The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920 (part 3 of 5)
The Conference further considered in detail and adopted the committee's scheme for the management of the journal, of which the chief principles may be mentioned. The control of the trustees is final, but they undertake to exercise it through a managing committee, which they will appoint on the nomination of a large number of bodies, the chief of whom are the Conjoint Board of Scientific Societies, who will nominate five members, the Classical, Historical, English, and Geographical, each of whom will nominate one member, and the Modern Language Association, if, as is hoped, that also adheres to the scheme. Further the British Psychological Society and the Royal Society of Economics will appoint one member.
This, however, is only one side of the committee's constitution. It will comprise also representatives of the great Associations which represent different bodies of students and teachers, and the public libraries. Those that have already pledged themselves to take part are the National Union of Teachers, which is to nominate two representatives; the Co-operative Union; the Associations of Headmasters and Headmistresses, who will appoint one member. Similar co-operation is hoped for from the Royal Society of Literature, the Library Association, the Young Men's Christian Association, the Workers' Educational Association, the Associations of Assistant Masters and Assistant Mistresses, and the Association of Education Committees, all of which have expressed sympathy with the movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
ARTHUR CLUTTON-BROCK
ETON. Bell. 1900. (Handbooks of Great Public Schools.)
SHELLEY: THE MAN AND THE POET. Methuen. 1909.
DESCRIPTION IN POETRY. English Association. 1911.
WILLIAM MORRIS. Williams & Norgate. 1914. (Home University Library.)
THOUGHTS ON THE WAR. Methuen. 1914.
MORE THOUGHTS ON THE WAR. Methuen. 1915. [Several times reprinted. Collected from the Times Literary Supplement.]
SIMPSON'S CHOICE: AN ESSAY IN VERSE ON A FUTURE LIFE. Omega Workshops. 1916.
A MODERN CREED OF WORK. Design and Industry Association. Miscellaneous Publications. 1915.
THE ULTIMATE BELIEF. Constable. 1916.
STUDIES IN CHRISTIANITY. Constable. 1918.
WHAT IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN? Methuen. 1919.
ESSAYS ON ART. Methuen. 1919. [Reprinted from the Times Literary Supplement.]
(He has also written Introductions to Shelley's Works (1911); to Kenneth Richmond's Permanent Values in Education (1917); to Letters of a Soldier (1917); and an essay on Immortality in the Rev. B. H. Streeter's collection of theological essays (1917).)
HILAIRE BELLOC
Prose
DANTON--A study. Nisbet. 1899. Reprinted, 1911, in Nelson's Shilling Library.
PARIS. E. Arnold. 1900. Second Edition. Methuen. 1907.
ROBESPIERRE. Nisbet. 1901.
THE PATH TO ROME. George Allen. 1902. Now published by Allen & Unwin and by Nelson. [Illustrated by the author.]
AFTERMATHS AND GLEANINGS OF A BUSY LIFE CALLED CALIBAN'S GUIDE TO LETTERS. Duckworth. 1903. Greenback Library.
TRISTAN AND ISEULT. George Allen. 1903. (French Romances.)
THE GREAT ENQUIRY. Duckworth. 1903. [A Tariff Reform satire with illustrations by G. K. Chesterton.]
EMMANUEL BURDEN: A Novel. Methuen. 1904. [Illustrated by G. K. Chesterton.]
THE OLD ROAD. Constable. 1904. Reprinted. 1910.
AVRIL: Being an Essay on the Poetry of the French Renaissance. Duckworth. 1904.
ESTO PERPETUA: Algerian Studies. Duckworth. 1906. [Both the above have been reprinted in the Reader's Library.]
HILLS AND THE SEA. Methuen. 1906.
THE HISTORIC THAMES. Dent. 1907.
MR. CLUTTERBUCK'S ELECTION. Nash. 1907. [Now published by Nelson.]
THE EYE WITNESS. Nash. 1908.
ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS. Methuen. 1908.
ON EVERYTHING. Methuen. 1909.
MARIE ANTOINETTE. Methuen. 1909.
THE PYRENEES. Methuen. 1909.
A CHANGE IN THE CABINET. Methuen. 1909.
ON ANYTHING. Constable. 1910.
ON SOMETHING. Methuen. 1910.
PONGO AND THE BULL: A Novel. Constable. 1910.
THE GIRONDIN. Nelson. 1911.
FIRST AND LAST. Methuen. 1911.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Williams & Norgate. 1911. (Home University Library.)
WARFARE IN ENGLAND. Williams & Norgate. 1911. (Home University Library.)
THE PARTY SYSTEM. Stephen Swift. 1911. (Written in collaboration with Cecil Chesterton.)
SOCIALISM AND THE SERVILE STATE. Debate with Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, Independent Labour Party. 1911.
BRITISH BATTLES Stephen Swift. 1911. Now published by Hugh Rees. [Six Monographs on Waterloo, Blenheim, Tourcoing, Malplaquet, Crecy, and Poictiers.]
THE GREEN OVERCOAT. Arrowsmith. 1912.
THE FOUR MEN. Nelson. 1912. [Illustrated by the author.]
THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER. Methuen. 1912
THE RIVER OF LONDON. Foulis. 1912.
THE SERVILE STATE. Foulis. 1912.
THE HILAIRE BELLOC CALENDAR. Frank Palmer. 1913.
THE BOOK OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY. Chatto & Windus. 1913.
THE STANE STREET: A Monograph. Constable. 1913.
A PICKED COMPANY. Methuen. 1915. (Selected Writings.)
THE TWO MAPS OF EUROPE AND SOME ASPECTS OF THE GREAT WAR. Pearson. 1915.
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE FIRST INVASION OF THE ROMANS TO THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE V. By J. Lingard and Hilaire Belloc. 1915.
[Mr. Belloc wrote a concluding volume to Lingard, covering the period from 1688.]
A GENERAL SKETCH OF THE EUROPEAN WAR. Vol. I. Nelson. 1915. Vol. II., 1916.
THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY. Chapman & Hall. 1916.
THE FREE PRESS. Allen & Unwin. 1918.
Verse
VERSES AND SONNETS. Ward & Downey. 1895. [Withdrawn from circulation.]
THE MODERN TRAVELLER. Arnold. 1898.
A MORAL ALPHABET. Arnold. 1899.
LAMBKIN'S REMAINS. Alden, Oxford. 1898.
THE BAD CHILD'S BOOK OF BEASTS. Alden, Oxford. 1897.
MORE BEASTS FOR WORSE CHILDREN. Arnold. 1898. [The above five books are now published by Duckworth.]
CAUTIONARY TALES FOR CHILDREN. Nash. 1907. [Now published by Nelson.]
VERSES. Duckworth. 1910. [A collection including certain poems from previous books.]
MORE PEERS. Verses. Stephen Swift. 1911.
(He has also written numerous Introductions, a chapter in (Oxford) Essays in Liberalism, a number of penny religious tracts published by the Catholic Truth Society, and contributions to various anthologies.)
DRAMA
THE DUCHESS OF MALFI
The production by the Phœnix Society of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, gave many people an opportunity to make an exhibition of themselves. In the first place, it was somewhat astonishing to find that on the Sunday night the audience, which one might have supposed to have been made up of people of some education, contained many persons who were evidently unaware that Webster wrote at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, and who had gone to the Lyric Theatre expecting to find a classical and not a renaissance tragedy. Perhaps this is being too kind to them; perhaps they thought The Duchess of Malfi was a Revue, or a Viennese Musical Comedy by Leo Fall or Franz Lehar, which, owing to D.O.R.A., could not yet be produced on the ordinary stage. But perhaps they did not even think at all, and their tittering and nudging was merely the manifestation of the vacancy of their minds. Whatever the explanation, it is certainly odd that such people should be--as they presumably were--members of the Phœnix Society. It has been said to me that this section of the audience was composed largely of the profession, to whom Sunday night is their one opportunity of the week to enjoy the role of spectator. I hesitate to believe it. I refuse to believe it, although the notorious and shameful ignorance of many actors and actresses of the dramatic literature of their own country is difficult to forget. But if this is the explanation--and it is an unpalatable one--it also accounts for the reception given--again by a section only of the audience--to Mr. Farquharson's extraordinarily fine effort to grapple with the part of Ferdinand. The rank and file of actors, like the rank and file of musicians, are notoriously poor judges of their own art. They are sound enough when it is a question of merely conventional skill. They know in an ordinary way the difference between the professional and the amateur. Mere clumsiness, roughness, or smoothness of technique they can discern and, to some extent, understand; but even in these matters it is the conventional, the accustomed way of doing a thing rather than the essentially good way of doing it that they judge by. The moment an actor goes outside routine methods he runs the risk of being ridiculed; his slightest faults and exaggerations and mistakes are fastened upon, while what there may be of insight, imagination, and power in his characterisation is completely passed over.
This is what happened to Mr. Robert Farquharson at The Duchess of Malfi. He gave an interpretation of the character of Ferdinand which was a real creative effort of the actor's imagination. Even if he had been less successful than he was in producing the effect he aimed at, he should have met with a respectful attention from his fellow-artists in the audience. But such an attention would have proceeded from an interest in and some glimmer of an understanding of the serious efforts of an artist; whereas these people who disgraced themselves by loudly giggling at Mr. Farquharson were not obviously blind to serious art.
Of Mr. Farquharson's interpretation I will say this. It was essentially sound and convincing. In portraying Ferdinand as a man abnormal, fanatical, and almost insane on the subject of sex, we are made to understand all his subsequent conduct. Ferdinand, as drawn by Webster, is a man of diseased imagination; he is described in the very first scene by Antonio as "a most perverse and turbulent nature"; his very language right from the start is more violent, more imaginative than that of any other character in the play. Sex is an obsession with him; his first words to his sister are:
You are a widow: You know already what man is;
And his second:
Marry! they are most luxurious Will wed twice. Their lovers are more spotted Than Laban's sheep.
He cannot let the subject alone, he is always returning to it. Earlier in the scene, when he tells Bosola that he does not wish his sister to marry again, he says:
Do not you ask the reason, but be satisfied I say I would not.
Mr. Farquharson said these words with just the right emphasis, an emphasis that sent a shudder through one's flesh, it was so simple, so vague, and yet so peculiar.
Now, for this Mr. Farquharson ought to have been highly praised. It meant, first of all, that Mr. Farquharson had an original conception of his part; and, secondly, that he had the technique to carry his conception across the footlights. But imagination must meet imagination; if it meets nothing but dullness it might just as well be dull itself, its effect is necessarily nil; and, apparently, that is what Mr. Farquharson's noble effort did meet. It was really astonishing to find written in the daily Press the pained little grumblings of men who had been unable to discover an adequate motive for Ferdinand's conduct, and who expressed their dissatisfaction with Webster's capacity as a dramatist, after having been accustomed for many years to the dramatic genius of Mr. Walter Ellis (the author of A Little Bit of Fluff), Mr. George R. Sims (the author of The Great Day), Mr. Oscar Asche (author of Chu Chin Chow), Mr. Robert Hichens (author of The Voice from the Minaret), and many others of equal greatness but too numerous to mention. It was perhaps an over-familiarity with the works of this galaxy of genius that led one London newspaper to describe The Duchess of Malfi in headlines as "Funnier than Farce." The atmosphere of a genuine tragedy might easily appear "funny" to anyone accustomed to that of the average London play. One great difficulty that confronted some critics was the impossibility--after a war in which millions were slaughtered--of imagining the murder of four men. Because Webster's tragedy ends in the death of four of the principal characters, it is, apparently, farcical or funny. It never even seems to have occurred to these detractors of a great work that in Italy of the Renaissance--the place and period with which Webster is dealing--such incidents were as common as divorce suits nowadays; but it would, assuredly, be asking too much to expect people to exercise a little historical imagination who have no imagination of any sort, and who are, therefore, to be pitied for their inability to understand any play that does not contain a telephone.
On the bulk of the audience, however, Mr. Farquharson's Ferdinand made a deep impression, and the wonderful fifth scene in the second act, where Ferdinand enters with the words: "I have this night digged up a mandrake," was very nearly one of the finest and most blood-curdling things I have ever witnessed. It was just marred by a few exaggerations of gesture and crudities which could have easily been put right, but in conception and power it was magnificent. I have used the word "blood-curdling," although I know that nobody's blood curdles nowadays, least of all the blood of dramatic critics. But that is just what is wrong with them. It is no distinction to have blood that does not "curdle." The blood of an ox does not curdle--not at the tragedy of King Lear, nor Macbeth, nor the third act of Die Walküre, nor the Prometheus of Scriabin. There must be an imagination in the spectator to take fire, and without imagination the work of a poet like Webster must of necessity appear incomprehensible:
Methinks I see her laughing-- Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat quickly, Or my imagination will carry me To see her in the shameful act of sin.
To the unimaginative these lines of Ferdinand's will seem nothing, but they are wonderful in their dramatic vividness and appropriateness. I have quoted them because it is the sort of writing Webster gives us on every page; it is not one of his purple patches. Webster's command of language is little short of marvellous. To anyone with a sense of words it is a wonderful experience to read The Duchess of Malfi for the first time; and after seeing it played one returns to the book and finds it all ten times more wonderful still. Could anything be more utter cant than the suggestion that the plays of many modern dramatists are superior to Webster's even as literature? How many of them can be read at all, even once? It is so nearly impossible that more than half of them cannot be published, and of those that are published the perusal of a few pages leads to their prompt consignment to the dustbin. As for ever attaining that combination of great poetry with perfect dramatic appropriateness culminating in moments when vox in faucibus hæsit, it is utterly beyond them. Such passages as:
Bosola. Strangling; here are your executioners.
Duch. I forgive them: The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs Would do as much as they do.
Bos. Doth not death fright you?
Duch. Who would be afraid on't Knowing to meet such excellent company In the other world?
Bos. Yet, methinks The manner of your death should much afflict you: This cord should terrify you.
Duch. Not a whit: What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut With diamonds? or to be smotherèd With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls? I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits; and 'tis found They go on such strange geometrical hinges You may open them both ways.
Such passages are as abundant in Webster as dots in the novels of Mr. H. G. Wells. The only readable modern English dramatist--with the exception of Mr. Granville Barker, and possibly of Sir James Barrie--is Mr. Shaw; but one reads Mr. Shaw for his wit, and his wit, like water-ices, is, though tasty, very poor sustenance. Yet the same people who treat The Duchess of Malfi as "Farce" take Mr. Shaw's amusing buffoonery quite seriously; and there is one explanation for both phenomena, and it is the one with which I began--lack of imagination. An imaginative man does not need Mr. Shaw to show him in a play that soldiers value their lives, and there being nothing astoundingly novel in the idea, he is free to appreciate Mr. Shaw's extravagant humour; but the unimaginative man thinks, firstly, that it is some perilous and subversive doctrine, or some new and wonderful truth--according to his political prejudice--and then, secondly, when some personal experience fits Mr. Shaw's formula, looks upon Mr. Shaw as a dealer in real property, and has for him that serious consideration he has for his landlord. This explains the fate of such a brilliant piece of extravaganza as Arms and the Man, which Mr. Loraine has produced at the Duke of York's Theatre. Originally the darling of unimaginative intellectuals--to whom it had brought light--and the bugbear of equally unimaginative Philistines--to whom its "light" was the flame of revolution--it is now accepted by the ordinary man in the pit as an ordinary, matter-of-fact account of what war is, because the man in the pit is just back from one and recognises the likeness. The deafening applause from ex-soldiers at the Duke of York's Theatre is something to go and hear. To them Mr. Shaw is no intellectual forerunner opening up obscure paths of thought, but a man who has described exactly what used to go on in the only army they have ever known, and they have for him the serious respect they have for all retailers of materials. He is a dealer not in "fancies," but in real goods. But this "reality" is just as imaginary as the former "light." Neither Bluntschli nor Cyrano de Bergerac represents the soldier. There is, in fact, no such thing as a soldier, there are only soldiers. The intellectual has never had his "light" nor the plain man his "reality"; for, being without imagination, they cannot have these things. There is no way of truth reaching an unimaginative man; he is doomed to live under a series of illusions, only shedding one to receive another, but, by a sublime paradox, the only illusion he can never shed is the illusion that poetry is an illusion, an illusion of the senses. It is the fate of poetry, of such magnificent poetic drama as Webster's, to remain always undraped in the world of imagination and never by any protective mimicry to take the colour of its surroundings and put on a fashionable dress. This, its unique greatness, is in the eyes of the unimaginative man its weakness, because he fails to recognise in it any of the outward appearances of his daily life--in short, he fails to see his washerwoman because to him she is a washerwoman and not a woman.
It is pleasant to think that there are actors and actresses who practically, for sheer love of their art, will give their time and ability for two isolated performances of a long and difficult work like The Duchess of Malfi. The performance, as a whole, was remarkably good, and it seems to me worth while recording the cast here:
FERDINAND, Duke of Calabria ROBERT FARQUHARSON CARDINAL, his Brother ION SWINLEY ANTONIO BOLOGNA, Steward of the Household to the Duchess NICHOLAS HANNEN DELIO, his friend MURRAY KINNELL DANIEL DE BOSOLA, Gentleman of the Horse to the Duchess WILLIAM J. REA CASTRUCCIO FREDERICK HARKER MARQUIS OF PESCARA ROBERT ATKINS COUNT MALATESTE BASIL GORDON RODERIGO IVAN SAMSON SILVIO CLAUDE ALLISTER GRISOLAN J. ADRIAN BYRNE DOCTOR JOSEPH A. DODD THE DUCHESS OF MALFI CATHLEEN NESBITT CARIOLA, her Woman FLORENCE BUCKTON JULIA, Castruccio's wife and the Cardinal's mistress EDITH EVANS OLD LADY BLANCHE STANLEY
The Play produced by ALLAN WADE, in a setting designed by NORMAN WILKINSON of Four Oaks.
Of Mr. Farquharson I have already spoken. Equally fine but smoother and more accomplished was the work of Miss Cathleen Nesbitt as the Duchess. Mr. William J. Rea gave a fine and convincing study of Bosola, whose "garb of melancholy" he wore with an exquisite naturalness. Mr. Rea has a beautiful voice, and I hope it gave him as much pleasure to speak Webster's wonderful verse as it gave me to hear it so beautifully spoken. Antonio is difficult to make attractive, but Mr. Nicholas Hannen might have been more successful. I thought Miss Edith Evans's Julia excellent, but the Cardinal might well have been more sinister; he has some splendid lines to speak, including the famous:
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden, Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake, That seems to strike at me,
and they were not always as effective as they might have been. It is to be hoped that the Phœnix Society will get a large number of new members through this fine production.
* * * * *
The French Classical Matinées at 2.30 every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon at the Duke of York's Theatre will be as follows: Les Plaideurs, January 6th, 7th, 13th, 14th, 20th, and 21st.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
British Comic Drawing
I have before me the Christmas Number of Punch. After a conscientious perusal of its illustrated pages, I was led to think seriously about comic drawings. Punch has probably the largest circulation of comic papers, its position is undeniably established, it is, in fact, an institution in much the same way as the British Museum: we are accustomed to it, it exacts its quota of mirth from hundreds of thousands of people each week. It always contains some amusing things, but it is a pity that its drawings are not funnier. As comic drawings, most of them are quite valueless; they are not comic drawings but drawings of persons correctly portrayed in more or less amusing situations, the whole greatly helped by the wording beneath. Even the faces joined to the carefully-rendered bodies, with their carefully-drawn clothes (texture is felt here) and surroundings, are presented with the correct lines and expressions which a professor of physiognomy would connect with the various human emotions. The artist's personality behind these productions is rarely felt except as a stumbling-block to any progress of the absurd or whimsical. Mr. Max Beerbohm sums the matter up in his preface to a recent book of nonsense: "That a comic drawing should itself be comic seems to be a reasonable demand. Yet it is a demand which few comic draughtsmen meet. Comic drawings for the most part are but comic ideas seriously illustrated. We are shown an angry man who has just raised his stroke at golf; near him a caddie grinning behind his hand; and a view of the golf-links. Admirable! The man's stockings and knickerbockers, his cap, his collar, and tie are so rendered that a hosier would not blush to sign them. The drawing of the caddie's fingers would satisfy any drawing-master in any municipal art school. The treatment of the golf-links is faithful, sensitive, reverent. But--where does the fun come in? Through the text beneath maybe. But only for a moment. Out it goes, arrested, in the grip of the artist's firm and laborious hand."
Quite recently a friend of mine, whose drawings were more remarkable for their absurdity than for their strict draughtsmanship, attempted to obtain some work at the offices of one of our latest and most frivolous papers. The following conversation matured between him and the art editor:
ART EDITOR: These drawings are too queer for us, they won't go down over here.
ARTIST: How do you mean won't go down?
ART EDITOR: People don't understand them. They might do for France, but (mind you) they'd be queer even there.
ARTIST: Ah!
ART EDITOR: Now frankly (I hope you don't mind my being frank?)--(ARTIST: Not at all.)--You wouldn't say you could draw, would you?
ARTIST: I should not dare to be so presumptuous.
ART EDITOR: Well, these are the sort of drawings that children do in the suburbs of an evening.
ARTIST: Indeed!
ART EDITOR: Now, see here, in this drawing--you've only put three fingers on one hand. People notice that, you know. Now, if you could do us something like this (producing a third-rate imitation of Bateman figuring some gentleman of a pronounced Semitic type) we might be able to find you a job.
ARTIST: Well, I think I won't swell the ranks of people who are doing drawings of this kind.
ART EDITOR (surprised and suspicious): Ah, I'm sorry, I fear the drawings are no use to us, but I hope you don't mind my giving my opinion?
ARTIST: No, no, not at all. I shall value it. And now, please, how do I get out of this building?
Among the hosts of illustrators working for the comic papers there are very few comic artists and more artists than comedians. Punch would do well to relieve the monotony of its pages more often with the drawings of Mr. Bateman. There is a strength and subtlety in Mr. Bateman's line which places him far above other illustrators of this nature, while his knowledge and portrayal of types with the utmost economy of means is very stimulating: but then he can afford to be realistic also because he is above all a humorist. He possesses the faculty for letting himself go. Mr. George Morrow pleases us frequently by his gentle humour, and Mr. Haselden, a remarkable man, sustains our daily interest in the Daily Mirror. Mr. Heath Robinson is a master of whimsical invention, but I am not certain if he is not a very skilful engineer and mechanician in disguise--but certainly ingeniously disguised. Of the too regular contributors to Punch very little need be said, and of the illustrators of the cheaper comic publications still less: the best one can say of some of them is that they reproduce drawings from Continental papers. Between the extremes of academic respectability on the one hand and feeble vulgarity on the other there would seem to be no middle course. Our humorous papers are far below the level of such papers as the German Jugend or Simplicissimus, or the French Le Rire. One feels that their draughtsmanship is more simple and effective and their humour more spontaneous. This is not a plea for mere savagery of caricature, which appears foreign to our national temperament. But what a relief it would be if one fine week Punch went quite mad and appeared with its print upside down, or, better still, no print at all, and if all the artists gave free rein to whatever absurdity possessed them that week!
M. Henri Matisse
I suppose it is natural that the landscapes of M. Matisse should have a stronger appeal to me than his other works in the Leicester Galleries. Yet, apart from any purely egotistical considerations, I think many people will agree that his landscapes play a very important, if not the most important, part in the success of his exhibition. In many of them there seems to be no striving for the accomplishment of a unique or startling design, but there is a depth of feeling in their form and a mystery in their colour that alone accounts sufficiently for Matisse's reputation in modern art. I am extremely covetous of any one or all of these pictures. Matisse, in his landscapes, is a poet as well as a painter: his intense feeling for the quiet and rather awe-inspiring moments in Nature, his rendering of the vague profusion of growth, the cool grey horizontal clouds and subtle effects of light, make him a master in this branch of his art. I do not find this intensity of feeling in his other works, they are apt to cool one's ardour after the landscapes, and we are brought to think of design per se, and confronted with a flatness of handling that is not nearly so intriguing. His largest painting, Portrait de Femmes (trois sœurs), is very noble, and the drawings should not fail to satisfy the diminishing (I hope) body of people who will sniff at such an exhibition and utter those well-worn and unpardonable remarks on lack of draughtsmanship. Messrs. Brown and Phillips are to be congratulated on procuring for us such an interesting exhibition, and for giving us in the catalogue a photograph of M. Matisse. A glance at this likeness might still the outcries of Philistia more effectually than much argument.
Goupil Gallery Salon
Mr. William Marchant's salons, discontinued during the war, have come to life again, and the ninth of the series has been open during November and December. The Goupil Gallery has a large capacity, and Mr. Marchant seems to have gone out into all parts of the United Kingdom and gathered in a large crowd of artists, nor has he been able entirely to exclude some of the halt and the blind. A detailed criticism from picture to picture, or even from one man's group of work to another's, would be very tedious, for there are some 300 exhibits displayed in the series of rooms. The choice of work is very comprehensive, ranging from James Pryde to Pamela Bianco, from Mr. Lewis's portrait of Mr. Pound to the post-Millais backwash of Mr. Ranken.
In the Large Gallery are Mr. Augustus John and Mr. Sickert. The former exhibits two soldier portraits and No. 51, Birdie, all of which serve to remind us of his unequalled position in that branch of art. Mr. Sickert, the contemporary in age with most of the artists in this room, shines forth in his work with all the vigour and freshness of youth. His No. 49, Bridge at Bath, challenges the declining interest in the work of the more established artists in the room, while he runs level with, even sets the pace for, the younger generation.
In the First Gallery Mr. Lewis's portrait of Mr. Ezra Pound is apt to blunt our sensibilities to the other works therein. It is indeed a remarkable painting, standing like a ferro-concrete factory amidst a peaceful and rather decaying village. Of its faithfulness I am unable to judge, being acquainted with Mr. Pound solely in the pages of the Little Review, but its hard compelling colour and the solidity of its built-up design make it a thing difficult to forget. Mr. Robert Bevan's landscape, No. 100, has a reposeful design that is very telling. Mr. Ginner's sturdy realism is refreshing, and his painting in this room is, I think, more successful in design and colour than his other exhibit.
The Third Gallery.--Here, again, Mr. Sickert's two charming paintings attract our attention, and Mr. Mark Gertler's fine portrait is essentially a picture that leaves an impression in this maze of paintings. There are besides two fine wall paintings by Mr. William Rothenstein.
The Grey Room deserves its name indeed. It is difficult to say why the standard of water-colours is so low compared to the oils: with a very few exceptions, noticeably the drawings of Mr. Albert Rutherston, we seem to have touched bottom in this room, and a very muddy bottom too, so that coming at last to Mr. Shackleton's Peace Day one felt there remained nothing but to burst through the skylight into the air again. The absence of line in the water-colour drawings is very depressing.
ARTISTIC PERIODICALS
ILLUSTRATION
Foremost among the periodicals issued recently is Mr. Gerard Meynell's Illustration. This is a trade circular, and as such would naturally demonstrate within its covers the printer's aspirations in the reproduction of blocks and lettering. "Circular" is not an attractive word, but Mr. Meynell is no ordinary printer, and his circular is still less an ordinary affair. To those who are unacquainted with it, I would hasten to say that Illustration is more like a beautifully-coloured fairy-tale book than the accepted idea of a circular. This time Mr. Meynell has surpassed himself in his efforts not merely in the turn-out of his book, which to the professional and the amateur glance must be entirely admirable, but in giving us the added interest of a Supplement containing eight reproductions of modern art.
JOHN NASH
MUSIC
COVENT GARDEN
One success at least Covent Garden has achieved--Parsifal. It fills the house, and it deserves to do so, for it is by far the best performance that has been seen this season. The scenery and costumes, as far as could be seen from the topmost proscenium box, in which the LONDON MERCURY was accommodated, were those of the original Covent Garden production. The Temple of the Grail was dignified and beautiful, the magic flower-garden ridiculous. The flower-maidens, who sang extremely well and were in themselves quite competent to look their parts, wore dresses that might have been discarded by a travelling Gilbert-and-Sullivan company, half from Iolanthe and half from The Mikado. The swan was as ridiculous as ever. That worst trap of all for producers of Parsifal, the undressing and washing of the hero in the first scene of the third act, was painfully successful. It was a toss-up whether Kundry would not remove Parsifal's wig along with his helmet, and the struggles of the holy knight to pull his white draperies down from under his armour were comic in the extreme. There are many little hitches and absurdities in all operas which pass unnoticed, because something of greater importance happens at the same moment and distracts the attention. But these particular episodes are in themselves the most important things happening at their particular moments. It is on them that all attention must be concentrated by the audience, and if they are made ludicrous by careless handling the solemnity of the drama is very gravely impaired. It is not as if they depended upon elaborate machinery. What is required is forethought and common sense.
Miss Gladys Ancrum's Kundry was a very notable achievement. Her gestures would be the better for a little more restraint and a good deal more sense of definite design. Her singing was full of colour, and she showed great dramatic power in the use of different qualities of tone. It is a part which covers a very wide range of character-drawing; there are at least four distinct personalities in Kundry, and Miss Ancrum went a very considerable way towards distinguishing them and endowing them with life. Parsifal is one of the most ungrateful parts ever given to a hero. Pure fools may be quite attractive people in ordinary life, but on the operatic stage, especially when tenors, there is little to be done with them. Van Dyck, who was reputed the greatest of Parsifals, was corpulent, and sang out of tune. Mr. Walter Hyde did not look very boyish, but he at least sang well. Mr. Langley's melodramatic manner was well suited to the part of Klingsor. As Gurnemanz Mr. Norman Allin showed a fine voice and a dignified presence; but of all Wagnerian bores Gurnemanz is the most boring, surpassing even Wolfram in tediousness, and it is only a very ripe actor, with that quality of vocal style which may be called either unction or unctuousness according to taste, who can make the part really effective on the stage. The most sympathetic character in Parsifal is Amfortas, and Mr. Percy Heming being one of the most sympathetic actors and singers in the company, it was very poignantly realised.
When we read of a new opera by Mr. Delius, Fennimore and Gerda, having been produced recently at Frankfurt with great success, it was indeed a bitter disappointment that Covent Garden could not even resuscitate A Village Romeo and Juliet. The Beecham Company performed it in a previous season, so it cannot have presented all the difficulties of a new creation. It may well have been better to withdraw it altogether than to give it badly; but if more time was wanted for rehearsal it might well have taken the place of Nail, which reflects more credit on Sir Thomas Beecham's good nature than on his artistic judgment.
Moussorgsky's Khovantchina had an indifferent performance and an indifferent house. It is less popular than Boris Godunov, and less obviously dramatic, but it has more unity of purpose and contains much better music. Both operas, however, are invariably so much cut about that the difficulty of following the story is very much increased. Mr. Norman Allin had a magnificent opportunity in the part of Dositheus, but it is not sufficient to treat it as if Dositheus were one of the conventional operatic ministers of religion. It was one of Chaliapin's most overwhelming creations; but Mr. Allin, though undoubtedly a fine singer, has far to go before he can achieve the ease and perfection of Chaliapin's vocalisation. Our singers do not concentrate nearly enough attention on the pure art of singing. They may be divided roughly into two categories: the clever ones who think that the psychological understanding of a character and the vigorous declamation of words are enough to carry them through any part, and the stupid ones who think that fine singing consists in imitating the external mannerisms of Caruso or any other Milanese or Neapolitan star. The clever ones are quite right in realising that English singing can never be achieved by trying to make a bad copy of Italian tricks. Many of these tricks do not indeed belong to the fine art of singing at all; they are merely appeals to false emotion, which excite a vulgar Italian audience just as the well-worn ballad-concert mannerisms excite a vulgar audience in England. A training in the real Italian style is without doubt of the greatest possible value to an English singer, provided that it means a thorough training in Italian literature and conversation, for that involves a study of speech-rhythms and a purity of articulation, which are invaluable to any one who makes use of his voice either as a singer or as a speaker. Pure singing and pure speaking are essential requirements to any operatic artist, and the singer must grasp the principle that his vocal technique is to be the servant of his artistic idea and not a hindrance to its sincere expression.
For Bizet's Djamileh Sir Thomas Beecham would no doubt have deserved sincere gratitude had it not been postponed until too late for inclusion in this notice. There was much that was laughable in the The Fair Maid of Perth, but Bizet even at his lowest has always charm and, what is more important, unexpected turns of originality.
There are historical reasons for thinking that the lighter forms of opera are those most suited to the English temperament in general. Attempts are constantly being made to re-establish light opera of a really artistic kind in this country, and although no one has yet succeeded in rivalling Sullivan in this field, Sir Thomas is certainly doing an excellent work in perpetually holding up Mozart and Bizet as working models for both the English composer and the English public to study and to enjoy.
CONCERTS
When Busoni next visits this country it is to be hoped that he will have better opportunities of being heard under appropriate conditions. The crowded and enthusiastic audiences which filled the Wigmore Hall for his two recitals showed that he might well have given half-a-dozen similar programmes instead of appearing as star turn at the Albert Hall on Sunday afternoons, and there is not the slightest doubt that the Wigmore Hall audiences were of the kind that he could play to with real pleasure. He appeared at one of the Queen's Hall Symphony Concerts as composer and conductor, and also played Mozart's Concerto in C minor. Here, too, it was impossible to separate Busoni the pianist from Busoni the composer, for the concerto was embellished by cadenzas of singular originality and loveliness. Those inserted in the slow movement were startlingly modern, but with a modernity that Mozart himself might well have achieved if he had lived to the age of his interpreter, for they were certainly designed on thoroughly Mozartian principles of composition. Two fragments from a Faust opera, on which Busoni is now engaged, gave the highest hopes of the complete work, for they were most noble and impressive musical pictures. At his farewell recital on December 6th he played Liszt's Sonata in B minor with a breadth and dignity that placed Liszt almost on a level with Beethoven. As a player of Chopin, Busoni has always been somewhat hard to accept; but the mellowing of style which the last five years have brought him was very apparent in his treatment of the Five Ballades, and still more in the Nocturne in C minor, which of all the Nocturnes is the most suited to Busoni's very monumental interpretation.
Of singers by far the most interesting has been Mme. Jane Bathori, who appeared at one of the Classical Concert Society's concerts. She has long been known as the finest exponent of modern French songs. She is also an excellent pianist, and often plays her own accompaniments, thus securing a perfect homogeneity of performance, which the best pair of partners can hardly ever realise.
The Royal Philharmonic Society, after passing through some trying moments during the war, has made energetic efforts to regain its ancient honourable traditions. With Mr. Coates, Mr. Geoffrey Toye, Mr. Adrian Boult, and Mr. Landon Ronald as conductors, it is quite clear that London has no scarcity of orchestral directors. A new departure has been made by the establishment of the Philharmonic Choir, under the management of Mr. Charles Kennedy Scott, the conductor of the Oriana Madrigal Society. The programmes of the concerts exhibit a judicious selection of classic and modern works, among which English music is prominent. The general verdict on the first two concerts was that some of the pieces chosen, both old and new, were not of first-rate importance. The compilers of the programmes were probably quite well aware of that fact. There are, in fact, plenty of works, such as Holbrooke's Ulalume and Meyerbeer's Struensee Overture, to name two examples only, which certainly are not immortal masterpieces, but are none the less quite interesting and well worth an occasional hearing. Even acknowledged masterpieces have been known to suffer from too frequent performance.
A new Italian composer, Francesco Malipiero, has been very prominent in recent programmes. M. Yves Tinayre sang his Chanson Morave, Mr. Mark Hambourg played his Barlumi for pianoforte; of his orchestral music, Impressioni dal Vero was heard at the Promenades, a Ditirambo Tragico at the Queen's Hall Symphony Concerts, and, lastly, at the second Philharmonic, Le Pause del Silenzio. No explanation has been offered of this curious title, but it may possibly bear some connection with an interesting passage in D'Annunzio's novel, Il Fuoco, in which Stelio Effrena maintains that the essence of music lies not in the sounds but in the silences that separate them. It is something of a compliment to Malipiero that his last work succeeded in rousing a Philharmonic audience to hostility. Such demonstrations are rare in this country, though their rarity is due less to broadminded receptivity than to courteous indifference. Malipiero will survive his hisses. His language is harsh and obscure, although a study of his scores shows that he has plenty of technical skill, for he is evidently dealing with emotions which he has not yet been able to express clearly, and which we have probably not been accustomed to hear expressed. Judging from the scores, it seemed that the performances, both under Mr. Toye at the Philharmonic and under Sir Henry Wood, were lacking in the singing sense. There is a temptation in these days to lay too much stress upon the strangeness of strange harmonies. They would become clearer if more attention was given to the elucidation and intensification of the strange melodies which are at the foundation of all modern music that is likely to last. There can be no doubt about the sincerity and depth of feeling in Malipiero's music, though it has not the more attractive qualities of Casella's facile ingenuity.
EDWARD J. DENT
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ASSISI. Impressions of half a century. By SIR WILLIAM B. RICHMOND, K.C.B. Macmillan. 42_s._
STREAMS IN THE DESERT. By J. H. MORRISON. Hodder & Stoughton. 4_s._
AMONG ITALIAN PEASANTS. Written and Illustrated by TONY CYRIAX. Collins 7_s._ 6_d._
THE LONDON MERCURY
Editor--J. C. SQUIRE Assistant-Editor--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 4 February 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
An interesting exchange of opinions about modern art took place in the Times last month. The art-critic stated that modern English artists were afraid of ugliness; Sir Sidney Colvin replied that so far was this from being the truth "that the prevalent malady of the time, at least among those artists and critics who arrogate to themselves the title of 'modern,' was a much less becoming form of cowardice--namely, the fear of beauty. Because the beauty-blind may be taken in by prettiness, and because a new fashion in critical theory has come over from France (to perish, as I have seen dozens of such theories perish in their day), nothing, in the circles to which I refer, is attempted or applauded which either bears any resemblance to nature or records any predilection of the mind except for what is shrieking and dissonant in colour and jumbled and jarring, like a kind of insane geometry, in form. Of all things such 'modernity' is doubtless doomed soonest to be ancient, or not to give it so honourable a name, at least obsolete, discarded, and unregretted."
* * * * *
That there are many English artists who are in a sense afraid of ugliness, in other words, who will only make pretty imitations of things recognised as beautiful, is not to be denied: it might almost be said that artists may be divided into those who have an unreasonable fear of ugliness and those who have a reprehensible love of it. Many difficult questions are involved in such a discussion: often two disputing parties will be found to be fundamentally in agreement. The Times critic was emphasising the truth that unoriginality is bad; Sir Sidney Colvin the equal truth that bogus originality is bad. But his remarks reminded us of a great many observations we have all recently heard with respect to certain tendencies to be observed in contemporary art or pseudo-art. The elderly and many of the soberer young are alarmed at much that they see painted or published. What does it all mean? they ask. Are the world's artists rushing over a steep place into the sea? Is there some new revelation in what looks at first sight like obscure rubbish? Are these noisy rioters really the young? Do they really hate everything that has ever been considered true? Will the whole of the coming generation be captured by them? Mingled with the dislike there is a great deal of bewilderment. Men doubt themselves. After all, new artistic developments have often been incomprehensible; these things are undeniably incomprehensible, so perhaps they are new artistic developments. Those who are tired of strife shiver, wrap their coats around them, prepare to retire into corners where the cold blast cannot reach them. But we really do not think that they should be so depressed, or that more vigorous men like Sir Sidney Colvin should be so alarmed: a rational diagnosis of the situation dissipates these apparent dangers.
* * * * *
Now we had better begin by premising that in the sphere of the fine arts we are not (these things are never taken for granted) denying the value of modern developments and the possibility of later ones. Not all the technical experiments of modern intellectual artists (akin to experiments in new media) may be fruitful, but at the centre of most movements, however extravagant, may be found an original artist who has either a peculiar way of looking at the world (El Greco is an example) or desires to experiment with some method in order to find out what results may accrue from it. But it is not a good thing to base a theory on the mannerisms of an original artist; it is still worse to build a convention on his unsuccessful experiments; and worst of all, perhaps, for an artist to paint not what he sees as he sees it through the medium of his temperament, but what some philosophical critic, with a distaste for both Nature and humanity, tells him to paint. A painter with intelligence, however, will soon tire of something which produces results which do not interest him; and the painting of foolish pictures by people who desire merely to attract attention is to some extent limited because anything that would deceive anybody involves a good deal of time and trouble. The fine arts will look after themselves; few members of the public will pay large sums for pictures that convey nothing to them. The printed word is in a rather different category. The world is always full of ineffective people who have a desire to write: a thing which can be done at any moment by anyone who has pen, ink, and paper. They also desire to attract attention by their writing. In our time "stunts" for their assistance have been discovered which have never been hit upon before.
* * * * *
The various stunts with which we are now familiar have spread over the whole world with a rapidity that no genuine spiritual movement or technical discovery has ever equalled. Just before the war that vivacious Southerner, Signor Marinetti, introduced us to the type-page, which consisted of capital letters and notes of exclamation tumbled about in apparent confusion. The first large English enterprise of the Futurist-Vorticist-Cubist kind was (though it contained normal patches) the magenta magazine Blast. It succumbed shortly after a hostile critic, consulting his Webster, had discovered the definition: "Blast:--a flatulent disease of sheep." But it died to give place to countless smaller magazines and books containing bewildering designs and extraordinary poems. The drawings and, to the eye which can take in only their typography, the poems are indistinguishable from others which are being published all over the world. The blagueurs attach themselves to anything which will give them publicity. There is something pathetic about the way in which, wherever the political Bolsheviks get into office, they print the verses and cartoons of the artistic anarchists. They don't understand them; all they know is that the bourgeois dislike them; so in Munich last Easter, and (we daresay) in Moscow now, there is an excellent opening for those who, for all anyone would be able to say to the contrary, have only to scratch out the old titles of their interlocked triangles and write underneath "Uprising of Proletariat," or some such thing. The Vorticists and verslibrists exist from Spain to Sweden. We saw this month a most beautifully produced volume from Tiflis. The words, scattered about in the Paris-and-London style, were in Georgian and Russian; but no translation was necessary; when one was supplied, the words and the lack of sense were precisely what we expected. They might have been Italian or English; and in the illustrations, mingled with the parallelograms, could be seen fragments of wasp-waisted "nuts" in opera-hats and shirt fronts, such as never were seen in Tiflis, where their heads are clad with fur. In a recent number of the Monthly Chapbook Mr. Flint, giving specimens of good and bad contemporary verse, quoted one gentleman who begins a poem with:
éo ié iu ié é é ié io ié ui ui io iè aéoé iaoé.
And another poet who writes:
vrron -- on -- on -- on -- on -- on vrrr vrrr vrrr hihihi.
It isn't really serious; but is any of this kind of thing serious? And is this mere noise at bottom sillier than much of the free verse to which some superficial meaning can be attached? We quote from an American review which, as a whole, is sensible and good these lines from a poem called Autumn Night:
The moon is as complacent as a frog. She sits in the sky like a blind white stone, And does not even see Love As she caresses his face With her contemptuous light. She reaches her long white shivering fingers into the bowels of men.
* * * * *
She is Death enjoying Life, Innocently, Lasciviously.
Of that kind of thing, usually done with a little less force in the images, but always meandering, stupid, and utterly unrhythmical, good American journals have lately been full. It has ceased to be amusing; but we don't think that anybody need be alarmed; nobody can like it, and in the end those who, from restlessness or fear, have pretended to will revolt against a diet of wind and sawdust and return to something more palatable.
* * * * *
For the simple truth is that the trick of incomprehensibility is the best trick that has ever been invented for the benefit of writers who, if they can feel or think, do not know how to translate their thoughts and feelings into the language of art. Twenty years ago the swarm of useless young writers discoursed on common themes in common metres imitatively, after the manner of Tennyson or of Swinburne or of Verlaine. If they favoured dignity and nobility they wrote sonnets beginning:
Under the high invulnerable stars,
or plays like Savonarola Brown's; if Nature was their theme we heard of
The blackbird's descant from the bough.
The virtuous wrote of love in the manner of:
Your brows are calm and virginal,
warming to:
Your mouth is red as red, red roses are.
The sham rake-hells festooned their hectic amours with references to purple breasts, absinthe, Messalina, and Semiramis: the banality was plain to see. But Signor Marinetti and his congeners--we had been gently acclimatised to great obscurity by artists like Mallarmé--provided these poets with a priceless gift. Let rhythm go, let sense go: put down in barbarous sequence any incongruous images that come into your head: even, if you like, put down sheer gibberish: if possible, deceive yourself, and you will deceive others. Produce a work so opaque that it cannot be seen through. The innocents will either wildly protest against these dangerous revolutionaries--a much more pleasing rôle to find oneself in than that of harmless mediocrity--or else they will knit their brows with the reflection "if this young man expresses himself in thoughts too deep for me, why what a very, very, very deep young man this deep young man must be." But we have noticed that most of these dealers in chaos soon tire. Those who have something in them (and any young man is liable to be infected by a current fashion) get through, none the worse: those who have not flag and stop.
* * * * *
In our second number we called attention, as many before us have called attention, to the scandalous state of the American copyright laws whereunder British authors have been put to immense inconvenience and loss, and which have resulted in the early books of almost every important British author being, in America, beyond his control. Since we wrote the American Senate has come to a decision which greatly ameliorates the conditions as they affect books published here since the war. It has been clear that during the war, owing to the delays of mails, it has often been impossible for English publishers and authors to secure American copyright even where American publication could easily be arranged for--copies for deposit could not be got across sufficiently quickly, and the time-limit of thirty days from English publication expired. Under the new decision--which is largely due to the efforts of Major G. H. Putnam--protection is secured for all British books of which the American copyright has been lost during the war. The Act has been amended: friendly alien authors have been given American copyright on works of which copyright lapsed during the war; the concession extends to works issued within fifteen months after the war, whatever the end of the war may be defined to be. During that fifteen months authors may take steps to establish their copyright; after that period, as we understand it, British authors and publishers will have a longer period (i.e., four months) than before in which to secure their rights, provided a complete copy of the English edition has been deposited in the Copyright Office not more than sixty days after publication. We suppose, though we await further information, that the fact that a book, presumed non-copyright, has been published in America during the war will not prevent its being copyrighted; but if this be so what will happen to a pirated edition (assuming such to exist) which was legally permissible before the new amendment?
* * * * *
An important step has been made in the development of the literary relations of the two countries. But these are still far from perfect. It may not be possible to make the domestic copyright laws of the two countries the same, but it should not be impossible for each country to extend to the books of the other a simultaneous and automatic copyright on publication. American books should be automatically copyright here when they appear in America; English books should be automatically copyrighted in America when they appear here. There is room for discussion as to the length of term of copyright to be granted to foreigners; but a basis for mutual agreement would not be difficult to find. We trust that Major Putnam will not flag in the good work, and that English authors will co-operate to the best of their ability.
* * * * *
We printed in our last number a letter from Mr. J. G. Fletcher disputing a statement made by our American correspondent that Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was the only "live" poet now writing in America, and questioning the justice of the praise given to Mr. Lindsay. On the assumption that our readers will be interested, we are publishing in this issue a work by Mr. Lindsay which illustrates his recent manner. It is a poem which presents some difficulties to English readers. It evokes memories of a Presidential campaign long gone past, and some of Mr. Lindsay's political references (not to speak of his presumably mythical animals) will puzzle people; even those English people who vaguely remember who Mark Hanna was will probably not have the ghost of a vision of Altgeld.
* * * * *
A binding case for THE LONDON MERCURY is being prepared, and will, we hope, be ready when the first volume (of six numbers) is complete. It would be a convenience if readers who are preserving their sets and will desire the official binding (which we can promise will not be an offensive one) would let us know in advance by postcard so that we may have some basis for our first order of cases.
