horrors of child-slavery in +factories which anticipate the factory reports of a generation later, +and which were so much in advance of their time that they still hold +good in reference to certain of the States of America. Godwin saw the +whole thing very clearly: the pale, emaciated child given the free man’s +right of selling his labour at his own price in the open market and, as +Godwin put it, able to earn salt to his bread at four, but unable to +earn bread to his salt at forty. The placid Bage’s novels were admired +by Walter Scott. The most original is _Hermsprong, or Man as he is not_, +the hero of which—who enters civilized society after being brought up +among the Red Indians, and quails at the change—criticizes institutions +with something of the tone of the versatile Mr. Smilash in _An Unsocial +Socialist_. + +Shelley’s _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_ are only interesting, if +interesting at all, because they were written by their author. Miss +Gregory ploughs through them, and also through the novels of Charlotte +Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. She has a very interesting chapter +on Mary Wollstonecraft and the early Women’s Rights authors. I find most +alluring the bare mention made of a certain Ann Plumptre, a novelist of +whom I had never previously heard, who admired Napoleon enthusiastically. +In 1810, according to Crabb Robinson, + + “she declared she would welcome him if he invaded England + because he would do away with aristocracy and give the country + a better government.” + +Finally Miss Gregory has given space to the anti-revolutionary novelists, +especially George Walker and Charles Lucas, of _The Infernal Quixote_. +Ridicule of visionaries and demagogues through the medium of novels +was a recognized sport then as now; and Lucas instituted an elaborate +comparison between political and religious revivalists. A good +bibliography rounds off a very laudable compilation which should interest +all persons of subversive views and direct the reading of the curious +into some very agreeable channels. + + + + +Herrick + + +Mr. F. W. Moorman has edited for the Oxford Press a new edition of +Herrick, which should supersede all its predecessors. There is very +little editorial matter; Mr. Moorman has already written a _Life_, and +his introduction and notes have a purely textual reference. The text, +which is as satisfactory a one as we are likely to get, is based upon a +collation of various divergent copies of the first edition; for Herrick +appears to have hung about the printer’s making alterations whilst the +sheets were going through the press. And a full list is given of variants +which occur in other printed copies of some of the poems and in MSS., of +which the editor records several which have not previously been dealt +with. + +Any one who regards Herrick as an unsophisticated warbler pouring forth +profuse strains of unpremeditated art may study these variants and +correct himself. Mr. Moorman—I suppose he has sufficient reason, though +he leaves one to guess what it is—assumes that the versions in MSS. and +anthologies, etc., including those published after the _Hesperides_, are +all earlier than the versions in the _Hesperides_. Now and then one is +sorry that this should be so, as when the presumably earlier + + _And night will come when men will swear_ + _Time has spilt snow upon your haire,_ + +is changed into + + _And time will come when you shall weare_ + _Such frost and snow upon your haire._ + +But almost invariably the changes are improvements; and they are +exceedingly numerous. Sometimes alterations in almost every line of a +poem may be studied; sometimes there is a whole series of attempts at a +line; and if we had more of Herrick’s original MSS. available, we should +no doubt find every poem a mass of trial trips and deletions. He blotted, +filed, and pumice-stoned as much as any English poet, and he had the most +delicate and deliberate sense of all the complex mechanism of verse. This +rubicund Royalist rector was above all else a craftsman and a connoisseur. + +What distinguishes his best—they are so well known that I need not quote +them—poems from his second best is usually that the former have some +especially taking touch of tenderness. It is never very deep; even in an +epitaph he is more concerned with turning it well than with the, often +apocryphal, death of the person commemorated. His adorations and griefs +are as light as rose-leaves, but they are genuine in their way, and it is +rather a slight difference in the quality of his emotion than a relative +superiority of craftsmanship that distinguishes his most perfect lyrics. +His strongest characteristic, one that runs through the whole body of his +verse, was his intense sensual appreciation of the material world. He was +a connoisseur in life as in art. His admired record of the “liquefaction” +of Julia’s silks is characteristic of him. “O how that glittering taketh +me!” he might have said of a thousand other things. He looked at colours +and felt surfaces like a connoisseur; he tasted substances like an +epicure tasting wines. He crushes all the distinctive hues and flavours +out of flowers and spices, roses and primroses and violets, tulips, +lilies, marigolds, cherryblossoms, virgins’ skins, jet, ivory, amber, and +gums. There is nothing romantic about him, and nothing dim; all things +are equally vivid and clear, no thing is mysteriously vaster than other +things. The moon and cream are both white—he will compare his lady’s +cheek to either indifferently or to both in a sentence; he relishes the +loveliness of each and he drinks each, with exquisite pleasure, out +of the same sized liqueur glass. Few other writers give one so keen a +contact with the beauties of the physical world. But it is usually their +sensuous appeal that is registered, sometimes their sentimental appeal, +but never their mystic appeal. Herrick was a thoroughgoing pagan. + +His capacity for conveying vivid impressions of the physical was not +invariably employed upon such agreeable objects as daffodils and +maidens. His sheer virtuosity made him compose those offensive epigrams +which some bashful editors exclude from their collections. It is not +to be supposed that he really wished to vent his spleen against Lungs, +Gryll, Clasco, Scobble, Bunce, and his other, presumably pseudonymous, +butts; though if his efforts in this direction got about in his +Devonshire village and people took them to apply to themselves it is no +wonder that the natives behaved towards him, as he complained, like surly +savages. “Upon Batt” is one of the mildest of them: + + _Batt he gets children, not for love to reare ’em,_ + _But out of hope his wife might die to beare ’em._ + +A more characteristic, but still a mild one, is “Upon Lungs”: + + _Lungs (as some say) ne’er sits him down to eate_ + _But that his breath do’s Fly-blow all the meate._ + +He tells—I refrain from the grossest ones—of another gentleman whose eyes +were so sticky in the morning that his wife had to lick them open; of +another whose raw eyes would supply an angler with a day’s bait; and of +another (very parsimonious) who preserved his nails, warts, and corns in +boxes to make jelly for his broth. It is not astonishing that when the +“sprightly Spartanesse” appeared to him in dream she remarked: + + _Hence, Remove,_ + _Herrick thou art too coorse for love._ + +But as one goes on through these things one is too amused to be +disgusted; one wonders what on earth the man is going to think of next. +And that was the idea. He had compressed all the fragrance of the spring +into short lyrics—how much concentrated beastliness could he get into a +couplet? He had rivalled Horace and Anacreon in one line; could he rival +Martial in another? You may picture him making these things—sitting at a +table in the sun outside the rectory, quaffing, as was his wont, a social +tankard with his favourite pig, and working and working at these singular +concoctions until there came the thrill of the artist who knows he has +produced a perfect cameo. + +His outlook and methods being such, it is not surprising that when he +gave up his “unbaptized Rhimes” and took to “Noble Numbers” he was +comparatively unsuccessful. Quaintness and neatness do not go far in +religious verse, and the congenital materialism of Herrick’s imagery +sometimes produced the most grotesque effects. + + _God is all forepart, for we never see_ + _Any part backward in the Deitie._ + +An epigram which might have had some point if applied to a man is merely +vapid when applied to the Deity. And the vapid becomes comic in + + _I crawle, I creep; my Christ I come_ + _To thee, for curing Balsamum,_ + +and + + _Lord, I confesse, that thou alone are able_ + _To purifie this my Augean stable;_ + _Be the Seas water, and the Land all Sope,_ + _Yet if thy Bloud not wash me, there’s no hope._ + +Herrick was not an exalted religious poet. But it doesn’t much matter +what he was not; what he was is one of the greatest small masters in the +history of verse. + + + + +The Muse in Liquor + + +In former times men wrote about drinking without the slightest +self-consciousness. Our forefathers, from Teos to Chertsey, from +Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, sang the praises of +what nobody in those days dreamt of calling alcohol, as they sang the +praises of the other amenities of life. To Homer “bright wine” was as +indispensable a commodity as bread: no home could be complete without it. +If Anacreon and Horace were rather more sophisticated about it and tasted +their liquor with a deliberate and spun-out sensuality, they still had no +idea that there was anything morally questionable about drink. So onwards +to mediæval times. When the Anglo-Saxon leech laid it down that if a man +has fainted from hunger one should + + “pull his locks from him, and wring his ears, and twitch his + whiskers; when he is better give him some bread broken in wine,” + +there was no rival school of leeches to jump up and protest that to +inject alcoholic poisons into a debilitated frame was about the worst +thing you could do. Drinking in the Middle Ages was unchallengeably +respectable. “The introduction of wine and viticulture,” says Mr. A. L. +Simon in his history of the _Wine Trade in England_, + + “is coeval with the introduction of the Christian religion. As + the numbers of clergy increased, greater supplies of wine were + required, so vines were planted at home, and a considerable + foreign wine trade came into being.” + +The drinking-songs of the Middle Ages were largely composed by +theological students, and it was (at least I am of that party which +maintains that it was) an archdeacon of the English Church who wrote one +of the two best lyrics of the kind that this island has produced—that +perfect song in which he expresses the hope that he shall meet his latter +end in a hostelry and that some one should hold a pottle-pot before his +dying eyes: + + _Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori_ + _“Deus sit propitius huic potatori.”_ + +Our other great song has also been attributed to an ecclesiastic, Bishop +Still. + +But if a modern bishop wrote a song about hot whisky, he would get into +hot water. Times have changed. When a modern English king wants to do +the popular thing, he takes the pledge; when Henry III wanted to, he +gave his old wine to the poor—the gift was not so noble as it sounds, +for in his day old wine was bad, owing to the lack of glass bottles and +well-made casks. Bishop Still, when he wrote (if he wrote) about the +ale-swallowing capacity of himself and Tib, his wife, was on the safe +side, for his sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, was addicted herself. Her +Ministers had a job keeping her supplied with beer. When she was on one +of her royal progresses, the Earl of Leicester wrote to Lord Burleigh: + + “There is not one drop of good drink for her. We were fain to + send to London and Kenilworth and divers other places where ale + was; her own here was so strong as there was no man able to + drink it.” + +But since that time a question of principle has arisen, and the changed +attitude of society towards drink has been accompanied by a corresponding +change in the tone of those who write in praise of drink. They used to be +natural and expository; they are now self-conscious and on the defensive. + +I note the transition in a volume (1862) called _How to Mix Drinks, +or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion_, by Jerry Thomas, formerly principal +bartender at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, and the Planter’s +House, St. Louis. It is an ingenious book and a suitable companion +to its shelf-neighbour, _The Maltworm’s Vade-mecum_, a guide to the +public-houses of early Georgian London. But if Mr. Thomas had been a +contemporary of his brother connoisseur, it would never have occurred to +him to write a preface apologizing for the mere compilation of such a +book: + + “Whether it is judicious that mankind should continue to + indulge in such things, or whether it would be wiser to abstain + from all enjoyments of that character, it is not our province + to decide. We leave that question to the moral philosopher. We + simply contend that a relish for ‘social drinks’ is universal; + that those drinks exist in greater variety in the United States + than in any other country in the world, and that he, therefore, + who proposes to impart to those drinks not only the most + palatable but the most wholesome characteristics of which they + may be made susceptible, is a genuine public benefactor.” + +You see the uneasiness coming in; the devotee is conscious of a +disapproving eye. And what was perceptible in 1862 is much more marked +to-day, when a considerable percentage of the population looks askance at +a man who has been seen coming out of a bar, and when most of our priests +and half our politicians denounce fermented drinks as an invention of the +Devil. The results of this are seen in the twentieth-century Bacchanal’s +writings. He is on the defensive. He cannot write a mere song in praise +of drink: his Muse is largely, even mainly, concerned with dispraise of +the opponents of drink. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, belauding drinks +as against beverages, strike an attitude which Anacreon simply would not +have understood. They cannot lie and lap their liquor in dreamy content. +Whenever they take up a pot of beer they have to march out and drink it +defiantly in the middle of the Strand. It is almost as if they knew they +were the champions of a lost, though noble, cause; and felt that at any +moment they might be called upon to Die in the Last Tankard. + +This tendency is strongly marked in Mr. Chesterton’s volume _Wine, Water, +and Song_. Mr. Chesterton spends half his time in abusing abstemious +American and English millionaires, tea, cocoa, mineral waters, and +grocers—who, lacking the genial proclivities of publicans, have never +been known + + _To crack a bottle of fish sauce_ + _Or stand a man a cheese._ + +But the novelty of tone makes the songs all the better: for the old +material of drinking-songs was getting threadbare. To my thinking, these +songs—most of them appeared in _The Flying Inn_, and it was a pity +that they were omitted from the volume of collected _Poems_ recently +issued—are amongst the finest bibulous songs ever written, and some of +Mr. Chesterton’s very best work. You can read them aloud to other people +and very seldom come across a stilted or obscure phrase which makes you +feel sheepish to say it. But, more than that, _Wine and Water_, _The Good +Rich Man_, _The Song against Songs_, and the two poems on the English +Road are the sort of infectiously musical things that one learns by heart +without knowing one has done it. + + _Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,_ + _He ate his eggs with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,_ + _And the soup he took was Elephant Soup, and the fish he took was + whale,_ + _But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to + sail,_ + _And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,_ + _“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”_ + +Lives there a man with soul so dead that when he comes across this or +_The Road to Roundabout_ (which is about the best of the lot) he does not +automatically improvise a tune to it and start, according to his ability, +singing it? + + + + +£5 Misspent + + +Any one who is interested in what nobody has yet asked us to call +the British language must have felt apprehensive if he read the +correspondence recently printed in the _Times_ on the subject of a +synonym for the word “Colonial.” It appears that this word is “strongly +objected to” in the—er—Dominions, and especially in Canada. The Central +Committee of the Overseas Club therefore started a Missing Word +Competition. It offered a prize of £5 for the best synonym and “members +have been most prolific in their ideas.” The examples given of their +fecundity are, however, so malformed as to lead to the hope that in +future they will practise an intellectual Malthusianism. The Chairman of +the Club says that amongst the terms suggested are Britainer, Britonial, +Imperialist, Dominion, Britannian, Britoner, Greater Briton, Anglian +Pan-Briton, and such repulsive composts as Empirean, Transmarine (why not +Ultramarine?), Away-Born, Out-Briton, Co-Briton, Albionian, MacBriton, +and Britson. What those which he does not publish were like one can +only surmise; but no doubt Ap-Briton, O’Briton, Britidian, Britkinson, +Dominisher, Fraternanglian, Nonsunsetton, and Heptathalassian were among +them. And so, possibly, was Oversear. + +It needs must be that new words should come; and one should not cry +woe against those through whom they come. We are constantly inventing +or importing words to convey ideas or shades of feeling for which we +previously had no exact means of expression. We also necessarily acquire +new words for new objects, such as chemicals and machines. When men made +the telephone they had to call it something; and the same thing applied +to the omnibus. We can frequently trace new words to their inventors. +But we may safely say that successful new words are seldom “made up” +cold-bloodedly merely for the sake of the thing. An author hits upon a +word half-accidentally, developing it usually from some word already +familiar; or a philosopher or scientist constructs one out of fragments +of Greek, or Latin, or Greek and Latin mixed, because he has a new object +to describe. The process is going on continually. The rivals “airman” and +“aviator” (somebody once asked if you could call a miner a “talpiator”) +are at present[2] fighting it out in the Press and on men’s tongues; and +if some central authority is in the future established over the heads of +the sovereign Powers, it is likely that the word “supernational,” now +being bruited about, may come into use to describe it. We may get in +time, too, an inclusive word which will imply “citizen of the British +Empire,” covering both Britons (or, if you prefer it, Britirish) and +Colonials. But I doubt whether such a word will result from a public +competition. + +When it comes it will come because some one person starts using it and +others take to it. And when it is a case of inventing a synonym, a new +word as a substitute for an old one in general use, I think it most +unlikely that a group of persons such as the Overseas Club could persuade +the race to abandon a universally used word like “Colonial” for some +£5 prize word merely because hypersensitive people think that the word +used to have a faintly derogatory flavour. “Colonial” is very strongly +entrenched. One can just understand how the Americans have come to use +the abominable word “Britisher” instead of the ancient “Briton”; for it +falls more trippingly off the tongue. But “Colonial” is a most liquid, +easy, and euphonious word. If it is ever superseded, it will be so +because some other word comes in with the larger connotation to which I +have referred, a word which is bound to come into being when we cease to +think of the Empire as composed of the United Kingdom on the one hand and +the Colonies on the other, but think of it as a federation of equal and +distinct units. + +It is a pity that people take so seriously the fact that when the +words “Colonies” and “Colonial” were first used by us they had certain +associations. For it is evident that to the vast majority of our +countrymen they are entirely divested of them. Whatever one’s habits, +one automatically thinks when the word “Colonial” is mentioned, not of a +humble emigrant who wants shepherding, but of a person who is the very +quintessence of independence. Any one who has even the most superficial +acquaintance with the language knows that words can lose their old +associations utterly. If, for example, I were arrested and charged for +alleging, in a public speech, one of our Royal Princes to be “a silly +knave,” I should not find the magistrate very sympathetic if I said I +was using the words in a Shakespearean (which in this case would be +equivalent to a Pickwickian) sense, and that I merely meant to call him +“a simple boy.” Similarly, where an object changes its form its name +changes its connotation. If one could talk of a bottle to a mediæval +ancestor, he would think of something made of leather; to-day a bottle +is essentially something made of glass. If we always wanted a new term +directly a new association was created, there would be no end to the +process; we should have to have a Ministry of Constructive Philology +always at work. After all, Charleston was named after an English king +when the North American plantations were very subordinate indeed; and +Melbourne after a member of the British House of Lords, an institution +of which few modern Australians approve. So, on the whole, saving the +Overseas Club’s reverence, we may as well, for the time being, stick to +“Colonial.” + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[2] Airman happily seems (July 1918) to have won.—S. E. + + + + +Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore + + +Handling the Porcupine of Avon is always ticklish work. When Mr. George +Moore, after containing himself for years, at last wrote to explain that +it was he, and not Mr. Shaw or Mr. Franz Heinrichs, who discovered the +fact that Shakespeare’s female characters were weak because they were +written for boy-actors, it was only natural that another correspondent +should show that Mr. Moore had been forestalled by an eighteenth-century +Frenchman. Mr. Moore’s remark about the boy-actors was, however, merely +a passing observation in a lecture in French (published in the _Revue +Bleue_ in 1910) which is an important document in the movement against +what Mr. Shaw calls Bardolatry. + +“He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.” Thus Emerson; and a +few generations of such sweeping remarks were bound to be followed by a +reaction. For a hundred years we have swallowed Shakespeare steadily and +swallowed him whole; a man has even written a book on _The Messiahship +of Shakespeare_. And of all his powers, that of creating an infinite +variety of female character has been perhaps more enthusiastically +praised than any other. The professors have given us treatises on +Shakespeare’s Feminine Types; and the less erudite public has been +deluged with Posies from Shakespeare’s Garden of Girls. “O Nature! O +Shakespeare! which of ye drew from the other?” That is typical. Dr. +Lewes, one of the ablest German writers on the subject, kneels and +adores, and asks women to do the same. “This piece,” he says of _Henry +VIII_, + + “this piece and its female characters should indeed inspire + women with profound gratitude towards a poet who represents + a queen and a heroine who is above all things an excellent + woman, displaying in the midst of frightful trials all the best + womanly qualities, thus proving that a noble, pure feminine + heart is the home of the noblest virtue, the highest truth and + purity. Seldom has more flattering homage been paid to the sex + than by Shakespeare in his presentation of Catherine of Aragon.” + +And hear Mrs. Jamieson, author of the best-known English book on these +women. Dare any one apply the epithet “clever” to Portia, “this heavenly +compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness”? As for Lady +Macbeth, with her “Gothic grandeur, rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned +colours,” even she is not to be insulted by comparison with other +villainesses. Sophocles’ Clytemnestra had been mentioned, but + + “would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel + murderess and unnatural mother with Lady Macbeth? _Lady Macbeth + herself would certainly shrink from the approximation._” + +One _has_ sometimes felt that her ladyship was probably president of the +local branches of the G.F.S. and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families +Association. + +There was nothing of this sort about Mr. George Moore’s lecture. It +opened with a strong protest against the “vast clamour” of Shakespeare’s +worshippers: + + “One might take them for a gathering of negro Methodists in + a chapel, each one straining his lungs to out-bellow his + neighbour, in order to attract the Almighty’s attention. Is it + that the critics think that Shakespeare is listening to them? + At any rate, the madness increases daily, and, if the cult + of Jahveh should happen to decay in England, I should not be + surprised were they to promote Shakespeare to the vacant throne + in the heavens.” + +After this engaging beginning he went on to the general contention that +neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries drew or painted a +real woman. The Renaissance was interested in women only as queens or +odalisques, and Shakespeare at most made a few delicious silhouettes +of women. His men were another matter. “Hamlet is the secret thought +of all men”; and, though it hurts Mr. Moore to agree with Tolstoi, he +reaffirmed Tolstoi’s statement that “Falstaff is the most universal and +original thing in Shakespeare.” “Hamlet is the hieroglyphic and symbol +of the intellect; Falstaff is the symbol and arabesque of the flesh.” +But Shakespeare, like Balzac, was chiefly concerned with “the eternal +masculine.” + +But suppose it be admitted that Shakespeare has no female Hamlet and +no female Falstaff; is it not arguable that then the case for the +superiority of Shakespeare’s males over his females is very much less +strong? It would be absurd to attempt to dogmatize on the subject; but +personally I doubt whether any one who cannot get inside the minds of +most (though many would exempt Heine’s “ancient Parisienne” Cleopatra, +and one or two more) of Shakespeare’s women will get inside the minds of +most of his men either. When Professor Dowden said that he had “edited +a whole play for love of Imogen” the remark (if he heard it) may have +sounded strange to Mr. Moore; but would he understand, either, any +one editing a whole play for love of Antonio, Bassanio, Benedict, the +Duke of _Twelfth Night_, King Lear, Othello, Mark Antony, or Henry V? +It is possible to hold the view that Shakespeare “put himself” into +a few characters and observed the others “from the outside,” making +them most interesting when they are most markedly what are called +“character parts.” Personally, though I should certainly know Hamlet +or Falstaff if I met them in swallowtails, I don’t think there are +many other of Shakespeare’s characters whom I should recognize if I +encountered them clothed in other than their traditional garments. But +I do not think it is easy to sustain the argument that, as a whole, his +women are less carefully and sympathetically drawn than his men—Lady +Macbeth than Macbeth, Juliet than Romeo, Cleopatra than Anthony, +Beatrice than Benedict, Rosalind than Orlando—or, still more, that he +was not interested in women and regarded them in a casual lazy way as +decorations. Shakespeare’s politics were Heaven knows what; and he may +not necessarily have drawn Portia as an argument for the admission of +women to the Inns of Court. But one would have imagined that if ever +there were a writer who treated women and men on a footing of complete +equality, and even perhaps elevated women’s moral superiority to an +indefensible pitch, it was he. If his female characters are not living +human beings it is certainly not because he despised them. He gave them +plenty of virtue, wit, courage, and will, and an ample share of the +stage; it is, with all due respect to Mr. Moore, grotesque to suggest +that he thought of them merely as properties. + +The recent correspondence sent me back to Mr. Moore’s paper, and I +read it with admiration for the fruits of what he called a month’s +rather exhausting liaison with the French language. But something about +it—perhaps it was the catalogue of heroines, each with an appropriate +criticism—seemed familiar. I have tracked it; here also Mr. Moore has +been anticipated. It was the late Max O’Rell—it is almost like being +anticipated by Charley’s Aunt—who remarked that + + “The heroines of Shakespeare are for the most part slaves or + fools. Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a sort of submissive + odalisque, Beatrice a chatterbox, and Ophelia a goose.” + +It is very difficult indeed to say anything new about Shakespeare. + + + + +Moving a Library + + +I do not remember that any of our meditative essayists has written on +the subject of Moving One’s Books. If such an essay exists I should be +glad to go to it for sympathy and consolation. For I have just moved from +one room to another, in which I devoutly hope that I shall end my days, +though (as Mr. Asquith would put it in his rounded way) “at a later, +rather than at an earlier, date.” Night after night I have spent carting +down two flights of stairs more books than I ever thought I possessed. +Journey after journey, as monotonously regular as the progresses of a +train round the Inner Circle: upstairs empty-handed, and downstairs +creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, dangerously bulging +column of books wedged between my two hands and the indomitable point +of my chin. The job simply has to be done; once it is started there is +no escape from it; but at times during the process one hates books as +the slaves who built the Pyramids must have hated public monuments. +A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul. How ignominious +to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men’s +sentiments! Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the rubbish +where it lies and walk out into the world a free, untrammelled, +illiterate Superman? Civilization! Pah! But that mood is, I am happy +to say, with me ephemeral. It is generated by the necessity for tedious +physical exertion and dies with the need. Nevertheless the actual +transport is about the briefest and least harassing of the operations +called for. Dusting (or “buffeting the books,” as Dr. Johnson called +it) is a matter of choice. One can easily say to oneself, “These books +were banged six months ago” (knowing full well that it was really twelve +months ago), and thus decide to postpone the ceremony until everything +else has been settled. But the complications of getting one’s library +straight are still appalling. + +Of course, if your shelves are moved bodily it is all right. You can +take the books out, lay them on the floor in due order, and restore them +to their old places. But otherwise, if you have any sense of congruity +and proportion, you are in for a bad time. My own case could not be +worse than it is. The room from which I have been expelled was low and +square; the room into which I have been driven is high and L-shaped. +None of my old wall-shelves will fit my new walls; and I have had to +erect new ones, more numerous than the old and totally different in shape +and arrangement. It is quite impossible to preserve the old plan; but +the devisal of another one brings sweat to the brow. If one happened to +be a person who never desired to refer to his books the obvious thing +to do would be to put the large books into the large shelves and the +small ones into the small shelves and then go and smoke a self-satisfied +pipe against the nearest post. But to a man who prefers to know where +every book is, and who possesses, moreover, a sense of System and wishes +everything to be in surroundings proper to its own qualities, this is not +possible. Even an unsystematic man must choose to add a classification by +subject to the compulsory classification by size; and, in my case, there +is an added difficulty produced by a strong hankering for some sort of +chronological order. There is nothing like that for easy reference. If +you know that Beowulf will be at the left-hand end of the shelf that he +fits and Julia Ward, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, at the right-hand end, +you save yourself a good deal of time. But when your new compartments do +not fit your old sections, when the large books of Stodge are so numerous +as to insist upon intruding into the shelves reserved for large books of +Pure Literature, and the duodecimos of Foreign Verse surge in a tidal +wave over the preserves of the small books on Free Trade, Ethics, and +Palæontology, one is reduced to the verge of despair. That is where I +am at this moment; sitting in the midst of a large floor covered with +sawdust, white distemper, nails, tobacco-ash, burnt matches, and the +Greatest Works of the World’s Greatest Masters. Fortunately, in Ruskin’s +words, “I don’t suppose I shall do it again for months and months and +months.” + + + + +Table-Talk and Jest Books + + +Samuel Butler’s _Note-Books_ have now gone into another (popular) +edition, issued by Mr. Fifield. I don’t know how large these editions +are: if, as I fear, they run to less than fifty thousand copies apiece, +Samuel Butler has not yet got his due. There is no other volume in the +whole of his collected works to equal this selection from his note-books: +you have here the quintessence of his wisdom, his taste, and his superb +impudence. The book really belongs to the “table-talk” or “ana” class of +books. Butler, that is to say, recorded his own table-talk. His principle +was, he said, that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it +on the wing. If, therefore, he thought of or said anything especially +illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, +down it went. And it always went down as colloquially and freshly as if +a Boswell had been present recording conversation with a faithful pen. +Butler Boswellized himself. For Boswell’s _Life_, as has been remarked +before, is the greatest collection of “ana” in the language. It consisted +of Johnson’s table-talk strung on a biographical thread. + +Personally I find it hard to draw the line between general table-talk +and anecdotes told of certain persons: most collections include both. +But such works, of whatever kind, consisting of detached scraps of great +men’s wit, are an agreeable form of reading, and an old-established one. +The Greeks possessed volumes of excerpts from people’s conversation, +and some Latin wrote a book, now unfortunately lost, under the piquant +title of _De Jocis Ciceronis_. The great age of such collections began, +however, with the Renaissance, when Poggio the Florentine collected +his “facetiæ.” My own extracts from Poggio are included in a German +collection of 1603, all written in Latin, which gives also the “facetiæ” +of other wits, notably of Nicodemus Frischlin of Balingen. This man +was a German scholar of exceptional brilliance who finally, on being +incarcerated for the last of many escapades, broke his neck trying +to escape. We have no such University professors of classics now. +“Ana” so-called begin with the _Scaligerana_, which gave the drastic +conversation of the younger Scaliger as recorded by two of his disciples. +The success of this led to a rush in France. Every one who had known an +eminent man deceased rushed out with a volume of table-talk; _Thuana_, +_Perroniana_, etc. The _Sorberiana_ “sive excerpta ex ore Samuelis +Sorbiere” was famous in its day, but I find it very dull. Much the best +collection is _Menagiana_, “Bon Mots, Rencontres Agréables, Pensées +Judicieuses, et Observations Curieuses de M. Ménage,” of which the +second edition (my copy) is dated 1694-5. This man was a scholar, knew +everybody and had a sharp tongue: he is extremely good reading, though, +nowadays, very little read. The contents of both of these books are +arranged (as is Butler’s) under subject-headings, in alphabetical order. +The same order is observed in Selden’s _Table-Talk_, the next best book +of the kind to Boswell in our tongue. It was published after Selden’s +death by his private secretary, and is full of extraordinarily sensible +and witty things. And, unlike many wits, Selden always possessed a sense +of responsibility. He remarked himself (under heading “Wit,” as he did +not realize) that + + “He that lets fly all he knows and thinks may by chance be + satyrically witty. Honesty sometimes keeps a man from growing + rich, and civility from being witty.” + +Few of the wits whose sayings are collected are so scrupulous. Our other +classical example in the kind is Coleridge’s _Table-Talk_, which is full +of fine criticism, funny stories, and good epigrams. + +These collections shade off into the ordinary jest book. After all, there +is no clear division between stories told by a dead man and stories +collected and published by a living one, between stories about one man +and stories about fifty different men. When the new learning was still +new, men had a mania for collecting pointed anecdotes about the eminent. +The fattest book of the kind I know is Casper Ens’s _Epidorpidum_, +published at Cologne in the early seventeenth century. It is full of the +remarks of Alexander to Diogenes and Pope Innocent to St. Vitus and the +repartees of King Pyrrhus of Epirus to a recalcitrant phalanx. Right on +into the eighteenth century works with titles like _Elite de Bon-Mots_, +and full of such historical personages, were popular on the Continent. +English jest books were perhaps more local and contemporary in their +references. Our eighteenth-century ancestors were addicted to anecdotes +about Mr. Quin and Mr. Foote and what the Duke of Wharton said to the +Bishop. In our own time the larger, if not the smaller, public still +shows some demand for collections of anecdotes of this sort: and popular +weeklies of the _Answers_ and _Tit-Bits_ type usually seem to find it +desirable to print columns of stories about Henry Irving, Mr. Gladstone, +and such people. But it is a long way from _Tit-Bits_ to Samuel Butler: +which shows where one may land oneself if one does not know where to +draw a firm line when shading-off is apparently gradual. I cannot review +Butler at this time of day; but there are very few books existing which +contain more sense to the square inch than this. Though the worst of his +books is good reading, the _Note-Books_ is as certainly his finest book +as Boswell’s _Johnson_ is the finest of Johnson’s. + + + + +Stephen Phillips + + +The announcements of Stephen Phillips’s death must have carried many +people’s thoughts backward. Me personally it took back to a time, years +ago, when I was in the first flush of my youthful beauty and sitting out +at a country dance. Coloured lamps burned between boughs, trees gently +swished under a summer sky, the sound of violins and the glide of many +feet penetrated softly from a distance; and a partner, whose face was +shadowy pale in the faint light, sat clasping her knees, looking out into +the night, and talking in a deep ecstatic voice of _Marpessa_, _Herod_, +and _Paolo and Francesca_. It was not merely that she thought that I was +that sort of person: the same thing was happening in every county in +England. Phillips had the biggest boom that any English poet has had for +a generation. The extravagance of the eulogies seems very strange now. +There was scarcely a critic who did not lose his balance. I have just +been looking up some of these panegyrics, and the pitch of them makes +one feel a little sadly for a man who outlived so great and so early a +fame. The history of literature was ransacked for comparisons. Chapman, +Webster, Wordsworth, Shakespeare himself were brought in: and almost +the most modest of the assessors was Mr. William Archer, who described +Phillips as “the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of Milton.” I +remember the _Daily Mail_ devoting its magazine page to a description of +the poet, in the course of which it explained, with characteristic love +of figures, that here was a man who had discovered how to make £1000 a +year out of poetry. But it did not last. The climax of Phillips’s success +came with _Paolo and Francesca_; the subsequent plays were received with +a diminuendo of warmth; and in the last few years he was comparatively +ignored. + +The early adoration was absurd but not incomprehensible. It was due, +one might say, to the fact that Phillips was not an original writer. +Much used to be made of a certain trick he had of accenting occasional +lines of blank verse in a strange manner: on the strength of this he was +treated as a revolutionary innovator in English prosody. In reality, in +spite of this one peculiarity, he was anything but an innovator. He had +an ear for the magniloquent progress of Milton’s verse and the crooning +music of Tennyson’s; he had a great facility for reproducing them; and +to those who are susceptible only to artistic effects which (though they +are unconscious of it) remind them of effects previously experienced, he +seemed, therefore, to be a consummate artist. He gave them precisely what +they had learnt to desire and expect from a poet, the familiar splendours +and the familiar silences, the familiar agonies and the familiar +tendernesses, the scents, the flowers, the gems, the old words with +their unmistakable associations, the brilliant single lines, with here +and there an alliteration and here and there an onomatopœia. His work +was not, of course, a _mere_ compost. He added something. His emotions, +though not deep, were genuine enough; he had a pretty fancy; and he had +a considerable knowledge of how to produce effects on the stage. _Paolo +and Francesca_ was certainly in every way superior to most of the other +attempts which have been made in our time at stage-plays in blank verse. +It was effective in the theatre. One remembers the excitement about the +skilful ending: the murder behind the scenes, the bodies brought in, the +murderer’s revulsion: + + _I did not know the dead could have such hair._ + _Hide them. They look like children fast asleep._ + +But those who did not shrink from comparing it with _Romeo and Juliet_ +omitted to notice the same deficiencies as appeared in all his work. He +was largely derivative and there was very little hard brainwork behind +his verse. + +_Herod_, _Ulysses_, and _Nero_ were all less well made: the last two were +panoramas. In all three the author depended on succulent or flamboyant +“purple patches” for his effects, descriptions too full of redundant +metaphor and violent outbursts of picturesque but too flimsy rhetoric. +There was little characterization in them, the persons were puppets in +the hands of the contriver of stage spectacles: they were carried off +by brilliant and exotic scenery and costumes, by the romantic language, +and by the real and skilful, if conventional, melody of the verse. All +the best qualities of Stephen Phillips, the qualities that gave people +a thrill they were unaccustomed to in the theatre of his time, are +quintessentialized in Herod’s megalomaniac speeches and in the oratorical +Marlowesque remark that one of the suitors in _Ulysses_ made to Penelope: + + _Thou hast caught splendour from the sailless sea_ + _And mystery from the many stars outwatched._ + +His defects were observed by few when he was a popular dramatist: but +those readers who only know him by his later work will misjudge him if +they think that he never had more power than he showed in that. His +more recent volumes, written in ill-health, would never have got him a +reputation. Here and there the old bravura appeared, and there is a short +lyric in the volume of 1913 which is certainly equal to anything in the +early book of poems with which he made his name—and in which he showed +signs of contact with the “movement” of the ’nineties. But from most of +these later poems the life had gone, leaving the imitative structure +naked to the eye. His last volume, _Panama and other Poems_, was issued +just before he died by his original publisher, Mr. John Lane; and the way +in which he had succumbed to his influences was very evident. Lines on +the Canal such as + + _Chagres by Dam stupendous of Gatun_ + +not merely remind one of Milton but are exact mechanical reproductions of +Milton. + +Incidentally the difficulties of literary biography are illustrated +by his obituary notices. _My Daily News_ gave his age as forty-nine, +my _Times_ gave it as fifty-one; and looking into the _Encyclopædia +Britannica_ to see which of these estimates it would confirm, I found +that it alleged him to be forty-seven. _The Encyclopædia_ says that he +was at Queens’ College, Cambridge, when he joined Mr. Benson’s company; +the _Times_ that he was cramming at Scoones’. When we have this conflict +of evidence about a contemporary who was known personally to hundreds of +people in London, where are we with Elizabethans and Romans? Personally +I believe that, in the matter of birth-dates, nothing is really +reliable—not even a man’s own statement—except public registers. + + + + +Gray and Horace Walpole + + +If a gentleman in Calabria digs up with a spade a hitherto unknown +fragment of the obscure Latin historian P. Pomponius Fatto there is +great excitement about it, and research congratulates itself upon its +achievements. I can quite appreciate the feeling. All treasure-trove +is exciting. The smallest recovery from the long-buried past is worth +having; it may, in itself, fill a gap somewhere and encourages the hope +of greater finds. But why not make just as much of a palaver about Dr. +Paget Toynbee’s disinterment of nearly a hundred “new” letters by the +poet Gray? The new letters are included in _The Correspondence of Gray, +Walpole, West, and Ashton_ (Oxford University Press, 2 vols.); and +they were found in the collection of Captain Sir F. E. Waller, who was +recently killed in action, and to whose memory the volume is dedicated. +Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton formed a “Quadruple +Alliance” at Eton. West went on to Oxford, the other three to Cambridge. +We get first of all an exchange between all four; then West dies, in his +twenties; then, years afterwards, relations with Ashton are broken; and, +finally, there is a long series that passed between Walpole and Gray up +to the time of the poet’s death in 1771. In all there are 248 letters; +of these 153 were written by Gray, eighty-nine of which have never been +published before. Others have never before been printed in full, and few +have escaped maltreatment by previous editors. Their errors ranged from +deliberate alteration, truncation, and blending to bad transcription and +unintelligent acceptance. How easily the most comic errors may creep into +a text where each editor neglects to use, or has not access to, original +sources may be shown by the history of a single word. Gray wrote a Latin +poem about the god of Love in which one line began “Ludentem fuge.” +This was printed by Miss Berry as “Sudentem fuge”; and this has been +“corrected” by subsequent editors into “_Sudantem fuge_”! + +The characters of the correspondents come out very clearly. Even when, +just after they have left school, they are all writing rather affectedly +(and with a plethora of classical quotation), Ashton is obviously the one +fundamentally insincere member of the group. He is hyperself-conscious, +nastily artificial. Later on he even refers in Joseph Surface’s very own +words to his “noble sentiments”: this was clearly the man to make, by +his double-dealing, the temporary breach between Gray and Walpole, and, +ultimately, to compel Walpole to cast him off by his incivility when +Walpole was no longer useful to him. Richard West, son of an Irish Lord +Chancellor, has no apparent defect save excessive seriousness. There is +a touch of the priggish mixed with the high-mindedness and generosity +of this able young invalid; but one can understand Gray’s devotion to +him. Some of the poetry of his here given (he appeared in Dodsley’s +_Miscellany_ by the way) is surprisingly good. He was the Arthur Hallam +of the eighteenth century. + +The Walpole letters are, as always, unsurpassable of their kind. His +undergraduate letter (in parody of Addison’s descriptions