* * * * *
For some time after publication we were obliged to refuse orders for our first number. We have recovered a very few copies, and, as we prefer that they should go to persons who are really anxious to obtain them in order to complete sets, we offer them at 7_s._ 6_d._ a copy. Applications will be dealt with in the order in which they are received. No. 2 will shortly follow suit.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
We congratulate Mr. Austin Dobson, whose birthday was the eighteenth of last month, on arriving at the full age of eighty. He has lived, for the past twenty years, since his retirement from the public service, so noiselessly that an idle world, always attentive to sensation, has half-forgotten to regard his presence. He has always preferred to stand a little out of the limelight, being by nature unobtrusive, and more conversant with books than with men. Such serene natures miss some of the rewards of their own age, but when they possess the quality of Mr. Austin Dobson posterity gives them their revenge. No one in our time has pursued the profession of literature with a more disinterested fervour than he. Mr. Dobson has taken no part in controversy, he has been mixed up with no sensational "movements"; his whole thought has been fixed on the study of past times and on the perfecting of his own delicate and lapidary art. He was not precocious in his development. When his earliest volume of poems, Vignettes in Rhyme, appeared he had reached his thirty-fourth year. He did not venture upon prose until eleven years later, when he published his memoir of Thomas Bewick. His latest volume, A Bookman's Budget, of 1917, combined both arts in one.
* * * * *
The quality of Mr. Austin Dobson, both in verse and prose, is curiously out of sympathy with the general tendency of literature to-day. In prose--though we admit that his essays have had numerous and distinguished admirers, Mr. Balfour, if we remember right, having once praised them above his poems in the House of Commons--in prose he seems to us to sacrifice freedom of movement to an intensely meticulous accuracy and to a desire to leave no fact unrecorded. But in verse Mr. Austin Dobson is, in his own restricted field, unsurpassed. He carries on, through the second half of the nineteenth century, the tradition of Prior and Anstey and Praed. It may be said that his poems are metrical pastimes, but he lifts them to the dignity of poetry. His happiest pieces are so polished, so delicate, and so felicitous that not a word in them could be altered; they are, of their own kind, perfect, and perfection is not relative but positive. So long as the English language survives there will be readers of The Ballad of Beau Brocade. We wish Mr. Austin Dobson many more years, and we hope that he will yet be encouraged to give us specimens of his graceful penmanship.
The writers of the obituary notices of Sir William Osler were strangely silent as to the love of books which was one of his most marked characteristics, and this although in Who's Who? he had put down "Bibliography" as his only "Recreation," and at the time of his death had been President of the Bibliographical Society for seven years, nearly three times as long as any of his predecessors. In the true spirit of humanism his interest in bibliography was first aroused by the books relating to his own profession, and widened out from this to a fine catholicity. Within a year of his coming to England he delivered an address on Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici before the Physical Society of Guy's Hospital (printed in The Library for January, 1906), and he was never tired of singing the praise of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as "a great medical treatise (the greatest ever written by a layman), orderly in arrangement, intensely serious in purpose, and weighty beyond belief in authorities." The quotation comes from a paper he read before the Bibliographical Society on The Library of Robert Burton in November, 1909, in which he gave a summarised account of the 580 books of Burton's preserved at the Bodleian and the 429 in the library at Christ Church. Unless we are mistaken, the picking out of these books, and the grouping those at Christ Church round a portrait of Burton, copied from the original in Brasenose College, was due mainly to his initiative. He certainly took a keen interest in both libraries, was an enthusiastic curator of the Bodleian, and a generous supporter of the admirable Bodleian Quarterly, started by Mr. Falconer Madan. A paper he contributed to this on the Bookworm, illustrated by an admirable coloured plate exhibiting it in all its stages, is by far the best study of that elusive "worm" ever printed.
* * * * *
After he became President of the Bibliographical Society he gave another stimulating address on the medical books printed before the close of the year 1480, its object being "to get an idea of the mental attitude of the profession of medicine from the character of the books printed." He had then been working on this subject for some time, and even amid the countless activities into which he threw himself during the war did not wholly neglect it. The description of the books was practically finished some time ago; whether the introduction, in which he aimed at clothing the bibliographical skeleton with flesh and blood, had been written is not yet known. He had over forty medical books of the fifteenth century in his own collection, and was forming a specialist library to illustrate the history of science, and of medicine in particular, on a strikingly original plan. Its completion should have been the occupation of a leisurely old age, but he loved his fellows too well to give himself any leisure, and left this for others to complete.
* * * * *
We welcome from America the first number of the new Dial. The Dial was founded at Chicago in 1880 by Francis F. Browne. Until a few years ago it remained in the Browne family, who produced fortnightly a paper, sober, academic, and informative, somewhat resembling our Athenæum of Victorian days. A few years ago the paper changed hands: its offices were shifted to New York, and it has been at one time primarily an organ of rebellious literary youth, and at another a Radical political journal. The latest remodelling promises stability. The Dial appears as a purely literary and artistic monthly, in shape like one of our own monthly reviews, and typographically superior to most of them. We await its development with interest.
POETRY
Fortunatus Nimium
1
I have lain in the sun, I have toiled as I might, I have thought as I would, And now it is night.
2
My bed full of sleep, My heart of content For mirth that I met The way that I went.
3
I welcome fatigue While frenzy and care, Like thin summer clouds, Go melting in air.
4
To dream as I may And awake when I will, With the song of the birds And the sun on the hill.
5
Or death--were it death, To what should I wake, Who loved in my home All life for its sake?
6
What good have I wrought? I laugh to have learned That joy cannot come Unless it be earned:
7
For a happier lot Than God giveth me It never hath been Nor ever shall be.
ROBERT BRIDGES
To E. G.
Were I to pause and hesitate For something "picked," "alembicate," I might, by chance, no further get Than mere parade of epithet; So I'll just wish to You and Yours Strength to achieve while strength endures; And, when the power to do is done, Remembered radiance of the sun!
AUSTIN DOBSON
New Year's Eve, 1919.
The Shadow
Death, would I feared not thee,. But ever can I see Thy mutable shadow thrown Upon the walls of Life's warm, cheerful room. Companioned or alone, I feel the presence of that following gloom, Like one who vaguely knows Behind his back the shade his body throws 'Tis not thy shadow only, 'tis my own!
I face towards the light That rises fair and bright Over wide fields asleep, But still I know that stealthy darkness there Close at my heels doth creep, Ghostly companion, my still haunting care; And if the light be strong Before my eyes, through pleasant hours and long, Then, then, the shadow is most black and deep.
EDWARD SHANKS
By the Weir
A scent of Esparta grass--and again I recall The hour we spent by the weir of the paper-mill Watching together the curving thunderous fall Of frothing amber, bemused by the roar until My mind was as blank as the speckless sheets that wound On the hot steel ironing-rollers perpetually turning In the humming dark rooms of the mill: all sense and discerning By the stunning and dazzling oblivion of hill-waters drowned.
And my heart was empty of memory and hope and desire Till, rousing, I looked afresh on your face as you gazed-- Behind you an old gnarled fruit-tree in one still fire Of innumerable flame in the sun of October blazed, Scarlet and gold that the first white frost would spill With eddying flicker and patter of dead leaves falling-- I looked on your face, as an outcast from Eden recalling A vision of Eve as she dallied, bewildered and still,
By the serpent-encircled tree of knowledge that flamed With gold and scarlet of good and evil, her eyes Rapt on the river of life: then bright and untamed By the labour and sorrow and fear of a world that dies Your ignorant eyes looked up into mine, and I knew That never our hearts should be one till your young lips had tasted
The core of the bitter-sweet fruit, and wise and toil-wasted You should stand at my shoulder an outcast from Eden too.
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!
A RHYME IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
(The campaign of Eighteen Ninety-six, as viewed by a sixteen-year-old)
I
In a nation of one hundred fine mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting millions There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about, And knock your old blue devils out.
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion, The one American poet who could sing outdoors. He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendour, Wild roses from the plains that made hearts tender, All the funny circus silks Of politics unfurled, Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores, And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.
There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle; There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle; There were real lines drawn: Not the silver and the gold, But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and old, The mean and cold.
It was Eighteen Ninety-six, and I was just sixteen, And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois, When there came from the sunset Nebraska's shout of joy: In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat, He scourged the elephant plutocrats With barbed wire from the Platte. The scales dropped from their mighty eyes. They saw that summer's noon A tribe of wonders coming To a marching tune. Oh, the long horns from Texas, The jay hawks from Kansas, The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus, The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo, The horned toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo, From all the new-born States arow, Bidding the eagles of the West fly on, Bidding the eagles of the West fly on, The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig, The hellangone, The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig, The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow, In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast, They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West, From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long: Against the towns of Tubal Cain, Ah--sharp was their song! Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young, The long-horn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.
These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed: The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed, The gossamers and whimsies, The monkeyshines and didoes Rank and strange Of the cañons and the range, The ultimate fantastics Of the far western slope, And of prairie schooner children Born beneath the stars, Beneath falling snows, Of the babies born at midnight In the sod huts of lost hope, With no physician there Except a Kansas prayer, With the Indian raid a-howling through the air.
And all these in their helpless days By the dour East oppressed, Mean paternalism Making their mistakes for them, Crucifying half the West, Till the whole Atlantic coast Seemed a giant spider's nest. And these children and their sons At last rode through the cactus, A cliff of mighty cowboys On the lope, With gun and rope. And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call, And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall Of men and whirling flowers and beasts, The bard and the prophet of them all. Prairie avenger, mountain lion, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun, Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West, And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky, Blotting out sun and moon, A sign on high.
Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light, The scalawags made moan, Afraid to fight.
II
When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting, Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted, Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill, Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting-- In silver-decked racing cart, Buggy, buckboard, carryall, Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul, And silver-decked farm-waggons gritted, banged and rolled, With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tyres told.
The State House loomed afar, A speck, a hive, a football, A captive balloon, And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes and sunshine, Every flag in town, and Bryan's picture sold, When the rigs in many a line Reached the town at noon, And joined the wild parade against the power of gold
We roamed, we boys from High School, With mankind, While Springfield gleamed, Silk-lined. Oh, Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald, And the gangs that they could get! I can hear them yelling yet Helping the incantation, Defying aristocracy, With every bridle gone, Bidding the eagles of the West fly on, Bidding the eagles of the West fly on, Ridding the world of the low-down mean: We were bully, wild and woolly, Never yet carried below the knees. We saw flowers in the air, Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion, Hopes of all mankind, Made rare, resistless, thrice refined. Oh, we bucks from every Springfield ward! Colts of democracy-- Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.
The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl. She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes. With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear, But she kept like a pattern, without a shaken curl.
She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose. Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose. No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way, But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck. The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck. And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed along. Against the ways of Tubal Cain, Ah, sharp was their song! The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass, The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass. And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass, The angels in the flags peered out to see us pass. And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher, And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire, And then it was but grass, and the town was there again, A place for women and men.
III
Then we stood where we could see Every band, And the speaker's stand. And Bryan took the platform, And he was introduced. And he lifted his hand And cast a new spell. Progressive silence fell In Springfield, In Illinois, Around the world. Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled: "_The people have a right to make their own mistakes ... You shall not crucify mankind Upon a cross of gold._"
And everybody heard him-- In the streets and State House yard. And everybody heard him In Springfield, In Illinois, Around and around and around the world, That danced upon its axis And like a daring broncho whirled.
IV
July, August, suspense. Wall Street lost to sense. August, September, October, More suspense, And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.
Then Hanna to the rescue, Hanna of Ohio, Rallying the roller-tops, Swivel chairs, bulls and bears, Rallying the bucket-shops, Threatening drouth and death, Promising Mannah. Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth; Invading misers' cellars, Tin-cans, socks, Melting down the rocks, Pouring out the long green to a million workers, Spondulicks by the mountain-load to stop each new tornado, And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite, Populistic, anarchistic, Deacon-desperado.
V
Election night at midnight: Boy Bryan's defeat. Defeat of western silver, Defeat of the wheat. Victory of letterfiles And plutocrats in miles With dollar signs upon their coats, Diamond watchchains on their vests And spats on their feet. Victory of custodians, Plymouth Rock, And all that inbred landlord stock. Victory of the neat. Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys, The bluebells of the Rockies, And blue bonnets of old Texas, By the Pittsburg alleys. Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily. Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi. Defeat of the young by the old and silly. Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme. Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
VI
Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley, The man without an angle or a tangle, Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer, The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner; Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack; Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church, The devil vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote, The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack, The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote, Every vote....
Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna's McKinley, His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes? Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time, And the flame of that summer's prairie rose.
Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform Read from the party in a wonderful hour? Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman And sledge-hammer Altgeld, who wrecked his power
Where is Hanna, bull-dog Hanna, Low browed Hanna, who said: "Stand pat"? Gone to his own place with Pierpont Morgan. Gone somewhere ... with lean rat Platt.
Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy, Who hated Bryan, then aped his way? Gone to join the shadows with pious Cromwell And tall King Saul, till the Judgment Day.
Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth, Whose name the few still say with tears? Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown, Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.
Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan, That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West? Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle, Where the Kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
VACHEL LINDSAY
BLIND THAMYRIS
By T. STURGE MOORE
Since my father was a hero and my mother a goddess of the woods, I was sent when twelve years old to the cave of Chiron, that he might instruct me in wisdom and valour. This life, divorced from all female tenderness, appealed to my pride, and only at night were my eyes ever moistened with regret. I was now free to follow a stream until, too weary to advance further, some cradle of scented herbs would lure me to rest and doze. At length twilight brought me an energy, winged with dread of the dusking forests, that carried me right home to the cavern. The sources were always my goal, the more easy descent seawards never tempted my morning moods: and, as he taught me the lyre or the control of my voice, Chiron remarked that a similar bent was evinced by an instinctive preference for those words and cadences that lead the spirit away from the high-roads of thought and feeling. Surely emotions well up in the fastnesses of tranquillity, close under the blue and white of heaven, more virginal than can be experienced in lowland retreats? As time wore on, Chiron, the daily lesson being ended, began to speak to me of a rhapsodist, former pupil and great favourite of his. "Agenor," he began, "like thyself, Thamyris was ever striving to reach the summits before joint and sinew were sufficiently tough. Alas, though he has often brought back with him the rarest strophes and melodies, men have refused to listen to them! They prefer a music that better harmonises with their garish sea-board towns, and he wanders shrouded in an ever deeper gloom." With a sigh he paused, and I waited, expecting to be warned not thus to estrange myself from humanity by persistently climbing among the hills. But he seemed unable so to conclude, and presently bid me run away and practise throwing the spear.
One forenoon when wind, so strong as to seem foreign to the settled brilliance of the weather, was bowing the fir-trees, and now here, now there, their backs arched silverly, flashing like waves on the dark green ridges, while the sound was that of a chorus of Titans rejoicing in violence (so much so that we had to retreat well back within the cave before we could hear ourselves play or sing), Chiron broke off the lesson, still disturbed it may be by the hurly-burly without, though it strained but faintly through the stillness held under that roof of rock. He sat gazing forth into the sunny turbulence, so grandly though jaggedly framed; and I, leaning back against his flank, watched his moved visage worn with much living. Then for the first time he began to recite me actual words of Thamyris, recalling how their public delivery had proved that those who thronged round the other rhapsodists would never collect about him.
Untouched white cloud, Like a task acclaimed When the heart is young, Thou fliest higher Than the eagle deed That is praised by men
Unheeded silence, In the night or at noon, Thou singest to the hilltops A song that is richer Than the tales of war Which men crowd to hear.
Magnificent joys Lie about like garments Amazingly broidered; A god has discarded them Before launching upward In naked loneliness.
But no human hand Lifts a single tunic; No man's heart prefigures The deep satisfaction Of moving vested In the pictured raiment That a god walked the earth in.
Chiron was silent, and I dreamed of finding and putting on the slough of Apollo. I saw myself in a sultry glare climbing boulders with grey lichen-crusted cheeks, and dark moss-bearded cavities down which I peered in hopes of finding a cupful of collected dew. At last I arrived on the crest, and there, at the bottom of a crater of wild tumbled blocks, lay gleaming somewhat silver and violet and blue. I scrambled down; a pattern of scaled serpents was looped inextricably over white samite. I lifted it, and from the inside there slipped with a swish a body-vest of pale vermilion rippled with gold in a device of arrows, each drawn to the head in a sturdy bow: an armoury of the proper size for an host of mice had it been real instead of pictured. I gasped; and Chiron's eyes met mine, so that I blushed all down my neck.
Months later, on my return at dusk from a day's ramble, I learned from our new pupil, the little Achilles, that Chiron had been fetched away by two other centaurs, and expected to be absent all night, perhaps longer. We prepared and ate our supper of chestnuts boiled and then mashed in milk, and were shortly rolled in separate bears' skins to sleep. Achilles, who was but just turned six, was soon off, but I lay hour after hour forecasting coming events with eyes wide open. I cannot now revive those dreamy adventures, and only recollect that Thamyris figured in no few, and how fevered I was by the thought that, being mysteriously like him, much sadness and disappointment lay in wait for me. At last moonlight began to edge into the cave; travelling along the wall it soon lit up a trophy, the skull and huge hooped horns of an ibex; and next the rug made of four chamois hides that Chiron hangs over his flanks and crupper in winter, when round his bust he wraps thick folds of brown knitted wool; not long after it was bathing the ebony lyre inlaid with polished iridescent sea-shell that has both its fluted pillars and their screw-heads enamelled with lines of scarlet. This wonder Jason had brought back from Colchis and sent up by an embassy to Chiron. I rose and, stealing softly to it, looked up, not at the well-loved colours of the lyre, but towards the tranquil effulgence that had woken them out of the darkness, and was surprised to see that there were many swift-travelling clouds in the sky, for while I lay in the shelter the night had seemed quite still. At that moment the moon was covered, and the cave became so dark that I stepped outside and saw the moonlight fast growing again on the lawn lower down, where we throw the spear and wrestling matches take place. I hurried to meet it and, once there, the terror and attraction of the hills at night shook me; for was I not brought forth by the regent of a bosky grove? Though its sacred safety rustled leagues from where I stood, might I not brave these mountain forests, being able so to account for my hardihood? I was carried away, neither walking nor running, but at a sort of shaken trot that seemed dictated by the thudding of my heart. The almost level path wound along our valley high above the torrent, which it would meet and cross some two miles deeper in this fold under Pelion. My limbs moved as it were unbidden; once or twice I stopped and said, "This is a dream," till the indescribable reality of everything drove me on. My teeth were frequently jolted, yet the cold did not seem intense enough to chatter them, and surely I was not abjectly frightened? This notion roused my self-control and calmed me till I slipped along like a peaceful thought, unchallenged yet alert. The stream was crossed by the fallen fir-trunk, and the path returned eastward on the opposite side of the valley till the distant mouth of the cave was passed and the forefront of this new ridge won. Here the view was immense, embracing islands in the sea and snowy Olympus and the unnumbered chains of the mountainous coast. Here I squatted on the short fine turf and folded both arms across my knees as a cushion for my chin. Perhaps I dozed, for my head was heavy when I lifted it to make sure of a sound--the trampling of centaurs a great way off. "They are returning," I said to myself, and laid an ear against the earth, and then peered into the darkness, for the moon lit nothing now except one band of sea far out behind the islands. All but certain by which track they were coming, I plunged headlong downward through the brushwood as though it had been broad day, intending to cut their road on the moor above the cliffs. How many times I floundered into bushes or barked a shin against bough or boulder, those who have done such things may imagine. I at last stumbled out on the heather hundreds of feet beneath, limping but consoled to fancy my troubles ended. Before I had cleared a thousand yards I fell, ricking my ankle, and rose with difficulty, for an agony like death whenever my foot pressed the ground routed the very notion of an inexhaustible endurance latent within me. I fell again on to the thick springy couch of scented ling and soon felt deliciously relieved. Violent activity had chased the last vestige of night-terror, and the wind moaning round me made even that barren place homelike as with the movements of a familiar presence. The slightest jerk to my right foot and immediately my brow was beaded with sweat, for pain like a savage dog held my ankle in its jaws, and would grind them anew if I stirred. Hooves thundered nearer and nearer; the noise so invaded my consciousness that to cry for help seemed as useless as to halloo against tempestuous breakers on a rocky shore, yet simultaneously there returned on me all that Chiron had taught of the diverse tribes of sound--how some are irreconcilable while others easily agree, how the loudest of one family may fail to drown small ones of distinct origin, and in a continuous and familiar uproar their different calibre may startle even as in silence. Fed by these memories hope grew strong, and I cried out, "Father Chiron, Father Chiron, I am here, and must die if you do not come." Then I listened: all was still. At first I feared they had reached the hills and entered the valley so that the sound of their trampling was walled off. Just then it began again more slowly and unexpectedly near, so I shouted, "Father Chiron, do not leave me to the wolves!" Then his voice answered, and tears streamed over my face and sobs so shook me that I could not make out his words, yet between the spasms I gasped, "This way, this way!" And he came and knelt beside me, first on his fore-knees, then settling down on his haunches gradually so as not to scare me by the blundering of his fetlocks. His large gentle hand felt my moist burning brow while I pointed at my helpless ankle; then he lifted it between thumb and finger, and with the index of the other hand began to stroke the swelling thoughtfully. Then lifting his head he shouted, "Rhoetus, find me some sorrel or lettuce, and if you see any straight wands cut me one or two. Catch! Here is my knife!" and he slipped the thong by which it hung over his head. Now I must tell you it was a delicately smithied blade with both edges sharp, and lived, point foremost, in a snug trough cut along the yellow boxwood handle over which a lid of box was spliced, the open end being secured by a wedge of ebony attached by a thong. For use, the blade was first shaken out on the palm, then its heft-end replaced and secured by tapping the wedge with a stone. It was our great pleasure to borrow this knife and scratch lions or eagles upon a horn, or out of soft pine carve straight-robed Athena with casque and spear. I know every cut that defines her attitude, but can never give her features, either terrible or beautiful. But Chiron was repeating to me, "Did not Achilles tell you that I could not be back before morning?" for my mind had suddenly wandered to my foster-mother's farm kitchen in the lowlands forty miles away. "Yes, he told me, but I could not sleep, and at last I wanted to explore the woods by moonlight; after I heard you coming, in running I caught my foot in the twisted trunks of this heather," With a low husky chuckle he said, "Though I am supposed to be really wise, the simplicity of your explanation has surprised me harbouring sinister forebodings." I had no inkling then how he dreaded lest the violence of centaur-herds and the knavery of townsmen, like clashing flints, should cause a conflagration. For ever more pressingly he forebodes the violation of his cavern's peace, the only spot left where men and centaurs foregather kindly. At that time I attributed his words to the ocean of his wisdom, which, like a shore-bred child, I was accustomed to hear murmur, content if now and again the beauty of a thought meant for me stranded like a dainty shell at my feet. Hitherto I had lain like one bed-rid, haunted by the seriousness of that pain, but now, sitting up and taking advantage of the licence accorded to sufferers, I dared to show a curiosity which every endeavour would have suppressed had my right ankle been as sound as the left, and asked, "Where have you been, Father Chiron?" His husky laugh allowed the indulgence I had claimed, and his voice grew strained as he answered, "I was called to the death-bed of my best-beloved son Thamyris." "Is he very sick?" I asked. "Not now, for he moaned me his last epode and ended like the swan." At that I lay back once more and looked across the heather at the moon, unwilling to embarrass his sorrow by staring at it. And after a pause Chiron in a very low voice began to croon:
Falcon daughters of Apollo, Ye spur on a man to sing, Rend with pangs sharp as a sword: Then for his best award Faint praise and a broken wing.
Is it for larks to follow The snow-feathered cloud? They are dusky and hot and fragile And scarcely contain a proud Insanely throbbing heart: Ye are amber-eyed, sleek and agile, Taloned and savagely smart.
When the fierce blood bursts our pulses, Darkened like Hades at noon, There falls from the towering ether A mangled mass of feather.
An end to the pain that convulses Life with ambition is boon Enough for a soul uplifted, And by each of you severally gifted.
When silence had nursed the memory of this for a space I glanced at Chiron; his wet eyes stared steadily at the moon. He roused himself and began to shout to hasten Rhoetus, and the young centaur soon approached, bounding wildly, a mat of tresses flapping like a black flag about his head. Chiron took the knife, the leaves and the two sallows, and measuring these last against my leg cut two wands from their stouter ends, split them and placed their flat sides against the leaves in which he packed my tender joint. He next cut strands from under his white beard as long as his arm; with one he bound the splints lightly round my calf and with the other secured them beneath my foot. Rising, he helped me up, and warned me not to put any weight on the cage, which lengthened and imprisoned my leg. He then signed to Rhoetus to lift me on to his back, and side by side the two began walking across the heath; the sky was once more almost clear and the moon was setting. The sea, though it could be heard, was hidden by the heathery hillocks which thatched its cliffs, as Olympus and the great ranges were behind hills tawny and russet with beech and alder but hooded in evergreen firs that towered dead black in the moonlight. A whistle sounded, and there was Caudon waiting three hundred paces off. Rhoetus advanced, crying to him, "It is my turn to carry the body now," but his piebald fellow immediately heaved something on to his shoulder and set off at a gallop. "What is it?" I said to Chiron, round whose vast waist my arms clung. "They shame our breed," he replied. "Ghosts of the dead never haunt centaurs, so for them the lifeless body is no more than an empty smock. Men are born with older fears and cradled in whispering awe. Reverence is thus taught them, first by terror, and then by esteem, if they consort with finely-tempered minds. But these rough colts, deprived of the first, scarce heed the second lesson yet. Poor Thamyris, the fair course of thy days was driven about till, willy-nilly, it clashed with the coarse-grained crowd; and must thy body be tossed, fought for, and whirled away in the fury of this boisterous rivalry?" They were fetching wide curves across the heath; sometimes even Caudon's piebald flanks were lost in the darkness, and they became a mere chivy of distancing sounds; then again both toiled on the skyline above the cliffs, like shadows on a wall. Their shouts had at first betokened no more than horse-play, but took now an angrier accent. Chiron smartened his pace, and I felt that his spirit was chafing, and when they next drew within earshot he shouted commands to arrest them of such sternness as they were not sufficiently enslaved by passion to disregard, and they came severally, muttering, heated, and resentful towards us. The old centaur reproached them for thus jolting the body of his friend. "But he feels nothing," argued Caudon. "Well, well, had he been a skin of choice wine, you should have carried him with more care." "Wine can be spoilt with shaking--but a corpse!" grumbled Rhoetus. "Still for all he once was ..." "Why, he was so mad as to put out his own eyes!" grunted Caudon, and Rhoetus continued, "They say he died because he refused to eat in a rage that outlasted his life." "Yet I, who am old enough to be your sire's grandsire, have often wished the hour stayed when his fingers wandered the strings." "Years ago!" they interjected. "Last evening he kissed my hands and taught me words that fly straight to the heart." Neither colt retorted, and the silence seemed so consecrated to the gravity of the wise Chiron's sorrow that I feared to break it, though devoured with curiosity about this unaccountable madness, blindness, and death. We had entered the valley and were climbing at a foot-pace among the trees. Though the moon had set, the sky had not darkened but greyed with the dawn. As the light increased the body absorbed my attention; it hung wrapped in a coarse and torn cloak over Rhoetus's shoulder; for Caudon had ceded it to him soon after they left arguing with Chiron. The arms dangled along his muscular back and the dead hands flopped and turned upon the glossy black hide to which his brown skin gave place below the loins. They went a little in advance of us, and at times I could divine just how the head hung, by some yellow hair that appeared and disappeared behind a rent in the cloak which, swaying, opened and closed like the ill-hinged door of a granary loft that, swinging in the wind, shows the gleam of golden grain to a mid-winter day. My head had dropped in a doze before we reached the place where a path branches down to the bathing pool, and Chiron bade Rhoetus and Caudon carry the body up to the cave, build a fire, and seethe meat, for all would be more than common hungry. But me he carried down to the large pool that spreads out from the foot of a fall in the torrent; and at the outer brim of this basin, where the clear water becomes shallow and escapes in many minor cascades downwards, he chose a bank of sward and laid me gently down where the water would flow over my damaged foot. While I lounged at ease he himself gravely walked down under the pool; the water rose above the horse and only the man remained; still he trod carefully deeper, the white stones being often slippery with green weed; and now his beard and hair were floating like foam about his shoulders, as though a smaller column of invisible water were drilling the quivering surface right out in front of the torrent that thundered into boiling suds at the foot of the dripping rocks. Still his hooves felt their way down, till the billowy outward curves were sweeping right over his head. The white limestone lit up the depths and rendered his figure clearly visible, though it seemed strangely stunted; his chestnut crupper, silvered as it was with age, became violet by contrast with the icy blue water. All around thinned boughs hung out long yellow leaves, and the reflections of some of them flickered like fish about him. Time seemed to have ceased and all hostile conditions to have been suspended in favour of this magnificently weathered creature, that he might become divinely amphibious and death stand disarmed before him. Far above, a level shaft of sunlight from over the mountain shoulder suddenly caught the tree-tops. A naked scaffold of dark trunk, bough and intricately forking branch sustained each thin tower-like tent of brilliant leaves. Thus, their grand swelling shapes hollow instead of dense with foliage, tanned or yellow instead of green, these chestnuts whose flaunting camps reach far up the valleys made a last stand against the disenchanting season of storms. The banks beneath were thick with fallen leaves interspersed with clusters of nuts like hedgehogs. The whole vividly coloured scene swam in the limpid transparent slumber which tuned my breathing, though it had not closed my eyes. I thought, "He will stay under too long and I shall never hear how poor Thamyris went mad," yet it seemed acceptable or at least necessary that I should never hear and that he should remain immersed for ever. No, he lifted his head and parted his hair and rubbed his eyes, and came up as slowly and solemnly out of the pool as he had descended into it. Streaming and refreshed, he cantered round its shallow brim, splashing with his hooves; he shook and wrung from hair and beard streamers of diamond drops, quivering the while the glossy coat of his nether body to free its shaggy skirts, and whisking his tail against his hocks. Pausing beside me, he smiled into my sleepy eyes and said, "How goes the ankle?" I murmured that it was so cold as to have stopped aching, and I could not now feel whether it were there or not. He drew me a little higher up till my bandaged foot was out of the numbing flow. Roused by this I could no longer refrain from asking what had driven poor Thamyris mad; and the answer came, soothing the terror that it stirred in my soul by the grave compassion with which it was pronounced. "He could not endure to watch those whose attention he had in vain tried to capture, grouped about some common rhapsodist who, with shouts, recounted how one man killed another in some freebooting foray. He must have wandered unwanted and uninspired for months before at last he stood near the ships where fishermen had been chipping holes in large flints in order to thread them along the bottom of their great sweep-net. These had often split before they were pierced, and fragments with knife-like edges lay all about. Suddenly dashing down his lyre, he stooped and seized two sharp pieces, and sobbing out that his eyes should never again watch a crowd like that gaping upon the wharf at this bawler, he jabbed at his eyes. Others told me how they heard him, and turned to see blood streaming from his face and beard and from the two red hands that he waved as he staggered, unaccustomed to darkness. They thought some goddess in the shape of a sea-hawk must have struck him with her beak, and vanished as swiftly as she had come through the twilight. Afterward, when his broken lyre was found, they concluded that the Muses had sent her because he, though a mere mortal, sang such songs as might in the halls of Olympus be preferred to their own, for only among the gods, as those fishermen fancied, could he have found suitable audience. They led him to the temple of Apollo; there the priest killed a snake and bound its body across his bleeding orbits, and the wounds healed, but sight did not return. Later on, when he felt how he never knew where he was or who was near--when no one could lead him far towards the stony peaks he loved, for dread always overtook them at the danger of steep places for a blind man whose daimon left him totally unwarned--he refused food and sat all day on the temple steps, and never begged an alms or stooped to gather what was thrown him. At night the hierodules had sometimes heard him mutter as though he prayed for vengeance. They even believed that he had challenged the nine Muses to a trial of skill, offering to yield body and mind to their displeasure if he failed, but should he outsing them, then each of them was to submit her body to bear him a child. For servile minds, Agenor, ascribe the motives familiar to themselves to those whose outstanding actions they must perforce canvass. Thus he endured not only perpetual darkness, but companionless solitude where streams of men were constantly passing; hearing voices but not one conversable. Then when death first warned him, he sent a message to me; this was delivered to Rhoetus and Caudon, who bore it on up the shoulders of Pelion." And gazing round, he continued, "In this spot shall he rest, screened by these chestnuts from the cruel moons of summer; here shall a grave be dug. The distance from the cave is convenient, and bathers may often consent to remain while I rechant one of his lays, till, departing, they breathe a pious wish for the peace of him whose life was full of strife and storms, though he never joined in battle, or trod the planks of a ship. When I stood by his side he said, 'O god-like beast, no other ears ever listened to me with pleasure as thine did. Thou hast been rewarded with extended life, for thy actions and customs are swayed neither by fear nor by greed, but in the eyes of the young and in quiet haunts thou hast sought the wisdom most easily wed to divine melodies. Thou wilt understand and perhaps pity these strophes born of my anguish.' His fevered reveries would seem so to have exalted me that he used an address such as gods expect, and with the same trance-like utterance feebly and slowly delivered the hymn I repeated to you on the heath, but then the end came. Now you had better lie here for to-day lest you should jar that ankle, and I will send Achilles to you with some meat." I wondered over all I had heard, not without dread of a similar fate, till Achilles came and wanted to know what I had seen in the night, whether nymphs or daimons or Artemis herself. As I ate the warm meat or broke the brown crusts between sips of wine, I told him. Then with all the roguish effrontery of his beauty, shaking his long yellow curls, he laughed, "I should have done as you did for all the rest, Agenor, but I should not have sprained my ankle," and he danced off singing, "No, indeed, indeed no!" while I, dropping the drained horn into the empty maple bowl, rolled over and slept.
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When I woke the sun had passed the meridian, and the sound of a spade and the thud of falling clods could be heard, and looking across I saw Caudon working in a grave on a crest of the opposite bank; soon the blade rang on the rock and his action became that of shovelling out the loam. Next, Chiron and Rhoetus arrived, carrying the body between them wound in a long and splendid pall. This had been sent by Thetis as a present with Achilles when he joined us in July. It measured six yards by four, and might have served for a temple curtain or to drape a royal bed. The goddess herself had worked it far out under the sea, aided by the silver-shoed daughters of Doris. Flying over a ground of deep blue were seen harpies with black wings spread and every feather tipped with white, their brown bodies shaped like large eggs; they wore coral necklaces, and had the heads of women with singing mouths and long streaming raven curls. Yet they were armless and had the legs and talons of a bird. Each of the score was exactly like every other, and side by side and one after another they flew across the deep noon sky. So they sweep by close above some ship, with sweet voices advising mariners of a greater glory amid ocean than where sails are often met around the coast. Though well they know that from the vacant unislanded main the venturer has rarely returned. Chiron had no use in his cavern for a cloth so splendid, and he had determined to devote this to the honour of Thamyris. They laid his body, wholly enveloped in it, along the turf beside the grave, while they spread in it the autumn-tinted bracken that Achilles had been cutting with a sickle, and, armful after armful, had made a mountainous heap of. Next they lowered him in the great blue cloth on to that sun-saturated couch. Then Chiron took his lyre and sang:
A gentle spring was that long past Which brought thee to my cave; For thought yet more than action brave, O daring spirit, now thou hast Gleaned all that feeble mortals give To those in whom intenser joy has sought to live Here woodland peace broods ever, here Shall water alway carol in thine ear.
Caudon and Rhoetus now chanted the usual chorus of "Last Farewell," Achilles and myself piping in as well as their loud voices would let us. The rest of the bracken was then thrown down and on that the dark loam, the turfs were replaced, wine spilled in libation and grain strewn. The rites were ended: the two centaurs shouldered spade and mattock and clattered off. Achilles asked if he might go into the woods with his bow and arrow to shoot something. Chiron nodded consent and came to examine my ankle. While he uncased it and did it up again with fresh leaves, I asked why, if Thamyris so loved the lonely hills and scorned men, he was so angry at seeing them crowd about other rhapsodists. When he had finished with my foot he replied, "One of our friend's hymns is now trotting in my head," then touching his lyre he chanted:
From the west upward I toiled heavy-hearted; From the east joyous, Poising his weight on An arching instep, Came man to meet me.
And high in the azure, Where the rocks ended We sat down, friends. He heard there how often Was said, shown or felt The thing that rebuked me.
Then laughed and pretended That what the hand fashioned, House, sword or dead body, Alone remained; Thoughts and intentions Lost their existence.
His glad voice inveigled Belief from my candour; And lo! he was gone. Poising my weight on An arching instep Down I came, gaily Facing the sunset, As though in the sea-port That glittered beneath it I had not yet smitten The sonorous lyre. As though the folk there Had come from the eastward That very morning And found empty houses And ships abandoned, Needing only to be cleaned and repainted, And meant to make them gay as spring flowers, And were sure in the twilight To gather about me.
"There, that is his own answer to your question. I do not think he craved just any praise, nor did he much over-prize his own gift; and you see he was not thinking of this coast, but of one facing the other way, so that the poet could arrive from the quarter opposite to the sun and meet him at noon on the peak. As much as to say, 'Not myself, nor this town's people, but any place, any people, any poet.' He worshipped man, and it angered him to see homespun preferred to the skyey fabric the god had helped him weave. He regretted his violence and could not live without those eyes it had cost him." Having drawn these sentences one by one from his sad heart, Chiron lapsed into silence till I asked, "But why did he address the Muses as enemies in his last hymn, if what the folk said was quite false?" "It is strange. Can they have appeared to him smartly fledged in white plumage, with dapper tail and wings and vulture heart? Stately women clothed in daffodil chitons delighted my gaze the only time I ever had a glimpse of them." "When was that?" "I was scarcely older than yourself, and woke in a cave to see them sitting and resting at its mouth, delicately grouped against the dawn. I remember Euterpe's lap full of flowers, and Melpomene, for her hair was stormy, black and unbound, and a deep brown cloak had slipped from her shoulders, but still hung over her elbows; it was only afterwards that I regretted not having noted the features of Urania, but assuredly no single one of them had the eye of a hawk. They rose as I woke, and strolled on. I crept after them, but when I turned the buttress of rock, no glad-robed figure was in sight, though it seemed that choral voices floated in the air; yet soon I found myself listening to silence, so could not be sure." "It must be sad to sing unpraised, however beautiful the words." "Yes, boy, and the ecstasy that sings is counterfaced with a destroying rage; that is perhaps why his darkened soul figured the Muses as birds of prey." "Do you know any more of his rhapsodies?" "Perhaps I can recall another," and he struck some strange bell-like notes and then sang:
Leap, Ibex, leap: the drop From that mountain turret-top Is sheer two hundred feet! Crash head foremost to the rock; Those massive hoops, thy curved horns, take the shock And throw thee up! Albeit Tossed by their supple springs, Without the help of wings, Scarcely may eye believe Thou hast righted in the air! Rashness thou dost retrieve; Whence thou wast bounced, even there Arrivest without let; Four sturdy hooves of jet Plant thee on the slab thine eye Had chosen from on high.
So melodist that haunts The spirit-firing peaks, And deep in azure chants, Must take like dizzy leap Back to some sea-board town To find the praise he seeks.
And would he still his fervour keep, As fine resilience will he need So featly to light down, Hoop-horned Goat, as thine, By chamois herds acclaimed divine!
A god's grace truly will he need If he be not to suffer, not to bleed-- A shattered heart and brain a-fire, A trodden mantle and snapt lyre!
And how by headlong rapture whirled and blinded Should he know where 'tis won or how to find it? That unpredictable address Whose magic cleaves the rough quartz stone And makes its secret crystals known When the most boorish bless The most divine And flash back to their eyes the grace by which they shine!
This history has been written with Chiron's help, who says we have often found more appropriate words than were actually used, yet have not departed from truth as Clio bestows it on those who do her unfeigned reverence.
* * * * *
I covered this sheepskin years ago in the cave and have kept it ever since; now I must soon bequeath it to the care of others. Achilles and Chiron are both long since dead, and who wants to hear the lays of Thamyris now? I never picked up the slough of any god; though a bit later, when my foot was sufficiently healed for me to limp about, I found behind some bushes, where Caudon or Rhoetus had chucked it, the filthy ragged homespun mantle of Thamyris, for when I spread it out one could see where the blood had run down from his eyes by the dark stains. I folded it and laid it at the foot of his grave and raised a pyramid of stones over it, bringing them toilsomely from the pool each day as my ankle grew stronger, even as in two or three years' time I was adding crooked letter to crooked letter on the inside of this skin that Thamyris might be remembered. And as I wrote I was persuaded, in spite of Chiron's presentiment and that vivid dream of a white chlamys broidered over with blue, violet, and silver serpents, that such "magnificent joys" would never be mine. Which secret conviction, as I grew a beard and it grew grey, has been proved correct. Maeonides, best loved of all rhapsodists, may have found it, though when I heard him chant the war for Troy, he also was dressed in homespun and already blind; but old Agenor has kept his two eyes as safely as this sheepskin.
THE ROMANCE OF RHYME
By G. K. CHESTERTON
The poet in the comic opera, it will be remembered (I hope), claimed for his æsthetic authority that "Hey diddle diddle will rank as an idyll, if I pronounce it chaste." In face of a satire which still survives the fashion it satirised, it may require some moral courage seriously to pronounce it chaste, or to suggest that the nursery rhyme in question has really some of the qualities of an idyll. Of its chastity, in the vulgar sense, there need be little dispute, despite the scandal of the elopement of the dish with the spoon, which would seem as free from grossness as the loves of the triangles. And though the incident of the cow may have something of the moonstruck ecstasy of Endymion, that also has a silvery coldness about it worthy of the wilder aspects of Diana. The truth more seriously tenable is that this nursery rhyme is a complete and compact model of the nursery short story. The cow jumping over the moon fulfils to perfection the two essentials of such a story for children. It makes an effect that is fantastic out of objects that are familiar; and it makes a picture that is at once incredible and unmistakable. But it is yet more tenable, and here more to the point, that this nursery rhyme is emphatically a rhyme. Both the lilt and the jingle are just right for their purpose, and are worth whole libraries of elaborate literary verse for children. And the best proof of its vitality is that the satirist himself has unconsciously echoed the jingle even in making the joke. The metre of that nineteenth-century satire is the metre of the nursery rhyme. "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle" and "Hey diddle diddle will rank as an idyll" are obviously both dancing to the same ancient tune; and that by no means the tune the old cow died of, but the more exhilarating air to which she jumped over the moon.
The whole history of the thing called rhyme can be found between those two things: the simple pleasure of rhyming "diddle" to "fiddle," and the more sophisticated pleasure of rhyming "diddle" to "idyll." Now the fatal mistake about poetry, and more than half of the fatal mistake about humanity, consists in forgetting that we should have the first kind of pleasure as well as the second. It might be said that we should have the first pleasure as the basis of the second; or yet more truly, the first pleasure inside the second. The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. The heart of the tree remains the same, however many rings are added to it; and a man cannot leave his heart behind by running hard with his legs. In the core of all culture are the things that may be said, in every sense, to be learned by heart. In the innermost part of all poetry is the nursery rhyme, the nonsense that is too happy even to care about being nonsensical. It may lead on to the more elaborate nonsense of the Gilbertian line, or even the far less poetic nonsense of some of the Browningesque rhymes. But the true enjoyment of poetry is always in having the simple pleasure as well as the subtle pleasure. Indeed it is on this primary point that so many of our artistic and other reforms seem to go wrong. What is the matter with the modern world is that it is trying to get simplicity in everything except the soul. Where the soul really has simplicity it can be grateful for anything--even complexity. Many peasants have to be vegetarians, and their ordinary life is really a simple life. But the peasants do not despise a good dinner when they can get it; they wolf it down with enthusiasm, because they have not only the simple life but the simple spirit. And it is so with the modern modes of art which revert, very rightly, to what is "primitive." But their moral mistake is that they try to combine the ruggedness that should belong to simplicity with a superciliousness that should only belong to satiety. The last Futurist draughtsmanship, for instance, evidently has the aim of drawing a tree as it might be drawn by a child of ten. I think the new artists would admit it; nor do I merely sneer at it. I am willing to admit, especially for the sake of argument, that there is a truth of philosophy and psychology in this attempt to attain the clarity even through the crudity of childhood. In this sense I can see what a man is driving at when he draws a tree merely as a stick with smaller sticks standing out of it. He may be trying to trace in black and white or grey a primeval and almost pre-natal illumination; that it is very remarkable that a stick should exist, and still more remarkable that a stick should stick up or stick out. He may be similarly enchanted with his own stick of charcoal or grey chalk; he may be enraptured, as a child is, with the mere fact that it makes a mark on the paper--a highly poetic fact in itself. But the child does not despise the real tree for being different from his drawing of the tree. He does not despise Uncle Humphrey because that talented amateur can really draw a tree. He does not think less of the real sticks because they are live sticks, and can grow and branch and curve in a way uncommon in walking-sticks. Because he has a single eye he can enjoy a double pleasure. This distinction, which seems strangely neglected, may be traced again in the drama and most other domains of art. Reformers insist that the audiences of simpler ages were content with bare boards or rudimentary scenery if they could hear Sophocles or Shakespeare talking a language of the gods. They were very properly contented with plain boards. But they were not discontented with pageants. The people who appreciated Antony's oration as such would have appreciated Aladdin's palace as such. They did not think gilding and spangles substitutes for poetry and philosophy, because they are not. But they did think gilding and spangles great and admirable gifts of God, because they are.
But the application of this distinction here is to the case of rhyme in poetry. And the application of it is that we should never be ashamed of enjoying a thing as a rhyme as well as enjoying it as a poem. And I think the modern poets who try to escape from the rhyming pleasure, in pursuit of a freer poetical pleasure, are making the same fundamentally fallacious attempt to combine simplicity with superiority. Such a poet is like a child who could take no pleasure in a tree because it looked like a tree, or a playgoer who could take no pleasure in the Forest of Arden because it looked like a forest. It is not impossible to find a sort of prig who professes that he could listen to literature in any scenery, but strongly objects to good scenery. And in poetical criticism and creation there has also appeared the prig who insists that any new poem must avoid the sort of melody that makes the beauty of any old song. Poets must put away childish things, including the child's pleasure in the mere sing-song of irrational rhyme. It may be hinted that when poets put away childish things they will put away poetry. But it may be well to say a word in further justification of rhyme as well as poetry, in the child as well as the poet. Now, the neglect of this nursery instinct would be a blunder, even if it were merely an animal instinct or an automatic instinct. If a rhyme were to a man merely what a bark is to a dog, or a crow to a cock, it would be clear that such natural things cannot be merely neglected. It is clear that a canine epic, about Argus instead of Ulysses, would have a beat ultimately consisting of barks. It is clear that a long poem like Chantecler, written by a real cock, would be to the tune of Cock-a-doodle-doo. But in truth the nursery rhyme has a nobler origin; if it be ancestral it is not animal; its principle is a primary one, not only in the body but in the soul.
Milton prefaced Paradise Lost with a ponderous condemnation of rhyme. And perhaps the finest and even the most familiar line in the whole of Paradise Lost is really a glorification of rhyme. "Seasons return, but not to me return," is not only an echo that has all the ring of a rhyme in its form, but it happens to contain nearly all the philosophy of rhyme in its spirit. The wonderful word "return" has, not only in its sound but in its sense, a hint of the whole secret of song. It is not merely that its very form is a fine example of a certain quality in English, somewhat similar to that which Mrs. Meynell admirably analysed in a former issue of this magazine in the case of words like "unforgiven." It is that it describes poetry itself, not only in a mechanical but a moral sense. Song is not only a recurrence, it is a return. It does not merely, like the child in the nursery, take pleasure in seeing the wheels go round. It also wishes to go back as well as round; to go back to the nursery where such pleasures are found. Or to vary the metaphor slightly, it does not merely rejoice in the rotation of a wheel on the road, as if it were a fixed wheel in the air. It is not only the wheel but the waggon that is returning. That labouring caravan is always travelling towards some camping-ground that it has lost and cannot find again. No lover of poetry needs to be told that all poems are full of that noise of returning wheels; and none more than the poems of Milton himself. The whole truth is obvious, not merely in the poem, but even in the two words of the title. All poems might be bound in one book under the title of Paradise Lost. And the only object of writing Paradise Lost is to turn it, if only by a magic and momentary illusion, into Paradise Regained.
It is in this deeper significance of return that we must seek for the peculiar power in the recurrence we call rhyme. It would be easy enough to reply to Milton's strictures on rhyme in the spirit of a sensible if superficial liberality by saying that it takes all sorts to make a world, and especially the world of the poets. It is evident enough that Milton might have been right to dispense with rhyme without being right to despise it. It is obvious that the peculiar dignity of his religious epic would have been weakened if it had been a rhymed epic, beginning:
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal root.
But it is equally obvious that Milton himself would not have tripped on the light fantastic toe with quite so much charm and cheerfulness in the lines:
But come thou Goddess fair and free In heaven yclept Euphrosyne
if the goddess had been yclept something else, as, for the sake of argument, Syrinx. Milton in his more reasonable moods would have allowed rhyme in theory a place in all poetry, as he allowed it in practice in his own poetry. But he would certainly have said at this time, and possibly at all times, that he allowed it an inferior place, or at least a secondary place. But is its place secondary; and is it in any sense inferior?
The romance of rhyme does not consist merely in the pleasure of a jingle, though this is a pleasure of which no man should be ashamed. Certainly most men take pleasure in it, whether or not they are ashamed of it. We see it in the older fashion of prolonging the chorus of a song with syllables like "rumty tumty" or "tooral looral." We see it in the similar but later fashion of discussing whether a truth is objective or subjective, or whether a reform is constructive or destructive, or whether an argument is deductive or inductive: all bearing witness to a very natural love for those nursery rhyme recurrences which make a sort of song without words, or at least without any kind of intellectual significance. But something much deeper is involved in the love of rhyme as distinct from other poetic forms, something which is perhaps too deep and subtle to be described. The nearest approximation to the truth I can think of is something like this: that while all forms of genuine verse recur, there is in rhyme a sense of return to exactly the same place. All modes of song go forward and backward like the tides of a sea; but in the great sea of Homeric or Virgilian hexameters, the sea that carried the labouring ships of Ulysses and Æneas, the thunder of the breakers is rhythmic, but the margin of the foam is necessarily irregular and vague. In rhyme there is rather a sense of water poured safely into one familiar well, or (to use a nobler metaphor) of ale poured safely into one familiar flagon. The armies of Homer and Virgil advance and retreat over a vast country, and suggest vast and very profound sentiments about it, about whether it is their own country or only a strange country. But when the old nameless ballad boldly rhymes "the bonny ivy tree" to "my ain countree" the vision at once dwindles and sharpens to a very vivid image of a single soldier passing under the ivy that darkens his own door. Rhythm deals with similarity, but rhyme with identity. Now in the one word identity are involved perhaps the deepest and certainly the dearest human things. He who is homesick does not desire houses or even homes. He who is lovesick does not want to see all the women with whom he might have fallen in love. Only he who is sea-sick, perhaps, may be said to have a cosmopolitan craving for all lands or any kind of land. And this is probably why sea-sickness, like cosmopolitanism, has never yet been a high inspiration to song. Songs, especially the most poignant of them, generally refer to some absolute, to some positive place or person for whom no similarity is a substitute. In such a case all approximation is merely asymptotic. The prodigal returns to his father's house and not the house next door, unless he is still an imperfectly sober prodigal; the lover desires his lady and not her twin sister, except in old complications of romance; and even the spiritualist is generally looking for a ghost and not merely for ghosts. I think the intolerable torture of spiritualism must be a doubt about identity. Anyhow, it will generally be found that where this call for the identical has been uttered most ringingly and unmistakably in literature, it has been uttered in rhyme. Another purpose for which this pointed and definite form is very much fitted is the expression of dogma, as distinct from doubt or even opinion. This is why, with all allowance for a decline in the most classical effects of the classical tongue, the rhymed Latin of the mediæval hymns does express what it had to express in a very poignant poetical manner, as compared with the reverent agnosticism so nobly uttered in the rolling unrhymed metres of the ancients. For even if we regard the matter of the mediæval verses as a dream, it was at least a vivid dream, a dream full of faces, a dream of love and of lost things. And something of the same spirit runs in a vaguer way through proverbs and phrases that are not exactly religious, but rather in a rude sense philosophical, but which all move with the burden of returning; things to be felt only in familiar fragments ... on revient toujours ... it's the old story--it's love that makes the world go round; and all roads lead to Rome: we might almost say that all roads lead to Rhyme.
Milton's revolt against rhyme must be read in the light of history. Milton is the Renascence frozen into a Puritan form; the beginning of a period which was in a sense classic, but was in a still more definite sense aristocratic. There the Classicist was the artistic aristocrat because the Calvinist was the spiritual aristocrat. The seventeenth century was intensely individualistic; it had both in the noble and the ignoble sense a respect for persons. It had no respect whatever for popular traditions; and it was in the midst of its purely logical and legal excitement that most of the popular traditions died. The Parliament appeared and the people disappeared. The arts were put under patrons, where they had once been under patron saints. The schools and colleges at once strengthened and narrowed the New Learning, making it something rather peculiar to one country and one class. A few men talked a great deal of good Latin, where all men had once talked a little bad Latin. But they talked even the good Latin so that no Latinist in the world could understand them. They confined all study of the classics to that of the most classical period, and grossly exaggerated the barbarity and barrenness of patriotic Greek or mediæval Latin. It is as if a man said that because the English translation of the Bible is perhaps the best English in the world, therefore Addison and Pater and Newman are not worth reading. We can imagine what men in such a mood would have said of the rude rhymed hexameters of the monks; and it is not unnatural that they should have felt a reaction against rhyme itself. For the history of rhyme is the history of something else, very vast and sometimes invisible, certainly somewhat indefinable, against which they were in aristocratic rebellion.
That thing is difficult to define in impartial modern terms. It might well be called Romance, and that even in a more technical sense, since it corresponds to the rise of the Romance languages as distinct from the Roman language. It might more truly be called Religion, for historically it was the gradual re-emergence of Europe through the Dark Ages, because it still had one religion, though no longer one rule. It was, in short, the creation of Christendom. It may be called Legend, for it is true that the most overpowering presence in it is that of omnipresent and powerful popular legend; so that things that may never have happened, or, as some say, could never have happened, are nevertheless rooted in our racial memory like things that have happened to ourselves. The whole Arthurian Cycle, for instance, seems something more real than reality. If the faces in that darkness of the Dark Ages, Lancelot and Arthur and Merlin and Modred, are indeed faces in a dream, they are like faces in a real dream: a dream in a bed and not a dream in a book. Subconsciously at least, I should be much less surprised if Arthur were to come again than I should be if the Superman were to come at all. Again, the thing might be called Gossip: a noble name, having in it the name of God and one of the most generous and genial of the relations of men. For I suppose there has seldom been a time when such a mass of culture and good traditions of craft and song have been handed down orally, by one universal buzz of conversation, through centuries of ignorance down to centuries of greater knowledge. Education must have been an eternal viva voce examination; but the men passed their examination. At least they went out in such rude sense masters of art as to create the Song of Roland and the round Roman arches that carry the weight of so many Gothic towers. Finally, of course, it can be called ignorance, barbarism, black superstition, a reaction towards obscurantism and old night; and such a view is eminently complete and satisfactory, only that it leaves behind it a sort of weak wonder as to why the very youngest poets do still go on writing poems about the sword of Arthur and the horn of Roland.
All this was but the beginning of a process which has two great points of interest. The first is the way in which the mediæval movement did rebuild the old Roman civilisation; the other was the way in which it did not. A strange interest attaches to the things which had never existed in the pagan culture and did appear in the Christian culture. I think it is true of most of them that they had a quality that can very approximately be described as popular, or perhaps as vulgar, as indeed we still talk of the languages which at that time liberated themselves from Latin as the vulgar tongues. And to many Classicists these things would appear to be vulgar in a more vulgar sense. They were vulgar in the sense of being vivid almost to excess, of making a very direct and unsophisticated appeal to the emotions. The first law of heraldry was to wear the heart upon the sleeve. Such mediævalism was the reverse of mere mysticism, in the sense of mere mystery; it might more truly be described as sensationalism. One of these things, for instance, was a hot and even an impatient love of colour. It learned to paint before it could draw, and could afford the twopence coloured long before it could manage the penny plain. It culminated at last, of course, in the energy and gaiety of the Gothic; but even the richness of Gothic rested on a certain psychological simplicity. We can contrast it with the classic by noting its popular passion for telling a story in stone. We may admit that a Doric portico is a poem, but no one would describe it as an anecdote. The time was to come when much of the imagery of the cathedrals was to be lost; but it would have mattered the less that it was defaced by its enemies if it had not been already neglected by its friends. It would have mattered less if the whole tide of taste among the rich had not turned against the old popular masterpieces. The Puritans defaced them, but the Cavaliers did not truly defend them. The Cavaliers also were aristocrats of the new classical culture, and used the word Gothic in the sense of barbaric. For the benefit of the Teutonists we may note in parenthesis that, if this phrase meant that Gothic was despised, it also meant that Goths were despised. But when the Cavaliers came back, after the Puritan interregnum, they restored not in the style of Pugin but in the style of Wren. The very thing we call the Restoration, which was the restoration of King Charles, was also the restoration of St. Paul's. And it was a very modern restoration.
So far we might say that simple people do not like simple things. This is certainly true if we compare the classic with these highly-coloured things of mediævalism, or all the vivid visions which first began to glow in the night of the Dark Ages. Now, one of these things was the romantic expedient called rhyme. And even in this, if we compare the two, we shall see something of the same paradox by which the simple like complexities and the complex like simplicities. The ignorant liked rich carvings and melodious and often ingenious rhymes. The learned liked bare walls and blank verse. But in the case of rhyme it is peculiarly difficult to define the double and yet very definite truth. It is difficult to define the sense in which rhyme is artificial and the sense in which it is simple. In truth it is simple because it is artificial. It is an artifice of the kind enjoyed by children and other poetic people; it is a toy. As a technical accomplishment it stands at the same distance from the popular experience as the old popular sports. Like swimming, like dancing, like drawing the bow, anybody can do it, but nobody can do it without taking the trouble to do it; and only a few can do it very well. In a hundred ways it was akin to that simple and even humble energy that made all the lost glory of the guilds. Thus their rhyme was useful as well as ornamental. It was not merely a melody but also a mnemonic; just as their towers were not merely trophies but beacons and belfries. In another aspect rhyme is akin to rhetoric, but of a very positive and emphatic sort: the coincidence of sound giving the effect of saying, "It is certainly so." Shakespeare realised this when he rounded off a fierce or romantic scene with a rhymed couplet. I know that some critics do not like this, but I think there is a moment when a drama ought to become a melodrama. Then there is a much older effect of rhyme that can only be called mystical, which may seem the very opposite of the utilitarian, and almost equally remote from the rhetorical. Yet it shares with the former the tough texture of something not easily forgotten, and with the latter the touch of authority which is the aim of all oratory. The thing I mean may be found in the fact that so many of the old proverbial prophecies, from Merlin to Mother Shipton, were handed down in rhyme. It can be found in the very name of Thomas the Rhymer.
But the simplest way of putting this popular quality is in a single word: it is a song. Rhyme corresponds to a melody so simple that it goes straight like an arrow to the heart. It corresponds to a chorus so familiar and obvious that all men can join in it. I am not disturbed by the suggestion that such an arrow of song, when it hits the heart, may entirely miss the head. I am not concerned to deny that the chorus may sometimes be a drunken chorus, in which men have lost their heads to find their tongues. I am not defending but defining; I am trying to find words for a large but elusive distinction between certain things that are certainly poetry and certain other things which are also song. Of course it is only an accident that Horace opens his greatest series of odes by saying that he detests the profane populace and wishes to drive them from his temple of poetry. But it is the sort of accident that is almost an allegory. There is even a sense in which it has a practical side. When all is said, could a whole crowd of men sing the "Descende Cœlo," that noble ode, as a crowd can certainly sing the "Dies Irae," or for that matter "Down among the Dead Men"? Did Horace himself sing the Horatian odes in the sense in which Shakespeare could sing, or could hardly help singing, the Shakespearean songs. I do not know, having no kind of scholarship on these points. But I do not feel that it could have been at all the same thing; and my only purpose is to attempt a rude description of that thing. Rhyme is consonant to the particular kind of song that can be a popular song, whether pathetic or passionate or comic; and Milton is entitled to his true distinction; nobody is likely to sing Paradise Lost as if it were a song of that kind. I have tried to suggest my sympathy with rhyme, in terms true enough to be accepted by the other side as expressing their antipathy for it. I have admitted that rhyme is a toy and even a trick, of the sort that delights children. I have admitted that every rhyme is a nursery rhyme. What I will never admit is that anyone who is too big for the nursery is big enough for the Kingdom of God, though the God were only Apollo.
A good critic should be like God in the great saying of a Scottish mystic. George Macdonald said that God was easy to please and hard to satisfy. That paradox is the poise of all good artistic appreciation. Without the first part of the paradox appreciation perishes, because it loses the power to appreciate. Good criticism, I repeat, combines the subtle pleasure in a thing being done well with the simple pleasure in it being done at all. It combines the pleasure of the scientific engineer in seeing how the wheels work together to a logical end with the pleasure of the baby in seeing the wheels go round. It combines the pleasure of the artistic draughtsman in the fact that his lines of charcoal, light and apparently loose, fall exactly right and in a perfect relation with the pleasure of the child in the fact that the charcoal makes marks of any kind on the paper. And in the same fashion it combines the critic's pleasure in a poem with the child's pleasure in a rhyme. The historical point about this kind of poetry, the rhymed romantic kind, is that it rose out of the Dark Ages with the whole of this huge popular power behind it, the human love of a song, a riddle, a proverb, a pun or a nursery rhyme; the sing-song of innumerable children's games, the chorus of a thousand camp-fires and a thousand taverns. When poetry loses its link with all these people who are easily pleased it loses all its power of giving pleasure. When a poet looks down on a rhyme it is, I will not say as if he looked down on a daisy (which might seem possible to the more literal-minded), but rather as if he looked down on a lark because he had been up in a balloon. It is cutting away the very roots of poetry; it is revolting against nature because it is natural, against sunshine because it is bright, or mountains because they are high, or moonrise because it is mysterious. The freezing process began after the Reformation with a fastidious search for finer yet freer forms; to-day it has ended in formlessness.
But the joke of it is that even when it is formless it is still fastidious. The new anarchic artists are not ready to accept everything. They are not ready to accept anything except anarchy. Unless it observes the very latest conventions of unconventionality, they would rule out anything classic as coldly as any classic ever ruled out anything romantic. But the classic was a form; and there was even a time when it was a new form. The men who invented Sapphics did invent a new metre; the introduction of Elizabethan blank verse was a real revolution in literary form. But vers libre, or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture. It is no more a revolution in literary form than eating meat raw is an innovation in cookery. It is not even original, because it is not creative; the artist does not invent anything, but only abolishes something. But the only point about it that is to my present purpose is expressed in the word "pride." It is not merely proud in the sense of being exultant, but proud in the sense of being disdainful. Such outlaws are more exclusive than aristocrats; and their anarchical arrogance goes far beyond the pride of Milton and the aristocrats of the New Learning. And this final refinement has completed the work which the saner aristocrats began, the work now most evident in the world: the separation of art from the people. I need not insist on the sensational and self-evident character of that separation. I need not recommend the modern poet to attempt to sing his vers libres in a public house. I need not even urge the young Imagist to read out a number of his disconnected Images to a public meeting. The thing is not only admitted but admired. The old artist remained proud in spite of his unpopularity; the new artist is proud because of his unpopularity; perhaps it is his chief ground for pride.
Dwelling as I do in the Dark Ages, or at latest among the mediæval fairy-tales, I am yet moved to remember something I once read in a modern fairy-tale. As it happens, I have already used the name of George Macdonald; and in the best of his books there is a description of how a young miner in the mountains could always drive away the subterranean goblins if he could remember and repeat any kind of rhyme. The impromptu rhymes were often doggerel, as was the dog-Latin of many monkish hexameters or the burden of many rude Border ballads. But I have a notion that they drove away the devils, blue devils of pessimism and black devils of pride. Anyhow Madame Montessori, who has apparently been deploring the educational effects of fairy-tales, would probably see in me a pitiable example of such early perversion, for that image which was one of my first impressions seems likely enough to be one of my last; and when the noise of many new and original musical instruments, with strange shapes and still stranger noises, has passed away like a procession, I shall hear in the succeeding silence only a rustle and scramble among the rocks and a boy singing on the mountain.
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE NOVEL
By J. D. BERESFORD
I
If the opinion of the reviewer represents in any degree the opinion of the public, psycho-analysis is becoming at once the craze and the curse of the modern novelist. The chief persons of the story, we gather, are no longer units, recognisable illustrations of acceptable and well-defined types of character, but tend to split horribly into their component parts, revealing the workings of their unconscious minds with a spiritual immodesty worthy of the immortal Sally Beauchamp. Our heroes suffer from "Œdipus complexes" with a unanimity that must appear altogether perverse to a generation reared on the works of Charles Dickens, who consistently regarded all mothers as criminal, negligible, or insane. Our heroines are become either displayed specimens of morbid pathology or increasingly middle-aged. Finally, and as a culminating horror, we occasionally come across a novel written with such a single regard for the subjective emotions that the objective personality appears only now and then as an uncompleted cast momentarily lifted, for examination, from the matrix.
Moreover, these symptoms and their like--I still adapt and condense the current opinions of the outraged reviewer--exhibit an inclination to multiply. We picture the admirer of the world's most successful novelist (Harold Bell Wright) as arching his back and spitting furiously at the first indication of a Freudian thesis. And, to conclude the indictment, it is plain that unless the novel-writing disciples of the Vienna and Zurich schools of psychology can promptly be bled to death--they have, thank God, quite miserable circulations!--their influence may permeate and vitiate that sane and admirable method which has given us an Ethel M. Dell, a Temple Thurston, or a Zane Grey.
This indictment represents, no doubt, an extremist attitude, the opinion of that multitude which must have its heroines pure and its morality undiluted; but it cannot be neglected solely on that account. And when we recognise, as we must, that authentic critics have also shown a bias in the same direction, we have established a case that demands both a literary and a scientific consideration.
Our analysis, however, must begin with certain exclusions. If we are to test the influence of psycho-analysis on the novel as an art-form we must take into account not only the effect, but also the manner of the incidence. For it is manifest that of all theories of the nature of man ever put forward by a reputable scientist, that of Sigmund Freud is the most attractive and adaptable for the purposes of fiction. It was a theory of sex, the all but universal theme of the novel; it emphasised various peculiarities of thought, feeling, and action that no observant, and, a fortiori, no introspective novelist could thereafter overlook; it gave a new mystery to the human mind; adumbrated the suggestion of a freer morality by dwelling upon the physical and spiritual necessity for the liberation of impulse; and, last temptation of the enervated seeker for new themes, provided material for comparatively unworked complications of motive.
Now, these appeals have inevitably influenced the writing of just those experimenters and opportunists whose novels I wish to exclude from our analysis. Their productions can only be indicative of a passing fashion; their value, at best, such as the future historian may find in the record of the epidemic symptoms they have documented. But since novels of this type have a particular significance, both in relation to our present purpose and to all literary criticism of this form of expression, we must in the first place arrive at a clear understanding of the quality that differentiates them from those other works which, whatever their failings, have another representative value.
Taking, then, an extreme and therefore ideal example, I submit that the essential difference is that between pure observation and pure feeling, or variously between an intellectual as opposed to an emotional response to experience. In the case of the experimenters we are considering, such a subject as psycho-analysis is studied from the surface, the facts and general teachings are memorised and then applied, more or less arbitrarily, to the invented or observed characters who figure in the story. Such a method when brilliantly used may produce an impression of truth, may even in rare cases lead to discovery, but in its essence it is mechanical, a mere collection and presentation of material that has not been assimilated, and hence very slightly transmuted by the writer.
The opposed example is that in which the study of, say, psycho-analysis comes to the understanding of the writer as a formula that interprets for him a mode of experience. He has, let us assume, been aware of and puzzled by a habit of thought or feeling which is suddenly and beautifully illuminated for him by the application of this new formula. Nor, in the truly representative instance, does the process halt at the first discovery, but continues to open resolutions of old difficulties hardly recognised as such until they fall within the scope of the new criterion. The danger that besets the young disciple in the first ecstasies of such an adventure is that he will inevitably be tempted to apply his touchstone too generally, to imagine that his formula will explain all life.
In such a case as this the manner of incidence, to which I referred, differs markedly from the first example. Here we get a sense of interpenetration and subsequent assimilation, in the former case rather of obliquity and reflection; the true difference being that one writer finds in psycho-analysis an aid to the understanding of human thought and action, the other merely a useful piece to add to his repertoire. And, finally in this connection, one has true value as evidence of the validity of the theory; the other has not.
Having thus cleared the ground by eliminating more particularly those literary experiments in applied psychology that have had such an irritant action on the nerves of the reviewer, I propose to test the applicability of psycho-analysis to fiction by a brief examination of certain aspects of the work of a writer who had not heard of Freud and never attempted to anticipate his method. Dostoevsky, in fact, from our point of view, may be regarded primarily as a patient rather than as a doctor.
Of his life up to the age of seven years we lack that information which would provide us with the last triumphant detail of proof. It is exceedingly improbable that that detail will ever be forthcoming. But it is a fairly safe inference from the later evidence that at some time in the course of those earlier years he suffered either some shock of terror or stress of misery that initiated the trauma which was later confirmed and emphasised by his experience on the scaffold. This inference is inherently probable, and since it might conceivably be confirmed by research and could not conceivably be disproved, we may assume it as a premise, although it is not absolutely essential pathologically.
For the remainder of his life we see him beyond all shadow of doubt suffering from a neurosis that, even if it were not the cause, was the accompaniment and not the result of his epilepsy. The form taken by this neurosis has been provisionally termed an "inferiority complex." In its milder and practically harmless forms it is perhaps the commonest instance of a morbid inhibition, despite the fact that--pace Dr. Freud--it depends more on the power principle of Adler than on the pleasure-pain principle so tediously insisted upon by the Vienna school. The symptoms in aggravated cases exhibit on the one side an exaggerated humility, and on the other an intolerant use of any adventitious opportunity for the use of power. Two instances of everyday experience taken from a text-book of psycho-analysis are: The driver of a heavy van brutally threatening the temporarily inferior pedestrian by the threat of running him down; and the ordinarily meek woman who takes a delight in exerting temporary superiority of position, it may be in such a trivial act as keeping anyone waiting by a pretence of inattention.
Dostoevsky, however, has himself analysed the condition so perfectly that his study might well find a place in a medical library as the ideal type of this particular neurosis. The supposed autobiographer (his name does not appear) in Notes from Underground[22] is, perhaps, too intelligently aware of his own condition, but it is evident that Dostoevsky's purpose could only be fully served by the form of a personal confession. It is, indeed, a confession that holds no reserves. In the earlier part of the story we see the assumed writer of the notes suffering agonies from the consciousness of his humiliation. This is followed by two attempts to assert himself, both futile. We then see him in a contest with his servant, Apollon, whose condition is a reflex of his own. And, finally, we get the representative instance of a brutal use of temporary superiority of position in his dealings with the unfortunate little prostitute, Liza. Moreover, the title is conclusive. The "underground" is clearly indicated as that of the mind, and if the story had been written within the last ten years the author would have been accused by the reviewers of having steeped himself in the writings of the psycho-analysts. The opening sentences, indeed, would probably have been a little too much for the sensitive, since the sketch begins: "I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me."
[22] The novels of Feodor Dostoevsky. Vol. X. _White Nights and Other Stories._ Constance Garnett's translations. Heinemann.
This one story would be almost sufficient testimony as to Dostoevsky's own condition, the essential part of it coming, as it does, not from observation, but from the "underground" of the writer's own mind. But if we need further evidence it can be found in almost any of Dostoevsky's novels: the valet in The Brothers Karamazov is a fine example; Prince Myshkin in The Idiot develops the theme in its less self-conscious aspect; there is more than one example in The Possessed. But the truth is that, once started on this scent, the student of Dostoevsky cannot fail to conclude that the type dominates both the characterisation and the atmosphere of all his works.
Yet if our diagnosis rested solely on this evidence the inference would be open to attack by the layman on the grounds that Dostoevsky wrote of the Russian as he knew him; and has not Russia as a country exhibited precisely the symptoms of the neurosis we have been describing? Centuries of suppression and humiliation have been at work to foster and confirm the complex which we now see in its typical expression, although passing, as did that of the French in the last years of the eighteenth century, towards its natural sublimation.
But our evidence goes beyond the examination of Dostoevsky's imaginative writings--in which, by the way, he was continually able, within certain limitations, to sublimate his own complex. Indeed, it was not by his novels but by a study of his letters that I, personally, was led in the first instance to attempt the diagnosis. In the letters we must look chiefly for autobiographical indications rather than for the emergence of the unconscious wisdom that enriches the novels, but would be checked by the realisation of addressing a particular individual.
The first of them that attracted my attention was the adulatory tone of the letters begging for patronage, written just before the release from Siberia. One regrets, in reading them, that genius could so bemean itself. The common excuse for the tone of them is that Dostoevsky was ill and over-tried by his recent experiences, but it is just in such circumstances as these that one looks for the expression of the dominant individuality. In any case I prefer the pathological explanation. Then we come to the consideration of his jealousy of Turgenev, and of the unfortunate meeting of the two men in Switzerland. All Dostoevsky's resentment and his behaviour at the meeting in question are readily explicable by the theory of his neurosis, but the need for impartiality demands that we should ask if a perfectly normal explanation is forthcoming. Personally I have failed to find one that is consistent with an unprejudiced interpretation of Dostoevsky's general character. Apart from his prepossession, he exhibits traits of gentleness, affection, and tolerance that do not appear to me consonant with his treatment of Turgenev. He did not seek to belittle his other contemporaries. But, in this instance, like the hero of Notes from Underground, he could not resist the unconscious desire to try and jostle his superior from the pavement.[23]
[23] Cf. op. cit., pp. 87, et seq.
For our present purpose, however, it is not necessary to prove that Dostoevsky himself was the victim of a particular neurosis--although the argument is slightly strengthened if that hypothesis be admitted--since it is primarily only my intention to show that certain morbid conditions of mind, now clearly indicated and with obvious limitations explained by the psycho-analysts, may be artistically treated in the best fiction. Another instance of this, which may be briefly referred to, is that afforded by the writings of D. H. Lawrence, who in all his novels has demonstrated with the passionate conviction that is a witness to his genius the strange and occasionally dissociated workings of the unconscious mind. In this case we are confronted with just such a sex obsession as delights the faithful disciples of the Vienna school, but the particular type of complex is not of any importance in this connection.
II
The result of our preliminary examination may be summarised as the posing of two deductions: the first, that the deliberate, intellectual use in the pages of a novel of the teachings of psycho-analysis produces an effect upon the reader that may be variously irritating, unconvincing, and negligible, but is rarely, if ever, psychologically valuable; the second, that a writer of genius such as Dostoevsky has, in one sense, forestalled the conclusions of this branch of psychology and used them to the benefit of literature. At first sight these two deductions may appear to disclose an inherent contradiction, namely, that the theories of psycho-analysis can and cannot be used for the purposes of fiction; but this apparent contradiction is instantly resolved by a consideration of the manner of treatment. Briefly we may assume that, according to precedent, a true form of self-expression must bear the impress of spontaneity, and hence that a novelist's learning is comparatively valueless to him until it has been so assimilated and transmuted as to become a personal experience and conviction.
This last proposition, however, opens the second phase of our thesis, presenting as it does the obvious deduction that such a theory as that of psycho-analysis properly comprehended and applied may become a powerful influence in the novel of the future. But to decide that we must consider, first, how far the theory is a new one, and, secondly, in what respects it illuminates the problems of normal psychology.
The answer to the first question can be stated quite briefly. The knowledge of the facts upon which Freud's pathological method was founded are as old as folk-lore. Certain symbols that the modern practitioner recognises as having a peculiar significance in the dreams of his patient are the same symbols that were used not only in Greek and Norse mythologies, but also in the most primitive rites of the savage. What is new is primarily the pathological method by which the unconscious mind may be induced to reveal its dangerous secrets; but from the study of this method there is arising the outline of a new psychology for which we have no true precedent. Glimmerings and faint foreshadowings there may have been, but no sure recognition or understanding; and the answer to our second question involves some inquiry into what this new psychology implies.
Let me begin by saying that psycho-analysis throws very little light on the problem of the survival of the personality, and Dr. Jung, in his address to the Society for Psychical Research last April, refused to admit the probability of any authentic message having been received from departed spirits. We are able, therefore, to confine ourselves strictly to the study of humanity in its normal, that is to say, in its terrestrial, condition, and find our main point of convergence from older psychologies in the intensive observation of that element of our make-up which is now commonly spoken of as "the unconscious."
A scholarly history designed to collate the main facts of man's attitude towards and tentative realisations of his own duality would make uncommonly interesting reading; but outside religion and imaginative literature no real attempt was made to characterise the unconscious mind until Freud began to practise a pathology that relied upon the interpretation of dreams as an essential part of the method of diagnosis. In the past the oneirocritic was solely concerned with the significance of the dream in so far as it foretold the future; the Freudian analysis, before Jung restored the balance of factors, was equally single-minded in relating it to the past. And this change of attitude--so startling in its implications that it almost makes a break in the continuity of thought--tended very quickly to crystallise a host of speculations that had awaited a unifying hypothesis. For this method of interpreting the dream, supported as it was by verifiable results in the patient's nervous, mental, and physical condition, could only signify that we are endowed with a double consciousness, and that under a suitable stimulus the deeper consciousness could be examined and, as I have said, characterised. We are, in short, confronted with the theorem of a dual personality[24] in every human being, in which the second person has peculiar and essential functions, both in connection with our sanity and with our physical well-being. What precisely is the scope of these functions we are not yet in a position to say, but we can formulate with reasonable certainty various characteristic activities, tendencies and modes of expression, common to this second personality, that are of the greatest importance to modern psychology.
[24] In using the term "dual personality" I beg an essential question for the sake of a convenient image; but it must not be assumed that what I describe hereafter as a second personality is recognised as such by psychologists. It is possible that the unconscious bears some such relation to the conscious as desire bears to purpose, instinct to reason, or reflexive to deliberative action. But see also in this connection De l'Inconscient au Conscient, by Dr. Gustave Geley, Paris. 1919.
We must, for example, face the deduction that the unconscious can suffer from a queer and hitherto unrecognised form of ill-health. A sudden fright, for instance, more particularly in childhood, has apparently the effect of breaking the liaison in this one particular relation between the conscious and the unconscious minds. The shock itself, whatever it may be, is not remembered by the conscious mind, and this failure of contact between the unconscious and objective reality seems to produce a condition comparable to nervous worry. Speaking figuratively, one may say that the second personality becomes the victim of a growing obsession, and begins to concentrate its efforts more and more upon signalling its message of distress. And surely the strangest of all the strange facts that have recently been described concerning this amazing partnership of ours is that the second personality cannot communicate with the first except in the language of symbol. The means by which that vital message can be transmitted is, generally, in the first instance by a dream. But this dream does not picture the actual circumstances of the original shock, but seeks to describe it by a method that Dr. Maurice Nicoll has compared to that of the political cartoon. Night after night the message of distress is delivered with diligent ingenuity in a picture language the images of which are frequently taken from casual and unimportant experiences of the dreamer's waking life, such experiences being presented in the form of an allegory which, rightly interpreted, has a bearing on the urgent cause of distress. When this mode of communication fails, more drastic steps are taken and the physical actions of the body may be influenced in the form of a mania. A youth or a young woman shocked by a sudden sexual experience or revelation to the point of conscious forgetfulness of the incident in question may develop a mania for the continued cleansing of the hands--again, be it noted, the message being conveyed by a symbol. Or the effect may be the development of a phobia that in extreme cases may cause the death of the patient.
Now, the points of immediate interest in this amazing process are, firstly, what may be called the anxiety of the unconscious to communicate its distress; and, secondly, the inability to convey its message by any means other than that of symbol. From the former observation it may perhaps be inferred, inter alia, that it is vital to the functions of the unconscious that it should have universal touch with the objective realities of its partner; from the second, that the existence of a trauma causing a breach between the two minds is of such a nature that direct communication becomes impossible along that particular circuit. For, although it is true that the majority of dreams emerge in this form, they also contain now and then plain statements that solve a perplexity; and it is difficult to understand why in cases of such vital urgency, an image of the conditions responsible for the original trauma should not be directly presented, unless there is some nervous dissociation--it may be an actual physical displacement or temporary rearrangement of cell tissue--producing a restricted amnesia in the conscious mind.
Proceeding now with the characterisation of the unconscious, we come to that aspect of it which has above all others tickled and excited the popular imagination. In this aspect the unconscious figures as the crouching beast of desire, the primitive immoral instigator of all the animal passions, a thing of wonderful abilities and capable of amazing physical dexterities, but before all else unethical and uncivilised. But sorry as I am to destroy so romantic and intriguing a creation, I must admit that Dr. Jung's researches do not uphold this view of the unconscious as a universal type. It is, indeed, well established in the mythologies and appears as the serpent, a favourite symbol, in the second chapter of Genesis; but the individual may at once put away the fear, or the hope, that he himself is harbouring so fearful a beast. For, if we may argue from those abnormal instances that furnish the bolder illustrations of tendency, we have excellent grounds for following Jung in the assumption that the unconscious is the complement of the conscious. Is a man brutal, then he is suppressing the urgency to gentleness that wells up--an uncertain and impeded flow, no doubt--from the depths of his being; and we remember the callous murderer exhibiting a tender solicitude for some feeble animal. Is he a miser, he is occasionally tortured by promptings to an absurd generosity. Is he a loose-liver, he suffers from an unappeasable longing after chastity. The saint is tempted by his unconscious being to sin: the sinner to renounce the devil and all his works. In short, the character of the unconscious is as various as the character of man; although in this civilised world of ours, in which the dominant restrictions of society are in the direction of sex and decency, we are naturally inclined towards a generalisation that presents the unconscious as a creature of immodesty and lust....
But it is unnecessary for the purposes of this article that I should elaborate any further the larger inferences of the psycho-analysts with regard to the personal traits, influences, and functions of this astonishing partner of ours. All that I wish to demonstrate is that such a partner almost certainly exists and has an immense influence upon our impulses, our thoughts, and our actions. And the critical question we have to face is whether the agency of the unconscious, recognised now both by the philosophers and the psychologists, can possibly be kept out of the novel. Personally, I believe that neither the distaste of the reviewer nor that more influential factor the distaste of the public will avail to bar the conclusions of psycho-analysis from the fiction of the future. We are coming inevitably to a new test in our judgments upon human action and thought, a test that has been proved to be valid by many thousands of well-authenticated experiments. I am willing to admit that through all the ages genius has anticipated laboratory and clinical methods, and that the basis of the psycho-analytical theory was firmly established in literature before Freud applied it as a pathological method. But once such a theory as this is established--a probability one can hardly escape--how can any serious novelist afford to neglect the illumination it throws upon the subtle problems of human impulse? Is it not already tending to become a touchstone of the author's powers of observation and understanding, helping us to evaluate the intellectual productions of the writer, whether realist or romantic, who relies upon the evidence of his eyes and ears rather than upon his personal emotions and experience?
I am aware that such a postulate as this contradicts in some respects certain implications I have previously made. But it must be remembered that while the novelist's best material undoubtedly comes from his personal contacts, almost infinitely extended by his powers of entering with an emotional sympathy into the experiences of other lives either presented or recounted, he cannot entirely neglect the precedents afforded by learning. Such precedents may only serve him as a test and a formula for correction, but should he overlook them altogether he will be liable to fall into the error of regarding his personal equation as a universal standard and generalise from the atypical.
And, finally, I would submit that we are at this moment passing through a new phase of evolution that must have a characteristic effect on the fiction of the future--if the form of the novel survives the change. We may study the first evidences of this strange partnership of ours in the lower animals. In the wild what we call the unconscious appears to be the single control. It represents the genius of instinct, swift, feral, and unethical. In animals, such as the dog and the horse, age-long companions of man, we can trace the incipient rivalry of what in ourselves we regard as the representative consciousness. The horse and the dog have already learnt the meaning of conscious inhibition. At our command they can deny the spontaneous impulses of their natural desire. In civilised man that ability has been cultivated until he is able to present to the world and himself so complete an entity that we and he regard it as his proper expression. But, meanwhile, we cannot now doubt that his hidden partner has evolved with him. The impulses of the unconscious are no longer simply feral and animal. We are, a trifle unwillingly, coming to the conclusion that it is this other shadowed self that is responsible for all that is best and most permanent in literature. It is being associated with genius on the one hand, and on the other with the highest dexterity in games of skill. And is it not possible that with our growing realisation of this co-operation the "education of the subconscious"--as Varisco, the Italian philosopher, calls it--will proceed ever more rapidly? And to what end, unless it be that in the strange process of our earthly evolution this artificial shell of the conscious will be gradually broken and absorbed to reveal the single and relatively perfect individual that has been so steadily developing underground?
JOHN DONNE
By ROBERT LYND
Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a young man in his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage with his patron's niece--"for love," says Walton, "is a flattering mischief"--purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in prison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as "always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives." The picture is all of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of "his winning behaviour--which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant irresistible art." There are no harsh phrases even in the references to those irregularities of Donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortune of £3000--equal, I believe, to more than £30,000 of our money--bequeathed to him by his father, the ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate," writes Walton gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought experience." It is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of the irregularities of his early life. But he counts them of no significance. He also utters a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "the remarkable error of his life." But how little he condemned it in his heart is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife "with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the banquets of dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the world--him whose grave mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of curious and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of "the famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety, and beauty. More than that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and, as he mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see it re-animated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his Songs and Sonnets and Elegies rather than in his Divine Poems. We find, in some of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for experience--experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after it." His thoroughness of study may be judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1400 authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand." But we need not go beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do not think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later. The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may have been a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, because Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for Protestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious convert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines:
To adore or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go; And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from ardent faith.
It is all in keeping with one's impression of the young Donne as a man setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and experience. He travels, though he knows not why he travels. He loves, though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that it was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes:
Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain, Or to disuse me from the queasy pain Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.
In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most interest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously than any other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and loving." Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus of love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic, comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind even more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well as less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire's taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poems that "heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis," in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. Go and Catch a Falling Star is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women. In several of the Elegies, however, he throws away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He writes frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:
Whoever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
In Love's Progress he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of a woman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful seems almost beastly. In The Anagram and The Comparison he plays the Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting two of them. In The Perfume he relates the story of an intrigue with a girl whose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his using scent. Donne's jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion for ugliness:
Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought.
It may be contended that in The Perfume he was describing an imaginary experience, and indeed we have his own words on record: "I did best when I had least truth for my subjects." But even if we did not accept Mr. Gosse's common-sense explanation of these words, we should feel that the details of the story have a vividness that springs straight from reality. It is difficult to believe that Donne had not actually lived in terror of the gigantic manservant who was set to spy on the lovers.
But the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of Donne, from the point of view of biography, especially since Mr. Gosse gave it such commanding significance in that Life of John Donne in which he made a living man out of a mummy, is that of which we have the story in Jealousy and His Parting from Her. It is another story of furtive and forbidden love. Its theme is an intrigue carried on under a
Husband's towering eyes, That flamed with oily sweat of jealousy.
A characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by making the husband a deformed man. Donne, however, merely laughs at his deformity, as he bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that reduces her to tears:
O give him many thanks, he is courteous, That in suspecting kindly warneth us. We must not, as we used, flout openly, In scoffing riddles, his deformity; Nor at his board together being set, With words nor touch, scarce looks adulterate.
And he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have discovered them they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at some distance from where
He, swol'n and pampered with great fare, Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair.
It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a scarcely less extraordinary light on the nature of Donne's mind, if he invented it. At the same time, I do not think the events it relates played the important part which Mr. Gosse assigns to them in Donne's spiritual biography. It is impossible to read Mr. Gosse's two volumes without getting the impression that "the deplorable but eventful liaison," as he calls it, was the most fruitful occurrence in Donne's life as a poet. He discovers traces of it in one great poem after another--even in the Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, which is commonly supposed to relate to the Countess of Bedford, and in The Funeral, the theme of which Professor Grierson takes to be the mother of George Herbert. I confess that the oftener I read the poetry of Donne the more firmly I become convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated love. He is often described by the historians of literature as the poet who finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believe that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame the more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love was Anne More, whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for her where we will, whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow who had borne ten children when he first met her) or in the Countess of Bedford or in another. The name is not important, and one is not concerned to know it, especially when one remembers Donne's alarming curse on:
Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows Who is my mistress.
One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that these poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith's compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find in them the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of Donne's merely amorous work. We no longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He becomes in them a child of Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. He makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder at all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms--from Ben Jonson, who said that "for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to Coleridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described him as "rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopædia in his saddle-bags.
Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue each other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two beautiful poems, The Relic and The Funeral, addressed to the lady who had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what will happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers
To make their souls at the last busy day Meet at the grave and make a little stay.
Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics--the relics of a Magdalen and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile:
All women shall adore us, and some men.
He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different from what they imagine, and tells the miracle-seekers what in reality were "the miracles we harmless lovers wrought":
First we loved well and faithfully, Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why; Difference of sex no more we knew Than our guardian angels do; Coming and going, we Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals, Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free: These miracles we did; but now, alas! All measure, and all language, I should pass, Should I tell what a miracle she was.
In The Funeral he returns to the same theme:
Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For 'tis my outward soul.
In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the too miraculous nobleness of their love:
Whate'er she meant by it, bury it with me, For since I am Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry, If into other hands these relics came; As 'twas humility To afford to it all that a soul can do, So, 'tis some bravery, That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.
In The Blossom, he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where he will find a mistress:
As glad to have my body as my mind.
The Primrose is another appeal for a less intellectual love:
Should she Be more than woman, she would get above All thought of sex, and think to move My heart to study her, and not to love.
If we turn back to The Undertaking, however, we find Donne boasting once more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless to communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to love in the same kind, they "would love but as before." Hence he will keep the tale a secret:
If, as I have, you also do, Virtue attir'd in woman see, And dare love that, and say so too, And forget the He and She;
And if this love, though placed so, From profane men you hide, Which will no faith on this bestow, Or, if they do, deride:
Then you have done a braver thing Than all the Worthies did; And a braver thence will spring, Which is, to keep that hid.
It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love. His poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other English poet--not even, perhaps, Browning's--does. He was by destiny the complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed through phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. In his youth he was a gay--but was he ever really gay?--free-lover, who sang jestingly:
How happy were our sires in ancient times, Who held plurality of loves no crime!
By the time he writes The Ecstasy the victim of the body has become the protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is merely an ecstatic friendship:
But O alas, so long, so far, Our bodies why do we forbear?
He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the enemy but the companion of the soul:
Soul into the soul may flow Though it to body first repair.
The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater intellectual vehemence:
So must pure lovers' souls descend T' affections and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies. To our bodies turn we then, that so Weak men on love reveal'd may look; Love's mysteries in souls do grow But yet the body is the book.
I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's
Art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations and lean emptiness,
much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been written.
One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne's genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange them in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that has bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant Anniversary, and but a page or two before the Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as The Canonisation can be interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, in either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him for it:
For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.
In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be measured by the standards of the vulgar:
We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs or hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And, if no piece of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs, And by these hymns all shall approve Us canonis'd by love:
And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love Made one another's hermitage; You to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomise), Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above A pattern of your love!"
According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautiful verses beginning:
Sweetest love, I do not go For weariness of thee;
as well as the series of Valedictions. Of many of the other love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. All that we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames of his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring passion. The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. It is true that there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir Thomas Browne to think of Donne's verse rather as a confession of his sins than as a golden book of love.
To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as much divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religious ones. Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as having been uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, The Anniversary, which closes with so majestic a sweep:
Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be. Who is so safe as we, where none can do Treason to us, except one of us two? True and false fears let us refrain; Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write three-score: this is the second of our reign
Donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and revolutionary as his conversion in religion.
It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate religion. When his marriage with Sir George More's sixteen-year-old daughter brought him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed up the sorrows of the situation in the famous line--a line which has some additional interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name:
John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone.
His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due to ill-health, debt, and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy beyond prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in childbed, after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis resulted that turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. His original change from Catholicism to Protestantism has been already mentioned. Most of the authorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a formal rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he took Holy Orders in 1615, at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to any impulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall of Somerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments was brought to an end. Undoubtedly, as far back as 1612, he had thought of entering the Church. But at the same period we find him making use of his legal knowledge in order to help the infamous Countess of Essex to secure the annulment of her first marriage, and at the end of 1613 he is writing an epithalamium for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious fact that three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear, though innocently enough, in the story of that sordid crime. Donne's temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of the world. His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower, is the jest of an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the Church he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of Bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more than £30 to pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an affliction that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man of Donne's ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of his dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. To such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing less and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them some volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering from claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. In his poems and letters Donne is haunted especially by three images--the hospital, the prison, and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even more terrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put all the miseries that man is subject to together," he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriant anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has made from the Sermons[25]; "sickness is more than all.... In poverty I lack but other things; in banishment I lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton declares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he had probably the seeds of many diseases. In some of his letters he dwells miserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness "hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews, so much of a tetane that it withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is not like to be cured ... I shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a porter in a great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." Even after his conversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his ill-health. Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in October, 1623, give us a realistic study of a sickbed and its circumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd account of the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not gone away, but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, but gone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb." "I am mine own ghost," he cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them.... Miserable and inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the grave by lying still."
[25] Donne's Sermons. Selected Passages, with an Essay. By Logan Pearsall Smith. Clarendon Press. 6_s._ net.
It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchedness and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was often tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit suicide, and that he even wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide on religious grounds, his famous and little-read Biathanatos. The family crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these symbolise well enough the brood of temptations that twisted about in this unfortunate Christian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his salvation, abandoned the family crest for a new one--Christ crucified on an anchor. But he might well have left the snakes writhing about the anchor. He remained a tempted man to the end. One wishes that the Sermons threw more light on his later personal life than they do. But perhaps that is too much to expect of sermons. There is no form of literature less personal except a leading article. The preacher usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than a man giving expression to himself. In the circumstances what surprises us is that the Sermons reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne. Indeed, they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his private letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition. As a preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative heat. He shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the divine and infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most far-sought extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies of the Euphuists. Undoubtedly, the modern reader smiles when Donne, explaining that man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy to the elephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied elephant, millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, a multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over; nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a God that hath the millions of the heathens' gods in himself alone." But at the same time one finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the huge sorites of quips and fancies in which he loves to present the divine argument. Nine out of ten readers of the Sermons, I imagine, will be first attracted to them through love of the poems. They need not be surprised if they do not immediately enjoy them. The dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly enough. As one goes on reading them, however, one becomes suddenly aware of their florid and exiled beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to the passion of a great suffering artist. Here are sentences that express the Paradise, the Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A noble imagination is at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an imagination that is at home among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall Smith's anthology almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage which gives us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and hope that was Donne's contribution to the art of prose.
Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty that we expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's Sermons in their latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find beauty piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise, too, not to expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that famous confession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes, and which no writer on Donne can afford not to quote:
I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of praying; eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.
If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his Sermons would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the Apostles.
Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand bays and creeks and rivermouths, to the same degree as the personality that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It is a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently in the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There are jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by miners in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals and curious ornaments than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom tells his tale uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, no doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes us, as we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head and feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face," while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. He then had the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and servants in order to bid them farewell. As he lay awaiting death, he said characteristically, "I were miserable if I might not die," and then repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." At the very end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great Fire, and no other monument in the Cathedral escaped. Among all his fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently egoistic amid its worship.
Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God. Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the first man in a new found land.
THE NOVELS OF MR. COMPTON MACKENZIE
By JOHN FREEMAN
Wise men have foretold the death of imaginative literature. Spider-like, science will seize the body of this gilded fly, stab it methodically into numbness, and then, feeding upon its vitals, will exhaust and destroy the useless thing. With sedulous precision the scientist will do what the artist, alas, has failed to do more than vaguely and uncertainly: he will re-interpret life, he will rediscover man's relation to a vaster Universe. Ignoring or spurning all attempts at the æsthetic apprehension of the significance of life and time, he will at length announce his own positive formula by which all phenomena and all relations must be valued. It is the scientist who will feel and communicate, with a dry ecstasy wholly his own, the isolation of man amid the meanness or the majesty of the world. That language which we yet speak, stiff with ancestral associations, will be discarded; obscure symbols, their order intelligible perhaps to another scientist but to no one else, will be used to express the secrets of life and riddles of death Thebes never knew. The watcher of the skies will be no Keats: back to his galley-pots will every Keats be driven. In the midst of that web called science the spider will sit with vigilant eyes, holding their cunning in momentary suspense, swelling with vaster and vaster accumulations.
It is not poetry alone that is threatened: imaginative art is not confined to poetry. The strange thing is that when Thomas Hardy has carried an imaginative view of life to a finer expression than that of any artist of his time, and shown how easily prose may wear the strict shackles of scientific precision, that prose itself should find no younger masters ready to use and develop it; as if Hardy's forsaking of prose for verse were no simple forsaking, but rather a subtle betrayal. Unique success is his in combining the imaginative with the scientific, the emotional with the rational, in his novels; his younger contemporaries seem to have failed equally in both directions.
It would be absurd to charge this dereliction to any single novelist or group of novelists. Mr. Conrad, for instance, simply evades the charge by being in his turn unique; Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett fail in varying degrees but in both directions, and of their fellows it is hard to think of any who has not similarly failed. Where gifts are eminent the failure is eminent: hence this preface to remarks upon the novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. Diligent, observant, experienced, inexhaustible, or at any rate unexhausted, he has made his opportunities and gained a hearing; indeed, as he reminds us in the second volume of Sinister Street, he has won the greater advantage of a hearing refused, the libraries having so ineffably rejected the first volume. Nevertheless, from him that hath not---- What is it, in fact, that has deprived him of the truest fruit of the gifts which he has? I make no attempt to disguise the fact that Mr. Mackenzie appears to be a writer who is not an imaginative artist, yet who might have been an imaginative artist; a novelist who has not concerned himself with life at all save in its external and mechanic motions. He has not confined himself to a single manner: his first book, The Passionate Elopement, was an eighteenth-century story in a style familiarised by less capable and less versatile practitioners. Little indeed was to be expected from an author whose first book contained such writing as:
Presently he saw her join a blue mask and lose herself in the flickering throng. Last time he had remarked particularly that her vis-à-vis wore brown and gold, yet the two figures were alike in movement and gesture, and he could swear the hands were identical. It was the same without a doubt. Charles bit his nails with vexation, and fretted confoundedly.
"My dear boy, my dear Charles, pray do not gnaw your fingers. Narcissus admired himself, 'tis true, but without carrying his devotion to cannibality."
Charles turned to the well-known voice of Mr. Ripple.
"A thousand pardons, dear Beau, I was vexed by a trifle. The masquerade comports itself with tolerable success."
--and the glitter and varnish of an upholstered narrative casually spangled with Meredithean brightness. But Mr. Mackenzie's second novel, Carnival, disappointed expectation by being readable. Like some of its successors, it might be mistaken for realistic; while another, Guy and Pauline, might be termed idyllic by those who love the phrase. He moves and changes; he is a part of all that he has met; and you wonder at length what he is. For myself, I am reminded frequently of an ingenious character seen in provincial music-halls, who to the eyes of a happy audience swiftly and imperceptibly invests and divests himself of many costumes of marvellous hue--one growing plain as another is impetuously flung off, blue gloves giving place to pink, a crimson shirt to an emerald, a shooting-jacket to a dinner-jacket--until I laugh unrestrainably.
Mr. Mackenzie has not sought a fugitive and cloistered virtue; his characters, as Johnson said of Gilbert Walmsley, mingle in the great world without exemption from its follies and its vices. He loves their activities; he sets them going and follows their whirring motion with the ruthless gaiety of a child playing with toys, who stops them, breaks them, and sometimes sets them going again. He understands mechanics and they must move; and when they are run down in one book he winds them up again for another. He hurries hither and thither, clutching at the skirts of perpetual motion like that other pageant master, time. His scene is the capitals of Europe or a railway train between them. He shares with his characters, of whatever age, their brilliant youth. He invents untiringly. He does not vex himself or his readers with description, but if he pauses to paint he paints with unmistakable bright colours. He writes clearly: there is seldom a slovenly sentence, never a memorable one. He has a cruelly accurate ear for slang, and presents vulgarity with fond verisimilitude. Femininity haunts him; his flowers, even, remind him of frills. Something of extreme youth clings to his books--its zestfulness, curiosity, indiscriminateness, and its unregretful volatility. But when, you may ask, remembering at once his gifts and his opportunities, his gifts and the world amid which they are exercised, when will he grow up? When, rather, will he grow down and strike first roots into the dark earth of the mind? When, amid all his brisk preoccupations with men and women, will he touch life?
Leaving generalisation, it is interesting to look at one of the simplest of Mr. Mackenzie's novels, Guy and Pauline, published in 1915, and conspicuously dedicated to the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It is the story of Guy Hazlewood (wound up again after Sinister Street) and a rector's daughter. Guy, returned from Macedonian Relief Fund work, is charmed by a watery Oxfordshire house called Plashers Mead, and settles there to write poetry. The rectory family are his neighbours, and with the rector's daughters, Margaret, Monica, and Pauline, he quickly obtains a brotherly footing, and then becomes engaged to the youngest. The rector is a shadowy gardener with a singular fondness for answering every question, upon whatever subject and of whatever importance, by a reference to a blossoming or decaying plant; an idiosyncrasy which is supposed to endear him to his family. And it is an "endearing" book. Everybody is unvaryingly sweet; the adjective is as common and as adhesive as mud. The three girls form a group of the kind for which the far more finely observant and delicate art of Miss Viola Meynell (among living novelists) has already obtained and exhausted our sympathy. Ungracious as the comparison must seem to both writers, it is irresistible and fatal. Linked sweetness too long drawn out becomes tiresome, and the indistinct softness of the style makes the book something more than tiresome.
Pauline hurried through a shower to church on Easter morning, and shook mingled tears and raindrops from herself when she saw that Guy was come to Communion. So then that angel had travelled from her bedside last night to hover over Guy and bid him wake early next morning, because it was Easter Day. With never so holy a calm had she knelt in the jewelled shadows of that chancel or returned from the altar to find her pew imparadised. When the people came out of church the sun was shining, and on the trees and on the tombstones a multitude of birds were singing. Never had Pauline felt the spirit of Eastertide uplift her with such a joy, joy for her lover beside her, joy for summer close at hand, joy for all the joy that Easter could bring to the soul.
Elsewhere:
The apple trees were already frilled with a foam of blossom; and on quivering boughs linnets with breasts rose-burnt by the winds of March throbbed out their carol. Chaffinches with flashing prelude of silver wings flourished a burst of song that broke as with too intolerable a triumph: then sought another tree and poured forth the triumphant song again. Thrushes, blackbirds and warblers quired deep-throated melodies against the multitudinous trebles of those undistinguished myriads that with choric pæan saluted May; and on sudden diminuendoes could be heard the rustling canzonets of the goldfinches, rising and falling with reedy cadences.
The story is clogged by Guy's meditations upon "poetical ambition"--he is in the early twenties--and yet, with all these grievous handicaps, it survives with sufficient force to express the poignancy with which an incomplete passion may sink to oblivion. In Pauline Mr. Mackenzie has succeeded in showing with simplicity and truth the quick development of a child to a passionate, then a despairing, and at last a forsaken woman; and in Guy the æsthetic frog swollen to a fraction larger than his nature and then relapsing into insignificance. I am not sure that the best of this novelist's achievement is not seen in the isolation of these characters, the sufficiency of quiet incident, and the sense--faintly yet perceptibly communicated--that the tragedy of separation is implicit in the persons of his story. The atmosphere may seem close, the setting fanciful, scenes, characters, and action diminished and slightly prettified; yet there is genuine movement, rise and decline. The occasion of Guy's last parting from Pauline is worth noting, if only because Guy happens to be but the present name of Mr. Mackenzie's invariable young man from Oxford; let it be remembered, however, that Guy reappears years after in Sylvia and Michael as a larger shadow and dies with the Serbians before Nish.
"Even if temporarily I were interested in another girl, you may be quite sure that she would always be second to you."
"But you might be interested?" Pauline asked breathlessly.
"I must be free if I'm going to be an artist."
"Free?" she echoed slowly.
There remains a negative merit. If the artist, as a hundred critics have asserted and a thousand authors forgotten, is proved by what he omits, it must be counted to Mr. Mackenzie for a virtue that this book of four hundred pages does not contain a single seduction, and that, despite the obvious piquancy of a contrast between Plashers Mead and a London night-club, he has so easily and so blessedly avoided it.
The point is the more proper for remembrance inasmuch as such forbearance is the last straining of the quality of mercy in this author. Mr. Mackenzie commonly prefers cities to country scenes, although a country scene in his earliest novel yielded him his first opportunity of teasing innocent readers with an unsavoury interior. Since he is a cultured writer you might imagine that Hogarth had tutored him; but Hogarth is immensely masculine, and the origin of our novelist's inspiration need be sought no farther back than the 'nineties. Nothing is more surprising, at any rate to men approaching middle-age, than the fitful incandescence of that spark with which the 'nineties were tinily illuminated. The inferior intelligence and the yet more inferior imagination which impelled certain artists--pleased with the phrase decadent--to magnify the ferment of youthful senses, may now seem even more trivial in their fruition than an Olympian judgment would allow. But it is hard to be impartial when a purely remote contemplation is forbidden by the flashing reflections from living writers who are only in a narrow sense contemporary writers. Coventry Patmore, chief poet and almost chief artist in that church of which we hear so much in Mr. Mackenzie's novels, asserted with more force than originality that what is morally bad is necessarily bad art; and he proceeded to say, less tritely, that the delicate indecency of so much modern art was partly due to deficient virility which, in proportion to its strength, is naturally modest. Pleading for plain-speaking, he maintained that indecency (which only a fool could identify with plain-speaking) is an endeavour to irritate sensations and appetites in the absence of natural passion; that which passes with so many for power and ardour being really, in his certain and indignant eyes, impotence and coldness. The distinction between plain-speaking and delicate indecency is to be remembered when Mr. Mackenzie's most ambitious attempts at the English novel, Sinister Street and Sylvia Scarlett, are considered. There may be coarseness of expression, a fondness for trivial bluntness of phrase; but it would be stupid to see in that more than coarseness or bluntness. The theme of Sinister Street, says the author, is the youth of a man who will presumably be a priest; a theme developed in nearly four hundred thousand words by something like the process of "annual elongation" which Johnson observed in a Hebridean road. The book moves upon familiar biographical lines--the lonely children, the local school and lesser public school, Oxford, and the betrayed passion for a prostitute. It is an enormous and minute chronicle--of what? Of the externals of a boy's life, of the customs of school, flirtation with vulgar girls, evasions of school tasks, the ways of a decrepit group surviving from the 'nineties, Catholic ritual, and a little introspection here and there; and then, in the second volume, of the same externals of Oxford life drawn to the same scale. Such a scheme must needs attract the tens who have been to public school and University, and delight the tens of thousands who haven't. Is it taking a mean advantage of time's passage to compare Sinister Street with Serge Aksakoff's Years of Childhood and its successors? Aksakoff treats childhood with a simplicity, a quiet intentness, by the side of which Mr. Mackenzie's enormous reconstruction seems loose and artificial. Sinister Street is vast in size and meagre in content. It is packed with superfluities. Three-fourths of it is inessential to the author's declared intention; it is no more than a guide-book cleverly designed (e.g., the first week at Oxford) to evoke an illusion of Oxford in Pimlico and Shepherd's Bush; and concentrating upon the remaining fourth, you feel that your author has been aware of little more than the physiology of adolescence and the usual facile religious reactions. Boys from seventeen to twenty-three, girls from sixteen to any age, may find in Henry Meats alias Brother Aloysius, in Arthur Wilmot the last of the Decadents, in the Lilys and the Daisys of the streets, in the whole rank multitude of Mr. Mackenzie's "underworld," the irritation of sensation which adolescents naturally seek. Here may curiosity be half-satisfied, half-stimulated. A Guide to Prostitution could add little to the informations of Sinister Street: the dress, the habitation, even the finances of those who have "gone gay," are meticulously recorded. Passed, I am afraid, are the Orient promenade and the underground gilded sty, but their glory is not departed, it is merely transferred, and Sinister Street remains sufficiently lively and up to date to provoke the youngest and make the oldest feel young again. Do you ask why God gives brains for such a use? I cannot even guess. Mr. Mackenzie astonishingly blazons his book with Keats's famous analysis: "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, etc."--an astonishing phrase for index to this book; whether used in simplicity or in subtle defiance, this also I cannot guess. Clear enough is it that what passes for imagination is no other than the froth of yesty waves of youth.... It is a book written, if offence may be disavowed and avoided, by a boy for boys. Mr. Mackenzie himself, in his introductory letter, refers to his study of Russian writers (this in explanation of the length of his novels), and in his epilogical letter he apparently regards the book as a work of art. An author's opinion of his own intention is to be respected, for who shall challenge it? It does but afford an additional ground for judgment and surprise.
To consider Sinister Street a mere aberration is an extravagant possibility, but possibility itself is left panting behind Sylvia Scarlett. Here, again, the author is generous of space, and here he has not been content to write a guide-book. He has chosen a woman for his central figure, and she, unlike the male protagonists of the other books, is no coloured cloudy reflection of a reflection. She is no minikin Michael or Guy or Maurice, but a semblable moving figure. Sinister Street is her place of origin, Vanity Fair her scene of action--a world of music-halls where farce passes for fantasy and women's dress for an exciting theme. Farce? Sylvia is not only farcical in herself, but is, like Falstaff, creative--the cause of farce in others; and though Book One opens so admirably with a paragraph showing how well the author can follow a good model, farce ensues and recurs and makes her chronicle an amusing thing.
But it is amusing only so long as coarseness is not strained through a child's mind, coarseness of phrase only or more significant coarseness of invention. I say more significant, for whether that worse coarseness is intended or involuntary must be immaterial, save as indicating the particular code against which the offence is primarily committed, the code of manners or the code of art. There is here no such gentleness in the treatment of childhood as distinguishes the earlier chapters of Carnival.... The point need not be stressed. I dislike the current practice of setting one's wits against the author whose work happens to be the subject of discussion; I don't want to produce an artificial dilemma and pretend that Mr. Mackenzie is inevitably trapped by it. Put it, then, that there are certain obligations of civilised life, and certain obligations of that flower of civilised life which we call art; put it that coarseness of phrase or incident outrages the former, and that an intention to commit that outrage, or an insensibility of having committed it, is equally an offence against the less assertive but not less imperative obligations of art. In a word, the sin is vulgarity, two-edged vulgarity it may be, an offence against both canons or, if you will, both conventions; and the further weight hangs on the charge that it is here committed in the person of a child, and is, therefore, wanton. Shall I add that the immanence of farce just spoken of does in a little degree mitigate the cruelty by generalising the vulgarity? Here is rude, healthy Smollett out-Smolletted, reduced to the uncostly and only half-odious horseplay of a music-hall:
The encouragement put a fine spirit into Danny's blows; he hammered the unfortunate Cohen round and round the room, upsetting table and chairs and washstand until with a stinging blow he knocked him backwards into the slop-pail, in which he sat so heavily that when he tried to rise the slop-pail stuck and gave him the appearance of a large baboon crawling with elevated rump on all fours. Danny kicked off the slop-pail, and invited Cohen to stand up to him; but when he did get on his feet, he ran to the door and reached the stairs just as Mrs. Gonner was wearily ascending to find out what was happening. He tried to stop himself by clutching the knob of the baluster, which broke; the result was that he dragged Mrs. Gonner with him in a glissade which ended behind the counter. The confusion in the shop became general; Mr. Gonner cut his thumb, and the sight of the blood caused a woman who was eating a sausage to choke; another customer took advantage of the row to snatch a side of bacon and try to escape, but another customer with a finer moral sense prevented him; a dog who was sniffing in the entrance saw the bacon on the floor and tried to seize it, but getting his tail trodden upon by somebody, he took fright and bit a small boy, who was waiting to change a shilling into coppers. Meanwhile Sylvia, who expected every minute that Jubie and her pugilistic brother would come back and increase the confusion with possibly unpleasant consequences for herself, took advantage of Danny's being occupied in an argument with Cohen and the two Gonners to put on her hat and escape from the shop. She jumped on the first omnibus and congratulated herself when she looked round and saw a policeman entering the eating-house.
Sylvia herself is capable enough as well as universally attractive. The citation just made is from a passage following the second amorous attack upon her, when Danny Lewis threatens her with a knife, and she parries with the water in her bedroom. An earlier lover had retired from a similar contest with his underlip bitten through. When, some time after the knife-and-water episode, Sylvia meets the Oxford type in Philip Iredale, she is sent by him (being still but sixteen) for a year's schooling and then marries him. Coquetting with the Church is followed by flight--alone, it must be added; and indeed Sylvia's whole recorded life is fugitive, a pilgrimage between this world and some other. Three months later her husband's Oxford composure is shocked by:
"You must divorce me now. I've not been able to earn enough to pay you back more than this [ten pounds] for your bad bargain. I don't think I've given any more pleasure to the men who have paid less for me than you did, if that's any consolation."
Adventures repeat themselves. A huge Russian officer bursts into Sylvia's room one night and is pitched out of the window by a couple of acrobats. The war begins and spreads itself over Europe as a background for her passages and parleyings; and maybe the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force have beguiled many a tiresome after-war hour in pursuing Sylvia's wanderings between places familiarised by their late anxieties. Sylvia is differentiated from the other women of these novels, not only by her superior capacity for experiences, but even more by her superior volubility. She is, consciously, mind as well as body, and as the narrative goes on and on she develops a passion for monologue--terrifying in any woman, and rare among women whose occupation Sylvia Scarlett's own name is perhaps meant assonantally to suggest. These monologues, recurrent as the farce and more deadly, might be called shortly the jargon. "I represent the original conception of the Hetaera," she asserts.
"He'll think of me, if he ever thinks of me at all, as one of the great multitude of wronged women. I shall think of him, though as a matter of fact I shall avoid thinking of him, either as what might have been--a false concept, for, of course, what might have been is fundamentally inconceivable--or as what he was--a sentimental fool."
She meditates upon the art of Botticelli, whose appeal she seems to think is only childlike, upon the conflict of nationality with civilisation. She reads Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky, putting Apuleius by, goes to confession, analyses her sensations, details the errancy of her parentage, and seeks to shock the priest who, when Sylvia acutely suggests that God is "almost vulgarly anthropomorphic," can only murmur, "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?" But here is a brief specimen of the almost unbroken monologue to which the priest of the wisest of the churches can make no answer but a profession of the power of the Church:
"I suppose my running away was the direct result of my bringing up, because whenever I had been brought face to face with a difficult situation I ran away. However, this time I was determined from some perverted pride to make myself more utterly myself than I had ever done. It's hard to explain how my mind worked. You must remember I was only nineteen, and already at thirty-one I am as far from understanding all my motives then as if I were trying to understand somebody who was not myself at all. Anyhow, I simply went on the streets. For three months I mortified my flesh by being a harlot. Can you understand that? Can you possibly understand the deliberate infliction of such a discipline, not to humiliate one's pride but to exalt it? Can you understand that I emerged from that three months of incredible horror with a complete personality?..."
Sylvia did not wait for the priest to answer this question, partly because she did not want to be disillusioned by finding so soon that he had not comprehended anything of her emotions or actions, partly because there seemed more important revelations of herself still to be made.
--Farce at least is unpretentious, but this crude jargon, this retroverted intellectualism, is offensive beyond farce, odious beyond "delicate indecency."
It may not be wholly due to perversity if the characteristics of these long biographical novels should overshadow the sharp merits of, say, Carnival. Carnival, even better than Guy and Pauline, may serve as a measure of Mr. Mackenzie's decline from his promise; since although its conclusion is a disharmony, its best chapters are good enough to cause a reader to sigh over the later novels. Was it, indeed, quite a worthless aim to follow in the footsteps of George Gissing? Carnival suggests that a new Gissing might have grown up before our eyes, with a touch of the same veracity, the same mordancy, and a little less than the same humourless and dishumoured regard for what is wry and hapless; but Carnival stands alone, and the exactions of that difficult sincerity have been put by.... Or take, again, Poor Relations, the latest of Mr. Mackenzie's inventions. With its ease and brilliant vivacities, with the comedy of its conception, what a delightful play it would make! But might not the comedy have depended--as comedy must--more surely upon character and less upon incident? The author of Sylvia Scarlett, however, has imposed a too-swift facility upon the author of Poor Relations. If practice makes perfect, then nothing was wanting to the completeness of Poor Relations--but how much is wanting! Admirable are the opening notes, but of the rest too much is a brisk falsetto. There is excess in the situations, excess in the characterisation, excess in the style:
When he looked at the old lady he could not discover anything except a cold egotism in every fold of those flabby cheeks where the powder lay like drifted snow in the ruts of a sunless lane.
It is equally the virtue and the fault of Mr. Mackenzie that he provokes melancholy regrets, even in the middle of frequent chuckles; and when the chuckling has died away the shadow of Sylvia Scarlett falls upon the book, just as with the same unhappy denigration it is flung backwards over the better qualities of the earlier Carnival.
Yet Poor Relations, like Guy and Pauline, is free from the worst flaw of the longer novels, the crude determination to shock, which breaks most starkly through the superficialities of Sylvia Scarlett. That is a breach of the code of art rather than the code of morals, an eruptive épatism which would disfigure a better book, if it could be found there. Can you conceive a more attractive subject, if you are but three-and-twenty, than the philosophic harlot? Or an easier? I do not suppose that it is less interesting to be on the streets than to be in the Ministry of Food; neither occupation can be objectionable as subject of a novel. It would be untrue to say that the subject of a novel is a thing of complete indifference, and that the treatment is everything; for a writer would not do wisely to forfeit the advantage which a subject might offer him. But neither would he do wisely in exploiting a subject only to excite the curiosity or astonish the simplicity of his reader. Merely adventitious at best is the gain. It is to reduce subject and treatment to their lowest terms, and reject the implicit conditions which confront every writer who would explore the imaginative world where there can be no laws save honour, loyalty, and delicacy. The scientific writer is secured against deceiving himself or his readers for long; his assumptions can be verified, his deductions precisely analysed, his whole professions rationally weighed. The imaginative and the quasi-imaginative writer have no such security, nor their readers such protection. Traditional values may be inapplicable; it is hard to discriminate novelty from originality. A book that shocks may be as profoundly conceived as Jude the Obscure, as cheaply fashioned as Sylvia Scarlett. Incident may be prodigal equally in Dostoieffsky and Mr. Compton Mackenzie, but significance of incident may vary infinitely. Mr. Mackenzie's incidents have no significance; they remain incidents. His thoughts are insignificant except in so far as they indicate a modern intellectual disvertebration. His view of character is insignificant except in so far as it betrays an adolescent apprehension. Who is Sylvia? you ask, and your author is silent. What is she? and the answer is dispersed among eight hundred garrulous pages.
Yet, it must be repeated, Mr. Mackenzie has conspicuous gifts, and, as the letters with which Sinister Street opens and closes indicate, he is aware of them, and has not undertaken these enormous fictions without a sense of his task. But he has accepted the easier way. He can invest his scene with an illusion of activity, if not of reality, but he is unable to picture reality, for he does not distinguish; neither does he create a reality, a world for himself, amenable to its own laws, establishing its own consistency. That would be a wonderful but a hard thing. Amid the booths of his Vanity Fair he moves, not soberly and critically as Christian and Faithful moved, but as one swiftly enchanted by externals. He approaches the field of imaginative art, and I cannot say that his powers and pretensions are such as must discourage entry; but for imagination he learns to substitute invention, chooses the superficial, and does not even trouble to secure the consistency of his characters; Michael Fane's mother, for instance, being declined from an irregular great lady in Volume One to a parish imbecile in Volume Two. He might have chosen otherwise. His alertness, his preoccupation with externals, his fullness of incident, his soft fluency of style might have been flogged into subordination; he need not have been very serious to have taken his work seriously. But all that he promises now is, if the tempting derangement of a line by a modern poet be pardonable:
A torment of intolerable tales.
Mr. Mackenzie has divagated. The task of presenting reality is left to the scientific mind, and the task of creating another reality is left to the poetic mind.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability, answer all queries addressed to him.
GENERAL NOTES
Mr. Septimus Rivington's recently published book, The Publishing Family of Rivington (Rivington, 1919; 10_s._ net), contains a certain amount of interesting information about the eighteenth-century book trade. Charles Rivington started publishing in 1711. His successor, John, succeeded Jacob Tonson (great-nephew of the original Jacob Tonson who published Dryden's works) as managing partner of the institution known as the "Conger," the association of booksellers formed to share the risks and the profits of publishing ventures. In this volume Mr. Rivington has printed a number of Conger documents in his possession. It is interesting to learn the trade value of well-known books of the period. Thus, one-eighth of Archbishop Tillotson's works is bought by Tonson in 1711 for £87 10_s._ In 1738 a third part of Watts's Hymns is worth £70.
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Mr. Rivington prints several extracts from old catalogues in his possession, which show that a book sale in the eighteenth century was a convivial affair. The catalogue of Thomas Osborne's stock-in-trade, consisting of books, copyrights, and shares in publications, is issued "to a select number of booksellers at the Queen's Head Tavern, in Paternoster Row, on Thursday, the ninth day of February, 1743/4, at Eleven of the Clock in the Forenoon. DINNER will be served on the table exactly at One of the Clock, consisting of Turkies and Chines, Hams and Chickens, Apple-pies, etc., and a Glass of very good Wine."
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Another recent book by a member of one of our great publishing families is Mr. John Murray's brief memoir of his father, John Murray the Third, the inventor of what was in his day an entirely new literary form, the Guide Book. Murray's first guide was issued in 1836. Three years later Karl Baedeker published a Handbüchlein of the same districts. Baedeker, like Shakespeare, disdained to invent his own plots. Murray's eighteen European guides were the Plutarch and Holinshed of the German's stupendous creations.
Those who hope, by taking advantage of the present rate of exchange, to secure German books at an eighth or tenth of their value will be sorry to hear that German publishers are in league to put a stop to such delightful bargains. They are insisting on being paid at the rate of about fivepence to the mark; so that your books will cost you as much as half their real price.
We were surprised, considering the blockade and the general shortage, at the excellent "get-up" of such recent German publications as we have seen. Among them were two illustrated volumes, one on Egyptian and the other on Negro art, published during the war, and produced in the most magnificent style. Almost more surprising were some exquisite little volumes of Czech poetry published at Prague, in which print, paper, and binding were all equally admirable.
A book for which one may search long in vain, but for which it is worth while to take some trouble, is the Memorie di Lorenzo da Ponte da Ceneda, three volumes, New York, 1829. Da Ponte is well known as the librettist of a number of Mozart's operas, and should be better known as the author of some of the most charming of eighteenth-century memoirs. His memoirs and poetical works were republished at Florence in 1871, and a French translation of the memoirs only was executed by M. C. D. de la Chavanne (Paris, Pagnerre, 1860). So far as we are aware, no English translation of this work exists. If this is indeed the case, it is high time that the defect was remedied. The Memorie Inutili of Da Ponte's earlier contemporary, Carlo Gozzi (three volumes, Venice, 1797), were translated by John Addington Symonds, and published in a very sumptuous illustrated edition by Nimmo in 1890.
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Another important book on the Italian eighteenth century, and one which it is not easy to find a copy of in any edition, is the Lettres Historiques et Critiques sur l'Italie of the Président Charles de Brosses (Paris, Ponthieu, An VII., and under the title Le Président de Brosses en Italie, Paris, 1858). De Brosses' letters make the best possible book to take on a voyage to Italy.
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Londoners cannot have failed to notice in the past weeks the presence of numerous posters--we have seen them in every part of the city--bearing the legend: "The Bishops must open Joanna Southcott's Box and save the country from ruin." We hope that this faint echo of a vanished notoriety may arouse among book-lovers an interest in Joanna's numerous literary works. The first of them, The Strange Effects of Faith, was published at Exeter in 1792, and from that time onwards she poured forth a stream of prophecies in prose and verse. In one of the latest of them (the last part of The Book of Wonder, if we remember rightly; but it is some years since we saw the book) is a superb engraving of a cradle subscribed for by Joanna's disciples against the birth of Shiloh. Shiloh, unhappily, was never born, and Joanna Southcott died three months after the presentation of the two-hundred-guinea cot. Enthusiastic bibliographers will find plenty of interest in the study of Southcottian literature; first editions are satisfactorily scarce. As for the box--well, why don't the Bishops open it? Who knows? it might save us from ruin, more effectually perhaps than all the politicians together.
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An important collection of autograph letters and historical documents, the property of the late Charles Fairfax Murray, is to be sold at Messrs. Sotheby's on Thursday and Friday, February 5th and 6th. The first 163 lots are autographs of famous artists, and include four letters of Blake, Michelangelo's specification for the tomb of Julius II., a letter of Benvenuto Cellini, a letter of Albrecht Dürer, illustrated by charming little sketches, letters of Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, and Constable, a letter of Titian written at the age of eighty-five, and a series of notes by Leonardo on the flight of birds.
Lots 164 to 280 are of historical, literary, and musical interest. One of the most interesting items is the MS. of Baudelaire's La Charogne, with a drawing of a woman by the poet. A beautifully written letter from Lucretia Borgia to Cardinal D'Este is another remarkable piece.
Lots 281-286 are documents which will appeal to collectors of relics of Mary Queen of Scots. The first is a document signed by Bothwell; four are letters of John Lesley, Bishop of Ross; and the last a document signed by William Davison, Queen Elizabeth's agent in Scotland.
ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
Messrs. Maggs's catalogue (No. 386) of autograph letters and MSS. contains a number of items which will be of interest to musicians. In a letter to Birchall, the English music publisher, dated October, 1831, Beethoven writes the following sentence: "I have duly received the 5 £s, and thought previously you would not encrease the number of englishmen neglecting their word and honor, as I had the misfortune of meeting with two of this sort." He goes on to offer Birchall a Grand Sonata for the Pianoforte for £40, and a Trio for piano, violin, and cello for £50. The letter is priced at £21. There are also four letters of Wagner, a note in the handwriting of Sir Arthur Sullivan (12_s._ 6_d._), a signed autograph piece by Gounod (£3 10_s._), letters of Berger, Spontini, Balfe, Hiller and Heller, Verdi, Thalberg, Paganini, Brahms, and Liszt; there is an autograph musical MS. of Mendelssohn dated 1844 (£10 10_s._), and another of a Scena composed by Haydn for Signora Banti (£85).
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Other pieces of the greatest interest are advertised in the same catalogue. A beautifully written letter in the hand of Benvenuto Cellini is priced £105. Another letter of slightly earlier date than Cellini's is the almost illegible scrawl of Götz von Berlichingen, the Knight of the Iron Hand (£32). The collection also includes several very important letters of Byron: one to John Murray (October 29th, 1819), in which he speaks of his Memoirs, entrusted to Moore, and afterwards solemnly burnt at Murray's house in Albemarle Street (£105): one to Kinnaird (1822) on the morality of Don Juan.
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Mr. Francis Edwards has also issued a catalogue of autograph letters which contains many items of remarkable interest. Hrothgar, a seventy-eight verse ballad (unpublished), by George Borrow, is a curious by-product of Beowulf scholarship, which ought to be worth the thirty pounds at which it is priced. Among the five autograph letters of Thomas Carlyle we find one addressed to the Bishop of Chester (August 23rd, 1840), in which Carlyle writes: "May I apply to you for a charitable service on behalf of a certain Mr. Mazzini, an Italian neighbour and friend of mine?" Two holograph manuscripts of John Evelyn are offered for £15 and £25 respectively. Ten pounds is the price of a letter from Sir William Hamilton (Naples, 1792) to Horace Walpole, in which Hamilton remarks of his famous wife: "She is ... most grateful to me for having saved her from the precipice into which she had good sense enough to see she must, without me, have inevitably fallen, and she sees that nothing but a constant good conduct can maintain the respect that is now shown her by everybody. It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes a good husband, why not vice versa?" Why not? The answer is to be found in a letter from Nelson to Lady Hamilton (Yarmouth, 1801; £21). Other Nelson and Hamilton autographs, the Morrison collection, are on sale at Messrs. Suckling's, of Garrick Street.
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Other interesting letters and manuscripts offered by Messrs. Edwards are by Dr. Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Swinburne, Meredith, Landor, Pepys, Lamb, Southey, Thackeray.
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We are glad to notice that a manuscript by a young contemporary can command as big a price as ten guineas. This is the sum asked by Messrs. Davis and Orioli for the autograph MS. of Mr. Robert Nichols's The Faun's Holiday, published in his volume of Ardours and Endurances. To buy it would certainly be a speculation; but we believe there is a good chance of the speculation turning out profitably.
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Early Editions of Fielding: Messrs. Bowes and Bowes, of Cambridge, are asking £25 for the first edition (two volumes in contemporary calf) of The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams. A copy of the second edition, published in the same year as the first, is offered for 31_s._ 6_d._ by the Ex-Officers' Book Union, 16 Rathgar Avenue, West Ealing.
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Messrs. Pickering and Chatto are offering a copy of Endymion (Taylor and Hessey, 1818), in the original boards, for £78. Another interesting Keats relic is the original autograph MS. of a portion of Otho the Great, which is offered by Messrs. Maggs Bros. for £60. The MS., entirely in Keats's own writing, is a fragment of the first scene of the play.
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We note that a fine copy of Fulke Greville's Poems (1633), of which we recently had occasion to speak, is for sale at Messrs. Dobell's, the price being six guineas.
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Messrs. Maggs Bros.' new catalogue, Bibliotheca Aeronautica, price 5_s._, is a fascinating book. It contains the account of some fifteen hundred volumes dealing with the problem of flight from the earliest times to the present day. The first section contains books published prior to the invention of the Montgolfier Balloon in 1783. A fine copy of Francesco de Lana's Prodromo Overo Saggio di Alcune Inventioni appears in this section (£16 16_s._). Paltock's famous flying novel, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, London, 1751, is offered at £15 15_s._, and the work which Restif de la Bretonne founded on it, La Découverte Australe par un Homme Volant, ou le Dédale Français, at £18 18_s._ Fine engravings are reproduced from these books.
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In the second section we find a number of Blanchard's narratives, including the account of the first aerial crossing of the Channel; we find Lunardi's Account of the First Aerial Voyage in England, London, 1784 (£7 10_s._); several books on the Montgolfier brothers, as well as the works of the great Baron Munchausen, so famed for his aeronautical exploits.
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The third section of the catalogue deals with the evolution of aircraft from 1851 to 1899. An interesting item is the first edition of Rémy de Gourmont's En Ballon, Paris, 1883. A large number of works by Tissandier, author of the Bibliographie Aéronautique, Paris, 1887, naturally appear. We may here note the remarkable fact that by far the greater number of the volumes on flight are in French. British interest in the problem was not aroused till a good deal later, after the first practical difficulties had been solved. A first edition of Jules Verne's Robur le Conquérant, Paris, 1886, is included (15_s._). His Six Weeks in a Balloon also deserves a place.
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In the fourth section we come to "Aeroplanes and Dirigibles in the Twentieth Century." The period opens with the intrepid Santos-Dumont and his flights and falls over Paris. His My Airships, London, 1904, is priced at 10_s._ The handsomest aeronautical work published during this period is perhaps La Conquête de l'Air, by Grand-Carteret and Delteil, a finely illustrated folio, offered at £3 3_s._
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A fifth section contains pictures of famous balloon ascents, portraits of aeronauts, caricatures, and the like.
A. L. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
A PROTEST
(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your dramatic critic writes of my play Sacred and Profane Love, "A writer of Mr. Arnold Bennett's eminence and great sagacity would be the last person to expect us to take this play seriously as a contribution to dramatic literature." Only a certain ingenuousness prevents this remark from being outrageous. Of course I expect the play to be taken seriously. Your writer is perfectly entitled to condemn my play; but he is not entitled on the strength of his opinion to attribute to me an attitude which is not mine, and which, if it were mine, would render me odious in the sight of artists. Why in the name of my alleged great sagacity should I publish a play which I did not expect to be taken seriously? Did your critic perhaps imagine that he was being charitable? One does not expect from the critics of THE LONDON MERCURY the ineptitudes which characterise the dramatic criticism of the stunt daily Press. I mention the matter because I think that an important point of principle is involved, and because this is not the first time that one of your critics has exceeded his province. In your first number there were references to the work of Mr. Frank Swinnerton which amounted to a quite gratuitous imputation against the artistic integrity of the author.--Yours, etc.,
ARNOLD BENNETT.
12B George Street, Hanover Square, W.1, December 19th, 1919.
[We gladly publish Mr. Bennett's disclaimer, but we think he exaggerates the gravity of the supposition he repels. We need scarcely say that our critic had no intention of imputing to Mr. Bennett anything which we supposed would render Mr. Bennett odious. Taking the view that he did of Mr. Bennett's play, our critic thought he was paying a compliment to Mr. Bennett's intelligence. If it is odious to write, occasionally, things which we do not regard as serious contributions to literature, we can only say that a great many artists have made themselves odious. As for Mr. Swinnerton, our reviewer, detecting a falling off, suggested that it might be due to the novelist having got into the habit of turning novels out regularly instead of waiting for the impulse. If a serious reviewer is to be precluded, when he thinks himself justified, from making suggestions like that, he might just as well be muzzled.--EDITOR.]
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"THE DUCHESS OF MALFI"
(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Mr. Turner says he can hardly believe that the section of the audience which behaved so abominably at the "Phœnix" performance consisted largely of the theatrical profession. I think he is right. I happen to know that an effort was made by two actors in the audience to get a request for order made from the stage during the first interval.
Nor were these people entirely of the "uneducated" sort--in the conventional sense. One of the worst offenders was a terrible woman sitting next to me, who occasionally interrupted her nervous giggle to remark, "A wonderfully characteristic touch!" or something of the kind. I believe she must have been a don.
May I suggest that at the next performance by the "Phœnix," if similar trouble occurs, the matter should be brought to the notice of the management during the first interval, and that a request should be made from the stage by the latter? Personal requests to individual offenders were made by more than one member of the audience at the performance in question, but without result. It is worth while making a concerted effort to prevent the authentic joy of the theatre, when at last it is offered to us, from being marred by the behaviour of vulgar sentimentalists and neurotics.--Yours, etc.,
VICTOR GOLLANCZ.
Authors' Club, 2 Whitehall Court, S.W.1, January 9th.
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TAM HTAB
(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--In vain Mr. L. Pearsall Smith held out a juicy carrot. Lest Mr. J. J. Biggs also be disappointed in his hope of a solemn ass, I beg to offer myself in that capacity, and with well-feigned eagerness point out that this page, if held to a mirror, will show that TAM HTAB is no more the reverse of BATH MAT than MOOR EEFFOC of COFFEE ROOM.
As you say, these public inscriptions are responsible for much distress.--Yours, etc.,
A. P.
January 6th.
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THE LAMBKIN MSS. AND MR. BELLOC
(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your valued bibliographer classifies the Remains of the Rev. J. A. Lambkin among the verse attributable to their editor. I feel very strongly the impiety of this error. For, although the influence of that eminent divine is traceable in the Dedicatory Ode prefixed by Mr. Belloc to the Remains of his great mentor, it is nevertheless in the realm of prose that we must look for Lambkin's main contributions to knowledge and literature. True it is that the late Fellow of Burford's justly famed Newdigate Poem is included in the definitive edition--indeed, Mr. Belloc must have felt the impossibility of rejecting its claims to such inclusion--yet, if I may quote a delightful "Lambkinism" which deserves a wider fame, "One swallow does not make a summer"; and, as one who owes a goodly part of the culture discernible (as I trust) in this letter to the author of the Article on the North-West Corner of the Mosaic Pavement at Bignor, I feel I should be untrue to the memory of my late dear tutor if I allowed such glories to be catalogued as if they formed part of the verses of a mere poet. No, sir, Lambkin is "this England's" Seneca, and all who treasure a great cultural inheritance should rally to do justice to its Remains. The late Dr. Pusey, whose character held so much in common with that of his younger disciple, never tired of narrating that wonderful instance of Lambkin's profound yet finely epigrammatic Latinity which is connected with the death of the late Pastor of Bremen, I think. I was present on that occasion, and can testify that, far from any library, Mr. Lambkin, after a short silence lasting perhaps for two minutes, whispered the words Requiescat in Pace--surely the most terse and crisp of potential epitaphs and one almost certain to secure the immediate popularity which it obtained, falling as it did upon the receptive soil afforded by the Oxford Movement from which event in our history the expression dates. As the fact is not generally known, perhaps, sir, you will allow me to state here that the present Sir Ezra Crumpton-Padge of Whortlebury Towers, near Brixton, is now the sole surviving link between the author of Physiology of the Elephant and our own times, the claims to this honour made by M. Lamkinski, President-elect of the Kacheefucan Soviet, having been expressly refuted by that gentleman's father-in-law, M. Georgeovitch Bernardenko Shavkin, the well-known big-game hunter and editor of Agapé.
Curiously enough Mr. Belloc's fine monograph on the "Padge" System of Rhetoric makes no allusion to this interesting example of what we may surely describe, in the truest sense of Lambkin's happiest aphorism, as a "survival of the fittest." Your bibliographer will doubtless wish to note these errata. Meanwhile I trust the importance of the subject may condone in some measure for the length of this letter.--Yours, etc.,
R. N. GREEN-ARMYTAGE [Curator L.L.].
Lambkin Library, Whortleboro', near Weston-S.-Mare, January 10th.
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ONED
(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--Your reviewer, in his notice of Mr. Dormer Creston's Clown of Paradise, claims to record a neologism which he commends to the notice of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary. Unfortunately they have anticipated him. If he will turn to the Oxford Dictionary, vol. vii, page 123, the top of the second column, he will find eleven examples, the last from a book published as recently as 1839, of this astounding grammatical invention.--Yours, etc.,
GERARD HOPKINS.
Oxford University Press, Amen Corner, E.C.4, December 17th, 1919.
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CANDIDE
(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--It is interesting to learn from Mr. Lewis H. Grundy's letter in your issue of December that an English translation of Candide, with the name of M. de Voltaire as the author of the original, was published in London as early as 1759.
According to the preface of the edition of the Académie des Bibliophiles of 1869 Candide first appeared at the beginning of March, 1759, the Journal Encyclopédique of the 15th of that month containing an article on the book, which is headed by the following:
"We do not believe that this tale has a German original. It is attributed to M. de V."
This note produced a reply from Voltaire signed "Démad."
Though the reply is dated April 15th, 1759, it did not appear in the Journal Encyclopédique till July 15th, 1762, with the following note:
"This letter has been mislaid for a long time, and when it reached us we made fruitless efforts to discover the existence of M. Démad, Captain in the Brunswick Regiment."
A facsimile of the title-page of the first edition of 1759 is also given in the edition of 1869, and is the same as that quoted in the Bibliographical Notes of your issue of November.
L'Ingénu was also published anonymously in 1767. The title-page runs as follows:
"L Ingénu, Histoire véritable, tirée des manuscrits du Père Quesnel, à Utrecht, 1767."--Yours, etc.,
ERNEST F. GYE.
61 Tregunter Road, S.W.10, December 19th, 1919.
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS
In the recent Housing Supplement issued by the Times the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has expressed its views on the housing problem in connection with old cottages. There are in this article two main points worth noting. The first is that until a subsidy is made, proportionate to the value of the work of repair, old cottages will not be readapted, but allowed to fall into ruins. The failure to award this subsidy tends to shift the responsibility, in regard to the upkeep of such property, from the owner to the State, for whilst the State encourages and partially finances new building, old cottages, though in theory valued by the Ministry of Health, in practice will hardly receive the attention they deserve. The second point is this: that the Society shows clearly it is no lover of mere decay, or old and mouldering walls, features we are apt to associate with the sketches of an early nineteenth century schoolgirl.
It lends no countenance to the habitual carping at all things new. It is as eager that the architecture of to-day should be as clean and decent--the natural expression of the life of to-day--as it is anxious to preserve, and where possible render habitable, those buildings of the past embodying the spirit of their time.
But since "words will build no walls," if our fine old cottages are to be preserved, it will need something more than mere discussions or eulogiums on their value as relics of the nation's past. By all who are interested more practical help must be given, and it is for this that the Society now makes a special appeal.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
The monthly meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society was held on December 18th, Sir Henry Howorth, Vice-President, presiding. Mr. G. F. Hill read a paper entitled "The Mint of Crosraguel Abbey," written by Dr. George Macdonald, who was unable to be present. Recent excavations at Crosraguel ("Crossregal") Abbey, a Cluniac foundation in Ayrshire, founded in 1244, and endowed by the Scottish kings with extraordinary privileges, resulted in the discovery in a latrine-drain of a large number of small objects, some of a miscellaneous nature, others evidently the remains of a local mint: large quantities of small tags of brass, needles, portions of thin sheets, etc., as well as objects and pieces of copper and lead, together with 197 coins of billon, bronze, or copper and brass. The coins are (a) contemporary imitations of pennies of James III. and IV., and farthings of James IV., including twenty which are a combination of the obverse of one type with the reverse of another; (b) fifty-one pennies bearing a cross on one side and a regal orb on the other, and the inscriptions Jacobus Dei Gra. Rex and Crux pellit omne crimen variously abbreviated; (c) eighty-eight copper or brass farthings, of types not hitherto known, inscribed Moneta Pauperum. The imitations of class (a) are the "black money" known from records. The pennies of class (b) are almost exclusively found in Scotland, though they have hitherto been attributed to one or other James of Aragon. They were clearly minted at Crosraguel, the types having a punning significance. They and the farthings are the only known instance in Great Britain of an Abbey coinage, such as is very frequent on the Continent, e.g., at Cluny. The inscription Moneta pauperum shows that the coins were intended to provide small change for the especial benefit of the poor like the seventeenth century tokens. The mint was probably suppressed by James IV.
At the meeting of the Society on January 20th, Rev. E. A. Sydenham gave the results of his study of the "Coinage of Augustus."
THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
The passage through Parliament of a new Public Libraries Bill was effected with the minimum of friction--one might almost say "of interest." But public libraries, accustomed as they have been through fifty years to Legislative stonings, can hardly yet realise that they have in their hands at length the very bread of life. For some, that statement "renews the unspeakable anguish" of dissolution--of the day when they closed their doors to the public from sheer inability to exist. Others may witness to a miracle of healing, rescue when in extremis. Others, again, survey the newly-granted means wherewith to end bravely contracted debts. But the majority become slowly conscious that the burden has fallen from their backs, and that they may go forward with a lighter step to a far brighter future. The removal of the rate limit will effect a revolution in public library practice; but its results cannot become at once apparent. It rests with individual library authorities to make a rate each year--to afford their charges the opportunity, as they now possess the power, of proving to all sections of the public that they are necessities and not luxuries. That some of these Councils will fail is certain--the public library idea is not yet sufficiently commended to minds with the parish pump ideal; and only external pressure and the education of the general public in library values will bring certain painfully parochial legislators into line with their opportunities. In London the situation is diverting; one Metropolitan Borough has awakened rather late to its peril, and like a surprised bather is frantically making for shore; with a desperate consciousness that close behind is the shark-like shadow of the London County Council. Other two Boroughs must be in doubt as to whether their very exiguous libraries, possessed of neither service nor system--neither use nor ornament--will place them out of reach of attack. And, if so, for how long? Other legislation is foreshadowed, and the Library Association (deeply grateful that the long years in the wilderness have ended) intends to bring libraries to all the people as a necessary preliminary to bringing all the people to the libraries.
A correspondent writes of a report in our first issue: "On page 109 you state that our forty-second annual meeting marked 'a definite cleavage between librarians and the Board of Education' with respect to future library policy. Here you innocently place the Association in a false position. The third interim report, the subject of the discussion to which you refer, was that of a committee appointed by the Ministry of Reconstruction, and was addressed to that Ministry. The Minister of Education considerately invited the opinion of the Library Association on that report. The Library Association, whilst approving certain recommendations contained therein, differed from others, and submitted a reasoned statement of its views to the Board of Education, as a reply to Mr. Fisher's request. It is therefore obvious that there is no 'cleavage' between librarians and the Board of Education; and an incorrect statement to that effect would give a wrong and damaging impression of the facts. Moreover, the Library Association is by no means exclusively composed of librarians. A very considerable proportion of those present at the Southport meeting were members of library authorities, many of whom were also members of education committees."
THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
Of the three fragments of Christian art described by Mr. Dalton, one is a spandril of morse ivory 3 inches long, carved in high relief with two soaring angels back to back. This fascinating example of the Winchester School of Art dates from about 1000 A.D., and having been found in a garden at St. Cross, is now appropriately housed in the museum a mile away. The other two are products of the Near East: the first a detail from a mosaic pavement in a small church of the sixth century at Umm Jerar, south of Gaza, representing a phœnix on a fire-altar, a rare instance of this motive in early Christian times. The other is a marble slab in the British Museum, apparently part of a screen, from a church at Miafarkin, north-east of Diarbekr, Kurdistan. Dating probably from the twelfth century, it is carved in low relief on both faces, and a central medallion bears a double-headed eagle, which had already started on its eventful career. A gift from Sir John Ramsden has enriched the national collection with a fine example of the penannular brooch, for a long time in the Breadalbane family. It was probably found in Scotland, and falls into its place in the series of Irish or Scotic works of art, the date being towards the end of the eighth century. The material is silver-gilt, with gold filigree and glass settings; and even the back is ornamented with medallions of trumpet spirals.
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
The occasion of the annual meeting of the Society, which was held on January 19th, was saddened by the recent death of Sir William Osler, the President of the Society, who had held that office for seven years. During that time he seldom failed to preside at the Society's meetings, and his courtesy and geniality, no less than his keen interest in bibliography, and especially in the Society's own sphere of work, won him the warm regard of the members. For some years past he had been engaged in the preparation of a monograph on medical works printed in the fifteenth century, which, it is hoped, will be issued by the Bibliographical Society. Sir William's successor in the Presidency is Mr. Falconer Madan, formerly Bodley's Librarian. At the January meeting he read an abridgment of a paper which he had written describing the work of the Daniel Press, which since the death of its founder and owner has passed into the possession of the Bodleian Library.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
FLORA. By PAMELA BIANCO. Verses by WALTER DE LA MARE. Heinemann. 25_s._ net.
Miss Bianco is twelve years old--at least she was when these drawings were made. There is a sameness about them. Almost all of them contain a rather languishing female face, with something of a primitive Madonna about it and something (if we dare suggest it) of the sophisticated 'nineties. In the coloured and in the more elaborate of the black-and-white pictures the faces are framed in setting of conventional but charming flowers, with, as Tennyson would put it, here and there a rabbit. The drawings are unreservedly amazing for a girl of Miss Bianco's age; if her future progress were to be on a par with her present precocity she would become one of the greatest artists in the world. We cannot assume that; nor, on the other hand, need we rummage in our notebooks for ancient generalisations about the fate of ancient prodigies. Miss Bianco is remarkable now; and she will be what she will be. If we were predicting we should say that she would become a very skilful and charming decorator, a more complicated Kate Greenaway.
She has at least performed one great feat already: she has provided little platforms from which Mr. de la Mare's Pegasus has sprung into the æther. We can imagine nothing which could more finally illustrate how small suggestions may germinate in a poet's mind than the verses which Mr. de la Mare has written to these so slight, so purely decorative pictures. His imagination has been coloured and excited by every smallest hint of a mood; and where, to the passing observant eye, Miss Bianco has left nothing more to be said to the little she has stated herself, anything, a droop of the eyelids, an indicated detail in the background, serves to send Mr. de la Mare off dreaming into remote fairylands. Behind one of Miss Bianco's damsels, slit-eyed and straight-fingered, is a path leading to a small crude building. The wind bloweth where it listeth. On this small thing, missing girl and child and leafy tree, Mr. de la Mare's eye has rested. The outlines have filled in, atmosphere has trembled in, sounds and lights; and the outcome is something of which Miss Bianco never dreamed:
Is it an abbey that I see Hard by that tapering poplar-tree, Whereat that path hath end? 'Tis wondrous still That empty hill, Yet calls me, friend.
Smooth is the turf, serene the sky, The timeworn, crumbling roof awry; Within that turret slim Hangs there a bell Whose faint notes knell? Do colours dim
Burn in that angled window there, Grass-green, and crimson, azure rare? Would from that narrow door One, looking in, See, gemlike, shine On walls and floor
Candles whose aureole flames must seem-- So still they burn--to burn in dream? And do they cry, and say, "See, stranger; come! Here is thy home; No longer stray"?
The poem Suppose, which appeared in our first number, starts on its fantastic flight from a face with eyes of wonderment in it; and from another head--a head crowned, a neck girdled--comes The Comb, perfect in itself without any picture:
My mother sate me at her glass; This necklet of bright flowers she wove; Crisscross her gentle hands did pass, And wound in my hair her love.
Deep in the mirror our glances met, And grieved, lest from her care I roam, She kissed me through her tears, and set On high this spangling comb.
Mirage is lovelier still, and far more slender in its origins; how Mr. de la Mare's imagination can fill out an outline that really is given is shown in his delicious poem of Master Rabbit. There is a charming sketch: a rabbit, and nothing more. But to the poet a whole scene comes up, country scents, green grasshoppers talking:
And wings like amber, Dispread in light, As from bush to bush Linnet took flight.
He sees the rabbit looking out from the shadow-rimmed mouth of his shady cavern at sunset. Rabbit sees him:
Snowy flit of a scut, He was into his hole;
And--stamp, stamp, stamp, Through dim labyrinths clear-- The whole world darkened, A human near.
This is an extra number to Peacock Pie, and the poems as a whole make us once more impatient for a collected volume of Mr. de la Mare's work which will show the bulk and the quality of the performance of one of the most exquisite artists in words who has ever contributed to the unequalled treasury of our English lyrics. Nevertheless it must be admitted that his average level is higher when he is not writing verses to a series of pictures.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH VERSE, 1616-1660. Edited by H. J. MASSINGHAM. Macmillan. (Golden Treasury Series.) 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Massingham collects here four hundred poems written, with few exceptions, in the forty-four years that followed the death of Shakespeare. It may not be correct to describe this period as the most neglected period of English literature. It is true that many of the authors and most of the poems to be found in Mr. Massingham's collection have been ignored by anthologists, and are utterly unknown to the reading public; but we suspect that the periods of Anne and the Georges have been even less thoroughly searched, though they would not yield results so rich as those which have come from the claim that Mr. Massingham has staked out. There were great poets in that period; it left us many poems by Milton, Herrick, Herbert Vaughan, Cowley, Crashaw, Lovelace Suckling, and Carew which are familiar to every reader at all interested in English poetry. Had the obvious best been always selected Mr. Massingham would have found himself crowded out with stock pieces before he began. He has therefore--since he desired mainly to give publicity to the unfamiliar--left Milton and Herrick out altogether and excluded some of the best-known poems of their nearest rivals. This has given him room for everybody, or at least for a hundred and more poets, for Nabbes and Festel, as well as for the poets above mentioned, for Donne, and for such other respectable poets as Brome, Bunyan, Cartwright, Corbet, Davenant, Denham, the Fletchers, Habington, Bishop King, Massinger, Jasper Mayne, Quarles, Randolph, Shirley, T. Stanley, Traherne, Waller, Wither, and Wotton. It is an imposing array; contemplating it one realises that if that age could not vie with the Elizabethan in the number of great works produced, it actually beat it in the number of men it produced who wrote a few, or many, good short poems. And it had, as Mr. Massingham rightly says, a quality of its own. It may be difficult to deduce "tendencies" from this mass of metaphysical, amorous, graceful, jocular, scholarly, tripping verse. But at least the age was no mere afterglow. There are very few poems in this fine selection which could have been mistaken for products of any other generation, and there are few which are mere degenerate imitations of the songs of an earlier race. There was, under Charles and Cromwell, a distinct civilisation with a colour and a mind of its own; less passionate (save, in some quarters, in the matter of religion) than the last; less certain in its music; more self-conscious in all its ways: but genuine and, temperately, ardent, cheerful, chivalrous, genial, often tender. From the one pole of
What a dainty life the milkmaid leads!
to the other of
I saw Eternity the other night,
it covered, in its manner, the whole range of poetic experience and expression, and it did many things perfectly. Herrick and Vaughan were its typical products, and neither, in his sphere, has an equal.
We find no material fault in this most admirable and enjoyable anthology. We may, however, make in passing a few unimportant comments. Mr. Massingham, as we have said, has covered the ground more exhaustively than we had any right to expect; and for most of his important omissions he accounts satisfactorily on the ground that he does not want to reprint poems which everyone already knows. There are, however, a few things which he might have included. The selection would have been more thoroughly represented had it contained more of the controversial element. "I suppose," he says, "that my political temper would urge me to declare for the Parliament in the Civil War. But a bruising disunion of feeling would arise were such a choice forced upon me. Before the Civil War the middle and upper classes in England were highly educated and passionately drawn to music. Turning over these old Song-books, printed fifty years after their Elizabethan prototypes, one feels a horror at the men who violated the temples of song and learning. For the Puritans killed the musical soul of England and paved the way for our doom--the triumph of the business sense." That is as may be: at all events he who regarded Royalism as the devil would have to admit that, not forgetting Milton and Marvell, the devil had most of the best tunes; and there is a lilt about many of the Rump songs that equals anything in English polemic verse. Cleveland, in fancy, might have been more freely drawn on. Politics apart, there are things missing. A selection from Joseph Beaumont is given, but where is that beautiful poem about the "sweet fury" of Mary Magdalen? One poem of the mysterious Anne Collins (it is only, we think, one edition of her works of which a unique copy is supposed to exist; there was a second) is given, but not the best. Orinda is done scant justice; and another woman (not a genius, but as good as some of Mr. Massingham's men) who deserved quotation, however brief, is Anne Bradstreet, the Tenth Muse, the Female Homer and what not, of New England. The admission of Philip Ayres, who was twenty years out of date, is not really justifiable. Granted that he was old-fashioned in style and spirit, the same might be said of some of his Restoration contemporaries. Dr. Walter Pope's celebrated poem, for instance, would not have been out of place in a volume which contains Thomas Jordan and might have contained Martin Parker. A few of Mr. Massingham's copious and highly entertaining notes invite controversy. It is cruel of him, so tender as a rule towards small poets who have patches of goodness, to describe Flatman as a poetaster; it is rash of him to declare that a good Alexandrine must have a noticeable cæsura; and it must surely have been a moment of aberration which led him to detect "a superb freedom of imagination" in the ordinary tropes of Lord Herbert's Elegy:
Doth the sun now his light with yours renew? Have waves the curling of your hair? Did you restore unto the sky and air The red and white and blue? Have you vouchsafed to flowers since your death That sweetest breath?
These things, however, matter little.
We note, by the way, that Mr. Massingham, like his predecessors, is unable to contribute anything new to the discussion concerning one of the noblest of the poems that come under his survey. We refer to "Yet if His Majesty our Sovereign Lord," which was discovered by Mr. Bullen in Christ Church Library. Mr. Bullen conjectured Vaughan as author. Mr. Massingham, with all deference, says that Mr. Bullen is wrong. We agree with Mr. Massingham; but we should greatly like this problem to be cleared up.
A MISCELLANY OF POETRY--1919. Edited by WILLIAM KEAN SEYMOUR. Palmer & Hayward. 5_s._ net.
This miscellany "is issued to the public as a truly catholic anthology of contemporary poetry." We do not quite gather what the author means by this. He has restricted the range of his selection by printing only poems which have not yet appeared "in book form," and he certainly cannot suppose that he has even half of the best living poets in his volume, or even half of the best poets of the younger generation. Mr. Chesterton appears, but not Mr. Belloc; Mr. Binyon, but not A. E. or Mr. Yeats; Mr. Davies, but not Mr. de la Mare; Mr. Sturge Moore, but not Mr. Freeman; Mr. Nichols, but not Mr. Sassoon, Mr. Graves, or Mr. Turner. Possibly the suggestion is that Mr. Seymour has consulted other people's tastes as well as his own; this might explain the presence here of poets who are not known to have written anything of any merit and who certainly contribute nothing of merit to this collection.
However, the good things make the book worth having. Chief among them is a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his Micah so peculiarly rich a poem. Mr. Chesterton's Ballad of St. Barbara has glorious lines, and the spirit is the spirit of The White Horse, but ballads should not be obscure, and this one is. There is no obscurity in Mr. Chesterton's Elegy in a Country Churchyard:
The men that worked for England They have their graves at home, And bees and birds of England About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England, Following a fallen star, Alas, alas, for England They have their graves afar!
And they that rule in England In stately conclave met, Alas, alas, for England, They have no graves as yet!
The series of lyrics by Mr. Davies are, as usual, delicious, and there is less of rotundity than usual, and more exactness and feeling, in Mr. John Drinkwater's Malediction. Mr. Gibson contributes a series of descriptive war-sonnets, adjectival but interesting; and Mr. Gerald Gould eight sonnets very skilfully written and full of good, if reminiscent, phrases, which are unfortunately not as intelligible as they look. The editor's Fruitage is too much like the more pontifical octosyllabics of Mr. Drinkwater, but his Siesta gives a hot coloured picture vividly. Of the other contributors Mr. Binyon, Miss Macaulay, Mr. Theodore Maynard, and Mr. Charles Williams (whose Poems of Conformity, difficult but sinewy, should be better known than they are) are interestingly represented. To these we may add Mr. F. V. Branford, who has almost made a good poem out of mathematics. It concludes:
For here and hence I sail Alone beyond the pale, Where square and circle coincide, And the parallels collide, And perfect pyramids flower.
Obscurity is more excusable in this poem than in his others. The discriminating reader who has read this book once will probably mark the poems he wants to read a second time; there are many here by authors who need not be specified which have given us an uncompensated headache. If the editor means to follow the volume up he would be well advised next time in being less "catholic" in this regard; an anthology of contemporary verse has to be almost uniformly good to serve any useful purpose.
NOVELS
INTERIM. By DOROTHY RICHARDSON. Duckworth. 7_s._ net.
VALMOUTH. By RONALD FIRBANK. Grant Richards. 7_s._ net.
FULL CIRCLE. By MARY AGNES HAMILTON. Collins. 7_s._ net.
INVISIBLE TIDES. By BEATRICE SEYMOUR. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.
Miss Richardson's novel is her fifth volume in the same manner and about the same person; and a sixth volume is announced. She has apparently in effect only one novel to write and only one manner in which to do it. It is a manner distinctively her own, and yet not an isolated phenomenon. This kind of thinking and this kind of writing seem to be abroad at the moment. There are deep and genuine analogies between Miss Richardson's style and the style of Mr. James Joyce; there is a much more superficial resemblance between her work and the fumisterie of Mr. Ronald Firbank. She has influenced (but in this case it was a conscious discipleship) the method of Miss May Sinclair. It would not be difficult to find in her traits which she has in common with the more sincere exponents of Futurist poetry and with the theory an attempt to embody which was made in Futurist paintings. She is, in fact, an individual member of a school which is mostly posing and pretence, and which tends to discredit its very few genuine exponents. But that Miss Richardson is genuine, whether we like reading her books or not, is a question beyond dispute. She writes as she does because she must, because it is the way in which it has been given her to write.
It is her object to translate the memories of sensations into words directly and with as little change as possible. This is a specimen:
Miriam pulled up in front of a large oil-painting over the sofa; its distances--where a meadow stream that was wide in the foreground with a stone bridge and a mill-wheel and a cottage half hidden under huge trees, grew narrow and wound on and on through tiny distant fields until the scene melted in a soft-toned mist--held all her early visits to the Brooms in the Banbury Park days before they had discovered that she did not like sitting with her back to the fire. She listened eagerly to the busy sounds of the Brooms. Someone had bolted the hall-door and was scrooping a chair over the tiles to get up and put out the gas. Dust-sheets were still being flountered in the room behind her. Grace's arm came round her waist.--I'm so glad you've come, sweet, she said in her low, steady, shaken tones.--So am I, said Miriam.--Isn't that a jolly picture.--Yes. It's an awfully good one, you know. It was one of papa's.--What's O'Hara doing in the kitchen?--Taking Grace by the waist, Miriam drew into the passage, trying to prance with her down the hall. The little kitchen was obscured by an enormous clothes-horse draped with airing linen. She's left a miserable fire, said Mrs. Philps from behind the clothes-horse. She hasn't done the saucepans, aunt, scolded Florrie from the scullery.--Never mind, we can't have er down now. It's nearly midnight.
This is the reconstitution of a moment and, for what it is worth, Miss Richardson makes the moment live again. But minds which observe and record in her close, literal fashion are not normal minds; and therefore her impressions of life, coloured as they are by her acute introspectiveness, cannot correspond to life as normal persons see it. The normal person simplifies life, not merely when, if ever, he describes it, but also when he perceives it. The world is not to him the fragmentary incoherent whirl of feelings and events which it is to Miss Richardson. Nevertheless, it is obvious that this is how the world appears to her; and here, again for what it is worth, is her description of it. With such a book, a document rather than a novel, the ordinary attitude of the critic of fiction is naturally unsuitable and inapplicable. He cannot assume the conventional position of judgment from a definite and unalterable standard. He can, in fact, do no more than explain what is the book before him and leave it at that. We attempt to do no more. We do, however, think it worth while to establish the fact, if possible, that Miss Richardson's "novels" are the real expression of a real personality. On some readers they may have absolutely no effect; on some a small or a transitory effect; some, we know, appreciate them enormously. But they are genuine; they are not "stunts." When the series is finished, it may, of course, appear that Miss Richardson has given to the life of Miriam Henderson an artistic shape and moulding, instead of making it merely an endless film. But this does not at present suggest itself. What we have now is the record of a particular mind in various states, a mind which is not normal, but is not possessed to an abnormal degree of either beauty or power. That, we confess, is all we are able to say.
That Miss Richardson's method is native and genuine may be seen by a comparison of it with that of Mr. Ronald Firbank, whose Valmouth is worth noticing here in order to make the point. Here, again, a random specimen is necessary:
Depositing his scrip in the outhouse, the cowherd glanced around:
"Where's Thetis got?" he asked, addressing the small boy, who, brandishing a broken rhubarb leaf, was flitting functionarily about.
"Thetis?... She's," he hopped, "standing in the river."
"What's she standing there for?"
"Nothing."
"... Must I thrash you, Billy Jolly?"
"Oh, don't, David."
"Then answer me quick."
"When the tide flows up from Spadder Bay she pretends it binds her to the sea. Where her sweetheart is. Her b-betrothed.... Away in the glorious tropics."
"'Od! You're a simple one, you are!"
"Me?"
"Aye, you."
"Don't be horrid, David, to me ... you mustn't be. It's bad enough quite without."
"'Od."
Throughout this curious book we have again an attempt at an incoherent and bewildering style, a picture of a world which disintegrates into a thousand pieces as we regard it. It is indeed in some sort that deliquescence of language and thought of which a certain school of French writers once dreamed. But it expresses not a native, if unusual, way of seeing, so much as a perverse, deliberately assumed attitude. Mr. Firbank has clearly talents and ingenuity enough to prevent any nonsense he may write being thrown away as pure nonsense. But it is also clear that his aim is to write nonsense rather than sense and perhaps to put forward under a film of absurdity a certain natural perversity which would not be welcomed if it were more lucidly expressed. He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly etherealised frivolity; but this may be inextricably connected with his demerits, in which case it would be useless to ask him to change. If he does not, he will remain a curiosity, mildly amusing a few readers, deluding a few into a belief that they have found a super-genius and boring or displeasing the great majority.
These two books taken together suggest an aspect from which it may be profitable to consider Mrs. Hamilton's Full Circle. Neither of them tells a story, in the sense in which the miraculous inventors of the Arabian Nights told stories. Miss Richardson has no "astonishing history" to recount. She rather describes than tells: though her heroine moves chronologically, one has yet the sense rather of movement in space than of movement in time. Mr. Firbank tells some story or other, but it is not possible to discern it under his incessant saltimbanqueries. Mrs. Hamilton tells a definite tale. Certain persons enter into relations, find themselves in a situation, resolve it: there is an introduction, a complication, and a dénouement. It is, however, the story that we miss when we look back on the book. Mrs. Hamilton has observed or imagined certain persons of various characters and, in order to exhibit them, has invented the shocks and clashes between them which carry on her narrative. But, while the persons are clearly observed or imagined, the book suggests that nothing more than invention was used for the bringing forth of the incidents. The writer might easily have been content to describe her characters without showing them in motion. The Quihamptons, Iris Mauldeth and Wilfrid Elstree, are vivid and real, portrayed in the round. We should know them if we met them; and, from their presentation here, we can make such estimates of and guesses about them as we make in ordinary life--they are no less real than that. But in Wilfrid's affair with Bridget Quihampton, in his disappearance and return, in Roger's marriage and destiny, it is impossible not to discern a certain lassitude and want of interest. The incidents are not improbable or ill-drawn; but Mrs. Hamilton cannot have felt very much about them as incidents. Though the people have undoubtedly come to life in her hands, they have not proceeded to do anything of their own initiative; except in one instance, we feel the hand of the author jogging their elbows and ruling their fates. When two of them, when Bridget and Wilfrid, are involved in an emotional situation, the author's interest continues to reveal itself in Bridget and in Wilfrid, not in the situation which the clash of their individualities has produced. A tale need not deal with the marvellous and fantastic, with genies in bottles and young princes transformed into calves, in order to exhibit the special gift of the story-teller. It may concern itself with themes as slight as those of The Spoils of Poynton or What Maisie Knew. But it must at least deal not with isolated personalities but with that which is produced by the fusion, whether in love or hate or some other emotion, of two or more personalities, or by the impact of events on a single personality or more. We do not mean to suggest that Mrs. Hamilton's novel is deficient in this essential: we mean only that on this side of her work there are traces of what appeared to us to be lack of interest, even traces of boredom. In one situation only, in the subtly and mysteriously hinted conflict between Wilfrid Elstree, the brilliant, untrammelled egoist, and Iris Mauldeth, the pretty girl whose commonplace character is as rigid as iron, are these traces absent; and here the novelist's work is done so exceedingly well as to make the deficiencies of the rest especially noticeable.
Mrs. Beatrice Seymour's novel is also distinguished by one remarkable incident. It is, we are informed, a first work, and as such it deserves praise for its smoothness and competence. But in nine parts out of ten it seems to be the attempt of a quite clever writer to sum up in short space what Mr. Bennett did in the three volumes of the Clayhanger series, and what Mr. Compton Mackenzie has not yet finished doing in the four volumes of the Sylvia and Michael series. It describes, that is to say, the separate childhood and youth of a young man and young woman and then their union, which in this case is illicit and which is terminated by the war. Much of it is a great deal too up-to-date to have any depth. Hilary Sargent is a painter, calls Helena Morden "Deirdre" as soon as he sees her, and, one day when they were together on the Downs, "he read to her things she knew and things she didn't from de la Mare, Drinkwater, Gould, Hodgson, and (most appropriately) Hilaire Belloc. And there was Flecker and Brooke and Frances Cornford and Lady Margaret Sackville; and Dora Sigerson whom Helena loved." No wonder that, as the reader easily foresees, they lost the last train home; they had confused their minds with too many styles, and had far too many books to carry. This kind of modernity is too superficial and too easy of achievement: it is presenting the reader with false coin. For the rest the book has the slickness and the clicking regularity which, though they are by no means common in novelists, cannot be of great interest, except to the subscribers to circulating libraries who are wont to ask for a novel which will enable them to support the tedium of the week-end. But in one chapter Mrs. Seymour surprisingly faces and masters a real and a painful situation--that of a shallow girl who, having rejoiced that her husband at the front enables her to be in the fashion, collapses under the news that he has been made hideous by injuries received in the trenches. This is a thing which has undoubtedly happened; it is unspeakably agonising to contemplate; and, so far as we know, no novelist has hitherto attempted it. But there is no reason why it should not be used for purposes of art if the novelist has the requisite skill and tact and, above all, the requisite courage. Mrs. Seymour looks the basilisk in the eyes and reduces it to her service. The conversation between Helena and Pamela Sand--it occupies less than eight pages--in which the whole affair is begun and ended, projects violently out of the book, makes the rest of it look rather emptier than it really is, and testifies unmistakably to the genuine powers which Mrs. Seymour has not elsewhere employed. One scene does not make a novel, much less a novelist; but one such scene as this in a first book persuades us to look hopefully to Mrs. Seymour's future.
THE CHORUS GIRL AND OTHER STORIES. By ANTON TCHEHOV. Chatto & Windus. 3_s._ net.
In the title-story of this volume the injured wife of Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov calls suddenly at the house of Pasha, a chorus-girl, with whom he is accustomed to spend his time, and Kolpakov, who is there, goes into hiding. He has been ruined by his extravagances and is on the point of being arrested for embezzlement. His wife demands the return of the gifts he has lavished on Pasha, in order that the missing sum may be made up and dishonour averted, but Pasha has had no gifts from him. The wife refuses to believe it, repeats her demand, and then, without altering her attitude of contemptuous hatred, implores and entreats. Pasha at last gives her the presents she has received from more generous admirers. She declares these are not enough and asks for more, and Pasha gives her everything she has. When his wife has gone, Kolpakov comes out of his retirement and, expressing his angry remorse that she should have had to kneel to a "low creature," pushes the girl aside and leaves her. Then
Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting her things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings were hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.
This synopsis suggests, more accurately than any analysis we could attempt in the space at our disposal, why we should welcome the eighth volume of Mrs. Constance Garnett's admirable rendering of the tales of Tchehov into English. An extended study might discover many traits in this author which would be worthy of observation. There is, for example, the peculiar acuteness of his sense of smell. "The air was full of the smell of freshly scrubbed floors." ... "As I mounted the soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of india-rubber" ... a house "was half dark and mysterious and smelt of mushrooms"--these are sentences taken at random from two or three stories in the present volume. A minute examination would reveal other characteristics by which a formal criticism could distinguish Tchehov from other writers of the short story. But it is doubtful whether any study could come nearer to defining the nature of his genius than by naming the qualities which are immediately obvious in The Chorus Girl. He has precision, economy, detachment, and, for all his gloom and squalor, charm also. He stoops as it were from an ineffable height, picks up a situation, describes it in the smallest possible number of words, and lets it fall back into the welter of human lives. It is not likely that any English author will imitate him, nor would it be desirable, but his qualities, if they cannot be learnt, can at least be used to correct excesses. And, apart from that, these eight volumes are a monument of narrative and (for with Mrs. Garnett's translation one can say so much) of style.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LONDON VENTURE. By MICHAEL ARLEN. Heinemann. 4_s._ net.
It is a little hard to know under what classification this book ought to be considered, whether fiction, biography, or belles-lettres. The same difficulty has occasionally arisen with the works of Mr. George Moore. But since the author is alluded to in it by the name which he acknowledges to be his own, we have decided that it cannot be fiction. For a reason which has sometimes occurred to the critics of Mr. George Moore, we beg to be excused from treating it as biography. There remains nothing but belles-lettres.
And Mr. George Moore's name occurs here very appropriately, for not he, not even Mr. Max Beerbohm, has written anything so characteristically Moore-ish as some of these pages. Observe how it is done:
But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar Wilde I might wonder now if Englishwomen who die in America come back to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like to be in London to-day--Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine, London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside." ...
... Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her. I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark; and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive branch which has at last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth, Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most perfect dream." ...
Here is the very attitude, here the very cadences of the original; and the adventures are not dissimilar. Now Mr. Moore has acquired his style by long labour, and it is a little amusing to see the flower of it culled by a writer who has neither dug nor watered. But Mr. Arlen will not in so close a discipleship make the best of the talents which the very closeness of his discipleship shows him to possess. An author who can copy so exactly the manner of another ought to be able to evolve a manner of his own; and we look forward to seeing a book in which Mr. Arlen shall have done this.
IN THE GARRET. By CARL VAN VECHTEN. Knopf.
Mr. Van Vechten is an American critic, rather of the type of the ingenious Mr. Huneker. He is quite as fluent, not quite so versatile. No art or aspect of life presents itself to Mr. Huneker as superior to any other; but Mr. Van Vechten has a great deal more to say about music than about anything else. He touches the theatre a great deal, literature a little, and music most of all; and he gulps down greedily all he touches. One name is as good as another to him and he knows a great many names of all sorts. "George Moore," he says, apropos of Mr. Moore's suggestion that Robinson Crusoe ought to be rewritten, "has rewritten many of his own books. Henry James rewrote all of his novels and tales that he cared to preserve for the definitive edition. On the other hand, Ouida believed (and expressed this belief in a paper published in her Critical Studies) that once a book was given to the public it became a part of life, a part of history, and that its author had no right to tamper with it." Mr. Ernest Newman likes the operas of Isaac Albéniz, but Mr. Marliave does not share his enthusiasm. On two opposite pages we discovered the names of the following persons: Mr. Cabell, Mr. Arthur Machen, George Sand, M. Maeterlinck, Mr. Cecil Forsythe, Monet, Leonardo, Homer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Remy de Gourmont, Dickens, Huysmans, and Mr. Havelock Ellis. This is lively enough in all conscience, and Mr. Van Vechten is able to keep it up without flagging and to support it with an equal vivacity of style, as when he remarks that the art of the musician "deals with clang-tints." Modern English criticism is sometimes reproached with being a little too heavy. Here we have a critic so volatile that he bounces like a child's balloon from the name of one great man to another.
AMONG ITALIAN PEASANTS. By TONY CYRIAX. Collins. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.
The brush rather than the pen is evidently the medium of expression for Mrs. Tony Cyriax. The pictures in her book convey an infinitely better impression of the life of the peasant in an Italian mountain-village than all she says about it in writing, which is rather crude and colourless. But the pictures are delightful, and are sufficiently praised in an appreciative Introduction by Mr. Muirhead Bone.
The best chapters in the book are those dealing with the tending of silkworms in peasant cottages, and the greatly dreaded hailstorm which, despite the prayers of the priest, religious processions, and the ringing of church bells, destroys in an hour the labour of months and brings the villagers to the verge of starvation.
Such a storm as the writer describes will recall vividly to the memory of any one who has stayed in an Italian hillside village the pathetic anxiety of the natives when a thunderstorm is brewing. All around stretch the vineyards, which from dawn till dusk have been the care of people to whose toil the day's work of an English agricultural labourer is child's play. Will the hailstones utterly ruin the vines? If so, the villagers will be faced with semi-starvation, and yet more bread-winners, in despair, must emigrate to America, that refuge for the Italian destitute.
Pathetic, too, is an account of weeks of unceasing toil in connection with the cottage silkworm industry. The cavalleri (as the peasants call the silkworms), remorseless in their greed for mulberry leaves and their demands for the right temperature, will keep a whole family working for them from morning till night.
Here, as given by Mrs. Tony Cyriax, is the result of the labour of one such household:
"The work from start to finish had covered forty days, and Rosina's cocoons had weighed fifty-six kilograms ... so Rosina had earned exactly 224 lire, which is all but £9."
As a record of the hard existence that may be passed in the midst of Nature's graciousness and beauty Among Italian Peasants is not without value.
SUSSEX IN BYGONE DAYS: Reminiscences of Nathaniel Paine Blaker, M.R.C.S. Hove, Combridges. 1919. 5_s._
The recorders of Sussex must have a shelf to themselves by this time, and there are many reasons for it. Sussex has not only individual quality, amenity and interest: all counties have them. But it is accessible, and it is the fashion. Not to go back to Dallaway and his likes, the best of the moderns are Mr. Lucas and Mr. Halsham, and the better of them Mr. Lucas, as we think. He has the mellower outlook, a benevolent, postprandial regard. Mr. Halsham is more pedagogical; he regrets much, and seldom approves. He cannot praise a landscape without reminding us how much better it was before old What's-his-name cut down those trees. Taken at some length--indeed, taken in series--he becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, he wrote a novel once, called Kitty Fairhall, which contains more of the essence of the Sussex peasant than Mr. Lucas himself is likely to apprehend.
Mr. Nathaniel Blaker, the latest chronicler, earns a place upon the shelf the rather because it need only be a little one. Our quarrel with him would be that it did not ask a larger. He has lived long and served his county honourably in an honourable profession; but he has not much to say. That is a pity. He has stored his mind, but cannot load his page. He remembers mail-coaches, he remembers the ox-teams, he remembers the days of reaping with the sickle, the foot-high stubbles, the threshing with a flail. To some of us those memories have a savour so sharp that, with the wind, one might catch and transfigure it in words. To Mr. Blaker they are as the primrose was to Mr. Bell, and one feels that he puts them down rather because that is the kind of thing one does put down in books of this sort than because they import a perfume which it is luxury to distil upon the page. Lacking gusto, Mr. Blaker tantalises his reader. The beautiful names which he strews about him--Selmesten, Steyning, Hurstpierpoint, Ringmer, Fulking--flicker like a mirage. He tells us, for example, that Steyning Fair in the old days "was a scene of great excitement and confusion, and probably as much iniquity as could be crowded into so small a space." We dare say so; but we are athirst for the iniquities, and he gives us none to drink of. One wishes to get Mr. Blaker by the fire with a matured cigar, and ply him with questions. Gypsies now. Obviously he knows a great deal about them. He says, "I well recollect, very many years ago, one rainy afternoon, which prevented them working, watching a family of gypsies in a barn. I think the family must have consisted of the father and mother and several children, one daughter nearly grown up, and two or three acquaintances. They all sat or lay about upon the straw, doing absolutely nothing, while one or two girls kept singing a peculiarly plaintive and monotonous but soothing and agreeable tune in a language, I believe, I did not know, for I could not catch a single word." That is the sort of thing Mr. Blaker will do with a pen in his hand--give us the materials of a picture and leave us burning. His "broken hinted sights" do but sting the mind.
Of course he tells us--he can't help it--some interesting things. One of them is "a common saying that Sussex girls had such long legs because they stretched them by pulling them out of the mud." That must have been in the Weald--but we did not know that feature of Sussex girls. Cobbett knew, and so do we, that they are remarkable for their good looks. Mr. Blaker does not say so. We regret his Peter Bell attitude to life. His best chapters are upon the horse and the birch, with both of which he is evidently acquainted. "It used to be considered," he says, "a great joke when a lady's first baby arrived to send her a carefully packed parcel containing a small birch rod, with a label, 'To be used when required.'" That is what we want. And, again, he says that "it was the custom when the cloth was laid for dinner in the middle of the day, for the cane, which was kept over the mantel ... to be placed with the carving-knife and steel on papa's right hand." Excellent. These scraps show what a handsome sack of oddments Mr. Blaker must have. He should have shaken it more liberally over his book.
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE AFTER ITS DELIVERANCE. By JOHN FINLEY. Chapman & Hall. 10_s._ net.
Of Mr. Finley's sincerity and enthusiasm there can be no question: of his taste there is a good deal to be said. Many books have been written about the Holy Land; but surely none before which deliberately puts the history and the personages of Palestine into the background of a picture whose foreground is occupied with the events of the recent campaign. Mr. Finley has no hesitation in viewing sacred history sub specie temporis hodierni. For him Allenby's battle at Armageddon is "the beginning of the end of the battle with the Beast." The German is not, however, only Anti-Christ: he is also Judas. Here are Mr. Finley's meditations over the Holy City:
I was an ashamed spectator, standing there at the Gethsemane Gate, feeling that we had been sleeping when we should have been watching, when we should have been preparing for defence against the German Judas who had professed devotion to the teachings of Him who spoke the Sermon on the Mount. Did not the great German Hospice stand most conspicuously on the Mount, that its pilgrims might dip their bread in the very sop of the Master's dish? And do not the towers of the German churches stand out most prominently (and offensively) in the Inner City?
Most of his book is like that: and if you cannot see history in quite the startling black-and-white of Mr. Finley's imagination you had better leave the book unread. Mr. Finley was with the American Red Cross, and he tells one happy story of himself, which it is only fair to quote. He was worshipping in the Russian Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives:
A woman of sharp, eager face, as of a zealot, with a grey shawl over her head, seeing me standing near the door, approached me and said, in rather sharp voice, "Quelle croix?" I did not at first understand the import of her inquiry, though I realised that she was putting to me an all-important question: "Quelle croix?--grecque ou latine?" ... My answer was "La Croix Rouge."
If the soil of Palestine be favourable for legends, no doubt a tale will arise of a strange religion whose devotees cross themselves neither in the Western or Eastern manner, but in some strange, "red" mode which Mr. Finley's zealot was probably eager to see.
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
Generalisation, which used to be a philosophy, is rapidly becoming little more than a hobby. During the war it was a hobby savagely or amiably ridden by those who sought to explain the mentality of the Allies or the Enemy. Gradually individuals learnt that not every Belgian was Belgium, nor every German Germany: but for propaganda purposes we still used great typical figures. It saved thought, and it flattered either our own pride or that of our friends. The propagandists' most delicate task was always to explain Great Britain to the United States of America: and certainly it was a wise thing to send Mr. Galsworthy across the Atlantic. Surely he, if anyone, might be able to justify the ways of the country house to Boston and New York, to Washington and even to Chicago. Here we have his addresses delivered during 1919 in the United States. In his paper on America and Britain he takes the line that by words we are saved:
The tie of language is all-powerful--for language is the food formative of minds. Why a volume could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone.
It sounds not unconvincing, until one remembers that French is not the language of Alsace; that English is spoken by most of the inhabitants of Ireland; or, to go further back, that the possession of a common language did not prevent Athens and Sparta from indulging in the Peloponnesian War.
We like Mr. Galsworthy better when he leaves his generalisations and tells stories. In the paper "Tallary at Large" he displays that sweet-naturedness, that mellowed irony which never lapses into satire, that humour which is always aware that a sense of pity is invaluable in comedy. Here is the true Galsworthy:
In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage. One pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as if his days were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man, and said, ... "Could you give me a light, sir?" The elderly man regarded him for a moment, dropped his eyelids, and murmured: "I've no matches." The young man sighed, mumbled the cigarette on his watering lips, then said very suddenly: "Perhaps you'll very kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir." The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred had been thrilled within him. "I'd rather not," he said, "if you don't mind." A quarter of an hour passed, while the young man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder man's cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and said: "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge."
And there are people who are surprised that the returned soldier occasionally commits acts of violence.
THOUGHTS IN MIDDLE LIFE. By G. LOCKER LAMPSON. Humphreys. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
This book is beautifully printed on admirable paper, and is priced very low. Unfortunately Mr. Locker Lampson has reached middle life without learning that most platitudes are better unwritten. "No man is a hero to his own valet, and the same principle may be applied as in part the cause of our invidious comparisons between the men of yesterday and those of to-day." "He alone has a right to be called successful who has led a happy life." Sometimes he will enliven his platitude by a pleasing derangement of metaphors. "Autobiographies are of little value in extending the personality of their authors. We may get an occasional glimpse below the surface, but the waters are generally agitated by all kinds of subsidiary motives, and the eye cannot pierce them." The one sentence which explains the author is to be found in the essay One's Own Company: "No man, then, need ever be bored by himself, although he cannot avoid being bored by others."
DOMUS DOLORIS. By W. COMPTON LEITH. The Bodley Head. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
In the unornamental language, from which even the loftiest intelligence may extract apt expression for itself, this little book may be called a collection of thoughts in hospital from a patient's standpoint, and an impression of the various nurses who attended him. And yet such a description is unjust and utterly beside the point. The publisher's note upon the cover tells us that Mr. Leith has "a rare sense of the value of words and the beauty of phrases," and there is no doubt of it. But the value to literature and humanity of phrases which are but the vehicles of their own intrinsic beauty is to be questioned. The whole essay is precious in the last degree.
"Oblivion flowed up like evening gloom. Life moved with it to the edge of a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated down and down, wound in the arms of sleep."
"A faint awareness stole into being, like the grey of morning; then a sense of movement; but whether it was a coming up and forth, or a declining, there was no power to tell."
This sort of thing, exquisite as it may be sometimes, constantly reminds us, however, and with relief, that Henley, with simplicity and humour, covered the same ground in verse. From time to time an unpretentious passage comes to us with a shock, and we ask ourselves again and again, if, as it seems, the writer has opinions to air, observations about life and death to make, what especial virtue there is in the high-falutin obscurity of his expression. One of the chief and most necessary concealments of art lies in a well-simulated nonchalance to the more obvious kind of purple patch. Here the entire robe is of purple, though certainty of a royal shade. There were voices, Mr. Leith tells us on the first page (and it was not until the fifteenth that we knew where the voices came from), which "kept thought strained after a meaning." A light strain is no doubt good for thought; but in reading this book it is not light: and it is hard to say which strain is the more severe--the student's for meaning or the author's for effect.
A CHILDHOOD IN BRITTANY EIGHTY YEARS AGO. By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK. Arnold. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
Nowhere in England, nor even in Ireland or Scotland, could the life pictured in this book be paralleled. Feudalism has lingered, but not in delicate or decorative ways: in the Brittany of which Miss Sedgwick tells us, the beauty, the generous abundance, and the sincere brotherliness of life almost overcome one's distaste for the feudal system which formed its basis. The lady whose childhood is shown us was of a noble Breton family; her father seems to have been the only Republican she knew among the company of Royalists; life was still so ordered that the country people, coming to Mass, would bow to the lord and lady of the manor, after paying their respects to the altar. Yet one is left with a sense of fraternity as genuine as that one feels in reading Chaucer, as the story witnesses:
One peasant, I remember, Paul Simur by name, of whom my father was specially fond, was so dirty and unwashed that a sort of mark of dirt had formed upon his features. One day, at a hunting-party, papa called to Paul to come and sit beside him, and the other huntsmen, with singular bad taste, began to make fun of Paul, who sat much abashed, with hanging head. Papa affectionately laid an arm about his neck and defended him, until his friends finally cried out that they wagered he would not kiss him. At this, although he confessed afterwards to the most intense repugnance, he at once kissed Paul heartily. Poor Paul was quite overcome. He came to my father afterwards with tears in his eyes and said, standing before him and gazing at him: "Oh, mon maître, que je t'aime!"
Although the accounts of old Breton customs--the glimpse at the Folgoat pardon, the gently critical analysis of the lives of the gentry, the sidelights on the peasants, their cooking and their cottages--are all full of interest, the book is chiefly to be valued for preserving the fragrance of an order of living which too many of us are apt to think of as one of harsh tyranny alleviated by wanton luxury.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE OF THOMAS COUTTS, BANKER. By ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. 2 Vols. Lane. 42_s._ net.
Thomas Coutts, virtual founder of the Bank of his name as it now is, was born in 1735, and, according to the standards of Scotland, well born, having, that is, wise, reputable forbears, relatives with place-names of their own--Stuarts of Allanbank and the like--and a coat-of-arms. "Instead of which," as the old story has it, at the age of twenty-eight he married his mother's nursemaid, and loved and served her faithfully until, after some fifty years' partnership, she wandered out of her mind and then out of his world. By that time his three daughters by her had married, one an Earl of Guilford, one a Marquis of Bute, and one Sir Francis Burdett. By that time also Coutts was one of the most considerable bankers in London, and one of the richest men in England. It might now be thought that his adventures in life were over--but not at all. At seventy years of age he stepped once more into the Pays du Tendre, and took into his protection--which in his case, it really appears, had no secondary meaning--Miss Harriot Mellon, a low comedy actress of abundant charm, humble birth, little education, and excellent disposition. She was then twenty-eight. He fell headlong in love with her and head over heels. He endowed her with stock and other movables to the amount of £500 a year, and when, at the age of eighty, he made her his second wife he settled the whole of that endowment upon herself. At his death, Mr. Coleridge tells us, her private fortune could not have been less than £200,000. Notwithstanding the estrangement and unconcealed disgust of "the ladies," as he always called his daughters, she made him perfectly happy for nine years; and when, at eighty-nine, he died, very reasonably, he left her practically everything he possessed.
That in outline is the life-history of Thomas Coutts as Mr. Ernest Coleridge pleasantly and ably narrates it in two portly volumes. The book offers a view of eighteenth-century manners which is not often, and seldom so well, illustrated. Coutts must have been, and he was, a notable man of affairs; but he was a good deal better than that. He knew, of course, everybody who was anybody. He was the friend and correspondent of Lord Bute, the favourite of Lord Chatham, of William Pitt. He lent, mero motu ejus, £10,000 to Charles Fox without security of any kind. He lent large sums to the Duchess of Devonshire, and forwent the interest until such time as her son was pleased to pay it; for her husband never would. He lectured that great and gay lady upon her follies with perfect freedom and no result. All the royal rips, sons of George III., banked with him, or, in other words, borrowed from him; and they dined with him too. Edward Duke of Kent, the only one of them who was not a rip, made a friend of him as well as a convenience. It is interesting to remark how Coutts deals with these disreputable magnates. He is respectful of their degree in so far as he is shopkeeper and they customers; but outside the bank-parlour he stands on level terms. His children are to commence with their children; his wife's table is as good as their tables. Servant-girl or not, his wife, Mrs. Coutts, is the equal of their wives. There is nothing of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in his letters, although, as a trader, he continually has his eye upon business, and is never above doing himself a good turn. Mr. Coleridge is to be congratulated upon having presented so engaging a picture of the sound, cautious, and upright Scots merchant, who kept his head and his balance through the convulsions of the American and French wars, and cultivated the domestic virtues in the same social set as Old Q. and the Duchess of Gordon.
But, except for that sappy core of romance which twice betrayed itself in act and once in word, Tom Coutts was a dry stick. While his views of political affairs were sound and uncommonly independent, his expression of them was not interesting. He was by inheritance a Tory, yet he was staunch upon the American war. "The idea," he wrote in 1775 to Lord Stair, "of reducing such a continent to obedience (especially after letting them have so much time to unite) appears to me, so far as I am capable of judging, to be absolutely impossible." So, too, he opposed the war with revolutionary France. "The war made against their growth seems to me to be exactly the way to encourage instead of destroying them. There is no instance of opposition by force of arms subduing opinions! which by such manners have always grown stronger and more inveterate." One might be reading the present Dean of St. Paul's. The same faculty of seeing things as they really were allowed him to have no good opinion of Pitt's Reform proposals of 1784, and gave him as early as 1785 a plan of dealing with Irish disaffection which was in fact adopted in 1800, to our cost. "As to Ireland, I apprehend it is an aristocracy of about thirty nobles, etc., who command two hundred votes in the Lower House, and that these thirty may be bought and a union accomplished more easily than that heap of nonsense called the Irish propositions." They were bought.