of Italy) +relating a journey from London to Cambridge, is admirable; but the +letters describing his continental tour with Gray are better, and +those, still later, about the _beau monde_ of Paris are perfect. There +is a peculiar charm too about the correspondence with Gray as to the +details and publication of his works, the half-solemn, half whimsical +concentration on the tiny antiquarian details to which each was addicted, +the eager little controversies and explorations, the odd little jokes. +But though Gray, taking his correspondence as a whole, considering both +volume, range, and formal excellence, cannot contest Walpole’s position +as the greatest of English letter-writers, there is a flavour about his +letters that makes them peculiarly delightful. Walpole writes fully +dressed, though with exquisite manner; Gray writes naturally, and without +obvious reserve sometimes even gambolling. There may be people, familiar +with Gray only through his elevated and sombre verse, who fancy him an +exceedingly self-contained and formal man, who feel (like the person +who greatly amused him by addressing him as “The Rev. T. Gray”) that he +simply _must_ have been a divine. There were certainly contemporaries +of his who met him and got the impression that he was constitutionally +grave, reticent, aloof. His letters show that he was anything but that +to his friends. The author of the _Elegy_ habitually “played the goat.” +There are a whole string of skit letters here: in one he writes to +Walpole as “Honner’d Nurse,” addressing the illiterate screed “to mie +Nuss att London”; in another he wallows in Oriental imagery about the dew +of the morning; in another he applies to stagnant Cambridge a whole long +passage from Isaiah describing deserted Babylon, the home of dragons and +haunt of screech-owls. He had a great habit of ending his letters with +something openly idiotic. Once he bursts out with “Pray, did you ever see +an elephant?”; another time his peroration is: + + “The Assizes are just over. I was there; but I a’nt to be + transported. Adieu!” + +and another excursion concludes with a ludicrous burlesque of the type of +commonplaces usually to be found in letters: + + “There is a curious woman here that spins Glass, and makes + short Aprons and furbelow’d petticoats of it, a very genteel + wear for summer, & discover’s all the motions of the limbs to + great advantage. She is a successour of Jack, the Aple dumpling + Spinner’s: my Duck has eat a Snail &c.: & I am—yours sincerely + T. G.” + +Those who think of poets as persons without humour who live in a +permanent exaltation and are quite unlike reasonable beings will be +shocked with Gray’s remarks when he had, to the publisher’s alarm, +withdrawn a poem from his forthcoming small volume: + + “but to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my work should + be mistaken for the works of a flea or a pismire, I promised + to send him an equal weight of poetry or prose: so, since my + return hither, I put up about two ounces of stuff: viz. The + Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin ... with all this I shall be + but a shrimp of an author.” + +On a night nine years before this, General Wolfe, as his boat crept +towards the Quebec bank of St. Lawrence, had recited the _Elegy_ to his +companions and told them that he had rather have written that poem than +take Quebec. + +Gray’s judgments on other authors (though he was unjust to the more +fermentative kind of Frenchman) were uniformly good. He suspected +Ossian, but hoped he was a fraud for the sake of the jest. If, he +said, Macpherson had done it all to hoax fools, “I would undertake a +journey into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him.” He read +Boswell’s early book on Corsica and almost prophetically observed: + + “The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any + fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only + tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.” + +In politics he was interested only mildly, but he liked to gossip about +them. “Do oblige me,” he writes to Walpole, + + “with a change in the Ministry: I mean, something one may tell, + that looks as if it were near at hand; or if there is no truth + to be had, then a good likely falsehood for the same purpose. I + am sorry to be so reduced.” + +“A good likely falsehood”: is it not in perpetual demand? + + + + +A Horrible Bookseller + + +People often complain that booksellers know too little about the goods +they sell. If only, the argument is, books were sold by men of taste, +familiar with their contents, the public would buy more good literature: +as things are, the blind bookseller leads the blind customer. There is +something in this. An educated bookseller can actually educate other +people. Many intelligent young persons reach the age of twenty-one +without having met a single person with the habit of good reading, and +do not “get on to” literature because it has never been suggested to +them that they will like it. Booksellers may act as teachers. There are +booksellers, though not many, who make a practice of “nursing” promising +young customers, gradually cultivating their taste until they become +confirmed book-lovers and book-buyers. One such complained to me not long +ago that he had had scores of likely colts taken away from him by Lord +Kitchener, and did not know how many of them would come back. That is an +ideal sort of man for the trade in modern literature. One might say, in +fact, that in a perfect world (from the book-buyer’s point of view) the +dealers in new books would know everything about books, and the dealers +in old books would know nothing whatever about them. The point of this +last subsection is obvious, but the other day I had an experience that +greatly fortified my view. I had often met the second-hand bookseller +whose learning prevented one from buying anything cheap from him; I have +now encountered one whose interest in his subject prevented one from +buying anything at all. + +He was not so much a really learned man as a man with what is called +“an inexhaustible fund of information.” It is quite possible that if +he had had a real rarity in his shop he would have known nothing about +it. But about the promiscuity of his reading there was no doubt. When I +entered the shop he was seated at a table absorbing something that looked +as if it might be the Travels of Livingstone or Speke. His spectacles +were on his forehead, his elbows on the table, his hands in his hair; +and his beard almost touched his book. “Do you mind if I go through?” +I said. “Sairtainly,” he said, betraying his origin. “And what may you +be interested in?” “Oh ... books,” I replied vaguely. “That is a verra +conseederable category,” he observed. Was it poetry I liked? he went +on. I murmured “Yes,” and he led me to the place where he kept it. But +before I had got my fingers on a book he made it evident that it was he +and not I that was going to have the “look round.” Here, for example, +was a volume of Kirke White. Had I ever read him? How wonderful was that +hymn (quoted at length) of his! What a career! He was a butcher’s son +and a lawyer’s clerk. He had a gift for mathematics, and they gave him a +sizarship at Cambridge. He would have been one of the greatest figures in +English literature had he lived. Was I interested in Italian books? Well, +then, perhaps I would like a good copy of (!!!) _I Promessi Sposi_. It +was extraordinary the number of copies of that book which must have been +printed. But there was no supply without a demand. + +I tried in vain to check the torrent with some sort of remark which, +though polite, might, nevertheless, have an air of finality. It was no +good. My fingers never got beyond touching the back of a book before he +had taken down another, pulled me round, and fixed me with a glittering +eye for which the Ancient Mariner himself would have been tempted to +offer a large sum. Godwin, now. Did I like _Caleb Williams_? Yes, of +course! But had I read his History of England? It was by way of being +a reply to Clarendon. Clarendon was a great writer. But he was not +impartial. And the worst of it was that he seemed to be impartial when +he was most unfair. When he was sacrificing everything for his King he +little thought how his loyalty would be rewarded. He was too moral for +Charles II; but, what was worse, he kept the purse-strings too tight. +He would not give him money for one of his mistresses. Was it Barbara +Palmer? No, it was not Barbara Palmer, and it was not Nelly Gwyn. At any +rate, it was one of them. And when, in the end, the grant was made to +her, she died before she got the money! + +This appeared to amuse the old man. When he had laughed himself out, +it was to resume with some work, dated 1784, which contained a recipe +for making a Prime Minister: the chief ingredients being hypocrisy, +mendacity, corruption, and cant. This opened up a large field of +speculation. Who was Premier in 1784? Why, of course, it was young Billy +Pitt! (“Yes,” I said.) No, it was Rockingham. (“Yes,” I said.) No, it +wasn’t; it was Bute. So it proceeded. I spent, in all, two hours in +that shop; in the course of which time I had stolen glances at about +six worthless books. For all I know it was as full of gems of purest +ray serene as are the dark unfathomed caves of ocean. I left without +making a single purchase, and the proprietor seemed quite hurt at this +unfriendly response to his attentions. How that old man earns his living +I don’t know. I think he must have private means. But in future I shall +have a warmer feeling than ever for the sort of red-nosed second-hand +bookseller, now, unfortunately, not very common, who knows only the +outsides of books, and who sits smoking on a heap of rubbish in the +corner of his shop with the air of a tramp resting on a roadside pile of +stones. + + + + +The Troubles of a Catholic + + +Being at the moment in bed with influenza, I was at once incapable of +intellectual effort and in need of spiritual sustenance. I had therefore +been reading a little Theology. The more modern works of the kind in +my possession are at once too profound in thought and too arid in +phraseology, so I worked rapidly backwards. One never knows what one is +going to come across, and in the beginning of _A Just Discharge to Dr. +Stillingfleet’s Unjust Charge of Idolatry Against the Church of Rome with +a Discovery of the Vanity of his late Defense in his Pretended Answer +to a Book Entitled Catholicks No Idolaters By way of Dialogue Between +Eunomius, a Conformist, and Catharinus, a Nonconformist_, I struck a +very pathetic thing. The work was written, I believe, by the Catholic +controversialist Godden, and published in 1677. At that time it was +difficult for Catholics to get anything out in England, and this work was +published at Paris. Hence the unhappy author’s statement about “Errata”: + + “The English Press being watch’d of late, as the Orchard of + the Hesperides was of old, and a necessity arising from thence + of making use of a Paris Printer, who understands not a word + of English, the Reader will have no cause to wonder, if he + sometimes meet with _ant_ for _and_, _bu_ for _but_, _te_ for + _the_, _is_ for _it_, _tit_ for _tis_, _wish_ for _with_, etc., + and oftentimes with false Pointings, words unduly joined, and + syllables un-artificially divided at the end of lines, as + _Ro-me_, _appropria-te_, and the like. I can assure him, the + Correction of the Press cost little less pains than the writing + of the Treatise.” + +In that century a great many English books were printed on the Continent, +at Paris, Douai, and elsewhere; and the situation thus candidly explained +must have been a common one. A collection of English books printed +abroad, which would be interesting for other reasons, might also have an +added interest as a repository of comic misprints. But my disease must +have brought me very low that I can spend my time thinking of that. + + + + +The Bible as Raw Material + + +Mr. George Moore’s new novel, _The Brook Kerith_, is a Biblical story. +Mr. Moore has adopted the legend which says that Our Lord survived the +Crucifixion. He is taken away alive and joins a colony of the Essenes, +complications afterwards arising with St. Paul. The book is named after +the site of the Essene settlement; Mr. Moore personally toured the Holy +Land looking for a really eligible position. The story opens with a +description of the boyhood of Joseph of Arimathea: a beginning which at +least avoids the reproach of being obvious. + +One might almost say that literature about Biblical personages can only +hope to be good if its writers either deal with episodes that are not +related in the Bible or if they tell the Bible stories from an entirely +novel and unconventional point of view. Anatole France’s story about +Pontius Pilate, _The Procurator of Judaea_, has this last quality, and +owes its success mainly to the odd and unexpected angle from which the +subject is approached. The unusual angle we may at least expect from +Mr. George Moore. Attempts at covering the same ground as the Bible, at +amplifying an already fine thing, are almost predestined to failure. One +can understand the temptation. A modern writer comes across a noble story +or a fine lyric passage, and thinks, “What a scandal that this should +be buried away out of sight in the Old Testament! It is just the theme +for me.” The lure is so strong that one contemporary poet has attempted, +and failed (through not ignominiously), to rewrite David’s Lament for +Jonathan, and another has endeavoured to adapt the dramatic poem _Job_ to +the modern stage. It was a lamentable affair, redeemed only from complete +inconspicuousness by a highly incongruous chorus inspired by Swinburne +and by an arresting entry of Satan with the salutation: + + _Ho Job! How goes it?_ + +No modern—but I have not thoroughly ransacked my memory—has really +succeeded in rewriting a Bible story. The most striking of recent efforts +was Mr. Sturge Moore’s _Judith_. Mr. Robert Trevelyan’s poem, _The +Foolishness of Solomon_ (a title that, for some vague reason, I always +resent), belonged to the other class of works dealing with Biblical +personages (though he brought in a Chinese mandarin as well), but not +on the Biblical lines. The most recent effort at elaborate treatment of +the New Testament story was, I suppose, Maeterlinck’s _Mary Magdalene_. +But in spite of its unorthodoxy and the novelty (at least as far as the +Bible is concerned, for some of it was borrowed from a German) of the +incidents, that play scarcely competed, in point of dialogue or dramatic +force, with the more old-fashioned narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and +John. + +Milton is the one English writer who has done anything with Biblical +materials on a large scale. It will be observed, however, that in +_Paradise Lost_ he enormously elaborated the story in Genesis; that his +Adam and Eve are somewhat colourless; and that the finest parts of his +poem are not directly concerned with “man’s first disobedience and the +fruit,” but deal with regions into which the author of Genesis did not +penetrate. In _Samson Agonistes_ he did take a story from the Bible and +make out of it a work of art equal to almost anything in our language. +Byron’s _Cain_ might mostly have been about Nietzsche for all the +connexion it has with the Bible: but it is not very good. Almost every +fine subject in the Scriptures must have been attacked at one time or +another. There have been a few good short Biblical poems, like Browning’s +_Saul_. But the only other really reputable Biblical poem on a large +scale that I can think of is Charles Wells’s _Joseph and His Brethren_, +which has strength as a story and some passages of fine imagery. Wells +belonged to the generation of Keats and lived on into our own time. He +was an engineer, stopped writing when young, and was admired by Rossetti +and Swinburne. His poem, however, cannot really be considered such good +reading as the Bible account of the same story. One of the episodes +that came within his purview, that of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, has +been a subject for poets in all ages. The last endeavour that I can +recall to make something out of it was a somewhat bejewelled one of +Sir Edwin Arnold’s. The longest, I should think, is Joshua Sylvester’s +intolerably tedious series of couplets entitled _The Maiden’s Blush_. +Why he conferred that title upon such a poem I don’t know, unless he was +thinking of what might happen to the less robust of his female readers. +Those parts of Holy Writ which are of purely historical interest have not +been freely drawn on by English writers. I don’t remember that much has +been done with the Maccabees, and the chronicles of the Kings of Israel, +which supplied Racine with a subject for his _Athalie_, have left English +writers cold. Jehu drove furiously, Jeroboam the son of Nebat made Israel +to sin, and Rehoboam afflicted his people with scorpions instead of +whips; but their violence does not seem to fire the poetic imagination as +does that of Herod, about whom we know very little more. But Herod, of +course, was fond of the Russian ballet; which brings him closer to us. + + + + +How to avoid Bad English + + +Good books on the practice of writing are rare. Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s +_On the Art of Writing_ is extraordinarily good. It contains the lectures +he delivered at Cambridge just before the war; and even readers who do +not desire to write at all will find Sir Arthur’s jokes very amusing +and his criticisms, general and particular, sound and (what is more +unusual) new. He touches a great variety of subjects, though always in +some relation to the main theme. He is especially illuminating on the +Authorized Version, and on Homer’s skill in dealing with the “Primary +Difficulty of Verse”—that is to say, the difficulty of filling up the +interstices between highly emotional passages without lapsing into dull +prosiness. His most diverting chapter is that on what he calls “Jargon,” +which he distinguishes from Journalese. The distinction he draws may +be appreciated if I concoct examples of both commodities. Writing in +“Jargon” I might say: + + “In the case of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch I am proud and happy + to associate myself in the fullest sense with a work of this + useful, elevating, instructive, and educative character.” + +Writing in Journalese, as he defines it, I might say: + + “‘Q.’s brilliant book goes to the root of the matter. It + strikes home. He is out to slay the dragons of bad writing. + He burns them with the fire of his passion. He lashes them + with the scourge of his invective. He tears them to shreds and + tatters with the shrapnel of his ridicule. He will not sheathe + the sword until ...” + +Yes.... The first kind consists of woolly, indefinite words, of +redundancies and shapeless prolixities; the man who writes the second is +trying to produce what he believes to be “literature” by means of imagery +and rhythmical movement. Sir Arthur says that the greatest propagators of +Jargon are public bodies, politicians, and so on; but he recognizes that +journalists also use it. The two things, in fact, are often seen in one +article. I conceive that there might be passages which would fall into +either of Sir Arthur’s classes. But there is a clear difference between +bad sentences produced by an effort to say something and those produced +by an effort to say something vividly. All bad writers, however, have +common defects, and these are dealt with in other chapters. + +Every one who has thought about the art at all has discovered for himself +the truths that Sir Arthur tabulates. One must aim at accuracy (a word +that covers almost everything that is needful) and at clarity; one must, +normally, prefer the concrete to the abstract word, and the short word to +the long; and one must avoid the superfluous adjective. How well we know +these rules; how certain we are of their validity; how feebly we struggle +to obey them! At all times the ready-made sentence, the makeshift +epithet, the pot-shot image must have been ready to the hand. In the +present age, when we live in a honeycomb of print and begin each day by +exposing ourselves, before, during, or after breakfast, to masses of the +weakest English we can find, the job of writing well is more difficult +than ever. Our fluency is the measure of our accursed memory. We have +bales of phrases ready for every experience we describe; our pigeon-holes +are stuffed with dead metaphors and bogus synonyms; and we are always +ready to say in six words what ought to be said in two. Every time we +sit down at a desk or open our lips to speak, the nymphs Jargonia and +Journalesia, besieging us as the sylphs besieged St. Anthony, hold out +their hands full of glittering treasures which will save us the trouble +of thinking. Usually we do not even see them; we find the fatal gifts +in our hands and employ them without remembering their origin. And the +descent to hell is rapid. + +It is good to revise: to correct, to improve, and to delete. Few, even of +the most careful writers, find their proof-sheets free from trite and +superfluous words which they would be ashamed to publish. It is better +still to think long before writing, to make sure that one’s thoughts +are clear-cut before one gives them a visible form. That habit it is +a writer’s duty to acquire. But it does not do to be incessantly and +acutely conscious of the qualities of good writing and the difficulty +of securing them. That way madness lies. Sometimes, to a man who broods +overmuch on these things, every phrase will appear a cliché, and every +word a dummy. “God help me!” he will moan, “I have called the sun +‘bright’ and the grass ‘green’! Millions of men before me have written +‘bright sun’ and ‘green grass.’ I know I did not think freshly and +independently _at_ these objects. I put the adjectives down mechanically. +I have merely heard that the grass was green. Why haven’t I looked at it +through my own eyes? If a real writer looked at it, I don’t for a moment +suppose that its greenness would be the attribute which would impinge +most forcibly upon him. Very likely it isn’t green at all.” This, I +say, does not do. I don’t suggest that there is anything peculiar about +grass which should make a novel statement about it impossible. In fact, +Swinburne said that grass is hair, and Mr. Chesterton has very probably +said that it is red. I merely use “green grass” as an example of the sort +of thing that an exaggerated fastidiousness might lead a man to question +in his own work. + +There remains one property of good prose that no amount of painstaking +or instruction can produce. That is rhythm. It is, indeed, remarkable +that one of the most elaborate analyses of prose rhythms hitherto made +was made by a writer whose own prose is anything but musical. Either +Providence has given a man an ear or it has not; if it has not, he will +not write great prose. But his prose will be better in proportion as +he obeys the principles of good writing as “Q.” enunciates them. One +suggestion more might be useful for him. That is, that he will be well +advised in making his uneuphonious sentences short if he desires his +writing to be an efficient instrument of persuasion. + + + + +Woodland Creatures + + +“Parnassus in Piccadilly,” is the headline I see in my paper. Follows an +account of a “séance” promoted by Miss Elizabeth Asquith in aid of the +Star and Garter Home. Ten or twelve poets read works of their own to an +audience of four hundred who had paid a guinea apiece. Outside the house +a large concourse watched the poets arrive. There were Mr. Yeats, Sir +O. Seaman, Mr. Hewlett, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. de-la Mare, +Mrs. Woods, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. W. H. Davies, who is described as looking +like “one of his own woodland creatures.” I read that one of the reciters +intoned, that another was bluff, and that a third ought to get somebody +else to read for him; also that Mr. Birrell, the chairman, sat with his +head buried in his hands until the arrival of the first comic turn, Mr. +Belloc’s. But I wish I had been there: for the account does not tell me +how it was really done. + +Did the poets sit in the audience and march up to the platform one by +one as their turns came? Did they stand out of sight, each gliding in +singly, and then retiring into the antral seclusion of the wings when +ten minutes was up? Or did they rather, as I prefer to think, sit on the +platform, the whole dozen of them in a semicircle, listening to, and +discreetly applauding, each other’s efforts. I am sorry I missed it. Some +of them will have been exalted by a sense of the holiness of their work; +their eyes will have looked out across the audience with a prophetic and +otherworldly fire. Others will have been uneasy and not knowing (unless a +table was thoughtfully provided) what to do with their feet. And one or +two, I think, will have been preoccupied with the control of their own +faces, which, on such an occasion, must have “strained at the leash of +dignified deportment.” + +Why is it that so many people feel awkward when they are present at a +public recitation by a poet of his own verse; and why should writers +shrink from such recitations? Amusement on such occasions is closely +allied to sheepishness: both spring from a feeling of inappropriateness, +a sense that “the fitness of things” is being violated. We are +accustomed, of course, to the other kind of recitation, the reading by +an interpreter who is not a creator, and who is not exposing his heart +in public: the prize child and the local elocutionist who declaims +Tennyson’s _Revenge_, daintily fluttering his fingers in the air when +he comes to the part about the pinnace which is like a bird. But our +poets themselves have not recited much. It was not always so. “’Omer +smote his bloomin’ lyre” in public; he had nowhere else to smite it, +for he (presumably) could not write, and his audiences could not read. +Every composer of tribal lays, from Tubal-Cain (unless his songs were +_Lieder ohne Worte_) to the Druidic harpists, sang his compositions to +his admiring fellows without embarrassment; troubadours and mediæval +laureates had no objection at all to public recitation. Most foreigners, +one supposes, do not feel so strongly as we do about it now; but the +timidity of Englishmen in the matter is very pronounced. I am sure that +nothing short of the needs of a War Fund would have induced some of the +Piccadilly performers to face the ordeal. + +It is all a part of our national reserve, that very reserve which, +perhaps, accounts for the greatness and volume of our poetry. In poetry +our feelings find an outlet. We have the habit of concealing our finest +sentiments and our profoundest emotions. We don’t mind putting them into +books and then running round the corner out of sight. But we dislike +unbosoming them _viva voce_ in the actual physical presence of strangers. +Our dislike of “scenes” covers equally the public row in a restaurant and +the public demonstration of our yearnings after virtue and the stirrings +of our hearts when we hear the nightingale or listen to the Atlantic at +night. We sit bolt upright at concerts; look at pictures with our mouths +set like vices; and observe “Yes, very nice” as, with wistfulness in our +breasts, we stand on a hill and look at a wooded panorama under the +moon. The grotesque Englishman who stares at a sunset and then laughs +and says it looks like a fried egg is really bolting in terror from the +admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts of the world. So, if +somebody gets up to recite his most intimate feelings, we feel it as +almost an indecency. He is usually bashful about it himself, and unable +therefore to recite with that abandonment which will do his poem justice. +The audience, at least that part of it which is most intelligent and +self-conscious, feels as if it were intruding. It is like eavesdropping +or opening a stranger’s letters. And everybody is conscious of the +national titter in the background. When the authors of Prize Poems at the +Universities give the official reading of their verses, their friends +invariably assemble to grin in the galleries. Undergraduates have still +some naturalness. They titter aloud, but the adult Englishman titters in +silence. It is reserve that brings forth the titter and it is still more +reserve that suppresses it; just as it is reserve that makes our soldiers +sing, not invocations to England, home, or glory, but comic songs about +cowardice and death. + +The foregoing series of platitudes, slightly varied in accordance with +each writer’s tastes and talents, is invariably repeated when the +character of English people is under discussion. But it may be that, at +any rate in our attitude towards poetry, we are changing. In the last +four or five years the habit of public readings has been growing; and +some of our poets have grown quite addicted to them. This may be a time +of transition: if the enthusiasts for recitation keep at it hard enough, +people’s constraint may be overcome, and it may be regarded as quite an +ordinary and natural thing for a man to stand on a platform and, with all +the passion he can release and all the vocal modulation he can command, +chant his lyrics to congregations which will yield themselves to him with +all the spontaneity, though less than all the gestures and ejaculations, +of a Welsh revivalist’s converts. It is a commonplace that poetry +gains by being spoken; and that if verse were always read and never +recited, poets would be in danger of getting out of touch with natural +speech-rhythms. We could do with a little less amusement and a little +more excitement; and we might as well, if cowardice or a sense of humour +are the only things that hold us back, hold and attend public readings +until we are as unselfconscious about them as we are about church +services or political meetings. The worst of it is that poets do not +invariably read well, and that few persons with the taste for standing +on a platform and declaiming are competent to take an author’s place as +reciter of his work. There is such a thing as the inspired reader of +other people’s verse; but the understanding, the inclination, and the +voice cannot be expected to come often together. When the author himself +is reciting you can at least be certain that the speaker—unless he is a +very “advanced” poet indeed—understands the work which he is repeating. +With other performers one always has to take one’s chance. From the +professional reciter God save us all. + + + + +Other People’s Books + + +Like most people, I possess a number of books which I have not read. I +am not referring to volumes, such as the _Speculum Morale_ of Vincent of +Beauvais or the commentary of Œcolampadius on St. John’s Gospel, which +I bought merely because they looked pleasant and which nobody on earth +could be expected to read. I mean books in English and of comparatively +recent date. There is, for example, Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, for +which, in a weak moment, I paid some shillings with the feeling that, +as a cogitative being, I ought not leave so notable a stone unturned. +The feeling passed and never came back. And there is Ranke’s _History of +the Popes_—up to the present undisturbed by me; there are _The Last Days +of Pompeii_, _Romola_, _Vittoria_, Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott, +_What Maisie knew_, _What Katy did_, and dozens of other modern works, +some of which, if I live, I shall certainly read, and others of which, I +am sure, I shall never begin. But it makes no difference. Whether he has +read them or not, a man’s own books get, in a manner, stale to him. If a +book remains for years unopened on one’s shelves it becomes increasingly +difficult to read it. Yet if one finds another edition of it in somebody +else’s house one may fly to it, and, under the same conditions, one may +read or re-read almost anything one finds. + +So it is, at the moment, with me. I am in a place previously unknown to +me. It is bestrewn with books; and, penned to the house by the brilliant +summer weather, I have been doing some miscellaneous reading. For one +thing I have gone solidly once more through Mr. Thomas Hardy’s verse. How +extraordinarily good it is! And how remarkably he has gone on improving, +especially as a metrist. But more than ever, after a heavy dose of these +compressed statements of his point of view, one realizes his determined +and unmitigated gloom. It is at its densest in _Wessex Poems_, and in +places one laughs outright at it. He illustrated the book himself, his +drawing is naïve, and the sketch of two floors of a church, the pews +(and two lovers) above, and the skulls and cross-bones below, has an “I +_will_ be grim at all costs” air about it that robs it of all its horror. +The story attached is a neat one. The man is a consumptive about to die; +he asks the woman if she loves him? She falsely says “Yes” in order to +brighten his last hours. He dies, and her life is ever after blighted +because she cannot reconcile herself to a Universe in which the telling +of such lies is a moral obligation. There is another small drama in which +a woman, maltreated by her husband, dies, telling her old lover that +she wishes she had married him and that her child could have been his +child, and asking him to see that the brutal husband does not ill-treat +the child. The brutal husband remarries and does ill-treat the child. One +day he finds the lover mourning on the dead wife’s grave, and demands +by what right he is there. The lover, remembering the death-bed remark +and suddenly seeing a chance of saving the child, says that he has every +right to be there as he was really the father of the child. His supposed +offspring is then left on his doorstep, to be looked after carefully, +and he spends his time wondering whether he was justified in telling, +etc. Probably these stories, if expanded into novels, might convince; as +narrative poems they do not; and when they are squeezed into the brief +compass of the _Satires of Circumstance_ they are grotesquely Life as +Thomas Hardy makes it and not Life as Thomas Hardy sees it. + +It is a little bold in these days to admit that one hasn’t read the +whole of Mr. Conrad’s works, but until this week I had never laid hands +on _Almayer’s Folly_. It was his first book. In his _Reminiscences_ he +gives an account of how it was begun, in a Pimlico lodging-house, when +he was a sea captain and carried about the ocean for five years until +(when he was thirty-five) he finished it. When, half-done and laid by, +it was yellowing and mouldering, he showed it to his first reader, a +Cambridge man going to Australia for his health, and asked him if it was +worth completing. The passenger, with a nice economy of words, answered +“Distinctly,” and Captain Conrad was thus encouraged to proceed. I had +read all this before, and also the novelist’s statement that before +this he had not attempted literature and had hardly ever written even a +letter—though I suppose there must have been an occasional entry in a +log. I have certainly been surprised by the craftsmanship of _Almayer’s +Folly_. Not only is the structure good, but the writing, except in one +or two places, is astonishingly finished, accurate, and restrained. It +is absurdly unlike a first book. Its weakness, as it appears to me, lies +in the dullness of the principal character. It is difficult to keep up +one’s interest in a person whose main characteristic is his impotence. +But it doesn’t matter so much here as it might, for the subsidiary story +of Dain and Nina is very fascinating, and the real hero, after all, is +none of the people, white or Malay, but the Bornean river (its topography +is not always clear to me) on whose overgrown banks they all live and the +changes of which, night and day, are described with marvellous eloquence +and certainty. + + + + +Peacock + + +Finally, after various minor excursions, I have settled down to the +works of Thomas Love Peacock, of whom I had read nothing before except +some poems. Why? I don’t know, but I think his name has vaguely +repelled me. Anyhow, I am thankful now that I have been able to come +fresh to Peacock’s novels. He has a few devotees, but it is surprising +that so admirable a writer is not more read. _Nightmare Abbey_ and +_Headlong Hall_ are not great masterpieces, but they are certainly small +masterpieces. They belong to the class of intellectual comedy to which +_Candide_, and, in some measure, _Rasselas_ belong; in fact, they must +certainly have been modelled on _Candide_. They are burlesques of oneself +and one’s friends, and every other discussing, theorizing person and his +friends. Charlatans of all kinds, literary, political, ecclesiastical, +and scientific, and philosophers of all kinds from the man who believes +that upward progress is inevitable to the man who believes that downward +progress is undeniable, from the secret revolutionary conspirator to +the professional sceptic; he gets them all in, quintessentializes their +doctrines into exquisitely flowing prose, and knocks their heads together +with charming ruthlessness. Any extract will illustrate the flow of his +dialogue: + + “‘The anatomy of the human stomach,’ said Mr. Escot, ‘and the + formation of the teeth, clearly place man in the class of + fungivorous animals.’ + + “‘Many anatomists,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘are of a different + opinion, and agree in discerning the characteristics of the + carnivorous classes.’ + + “‘I am no anatomist,’ said Mr. Jenkinson, ‘and cannot decide + where doctors disagree; in the meantime, I conclude that man is + omnivorous, and on that conclusion I act.’ + + “‘Your conclusion is truly orthodox,’ said the Reverend Doctor + Gaster; ‘indeed, the loaves and fishes are typical of a mixed + diet, and the practice of the Church in all ages shows——’ + + “‘That it never loses sight of the loaves and fishes,’ said Mr. + Escot.” + +If loud asseveration on my part sends to Peacock a few people who have +not tried him before, I shall feel that the recent rain has not descended +in vain. + + + + +Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness + + +The Strange Case of William Wordsworth is to me of perennial interest, +and I have just emerged from several days’ burrowing under Professor C. +G. Harper’s two enormous volumes entitled _William Wordsworth, His Life, +Works, and Influence_. It is a conscientious and valuable piece of work, +very fully documented, and containing much out-of-the-way information +and a great deal of sensible, if not always illustrious, criticism. +The information may perhaps be a little too ample for the weaker +brethren. The map (showing lakes, mountain ranges (brown) and so on) +of Wordsworth’s country with which we open gives the clue to Professor +Harper’s exhaustive method. Every procurable date of Wordsworth’s +continental programme is copied out; and we are even supplied with the +winter and summer timetables of the Grammar School at Hawkshead which he +attended and at which (as Professor Harper rather sententiously observes) +an education different in kind, but perhaps not inferior in quality, +to that supplied by Eton was bestowed upon him. New light is thrown on +certain incidents in his career; his “circle” is elaborately described; +and a very charming picture is given of his sister Dorothy. But the old +problem of Wordsworth’s defects remains much where it did. + +It is a commonplace that Wordsworth is the most uneven of great poets. +Every textbook writer tells one that when he was inspired he was a +giant, that when he was not he wrote maundering doggerel, and that he +himself never knew when he was and when he was not at his best. _The +Idiot Boy_ has been held up to the ridicule of generations—beyond its +deserts perhaps. The point was most forcibly put by J. K. Stephen when he +wrote a parody of Wordsworth’s “Two voices are there,” saying that one +of the voices was that of the sea, etc., and the other that of “an old +half-witted sheep.” But a thing less frequently faced, and never, as far +as I know, properly explained, is his personal lack of attractiveness. +Flippant persons may be met who dismiss him as “a pompous old dullard”; +but, generally speaking, whenever one hears such a remark it comes from +some one who openly confesses that he cannot stand Wordsworth’s poetry at +any price, and that he has very seldom attempted to read it. The people +who are in difficulties are those (and I am among them) who agree without +qualification that Wordsworth is our greatest poet since Milton, but +who cannot sincerely say that they are drawn towards him as a man. If +they—any one who does not feel like this is happy and I do not speak for +him—pretend to be fond of him their pretence is glaring. If they do not +stick up for him they feel that they are being faithless to a poet who +still stands in need of all the propagandists he can get. It is not easy +to face the truth about him even in the solitude of one’s own chamber. +But, by heaven, he _is_ a dull man! + +“There was a boy” (as Wordsworth would himself begin) who at one time +used nightly to dine in hall under a large oil-painting of the poet. +In this painting Wordsworth was represented sitting on a rock against +a landscape background which was an agreeable and symbolical blend of +wildness and tranquillity. The poet was clad in broadcloth; he held a +book in his hand; his face was smooth and pink; and his mild eye surveyed +the spectator as though the latter were a lamb about to receive a pat +of the hand and his blessing. There he sat, meditative and benevolent, +while the soup gave place to the fish and the fish to the beef; and +when one had drained off the last dregs of one’s beer one went off +still conscious of that meditative and benevolent eye. It became almost +maddening. Every other great English poet had something fascinating about +him. Even Milton, in spite of certain unsociable qualities, had a certain +attractive force, a touch of the virulent, and the scars of suffering. +But this Wordsworth! His genuine philanthropy was unquestionable. His +portrait might, one thought, be that of a pioneer of the Anti-Slave +Trade Agitation, or an inventor of Sunday Schools, or an endower of Bands +of Hope. But not a poet; oh, not a poet! + +So it is with all his portraits. Professor Harper gives a selection of +them. Always the sage is a bland and upright man; the _mens conscia +recti_ typified. But never a sign of eloquence or fire; of the +magnificent oratory of his great passages, of the music and profound +tenderness which are so profuse in his poetry. Not a sign of stress; +not a mark of any but the most complacent vicarage thought; no passion, +no enthusiasm, no challenge, and no response. It is not to be explained +away, as Professor Harper attempts to explain it away, by saying that +the myth of “Daddy Wordsworth” (as FitzGerald called him) is based on a +disproportionate view of his life. Professor Harper thinks that far too +little attention has been paid to his early revolutionary period, when +the ideals of the French Revolution gripped him, and far too much to his +later period of orthodoxy and respectability. Professor Harper himself +attempts to redress the balance. He gives as full an account as he can of +the earlier Wordsworth and of his relations with Revolutionary France. +But, as Wordsworth’s French friends would have said (provided they were +not ashamed of using such a worn-out tag) _plus ça change plus c’est la +même chose_. The early Wordsworth may have been a different being; but +Professor Harper certainly does not prove that he was. From birth to +death in this biography he appears as the same high-minded, staid, sober, +solemn monument. He joined in the Revolution not so much a “kid-glove +revolutionary” as a woollen-glove and warm comforter revolutionary. Had +he stayed in France he might have made even the Terror respectable. + +On myself and on others Wordsworth’s portraits and his biographies always +leave this sort of impression: the impression of an old bore to whom +one would not be rude simply and solely because one would not willingly +hurt the feelings of a person so worthy. And then one goes back to his +poetry—and his prose—and hears a voice of almost unsurpassed grandeur +speaking the deepest of one’s unexpressed thoughts, appealing to and +drawing out all the divinest powers in man’s nature. Of his greatness +surely no rational and unbiassed being could entertain the slightest +doubt. He is not so popular or so frequently read as some poets, and that +is not difficult to explain. His absence of humour, or an equivalent +vivacity, is not in itself an explanation; but the accompanying general +absence of any luxurious appeal to the senses is. He speaks direct to the +labouring intellect and the sensitive heart; and the enjoyment of him, if +great, is usually enjoyment of the austerer kind, like mountain-climbing. +There is nothing soft or enervating or luxurious which can make reading +him an æsthetic debauch. He does not often sing to a tune which gives +one pleasure even if one does not attend to the words. Without being in +the least obscure he demands an effort from the reader parallel to his +own. That, at least as much as the tediousness of many of his writings +(and his irritating classification of them), is the reason of his +comparative lack of popularity. But ... + + + + +Henry James’s Obscurity + + +Henry James’s last work was his essay on Rupert Brooke, written as an +introduction to _Letters from America_. Mr. James’s essay is a personal +appreciation, and not in any way a biographical memoir. Such a memoir, by +another hand, will follow. Mr. James left unfinished two novels, and a +third volume of the series begun with _A Small Boy and Others_ and _Notes +of a Son and Brother_. + +Presumably the public (which might well make a start with the short +stories of which Mr. Secker has already published eight half-crown +volumes, very pleasant to the eye) will at last begin to buy James’s +novels. They have certainly not bought them in the past. He was, in +critical circles, almost universally recognized as one of the three or +four greatest of English writers living a week ago. But some of his books +had not even gone into a second edition. He was intermittently talked +about in the Press. Fifteen years or so ago he had a boom of the sort; +then there was a period of comparative newspaper obscurity; in the last +three or four years he suddenly and silently, like a star appearing from +behind a cloud, took his unchallenged place in the firmament as one of +the established great. But he was not widely read. _Daisy Miller_, ever +so many years ago, had a fairly general success; _The Golden Bowl_, also, +I should think, sold well. But many people who paid lip homage to him +were very unfamiliar with his work. + +In no case would a man with his interests, his approach, his subtlety and +avoidance of the grosser excitements, his restraint and delicacy, have +sold by the hundred thousand. But his appeal was still further limited +by the legend of his style. I remember reading an old novel written +in the days when Robert Browning was an Incomprehensible studied by a +Cult. The heroine of it gave herself away rather by remarking, “Oh, +Mr. Browning! I’ve never been able to understand a single thing that +he has written. That is why I have never tried.” One feels that there +were persons who were in the same position as towards Henry James. They +had heard that he was a hard nut to crack; they had seen perhaps—it was +always a great temptation to a reviewer to extract—specimens of his more +elaborate discursions, complicated arabesques of sentences, parenthesis +after parenthesis wandering from comma to comma like barbed wire tangled +around its supports. And they thought therefore that he was an obscure +eclectic as difficult as Jacob Behmen or Swedenborg and lacking their +excuse of religious inspiration. Certainly he was sometimes difficult. +But it was a unique kind of obscurity. There is an obscurity produced +when a man, eagerly tumbling along an argument, writes down only a +sort of fitful shorthand, a language which leaves things out and which +resembles the stray pieces of disconnected paper in gutter or hedge which +merely indicate the course that the runner has taken. There is another +and commoner kind of obscurity of speech which derives from mistiness of +mind; for a man cannot write clearly down what he does not clearly think. +And there is a kind of obscurity which is produced by mere inaptitude for +writing: the awkwardness of the cow handling a rifle. James’s obscurity +was the direct product of his passion for clarity. He detested the +slipshod sentence which, compact as it may look