Mr. Coleridge prints a recently discovered bundle of his love-letters to Harriot Mellon, from which, if one could feel love-letters to be fair game, it would be tempting, and easy, to make extracts. They are striking by their extraordinary difference from his other familiar correspondence. Coutts becomes emotional, profuse, sentimental, and occasionally ridiculous. Few love-letters, however, will stand the test of examination in cold blood. It can be said of his at least that there is nothing in them which is not intended to honour the recipient. To Coutts his Harriot was a pattern of womanly virtue. It is Mr. Coleridge's opinion, as it is our own, that she deserved it. That she made him happy is obvious; that she returned him a grateful love let this, which was written by herself five years after her wedding-day, bear witness:
"I never lose my spirits." My blessed Tom said these words to me in a dream. After he had kissed me and laid his dear head on my bosom, I felt his tears on my cheek--I was so happy, but so melancholy happy. He looked so well, tranquil and divine.... I see him at this moment, upright, beautiful and composed, as in his long and immaculate life. He looks just as I first saw his dear, blessed face upwards of twenty years ago.
That is both tenderly and prettily said. Tom Coutts, in his marriage as in other things, knew what he was about.
THE TURKS IN EUROPE. By W. E. D. ALLEN. Murray. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
"La Turquie est le pays classique du massacres," it has been truly said.... "Son historie se résume à ceci: pillages, meurtres, vols, concussions--sur toutes les échilles--révoltes, insurrections, répercussions, guerres étrangères, guerres civiles, révolutions, contre-révolutions, séditions, mutineries." All these things are the theme of Mr. Allen's interesting and well-written sketch of the Turkish power, from the rise of Osman in the thirteenth century down to the Treaty of Bukarest in 1913. Mr. Allen does not, however, confine himself to a mere record of horrors. He contrives throughout his book to draw in a few lines the characters of the chief actors in the drama, and, especially in the later chapters, to expose the policies, European and Turkish, which have created and complicated the long nightmare of the Near East. Many of our troubles of the last forty years are attributed by him to the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the triumph of Lord Beaconsfield's policy. It was a treaty concluded, he says, "in a spirit of shameless bargain, with a sublime disregard of elementary ethics, and in open contempt of the right of civilised peoples to determine their own future. It was essentially a temporary arrangement concluded between rival Imperialist States." A few years later the "grim raw races" in the Balkans were again in a savage ferment, and we could enjoy "the spectacle of the heads of the civilised world, in their palaces in the capitals of Europe, setting those same 'grim raw races' to kill." Mr. Allen in his narrative of this later period does not spare his criticism of the diabolic diplomacy of Berlin and Vienna, of the brilliant cunning of their agents in Turkey--and notably Baron Marschal von Bieberstein.
ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. By ALFRED W. POLLARD. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3_s._ net.
In this little volume, one of a series called Messages of the Saints, Mr. Pollard has re-told the ever-fascinating story of St. Catherine, Siena's fourteenth-century saint. "In the present sketch," says the author, "there is nothing original, save possibly its point of view and (I believe) the chapter on St. Catherine's book."
Its point of view is that of an ardent if critical admirer of St. Catherine, and full justice is done to what after all are the qualities which made of her not only the most lovable, but perhaps the most amazing of saintly women. Amor vincit omnia is the motto which springs to the mind as most fit for Catherine of Siena. In an age of cruelty she is love personified. It was love for her fellow-creatures, concern for their immortal welfare, that led her, a poor ignorant "little bit of a woman," to face with the simplicity of a child and the wisdom born of simplicity princes and popes, and force them, not to her own will, but to what she conceived to be the Will of God.
To all who have lived long enough in Siena, Catherine becomes a living personality. So real indeed that it would scarcely be surprising to meet her one evening at dusk in that long steep street--still the street of the tanners--where six hundred years ago she walked with her lantern on her way to the sick and dying during the plague. In Siena one is apt to forget that St. Catherine was a figure in politics and the composer of a book about which the learned dispute. Still, on the day of her festival the townsfolk sing the "Praise of Catherine," to them merely the tanner's daughter who, greatly to the glory of their beautiful little city, somehow became a saint.
Mr. Pollard's chapter on the Libro della Divina Dottrina, the treatise said to have been dictated by St. Catherine while in a trance, is valuable because it summarises typical pronouncements of the mystic upon the various stages of the soul in its pilgrimage towards a spiritual goal.
As a revelation of the subconscious self, if for no other reason, St. Catherine's book has its own intense interest. Those who are already familiar with her story may, by the help of Mr. Pollard's pleasant sketch, refresh their memory of its details, and to those who are not it should, as he hopes, prove a stimulating introduction to the life of a wonderful woman.
VICTORIAN RECOLLECTIONS. By J. H. BRIDGES. Bell. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Bridges deliberately adopts the attitude of the laudator temporis acti se puero. The worst of this prose is that, just as it may attract the sympathy of men of his own generation, it inevitably repels slightly those of a younger. Nothing is more tiresome than to listen to judgments on life and manners whose chief point lies in the opening words, "Well, I tell you in 185--we did not," or "we did"--such criticism automatically provokes the retort, "Well, this isn't 185--," whereat your ancient growls, "I would to God it were," and youth and eld stand back to uncomfortable back, with no chance of doing any useful work.
Fortunately Mr. Bridges, although angry at the modern depreciation of things Victorian, is better than his threat. He is not too comparative, and although overfond of censure, his blame has a humorous quality which keeps it inoffensive. At times the humour is unconscious, as in Mr. Bridges' charming suggestion that the beauty of the primrose is more noticed and "more respected" because ardent Tory enthusiasm associated Peter Bell's flower with the late Lord Beaconsfield: but Mr. Bridges' essentially "pawky" quality of mind--we use the word in an amiable sense--crops out not infrequently as, for instance, in his grave statement that he would be "in favour of a law forbidding anyone to own more than 150 newspapers."
Mr. Bridges gives an account of his schooldays under a flogging master, which adds yet another count to the indictment against Victorian methods of education. He does not tell us much that is unfamiliar, either of Eton or Oxford, though many will be glad to have his description of the old-time Don, and the Dean Gaisford's letter to a noble father who enquired after his son's University progress:
"My Lord, Such letters give much trouble to "Your humble servant, "THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH."
In the late fifties Mr. Bridges visited Canada and the United States, and he records his conviction that Senator Douglas was Lincoln's "superior as speaker and politician," a verdict which makes one wonder a little what his standards of oratory are, and how a politician, obviously inferior in moral character, who also fails to keep his country's confidence can be called the inferior of one who wins its trust. Mr. Bridges abandoned his plan to settle in the New World, and returned to England and started farming, first in the Eastern counties and subsequently in Shropshire. In the chapters dealing with his life in rural England he sketches some village types for the reader with a genuine feeling for character. Particularly good is the final chapter, "A Survival," with its touching picture of Old Tom, "the last survivor hereabouts of the old-style agricultural labourer." Whatever one's political colour, one cannot help sympathising with Mr. Bridges and Old Tom in their lament at the decay of rural England, and at the growth of conditions which made it possible for "more and more people to wax rich in London and in the big towns, while no one can earn a living in the country." Though the latter ceased to be true during the war, one is yet uncertain how far the prosperity then enjoyed by the farmer will continue as war conditions slowly depart.
THE LIFE OF LIZA LEHMANN. By HERSELF. T. Fisher Unwin. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
Born in London, daughter of a Scotswoman, educated in Italy, married to an Englishman, Liza Lehmann's heart--and she was a woman who always let her heart rule her head--was unconsciously fixed in England. Yet as we turn the pages of her autobiography there is hardly one in which we do not feel conscious that she belonged by unalterable temperament to the land of Die Gartenlaube and Familie Buchholz. Many English singers and audiences in the happy days before the war have felt that for all their devotion to Schumann, the domestic intimacies of Frauenliebe und Leben were too intensely German for an English sense of proportion and sense of humour. Let them read The Life of Liza Lehmann in their own tongue, and they will turn with relief to the reticence and dignity of Chamisso's lyrics. It is evident that she was a woman who never did an act, never cherished a thought, that was not a kind one. She collaborated in an opera with Mr. Laurence Housman; he considered that she had wrecked his play, she thought that he had wrecked her music; but she records the awkward incident without the least trace of ill-will, nay, without the least supposition that he or anyone else in the world could have borne ill-will to her. Liszt, Brahms, Browning, and Verdi were among her acquaintances; but she has little to tell us about them. They counted for far less in her life than Madame Clara Butt, Mr. Kennerley Rumford, Mr. Arthur Boosey, and Mr. Landon Ronald; and even these were unsubstantial shadows compared to her mother, her husband, and her sons. A large proportion of her book is taken up with newspaper criticisms and interviews, mostly American. They gave the authoress no little pleasure, and they will give the reader no little amusement; indeed, as studies of American literary style, they are most instructive. The final chapter, dealing with the death of her elder son, so shortly to be followed by her own, can hardly be touched upon in a review; it seems an intrusion to read it.
THE GLORY OF THE COMING. By IRVIN S. COBB. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._ net.
THE 25TH DIVISION IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS. Harrison. 4_s._ net.
These two war books, extremely dissimilar, belong to two well-known types. Mr. Cobb is an American journalist, and he gives a lively, journalistic account of the coming and doing of the American armies in France. The other book is a detailed and somewhat bare record of the doings of the 25th Division, by Lieut.-Col. M. Kincaid-Smith. The 25th Division made a great name for itself in the war; this book shows that it was not unearned.
THE PARAVANE ADVENTURE. By L. COPE CORNFORD. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
The story of the paravane, the remarkable anti-submarine contrivance invented by Commander Burney and used by the Allied navies and also by merchant ships during the later period of the war, is told by Mr. Cope Cornford in a popular style and with considerable enthusiasm. It is possible that he is over-enthusiastic, for in a prefatory note he tells us that some naval officers and also the Admiralty consider that he exaggerates the effects of the paravane. There is no doubt, however, as the official figures themselves show, that paravanes and "Otters" (as they were called when fitted to merchant vessels) did have an enormous success. The total tonnage of H.M. ships and merchant ships definitely saved by them comes to over a quarter of a million; and the financial saving to the British Empire is estimated at approximately £100,000,000. Mr. Cope Cornford has a good deal of criticism--some open and more, we think, implied--to make against the Admiralty. Exactly how far it is justified we cannot say; but there are certainly a good many people with inside knowledge who assert that the Admiralty were decidedly cold about the paravane, even if they did not actually "crab" it. And the rewards and honours bestowed on the brilliant young officers who devoted themselves to the paravane and Otter services were not particularly generous.
SUBMARINES AND SEA POWER. By CHARLES DOMVILLE-FIFE. Bell. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Domville-Fife's purpose is to discuss the importance of the submarine arm in naval warfare of the future. His treatment of the subject is very balanced and his conclusions are cautious. He gives us a great deal of interesting information about the history of submarine craft (beginning as far back as 1578) and of the submarine explosive mine. In dealing with the tactics of submarines and their influence in naval strategy, he speaks as an expert; for not only has he devoted many years to their study, but during the war he was in command of anti-submarine craft and an instructor at H.M. School of Submarine Mining. The economic influence of the submarine on this country, Mr. Domville thinks, is summed up in the words of Lord Selborne in 1915: "After the war the whole question of our agricultural and economic policy of the food production at home will have to be revised in the light of our submarine experience." But what of the League of Nations? Are we not entitled to voice our views of the future of naval warfare in the light of that? Here Mr. Domville-Fife is guarded. He looks forward "steadfastly and even hopefully towards the vivid dawn of a new era." But he is not for abandoning the old motto, Si vis pacem para bellum.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
BEFORE THE WAR. By VISCOUNT HALDANE. Cassell. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE. By JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, C.B., Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Macmillans. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.
These two books must rank among the most important documents yet produced which bear upon the antecedents and the consequences of the war in so far as British policy is involved. Lord Haldane was for many years War Minister, and during the critical period of Anglo-German relations he was also a sort of supplementary Foreign Secretary whose influence over the most important department of Foreign Affairs was very great, partly because of the weight his opinion carried with Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith, and partly because of his special knowledge of Germans and Germany. His book has a double subject as it has a double object. He outlines the main elements and the principal stages in our policy versus Germany before the war, and he sketches what was done during his administration to perfect the organisation of our Army. He defends our national policy (there are interesting sidelights thrown by his personal experiences with the Emperor and among the governing classes of Prussia) on the ground that we did the best we could when we combined an earnest effort to prevent war with a resolution to be ready for it; and in his personal apologia he argues, in effect, that in the circumstances (we must not forget that the nation as a whole, and Parliament in particular, viewed military expenditure with a very jealous eye) his régime did the utmost that could have been expected. It is now commonly conceded, even by those who distrusted Lord Haldane's views in foreign affairs, and those who were bitterly against him because of his refusal to adopt universal military service, that he did a great work at the War Office. What he says about the efficiency of his Expeditionary Force ("If the warrior looked slender he was at least as well prepared for the ring as science could make him") must be universally admitted; and with his great work in that department must be coupled the creation of the Territorial Force. On the point of compulsory service Lord Haldane defends himself by saying that in 1912 the General Staff was allowed to investigate "the question whether we could or could not raise a great army." "The outcome was embodied in a report made to me by Lord Nicholson, himself a soldier who had a strong desire for compulsory service and a large army. He reported, as the result of a prolonged and careful investigation, that, alike as regarded officers and as regarded buildings and equipment, the conclusion of the General Staff was that it would be in a high degree unwise to try, during the period of unrest on the Continent, to commence a new military system." We might have become "seriously weaker before we had a chance of becoming stronger," and an enemy might have sprung on us. "I quite agreed, and not the less because it was highly improbable that the country would have looked at anything of the sort." We imagine that the one thing which should (in the light of our subsequent experience) have been done and was not done (though lack of money would have been a severe limitation to the actual accumulation of large stores, whether of rifles or of clothing) was to prepare a scheme whereunder the material for a greatly expanded force would be easily and rapidly obtained immediately an emergency had arisen.
Lord Haldane has many interesting obiter dicta. He insists on the need (never more necessary than now) for politicians to understand the meaning of the words they use, and the nature of the main conceptions which are entertained by the nation, and those which dominate their own minds. He says that his opinion of the German people remains unchanged. "They were very much like our own people, except in one thing. This was that they were trained simply to obey, and to carry out whatever they were told by their rulers. I used, during numerous unofficial tours in Germany, to wander about incognito, and to smoke and drink beer with the peasants whenever I could get the chance. What impressed me was the little part they had in directing their own government, and the little they knew about what it was doing." Lord Haldane dates this habit of mind back to the days of Frederick the Great; but is there not something to be said for the view that it is to be traced back through the period of the religious wars into the baronial Middle Ages?
Lord Haldane's conclusion is that "the question is not one simply of the letter of a treaty, but is one of the spirit in which it is made.... The foundations of a peace that is to be enduring must, therefore, be sought in what is highest and most abiding in human nature." These sentiments are eloquently supported by Mr. Maynard Keynes, who resigned his position at the Peace Conference (where he represented the Treasury) because he felt that the negotiations were not being inspired by that spirit and by those high and abiding ideals. His argument, which is supported by very acute reasoning, is that the economic clauses of the Treaty threaten the ruin of our interlocked economic civilisation; and, with the skill of an artist, he strengthens the gloom of his tale by giving in introductory chapters a tragic setting: a concourse of statesmen, oblivious of the greatness of the issues involved, men of mechanical or cunning minds, men obstinate and narrow, ruthless and cynical, adroit and cunning, intriguing, hoodwinking, whilst their world was rolling towards the precipice. The issues he considers, the arguments he advances, are far too controversial to be entered into here: but it is a book which states one point of view far more powerfully than it has been stated anywhere else and, as such, should be read, if only to be answered. We take it that beyond the public questions which engage the author's mind there must have been a personal one (which is also, however, a public one) which must have caused him much disquiet: the question how far a civil servant, whilst the events under discussion are still in progress, is morally entitled to divulge things he would not have seen save in his official capacity. He may--this we suppose is beyond dispute--resign and conduct argument on the basis of facts known to the public; but should he watch statesmen at private assemblies, judge their characters by what he sees there, and then come out and attempt to blow them sky-high? We suppose that Mr. Keynes, who is no doubt convinced that his estimates are sound and that the whole future of the world may depend upon people realising what he believes to be the truth, would say that there was a conflict of obligations, and that the larger one had overcome the lesser. But we do think that there is room here for investigation and definition by a political philosopher with some practical experience. The problem is not a simple one.
A HANDBOOK OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS. By SIR GEOFFREY BUTLER. With an Introduction by Lord Robert Cecil. Longmans. 5_s._ net.
THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE LEAGUE. By EUSTACE PERCY. Hodder & Stoughton. 6_s._ net.
It would hardly be possible to find two more different books on the same subject than these two. Hence it is extraordinarily instructive to read them together. Sir Geoffrey Butler is an academic international lawyer, a lecturer in International Law and Diplomacy in the University of Cambridge. He is therefore well qualified for the task which he has undertaken, a short and elementary treatise, "which tries to place the League in its historical perspective." He traces the history of international relations and shows that the League is a development of the idea of a Concert of Europe as opposed to the idea of a Balance of Power. He then explains the constitution and machinery of the League as it appears in the Paris Covenant, gives the text of the Covenant, and adds a commentary or explanation of its various clauses. Sir Geoffrey does not possess a light or facile pen, and occasionally his meaning is singularly obscure. The book is academically cautious and unoriginal, but it sticks to its object, which is to explain the kind of international instrument which the victorious statesmen fashioned in Paris. Hence it will be useful to those who do not possess technical knowledge but wish to understand the significance of the clauses, or bare bones, of the Covenant.
Lord Eustace Percy is not concerned with bare bones, but with the flesh and blood which may or may not one day clothe the skeleton which the victorious Powers produced at Paris. No one could call the author or his book cautious; they are always trying to get back to fundamentals. To Lord Eustace the Covenant of the League is a "revolution," and he endeavours to show the revolution in British policy which it implies--the ultimate, fundamental responsibilities which, with the signature of the Covenant, the nation and its statesmen assumed. In order to do this, he not only examines the League and Covenant; he gives a most interesting account of the previous international position and policy of Britain, the United States, and the chief Continental Powers; he analyses and criticises the terms of the Paris peace treaties; he deals with Labour unrest; the epidemic of revolution, Bolshevism. The whole forms a restless, brilliant, and often paradoxical essay on international relations. Its great merit is that the natural reaction to it in the reader is thought. It is true that the author's own political thinking is frequently much less deep than it would appear to be on a cursory examination; but at least if he cannot himself go to any great depths, he always tries to go as deep as he can, and he carries his reader below the obvious surface of political platitudes. His method is to appear at first to go almost to the extreme limits of "progressiveness" and unorthodoxy, and then, by the help of a paradox, to double on his tracks and to show that after all the "progressives" are out of date, and nothing much could have been done other than has been done. Thus he begins by writing about such terms of the Peace as the Saar, the Balkans and Austria, Shantung, the Adriatic, and the economic clauses, in language which we might expect from the extreme Left, and then, when the reader is beginning to feel that he has been robbed of his last illusion, he is headed back from despair with the paradox that "in a sense, the strength of the Treaty lies in its weakest parts--in those provisions which are the least workable in practice."
For some tastes there will be too much of this kind of paradox in this book. Lord Eustace is, perhaps, at his best when he is dealing either with past history or with the immediate subject of his book, the Responsibilities of the League. The League, in his view, is "the one novel contribution made to the settlement by the Conference at Paris"; it creates the conditions and machinery necessary if the family of nations is to realise a "policy of joint responsibilities," and to deal continuously in a spirit of friendly co-operation with "the standing common interests of nations." This thesis is explained, worked out, and illustrated with very great ability. Lord Eustace obviously considers that those who framed the Covenant produced the best international framework and machinery which at the moment it was possible for practical statesmanship to produce. Those who expected or asked for more are, in his opinion, impractical idealists, or, what is worse, they do not see that the whole object of the League is to continue and develop the existing international system of absolutely sovereign States. His treatment of this extremely difficult and important question of sovereignty is the least satisfactory part of his handling of the League. He holds that the doctrine of communal society "applied to the League of Nations clearly rules out first of all any encroachment upon the sovereignty of its members." But sovereignty does not consist solely, as he seems to imply, in "the claim of the State against any of its members," and surely the League might limit or "encroach upon" the sovereignty of its members without necessarily creating a Super-State. It is a pity that Lord Eustace has not dealt more thoroughly with this question, for it is vital to another important opinion held by him, namely, that the League must be the enemy of and bulwark against Bolshevik or Communist Governments.
THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA. By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD. Swarthmore Press. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is not a mere list of criticisms and reminiscences written by a carpet-bagger. Mr. Macdonald was in India as a member of the last Public Services Commission. He has studied numerous official and unofficial books and documents, and has met and heard the views of representatives of all classes and schools of political thought. He has stayed with Provincial Governors, Indian leaders, district officers, and heads of native institutions, such as the Gurukul of Hardwar and the Rabindranath Tagore school at Bholpur.
The result is a book of great interest, written with an insight and moderation which will commend it to many who do not agree with all its conclusions. It was written, Mr. Macdonald tells us, before the Montagu-Chelmsford Report was published; but it is none the worse for this. References and comments on the Report have been added, and every line may be read with profit alike by the extreme reformer, the moderate constitutionalist and the firm conservative.
Mr. Macdonald begins with an account of the rise of Nationalism and a sketch of the history of European penetration and the advance of the East India Company in India. This enables the British reader at once to understand the remainder of the book, and places him in possession of a store of knowledge which may help to foster that interest in India and her problems so lacking in British electors and politicians alike.
The pronouncement of August, 1917, the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, and the passing of the Government of India Act of 1919 are first steps towards the establishment of self-government for India; but the real difficulty to be solved is the representation of the mass of the people. Mr. Macdonald holds that "The democratic forms of the West are not the only forms in which democracy can take shape.... India is not a nation of equal citizens so much as an organisation of co-operating social functions." The question of diversity of race and language will remain even when primary education has become general, and Mr. Macdonald might have made clearer his views of the lines on which genuine popular representation can be secured. He does, indeed, in his account of the 50,000,000 "outcastes" of India give us a dim vision of his hopes that with education will come leaders of ability to represent them; but this does not solve the main problem of ascertaining and giving expression to the will of the people. With the Councils and reformed administration India will be somewhat in the position of England in 1832, and whether she is to develop under British tutelage, or to be left to work out her own salvation under her own bourgeois Government, is a question which statesmen will be called on to decide in the near future.
The chapters on finance and on religion and Nationalism are among the best in the book, while the pithy accounts of the ceaseless toil of a Lieutenant-Governor and of a District Officer should disabuse the minds of those who have been accustomed to regard Indian civilians as comfortable overpaid loafers.
SCIENCE
THEORETICAL AND APPLIED COLLOID CHEMISTRY. By WOLFGANG OSTWALD. John Wiley & Sons and Chapman & Hall. 11_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE CHEMISTRY OF COLLOIDS. By RICHARD ZSIGMONDY. John Wiley & Sons and Chapman & Hall. 13_s._ 6_d._ net.
Colloid chemistry, for which Dr. Wolfgang Ostwald claims to have established the right "to existence as a separate and independent science," is a study of very recent development, which has come to its own during the past twenty years. In many respects its development offers a close parallel to that of catalysis, a branch of chemistry recently noticed in these columns. In both cases we have a few brilliant, isolated studies, succeeded by a long period during which little attention was paid to the subject; in both cases this century has seen a large body of chemists, especially the younger men, attracted to the investigation, the phenomena in question, and results have been rapidly attained which have proved of great theoretical interest, and have already found wide application in industry. Just as the old idea that there were a few special catalysts has been succeeded by the belief now held that every substance can be made to act as a catalyst in suitable circumstances, so it is now stated freely that, instead of there being a small class of colloids, any substance can be prepared in a colloid state. Incidentally, colloidal preparations are widely used as catalysts.
Colloid chemistry may be said to have arisen some fifty years ago in the researches of Thomas Graham, who showed that a large class of liquids or semi-liquids would not diffuse through animal membranes, as do ordinary solutions of salts. Because many of these substances were sticky he gave to the whole class the name which they now hold, colloid. Since then his conception has been extended, and it is now realised that, strictly speaking, we should talk rather of a substance in a colloidal state than of a colloid, since typically crystalline substances, such as ordinary salt, can be prepared in colloidal solution. The characteristic of such a solution is the fineness of sub-division--the dispersion--of the "dissolved" substance. In a true solution, in the ordinary sense, we have, in general, the substance existing as separate molecules dispersed throughout the solvent. In a mechanical suspension, such as may be prepared from exceedingly fine sand and water, the suspended particles, which take some time to settle, can be easily seen with a microscope, if not with the naked eye. In between these two classes of dispersed systems we have solutions in which the particles, while consisting, in general, of a very large number of molecules, are small enough to pass through filter-paper and escape the ordinary microscope, while at the same time they do not diffuse through membranes and can be seen by special optical arrangements, i.e., the so-called ultramicroscope. Such dispersed systems are colloidal systems, which have only recently been investigated in detail, although Faraday prepared colloidal solutions of metallic gold which still exist. Colloidal chemistry has been picturesquely called "the world of neglected dimensions," which is appropriate enough. Of course the exact degree of dispersion which constitutes a colloidal solution is purely arbitrary, since, as Wolfgang Ostwald--the son of Wilhelm Ostwald--insists in the book before us, solutions are known which show all ranges of sub-division of the dissolved substance, from molecular dimensions to visible particles. Various distinguishing tests have led to solutions in which the diameter of the particles lies anywhere between a millionth and a thousandth of a millimetre being conventionally called colloids.
The scientific, industrial, and medical applications of colloid chemistry increase in number daily--we are already confronted with the word colloidotherapy--and there is a growing demand for books on the subject. The two before us are each by authors who are celebrated for their researches in the subject: Zsigmondy invented the ultramicroscope, which has been responsible for the most important recent advances in the study of colloidal solution, and Wolfgang Ostwald has added clearness to nearly every branch of the subject. Ostwald's book, adequately translated by Dr. Martin Fischer (although, we may remark, the word "enormity" is not generally used as a synonym for hugeness), is based on a series of lectures given by him in America just before the war. Publication has been delayed by the war, and it is interesting to note that in the preface, written in 1915 when Germany was apparently in a good position, the author looks to science to form the first bridge between the peoples then at war, and exclaims, "How should I, for example, cease to admire, to adopt, and to develop the labours of a W. B. Hardy, a W. M. Bayliss, a J. Perrin, a P. P. von Weimarn, and others, just because they belong to a people hostile to my own?" The book gives a most excellent sketch of the whole field, by one who is an enthusiast in his subject, and may be thoroughly recommended as an introduction for those who are beginners, even if their general knowledge of chemistry is slight, while even the expert will find much in it to interest him. As a detail we may mention that Ostwald gives a quick receipt for the preparation of red colloidal gold with ordinary distilled water, while other authors, including Zsigmondy, insist that the preparation is a delicate undertaking, requiring specially distilled water and the greatest care. The wonderful range of phenomena now included in the subject is clearly brought out, and the pictures of Liesegang rings and the ultramicroscopic photograph of a setting cement are beautiful. The treatment of gels, the jelly-like form into which certain colloidal solutions pass, is particularly good, and gives much valuable information not hitherto available in popular form. The last two chapters, or lectures, on scientific applications and technical applications of colloid chemistry are of surpassing interest, as indicating the practical importance which this young science has attained. All life processes take place in a colloid system, and the necessity to physiologists of the study of colloids is forcibly emphasised. Rubber milk, or later, is a colloid, so that all the problems of coagulation of rubber and its subsequent vulcanisation are included in the subject. The setting of cements is a colloidal problem. These, and many other questions, are briefly but clearly discussed. The experiments which accompanied the lectures are described, and are most suggestive.
Professor Zsigmondy's book is more technical, and deals mainly with "hydrosols" and "hydrogels." The author's reputation in this field vouches for the excellence of the treatment of the many expert problems discussed. Naturally the subjects of ultramicroscopy and protective colloids are discussed in detail--the author originated the "gold figure" used to express the protective effect of a colloid. The theoretical discussions are particularly valuable, and physiologists will read with interest the long discussion of protein bodies. There is an appendix on industrial colloid chemistry by the translator, Dr. Ellwood Spear, in which the problems of rubber manufacture, tanning, and other industrial processes are very briefly treated. There is in this section a chapter on smoke abatement, but the methods mentioned scarcely fall within the province of colloid chemistry as generally understood. A final chapter, by Dr. J. F. Norton, deals with the application of colloid chemistry to sanitation.
MODERN SCIENCE AND MATERIALISM. By HUGH ELLIOT. Longmans. Green & Co. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This book is an exposition of monism, the philosophic theory that asserts the identical nature of mind and matter, as distinct from the dualistic "superstition"--as our author terms it--of matter and spirit. Sir Oliver Lodge, in a recent article, claims that three fundamental things are required to explain our universe: viz., Mind, with its rudiment Life; Matter, with its element the electric charge; and Ether, with its fundamental properties equivalent to elasticity and inertia. Mr. Elliot will have none of this. For him there is no reason to postulate other things than those capable of investigation by physical science--the ether and matter are essentially of the same kind, while all the phenomena of life are, if not at present explained on a physico-chemical basis, yet ultimately explicable in terms of the exact sciences. Life is a name for certain properties of protoplasm, and the chemical reactions of life are more complicated, but not more mysterious, than those of the laboratory. As for "ghosts, gods, souls, et hoc genus omne," our author holds that "these have long been rejected from the belief of most advanced thinkers." He traverses the assertion of Professors Mach and Karl Pearson, that while science can explain "how" things occur it cannot explain "why" (the point under discussion depends, of course, on Mr. Elliot's interpretations of the words), he pours scorn upon Herbert Spencer, Bergson, and all the vitalists. Altogether the book is one of the most pugnacious defences of monism which we have read, and will delight the bitter opponents of all spiritualistic philosophies. At the same time the author maintains that his philosophy is not materialistic, in the ordinary sense, but a form of idealism, and this, of course, is true, in a way, of any form of monism, it being possible either to say that the atom of matter is as full of mystery as life, or that life is as full of mechanism as the atom. It is obviously impossible in the limited space at our disposal to criticise the arguments put forward on a subject so complicated and controversial, but we think that nobody will admit Mr. Elliot to be as unbiassed as he appears to consider himself, judging by his remarks on the bias of the vitalists. His claim for the support of the physiologists reminds us that Dr. J. S. Haldane recently opened a discussion on the question, "Are Physical, Biological and Physiological Categories Irreducible?" by a pronouncement in the affirmative; the physicists also are not all monists. The question is more two-sided than our author will admit. His science is unfortunately by no means beyond reproach: to say that the charge on the electron is "inconceivably immense" is either extraordinary inaccuracy of phrase or extraordinary error, while to state that the electron has weight is to assert something of which we have no experimental evidence. That light is a vibrating motion of the same character as sound is incorrect, and such instances can be multiplied. These things are not of fundamental importance to Mr. Elliot's argument, but they show, to say the least, a deplorable looseness of expression. Nevertheless, the book is worth reading to all interested, either as friends or enemies, in the monistic philosophy, and may lead some of those who talk so freely of souls and mind to be a little more precise as to what they mean by these terms.
ACCOUNTS RENDERED OF WORK DONE AND THINGS SEEN. By J. Y. BUCHANAN. Cambridge University Press. 21_s._ net.
Selections from the papers of the author have already appeared under the titles of Scientific Papers (Oceanographical) and Comptes Rendus of Observation and Reasoning. This third volume, with an English modification of the title of the latter work, continues the plan of that book. The papers are very varied in character, including chemical studies, accounts of physical determinations, addresses on geography and oceanography, more technical geographical writings, and short articles on topics of general interest, reprinted from Nature, the Times, and other periodicals. Many of the latter recall events of our generation important, but already half forgotten, such as the stranding of the Sultan and the wreck of Santos Dumont 6. An excellent feature of the author's Comptes Rendus was the detailed summary, with page references, provided for every article, and the same plan is followed in this work. The author's work on oceanography is too well known to need commendation--he was chemist and physicist to the Challenger expedition. His "Retrospect," the second article in the book, gives a fascinating summary of the work done on that expedition, and the other papers on oceanographical subjects are of great general interest, and incidentally recall the great services of the Prince of Monaco to that science. His general outlook, which lends such freshness to all his writings, cannot be better expressed than in his own words in a former book: "It was conveyed to me through an old friend and former colleague that this contribution ... had done much to retard the standardisation of research. I took it as a compliment. To standardise research is to limit its freedom and to impede discovery. Originality and independence are the characteristics of genuine research, and it is stultified by the acceptance of standards and by the recognition of authority."
It throws much light on the recent increase in the expenses of publishing that, whereas the Comptes Rendus was published in 1917 at 7_s._ 6_d._, the present volume of similar size and form is published at 21_s._
BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES
By J. H. MASON
The Studio special number, "Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs, by British and French Artists," with Commentary by M. C. Salaman, is the first collection, with any claim to comprehensiveness, of the artistic work of the present renaissance of the woodcut. The woodcut has a twofold employment: it may be used for pictorial broadsides or for book illustration. It concerns us here as a means--I wonder if I ought not to write the means?--of book illustration. Notwithstanding the great technical advances made in line and half-tone photo-process engraving, there is a tendency to return to the use of the woodcut for certain kinds of catalogue illustrations, and, to a still greater extent, for book illustration and decoration.
The half-tone process involves the use of so-called "art" paper, i.e., a wood pulp or grass pulp paper as a centre, coated over with kaolin or china clay, with a high finish, the glazed polish of which reflects the light very unpleasantly. This objectionable paper, apart from the incongruity of wash drawings or photographs with typography, relegates this method of book illustration to utilitarian ends. The line process is far preferable for book illustration, but in itself it has no pleasant quality, usually very much the reverse, and pen drawings are no more directly suitable for book illustration than pen lettering is for use with type. The woodcut modifies the character of the drawing with a discipline which produces a character more in sympathy with that which type has acquired at the hands of the punch-cutter and type-founder in its passage from writing; and the same discipline modifies the artist's vision as well as the drawing. Material, too, has its own character, and when the user is not too clever this character becomes active in the work, not merely passive. The wood block itself can contribute a valuable quality, and either the knife or the graver is a responsive tool. The corresponding elements in line process work are the zinc plate and etching acid, and they do contribute something of their quality to the work; but it is not an attractive quality.
The rediscovered qualities of the wood block have attracted many artists to its use. They are producing work of great variety of interest, but it is rather in the pictorial direction than as book illustration. The work of Valloton elsewhere, and of Jane Bouquet and Brangwyn, of Sydney Lee and Verpilleux in this Studio special number are examples of this. The work of Lucien Pissaro, of Charles Shannon, and Charles Ricketts shows the right use of the woodcut as decorative illustration, but their work belongs to the early days of this revival. Dürer, Holbein, and the Polyphilus printed by Aldus are the great exemplars for a pre-Bewick Brotherhood of the decorative woodcut. Where work of a freer quality is desirable, Miss Jackson's on page 13 shows the texture that goes with type satisfactorily. Miss Gribble has given the right degree of formal treatment to the pastoral motives she has chosen for tail-pieces, and makes them decorative without letting them lose their interest and so become vapid conventions. Both Miss Jackson and Miss Gribble are pupils of Mr. Noel Rooke, who has done so much for the right use of the woodcut for decorative illustration.
The lithographs suffer much more than the woodcuts by reproduction. To begin with, they are very much reduced in size, and they are printed by a letterpress method (i.e., from a relief surface) instead of from the plain surface for which they were drawn. The loss which they suffer by these changes can only be appreciated by those who know the originals. Both Mr. and Mrs. Hartrick's fine examples suffer through the loss of the rich lithographic black.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
G. K. CHESTERTON
Verse
GREYBEARDS AT PLAY. Brimley Johnson. 1900.
THE WILD KNIGHT. Grant Richards. 1900. Enlarged Edition. Dent. 1914.
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE. Methuen. 1911.
POEMS. Burns & Oates. 1915.
WINE, WATER, AND SONG. Methuen. 1915.
[A reprint of the songs from The Flying Inn.]
Prose
THE DEFENDANT. Brimley Johnson. 1901. Cheap Edition in Dent's Wayfarer's Library, 1914.
TWELVE TYPES. A. L. Humphreys. 1902.
G. F. WATTS. Duckworth. 1902.
ROBERT BROWNING. Macmillan. (English Men of Letters Series.) 1903.
THE PATRIOTIC IDEA. Brimley Johnson. 1904.
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL. John Lane. 1904.
THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES. Harper. 1905. Cheaper Edition. Hodder & Stoughton. 1912.
HERETICS. John Lane. 1905.
CHARLES DICKENS. Methuen. 1906. Popular Edition. 1913.
THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. Arrowsmith. 1908.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Methuen. 1908.
ORTHODOXY. John Lane. 1908.
TREMENDOUS TRIFLES. Methuen. 1909.
ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS. Methuen. 1910.
FIVE TYPES. A. L. Humphreys. 1910. (Reprinted from Twelve Types. 1905.)
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD? Cassell. 1910.
WILLIAM BLAKE. Duckworth. 1910.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. John Lane. 1910.
THE BALL AND THE CROSS. Wells Gardner, Darton. 1910.
APPRECIATIONS OF DICKENS. Dent. 1911. (Prefaces from Everyman Series of Dickens reprinted.)
THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN. Cassell. 1911.
SIMPLICITY AND TOLSTOY. A. L. Humphreys. 1912.
A MISCELLANY OF MEN. Methuen. 1912.
MANALIVE. Nelson. 1912.
MAGIC: A PLAY. Martin Secker. 1913.
THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE. Williams & Norgate. 1913. (Home University Library Series.)
THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN. Cassell. 1914.
THE FLYING INN. Methuen. 1914.
THE BARBARISM OF BERLIN. Cassell. 1914.
LETTERS TO AN OLD GARIBALDIAN. Methuen. 1914.
THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND. Palmer. 1915.
A SHILLING FOR MY THOUGHTS. Methuen. 1916.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Chatto & Windus. 1917.
IRISH IMPRESSIONS. Collins. 1919.
[He has also written prefaces to the following:--Carlyle's Past and Present; Extracts from Boswell's Life of Johnson; The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; Sartor Resartus; The Pilgrim's Progress; Creatures that Once Were Men, by Maxim Gorky; Dickens's Works; Essays, by Matthew Arnold; Literary London; The Book of Job; From Workhouse to Westminster; Ruskin's Poems; The Cottage Homes of England; A Vision of Life; Meadows of Play; Selections from Thackeray; Eyes of Youth (an anthology); Extracts from Samuel Johnson; The Book of Snobs; Famous Paintings Reproduced in Colour; The English Agricultural Labourer; Æsop's Fables; Dickens's Christmas Carol; Bohemia's Claim for Freedom.
He has also illustrated the following books:--Nonsense Rhymes; The Great Enquiry; Emmanuel Burden; Biography for Beginners; The Green Overcoat.]
JOHN FREEMAN
Verse
TWENTY POEMS. Gay & Hancock. 1909.
[Out of print.]
FIFTY POEMS. Herbert & Daniel. 1911. New Edition, Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
STONE TREES AND OTHER POEMS. Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
PRESAGE OF VICTORY AND OTHER POEMS OF THE TIME. Selwyn & Blount. 1916.
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD. Morland Press. 1918.
[No. 1 of Green Pastures Series. Cover and frontispiece by James Guthrie.]
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD AND OTHER POEMS. Selwyn & Blount. 1919.
[Includes the twelve poems published in the last-named.]
Prose
THE MODERNS. Robert Scott. 1916.
[Critical Studies of Robert Bridges, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, etc.]
DRAMA
CHILDREN'S PLAYS
The hold of the Pantomime on the affections of the public is possibly as strong as ever it was, but the character of those entertainments has been slowly changing and with it the character of the audience. Professedly I suppose the Pantomimes are for children, but except that almost any entertainment will amuse children, owing to their extreme curiosity, there is little in the modern Pantomime that seems to have been devised for them. In fact, the Christmas Pantomime has of late years come to have a particularly sophisticated and adult savour, which is to be noticed in the treatment of the old fairy-tales--one or other of which, in name at least, still forms the basis of every Christmas Pantomime, although in a shape that would scarcely be recognised by the compilers of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
This is particularly noticeable in the metamorphosis of the Witch who, fatigued by the possession of mysteriously terrible powers, dwindles into the obscene-faced mother-in-law. The sere old woman who turned the seven white-horsed princesses into low stones, over which the moss crept slowly, has become a gin-inoculated Widow Twankey, who dances like a man and gloats over the highly-successful love-affairs of her son as leading to more and better drink.
Pantomimes have always been less concerned with the imaginative, the more-than-human, than with the extraordinarily actual. Some will remember the artillery bombardment which was introduced one Christmas during the war into a Pantomime at Drury Lane, which was, if I remember rightly, superficially the story of The Sleeping Beauty. It was good fun that bombardment, much better fun than are the majority of these topical excrescences, but one felt that it had been introduced because the principal comedian had got bored with the comparative sober quietness of that land of imagination in which the inhabitants of a fairy-tale progress as if seen in a glass darkly. He had, therefore, deliberately pulled the story out of its semi-supernatural country into the limelight, and was rewarded by instant mirth and vociferous applause from nine-tenths of the audience. Only a few children hesitated, feeling the pangs of a violent up-rooting, a being torn out of a land, through which they had been slowly but with intense delight travelling, into a mass of gesticulating faces ranged in circles watching the elaborate and apparently comic contortions of two small grotesque figures on what was obviously the stage.
I have no doubt at all that the instincts and judgment of children in these matters is far superior to that of the majority of their elders. The steady vulgarisation in the theatre of fairy-tales originally the inventions of adult minds of phantasy and sensibility superior to the general is a record of the debasing influence of the mass of the inhabitants of our large cities, who are dissatisfied with less than an instant reaction to the efforts of those whom they pay to amuse them. They are too restless to submit to sit quietly and by slow degrees receive the heritage of beauty accumulated by the ambages of minds whose devious and amazed wanderings are like the apparently directionless perambulation of bees who are, without pause, gathering honey.
Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, Ali Baba--whatever they be, the essence of these Pantomimes is something grosser than any fairy-tale, and, whether borrowed from the brothers Grimm, or Andersen, or any other source, their fragile and mysterious beauty is roughly obliterated to give place to an obvious rough-and-tumble humour and crude topicality of the kind that not one in a million could miss. Of course the somewhat "hearty" atmosphere of Christmas-time is not conducive to fineness of vision. The subtler outlines in which resides the beauty of a fairy-tale, a girl, or a mountain are not to be grasped by eyes slightly dazzled with the inner glow of good feeding--that glow which has more heat than light. It is a time when a joke has to be obvious to be seen, and the propensity to enormous girth perceptible in the most popular characters of Pantomime may have a similar origin; but I speak from a painful experience when I declare that for a Christmas Pantomime nothing can be too crude, too stale, too trivial to be funny, and that the best condition in which to go to the Pantomime would be that in which you could see simultaneously the largest number of Moons.
The Change in the Pantomime
The Pantomime has become a sort of Christmas Revue, and parents in large numbers have ceased taking their children to these entertainments, appealing as they almost exclusively do to the "grown-up." In their place we have had of late years a large number of children's plays, of which Sir James Barrie's Peter Pan is the best known. It is years since I saw Peter Pan, but I was, I remember, greatly taken with it, and went during that season five or six times. Part of the attraction it had for me lay in the charming personality of Peter himself, as played by Miss Pauline Chase, whose postcard portraits I bought in large numbers and gazed on adoringly for long intervals in the seclusion of my own room. But the very fact that the play gave scope to a young actress to embody a figure of such originality and charm as Peter must be accounted as a virtue in the author.
I know there are people who object to fairy-tales. They have lately been greatly cheered by the public confession of Madame Montessori that she belongs to them. Apparently the essence of their and also of her objection to such seemingly innocent and delightful inventions of the human brain is that the most desperate need of children is for a steady inculcation of facts. Having schooled your child in facts--writes in a letter to the Observer the gentleman who knows the Secret of Human Power--in the pleasantest manner possible up to the age of, say, sixteen, then the lessons to be derived from fiction may be gently and cautiously dealt with. The spectacle of an adult dealing "gently and cautiously" with a fairy-tale is one of those which seem to have been invented as a subject for a Max Beerbohm cartoon; but it is curious that anyone should have such a narrow conception of reality as to think that it is compassed in material facts. How one is to present love, honour, bravery, beauty, virtue, daring, adventurousness, and all the other qualities of the human mind except by imaginative creation, when they are purely creations of men's minds, I cannot see. Perhaps these deluded realists imagine that they are abstract nouns. They would have us say: "Here, dear children, are a number of abstract nouns; contemplate them as you would marbles, but remember that they are not marbles or even peanuts but nouns. You cannot play with them, you cannot eat them, and what good they are nobody knows, but everybody is supposed to know their names, as there is no other way of distinguishing them one from another." This same champion of Madame Montessori's Anti-Fairy-Tale Campaign writes further in his letter to the Observer that Shakespeare's plays "were not written specially for children, but as morality incentives distinctly for adults." This is a pitiful notion for any intelligent adult to have, and one that no child with a mind not distorted by unnatural virtue could be expected to understand. It is most expressive of that horrible "seriousness" which seizes some minds like a cramp until the sufferer drowns himself in an ocean of blithering nonsense, refusing all the ropes which the onlookers on terra firma throw him, because their faces are convulsed with laughter. "Morality incentives"--to cling to the shocking expression of Madame Montessori's disciple--are of two kinds. They are either negative or positive. The negative class is the only one that an Anti-Fairy-Tale League could put in its syllabus. It consists of a series of ejaculations: Do not drink! Do not swear! Do not tell lies! etc. Drawn up in an amended form suitable for children, it might read like this:
(1) Do not drink your brother's ginger-beer. (2) and (3), etc. Do not imitate your parents.
It may appear excellent advice, but virtue--as many religious teachers have suspected and modern science is proving--does not reside in turning oneself into a van-load of inhibitions. Virtue is wholly positive, it is an expression of the spirit. He that imagines virtue is virtuous, and no other. It is a fairy-tale that men are trying to live in the world, and it can only be expressed in art. There is no virtue in a mere exhortation to be virtuous. Nobody takes any notice of exhortations, and quite rightly; but men who have seen a vision will try to capture it. What the creative artist does is to give men a vision of virtue, of beauty (for beauty is virtue), and it is just this vision which the Montessori teachers would have us put behind the backs of children while they glue their eyes to material things.
Not only would this practice be pernicious, it would be impossible to carry out, for, brought to its logical conclusion, the theory would demand the abolition of the teaching of mathematics and of science, as well as of poetry and of drama; or rather it would reduce mathematics to the counting of beads, science to the naming of smells (a return to "stinks" from which the schools are just escaping), poetry to this sort of thing:
Last night in pulling off a sock I gave my little nose a knock. To-day in jumping to get up I fell across my brindle pup.
That is to say, poetry would vanish, and as for drama, the only drama we could have would be by taking a proscenium into the park and putting it up in front of two lovers kissing on a seat; but the moment the lovers saw us the "drama" would cease, and we could not pay them to go on with it for our amusement, for that would be deception, that would be make-believe.
Those of us who are not by infirmity of constitution natural victims to every new fad that is advertised will take pleasure in anticipating a great growth in the supply of and demand for children's plays. They offer great scope for development, and will increasingly appeal to authors who have no desire to write the conventional stage play--a thing without imagination or beauty, a mere artificial contrivance to enable actors to exhibit their charm and skill. There is no possibility of getting literary men of the highest class to write the plays we see succeeding in our London theatres during the greater part of the year. They could not possibly have any interest in work of that kind, and they could not do it well, but the children's play is a much more elastic and adaptable dramatic form. To-day, for instance, even verse is used in successful children's plays, and managers do not demand for this purpose work so conventional and stereotyped as they require ordinarily. This Christmas there were three children's plays produced in the West End: Peter Pan, Once Upon a Time, and Where the Rainbow Ends. Of these only Once Upon a Time was new, and it was rather a series of fairy-tales--connected by the device of an elf telling the stories to a goblin who captured her--than an original work; but it was cleverly done by the author, Miss Wildig, and delightfully produced by Miss Edith Craig. I must confess to having enjoyed Once Upon a Time far more than most of the plays I had seen during the preceding year, but it was a pastiche not a homogeneous invention, and it contained an absurd and very irritating pseudo-patriotic melodrama called The Woman of the Black Mountain, as well as an extremely amusing and rather savage burlesque of certain marriage customs which are not yet quite extinct entitled The Bone of Contention. This latter would make an excellent sketch for a Revue, or possibly Mr. Oscar Asche will introduce it into Chu Chin Chow.
Demand and Supply
It is a great pity that the Pantomime has so degenerated now when it had got rid of much of the knock-about farcical element, of a great deal of the tyranny of the spectacular, and of the "transformation scene," because it is a form that offers great possibilities to the author, and if a genius came along he could do something wonderful with it. Even without a genius or without waiting for him a great deal could be done. If only those responsible for the annual Pantomimes at Drury Lane and the Lyceum would leave the beaten track for once and get into touch with the younger generation of writers and commission them to produce a Pantomime we might get a valuable addition to our dramatic literature. It involves very little commercial risk, and holds the possibility of an immense financial success, apart from other considerations. It may be asked why do not these young men write a Pantomime on their own initiative? But the answer is simple. Our young writers have no time to spend on work which has no prospect of ever being looked at, much less produced; besides, a Pantomime is essentially a thing for collaboration between two or three of them, and they are nearly all as busy as they can be with bread-and-butter journalism and with individual projects in those few spare hours that remain to them. There is, however, little doubt that they could produce a Pantomime which would draw all London for months, just as there is little doubt that the Pantomime and the children's play are the most promising and flexible of the dramatic forms which confront our young writers. The Revue may be thought to offer almost equal opportunities, and to be capable of development out of its present chaotic state, but it is rather more restricted by the fact that it has such a large public. To have the largest public is to have the least hope of commanding the attention of your audience sufficiently for them to appreciate what is not obvious. Besides, the Revue supplies a definite demand which does not change from year to year. It is a demand for pretty girls, pretty dresses, dancing and humour, and if there suddenly appeared among us a greater dramatic genius than any that has ever lived he would not be able to satisfy that demand as well as Mr. C. B. Cochran, Mr. André Charlot, or Sir Alfred Butt do. It is the minority that is not catered for in drama as it is catered for in literature. Where are the thirty-five thousand readers of the Times Literary Supplement in the land of theatres? They are scattered in twos and threes here and there, always dissatisfied and disgruntled. Whether at a Pantomime, at a Revue, at a Comedy, or at a Drama they find the entertainment a hundred per cent. below the standard they demand, and their only pleasure is an occasional Shakespearean production or a children's play. But they could be mobilised and brought together to support solidly and without the fickleness of the large public a theatre that gave them what they wanted. If the experiment were made with children's plays they would be reinforced by the thousands of parents who will not submit their children to the vulgarities of the latter-day Pantomime.
* * * * *
The next performance of the Phœnix Society will take place on February 8th and 9th, when Dryden's Marriage à la Mode will be given.
* * * * *
It is rumoured that Mr. Henry Ainley's next production at the St. James's will be Stephen Phillip's Paolo and Francesca, in which Mr. Ainley made his first success.
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
PROBLEMS OF THE ACTOR. By LOUIS CALVERT. Simpkin. 7_s._
This is a book which can be thoroughly recommended not only to every amateur but to every professional actor and theatre-lover. It is full of the most uncommon sense, and although Mr. Calvert has decided opinions on voice-training, gesture, team-work, scenery, dressing, music, and producing, he does not lay down the law with the evidence of inexperience, but reasons his position from point to point with a quietness that is far more impressive and convincing. Mr. Calvert has also done more than he probably set out to do. The book is, in the first instance, a guide for the young actor or would-be actor, giving him a good deal of wise advice on the technical side of his craft. But in doing this Mr. Calvert has written a book which should be read by every theatre-goer, since it will increase his appreciation of the theatre enormously by opening his mind to detail of which he was, in all probability, completely unaware, although more or less conscious of its cumulative effect. After reading Mr. Calvert's book he will find himself itching to go immediately to the nearest playhouse and regard the drama being enacted there with what he will feel are new eyes; and since the standard of acting and of drama generally is dependent largely upon the level of intelligence of its audience, Mr. Calvert's book will be as beneficial to the theatre when studied by the ordinary public as when studied by the actor. Finally, this book is an attempt to put the actor again in his proper position as the pillar of the drama. On this point I am in absolute agreement with Mr. Calvert. Plays are conceivable in which the actor may be no more than an instrument in the orchestra. I think they will be written, but I have yet to see them. But in the plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans the actor is first in importance, and scenery, dressing, music, and everything else must be used simply as a background and a subsidiary to him. Moreover Mr. Calvert makes a claim--which is also made by the late Mr. H. B. Irving in an introduction--to the consideration of the actor in his highest moments as a creative artist. This claim, in my opinion, Mr. Calvert makes good, and if there are any people to-day who still cherish the old superstition that the actor is merely a sort of clever but shallow showman, then unless they are bigoted beyond the reach of intelligence this book will dispel it once for all.
W. J. TURNER
THE FINE ARTS
War-pictures at Burlington House
One would have hesitated to predict success for a set of commissioned war pictures: meaning success in the sense of excellence. In commissioning any painting or piece of sculpture with a dictated subject there is always the danger that the subject will be uncongenial to the artist, that it may have no connection with his own intimate experience. This is one of the disadvantages of portrait painting. The artist is supposed to be capable and desirous of depicting all kinds of characters, not to speak of flattering them. The novelist and dramatist are more fortunate. People are anxious to avoid and also tired of their revelations. But Mr. Horatio Bottomley still expects the Poet Laureate to boom out the appropriate ode.
Besides the general objection there was the further feeling that the war was a sufficient preoccupation in itself, and a disagreeable one of such a kind that deliberately to set out to make contemporaneous art about it would be not only superfluous but almost profane. It would amount to gloating. The war was a foul and dirty job that had to be gone through with, and the experience of concentrating on this was enough. It was not without good reason that immediately following the war the most popular forms of art were the Revue and the Russian Ballet.
Again, one rather grudges the large sums of State money spent on war-pictures when one thinks of the comparatively small expenditure on art in peace-time. And those two rich and influential patrons who started the ball rolling with large contributions, did they before the war, will they now after the war, patronise art extensively and seriously? The motive may have been sound, but it was in all probability very mixed.
But doubt and scepticism tend to be quashed by the result, which must be admitted to be a very considerable success. The field appears to have been so wide that the artists have been able to select the themes which had most significance for them, and there is a direct continuity in their present with their past work. Even pure landscapes have not been ruled out. It is, in fact, far the best modern exhibition that has graced the walls of the Academy for some time, and the memory of it will still be fresh in the spring.
It is not meant, however, that the Exhibition is full of masterpieces. It contains work that is representative of much of the best English art of to-day, but the keynote of that art is talent, accomplishment, and not genius. And this judgment does not exclude such well-known painters as Sargent, Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Francis Dodd, Clausen, Orpen, Lavery.
I shall, no doubt, be accused of iconoclasm, of indulging in easy destructive criticism; and the term Futurist will be hurled at me with such a lot of prejudicial glue on it that, although it is inapplicable, it will inevitably stick. And I shall be asked if I would consign the whole of the past to the rubbish-heap and abolish all tradition, and so on. The answer is, emphatically and vehemently, no! It is precisely because the past looms so imposing and ever watchful that the late twentieth-century English painters are dwarfed. Place a Muirhead Bone beside a Meryon (the comparison is not irrelevant, because there are definite similarities between the two) and the Muirhead Bone will disappear into the Meryon. Two possible exceptions in the present Exhibition are The Great Crater, Athies (280) and Deniecourt Chateau, Estrées(284). Place a Sargent beside a Manet, Courbet or Velazquez and Sargent's horses beside those of Géricault, and the Sargent loses all vitality. Or, again, neither Steer nor Clausen will stand very prolonged comparison with Constable or even Monet. Practically the whole of English late twentieth-century art is derived from Constable and from the French Barbizon and Impressionist schools, and is inferior to it. The latter is the significant point. This may sound too sweeping, and indeed it probably does leave out of account the few gems which a complete collection would reveal. Still, the fact of it being necessary to hunt for these few gems and not rather to eliminate the few failures would confirm the general judgment. We have never had anything like the great constellation of French nineteenth-century art.
In reaction against the tendency of English Impressionism to degenerate into the pleasant but slipshod æstheticism of a Lavery there is the crude Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis and W. P. Roberts. It had once a negative, destructive, rebellious value, but as a permanent constructive effort it surely is a cul-de-sac, a mere mechanical formula. Before any theory comes into play the primary test is whether a picture really moves us, appeals to us. If Vorticist or Futurist art did this, then no amount of argument refuting their abstract theory could condemn the actual art. But, at any rate, so far as I am concerned, this art has no appeal to me in a picture-frame. Indeed, it seems to me to be becoming increasingly stereotyped, and it is amazing that Mr. Wyndham Lewis should honestly believe in it himself. Mr. Wadsworth's Vorticist design for a house, which was recently exhibited by the Arts League of Service, absurdly unpractical though it was, had far larger possibilities in it.
The most interesting work exhibited by the younger painters is that painted in the more traditional manner--that is to say it is not abstractionist. It is possible that on seeing for the first time the pictures of the Nash brothers, Meninsky, Schwabe, Elliott Seabrooke, one might mistake them for "Futurist" efforts. This is, however, not owing to any distortion or abstraction, but to the fact that they have in common with the abstractionists a certain restlessness of design. Even when allied to absolute truth in representation, this trait might at first sight appear novel and revolutionary. It is, or tends to be, expressive of a new outlook.
Paul Nash's large picture, The Menin Road, is a distinct achievement. It grips one's attention. Yet it is overloaded, the incident, the drama of the landscape is piled on too thickly. John Nash's Over the Top, on the other hand, attracts attention because of its very bareness and simplicity. On a small section of a snow-covered front men are stumbling out of a jagged muddy trench into rolling fog cloud. Yet in spite of its success in convincing us that that is exactly how it was, the picture lacks intensity and depth. We are grateful to Mr. Nash, as also to Mr. Sargent, for having spared us the harassing agonies of the typical old-fashioned Academy war-picture. But neither has altogether succeeded in providing the real substitute. What such a picture would be like still remains to be seen. For it has not yet been painted.
The distinctive characteristics of the younger school, its sense of actuality, of lively conflicting movement, its combination of realism with rhythm, are summed up in Stanley Spencer's Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smoll, in Macedonia. In spite of certain possible faults of perspective, this is a thoroughly good picture. But although about a scene in the war, it is not of the war. It contains an inner civilian joyfulness expressed in unhampered, rhythmical activity. Equal praise must be bestowed on Henry Lamb's Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment, which possesses the same sense of concrete (not abstract) dynamic form.
The New English Art Club
There are two large pictures by Stanley Spencer at the New English Art Club Exhibition which confirm the impression that there is an immense promise in his art and already considerable attainment. It has such depth and breadth, such spontaneity and comprehensiveness. Boggle as we may at certain neo-primitive tendencies in his figures, at certain humorous irrelevancies in their occupations, overriding and almost justifying these eccentricities there is the fact that these two pictures do immediately and irresistibly heighten and intensify our consciousness: they give us a "silent and instantaneous flash of collusion with beauty." The picture Swan Upping at Cookham is freer from the static archaistic convention than the pseudo-Biblical composition, The Sacrifice of Zacharias, which is, nevertheless, because of the landscape background, equally fascinating. In the former it is the rigid mask of the woman lifting the cushion out of the punt and the distortion of the shoulders of the dark-faced gentleman that provoke criticism: in the latter nearly all the figures are a little inexplicable, except (and here the realist will demur strongly) the gentleman who is footing it gently towards Zacharias and the Florentine gentleman who is indulging in a graceful and somewhat reminiscent dancing gesture. These two are an inevitable part of that luxuriant and yet refreshing scenery. Pre-Raphaelite will doubtless be the derogatory term applied to Mr. Stanley Spencer, and it is true that he has affinities with that group which started with such promise and then proceeded to develop its vices more fully than its virtues. But Spencer has not got these particular vices, an inordinate love of photographic detail and a languishing sentimentality. His work suggests, rather than actually contains, an infinite wealth of detail, and it is swept with fresh country air precluding any Pre-Raphaelite hothouse languor.
Nor must we fall into the error of demanding realistic character studies from an artist who does not see people from that point of view at all. His outlook is nearer to that of Blake: his people are embodiments of universal emotions, they are penetrated with a sense of religious awe and beauty. Or, rather, this is what they would be if his expression were to reach its full maturity and get rid of its present archaistic obsession. His figures might still be stiff and intense, but we would not notice this because of their profound significance.
HOWARD HANNAY
MUSIC
MR. ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN'S RECITAL
During the last few months the Wigmore Hall has been the scene of some very notable recitals given by pianists of the first rank. They had several interesting points in common. Their audiences consisted largely of professional musicians, their programmes were generally of a severe and far from popular type. Yet in spite of the somewhat exclusive character of both programmes and audiences, so well adapted, one might think, to the intimate atmosphere of a small hall, intimacy was exactly the quality that in all cases was entirely absent from the performances. Both with Busoni and Cortôt, and lastly with Mr. Arthur Rubinstein, it was impossible to avoid feeling that one was at much too close quarters. The difference between such players as these and the more intimate type of pianist is moral rather than physical. Some players give the impression that they are playing for themselves alone, and that it is by mere accident that we happen to overhear them; the others seem almost to assume that their audience will not listen to them unless its attention is gripped and consciously dominated by the overmastering compulsion of a powerful personality. If we are soothed and charmed by the intimate players, we may indeed be uplifted and transported by the men of might, but there is at the same time the chance that we may be crushed and exhausted.
Mr. Arthur Rubinstein is certainly to be counted among the great pianists, but not yet among the greatest. He is a player of outstanding ability, but not of outstanding personality. He lacks Cortôt's inspiring animation, and, still more, the monumental intellectuality of Busoni. A conventional programme, or an almost conventional one, was the index of an almost conventional mind. The usual Bach-Somebody, the usual heavy Chopin; no Beethoven (thank goodness!), some modern French and Spanish, a Liszt Rhapsody to end up with. What saved the programme were the Spanish pieces and Liszt's Funérailles. If Mr. Rubinstein had had the courage to offer a programme as individual as those of Busoni he might have given himself a better chance of asserting his own individuality.
To begin with the two extremes: the Bach transcription at the beginning and the Liszt Rhapsody at the end are long out of date. Liszt's arrangements of Bach's organ works may have been very wonderful fifty years ago or more when there were not many organs in England on which the originals could be played, even if there were the organists to play them. To-day they are familiar to all of us. Moreover, the modern big pianists play them too easily. They seek to reproduce, as far as they can, the effect of the organ, and sometimes achieve a very remarkable uniformity of tone, as faultlessly regular as any given row of pipes can produce. But this uniformity of the organ's tone-colour is just the obvious deficiency of that instrument, and the exact reproduction of it on the pianoforte very easily tends to reproduce no more than the relentless accuracy of the mechanical piano-player. Mr. Rubinstein played his Bach-Liszt with intelligence and skill, and even succeeded in suggesting a certain organ-like effect of sonority by means of an ingenious method of pedalling; but in these days we should prefer either a more astounding miracle of transcription or, still better, the direct simplicity of Bach unadorned. Again, if it is still necessary to end a recital with a display of fireworks there are surely more showy things available now than Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies; and if we want Liszt for his own musical thoughts, we want something that represents him in a more serious mood. For the Funérailles Mr. Rubinstein deserves sincere gratitude.
Liszt's Hungary is only less difficult to believe in than Chopin's Poland. It is true that Hungary exists, and true that in Hungarian cafés one may still hear the tunes which Liszt embellished, but such underlying truth as the Rhapsodies possess is completely disguised by their tawdry romantic theatricality. As for Poland, "if she had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her," for Paris of the eighteen-thirties. That Poland, populated entirely by devout and amorous aristocrats, is the musician's Mrs. Harris--no, his Countess Harricka. Certainly the robust vigour of Mr. Rubinstein's playing make short work of the languor and swagger of the Scherzo in B flat minor and the Polonaise in A flat. All pianists are expected to play Chopin; but there are not many works of Chopin that will stand the strain of interpretation in the modern virtuoso's manner. The Barcarole is one of the few which by virtue of its serene and classical beauty has still been able to survive it.
MODERN SPANISH MUSIC
One composer stood out with unexpected prominence from Mr. Rubinstein's programme--Isaac Albeniz. Albeniz is hardly to be counted among the moderns. His training as a composer was mainly German, and he came to a certain extent under English influences as well. Like Chopin, he was primarily a pianist and a composer for the pianoforte. His songs, a few of which have been heard recently in London, are pianoforte pieces with a voice thrown in. He lives almost entirely by virtue of the volume of Spanish pictures entitled Iberia. Mr. Rubinstein has spent a considerable time in Spain, and it is clear that he has succeeded to a wonderful extent in absorbing the musical spirit of the country. There was a depth of poetry and passion about his playing of the Evocation and Triana which he never attained in any other item of his programme. Spanish music has at last begun to come into its own. We can trace its development clearly in the successive stages represented by Albeniz, Granados, Turina, and De Falla. Granados, like Albeniz, writes on a harmonic system that is predominantly German, in that German influences are the foundation of almost all nineteenth-century music. Turina, a pupil of Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum, has affinities with the French intellectuals. He is the chief Spanish representative of chamber music. De Falla is more definitely one of the moderns. All four are pianists--Turina less obviously so than the other three.
It is easy to see the Spanish element that is common to the whole group. Anyone can recognise the rhythms and turns of phrase that are derived from Spanish national song and dance, the more so as all four have drawn their principal inspiration from popular sources. But it is to us foreigners that the Spanish local colour is most insistently obvious. In listening to the music of any particular school we may approach it in two ways. At first we are conscious of the school as a homogeneous group; we notice similarities and look out for more of them. This may easily lead us into error, for we are tempted thus to regard as essential characteristics things that in reality are only tricks of manner or stereotyped conventions of a particular place or period. If we are to form a reasonable judgment we must be prepared to ignore these and keep our ears open for differences. We must note not so much the local theme that is common to all the group as the diverse treatment of it which each separate composer affects. If there is anything really Spanish about these four composers that is of vital importance, it should be not the mere choice of a Spanish melody or rhythm as the foundation of their music, but the method on which the complete structure is designed and built up.
Here begin the difficulties of understanding even Albeniz and Granados. The Spanish themes appeal directly to the foreign ear, almost too directly; we might even dismiss them as cheap and obvious. It is the treatment of them that is individual. One's first impression of Iberia and the Gozescas is that they are rambling and incoherent--yet it would be strange if a Latin composer should lapse into a Celtic indifference to form and logic. Mr. Rubinstein succeeded in making the Albeniz pieces not only poetical but lyrical. They tempt a pianist at first to play them at top speed; their style of piano-forte-writing suggests the rattling brilliance of the virtuoso. Mr. Rubinstein avoided the error; but it takes a very skilful pianist to do so.
It is not the local colour about Spanish music that we must respect, but its grave seriousness of intention. Spain has always remained artistically somewhat behind other countries, just as England has done; and Spain at the present moment, unlike England, is not anxious to be in a hurry over progress. Hence even De Falla, the most modern of the group, is possibly a little old-fashioned as compared with the modern French and Italian composers. Yet he is modern, in the sense that he is intellectual and anti-sentimental, as compared with Albeniz. This was very evident in his ballet, The Three-cornered Hat, which the Russians performed all too seldom. But his intellectuality and anti-sentimentality are distinguished and serene. He makes no experiments with the purely grotesque, he has no desire to make a complete and irrevocable breach with the art of the past, as some of the French and Italians appear to do. Even in a traditional idiom he has something genuinely new to say.
A SCRIABIN RECITAL
If anyone could have converted me to Scriabin it should have been Mr. Edward Mitchell, who gave a whole afternoon of his works on January 17th at the Westminster Central Hall, ranging from Op. 8 to Op. 72. Mr. Mitchell is a player of extraordinary persuasiveness. He evidently understands Scriabin, and is determined to make his audience understand him. He has a very efficient and vigorous technique, and plays with remarkable accuracy and assurance. No one could listen to his programme without learning a great deal about the composer to whom it was devoted. Yet in spite of a very well-chosen selection of pieces, in spite of considerable variety of touch and style, the concert left only an impression of deadly and morbid monotony. An afternoon of Scriabin recalled at once to memory the effect of a concert of Hugo Wolf's songs, or of Elgar's The Apostles. It was morbid and narcotic, a perpetual command to abrogate reason and abandon one's brain to feeling, to emotion, to a mystical trance. The emotional force of such music is at times undeniable; what it sets out to achieve, the representation of moods and emotions, it achieves overwhelmingly. Scriabin has in the main three moods, a mood of violence and pain, a mood of comatose oppression, and a mood of struggle, the last of which is well illustrated by Vers la flamme. Perhaps this is all that some people require of music. Others demand a sense of dignity and nobility, with a conscious beauty of formal design.
Technically Scriabin can be summed up in a few words. His outlook on music is purely harmonic. Even in his early works he shows a partiality for certain well-known discords which he gradually comes to use so often that the resolution of them becomes superfluous. By this road we lead on to Stravinsky, Casella, and Malipiero. Melodic tone there is none. This melodic poverty is very apparent and easily demonstrable in the early works. Here Scriabin is obviously building, or trying to build, on Chopin. But while comparing Scriabin with Chopin, compare Chopin with Field. Chopin is clearly an advance on Field in every way--he has a much stronger melodic line, and a much deeper sense of harmonic values. But Scriabin is no advance on Chopin, only a retrogression from him. He can only imitate Chopin's emotional climaxes. He appears to be more interesting harmonically, because he keeps Chopin's discords and omits his concords, roughly speaking.
EDWARD J. DENT
SELECT LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
ANTHROPOLOGY
TOTEM AND TABOO. Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. By PROFESSOR SIGMUND FREUD. Authorised English translation by A. A. BRILL. Routledge. 10_s._ 6_d._
AN INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY. By the REV. E. O. JAMES, Vicar of St. Peter's, Limehouse. Macmillan. 7_s._ 6_d._
ART
THE GARDENS OF ITALY. By E. MARCH PHILLIPPS. Edited by ARTHUR T. BOLTON. "Country Life." 63_s._
OUTLINES OF CHINESE ART. By JOHN C. FERGUSON. Chicago: University Press. London: Cambridge University Press. $3.
PRINTING. A Practical Treatise on the Art of Typography as applied more particularly to the Printing of Books. By CHARLES THOMAS JACOBI. Sixth Edition. Revised and enlarged. Bell. 10_s._ 6_d._
THE STONES AND STORY OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. Traced and told by IRIS and GERDA MORGAN. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes. 21_s._
THE FOUNDATIONS OF MUSIC. By HENRY J. WATT. Cambridge University Press. 18_s._
BELLES-LETTRES
FROM FRIEND TO FRIEND. By LADY RITCHIE. Murray. 6_s._
SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY AND OTHER LITERARY PIECES. By SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER. Macmillan. 8_s._ 6_d._
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THE LONDON MERCURY
Editor--J. C. SQUIRE Assistant-Editor--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 5 March 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
As we write a deputation is to wait upon Mr. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, in order to press the claims of a National Theatre. "Why Mr. Fisher?" it may be asked--a member of the deputation was, in fact, asked the question. The Board of Education cannot establish a National Theatre; the Treasury would scarcely allow Mr. Fisher to make a grant to the National Theatre fund; and whatever the advantages of a National Theatre and the elevating influence which might conceivably be exercised by the drama, few people think of it primarily as educational in the narrow sense of the word. The answer given to the question was: "Because he's the nearest approach we've got to a Minister of Fine Arts."
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We suppose that in this special connection the answer was a true one. The President of the Board of Education may be supposed to stand in a closer relation with the drama than other Ministers, though had other arts been under consideration other Ministers would have been thought of. Had domestic architecture been the deputation's concern it would have addressed itself to the Minister of Health, and within a narrow range Sir Alfred Mond at the Office of Works actually performs some of the functions of a Minister of Fine Arts. The fabric of the Houses of Parliament is under his care; his predecessors, Lord Harcourt and Lord Beauchamp, left their marks upon it. It was the Office of Works which commissioned and supervised the later frescoes on staircase and corridor at Westminster, and it is its business to see that alterations are made consonantly with the character of the structure. But this is a very minor thing compared with the vast field in which the Government does at present exercise functions in which æsthetic considerations are largely involved.
Let us, for a moment, ignore the things which might be done--such as the subsidisation of a National Theatre--and think of a few of the things which have been done, or are habitually done. At this moment a Government department is supervising, or preparing to supervise, the erection of hundreds of thousands of houses. These houses will materially affect the architectural landscape. Design, the suitability of materials to local features and traditions, these things are of immense importance; what is done depends upon the competence, the information, the industry, the numerical sufficiency, and the domestic influence within the Department of the Ministry of Health's experts. Many departments build, or arrange for building to their own designs, numerous large public structures, or exercise, or could exercise, a determining pressure upon the design of buildings erected by local authorities. You cannot go many miles along the English coast without finding a barracks, and when you find it you will not like it. We have a complex of public museums which are the particular care of no Minister. We have an immense Government printing business which is directly under the Treasury; it is no powerful person's concern to see that its publications are well produced. Our Mint produces coins, our Post Office produces stamps, our War Office produces medals. The most important medal ever produced by the British Government is the large memorial bronze plaque which is to be given to the next-of-kin of nearly a million fallen. The last, word as to the nature of this, and the process by which it should be made, rested first (we believe) with the Contracts Branch of the War Office, which has been incorporated in the Ministry of Munitions. We have mentioned but a few typical illustrations of the confused, haphazard way in which the State is in operative contact with the Arts; and even then we have not mentioned the most recent and striking instances, the commissioning of a large number of war pictures by a "Minister of Information" who happened to want to see contemporary art well represented in the Imperial War Museum, and the employment of both British plays and British drawings as "propaganda abroad"--the Salome incident may be recalled.
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Is there not an overwhelmingly strong case for a Ministry of Fine Arts? We know there are always those who, when the suggestion is made, drop the curtain in their minds at once with contemptuous remarks about "official art." What they ignore is that we are bound to have "official art," that it could not conceivably be worse than it is, and that proper organisation would at least give an occasional intelligent Minister a chance. Design at present is everybody's business and nobody's business. It is not to be expected that even the most æsthetic of War Ministers should much preoccupy himself with the "elevations" of barracks, that the best of Ministers for Education should devote his days to the physical appearance of schools and training colleges, that the First Lord of the Admiralty should mind what his Stores look like, or that even new Government buildings in the middle of London, though they do engage serious attention sometimes, should be anything but bad. The Office of Works itself, which actually builds, is principally concerned with seeing that So-and-so gets so many rooms and So-and-so has his partition pulled down. There is no specialist authority in engraving or metal work. Ministers and officials sometimes consult experts, but it is a matter of chance what sort of experts they will consult. In no capital, not even in Berlin, are there uglier Public Offices than there are in Whitehall, or more pretentious ones. As for the immense amount of War Office building, the Guards Barracks at Chelsea may stand as a type. We commend them as a medicine for anyone who suspects himself of exaggerated national vanity. Our museums are starved. Readers will remember the ridiculous cheeseparing at Bloomsbury early in the war which, combined with the ruthless occupation and closing of museums and galleries, reduced many able and devoted public servants almost to despair. Had these institutions been under the control of a Minister whose prime concern they were, they would have had a higher status in Whitehall and he could have fought for them, as it was no one's interest or business to fight for them.
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We believe that in many regards a Minister of Fine Arts would preserve us from the worst infamies, and that a good Minister of Fine Arts would have great opportunities of doing more than that. For certain things he should be directly and solely responsible to Parliament: the art galleries and those museums which are not first and foremost technological. It should rest with his department at least to sanction all designs for public buildings erected by the central authorities, and it might act in consultative capacity to other authorities. His staff should include men capable of originating, obtaining, or vetoing designs for any other department doing work in which design is important. For the Stationery Office, though it be primarily a (not very well run) publishing business, we do not see why that should not be bodily transferred to him. The "format" of most Government publications is disgraceful, both from the point of view of appearance and from that of convenience, and were they better produced they might be better marketed. We are not under the illusion that any Minister of Fine Arts would initiate great revolutions in Art, but he could certainly greatly increase our facilities and add to the comfort of our walks abroad. And, where a subsidy for some definite object such as the National Theatre is wanted, he would be as the mouthpiece of the State and a Minister amongst Ministers far more likely to be able to do something than Mr. Fisher or any other existing Minister. We hope shortly to return to the subject, one of the few at all impinging on politics with which we feel entitled to deal.
Several correspondents have written drawing our attention to the prices paid at the sale of Lord Foley's library and to Truth's comments on them. The facts in brief are these. The Ruxley Lodge library was sold locally; there were few, if any, bidders for the important books, except a number of London booksellers, and the sums fetched were deplorably small. All four Shakespeare Folios (the third imperfect) were there. They fetched £100, £46, £28, and £20 respectively. Two months ago the Britwell copy of the first brought in £2300 at Sotheby's. Thirteen first editions of Shelley fetched £52 the lot, and Keats's Endymion and Lamia volumes produced £7 between them. Some valuable books were lumped in with bundles of miscellaneous books and went for a song; it is likely that, with such cataloguing, many rare and valuable works may have escaped mention except as "and others": our contemporary goes so far as to say that "there is every probability that in this way old books worth hundreds, even thousands, of pounds were disposed of for a few shillings."
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It is really deplorable that owners, or their executors and legatees, should suffer thus. Nobody grudges dealers their fair profits, nor does any one deny that a dealer, like anybody else, is entitled to pick up bargains because he knows what the other side doesn't know. But for dealers to combine at an auction in order to prevent a vendor from having more than a tithe of the known market value of his goods is another matter. We make no direct allusion to this particular sale. We did not see the catalogue or the goods, and it is--at any rate for the purposes of argument--conceivable that the best books may have been in very bad condition. Nor do we suggest that there are not dealers in London who keep outside rings and do not take part in "knock-outs." But everybody knows that there are rings in all the important collectors' trades, and that these rings frequently put up at auctions--and the country auction gives them their best chance--the merest simulacrum of competition bidding and retire to share out the loot among themselves. In the new volume of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's Diary there is an account of the beginnings of the late Sir Hugh Lane's career, given to Mr. Blunt by Sir Hugh's aunt, Lady Gregory:
She apprenticed him to Colnaghi at a hundred a year, where he learnt his business of picture-dealing. He began his fortune, she tells me, by an accident. He happened to hear of a picture which was for sale in some remote country place, and travelled down to look at it, but, having no money to buy, although there was almost no bidding, he was obliged to let it go for a very small price. When the sale was over, the bidders, who were all professional dealers, went to a public house, and he with them, and it then turned out that they had been standing in together not to bid, and they held a private sale of the picture among themselves, dividing the price realised between them, and as Lane was known to belong to Colnaghi's he was included in it, and got £160 as his share.
We have heard, we remember, that the picture was a Hals; at all events this illustrates the sort of thing that happens. Not long before the war there was a considerable disturbance about the operations of an alleged ring at Christie's; there were rumours of knock-outs in which picture-dealers shared out enormous sums. It was widely argued that this sort of operation should be legally defined as fraudulent and legally punished. That nothing came of the agitation, in the light of the fact that every honest man (which includes dealers who have been forced into rings) sympathised with the agitators, suggests that investigation opened up more difficulties than had been suspected.
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People are again urging a legal remedy. It appears to us that it would be impossible to enforce a law preventing rings and knock-out auctions. Nobody can compel men to bid against each other if they have an agreement--verbal and private--not to, and though large gatherings for a knock-out might occasionally be detected (but proof of guilt would be difficult), two or three are entitled innocently to gather together and can easily do so for purposes not entirely innocent. An occasional bad sale in London is bound to occur so long as rich private buyers continue their modern practice of not attending sales. We don't think anybody complained about prices when the Huth Library or Lord Vernon's rarities were sold, and we have been to many quite ordinary sales in Chancery Lane or Bond Street at which scarcely anything went for less than the owners had probably paid for it a few years ago. There are usually quite enough outsiders present to keep prices up, and it is only by accident that an agreeable little collection sometimes goes at a sacrifice. Moreover a private buyer, if he bids, is not harried as he is in some minor rooms where other commodities are sold; and some of the biggest dealers, if present, act entirely on their own. Such as the conditions in London are we cannot see much hope of change, unless and until (as we said) there is a return to the days when peers of the realm bid against each other for the jewels of the Roxburgh Library and their friends stood by them betting on the results. But the most calamitous occurrences, those which take place away from London, might easily be avoided if owners or executors would have a little sense. It is hardly conceivable that Lord Foley took really expert advice about his books; it is certain that if he knew anything about the market in old books he would never have had his put up at a local auction. Persons disposing wholesale of valuables, books, pictures, or china, from country houses should never allow them to be sold in the country. At Messrs. Sotheby's or Hodgson's, though a bad patch may now and then be struck, books would never go for the prices fetched at Ruxley Park; and when a really important collection comes up the big American buyers are almost invariably present, and the only comment likely to be made on prices is that there seems no end to their possible inflation.
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Last month we stated in this place that we had recovered a few copies of No. 1 of THE LONDON MERCURY. These are now exhausted. We shall have no more copies, and if people send us money for No. 1 we shall only be at the pains of returning it. We would advise those who are anxious to get No. 1 to take steps to secure it privately, by advertisement or through secondhand booksellers. We have still a certain stock of No. 2, and new subscriptions may still begin as from that issue. We repeat our invitation to readers who will be wanting binding cases for Vol. I. to let us know.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
The death, recently reported from Germany, of Dr. Richard Dehmel at the age of fifty-six removes after a long interval the second of the two poets who were admiringly regarded by their contemporaries as rivalling the literary partnership which once existed between Goethe and Schiller. The Freiherr Detlev von Liliencron, who died in 1909, was one of the initiators of a new movement in German literature; and of this movement his much younger friend was often proclaimed the most distinguished ornament. Dehmel was the son of a forest official in the Mark of Brandenburg, and it has been speculated, without obvious results, whether there was not some Slavonic admixture in his blood which was reflected in his work. But there is little in his career which requires further brought explanation than the conditions of its time and place. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, where he took his doctor's degree with a thesis on a point in the business of insurance, and he worked for some years as secretary to an insurance company, a period of his life which he regarded as having profitably taught him discipline and orderliness of mind. He developed late as a poet. He himself said that he wrote nothing worth having till his twenty-sixth year, and many of the pieces in his first volume, Erlösungen, published when he was twenty-eight, were afterwards discarded or altered. His works consist of several collections of poems, which he continually shuffled and regrouped with every new edition (he was inclined to rebuff critics who wished to trace the development of his powers); Die Verwandlungen der Venus, a series of poetical visions of all types of love from the highest to the lowest; Zwei Menschen, a novel in verse, describing the elopement of a librarian with his employer's wife; Der Mitmensch, a modern play in prose, to which he himself attached great importance; an elaborate wordless play called Lucifer; Michel-Michael, a political tract in dramatic form; a collection of short stories; a collection of essays; and a collection of tales and verses for children. Like most of his generation he was subject to many exotic influences, ranging from Verlaine to Przybyszewski and from Shakespeare to Pierre Louys; and his works contain many admirable translations, those from Verlaine being among the best in the German language. His own poetry is pre-eminently didactic and he preaches consistently, in allegory, in direct narrative, and in direct precept, the doctrine of self-control and of the full utilisation of all human faculties. He had passion and vigour, a not always active power of psychological discernment and an occasional perception of beauty. He is justly reproached with a certain brutality and vulgarity and, one might add, with strange lapses of humour. His courage and determination are beyond question; but in his erotic, as well as in his mystical, rhapsodies (which are often combined) there is too frequently a disagreeable element of frigid calculation. His obscurity is sometimes tiresome and unnecessary, and many of his allegories and symbols are incomprehensible without an external key to their meaning. Some of his lyrics, however, are extremely beautiful: there are passages of insight and dramatic force in Zwei Menschen; some of his epigrams and aphorisms are wise and terse; and a strain of earnest sincerity runs through all his preaching. In August, 1914, though his class was not called up, he volunteered for service, and, possibly as a reward for a great deal of patriotic poetry, he received the Iron Cross. He died at Blankenese, near Hamburg, where he had lived for several years before the war.
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Those many who knew the late Edward Thomas, who fell in France in 1917, will be glad to hear that a memorial is being prepared of an admirable poet and essayist. It will take the form of a volume, biographical and appreciative, of prose and verse, and the contributors will include, amongst others, Messrs. W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, V. Locke Ellis, Edward Garnett, James Guthrie, E. S. P. Haynes, and Edward Rhys. Extracts are given from Thomas's letters to Mr. W. H. Hudson. The book is being printed by Mr. Guthrie, whose beautiful work as draughtsman and painter in Root and Branch has not yet had the full recognition it deserves. It will be a quarto, set in Caslon Old Face type, and bound in dark green cloth, with a device in gold by Mr. Guthrie, who has also designed a frontispiece, title-page, and initial letters. The price is to be ten shillings, and prospective subscribers should apply to the Secretary, Pear Tree Press, Flansham, Bognor.
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Lady Burne-Jones, widow of the painter, died early last month. She was the author of one of the most readable and delightful biographies in the language. Her "Life" of her husband was written vivaciously rather than brilliantly, and it revealed in Lady Burne-Jones no notable gift for literary creation. But her two volumes contained no dull page, few slipshod sentences, and a life-like portrait of one of the most lovable of men.
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The next number of THE LONDON MERCURY will contain the first of two long contributions by Mr. Edmund Gosse embodying his reminiscences of Henry James and an article by Sir George Henschel on Interpretation in Singing. Either in that or the next number we hope also to publish a first instalment of the last diary of the late W. N. P. Barbellion.
POETRY
The Senses
Lo, as a garden-wandering bee, The soul seeks out her immortality From all the growths and blossoms manifold Which in this life men hold As things material: plying busy rounds, From the world's odours, sights, and sounds To fill her honied stores.
From the perfume acrid-sweet of dead leaves burning When autumn sunsets into dusk are turning: From the breath of damp stone floors And paraffin, pervading the cool porches And aisles of village churches: From the tepid, flat, mechanic exhalations Of desolate tube-stations: From woody savours stirred when children wrench Tufts out of deep moss-beds: from the subtle stench Of bad cigars and household slops, begetting Delighted memory Of sunny towns in France and Italy: From the stronger, tawnier stink of dust and sweat And camel-dung which haunts the glaring East; And the heavy, sweet, heart-piercing odours breathed From pale large lilies and narcissus wreathed Round some dear head deceased.
Such smells as these, and of the sights, The gleam on blue May nights Of the young moon in high ancestral boughs Among the scant young leaves: And in the wake of the moving ploughs The shining earth that, as the straight share cleaves, Turns flowingly over: and the half-seen sweep Of the high circles and the looming hollow Of the dark opera-house, where through the leap And lapse of the music unseen hundreds follow The curtain's slow ascent: And the rosy apple-blossom on the bent And knotted bough, against the blue of heaven: And the sudden rainbows riven By the salt breeze from the billows many-leaping In the sunny Mediterranean.
And of things heard, The cooling whisper of summer breezes sweeping The grey-green barley-fields: and the echoes stirred By music interwoven in some dim-lighted Cavernous cathedral: and the eighteen-pounders' Buoyant drum-beats and hisses and whoops united In a hurricane-barrage: and the clear laughter and shouting Of girls in old green gardens playing rounders: And the ripple of fountains spouting Over marble nymphs and dolphins drenched and cool To the sun-splashed fountain-pool, Where golden in the Tuscan sun The age-worn palace sleeps.
But deep in all the immortal Spirit leaps Unquenchably, the Imperishable One To whom through all this multiplicity Of scattered universes longingly The Soul, world-wandering mendicant, upreaches Imploring hands, and as an alms beseeches The humble coin which buys that one small treasure Beyond all worldly measure.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
The Coming of Green
Here like flame and there like water leaping Green life breaks out again; in sunlight gleaming, Small bright emerald flames through grey twigs creeping, Little freshets of leafage shyly streaming Among dark tangles. And sunlight grows serener Daily, and wider extends the leafy awning, And the green undying lawn beneath grows greener-- Greener and lovelier with lights and shadows dawning Alternate, many-toned, born of the trooping Of clouds o'er sun. Assembled Planes are bending Long festoons high-hung and heavily drooping From domes of luminous greenness. Willows are sending Their fountains live and many-shafted swooping Skyward, and lazily backward coolly showering.
Like tongues of flame, like water showering, dripping, Green life slides down the branch, from bushes shaking A verdant dew, or, out on a long curve slipping, At the far extreme to a shivering soft foam breaking.
A spring in the desert, a fire in the darkness leaping, Greenness comes transparently roofing and walling Garden ways with an indolent downward-sweeping, Or mounded high ... aspiring ... airily falling, Or leaning fan over fan. A green and golden Lucent cave enfolds us, cunningly vaulted, With delicate-screened high chambers to embolden Birds to flutter and sing or nest exalted In swaying sanctuaries, and the lime-tree's clustering Flowers to blow that the leafy ways be fragrant.
A dancing flood, a wild fire strengthening, mustering, Over the gardens the young green life runs vagrant.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
The Modern Hippolytus
Not, like poor monks, with fasting and the rod To mortify the flesh for fear of God: Not, like Sir Galahad, to run to waste In sentimental worship of the chaste: Not, like the Puritan, to hug disgust And feast on others' sins to quench his lust: Not, like the saint, with dreams of future bliss, Lost in a fancied world, this world to miss. But, like Hippolytus, in pride to make The body servant for the body's sake; Spurning the Cytheræan's toils, who craves With servile heart the passion of her slaves, Freely to render homage unto Her Who, being free, desires no worshipper: To render soul for soul, without pretence, Not wooing sense through soul, nor soul through sense: To shun the twilight of the world's mistrust Where Lust for Love's mistaken, Love for Lust, And seek Diana's cold and hueless light That knows no difference save of dark and bright:-- There lay the man's will: but the unborn child Cried in the darkness, and the old world smiled.
KENWORTH RUSHBY
Nature's Fruitfulness
This summer on our yard-wall there does swing A groundsel-bush from one seed last year sown. A burnet moth, sun-wakened in the Spring, Flew out and laid its hundred eggs thereon.
An hundred seeds each blossom on it gives, An hundred caterpillars eat its leaves.
Its plumed seeds scattered by the wind now fall Into our yard on water and on stone. Here too the caterpillars over blown Gyrate and starve, for few can climb the wall.
Next year again there will be one of both: One bush of groundsel and one burnet moth.
FRANCIS BURROWS
Almswomen
At Quincey's moat the squandering village ends, And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends Of all the village, two old dames that cling As close as any trueloves in the spring. Long, long ago they passed three-score-and-ten, And in this doll's house lived together then; All things they have in common being so poor, And their one fear, Death's shadow at the door. Each sundown makes them mournful, each sunrise Brings back the brightness in their failing eyes.
How happy go the rich fair-weather days When on the roadside folk stare in amaze At such a honeycomb of fruit and flowers As mellows round their threshold; what long hours They gloat upon their steepling hollyhocks, Bee's balsams, feathery southernwood and stocks, Fiery dragons'-mouths, great mallow leaves For salves, and lemon plants in bushy sheaves, Shagged Esau's Hands with five green finger-tips! Such old sweet names are ever on their lips. As pleased as little children where these grow In cobbled pattens and worn gowns they go, Proud of their wisdom when on gooseberry shoots They stuck egg-shells to fright from coming fruits The brisk-billed rascals; waiting still to see Their neighbour owls saunter from tree to tree Or in the hushing half-light mouse the lane Long-winged and lordly. But when those hours wane Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm, And listen for the mail to clatter past And church clock's deep bay withering on the blast; They feed the fire that flings a freakish light On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright, Platters and pitchers, faded calendars And graceful hour-glass trim with lavenders.
Many a time they kiss and cry, and pray Both may be summoned in the selfsame day, And wiseman linnet tinkling in his cage End too with them the friendship of old age, And all together leave their treasured room Some bell-like evening when the May's in bloom.
EDMUND BLUNDEN
1920.
Intimacy
Since I have seen you do those intimate things That other men but dream of; lull asleep The sinister dark forest of your hair And tie those bows that stir on your calm breast Faintly as leaves that shudder in their sleep: Since I have seen your stocking swallow up, A swift black wind, the pale flame of your foot And deemed your slender limbs so meshed in silk Sweet mermaid sisters drowned in their dark hair: I have not troubled overmuch with food And wine has seemed like water from a well; Pavements are built of fire, grass of thin flames; All other girls grow dull as painted flowers, Or flutter harmlessly like coloured flies Whose wings are tangled in the net of leaves Spread by frail trees that grow behind the eyes.
EDGELL RICKWORD
The Soldier Addresses His Body
I shall be mad if you get smashed about, We've had good times together, you and I; Although you groused a bit when luck was out And women passionless, and we went dry.
Yet there are many things we have not done; Countries not seen, where people do strange things, Eat fish alive, and mimic in the sun The solemn gestures of their stone-grey kings.
I've heard of forests that are dim at noon, Where snakes and creepers wrestle all day long; Where vivid beasts grow pale with the full moon, Gibber and cry, and wail a mad old song;
Because at the full moon the hippogriff With ivory-pointed snout and agate feet, With his green eye will glare them cold and stiff For the coward wyvern to come down and eat.
Vodka and kvas, and bitter mountain wines We have not drunk, nor snatched at bursting grapes To pelt slim girls among Sicilian vines Who'd flicker through the leaves, elusive shapes.
Yes, there are many things we have not done, But it's a sweat to knock them into rhyme. Let's have a drink, and give the cards a run And leave dull verse to the dull peaceful time.
EDGELL RICKWORD
Night Rapture
For Florence Lamont
How beautiful it is to wake at night When over all there reigns the ultimate spell Of complete silence, darkness absolute, To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree, In slow gyration, with no sensible sound, Unless to ears of unimagined beings, Resident incorporeal or stretched In vigilance of ecstasy among Ethereal paths and the celestial maze, The rumour of our onward course now brings A steady rustle as of some strange ship, Darkling with soundless sail all set and amply filled By volume of an ever-constant air, At fullest night, through seas for ever calm, Swept lovely and unknown for ever on!
How beautiful it is to wake at night, Embalmed in darkness, watchful, sweet, and still As is the brain's mood flattered by the swim Of currents circumvolent in the void, To lie quite still and to become aware Of the dim light cast by nocturnal skies On a dim earth beyond the window-ledge, So, isolate from the friendly company Of the huge universe which turns without, To brood apart in calm and joy awhile Until the spirit sinks and scarcely knows Whether self is or if self only is For ever....
How beautiful to wake at night Within the room grown strange and still and sweet And live a century while in the dark The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns, To watch the window open on the night, A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs, And, lying thus, to feel dilate within The press, the conflict and the heavy pulse Of incommunicable sad ecstasy Growing until the body seems outstretched In perfect crucifixion on the arms Of a cross pointing from last void to void While the heart dies to a mere midway spark!
All happiness thou holdest, happy night, For such as lie awake and feel dissolved The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool Breath hither blown from th' ethereal flowers That mist thy fields! O happy, happy wounds, Conditioned by existence in humanity, That have such powers to heal them!--slow sweet sighs Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes Of midnight with ineffable purport charged.