as a piece of grammar, +is a mere pot-shot as a piece of representation. He wanted to make no +statement which did not embody precisely what he wanted to say; what, +that is to say, he saw as Truth. He would have taken, for example, that +last sentence of mine and, endeavouring to give it a more exact shape, +have made of it something like the following: + + “He wanted, when, that is, he experienced anything so definite + or, shall we put it, so positively energetic, as a want, to + make no statement, none at any rate which might be taken by + even the least perceptive of his hearers as a _delivered_, + and, as it were, final testimony of his reaction to things as + he saw them, which did not precisely embody what he wanted + (when, once more, he coherently desired anything, as we have + it, ‘higher’ than the elementary physical) to say; what, that + is to say, he saw, at the moment of speech, be it understood, + for the eye of the watcher changes, as what, in the absence of + a happier name, it has pleased us to ennoble with the majestic + name of Truth.” + +I don’t suggest that I myself have added anything to my own sentence +by this addition of the pomp and circumstance of parenthesis and +circumlocution. I have merely turned a short platitude into a long one. +But it may serve to show the method by which Henry James arrived at +his more tortuous pages. The method has its disadvantages. The man who +employs it is sometimes like a man working with a pickaxe in a cave. +The more he digs away the larger the unattacked expanse which invites +his strength; or, as one might say, the bigger the hole he is in. But +when this method is employed by a man with the analytical powers, the +sensitiveness to fine shades, material and spiritual, of Henry James, +the result is a “product” (the kind of word that James would always have +put in actual or implied inverted commas) which never stales and from +which one gets more and more enjoyment each time one reads. In the last +resort novels live by the richness of their detail; and James’s detail is +exquisite and inexhaustible. + +Few modern writers have exercised so strong an influence over those who +have surrendered themselves to him. He is, I should say, more infectious +than any writer since (what a strange collocation!) Lord Macaulay. A man +with a formed style can usually read and enjoy Carlyle, Jeremy Taylor, de +Quincey, or George Meredith without showing the least tendency (unless +deliberate) to imitate them. But when one has (I don’t speak only for +myself) been reading James one finds for a time that one is tempted to +write even one’s private letters in a style which shows plainly that one +has set him as a seal upon one’s arm. Even now, when I am merely thinking +about him, I feel the pressure of that stern artistic conscience, and can +only with an effort resist the demand that I should guard myself here, +qualify myself here, and elucidate myself there. He was irresistible, +like one of those stammerers or persons with other attractive or +unattractive vocal idiosyncrasies whom one cannot help imitating when one +is with them. A person of any force gets through this and the permanent +effect of a subjugation to James was always good. A too marked echo of +him would be painful: but his example was salutary. It may be possible +to grumble with him for this and that. He did write mainly about persons +with incomes (though these also are God’s creatures); he did occasionally +behave (as Mr. Wells very wittily put it) like a hippopotamus picking +up a pea; and he did annoy some enthusiasts by refusing to place his +pen habitually at the service of the Great Forces of Our Time and other +things whose capital importance is of custom indicated by capital +letters. But in an age of sloppy writing he stood for accuracy of +craftsmanship; and even men whose subjects are Invisible Exports of +the Parthenogenesis of Plants might learn from him how to use to more +advantage their intellects and their pens. + + + + +The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade + + +A bibliophile writes the following complaint: “At the recent sale of +Swinburne’s library, certain lots, chiefly signed presentation copies, +fetched extravagantly high prices. But the outsider is generally puzzled +at the extreme variation in the prices, a variation which passing +fashions in taste do not explain. There is an explanation, as one +would-be purchaser was made somewhat rudely aware. He wanted a book by +a modern poet, a poet of delicate talent and little recognition; and he +asked a bookseller to bid for the lot. He was willing to spend between +ten and thirteen shillings on it. The agent who was to bid arrived late, +and another bookseller bought the lot for five shillings. So the would-be +purchaser asked his bookseller to approach the man who had bought the +lot, and find out if he would sell it. The book was cheap at five and +would be rather dear at ten shillings. When approached, the purchaser +informed his colleague that ‘he had had to pay a good deal more for the +lot than the price given in the rooms, and that he could not part with it +for less than eighteen shillings.’ Such are the blessings of the ‘ring’ +at Sotheby’s. + +“The ring consists of some of the largest and best-known members of the +bookselling trade—all honest men—and their plan is this: they never +bid against each other, except for show; lots go at small prices, thus +robbing owners and executors of their right profit; and subsequently +these cheap lots are put up again and resold among the members of the +ring. The auctioneers can, of course, do nothing to stop the practice—and +it is as legal as it is dishonourable. At times an outsider with a +big banking account gives the ring a good deal of trouble; but it has +survived all private attacks, and is likely to—though a private buyer +with a confident manner and a quick power of decision can occasionally +get a great deal of amusement by running lots up, and so forcing the ring +to pay exorbitant prices for things they do not want.” + +It is true. There exists among the second-hand booksellers precisely +such a ring as gave rise to so much discussion a few years ago when the +scandal of the art-dealers’ “knock-out” was widely discussed. For some +time I myself have been trying to get information about it. But it is not +easy. You can find out from booksellers who are not in the ring (few of +these lone wolves are important) who the booksellers are who are in the +ring, but that is about all. But the method is simple. The attendance +at book sales is not large. Private collectors are lazy people; it is +not now fashionable—as it was in the Duke of Roxburghe’s day—for the +Old Nobility to crowd the salerooms, bidding desperately amid groans of +anguish and cheers of triumph. The result is that very often one will +attend a sale and be the only private person there, and it is a matter of +chance (especially when the sale is a comparatively small one) whether +any one at all is there except the members of the ring. The ring, _pro +forma_, will run a book up to about a third of its value and leave +it at that. At the close of the proceedings its members will adjourn +somewhere—I don’t know where, but let us say a back room in the Charing +Cross Road—and hold a “knock-out” auction of the books they have bought. +The difference between the sums paid here and the sums paid at Sotheby’s +or Hodgson’s will be pooled and divided, so as to equalize the spoil; +and the owners of the libraries sold will have got only, perhaps, a half +of what they really ought to have got considering the prices that the +ultimate purchasers are willing to pay. + +But I don’t see what is to be done about it. As my correspondent +remarks, the auctioneers can’t stop it. They also must suffer as their +work is done on a commission basis. It must not be assumed that all the +booksellers like the system, but the minority cannot help themselves. +I remember that one very well known bookseller, now dead, tried for +several years to keep out of it; but in the end, by co-ordinated bidding +against him, he was forced in. There the thing is; the dealers find it +profitable; it is not easy to keep out of it unless you are a prince of +the trade, with rich customers and great resources, or a person with +special knowledge who is after a special kind of book and will be let +alone; and there is no short cut to reform. How can Parliament interfere? +If one dealer who buys a book can sell it to another after the sale, how +can six or a dozen dealers be prevented from exchanging their purchases +similarly. It would be all very well to make the “knock-out” illegal, +but how many does it take to make a ring and how many detectives could +be spared? The only conceivable remedy is for persons who habitually +buy old books to make a point (when the war is over and they are +released from their present occupations) of turning up at the salerooms +and bidding against the pros. Even at that the remedy would only be +efficacious as long as it was actively applied. It might be worth a +guinea a box, but you would have to take a box every day; there would be +no permanent cure. Directly the strangers slacked off again the ring and +the “knock-out” would revive, and my unfortunate friend (for I presume +that the disconsolate buyer he refers to is himself) would have once more +to pay for his books much more than the price recorded at the rooms. +“There is no cure for this disease,” as Mr. Belloc’s poem puts it, unless +auction-frequenting again becomes a popular form of amusement. + +But, if I may digress, I must say that, for persons of a bookish turn +of mind, there is nothing more amusing than an occasional visit to +Wellington Street or Chancery Lane. I shouldn’t care to do it every day; +the combined mustiness of books and booksellers is a bit overpowering. +But it is exciting to bid occasionally, and the books that come into the +London auction-rooms are of such quality that sometimes you might almost +as well go to Sotheby’s as to the Exhibition Rooms (now shut up so as to +pay for two minutes of the war) of the British Museum. The bindings that +great collectors put on their books are in themselves wonderful. And the +booksellers, rich and poor, glossy and seedy, as they nod to the rostrum +and paw the goods, are a sight to which only Balzac could do justice. +They all wear looks of settled gloom as though they were on the verge of +bankruptcy; they all (if one speaks to them) swear that “it is impossible +to get anything to-day as everything is going so dear”; and they all have +a sovereign indifference to everything but the commercial value of the +books they deal in. I say all: there are exceptions; but the crowd as a +whole is utterly depressed and completely free from the remotest concern +with literature. But possibly when they get in that back room somewhere +and assess the margin between what executors have got for books and what +they ought to have got for them, their morose countenances may brighten. +For all I know, every “knock-out” auction may end with the circulation +of the punch-bowl, jolly songs, and toasts to the damnation of all the +idiots who waste their money on rotten old books unfit to read and +thereby keep in affluence a set of honest men who read the _Daily Mail_ +in the morning and never a line for the rest of the day. + + + + +Music-Hall Songs + + +Mr. William Archer contributes to the _Fortnightly_ an attack on the +music-hall. He says that it is the home of vulgarity and inanity; that +the audiences, as a rule, would enjoy much better stuff than they are +given; and that “the music-hall seems to have killed a genuine vein of +lyric faculty in the English people.” With all that I don’t think that +any one but a poseur could disagree. Mr. Archer makes an extraordinary +slip when he puts forward _Sally in our Alley_ as a folk-product of +which neither the composer nor the author is known to fame: both words +and music being by Henry Carey, who was scarcely an obscure person in +his day and is not entirely forgotten now. He concludes, too, with a +somewhat vague suggestion of a remedy which has no bearing whatever upon +the improvement of music-hall songs, and which one suspects to spring +from his perennial desire to induce the public to go and see Ibsen. +But his case as a whole is irrefutable. The nation’s songs since the +industrial revolution have been immeasurably worse than at any other time +in its history. They are almost all commercial products manufactured by +half-wits. + +Mr. Archer’s case being so sound, it is all the more a pity that he +overdoes it. It is true that almost all these songs are vile rubbish, and +that the songs of the _Villikins and his Dinah_ and _Champagne Charlie_ +periods were even more fatuous than those of the present day. But it is +exaggeration to say that + + “what is certain is that the whole music-hall movement has + produced not one—literally not one—piece of verse that can rank + as poetry of the humblest type, or even as a really clever bit + of comic rhyming,” + +for such songs turn up fairly frequently. Possibly Mr. Archer’s horror +of the “red-nosed comedian” prevents him from ever listening to his +words: certainly one gets from Mr. Archer’s article the impression +that the critic is only acquainted with a few of the most famous of +music-halls songs. But although I heartily support his general case and +would willingly consent to the execution of all music-hall managers and +versifiers and most music-hall artists, I must protest that “really +clever bits of comic rhyming” do turn up occasionally. + +I wish I had a better verbal memory. But I can at least refer Mr. +Archer to a few songs of which, if he cares to spend a month in the +Museum with old volumes of Francis, Day and Hunter’s song-books and +other collections, he can find the full words. For instance, there is +Mr. Harry Lauder’s _It’s Nice to get up in the Morning_. As I remember +them (and here and elsewhere I don’t guarantee that my quotations are +literally accurate) the words of the chorus are: + + _Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning when the sun begins to shine,_ + _At four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time;_ + _But when the snow is falling, and it’s murky overhead,_ + _It’s nice to get up in the morning—but it’s nicer to stay in bed._ + +Of course the tune helped it. But it is quite well turned and it springs +clean out of popular experience. It is folk-poetry even if the folk +didn’t write it. It is not the folk-poetry of the seventeenth century, +but it is distinctly the folk-poetry of modern commercial and urban +England. _We sat upon the Baby on the Shore_ I’m not sure about; it +didn’t, I suspect, have a music-hall origin, though I do not know. But +_A Little Bit off the Top_ was quite comic in places; so were _The Four +Horse Charabanc_, _Right in the Middle of the Road_, _Whitewash_, and _’E +dunno where ’e are_. I wish I could recall the words of the song which +had a chorus beginning: + + _More work for the undertaker,_ + _Another little job for the tombstone-maker;_ + +but even that high-spirited couplet shows their quality. These +mock-tragic songs are often quite good. The best known was _His Day’s +Work was done_, which was undeniably a comic conception well carried out. +Did Mr. Archer ever hear _If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between_? The +one fragment that sticks in my mind both dates it and shows that it was a +“clever bit of comic rhyming”: + + _If the weather had been finer_ + _You’d have seen the war in China—_ + _If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between._ + +And what about _Waiting at the Church_?— + + _There was I waiting at the church,_ + _Waiting at the church._ + _When I found he’d left me in the lurch,_ + _Lor’, how it did upset me!_ + _Then he sent me round a little note,_ + _Just a little note,_ + _This is what he wrote:_ + _“Can’t get away to marry you to-day—_ + _My wife won’t let me.”_ + +That seems to me a well-calculated chorus, and the clinch of the last two +lines couldn’t be beaten. But perhaps the austere Mr. Archer would think +it debasing on the grounds that it led the audience to think lightly of +bigamy. + +Bigamy is one of the chief comic-song subjects. Vermin in one’s bed, +drunkenness, and the food in boarding-houses are the others. The “booze” +songs are not, as a rule, as good as they should be. The only one I +remember that was at all neat ran _something_ like: + + _First she had some marmalade,_ + _And then she had some jam,_ + _Then some dozen of oysters_ + _And then a plate of ham,_ + _A lobster and a crab or two_ + _And a pint of bottled beer,_ + _A little gin hot to settle the lot_ + _—And that’s what made her queer._ + +I certainly don’t suggest that any of the songs I have quoted—and I’m +certain that consultation with a few expert friends, now in Flanders, +would bring better ones to light—are masterpieces. But I do think they +are quite comic verse, and that if all music-hall songs were as well +turned there would not be much ground for complaint. One does, that +is, laugh _occasionally_ at a music-hall, in spite of Mr. Archer. +But, unhappily, of ninety-nine songs out of a hundred the words are +too abysmal for anything, and the serious ones are almost invariably +imbecile. I wonder, by the way, whether the music-hall authorities ever +try to induce competent comic rhymers, known in other spheres, to turn +out songs for them? Probably not; they think the words don’t matter. +That they are mistaken (though the tunes count for most) is shown by the +way that a song with good words succeeds with the audience. Even one +ingenious line will often bring the house down. I remember the old song +_I can’t change it_. There was a stanza about a bride who appalled her +bridegroom by taking herself to pieces, removing a wig, a glass eye, a +wooden arm, two wooden legs, etc. In the chorus the narrator suddenly +described her as “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree,” and this admirable if +unrefined trope was the most successful thing of the year. But as I say, +I largely agree with Mr. Archer. If only they would let me smoke in +theatres I would never go near a music-hall again until the programmes +were improved, and I imagine many other people are in the same boat. + + + + +More Music-Hall Songs + + +How little do we know the consequences of our acts. “I say there is not +a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel with his squaw, but +the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? +It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand +alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.” That was Carlyle’s way +of putting it. Somebody wrote a book of theatrical reminiscences: the +book set Mr. William Archer pondering on the fatuity of music-halls; Mr. +Archer’s article made me try to remember comic fragments of music-hall +songs; and my observations would appear, judging from the quantities of +correspondence they have produced, to have tempted whole families to +spend their evenings trying to recall the popular choruses of their youth. + +Numbers of them seem to have better memories than mine. Whole verses of +_More Work for the Undertaker_ (I think it was Mr. Dunville’s song) reach +me. The scheme may be illustrated by one stanza: + + _Sammy Snoozer laboured on the railway;_ + _His work he was very clever at!_ + _Sammy one day was a-polishing the metals_ + _With a lump of mouldy fat._ + _Up come a runaway engine,_ + _Sammy stood upon the track;_ + _He held out his arms, for he firmly believed_ + _He could push that locomotive back._ + + (The drum: _Boom!!_) + + (Chorus) + + _More work for the undertaker,_ + _Another little job for the tombstone-maker;_ + _At the local cemetery they’ve_ + _Been very very busy with a brand-new grave,_ + _For Snoozer’s_ + _Snuffed it!_ + +I am afraid that I should have to grant Mr. Archer the verse: the second +line, especially, cannot be called a model of good craftsmanship. +But the chorus is very neat. It was varied with each verse. Another +correspondent’s specimen finishes with “For Frederick’s fragments.” + +I must bow to the correspondent who suggests that the success of the song +about the bride with artificial limbs was at least as much due to lines +he quotes as it was to “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree.” His lines are: + + _I can’t change her!_ + _No matter how I try,_ + _But I’ll chop her up for firewood_ + _In the sweet by-and-by._ + +An equally impolite chorus is that of Herbert Campbell’s _’Blige a Lady_ +which another correspondent sends. The conductor, on a rainy day, asked +the inside males to give up a seat to a lady and go outside, and the +reply was on the lines of + + _Said I, “Old chap, she may have my lap,_ + _But I don’t get wet for her.”_ + +That is very typical music-hall; and it will be observed that it gets +its effect by sticking close, as Wordsworth advised, to the natural +phraseology and sequence of everyday speech. + +Mr. Albert Chevalier, I admit, I did not mention. He has not been +primarily a music-hall artist, and Mr. Archer himself made an exception +of his songs. Some of Mr. Gus Elen’s certainly might be quoted: _e. g._ +_’E dunno where ’e are_ and _What’s the Use of looking out for Work?_ I +am afraid that I am not sufficiently well informed to answer questions +as to the sources of supply of modern music-hall songs. The only thing +I have observed is that large numbers of the worst ones are composed +by persons whose names suggest that the use of the English language is +with them rather an acquired than an inherited characteristic. How far +the practice prevails of a particular star employing a tame author to +write the words of all his songs for him I do not know. I have never +consciously met a writer of music-hall songs, though I did know one +man who made two attempts to produce what he thought the right sort of +commodity. He sent them to an entrepreneur, but all his wit was wasted. +The chorus of one song mentioned a well-known and much-advertised +comestible: this wouldn’t do, as all the vendors of similar articles +would be jealous and, possibly, refuse to advertise any more on the +programme. In the other song the author had had the misfortune to hit +upon an idea which had been used before. His refrain was: + + _And when the pie was opened_ + _The birds began to sing._ + +But there was an old song with the same tail to it. It was a song about +a pigeon-pie which was no better than it should be. This reminds me that +in tabulating favourite music-hall subjects one should certainly have +mentioned bad smells. Throughout history any reference to unpleasant +smells has moved the Englishman to roars of laughter. Perhaps it is +because we so thoroughly dislike them. I don’t think that these odours +take all nations in quite the same way: but travellers on the Continent +are sometimes tempted to think that most nations do not notice them so +much as we do. + +The music-hall versifier, usually feeble when funny, is certainly at his +worst when serious. Such of the war-songs as I have heard are dreadful. +Perhaps those I have not heard are better. Early in the war I was looking +into a music-shop window in Upper Shaftesbury Avenue and saw two typical +titles. One was _Only a Bit of Khaki that Daddy wore at Mons_, and the +other was _The Little Irish Red Cross Nurse_. I did not dare to buy them, +but I could not help admiring the ingenuity of the author of the second +who had managed to work the perennial Irish Girl theme so neatly into the +new subject. All music-hall poets seem to be obsessed by Irish girls. +They will even work them into translations of foreign songs which do not +mention them. Five or six years ago a German music-hall song which had +nothing whatever to do with Irish girls was imported and became very +popular here. The ideas of the original were largely preserved, but an +Irish girl had to be stuck in. But _quo, Musa, tendis?