How beautiful it is to wake at night, Another night, in darkness yet more still Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs, Filled rather by the perfumes' wandering flood Than by dispansion of the still sweet air, Shall from the furthest utter silences In glimmering secrecy have gathered up An host of whisperings and scattered sighs To loose at last a sound as of the plunge And lapsing seeth of some Pacific wave Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs, Rolls in to wreath with languorous foam away The flutter of the golden moths that haunt The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands!
So beautiful it is to wake at night Imagination, loudening with the surf Of the midsummer wind among the boughs, Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep To bear me on the summit of her wave Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge, Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised Above the frontiers of infinity, To which in the full reflux of the wave Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam, Borne to those other shores--now never mine Save for an hovering instant, short as this Which now sustains me, ere I be drawn back, To learn again and wholly learn I trust How beautiful it is to wake at night.
ROBERT NICHOLS
The Black Mountains, 1919
Elsie Inglis
Who is it lies here Betwixt the wind and the water, Whom all Scotland mourns As a mother for her daughter?
"I was Elsie Inglis When I trod the ground; Now I am lying here In a long sleep and sound."
What did you do, Elsie Inglis, To prove your heart's worth? "I laboured all my life long To serve women on earth."
And what was it you did Earned you this requiem? "When men went out to fight, I went out with them."
What could a woman do In such unholy revel? "Men fought with each other, And I fought with evil."
When men fought with men What foe could you hold? "The foe they left behind them. Fever, Famine, and Cold."
Which was the bitterest Of all you saw fight? "My foe slew blindly, But men in broad light.
"My foe slew blindly, The children with the mother: My foe slew men, But men slew each other."
MAURICE HEWLETT
Sorrowing for Childhood Departed
Who is there among us who has found the key Of the treasure that is locked in the hearts of men? Only the poet lonely in his chamber Or the man remembering his childhood again.
Hearing gay voices, my heart is hollow, An empty room with bright colours on the walls; The speech of my brother is no more than a traffic That remote and coldly on my dull brain falls.
I am deaf to the song in the speech of my fellows, I have outwitted my childhood's desires; And where have I travelled that to the far horizon Dead in the landscape are earth's bright fires?
Didst thou ever murder, Macbeth, thy sorrow, Didst thou ever murder thy soul's young joy, Thou hadst never flinched from the life of another, Thou hadst but with laughter stol'n from him a toy!
Would that a Spirit had stolen from me The glittering baubles of my cunning mind, And left me the sweet forest of my wondering childhood, Its transparent water in tall trees enshrined.
Then was I happy. Love was my companion; I was in communion with star and stream; With bird and with flower I was linked in rapture, We stared at each other--the valley's dream.
Out of the mountains we were carven, Birds and flowers, stream, rock and child-- O but I belong there! I am torn from my body, In that far-away forest it lies exiled!
There falls the water transparently shining, Hangs there a flower that blooms in my eyes. Long have I been ready! let me go thither, And unloosen my limbs to those dream-coloured skies.
O that it were possible! but that land has vanished; The magic of that valley has crumbled away; Bright crowds are there only, the mind's cold idola; And my footprints on the dead ground startle the day.
W. J. TURNER
SERVANTS
By MAX BEERBOHM
It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his rise from their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship; so that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in, must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example, ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as in France. But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so nimble-witted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world without powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not vanish from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, "'Tis a matter easy to settle. Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches shall powder their hair henceforth." Whereat his Lady exclaimed in wrath, "Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel of Abigails flaunting about the house in powder--oh, preposterous!" Whereat Sir John exclaimed "Zounds!" and hotly demonstrated that since his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its assumption by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper) went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, "Let Powder be taxed." And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine, and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end to those things which the Nobility and the Gentry had long since shed from their own persons--as, laced coats and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without these powder could not aptly be. And it came to pass that there was a great War. And there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the French one. And it may be that everything will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir John will say to his Lady, "My dear, I have decided that the footmen shall not wear powder, and not wear livery, any more," and that his Lady will say "Oh, all right." Then at length will the Eighteenth Century vanish altogether from the face of the earth.
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining tête-à-tête with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than in Rogers' day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his Study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his heir, "Discharge two more." Such enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.
Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether of good or evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution, and the whole spirit of the age, have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious houses, will presently be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee. Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were going on, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally, and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by that term, as a curiosity of past days.
You have to look rather far behind you for the time when "the servant question," as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants collectively "knowing their place," as the phrase (not is, but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria's reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the London parks to announce that "Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and Servants are commanded" not to do this and that. But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not requests, and were not "obliging" but obedient. As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidly-increasing middle-class, were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal. And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of them had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment's more leisure than was needed to preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all households, "followers" were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time, after giving a month's notice; and she did not work for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour from the second or third generation of her owners. As in ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. "Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own." Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.
Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and cumulous clouds. It was believed, however, that these would pass. Punch, our ever-quick interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano! Punch and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the face of Nature? Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It is unlikely that no English ladies were so in 'sixties. Pity, after all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the "some" a measure of the gulf between themselves and the "others." Those others had now begun to show signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.
Anthony Trollope was not, like Punch, a mere interpreter of what was upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given Orley Farm? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? "As she slowly made her way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I trust but few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering"--and here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be plain, ask you not to skip a word--"we call on the mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must," etc., etc.
You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when Orley Farm was published. Servants really were "most desolate" in those days, and "their sufferings" were less acute only than those of gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well, it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust Trollope.
Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this amelioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused, nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves thoroughly disagreeable; and not even then will it be up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's History of Trade Unionism the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servant's campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief. Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in 1872--But there is no use in repining. What's done can't be undone. On the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone. Housework, for example. What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?
Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually, and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of human dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of the community. She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their licence to employ. There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which survives to-day.
Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said "Sarah, your master wishes----" or Mr. Smith said "Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether----" I am well aware that the very title of this essay jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service in its old form depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.
Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all, worth saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly so ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile of yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid's light brisk tread in the corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman's shoulders as he noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good. But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well enough, no doubt. I myself am old enough to have known two or three servants of the old school--later editions of Ruskin's Anne. With them there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much--a fine mellowness, the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing the same things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from deep roots, and where they were you had always the sense of standing under great wide branches. One especially would I recall, who--no, personally I admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much indeed, but I never was of that kind, and it's too late to begin to be so now. For a type of old-world servant I would recall rather some more public worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout old hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. He stands there no more, and the hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort. Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as indigenous as the pond there--that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to Highgate. It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking, and on Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he wanted to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very loyal to that village. In the course of his life he had "bin down to London a matter o' three or four times," he would tell me, "an' slep' there once." He knew me to be a native of that city, and (for he was the most respectful of men) did not make any adverse criticism of it. But clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and--horses rather than cities were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of men. But he did--and this was a great thrill for me--did, after some pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when he was a boy, "a gen'leman with summut long hair, settin' in a small cart, takin' a pictur'." To me Ford Madox Brown's "Work" is of all modern pictur's the most delightful in composition and strongest in conception, the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great pride in having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend himself set little store on anything that had befallen him in days before he was "took on as stable-lad at the Castle." His pride was in the Castle, wholly.
Part of his charm, like Hampstead's, was in the surprise one had at finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger; and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and stout. At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that followed they were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of the past decades was undone: butlers were suddenly as old and stout as ever they were, and so they still are. But this, I take it, was only a temporary set-back. Since peace came, butlers have reappeared as they were in 1915, and maybe will soon be losing height and weight too, till they shall have become bright-eyed children, with pattering feet. Or will their childhood be of a less gracious kind than that? I fear so. I have seen, from time to time, butlers who had shed all semblance of grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a manifesto of contempt for their calling and of devotion to the Spirit of the Age. I have seen a butler in a well-established household strolling around the diners without the slightest droop, and pouring out wine in an off-hand and quite obviously hostile manner. I have seen him, towards the end of the meal, yawning. I remember another whom, positively, I heard humming--a faint sound indeed, but menacing as the roll of tumbrils.
These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was "a flame of old-world fealty all bright." Were these but the finer comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch in a merely æsthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his movements were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control. Baldness at the temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth face. It is more than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a long period I saw him often, both in town and country. Against the background of either house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be that. Brett's supremacy was in the sense he gave one that he was, after all, human--that he had a heart, in which he had taken the liberty to reserve a corner for any true friend of his master and mistress. I remember well the first time he overstepped sheer formality in relation to myself. It was one morning in the country, when my entertainers and my fellow guests had gone out in pursuit of some sport at which I was no good. I was in the smoking room, reading a book. Suddenly--no, Brett never appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett appeared, paused at precisely the right speaking distance, and said in a low voice, "I thought it might interest you to know, sir, that there's a white-tailed magpie out on the lawn. Very rare, as you know, sir. If you look out of the window you will see the little fellow hopping about on the lawn." I thanked him effusively as I darted to the window, and simulated an intense interest in "the little fellow." I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett, having done his to perfection.
What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over himself--but did he really lose it? There were only four people at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for drollery) and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had turned on early marriages. "I," said the young man presently, "shall not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of seventeen." His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, "Oh, Tom, what a perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn't born yet!" "No," said the young man, "but I have my eye on her mother." At this, Brett, who was holding a light for his master's cigarette, turned away convulsively, with a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His breakdown touched and pleased all four beholders. But--was it a genuine lapse? Or merely a feint to thrill us?--the feint of an equilibrist so secure that he can pretend to lose his balance?
If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might be in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that he was gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one glimpse of him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out late to visit some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and sound; for Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time. Not so much horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the populous quiet streets and squares. One square was less quiet than others, because somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I saw the whistler silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep from an open door, and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he bent out into the dark night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a great tensity--even of agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate evening cloak. Brett's back must have conveyed to her in every curve his surprise, his shame, that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry in her behalf was such as Burke's for Marie Antoinette--little had he dreamed that he should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. He had thought ten thousand taxis must have leaped from their stands, etc. The whistle that at first sounded merely mechanical and ear-piercing had become heart-rending and human when I saw from whom it proceeded--a very heart-cry that still haunts me. But was it a heart-cry? Was Brett, is Brett, more than a mere virtuoso?
He is in any case what employers call a treasure, and to any one who wishes to go forth and hunt for him I will supply a chart showing the way to that doorstep on which last I saw him. But I myself, were I ever so able to pay his wages, should never covet him--no, nor anything like him. Perhaps we are not afraid of menservants if we looked out at them from the cradle. None was visible from mine. Only in later years and under external auspices did I come across any of them. And I am as afraid of them as ever. Maidservants frighten me less, but they also--except the two or three ancients aforesaid--have always struck some degree of terror to my soul. The whole notion of domestic service has never not seemed to me unnatural. I take no credit for enlightenment. Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of one jewel: the sense of order. When I became a schoolboy, I greatly disliked being a monitor's fag. Other fags there were who took pride in the quality of the toast they made for the breakfasts and suppers of their superiors. My own feeling was that I would rather eat it myself, and that if I mightn't eat it myself I would rather it were not very good. Similarly, when I grew to have fags of my own, and by morning and by evening one of them solemnly entered to me bearing a plate on which those three traditional pieces of toast were solemnly propped one against another, I cared not at all whether the toast were good or bad, having no relish for it at best, but could have eaten with gusto toast made by my own hand, not at all understanding why that member should be accounted too august for such employment. Even so in my later life. Loth to obey, loth to command. Convention (for she too frightens me) has made me accept what servants would do for me by rote. But I would liefer have it ill-done than ask even the least mettlesome of them to do it better, and far liefer, if they would only be off and not do it at all, do it for myself. In Italy--dear Italy, where I have lived much--servants do still regard service somewhat in the old way, as a sort of privilege; so that with Italian servants I am comparatively at my ease. But oh, the delight when on the afternoon of some local festa there is no servant at all in the little house! Oh, the reaction, the impulse to sing and dance, and the positive quick obedience to that impulse! Convention alone has forced me to be anywhere a master. Ariel and Caliban, had I been Prospero on that island, would have had nothing to do and nothing to complain of; and Man Friday on that other island would have bored me, had I been Crusoe. When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave, I promptly freed you.
Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased--short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those things, and I should be glad were there no more of it.
W. N. P. BARBELLION[26]
[26] _The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Enjoying Life and Other Essays._ By W. N. P. Barbellion. Chatto & Windus. 6_s._ net each.
By EDWARD SHANKS
When The Journal of a Disappointed Man was first published in March, 1919, the suspicious circumstances that it contained an introduction by Mr. H. G. Wells, and purported to be written by a young assistant in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, immediately produced the impression that it was a fictitious work, composed by Mr. Wells himself. He was known at that time, from other books acknowledged to be his, to be feeling a particular interest in the philosophical problem of human suffering; he had done something of the kind before, and many readers, it may be conjectured, unconsciously found it a relief to suppose that this almost unbearably tragic history had been invented. But the impression could not long survive a careful study of the book. The author's identity was soon guessed at by a few persons who knew him and suspected by some who had heard of him; and presently Mr. Wells wrote to a newspaper to say that the only fictitious details in the Journal were the author's name and the date of his death, there given as December 31st, 1917. This date was in fact incorrect by nearly two years. Bruce Frederick Cummings lived until October 30th, 1919, that is to say for seven months after the publication of his diary.
Thus it comes about that the later part of it, which has not yet been printed, contains many references to his critics, in whose opinions he was deeply and frankly interested. He remarks again and again on the ordinary incompetence of reviewers, the usual complaint of an author, but especially poignant here. He mentions, once in a letter and once in the diary, an imbecile who thought that he was "a social climber"; and he welcomes with joy the first writer who seemed to him to have read the book carefully. But among all these references to his work there is none more illuminating than the last entry he ever made:
Friends and relatives say I have not drawn my true self. But that's because I've taken my clothes off and they can't recognise me stark! The Book is a self-portrait in the nude.
Thus, with this final self-explanation, he ends his work. The last two words stand alone at the top of a left-hand page, and opposite them in the book lies the blotting-paper he used. He had often before said farewell to his Journal. Once it was in a fit of disgust with it and himself, and he took it up again to record the discovery that he was suffering from an incurable disease. Once again, owing to the paralysis of his right hand, writing became too painful for him, and he thought this the hardest and shrewdest stroke of fate to deprive him of his secret consolation. Last, under the date May 25th, 1919, he made an entry of four pages, chiefly supplementing earlier entries, and concluded with the words, large and scrawled, but legible: "This is the end. I am not going to keep a diary any more." Then on June 1st, without explanation, he made a long entry, recalling an experience of early life, and on June 3rd the very last, which I have quoted. He desired that at the end should be written, "The rest is silence," for an inscription on the base of his "self-erected monument." Genuine self-portraits in the nude occur very rarely in the history of literature. This is a picture of a man of genius superbly drawn by himself. It is an astonishing book about an astonishing man.
Barbellion was born on September 7th, 1889, and was the third son of a reporter employed by a newspaper in a Devonshire town. He was able to remember the first time a bird's nest was ever shown to him; but a passion for natural history became very early the most important part of his life. He was articled as a boy to his father's unattractive and uncongenial profession. He nevertheless continued to pursue his passion with an extraordinary energy and strength of will, and was determined to secure somehow or other an entrance into the desired career. He was otherwise and exactingly occupied and he was entirely self-taught; and in 1910, just when by great good fortune he had been offered, and had accepted, a post in the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, his father's health broke down altogether, compelling him to renounce this dazzling but ill-paid opportunity. But in the following year he won in open competition an appointment in the Natural History Museum, which justified the abandonment of journalism.
In 1909 there first appears in the diary the definite indication of a theme which was soon to rival natural history in importance and at last most horribly to overwhelm it.
Feeling ill--like a sloppy tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan magazines in the Library and occasionally rink--with palpitation of the heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness and uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.
After this the subject of his health is rarely absent for many pages together. The deaths of his father and mother deepened the preoccupation, and Barbellion's symptoms and dreads were almost infinite in their variety. He suffered from intermittent action of the heart, from nervous weakness, and from dyspepsia; he feared now paralysis, now blindness, now consumption. The thought of death was constantly with him, but until the end he could not be sure in what form it would come. Sometimes he longed for it to finish his sufferings, sometimes he hoped it would linger enough to allow him to complete the work he had in hand.
Meanwhile, amid the unescapable and agonising reflections which this condition induced, another side of his nature was being developed. In 1910 there is an entry which again is like the first tentative introduction of a musical theme in a symphony:
I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park, in the dark, kissing her, I was testing and experimenting with a new experience.
He was not, of course, by any means so callous and inhuman as this brief note might make him appear; but he was immensely curious about himself and about other people, and immensely greedy for new sensations. He dabbled a good deal in love-making, and his dabbling was prompted partly by the natural pressure of the senses, partly by curiosity. At last he fell in love, could not make up his mind whether he wanted to marry, made it up and was rejected, felt relieved, then unhappy, renewed his suit and was accepted. In September, 1915, he was married. A few weeks before, during a holiday at Coniston, boisterously prosecuted with his usual reckless disregard of his weak health, he had fallen and jarred his spine, and this had brought on a partial paralysis which filled him with the gloomiest thoughts and seemed to suggest the cancellation of all his plans. But his doctor made light of the matter and the marriage took place.
In the following November, having formally presented himself for recruitment, he was led by curiosity to read the sealed certificate written by his own doctor, not supposing that its being sealed had any particular significance. Thus he discovered, while sitting in a railway-carriage, that eighteen months before he had shown the first symptoms of a terrible and incurable disease and that this had been concealed from him, though it had been communicated to his relatives. He found later that it had been known to his wife before their marriage and also that his fall at Coniston had reawakened activity among the bacteria and hastened the end. In 1916 his daughter was born, and in July of the following year his rapidly failing strength compelled him, after ineffectual periods of sick leave, to resign his appointment at the Museum. His health varied; he grew worse and recovered a little, but never recovered what he had lost. He prepared his diary for publication, but the publishers who had accepted it became afraid of it when it was partly set up in type and asked to be relieved of the undertaking. Another publisher was found. The book appeared, and its reception did something to soften the miseries of his last months.
How profound and unremitting were these miseries, and how he bore them, is shown in the last section of the diary. His disease was painful and the end certain. He had a wife, who was often fatigued and ill, and a child, and he had next to no money. The strain of witnessing his sufferings, as well as the necessity of earning her living, made it imperative that his wife should spend long periods of time away from him. In 1919 there was an idea that a certain prolonged and troublesome treatment might possibly, though only possibly, effect an improvement. But he did not care to be experimented with then. He was already dead, he said, it was too late, he could not bear the burden of a fresh hope. He continued to be tortured by the long-drawn-out agony of his dissolution, by the defeat of all his ambitions, and by the black prospects of his wife and child. But the success of his book brings a curiously sweeter and gentler note into the diary, a note most poignant to the reader who could understand his refusing to be grateful for anything.
I am still miserable [he writes], especially on E.'s account--that dear, brave woman. But I have suffered a change. My whole soul is sweetened by the love of those near and dear to me, and by the sympathy of those reading my book.
Grants were made to him out of various funds, and, just before his death, a committee of distinguished literary men was formed to see that his wife and child did not want. This in particular touched him to gratitude, and he died proud and happy in the thought that those who should have been dependent on him had so many good friends to serve them instead. A few hours before the end he said to his brother, "You will soon be able to blow the trumpets and bang the brasses"; but his eyes were full of a pathetic desire to have it denied.
It is not difficult to understand the complaint made by his friends and relatives that he had drawn a misleading portrait of himself, any more than it is difficult to understand his own protest that he had drawn himself with the clothes off. Both points of view are exceedingly natural, and perhaps it is possible for a disinterested observer to see in the diary the whole truth which could not be immediately obvious either to himself or to those who were closely connected with him. We need not involve ourselves very deeply in the theories of psycho-analysis to make the point that a man who keeps a journal will use it very largely to put down what he can say nowhere else, and to express that side of him which cannot be expressed in the ordinary world. Why else indeed should he keep a journal? It is thus that arise apparent contradictions between the outward appearance and the confession. On one occasion Barbellion says:
I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail often before stupid but overbearing persons who consequently never realise my contempt of them.... Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my double-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life--to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming--then this Journal would be quite unnecessary.
No man who is a hero to himself stands a very good chance of seeming a hero to other people. But in this passage Barbellion not only shows the difference between his appearance and his self-portraiture, but also directs attention to one of the factors which make his diary so extraordinary a document. He was aware of the contrast between what he allowed the world to see and the rest of his nature; but this contrast remained profoundly mysterious to himself. He understood himself enough to be able to describe himself, but not so thoroughly that the knowledge could remove all curiosity; and, in fact, while he knew much of his own character that no one else knew, there was left something over of which he was ignorant.
He once said:
I am apparently a triple personality: (1) The respectable youth. (2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic. (3) The real but unknown I. Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement.
One might also say that the reader of the diary discovers another triple personality: (1) Barbellion as he must have seemed to others. (2) Barbellion as he thought he seemed to others. (3) The real Barbellion, not fully known even to himself, yet, between his appearance and his confessions, for ever unconsciously betraying himself. In actual fact, he was, it is agreed by all who knew him, a man of enormous, almost dæmonic force of character. I have already alluded to the reckless vigour with which he drove his failing body through all manner of tasks and difficulties, and this trait in him gives a fair idea of his spirit. From boyhood onward he was weakened by continual ill-health. The diary is full of medical observations and forebodings, but no one, not even his family, realised how constantly the fear of sickness and death attended him. He never mentioned his health save in a tone of cheerful cynicism: he never pampered himself or allowed himself to be pampered. In spite of his palpitating heart, he exposed himself to fatigues and performed feats of endurance which a sound man might well have avoided. He worked furiously and unceasingly. He kept his balance and his courage under staggering blows of ill-fortune. Never was there so impossible an ambition as that of this sickly youth in a provincial town, already chained to the dreary work of a reporter, who desired, without any help, without even any decent opportunities for self-instruction, to obtain a scientific appointment. Yet he overcame these obstacles and his ambition was fulfilled. And when this was taken from him, when nothing was left but a few painful months of life and his Journal, when it was infinite labour even to trace a few words on the page, he continued the self-portrait which had become his last ambition as long as he could hold a pen at all. The straggling, irregularly-formed letters which sprawl across the paper are the last witnesses of his invincible courage.
And to others this timid and cowardly young man seemed strong, masterful, difficult to manage, frightening, sometimes savage and bitter in conversation, but always magnetic and fascinating. "I know," he says, "I am not prepossessing in appearance--my nose is crooked and my skin is blotched." In reality his height, his distinction of bearing and fine hair produced an immediate effect of good looks--which, with the emaciation of his final days, changed into an austere and painful beauty. He had particularly beautiful hands, and his photographs certainly represent him as being not only noticeable but also attractive. The disparity between what he says of himself and what others thought of him involves no real contradiction. He is writing of the hidden and secret personality whom no one else knew, and the fact that no one else could know this personality, save by his own deliberate act of revelation, is another proof of his strength. He is describing the other side of the moon.
His ambition was the one part of his secret life which was too great and too violent for even him to hide altogether. He might doubt his own qualities, but he could not conceal from himself or from others what he desired to be and to do. His ambitions were, he thought, very soon and very easily defeated, but the title he gave to his book, a catchpenny title, as he owned, and something wanting in sincerity, confessed to a graver defeat than he actually sustained. His achievements were not great in bulk. His scientific triumph was the triumph of reaching a self-proposed aim in spite of almost impossible obstacles; but it was worth less in itself than as a witness to character. He might have become one of the greatest of English biologists; but promise is only promise, and this, besides, is promise of a kind with which we are not concerned here. "In time," he once said, "I should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology." But he was not allowed time, and his scientific observations will be amplified, superseded, heaped under at last by an accumulation of the work of his successors. In literature his position is very different.
When his book was being prepared for publication and while he was still ignorant what reception it would have he remarked without hesitation that he "liked to look at himself posthumously as a writer"; and it appears from the introduction to Enjoying Life that his friends had long before expected him to turn his whole attention to literature. Even here his work is comprised in small space. It consists of three things: the published Journal of a Disappointed Man, containing extracts from his diaries between 1903 and 1917, the posthumous volume, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains, containing, together with a number of essays and articles, long passages omitted for the sake of space from the previous book, and the still unpublished diary from the beginning of 1918 onwards. Even from this certain deductions must be made. The scientific articles in the second volume were only just worth reprinting; and the essays on journal-writers and the two short stories, though they are promising, are yet no more than the experiments of a man who was considering giving himself formally to the profession of literature. But when all these deductions are made there is a residue which is unique in value.
In the introduction to the first volume Mr. Wells very comprehensively lays stress on the circumstances of Barbellion's fate. He represents the diarist as saying, "You shall have at least one specimen carefully displayed and labelled. Here is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square with this." This is, of course, an aspect of the matter which no reader could manage to overlook, even if he desired (as he might conceivably desire) to do so. It would be a pity, however, if we were to consider it to the exclusion of every other aspect. Barbellion was not essentially a specimen who by good luck had the ability to display and label himself. If his circumstances had been quite other than they were, he would still have been a remarkable man and would almost certainly have done remarkable work. His disease and death ought to play the same part in our conception of him that they do in our conception of Keats, with whom, besides, he had certain affinities which he half-consciously recognised. We do not know what part disease played in creating or forcing or conditioning Keats's genius; we only know that it infuses a poignancy and a colour into our picture of his life. He does not appear to us as the diseased poet, but as a poet who, as it happened, was stricken with disease. So with Barbellion: he had a personality and a gift for describing his experiences; and, since it fell out that his experiences were tragic, therefore the story he tells is a tragedy. But the tragedy is not interesting only as such. It is interesting because the principal figure in it is Barbellion.
The comparison with Keats is natural, is suggestive, and can be supported by a number of particulars, both accidental and essential. "Since the fateful November 27th," says Barbellion, "my life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys." Keats writes in his last letter, from Rome, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence." But there is a closer similarity between them than the superficial parallel suggested by their use of the same word. Barbellion himself made the comparison more than once, and once in a very significant context.
You can search all history [he exclaims] for an ambition more powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor Wilhelm II., nor Keats.
And this uncontrollable ambition in both of them was one manifestation of the innermost ruling characteristic which they had in common, the passion for life in all its shapes and forms, for all the sensations life can bring, which inspires Barbellion's Journal as surely as it inspires Keats's poetry and letters.
The title of Barbellion's second book was not, as it might seem, intended in irony. He enjoyed life to a terrifying degree and could abandon himself to the ecstasy which it produced in him.
As you say [he writes in a letter, referring to a review of the Journal] the rest of the notice distinguishing Marie Bashkirtseff from me by her zest for life is an astonishing and ludicrous misreading. Why, even since I became bedridden, as you will see one day, my zest for life took a devil of a lot of killing--like a sectioned worm with all the parts still wriggling....
In the last part of the diary his assertion is amply proved. Here the zest for life, in a man who could no longer indulge it save in memory, is sublimated to a piercing but sweet lyrical cry, which is one of the most moving utterances in literature. Before, when he was in possession of all his faculties, when the shadow of illness could sometimes be forgotten, it is a rapturous and boisterous expression of infinite energy, high spirits and gusto. Almost any paragraph in the essay called Enjoying Life would serve to demonstrate this:
"Dans littérature," said M. Taine, "j'aime tout." I would shake his hand for saying that, and add: "In life, Monsieur, as well." All things attract me equally. I cannot concentrate. I am ready to do anything, go anywhere, think anything, read anything. Wherever I hitch my waggon I am confident of an adventurous ride. Somebody says, "Come and hear some Wagner." I am ready to go. Another, "I say, they are going to ring the bull"--and who wants to complete his masterpiece or count his money when they are going to ring the bull? I will go with you to Norway, Switzerland, Jericho, Timbuctoo. Talk to me about the Rosicrucians or the stomach of a flea and I will listen to you. Tell me that the Chelsea Power Station is as beautiful as the Parthenon at Athens and I'll believe you. Everything is beautiful, even the ugly--why did Whistler paint the squalor of the London streets, or Brangwyn the gloom of a steam-crane? To subscribe to any one particular profession, mode of life, doctrine, philosophy, opinion, or enthusiasm, is to cut oneself off from all the rest--I subscribe to all. With the whole world before you, beware lest the machinery of education seizes hold of the equipotential of your youth and grinds you out the finished product! You were a human being to start with--now, you are only a soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor. Leonardo da Vinci, racked with frustrate passion after the universal, is reported to have declared that only to do one thing and only to know one thing was a disgrace, no less.
Crying for the Moon, the essay which follows, also extracted from the Journal, is the obverse of the same coin:
I am passing through the world swiftly and have only time to live my own life. I am cut off by my own limitations and environment from knowing much or understanding much. I know nothing of literature and the drama; I have but little ear for music. I do not understand art. All these things are closed to me. I am passing swiftly along the course of my life with many others whom I shall never meet. How many dear friends and kindred spirits remain undiscovered among that number? There is no time for anything. Everything and everyone is swept along in the hustling current. Oh! to sun ourselves awhile in the water meadows before dropping over the falls! The real tragedies in this world are not the things which happen to us, but the things which don't happen.
There are critics who would trace the source of such outbursts as these and of the joy in life that constantly appears in Keats to the effects of bacterial disease. We cannot contradict the conclusion, which may have a certain truth. We can only point out that the same cause does not always produce the same effect, and we must therefore deduce a particular genius in those in whom this spirit manifests itself. Barbellion was, from one point of view, a case of pathology, but he was not, any more than was Keats, nothing but that. He had a fine temperament which he expressed very finely.
There is a temptation when one is considering the Journal, to which Barbellion's work must eventually be reduced, to consider it as so much raw material and to speculate how, if he had lived, he would have used the many talents he displays in it. He began it as a record of a naturalist's observations, and it developed only very gradually into a self-portrait and a repository for all his reflections and impressions. He was still, when his last illness overtook him, a professional scientist, scribbling in his diary at night for a hobby. But he was thinking of going over to literature; and one cannot help asking whether, if he had done so, he would not have turned his genius to some more formal and less miscellaneous method of expression. It is easy to discern in him any number of capacities. He might have become a critic--a statement which can be proved by a few examples taken at random:
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.... All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.
It amuses me to discover the evident relish with which the author of The Daffodil Fields emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield's great excitement.... Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable book--a work of genius.
... James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist--one of those books which the mob will take fifty years to discover but once discovered will again neglect.
He might have been a psychological or a satirical novelist, a metaphysician, a casual essayist. He might have been a poet of nature. His diaries are studded with the most exquisite descriptions of landscapes and living things, which grow only more vivid and moving as the end approaches and they become transcripts from memory instead of recent impressions. The last long entry in the Journal is one of them, and it is so good and so characteristic that it insists on being quoted:
Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up!--rock pools, gobies, Blennies, anemones (crassicon, dahlia--oh! I forget). And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the morning when I put some sanded opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the sea, into a glass collecting jar and to my amazement and delight they turned into Ctenophors--alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap-bubble, from its North or to its South Pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat on the water.
But I think that this way of looking on Barbellion's work, excusable as it might be, would nevertheless be mistaken. Every author writes the book that it is given to him to write, and Barbellion's book was the Journal. If, as seems very likely, he had developed altogether into a writer, he might still not have abandoned this form which had become by a gradual process peculiarly his own. Goethe said that all his works were the fragments of a great confession, and this is true, in a greater or lesser degree, of most authors. Barbellion would have differed from the rest only in that his works would have been ostensibly and formally, as well as actually, his confessions.
And this view is supported by the fact that up to the last he was improving the flexible and accommodating method of literary expression which his diary had become. The last eighteen months of it seem to me to show an advance on the third part of the published Journal almost as striking as the advance of that third part on the first. The form fitted very closely to Barbellion's many-sided and individual temperament; and, as time went on and he understood better what he was doing, he made it fit more closely still. It was a frame into which he could put with perfect ease all that his roving perceptions picked up in life: an impression of a landscape or an animal, a conversation overheard in the street, a suddenly flashing truth about himself or some other person, a general reflection upon humanity. As a journal-writer he is not, of course, alone; but, being a strongly-marked personality, he is unique even among journal-writers. His intense interest in his own consciousness does not, as it did with Amiel, blind him to the actual outside world; he has more humour, more gusto in concrete detail than Marie Bashkirtseff, a vein of sheer poetry that we do not find in Pepys. This is not intended to rank him above the writers with whom he loved to compare himself, but rather to emphasise his individuality among them.
We find ourselves at last wondering not how he would have employed the gifts he displays in the Journal, but to what pitch of excellence he might have brought the Journal itself. The last entries are admirably full of matter and admirably worded. The passage I have quoted on the Ctenophors is of almost perfect lyrical beauty--not a random jotting, but an impression seized and made permanent with all the proportion and balance of a sonnet by Hérédia. Over against it there might be quoted passages on the old village nurse who attended him for months, closely and humorously observed and set down without the waste of a syllable. Or there are pages of reflections like this:
The Icons.
Every man has his own icon.
Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably with great respect, by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and subsists. In the self-righteous man's bosom, it is a molten image of a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egotist's, an ideal loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the truth-seeker preserves his image in clay, covered in damp rags--a working hypothesis.
A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered its heart's treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare refer to his own--it is bad form--so that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirls around each one's personality, a man remains sound-tight and insulated.
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person--as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.
Heavens! what a toy shop it will be at the Last Day! When all our little effigies are taken from their cupboards, undraped, and ranged along beside us, nude and shivering. In that Day how few will be able to say that they ever cried
"God be merciful to me a sinner," or "a fool," or "a humbug."
The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man's life is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and the real--the image (or the man's mistaken idea of himself)--like an ignis fatuus leading him through devious paths into the morass of failure, or worse--of sheer, laughing-stock silliness. The moral is:
γνῶθι σεαυτόν {gnôthi seauton}
(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life.)
The mellowness and sweetness of these lines are worth noting as characteristic of a transformation which is obviously taking place through all the last pages of the diary. This transformation adds something in the nature of a rounding and a completion to the whole work, which might otherwise have been merely an interrupted record. It enlarges too our conception of the author's character and capacities and fills in, most graciously, our picture of him.
Barbellion was accustomed to accuse himself of being an egotist; but, on his own definition, he was a truth-seeker. His portrait of himself was not immutable. It grew clearer as he understood himself better and it changed as he changed. It was not complete when he died because his own development was not complete. But he carried it as far as he could and made of it a singular picture. His Journal is a book of an enduring sort, not merely because it is an accurate and candid self-portrait, but also because of the inherent attractions of its subject. Barbellion was a poet, a humorist, an observer, a philosopher, as well as a truthful, passionate, and extraordinarily courageous man. In drawing a picture of the last he also made a picture of the world as it seemed to the first four and thus captured in it poetry, humour, observation, and philosophy. The subject is still too fresh, and, by the vividness of its presentment, too painful, for any attempt at a final valuation to be made. A few months ago Barbellion was still alive, suffering and hoping; and, with the best will in the world, no critic can avoid being influenced by this fact. But his book is a fair topic for prophecy; and it is not very rash to predict that, as it loses the sharpness and painfulness of a record of fact, so its qualities as a work of literature will come more into prominence and we shall realise that Barbellion was not only a genius untimely overwhelmed by an evil fate, but a genius who, before he was overwhelmed, had opportunity to do some at least of his appointed work. Then, whatever may be the theoretical views we hold on the connection between disease and genius, we shall be able to think less of Barbellion as a "case" and more of him as a writer. We shall, perhaps, not think that we have a complete portrait of him in his Journal any more than we have a complete portrait of Keats in the Odes or even in the Letters. The greatest of artists cannot entirely disclose himself in his work. Barbellion did so no more than others. But he was an artist, and, between what he wrote of himself and what was otherwise revealed, it is possible to form a picture of an extraordinary personality.
A LITTLE CLASSIC OF THE FUTURE[27]
[27] Bibliographical Note: _Principal Works by Edith Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross: An Irish Cousin_, 1889; Naboth's Vineyard, 1891; _Through Connemara in a Governess Cart_, 1893; The Real Charlotte, 1895; The Silver Fox, 1897; _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._, 1899; All on the Irish Shore, 1903; _Some Irish Yesterdays_, 1906; _Further Experiences of an Irish R.M._, 1908; Dan Russell the Fox, 1911; _In Mr. Knox's Country_, 1915; Irish Memories, 1917; Mount Music, 1919. All published by Longmans.
By ORLO WILLIAMS
The evanescence of laughter is most pathetic. Its bubbles vanish from the sparkling wine that held it so soon after it has been uncorked, leaving a sadly flat beverage to the critical palates of future generations. Wit, being a subtler and less easily disintegrated essence, does not so quickly pass away, but the buoyant bubbles of laughter, except in some rare vintages, survive but a moment the uncorking of their bottle. We may smile at the things that aroused the laughter of our ancestors, bringing our intellect and our imagination to the tasting, but it is seldom that we experience spontaneously the "sudden glory" of bursting sides when we read the words which aroused it. It is almost painful to look through the files of Punch of some sixty years ago, for it arouses that agonised shame with which one witnesses the failure of an inferior joke injudiciously introduced into superior society. One blushes for its pitiful exposure. Nor is it any consolation to reflect that the laughter of our own day will, for the most part, seem like the cracking of most unsubstantial thorns under ghostly pots to those who come after us. Very little of the literature of the past which truly survives is really provocative of hilarity. The Falstaffian passages of Shakespeare at once leap up as if to deny this statement; but, in the first place, Shakespeare brewed one of those rarer vintages whose beaded bubbles wink ever at the brim, and, in the second place, dramatic literature can always be revived by the fresh infusion of a living actor's personality. It is the purely written word of humour which will not give that sudden jerk to our emotions which it gave on its first outpouring. We say that we can appreciate Rabelais and the comic tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims; we profess to revel in Tristram Shandy, and to find the Pickwick Papers delicious, and we are not wrong; but it is a soberer enjoyment than that which these works of art gave to their first audiences. We pick them up, certainly, when we wish to be entertained, but seldom when we wish to laugh. There was a tutor at Oxford--there may be one still--who was invariably annoyed when any of his pupils attributed a historical phenomenon to "the spirit of the age," averring that there was no such thing. But surely he was wrong in coupling this convenient spirit with the ghosts of Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, for the peculiar changes undergone by laughter are there to prove its existence. Laughter is compounded of the spirit of the age: it is excited by peculiar and irrecoverable felicities and conjunctions of temperament and environment, all of which are ingredients in that very real but intangible spirit. We can guess at this spirit, but we cannot recapture it, any more than we can recapture the light effervescence of its laughter.
Further, laughter is not a lofty emotion. The beasts, they say, have it not, but those who are little better than beasts laugh heartily. We ourselves are not so proud of our laughter that we wish it to echo through the ages, as we would have our high thoughts ring and our tears, perhaps, drip. The heady wine that moves it is often an unworthy vintage, more like the champagne which Murger's Schaunard christened coco épileptique than the true Hippocrene. So it has been in the past. The shelves of libraries are full of these flat draughts from which all the liveliness that alone gave them savour has departed. Yet in all ages there have been nobler bins of these light literary wines which, for all that they no longer catch at the throat, have a more lasting quality and never entirely lose their gratefulness to the tongue of the taster. They may not have sparkled in their prime more brightly than their now neglected contemporaries, but they live for certain finer essences in their composition, wit, style, finish, colour, bouquet, or something even subtler than these, that indefinable taste which distinguishes all that has been grown on a rich literary soil, warmed by the sun of beauty and matured by a vintner who has carefully and lovingly learned his trade. Such, after exciting the laughter of the present in their youth, may in their ripeness, and even in their decline, earn the humour of posterity. They may possibly be numbered among the classics, that is to say, among the productions of any age which deserve to live as models for the future or as peculiarly happy expressions of a bygone time. The test of a classic is what men and women of any age will always call its modernity, which means that it possesses some of those timeless qualities of greatness or artistic excellence which permeate the spirit of any age. Skill in construction and delineation, accuracy of vision, fine rhythm, perfect choice of language, happy adaptation of form to matter, sense of beauty, all these, like beauty itself, do not die. The work which holds them, even though thinly commingled, will outlive the evaporation of its bubbles, and may by their preservative effect become, if not a great, at least a little classic.
To have done, then, with the bush which no good wine needs, I would like to taste again, in the company of the reader, what, if I may prophesy in hope rather than in certainty, may become in English literature a little classic of the future. The bush would not have been so thick had it not been, on the face of it, unusual so to greet a work that has moved so many thousands of us to hearty and inextinguishable laughter. I mean the work of Miss Edith Somerville and her mourned-for second self in letters who wrote under the name of Martin Ross. Few humorists who write merely to catch the passing fancy of the day can have been more successful or more popular: in the merely temporary quality of effervescence they can compete with any of their contemporaries. The sportsman who hates art and loathes poetry has the Irish R.M. and its fellows in well-thumbed copies on his bookshelves; the man who only reads for laughter and never for improvement praises these authors as highly as the most discriminating, and those who would faint at the suspicion of becoming in any way involved in classic literature will joyfully immerse themselves in "Somerville and Ross," like thirsty bibbers quaffing a curious vintage for its exhilaration rather than its quality. Appreciation has poured in upon them from all sides, from those who know and delight in the comic sides of Irish life, when treated observantly and not fantastically, from those to whom hunting and horseflesh are almost the be-all and end-all of existence, from those who treat their brains to a good story as to a stimulative drug, as well as from those who bring more discrimination to their appraisement. The devotees will often claim that they alone can scent the subtler flavour from these hilarious pages. The Irishman, unless he be of the kind that despises all light-heartedness in writing of his country, will assert that none but he can get the exquisite appreciation of comparing the work of art with the reality which inspired it: the hunting fraternity will find it hard to suppose that one who knows not what it is to be
Oft listening how the hounds and horn Clearly rouse the slumbering morn From the side of some hoar hill, Through the high wood echoing shrill,
can possibly enjoy the skill shown by these authors in describing the joy of horses and the thrill of hunting. Nevertheless, the books of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross are heartily enjoyed by a host of readers who are neither Irish nor hunting people, for the simple reason that they are prompted to an explosion of laughter whenever they take up one of these stories. The bulk of these readers would wish to go no further in their appreciation: they embrace the givers of present laughter with so full a measure of enjoyment that it would seem to them unnecessary to probe any further into the chemistry of such excellence, nor perhaps would they deem it possible that any higher praise than their freely-expressed enjoyment could be looked for by any authors. Yet to my mind it is possible. While including in one's general testimony all that can be said by the most extravagant of these admirers, the taster who is considering the cellar of English literature which is being laid down for posterity may discern qualities not so apparent to the quaffer for immediate exhilaration. It is hard to conceive it, but the bubbles may vanish: if they do, the question is, what will be left? My point is that the work of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross has the qualities of a wine that will keep.
It cannot be a great wine, for the vineyard is too restricted. The high winds of emotion have not swept over its soil, nor has the soft rain of tenderness moistened it. It will always be bright and rather dry like Vouvray, gay but with a little bite in it: posterity may even call it "curious." But they will recognise that it holds the authentic flavours that distinguish infallibly the finer products of English literary bins. The authors have chosen a small field, but they direct on it an accuracy of vision which is remarkable, and, seeing that they were two, a unity of vision which is a miracle. In the expression of this vision they display an unfailing sureness of touch and a precision which is perfect in its admirable economy. They handle our language with a deftness and flexibility which is a rarity in itself, and their style, though always original, is nourished by a recollection of great models both in prose and poetry. Theirs is a literary equipment of the first class, solidly framed, well clothed, attractive in appearance, and ornamented with taste. They touch nothing that they do not embellish: events by their unflagging narrative power, which goes as unfalteringly as one of their choicest hunters, character by their sympathetic insight, scenery by their love of natural beauty, dialogue by their dramatic sense. It is not all Ireland that they draw, let that be admitted; they prefer to laugh, letting others weep. Yet, if the whole heart of Ireland does not beat within their pages, a part of it is there, pulsing with true Irish blood and throbbing with truly Irish emotions. Their aspect is no more that of Mr. James Joyce or Mr. Synge or Mr. Yeats than it is that of Mr. George Moore or Mr. Devlin, but, if they are justly praised for their merits, that praise cannot be diminished because they looked on Ireland with laughing eyes through a West Carberry window. Their books are literature no less certainly than Castle Rackrent is literature, and for very similar reasons.
Well, let us taste. It is a bright dry wine, I have said. It is not, perhaps, the quality which the authors would ascribe to what they consider their best work, The Real Charlotte--an estimate in which Mr. Stephen Gwynn agrees with them. This is a fine sombre story of a middle-aged woman's jealousy, for Charlotte is a kind of Irish Cousine Bette. But, if the subject is comparable to that of Balzac's novel, the treatment is certainly not so, and that is my reason for not regarding this as the work by which their achievement can best be judged. It is the work in which they have aimed highest, and the measure of their success is not small, but the theme of Charlotte's jealousy and the havoc in other lives which it caused needed for its convincing development all the powers of a great tragic artist. It is with no want of recognition of the authors' artistic aims or want of sympathy with their regret at abandoning them for others less lofty that this is said: but the work of an artist can best be judged from that part of it which most nearly reaches perfection. Miss Somerville and Martin Ross most nearly reached perfection in their lighter stories of Irish life, and it says much for their acumen that they saw the line on which their talent could naturally reach its maturity, courageously turning their backs on higher and more tragic paths likely to tax them beyond their capabilities. At the same time, it would be unjust not to point out that even in their best work comedy does not exclude the more poignant feelings. It would be the greatest mistake to regard these two writers as nothing more than jesters. Their humour is the true humour which runs hand-in-hand with pity, and the sympathy mingled with their laughter robs it of any taste of bitterness. There is a chapter in Some Irish Yesterdays which shows how their hearts were touched.[28] It treats of marriage and love, death and birth among the peasantry in the south-west of Ireland with a delicacy of feeling which is beyond praise, and shows that the writers did not observe with the aloofness of an explorer among savages, but that for them seeing and describing alike were deeply-felt emotional experiences. The chapter opens with a memory of a wedding in the little Roman Catholic chapel of the village, a simple ceremony, after which the bridegroom hauled his wife up beside him on to a shaggy horse and started for home at a lumbering gallop. Then, in a brilliant transition by way of Tom Cashen's reflections on marriage and a glimpse of his married life, we are introduced at Tom Cashen's funeral to the bride of twenty-five years ago, "a middle-aged stranger in a frilled cap and blue cloak, with handsome eyes full of friendliness," with her ill-health, her profusion of children, and "himself" whose "nose glowed portentously above a rusty grey beard and beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tint." Then listen to the passage which follows:
[28] In Irish Memories Miss Somerville says that this chapter is the reprint of an article by Martin Ross--a fact which throws some light on the respective contributions of the two collaborators. I should like to mention another passage in which these writers touch the pathetic with distinction. It is that chapter in Dan Russell the Fox in which, while tending a poisoned hound, the Irish mother tries vainly to persuade her younger son to propose to the infatuated young lady. He rejects her suggestion as an outrage on the lady, and sets his face towards America. As the saved hound licks her hand, "It's no good now, poor puppy," she says.
The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March lived again as she spoke, the glare of the sunshine upon the bare country brimming with imminent life, the scent of the furze, already muffling its spikes in bloom, the daffodils hanging their lamps in shady places. How strangely, how bleakly different was the life history summarised in the melancholy October evening! Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on roads that were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day, with the large frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would be a long and miry tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with talk of guano and geese and pigs' food, and a perfect foreknowledge of how he would complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation had been well and truly laid at the funeral.
From the funeral we pass again to the cottage in which "the Triplets" are holding their reception, the three day-old babes cradled in the stuffy room, hazy with the smoke of the turf fire, the crowd in the doorway, the old woman rocking the cradle:
Obscure corners harboured obscure masses, that might be family raiment, or beds, or old women; somewhere among them the jubilant cry of a hen proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in muffled tones that suggested a lurking-place under a bed. Between the cradle and the fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat, motionless in the stupor of his great age; at his feet a boy wrangled with a woolly puppy that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed, in a delicious glance of humour, as it tugged at the red flannel shirt of its playmate.