_ If I go on like +this I shall end by agreeing with Mr. Archer. + + + + +Utopias + + +I saw recently a very entertaining article by Mr. Walter Lippman in the +_New Republic_ on the subject of Utopias. Mr. Lippman raised the question +of why it was Utopias had gone out of fashion. Since Mr. Wells wrote his +_Modern Utopia_ no one has had a shot. + +It is, of course, not the longest period in human history which has +gone without a new Utopia. As far as I know, nothing of the sort was +constructed between the time of Plato and that of Sir Thomas More. +Reasons might, no doubt, be discovered for this long lapse. The Romans +were too realistic to bother about such things, and in the Middle Ages +the only people who could write were priests, and they probably did not +dare outline any other perfect society than that of the New Jerusalem. +In fact, Utopias of any merit have until recently always been produced +at long intervals: with the exception of Bacon’s _New Atlantis_ and +Campanella’s _City of the Sun_, which were, I think, published in the +same year. The nineteenth century must have produced more imaginary +states of this kind than all its predecessors put together. And if we +stop constructing Utopias, this will happen not because we have ceased +to hanker after them, but because the complexities of civilization have +become too unmanageable to handle. When the structures of society and +industry were comparatively simple, a man could invent an ideal state +which would not look too far removed from the states he knew. We can +still go on dreaming of little paradises, such as that in Morris’s _News +from Nowhere_; but what it is difficult to do is to describe fully an +imaginary community which is world-wide, or, at any rate, in contact +with the whole world, which has to face the problems of race, and which +has to take over from existing civilization our highly developed methods +of manufacture and distribution of labour. Mr. Wells did try to depict +a state that might grow out of the existing order; but his picture is +notably less complete than those of older writers. He could only hope to +produce his effect by giving us a series of cinema glimpses of various +aspects of life. Personally, I doubt whether any one else will even +attempt the job. + +One could wish that somebody would make a thorough study of the principal +Utopias that the mind of man has conceived. Such a study would offer +many interesting paths to research. We might find out, for example, to +how great an extent the Utopians of various ages and nations have been +influenced (as Plato was conspicuously influenced) by the transient +conditions of their own time. For instance, the great variety of opinion +which Utopians have held with regard to the precious metals would be +worth examination. Some have held them in great respect; others have +vindictively suggested that they should be put to the basest possible +uses. Again, how far has each writer of this kind been influenced by his +predecessor? It can scarcely be supposed, for instance, that Campanella +did not lift his communistic ideas bodily from Plato, or that Mr. Wells’s +class of Samurai owed nothing to the same inspiration. Sometimes one sees +a quite minor and obviously personal idea lifted clean or adapted with +slight alterations which make it all the more curious. For example, in +More’s _Utopia_ brides and bridegrooms before marriage always inspected +each other in a state of nature. It is to be presumed that More had +some peculiar crank on this subject; for he mentions the possibility of +concealing deformities as though it were a common practice that should +certainly be guarded against by law. When we get to Bacon we find this +odd idea copied, with the difference that it is now the friends of the +respective parties that make the examination. + +The endless queer details in Utopias would in themselves make such a +study amusing. Plato’s passion to secure that no mother should know +her own child; the preposterously exact account of the amount of money +subscribed towards the foundation of the new state in Theodor Hertzka’s +_Freeland_; the wonderful battle between the fleets of, if I remember +rightly, Abyssinia and Europe in the same book; the trains going two +hundred miles an hour, so smoothly that people played billiards on +them, in Mr. Wells’s New World. I remember another Utopia, an obscure +eighteenth-century one, in which persons who had committed murders were +given the choice of being executed in honour or surviving in disgrace. +If they chose death they were led to the scaffold amid universal +applause, their names were inscribed upon rolls of honour, and their +relatives were given fat jobs. Then, again, one could have a quite +interesting chapter on the various literary devices by which authors +have precipitated readers into their supposititious communities. More’s +introduction—with the bronzed and bearded seaman who went out with the +companions of Columbus and was stranded on an unknown island—is as +charming as any. Later dodges have been more far-fetched. Mr. Wells’s +transferment to the twin-world of this one is very subtle; Edward Bellamy +made his hero wake up after centuries in a room where he asked for Edith +(his old fiancée) and was conveniently answered by another lady of the +same name. I say nothing of the books which lie on the outskirts of +Utopian literature, such as various grotesque Utopias and anti-Utopias +and books like Lord Lytton’s _The Coming Race_ and W. H. Hudson’s _The +Crystal Age_, which last is, I believe, the only book on record which +purports to have been written by a man who dies in the last chapter and +describes his own demise. And the practical attempts to set up working +ideal communities—such as the Oneida community which developed into a +prosperous “Mfg. Coy.”—are another pleasant by-way. + +I think that with all the peculiarities of time and place, all the +eccentricities of personal taste, and all the genuine varieties of ideals +allowed for, a student of Comparative Utopianism would probably find that +there was a good deal in the way of method and a very great deal in the +way of aim that all Utopians have in common. Mr. Yeats once suggested +that if we put together whatever the great poets have affirmed in their +finest moments we should come as near as possible to an authoritative +religion. In the same way, one feels that if one tabulated the ideals of +the most successful writers of Utopias we should be able to extract, if +not a residuum of agreed schemes, at least a common element of aspiration +which we might fairly say represented the permanent ideals of the human +race respecting the ordering of our life on earth. Really intelligent and +altruistic men—and nobody without some intelligence and some altruism +would bother to conceive a Utopia—have a tendency to dream the same +sort of dreams. To take it on its negative side, no deviser of an ideal +state, as far as I am aware, has proposed immense inequalities in the +distribution of wealth, crowded and insanitary houses, child labour, wars +of aggression, or sweating. There are large numbers of industrious and +accurate people in this country and America who are hunting for subjects +about which they can write volumes of “research.” I wish one of them +would write the book I suggest. + + + + +Charles II in English Verse + + +I was talking to a man the other day about books that ought to have been +written and have not been, when it occurred to me that somebody might +publish a very amusing selection of panegyrics written on undeserving +persons: say, the less immaculate of the English kings. I once thought of +writing a life of Charles II, each chapter of which should be headed by +an extract from some contemporary poem about him. The contrast between +the character and private and public actions of this monarch and the +descriptions of him by literary eulogists would have been illuminating. +Gross flattery was the habit of the time. James the First was given, very +unfairly as I think, the title of the British Solomon; and the Royal +Martyr, who after all had some virtues very highly developed, was written +of in terms which would have been extreme if applied to St. Francis of +Assisi. But no one, not even his father, received such wholehearted +praises as Charles II. + +His career as a recipient of them began early. When he was a child +Francis Quarles’s _Divine Fancies_ were dedicated to him. The Dedication +was headed: “To the Royal Bud of Majesty and Centre of our Hopes and +Happiness, Charles,” and began: “Illustrious Infant, Give me leave to +acknowledge myself thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself my Prince.” +The hope is held out that the illustrious infant will become “a most +incomparable Prince, the firm pillar of our happiness and the future +object of the world’s wonder.” Addressing then the boy’s governess, Lady +Dorset, Quarles becomes even more rhapsodical: + + “Most excellent Lady, + + “You are the Star which stands over the Place where the Babe + lies. By whose directions’ light, I come from the East to + present my Myrrh and Frankincense to the young child. Let not + our Royal Joseph nor his princely Mary be afraid; there are no + Herods here. We have all seen his Star in the East, and have + rejoyced: our loyall hearts are full; for our eyes have seen + him, in whom our Posterity shall be blessed.” + +One could scarcely hope that Quarles’s successors would quite live up to +that. + +Dryden’s poem on Charles’s return to England is pitched a little lower. +It certainly contains lines like + + _The winds that never moderation knew,_ + _Afraid to blow too much, too faintly blew;_ + _Or out of breath with joy would not enlarge_ + _Their straightened lungs...._ + +but that is a mere excess of avowed fancy. When he wrote his _Threnodia +Augustalis_ on Charles’s death, Dryden decidedly went one better. Perhaps +it was that he had had twenty-five years of Charles’s reign in which to +appreciate fully the King’s reverend qualities. He calls him + + _That all-forgiving King_ + _The type of Him above,_ + _That unexhausted spring_ + _Of clemency and love._ + +He apostrophizes the Muse of History: + + _Be true, O Clio, to thy hero’s name!_ + _But draw him strictly so_ + _That all who view the piece may know;_ + _He needs no trappings of fictitious fame,_ + _The load’s too weighty._ + +The anguished poet almost blasphemes against heaven for taking away so +peerless a sovereign; until he remembers that “saints and angels” had +been done out of Charles’s company for so long that their turn might +fairly be considered to have come. And there is the further consolation +that a James has succeeded a Charles: + + _Our Atlas fell indeed, but Hercules was near;_ + +or, as the Earl of Halifax put it, + + _James is our Charles in all things else but name._ + +Which Charles himself at least knew to be untrue. + +The Halifax extract comes out of another funeral poem On the Death of His +Most Sacred Majesty. “Farewell,” he cries, + + _great Charles, monarch of blest renown,_ + _The best good man that ever fill’d a throne._ + +He sketches Charles’s career. He compares his exile to the banishment of +David (an open crib _from Astræ Redux_) and says of England that, when he +came back, + + _to his arms she fled_ + _And rested on his shoulders her fair bending head._ + +He “Us from our foes and from ourselves did save.” Only the almost +inevitable comparison to the Almighty can do him justice: + + _In Charles so good a man and King we see_ + _A double image of the deity._ + _Oh! had he more resembled it! Oh, why_ + _Was he not still more like, and could not die?_ + +What did become of Charles is suggested by “the Lord R” in a poem which +appears in _Miscellany Poems_: + + _Good kings are number’d with Immortal Gods_ + _When hence translated to the best Abodes,_ + _For Princes (truly great) can never die,_ + _They only lay aside Mortality._ + +After which we are told that the deceased is in Olympus passing the +nectar round; an occupation that should have suited him very well. + +Perhaps the suggestion will be adopted. Let some publisher with a series +of anthologies get somebody to compile The Hundred Most Fulsome Poems in +the English Language. It would be a more entertaining book than most. +Very few examples, I think, would be drawn from the last hundred years. +As respects the monarchs, Great Elizabeth, the Great Jameses, the Great +Charleses, Great William, Great Anne, and the Great Georges all got +their full share of adulation. The break comes, I think, with George IV; +since whose accession we have lost the habit. Any one who should address +his sovereign to-day in words like those addressed to Charles II by his +subjects (e. g. Great George, the planets tremble at thy nod) would be +suspected of pulling the sovereign’s leg. + + + + +The Most Durable Books + + +The question of what books one would take with one for a prolonged +sojourn on a desert island is an old one. I thought it had lost its +interest for me, as too remote. For I do not propose to live on a desert +island; and if ever, by accident, I am cast upon the shore of one, +clinging to a solitary plank, it is unlikely that I shall have spent the +last hour on shipboard selecting mental food for a highly problematical +future as a hermit. But a letter from a distressed man in the trenches +revives my interest in the question. He complains that he very rapidly +exhausts the books that are sent him; that few of them are much use +as permanent companions; and that, as they take up room, he can carry +only a small bundle of them about with him. He cannot make up his mind +which ones to get and stick to; and he ends by putting the ancient poser +to me: “What three” (it is always three) “books would you rather have +with you if you had to live on a desert island?” He adds, with somewhat +unnecessary bluntness, that he will not believe me if I say that one of +them would be the Bible. + +I suppose there must be some definition of what a book—what _one_ +book—is. Otherwise one’s first impulse is to demand, as the companions +of solitude, _the Encyclopædia Britannica_, the _Dictionary of National +Biography_, and the _Oxford English Dictionary_—say some hundred and +twenty volumes in all. With these one could spend a fairly long life in +retreat without ever reading the same page twice. One might even read +with a definite scheme which would give one the semblance of systematic +inquiry united with a happy unexpectedness of route. Suppose, for +example, one were to start each day from something one had seen in the +morning. A boa-constrictor, for instance. Having twisted its neck and +left it for dead—castaways are very powerful fellows—one would go home +to the old hut and refer to _Boa in the Encyclopædia_. Having learnt all +about its anatomy, progenitiveness, and habitats, one would then refer +to the _Oxford Dictionary_ for the derivation of its name. Underneath +the philological discourse would be quotations from authors who had +referred to the beast or to its feathery similitude. The swift advent of +the tropic night would find one still immersed in the _D.N.B._ lives of +these authors. On a large rock outside one would keep, with a charred +stick, a list of the objects already dealt with; once in a way perhaps, +for sentiment’s sake, one would start from an old word again and revive +memories of the Boa Trail. A person of simple tastes, granted the island +produced enough goats and not too many constrictors, might well spend in +this way a life as contented as Horace’s. But to select those three books +would be cheating. + +One might fairly suggest, in such a connexion, that a book is either +(1) any single coherent work by one author, or two in collaboration; or +(2) any series of works which either has been, or might reasonably be +expected to be, published in a single volume. The edition for island +use would not, however, necessarily be a one-volume edition. This rules +out these distended works of reference, whilst letting in every single +piece of creative literature that exists. There may seem to be an unfair +discrimination between author and author, the poets, especially, as a +body, being at a great advantage over the novelists; but if novelists +will be so verbose they must suffer for it. What, then, would one’s three +books be? + +I can think of a good many books that I have not read and that I hope +to enjoy reading. There is _The Life of John Buncle_, there is _Old +Mortality_, there is _Hard Times_, there is Tom Paine’s _Rights of Man_, +there is Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_—and I am imperfectly acquainted +with the works of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. (I have also not +read _Ordeal by Battle_, and I don’t intend to.) But the mere fact that +one has not read a work which one knows to be interesting is not enough +to qualify it. It would be enough if one were proposing to be marooned +for a fortnight or three weeks and then taken off the island by “willing +hands”; but the books one wants for a residence of many years are books +one is sufficiently familiar with to be certain that they will not grow +stale at the fifty-fifth reading. + +Well, Gibbon is a large and a very long book. I have been through it +once, and I am pretty sure I shall do so again. But after that I suspect +that the passages with pencil-marks beside them will satisfy me. I +certainly could not, just after finishing it, recommence it at once, as +Lord Randolph Churchill used to do, or make a practice of dipping into +it daily. Great as it is, it is not sufficiently varied or sufficiently +human. For perpetual reference no general history, I think, would do; +one must have something more of the flavour of everyday humanity in it. +And every mood and every kind of character must be represented. Though +the books may supplement one another, one finds one’s choice growing +at once very narrow. Even Horace Walpole’s _Letters_ or Saint-Simon’s +_Memoirs_ would pall—at any rate on me. Shakespeare will do; but I cannot +personally think of anything which, for me, would contest the other +places with Boswell and Rabelais, unless it were _Morte d’Arthur_. + +There are people, no doubt, who would take _Don Quixote_ or Montaigne. +One man I know thinks that _Tristram Shandy_ would go with him. But +Sterne is too short; one would get to know him by heart in a month or +two. _Robinson Crusoe_ would have obvious advantages, especially in +an illustrated edition—which would provide one with useful models when +one was cutting out one’s garments. But I think I should take the three +I have mentioned—unless, indeed, I approached the matter from quite a +different angle. There is a strong case for taking a selection of the +more morose and bewildered modern novels—say _La Curée_, _Le Paradis des +Dames_, and _L’Assommoir_, or a judicious selection from Artzybascheff, +Mr. Cannan, and Mr. D. H. Lawrence. For these would do a great deal to +reconcile one to one’s lonely lot. Whenever one was regretting the world +of men one would find an everflowing spring of consolation in them. +“After all,” one would say, after each agued page, “there is a good deal +to be said for a desert island.” + + + + +The Worst Style in the World + + +The word “euphuism” is commonly employed: it is also commonly confused +with “euphemism.” The thing is very properly condemned, and the book +that gave it its name is usually condemned with it. But it is probable +that John Lyly’s _Euphues_ has frequently been abused by persons who +have never opened it. At any rate, confessions of having read it are +few, and have usually proceeded from the small minority who have found +merit in the book. It is very interesting, therefore, to see that Messrs. +Croll and Clemons have just published, through Routledge, a new edition, +fully annotated. A generation unfamiliar with it will have a chance of +reassessing it. + +The work is in two parts. _Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit_ was first +published in 1578; _Euphues and his England_ in 1580. How immediately +popular it was is shown by the fact that (my authority is Mr. Arundell +Esdaile’s _Bibliography of English Tales and Romances_) four editions +of the first part, three of the second, and then at least seventeen +editions of both parts together were published in fifty-eight years. +(His name, incidentally, is spelt on various title-pages Lylly, Lyly, +Lylie, Lilie, Lyllie, and Lily: a diversity worthy of “Shakspear.”) For +a time almost everybody with any pretensions talked and wrote euphuism, +very often employing Lyly’s fantastic alliterations, antitheses, and +superfluous imagery without the content of sense that Lyly always had. +Some writers openly ridiculed it. Shakespeare and Jonson made sport with +euphuistic characters, and Sidney (who, I think, did not entirely escape +the influence) ridiculed this + + _Talking of beasts, birds, fishes, flies,_ + _Playing with words and idle similes._ + +But the development of English prose was sensibly changed by it, and its +effect may be traced in the prose of Donne, Taylor, and Browne. The book +itself, however, like all extravagantly mannered books, had its slump in +the end. Early in James I’s reign the wider public seems to have turned +away from it, and in 1632, E. Blount, the publisher, prefacing an edition +of Lyly’s plays, referred to him as a forgotten poet whose grave he was +digging up. Blount’s own language is a terrible example of what Euphuism +may come to. He calls his author “a Lilly growing in a Grove of Lawrels”: + + “These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a Churchyard; + But I have gathered the scattered branches up, and by a Charme + (gotten from _Apollo_) made them greene againe, and set up as + Epitaphes to his Memory. A sinne it were to suffer these Rare + Monuments of wit, to lie covered with Dust, and a shame, such + conceipted Comedies, should be acted by none but wormes.” + +From 1636 to 1868, when the late Professor Arber (a man whose memory +has not been sufficiently honoured) published his edition in the +“English Reprints,” _Euphues_ never appeared again, save in two brief +eighteenth-century adaptations. For almost a hundred years his names +was never mentioned; Lilly the astrologer was much better known. Most +eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics dismissed him as a man who, +in Sir Walter Scott’s words, deformed his works “by the most unnatural +affectation that ever disgraced a printed page.” One of the few +exceptions was Charles Kingsley, who in _Westward Ho!_ attacks Lyly’s +critics with tremendous enthusiasm: + + “I shall only answer by asking, Have they ever read it? For + if they have done so, I pity them if they have not found it, + in spite of occasional tediousness and pedantry, as brave, + righteous, and pious a book as man need look into; and wish for + no better proof of the nobleness and virtue of the Elizabethan + age than the fact that _Euphues_ and the _Arcadia_ were the two + popular romances of the day.” + +Turning at this stage, on a sudden impulse, to my Encyclopædia, to see +whether sense is talked about Lyly there, I find that the article on him +is by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Life is full of surprises. + +The truth of the matter is that everybody is right, except those who do +not trouble to read the book. Kingsley is perfectly correct; it would +be difficult to find a book of the time finer in feeling or inspired by +higher conceptions of conduct. Lyly is as full of common sense as of +refinement; and the fact that he drew much of his discourses on education +and religion from other writers does not diminish the impression made +by his attitude to life. His narrative does not come to much; most of +his space is occupied by harangues, debates, treatises, and letters; +his Neapolitan and English love-stories move at a snail’s pace. But—his +first discussion, by the way, is on heredity and environment which, with +startling modernity, he calls Nature and Nurture—he usually argues about +things of perennial interest, and always with subtlety, delicacy, and +an insight into the human heart. Still, Sir Walter Scott really was not +exaggerating the monstrosity—though it is not uniformly monstrous—of his +style. It takes some patience to put up with the construction of his +sentences and his recurrent bunches of similes in order to follow his +argument. On the second page you fall plump into this sentence: + + “The freshest colours soonest fade, the keenest Rasor soonest + tourneth his edge, the finest cloth is soonest eaten with + the Moathes, and the Cambricke sooner stayned than the course + Canvas: which appeared well in this Euphues, whose wit beeing + like waxe, apt to receive any impression, and bearing the + head in his own hande, either to use the rayne or the spurre, + disdayning counsaile, leaving his country, loathing his old + acquaintance, thought either by wit to obteyne some conquest, + or by shame to abyde some conflict, who preferring fancy before + friends, and this present humor, before honour to come, laid + reason in water being too salt for his tast, and followed + unbridaled affection, most pleasant for his tooth.” + +The mania for balance and alliteration is shown here, but not the equally +characteristic passion for piling animals and plants, mainly out of +Pliny, into mounds of comparisons. They are most tolerable when the +statements made are least verifiable. Here are two specimens: + + “The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the Sea-Crab, and + is immediately recured: the Torteyse having tasted the Viper, + sucketh Origanum and is quickly revived: the Beare ready to + pine licketh up the Ants and is recovered: the Dog having + surfetted to procure his vomitte, eateth grasse and findeth + remedy: the Hart beein perced with the dart, runneth out of + hand to the hearb _Dicbanum_, and is healed.” + + “Then good Euphues let the falling out of friendes be a + renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble the bones + of the Lyon, which lying stil and not moved begin to rot, but + being stricken one against another break out like fire, and wax + greene.” + +Yet sometimes he will conclude a paragraph of such abnormalities with +a short, humorous, or pathetic sentence which is most effective; and +even sentences bearing the evident marks of his style sometimes move +one strongly in their context. I may quote such sentences as Lucilla’s +two complaints: “But I would to God Euphues would repair hither that +the sight of him might mitigate some part of my martyrdome,” and the +extremely sibilant but musical “O my Euphues, lyttle dost thou knowe +the sodeyn sorrowe that I susteine for thy sweete sake.” What a really +judicious critic would do would be to ridicule the style and admire the +book. + + + + +The Reconstruction of Orthography + + +Reconstruction is a blessed word, and very comprehensive: but I doubt +whether the Government, when it established the Reconstruction Committee, +anticipated that it would be asked to consider the problem of Spelling +Reform. The Simplified Spelling Society, however, has sent it a memorial +urging that “the reform of English spelling is eminently one that merits +the practical consideration of the Committee.” The signatories include a +number of scientific and other professors, scores of teachers, and a tail +composed of “men of business, men of letters, editors, etc.” The editors +do not include any man who edits a London daily or a literary weekly, +though the directive minds of the _Lady’s Realm_ and the _Ardrossan and +Saltcoats Herald_ are in the movement; and the only “men of letters” +are Messrs. William Archer, H. G. Wells, Eden Phillpotts, T. Seccombe +(at whom I am surprised), and a few persons who combine authorship with +business or with “etc.” One did not want this piece of negative evidence +to convince one that authors, as a body, will fight Simplifyd Speling +to the last mute k. The memorial makes the usual points about saving +children’s time, facilitating the acquisition of foreign languages, +lightening the work of teaching defective children, and assisting aliens +who are acquiring our tongue. We are also told that “the demand for a +rational spelling may be compared to that for decimalizing our coinage +and our weights and measures.” + +This comparison seems to me very misleading, if by decimalization is +meant the introduction of the Continental metric system. For this +latter is uniform in various countries, whereas the reform suggested +by the Simplified Spelling Society would do nothing to approximate the +sound-values of our letters to those of letters in foreign tongues. +Cosmopolitan systems have been proposed, very complex and full of odd +new letters; but this Society’s suggestions, whilst eliminating some +difficulties for the foreigner, would leave English just as difficult for +a Frenchman to pronounce as French is for an Englishman. Take the phrase +(I find it here) “A Ferst Reeder in Simplifyd Speling.” A Frenchman +would still mispronounce it. If he wished to indicate those sounds in +the French way he would write (I am not a phonetician) something like “E +Fœust,” etc. So the Society had better not pitch its promises too high. +This, nevertheless, remains a minor point. The chief considerations +undoubtedly are the domestic effects of this piece of Reconstruction. + +It sounds all very simple and convincing when people say: “Our spoken +language has diverged from our written language: let our written language +be made the same as our spoken language.” But directly you go into the +matter you find that the difficulties are enormous. That we have no one +spoken language is a commonplace. Our speech varies from fashion to +fashion and from locality to locality. “Educated” English at present has +an increasing Cockney element in it. The common “cultured” pronunciation +of “No,” for instance, embodies an “o” sound which is anything but pure. +Many rustics, however, still pronounce it with a good broad vowel. Even +the spelling reformers do not agree about words. A. J. Ellis thought +the “r” at the end of “proper” was still there; Sweet thought it had +disappeared. As a matter of fact, it is both there and not there: in some +classes and parts it is pronounced, in some it is not. And it is quite +possible that it will become universal again. + +This gets us on to the question of change in time. The Reformers +can be met both ways. If it be argued that phonetic spelling fixes +pronunciation, why have we abandoned the old pronunciation of words +once phonetically spelt? Shakespeare pronounced the initial “k” in +“know” and “knee.” We have dropped it out. And we have no guarantee that +spelling these words according to our present slack pronunciation would +not be followed by another divergence. The history of the word “sea” +is odd. In the Middle Ages it was spelt “see” and pronounced “say.” +In Tudor times the spelling was altered to “sea” in order to make the +spelling correspond to the sound (the same as that in “great”). We have +reached a pronunciation which the original spelling would have correctly +represented! If it be argued that spelling does not fix pronunciation, +the case for the reform is seriously weakened. The truth of the matter +is that nothing can fix a pronunciation, but that the written word, +especially in an age of universal literacy, does exercise a pull. And +that pull can as well be exercised by our present spellings as by new +ones. I think it was Titus Oates who went to the scaffold, or somewhere, +crying “Lard! Lard!” Had he been a spelling reformer he would have quite +unnecessarily assimilated the spelling of “lord” with that of the name of +the white stuff they keep in bladders: a distinct loss to the language. +Mr. Murison, in the _Cambridge History of Literature_, points out that +the word “kiln” was originally pronounced as spelt; then for some time +the “n” was dropped; then the old pronunciation returned. The same thing +happened to words containing the diphthong “oi.” “Join” and “oil” were, +in Middle English, pronounced as they are now. But for centuries men +called them “jine” and “ile,” a habit that still persists amongst many +of the most eager supporters of Spelling Reform. “H’s” were dropped +wholesale and then picked up again. We never know, in fact, whether we +shall not return to an old way of speech; and we might as well do that as +diverge from an old way of writing. + +The great consolation of conservatives in this matter is the length of +time during which the enthusiasts have continuously failed to bring about +a change. This is the oldest of the Campaigns. It was already old when in +1585 a book was published with this title-page (differently accented): + + “AEsopz Fable’z in true Orto’graphy with Grammar-nótz. + Heryuntoo ar al’so jooined the short sentencez of the wyz Cato + imprinted with lyk form and order: both of which Autorz ar + transláted out of Latin intoo English. By William Bullokar.” + +I don’t suppose that the Reconstruction Committee will find time to +consider this matter. But if they do think of handling it they should +realize that they are going to put their hands into a nestful of the +largest hornets. + + + + +Mr. James Joyce + + +Mr. James Joyce is a curious phenomenon. He first appeared in literary +Dublin about (I suppose) a dozen years ago: a strangely solitary and +self-sufficient and obviously gifted man. He published a small book +of verse with one or two good lyrics in it; and those who foresaw a +future for him became certain they were right. He published nothing; +but his reputation spread even amongst those who had never read a +line he had written. He disappeared from Ireland and went to Austria, +where he settled. The war came, and soon afterwards his second +book—_Dubliners_—was issued and reviewed with a general deference, after +wandering about for years among publishers who had been fighting shy of +it because of its undoubted unpleasantness and a reference to Edward VII. +Another interval and _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ began to +run serially in the _Egoist_. “The Egoist, Ltd.,” has now published this +book, and nobody is surprised to find all writing London talking about +it. Mr. Joyce has only done what was expected. + +Whether this book is supposed to be a novel or an autobiography I do not +know or care. Presumably some characters and episodes are fictitious, +or the author would not even have bothered to employ fictitious names. +But one is left with the impression that almost all the way one has been +listening to sheer undecorated, unintensified truth. Mr. Joyce’s title +suggests, well enough, his plan. There is no “plot.” The subsidiary +characters appear and recede, and not one of them is involved throughout +in the career of the hero. Stephen Dedalus is born; he goes to school; +he goes to college. His struggles are mainly inward: there is nothing +unusual in that. He has religious crises: heroes of fiction frequently +do. He fights against, succumbs to, and again fights against sexual +temptation: we have stories on those lines in hundreds. All the same, we +have never had a novel in the least degree resembling this one; whether +it is mainly success or mainly failure, it stands by itself. + +You recognize its individuality in the very first paragraph. Mr. Joyce +tries to put down the vivid and incoherent memories of childhood in +a vivid and incoherent way: to show one Stephen Dedalus’s memories +precisely as one’s own memories might appear if one ransacked one’s mind. +He opens: + + “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a + moocow coming down along the road and the moocow that was down + along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ...” + +“His mother had a nicer smell than his father,” he proceeds. There is +verisimilitude in this; but a critic on the look-out for Mr. Joyce’s +idiosyncrasies would certainly fasten upon his preoccupation with +the olfactory—which sometimes leads him to write things he might as +well have left to be guessed at—as one of them. Still, it is a minor +characteristic. His major characteristics are his intellectual integrity, +his sharp eyes, and his ability to set down precisely what he wants to +set down. He is a realist of the first order. You feel that he means to +allow no personal prejudice or predilection to distort the record of what +he sees. His perceptions may be naturally limited; but his honesty in +registering their results is complete. It is even a little too complete. +There are some things that we are all familiar with and that ordinary +civilized manners (not pharisaism) prevent us from importing into general +conversation. Mr. Joyce can never resist a dunghill. He is not, in fact, +quite above the pleasure of being shocking. Generally speaking, however, +he carries conviction. He is telling the truth about a type and about +life as it presents itself to that type. + +He is a genuine realist: that is to say, he puts in the exaltations as +well as the depressions, the inner life as well as the outer. He is +not morosely determined to paint everything drab. Spiritual passions +are as powerful to him as physical passions; and as far as his own +bias goes it may as well be in favour of Catholic asceticism as of +sensual materialism. For his detachment as author is almost inhuman. If +Stephen is himself, then he is a self who is expelled and impartially +scrutinized, without pity or “allowances,” directly Mr. Joyce the artist +gets to work. And of the other characters one may say that they are +always given their due, always drawn so as to evoke the sympathy they +deserve, yet are never openly granted the sympathy of the author. He is +the outsider, the observer, the faithful selector of significant traits, +moral and physical; his judgments, if he forms them, are concealed. He +never even shows by a quiver of the pen that anything distresses him. + +His prose instrument is a remarkable one. Few contemporary writers are +effective in such diverse ways; his method varies with the subject-matter +and never fails him. His dialogue (as in the remarkable discussions at +home about Parnell and Stephen’s education) is as close to the dialogue +of life as anything I have ever come across; though he does not make +the gramophonic mistake of spinning it out as it is usually spun out +in life and in novels that aim at a faithful reproduction of life and +only succeed in sending one to sleep. And his descriptive and narrative +passages include at one pole sounding periods of classical prose and +at the other disjointed and almost futuristic sentences. The finest +sustained pages in the book contain the sermon in which a dear, simple +old priest expounds the unimaginable horrors of hell: the immeasurable +solid stench as of a “huge and rolling human fungus,” the helplessness +of the damned, “not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws +it,” the fierceness of the fire in which “the blood seethes and boils in +the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast +glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the +tender eyes flaming like molten balls.” Stephen, after listening to this, + + “came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the + scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched + by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the + corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs + hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and + shapeless.” + +No wonder. For myself, I had had an idea that this kind of exposition had +died with Drexelius; but after I had read it I suddenly and involuntarily +thought, “Good Lord, suppose it is all true!” That is a sufficient +testimony to the power of Mr. Joyce’s writing. + +This is not everybody’s book. The later portion, consisting largely of +rather dull student discussions, is dull; nobody could be inspired by +the story, and it had better be neglected by any one who is easily +disgusted. Its interest is mainly technical, using the word in its +broadest sense; and its greatest appeal, consequently, is made to the +practising artist in literature. What Mr. Joyce will do with his powers +in the future it is impossible to conjecture. I conceive that he does +not know himself: that, indeed, the discovery of a form is the greatest +problem in front of him. It is doubtful if he will make a novelist. + + + + +Tennessee + + +Letters from strangers can usually be accounted for. But why on earth I, +more than any one else, should have received a letter from America asking +me to contribute towards the re-establishment of a backwoods library I +don’t know. This, however, has been my experience, and I trust that I am +not endangering the new Anglo-Saxon Entente by relieving my feelings in +the following: + + LINES + + _Written on receiving from the Librarian of a College which + educates “the mountain youth of Tennessee” a request for “a + book” to assist in the re-formation of the Library, which was + recently destroyed by fire._ + + _Mine ears have heard your distant moan,_ + _O mountain youth of Tennessee;_ + _Even the bowels of a stone_ + _Would melt to your librarian’s plea._ + _Although we’re parted by the ocean,_ + _I’m most distressed about your fire:_ + _Only I haven’t any notion_ + _What sort of volume you require._ + + _I have a Greene, a Browne, a Gray,_ + _A Gilbert White, a William Black,_ + _Trollope and Lovelace, Swift and Gay,_ + _And Hunt and Synge: nor do I lack_ + _More sober folk for whom out there_ + _There may be rather better scope,_ + _Three worthy men of reverend air,_ + _A Donne, a Prior, and a Pope._ + + _Peacock or Lamb, discreetly taken,_ + _Might fill the hungry mountain belly,_ + _Or Hogg or Suckling, Crabbe or Bacon_ + _(Bacon’s not Shakespeare, Crabbe ~is~ Shelley)_ + _And if—for this is on the cards—_ + _You do not like this mental food,_ + _I might remit less inward bards:_ + _My well-worn Spenser or my Hood._ + + _Longfellows may be in your line_ + _(Littles we know are second-raters),_ + _Or one might speed across the brine_ + _A Mayflower full of Pilgrim Paters._ + _Or, then again, you may devote_ + _Yourselves to less æsthetic lore,_ + _Yet if I send you out a Grote[3]_ + _For all I know you’ll ask for More._ + + _O thus proceeds my vacillation:_ + _For now the obvious thought returns_ + _That after such a conflagration_ + _A fitting sequel might be Burns._ + _And now again I change my mind_ + _And, almost confidently, feel_ + _That since to Beg you are inclined_ + _You might like Borrow, say, or Steele...._ + + Envoi + + _Yes, Prince, this song ~shall~ have an end._ + _A sudden thought has come to me—_ + _The thing is settled: I shall send_ + _A Tennyson to Tennessee!_ + +But, as a matter of fact, unless I get a special permit for the export of +second-hand books, I shan’t be able to send them even that. + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[3] Or, with an appearance of greater generosity, one might return them +the Pound they sent us some years since. + + + + +Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George + + +“Representatives of literature and art” usually appear in the Honours +Lists, and they are usually queer representatives. The knighted +_littérateur_, as a rule, is either a second-rate man or a man long past +his prime. Possibly more men than we know of refuse these knighthoods. +For myself I do not see what on earth a really distinguished artist wants +with a knighthood, unless he is poor, and thinks that a title would add +a guinea or two per thousand to the price of his work. If Sir Samuel +Johnson, Sir Charles Dickens, Sir William Blake, Sir Robert Browning, +Sir W. Wordsworth, Sir S. Taylor Coleridge, Sir George Meredith stood +beside Sir Lewis Morris and Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, Sir Henry Dalziel, +and Sir Hedley le Bas (of the Caxton Publishing Company), I do not +conceive that those eminent writers would be held in greater honour than +they are, or that literature would cut a more important figure in our +social life. The one man to whom a knighthood may _usefully_ be given is +the deserving person who has worked conscientiously for years without +adequate recognition and of whose existence the public might—to his and +its advantage—be officially reminded. As the crown of a famous career a +knighthood is absurd. + +Sir William Watson has presumably got his knighthood for being one of +the most industrious of the war-poets—and a war-poet congenial to the +Powers-that-now-Be. Twenty years ago he had a greater reputation than he +now has, and wrote several good and many respectable poems. He is still +skilful, and can echo effectively the accents of Wordsworth and Milton; +but he is certainly not a man of whom one thinks when one is estimating +the vital forces in contemporary poetry. A new volume, _The Man who Saw_, +has just appeared. The title-poem is about the Prime Minister: + + _Out of that land where Snowdon night by night_ + _Receives the confidence of lonesome stars,_ + _And where Carnarvon’s ruthless battlements_ + _Magnificently oppress the daunted tide,_ + _There comes—no fabled Merlin, son of mist,_ + _And brother to the twilight, but a man_ + _Who in a time terrifically real_ + _Is real as the time; formed for the time;_ + _Not much beholden to the munificent Past,_ + _In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour;_ + _No faggot of perfections, angel or saint,_ + _Created faultless and intolerable;_ + _No meeting-place of all the heavenlinesses,_ + _But eminently a man to stir and spur_ + _Men, to afflict them with benign alarm,_ + _Harass their sluggish and uneager blood,_ + _Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal;_ + _A man with something of the cragginess_ + _Of his own mountains, something of the force_ + _That goads to their loud leap the mountain streams._ + +Sir William proceeds to a peroration on + + _the man of Celtic blood,_ + _Whom Powers Unknown, in a divine caprice,_ + _Chose and did make their instrument, wherewith_ + _To save the Saxon; the man all eye and hand,_ + _The man who saw, and grasped, and gripped, and held._ + _Then shall each morrow with its yesterday_ + _Vie, in the honour of nobly honouring him,_ + _Who found us lulled and blindfolded by the verge_ + _Of fathomless perdition and haled us back._ + _And poets shall dawn in pearl and gold of speech,_ + _Crowning his deed with not less homage, here_ + _On English ground, than yonder whence he rose._ + +This must certainly be the most eulogistic poem ever written about a +British politician. + +There is nothing about Mr. W. M. Hughes, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, or +Lord Devonport in the volume; these, perhaps, will be dealt with in Sir +William’s next book, which, I do not doubt, will be ready before long. +But Sir Edward Carson gets his meed in a sonnet _To the Right Hon. Sir +Edward Carson, on leaving Antrim, June 30, 1916_, and another sonnet +acclaims Lord Northcliffe—to whom, possibly, there is a delicate allusion +in the line quoted above, beginning “Whom Powers.” The sonnet is called +_The Three Alfreds_; the three being King Alfred, Alfred Lord Tennyson, +and Alfred Lord Northcliffe: + + _Three Alfreds let us honour. Him who drove_ + _His foes before the tempest of his blade_ + _At Ethandune—him first, the all-glorious Shade,_ + _The care-crowned King whose host with Guthrum strove._ + _Next—though a thousand years asunder clove_ + _These twain—a lord of realms serenely swayed;_ + _Victoria’s golden warbler, him who made_ + _Verse such as Virgil for Augustus wove._ + _Last—neither king nor bard, but just a man_ + _Who, in the very whirlwind of our woe,_ + _From midnight till the laggard dawn began,_ + _Cried ceaseless, “Give us shells—more shells,” and so_ + _Saved England; saved her not less truly than_ + _Her hero of heroes saved her long ago._ + +It is a pity that there could not have been added some reference to Lord +Northcliffe’s conviction that nobody in his senses ever dreamed of using +shrapnel against wire. Had the shells passage been expanded it might +have been less cacophonous. As it stands, it gives rise to the suspicious +illusion that the sibilant cry was uttered by Mr. (or is it Sir?) Wilkie +Bard. But no; it was “neither King nor Bard.” + + + + +Stranded + + +“No,” I thought, “I won’t take any books with me. I want a rest. I +shall swim. I shall catch fish. There is sure to be a billiard-room in +that pub., and pretty certain to be a few people who play bridge. The +overtaxed brain must be allowed relaxation. So good-bye, Plato; good-bye, +Spinoza; good-bye, Samuel Rawson Gardiner; good-bye, Freud. I won’t take +any of you.” + +I had been in the place twenty-four hours, and had plumbed the depths of +my neighbours’ incapacity to play any games of skill or chance (except +possibly—I did not ask this—loo and vingt-et-un), when, sauntering down +the main, and indeed the only, street, I caught sight of the words, +“Grocer, Chemist, Tobacconist, Draper, and Circulating Library.” It would +be ungracious, I felt, to let such versatility go unrecognized. Besides, +one might as well take a novel or two out with one in the boat. It might +make the intervals between the bites seem a little shorter. So in I went. + +A young girl with a pigtail escorted me past the Quaker Oats and the +Gold Flakes, under a little low doorway and into a back room. “A +shilling deposit, and twopence on each book,” she said; and left me to +the shelves. There were books there all right: about two thousand of +them, reaching from floor to ceiling on both sides. There was no sort +of order, alphabetical or otherwise, so it was no good expecting to +find a particular author right off. The only thing for it was beginning +somewhere and going steadily along the rows. + +B. M. Croker: yes, I think I read a great many of hers in my youth. They +were about penniless young ladies going to India and getting married. It +is no good tackling this one. _The Gateless Barrier_, by Lucas Malet; +that was about spiritualism, and pretty average tosh it was; I shall +probably come to _Sir Richard Calmady_ presently, but I shall give him a +miss too. _The Iron Pirate_: I liked that rather, but it would be a pity +not to like it so much now. I feel the same about _Saracinesca_, _The +Witch of Prague_, and _In the Palace of the King_, which are all in a +lump together where some late devotee has replaced them. Marion Crawford, +upon whose every word my childhood hung, I dare not attempt you again; +even _A Cigarette Maker’s Romance_ and the chronicle of _Mr. Isaacs_ (who +enjoyed Kant and deluded me, for a time, into the belief that I should +like him too) will be more dear to the memory if they are not restored to +sight. _Count Hannibal_: that was the man who either massacred somebody +or escaped massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had a great square +jaw and eyes that made you jump; and women cowered and obeyed when he +emitted a short, sharp oath or looked like emitting one. William Black +I never liked at any time, so nothing by him need detain me. _Flames_? +No. _Dodo_? Oh dear, no. _Ships that pass in the Night_? No. There was +edelweiss in it, and an old man who was otherworldly and read nothing but +Gibbon. Queen Victoria thought highly of it, but I don’t want to read it +again. Nor _Red Pottage_ either. The husband and the other man (I think) +had a duel. They drew straws, and the man with the shortest straw had +to kill himself. What the lady thought about it I don’t remember. But +one of them was a Lord, New Zealand came in somewhere, and at suitable +places in the conversation a moth would flutter or a kingfisher flash by. +It is by touches like these that one can distinguish really imaginative +literature, but I am not tempted. + +It is not reasonable to expect a man at this date to return to _A Yellow +Aster_, or _Moths_ by Ouida. As for _The Silence of Dean Maitland_, the +predicament of that respected ecclesiastic with the undisclosed sin on +his conscience is still fresh in my mind, and I still remember how my +elders, when it first came out, debated whether such a book ought to be +written, and whether Maxwell Gray was a man or a woman. Of _The Sorrows +of Satan_ I recall little of the plot, except that the Devil was a +gentleman. I think that the first sentences were: “Do you know what it is +to be poor? Not with that—poverty that—on ten thousand a year, but with +that grinding poverty that,” etc. How many years ago is it since that +immortal paragraph, reproduced in facsimile from the author’s own script, +appeared in the _Strand Magazine_, with pictures of the great novelist in +divers postures? It would be Ethel M. Dell now, I suppose; but they don’t +seem to keep Miss Dell’s works in this Circulating Library, of which the +circulation seems to have stopped many, many, many years since. They keep +instead Frankfort Moore and G. B. Burgin. + +Anthony Hope now. Here is _The Intrusions of Peggy_. There was a grizzled +inventor who lived in the Temple, and he had a daughter (?) who shone +like a sunbeam amidst the dusty shades of the law. Anthony Hope, who was +very nearly a first-rate writer, must have put it better than that; but +I’m sure that that is what it was about. Seton Merriman now. This is +better. But will or will not a reperusal of _The Vultures_ and _Roden’s +Corner_ diminish the respect that still survives in me for him? He gave +me immense pleasure at one time; can I risk it? I don’t know. + +With meditations like the above I roamed up and down before the frayed +and wrinkled backs of these veterans, fascinated by so systematic a +recovery of the familiar. Then I remembered that the sun was shining in +a blue sky, only slightly fleeced with cloud; that the salt wind blowing +shoreward was driving broken sunlight over the waves; that there were +as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it; and that I must really +take care of my health. Catching sight of _She_ and _Many Cargoes_, +which I have read at least ten times apiece, but am always good for +again, I detached them from their faded companions and took them into the +front shop, meditating upon the astonishing sluggishness of this shop, +where even Mrs. Barclay had not yet penetrated and Garvice was a cloudy +speculation in the far future. + +I paid my one-and-fourpence and stepped out on to the cobblestones. As I +passed into the sun, it occurred to me that it was not surprising that +even the minor works in the library were like old friends. For—and things +like these do strangely remain known, yet for a time, unrelated—I spent a +summer in this village fifteen years ago. + + + + +Mr. Ralph Hodgson + + +Mr. Ralph Hodgson is a poet who has still not quite got his due. He +has just collected into one volume (_Poems_), with a few others, the +verses published in a series of “Flying Fame Booklets” with Mr. Lovat +Fraser’s charming and ingenious cuts. Ten years’ work goes into seventy +pages, so that a charge of over-production is scarcely possible. In +the circumstances Mr. Hodgson might have included one or two poems, +_The Last Blackbird_, for example, from his earlier book. That book as +a whole, however, was not comparable with this, which contains _The +Bull_, indubitably one of the finest poems of our generation, _The Song +of Honour_, which is almost as good, and many charming lighter lyrics. +_Eve_, particularly, is a feat. Mr. Hodgson makes a delicate tripping +song out of the Fall of Man; he pictures Eve, “that orchard sprite,” + + _Wondering, listening,_ + _Listening, wondering,_ + _Eve with a berry_ + _Half-way to her lips,_ + +and the serpent, a graceful beast, + + _Tumbling in twenty rings_ + _Into the grass._ + +The whole story trips like that. + + _“Eva!” Each syllable_ + _Light as a flower fell,_ + _“Eva!” he whispered the_ + _Wondering maid,_ + _Soft as a bubble sung_ + _Out of a linnet’s lung,_ + _Soft and most silverly_ + _“Eva!” he said._ + +But—and this is the achievement—one is not left with a sense of +inadequacy and triviality. For the feeling throughout is sincere, and the +nature of the calamity is conveyed as clearly by Mr. Hodgson, who makes +the small birds chatter with sorrow and indignation when Eve falls, as it +would have been by another man with all the paraphernalia of darkening +heavens, thunderous voices, and long Latin words. + +But this poem is not on the same plane as _The Bull_ and _The Song of +Honour_. No writer has ever entered more completely into the feelings +of an animal than does Mr. Hodgson as, in a setting of tropical forest +and swamp, he shows the defeated, expelled, and dying leader of the herd +remembering his calfhood, and his early fights, and his prowess and his +final fall, whilst the obscene birds circle round overhead waiting for +his death. _The Song of Honour_, an attempt to echo the Hymn of Praise +sung by all things to their Maker, is, in the nature of things, more +disjointed and impressionistic, less exact and well-shaped. It owes as +much as any poem can decently owe to another to Christopher Smart’s _Song +to David_. But the strength of feeling never fails, and parts of the +breathless pæan are very beautiful. + + _The music of a lion strong_ + _That shakes a hill a whole night long,_ + _A hill as loud as he,_ + _The twitter of a mouse among_ + _Melodious greenery,_ + _The ruby’s and the rainbow’s song,_ + _The nightingale’s—all three,_ + _The song of life that wells and flows_ + _From every leopard, lark and rose_ + _And everything that gleams or goes_ + _Lack-lustre in the sea._ + + _I heard it all, I heard the whole_ + _Harmonious hymn of being roll_ + _Up through the chapel of my soul_ + _And at the altar die,_ + _And in the awful quiet then_ + _Myself I heard, Amen, Amen,_ + _Amen I heard me cry!_ + _I heard it all and then although_ + _I caught my flying senses, Oh,_ + _A dizzy man was I!_ + _I stood and stared; the sky was lit,_ + _The sky was stars all over it,_ + _I stood, I knew not why,_ + _Without a wish, without a will,_ + _I stood upon that silent hill_ + _And stared into the sky until_ + _My eyes were blind with stars and still_ + _I stared into the sky._ + +Those are two of the last stanzas, and even standing alone, I think, give +something of the quality of the poem. They certainly are characteristic +in the simplicity of their language. + + + + +Double Misprints + + +I take the following paragraph from the _Connersville (Ind.) Herald_: + + “The Guest Day meeting of the literary club will be held at the + home of Mrs. L. A. Frazer to-morrow afternoon. Mrs. De Morgan + Jones, of Indianapolis, will lecture on ‘William Butler Meats + and the Garlic Revival.’” + +I think the Lady of Shalott should have been brought in. Double misprints +are rare, but I remember another which also was perpetrated in America +but which has not quite so convincing an air of sheer accident as this +one. A Colonel, who had fought in the Civil War, was described in +his local paper as “a battle-scared veteran.” This imputation on his +courage brought him to the office with a big stick and a demand that +the paragraph should be reprinted with the offensive remark corrected. +It was: but another misprint crept in and the word appeared as +“bottle-scarred.” Every one who has dealings with the Press occasionally +corrects, amid the mass of quite meaningless “literals,” a misprint +that really makes some sort of sense. I myself in the last few months +have had to emend printers’ references to Mr. Hotairio Bottomley and +Mr. Edmund Goose. The former one felt tempted to leave uncorrected, the +derangement of letters being so extremely apt. + + + + +The History of Earl Pumbles + + +“The late Earl (Eorl?) Pumbles was of lowly birth. He was born in the +thorp of Stoke Parva in 1850, the son of a penniless timber-wright. +Outdriven from his first school, he became a fighting-man. He was a +dreadless and fearnought wight, and was once left for dead on the field, +bleeding at every sweat-hole. The saw-bones brought him through. Coming +back to England he saw the haplihood of making a gold-hoard in the +soap-trade. He set up a business with the gold of others; got rid of his +yoke-mates by sundry under-slinkings, and soon became amazingly wealthy. +An earldom followed; though it is markworthy that on the morning after +its bestowal a great songsmith wrote to the _Daily Score_ to say: ‘The +Gusher of Fair-Name is befouled.’ In 1910 Lord Pumbles went as sendling +to the King of Siam, with a bode-word from our King. In the back-end +of the next year his health gave out; he became bit-wise worse; and he +died last night of belly-ache. Lord Pumbles was often to be seen at Sir +Henry Wood’s Out-Road Glee-Motes at Queen’s Hall, but he was almost a +comeling at the House of Lords. He was cunning in Kin-lore, and in his +fair wonestead at Pumbles wrote a great book on the stem-tree of his +kin. By ill hap he was an eat-all and rather soaksome. He will be buried +on Wednesday in the bone-yard at Pumbles, in which lich-rest his wife +already lies. The earldom goes, by out-of-the-way odd-come-short, to his +daughter.” + +This little biography may have puzzled those who have got thus far. +They may have thought it absurd. I compiled it with the help of “C. L. +D.’s” _Word-Book of the English Tongue_, just published by Routledge. +“C. L. D.” (the initials are, I observe, those of the author of _Alice +in Wonderland_) is one of those enthusiasts who long “to shake off the +Norman yoke” which lies so heavy on our speech. He follows, that is +to say, in the footsteps of the late Rev. William Barnes (of Dorset), +who asked his countrymen to call a perambulator a “child-wain” and an +omnibus a “folk-wain.” “What many speakers and writers,” he remarks, +“even to-day, call English, is no English at all but sheer French. +Nevertheless, there are many who feel not a little ashamed of the +needless loan-words in which their speech is clothed, and of the borrowed +feathers in which they strut. Over and over again it has been said, and +most truly, that for liveliness and strength, manliness and fulness of +meaning, the olden English Tongue were hard to beat.” “In this little +Word-Book, therefore,” he says: + + “after having chosen a few thousand stock loan-words, I have + striven to set by the side of each, not indeed ‘synonyms,’ but + other good English words, which may stand in their stead.” + +Which is certainly (or, I think I should say, “ywis” or “in good sooth”) +a pure English sentence. + +One primary fault “C. L. D.” avoids almost entirely. He does not (as +he might have done had he cared to take all the astonishing Latin +words from Johnson’s Word-Book) load the dice by including in his +list of “loan-words” words which we hardly ever use. There are a few. +Only a scientist would say “acephalous” when he meant “headless”; +and the general public does not need to be warned to say “grind,” +“bristly,” “stalkless,” and “barefooted,” instead of “comminute,” +“aristate,” “acaulescent,” and “discalced.” It would never dream of +saying acaulescent. Where our author errs is where he would inevitably +err: in suggesting to us (1) Saxon words which we simply won’t use, +and (2) Saxon words which do not take the place of the Latin words of +which he disapproves. Take, for instance, as an instance of the latter +category, this very word “disapprove.” All he can give us is a list of +“strong” words beginning with “hiss” and “hoot,” none of which gets the +exact shade of meaning required. Similarly with “decry,” for which his +suggestions are “boo” and “hoot.” In suggesting “clean,” “flat,” etc., +for “absolute” he is merely booing and hooting the slang use of that +word, but he has not found a Saxon equivalent for the real “absolute.” +For “complimentary” he gives “smooth-spoken”; but how would, say, the +Archbishop of Canterbury like to get a letter of thanks beginning: “My +dear Archbishop,—Many thanks for your very smooth-spoken remarks”? +For “uncomfortable” he can only suggest “writhing”—as though we could +say that we had spent a fortnight in a most writhing hotel; and for +“temporalities” he has nothing but “loaves and fishes”—which is simply +offensive. If one began using words like these promiscuously, one would +simply (here I consult the _Word-Book_ again) be asking for misluck. + +To turn to the other lot, it is altogether too late to ask us to say +“rede-craft” for “logic”; “back-jaw” for “retort”; “handmaid” for +“servant”; “outganger” for “emigrant”; “wanhope” (a most beautiful word, +I admit) for “despair”; “scald” or “songsmith” for “poet”; “hight” or +“yclept” for “denominated”; “uplooking” for “aspiring”; “fourwinkled” for +“quadrangular”; and, above all, to replace “depilatory” by “hair-bane.” +“Ereold” and “foreold” for “ancient” are no longer possible; and the man +who should say that the King was crowned and besmeared in Westminster +Abbey would be quite unable to persuade people that he wasn’t merely a +rather coarse satirist. In cases where both terms are alive, the Latin +is often more convenient—because shorter—than the Saxon. If we always +used “breach of wedlock” instead of “adultery,” many modern novels, and +most Sunday newspapers, would use up twice as much paper and ink. (There +was once a half-way word: the mediæval heralds used to say that the +leopard was “begotten in spouse-breach between the lion and the pard.”) +In proposing “hand-grip” for portmanteau, our wordloresman is doing an +audacious thing: adopting a bit of modern American—though, as often as +not, the term is shortened, across the water, to “grip” _tout court_. + +There remain, of course, a very large number of words for which “C. +L. D.” does provide genuine living synonyms which, in many cases, are +stronger and terser than the originals. Even here, of course, there are +occasional difficulties; we have, at any rate in print, thrown over +“C. L. D.’s” favourites “belly-ache” and “gripes” in favour of “colic” +simply because they _are_ what is called “good sturdy Saxon,” altogether +too apt and sturdy. As for his proposal of “ropes” and “manifolds” for +“intestines,” all I can say is that I much prefer here to remain under +the Norman yoke. At the same time, too much Latinity is a nuisance and +a danger to the vividness of our tongue; and, whilst refraining from +following “C. L. D.” to his thorps or Barnes to his folk-wain, I think I +shall sometimes find the _Word-Book_ useful. + + + + +On Destroying Books + + +“It says in the paper” that over two million volumes have been presented +to the troops by the public. It would be interesting to inspect them. +Most of them, no doubt, are quite ordinary and suitable; but it was +publicly stated the other day that some people were sending the oddest +things, such as magazines twenty years old, guides to the Lake District, +Bradshaws, and back numbers of _Whitaker’s Almanack_. In some cases, one +imagines, such indigestibles get into the parcels by accident; but it is +likely that there are those who jump at the opportunity of getting rid of +books they don’t want. Why have kept them if they don’t want them? But +most people, especially non-bookish people, are very reluctant to throw +away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses that +one knows every worthless or ephemeral volume that is bought finds its +way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to +keep rubbish merely because it is printed: it is positively a public duty +to destroy it. Destruction not merely makes more room for new books and +saves one’s heirs the trouble of sorting out the rubbish or storing it: +it may also prevent posterity from making a fool of itself. We may be +sure that if we do not burn, sink, or blast all the superseded editions +of Bradshaw, two hundred years hence some collector will be specializing +in old railway timetables, gathering, at immense cost, a complete series, +and ultimately leaving his “treasures” (as the Press will call them) to a +Public Institution. + +But it is not always easy to destroy books. They may not have as many +lives as a cat, but they certainly die hard; and it is sometimes +difficult to find a scaffold for them. This difficulty once brought me +almost within the Shadow of the Rope. I was living in a small and (as +Shakespeare would say) heaven-kissing flat in Chelsea, and books of +inferior minor verse gradually accumulated there until at last I was +faced with the alternative of either evicting the books or else leaving +them in sole, undisturbed tenancy and taking rooms elsewhere for myself. +Now, no one would have bought these books. I therefore had to throw +them away or wipe them off the map altogether. But how? There were +scores of them. I had no kitchen range, and I could not toast them on +the gas-cooker or consume them leaf by leaf in my small study fire—for +it is almost as hopeless to try to burn a book without opening it as to +try to burn a piece of granite. I had no dustbin; my debris went down a +kind of flue behind the staircase, with small trap-doors opening to the +landings. The difficulty with this was that the larger books might choke +it; the authorities, in fact, had labelled it “Dust and Ashes Only”; and +in any case I did not want to leave the books intact, and some dustman’s +unfortunate family to get a false idea of English poetry from them. So in +the end I determined to do to them what so many people do to the kittens: +tie them up and consign them to the river. I improvised a sack, stuffed +the books into it, put it over my shoulder, and went down the stairs into +the darkness. + +It was nearly midnight as I stepped into the street. There was a cold +nip in the air; the sky was full of stars; and the greenish-yellow lamps +threw long gleams across the smooth, hard road. Few people were about; +under the trees at the corner a Guardsman was bidding a robust good +night to his girl, and here and there rang out the steps of solitary +travellers making their way home across the bridge to Battersea. I turned +up my overcoat collar, settled my sack comfortably across my shoulders, +and strode off towards the little square glow of the coffee-stall which +marked the near end of the bridge, whose sweeping iron girders were +just visible against the dark sky behind. A few doors down I passed +a policeman who was flashing his lantern on the catches of basement +windows. He turned. I fancied he looked suspicious, and I trembled +slightly. The thought occurred to me: “Perhaps he suspects I have swag +in this sack.” I was not seriously disturbed, as I knew that I could +bear investigation, and that nobody would be suspected of having stolen +such goods (though they _were_ all first editions) as I was carrying. +Nevertheless I could not help the slight unease which comes to all who +are eyed suspiciously by the police, and to all who are detected in any +deliberately furtive act, however harmless. He acquitted me, apparently; +and, with a step that, making an effort, I prevented from growing more +rapid, I walked on until I reached the Embankment. + +It was then that all the implications of my act revealed themselves. I +leaned against the parapet and looked down into the faintly luminous +swirls of the river. Suddenly I heard a step near me; quite automatically +I sprang back from the wall and began walking on with, I fervently hoped, +an air of rumination and unconcern. The pedestrian came by me without +looking at me. It was a tramp, who had other things to think about; and, +calling myself an ass, I stopped again. “Now’s for it,” I thought; but +just as I was preparing to cast my books upon the waters I heard another +step—a slow and measured one. The next thought came like a blaze of +terrible blue lightning across my brain: “What about the splash?” A man +leaning at midnight over the Embankment wall: a sudden fling of his arms: +a great splash in the water. Surely, and not without reason, whoever was +within sight and hearing (and there always seemed to be some one near) +would at once rush at me and seize me. In all probability they would +think it was a baby. What on earth would be the good of telling a London +constable that I had come out into the cold and stolen down alone to the +river to get rid of a pack of poetry? I could almost hear his gruff, +sneering laugh: “You tell that to the Marines, my son!” + +So for I do not know how long I strayed up and down, increasingly fearful +of being watched, summoning up my courage to take the plunge and quailing +from it at the last moment. At last I did it. In the middle of Chelsea +Bridge there are projecting circular bays with seats in them. In an agony +of decision I left the Embankment and hastened straight for the first of +these. When I reached it I knelt on the seat. Looking over, I hesitated +again. But I had reached the turning-point. “What!” I thought savagely, +“under the resolute mask that you show your friends is there really +a shrinking and contemptible coward? If you fail now, you must never +hold your head up again. Anyhow, what if you _are_ hanged for it? Good +God! you worm, better men than you have gone to the gallows!” With the +courage of despair I took a heave. The sack dropped sheer. A vast splash. +Then silence fell again. No one came. I turned home; and as I walked I +thought a little sadly of all those books falling into that cold torrent, +settling slowly down through the pitchy dark, and subsiding at last on +the ooze of the bottom, there to lie forlorn and forgotten whilst the +unconscious world of men went on. + +Horrible bad books, poor innocent books, you are lying there still; +covered, perhaps, with mud by this time, with only a stray rag of your +sacking sticking out of the slime into the opaque brown tides. Odes to +Diana, Sonnets to Ethel, Dramas on the Love of Lancelot, Stanzas on a +First Glimpse of Venice, you lie there in a living death, and your fate +is perhaps worse than you deserved. I was harsh with you. I am sorry I +did it. But even if I had kept you, I will certainly say this: I should +not have sent you to the soldiers. + + +THE END + +[Illustration] + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78901 *** |