The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920 (part 4 of 5)

The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920 (part 4 of 5)

Such a passage in a Russian novelist would warrant ecstasies on the part of our illuminati: let us no less highly praise our own art when it is possible. The chapter concludes with some lights on the commercial methods of matrimony practised by the peasant class: the writers do not defend them, but call attention to the surprising bloom that is apt to spring from them. "From them springs, like a flower from a dust heap, the unsullied, uneventful home-life of Western Ireland." "There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright; no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable common sense, and a profound awe for the sacrament of Marriage. Marriage, humorous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act; the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the last is usually twilight and much faithfulness." The dialogue is a masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour, heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Of an elderly couple, married by a happy thought some thirty years before, it was said, as the authors' record, "their hearts were within in each other." This chapter, through which breathes all the soft beauty and humour of the soil, is a sufficient answer to those who would tax these writers with a uniform attitude of rather heartless derision or with following--what a blind criticism!--in the benighted footsteps of those who have given us the dreary horror of the traditional stage Irishman.

Then, again, there is another spirit that breathes delicately through these stories, tempering their outlines as the mists of the Atlantic those of the craggy western hillside. It is the spirit of natural beauty, which, to the hearts of Miss Somerville, herself an accomplished draughtsman, and Martin Ross, makes ever the sharpest appeal. They make the reader plainly feel that if the unconventional dignity and penetrating wit of the Irish folk clutches powerfully at their feelings, the inexhaustible beauty of its surroundings pierces to their very marrow. Quotation after quotation might be given to show their remarkable gift of rendering the scenery which has so moved their imaginations. I can only choose a few, embarrassed at the richness of the field of choice. The last chapter of Some Irish Yesterdays opens with an example which it is hard to surpass:

The road to Connemara lies white across the memory--white and very quiet. In that far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure upon the spacious country, away to where the Twelve Pins make a gallant line against the northern sky. It comes in the heathery wind, it borrows peace from the white cottage gables on the hillside, it is accented by the creeping approach of a turf cart, rocking behind its thin grey pony. Little else stirs save the ducks that sail on a wayside pool to the push of their yellow propellers; away from the road, on a narrow oasis of arable soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes; their persistent voices are borne on the breeze that blows warm over the blossoming boglands and pink heather.

Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of Irish air; the pureness of bleak mountains is in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and there is something more, inseparable from Ireland's green and grey landscapes, wrought in with her bowed and patient cottages, her ragged wails, and eager rivers, and intelligible only to the spirit.

Here is another landscape, the Irish R. M.'s view of his own demesne:

Certainly the view from the roof was worth coming up to look at. It was rough heathery country on one side, with a string of little blue lakes running like a turquoise necklet round the base of a firry hill, and patches of pale green pasture were set amidst the rocks and heather. A silvery flash behind the undulations of the hills told where the Atlantic lay in immense plains of sunlight.

What, again, could be a more delightful overture to the lifelike description of the regatta on Lough Lonen than the short paragraph which conveys in a few touches all the beauty of the scene?

A mountain towered steeply up from the lake's edge, dark with the sad green of beech-trees in September; fir woods followed the curve of the shore, and leaned far over the answering darkness of the water; and above the trees rose the toppling steepnesses of the hill, painted with the purple glow of heather. The lake was about a mile long, and, tumbling from its farther end, a fierce and narrow river fled away west to the sea, some four or five miles off.

In these descriptions there is no striving for elaborate effect: the authors simply place the scene before our eyes with that aptness of language which is like the unerring needle of a master etcher. To travel on the wings of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross gives one constant thrills of amazement at their hawk-like swoops after a telling phrase: they catch an apt simile on the wing with an arresting suddenness which adds moments of breathlessness to the already exhilarating flight of their rapid narrative. Instances can be picked out from any of the stories like plums from a pudding.

In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might be heard uttering those singular little yelps of encouragement that to the irreverent suggest a milkman in his dotage....

It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when everything was young and tense, and thin and fit to run for its life, like a Derby horse....

I followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, and so did Miss M'Evoy; we pooled our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening of two foot by three steadily, as the great god Pan drew pith from the reed....

Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not unusual in small fathers of large families; it always struck me that he understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected, and pursued an unnoticed, peaceful and observant path of his own in the background. I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied manner, like a partly-chloroformed ferret....

Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the Order of the Medjidie.

Like smuts streaming out of a chimney the followers of the hunt belched from the lane and spread themselves over the pale green slopes....

Though the temptation is almost irresistible, I refrain here from displaying this incisive power applied to character, notably to Irish character. The success of our authors in this respect is so notorious that further testimony is superfluous. If we have any appreciation of their art at all, the Major and the gentle Philippa, his wife, Flurry and Sally Knox, old Mrs. Knox looking as if she had robbed a scarecrow, with her white woolly dog with sore eyes and a bark like a tin trumpet, against the inimitable background of her ramshackle mansion of Aussolas, scene of many wit-combats between her and Flurry, Miss Bobbie Bennett, the McRory family, John Kane, Mrs. Knox's henchman, and Michael the huntsman, all are as vivid to us as our dearest friends. It is worth pointing out, however, that an almost diabolical power of delineation is not the only compelling quality in these portraits. There is in their introduction of their characters that natural dramatic instinct which they have so humorously observed in their Irish neighbours. I need only instance the ingenuity by which Mrs. Knox is first heard "off," easily vanquishing in speech that doughty antagonist, an Irish countrywoman: or the introduction of John Kane in "the Aussolas Martin Cat," in two inimitable pages, which are followed by another perfect passage of comic drama, the entry into the old demesne of Aussolas of vulgar Mr. Tebbutts, the would-be tenant:

Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a note of exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas; the turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion, and from further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally instant in taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to yell. Blended with these voices was another--a man's voice, in loud harangue, advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden. As it approached the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted clappings of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which they were wont to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the fruit. We sat in silence. The latch of the garden gate clicked, and the voice said in stentorian tones:

"My father 'e kept a splendid table."

Every gathering of their countrymen--the meet, the run, the horse show, the races, the regatta, the auction--have an intensity of motion and character which is achieved not by the tiresome enumerative methods of some modern realists, but by the skilful selection of the practised artist, and by a clever condensation of observations--their only form of exaggeration--gathered over a wide range of times and places.

Finally--the word starts up all too soon--let us praise the powerful sweep of their narrative, for it is this rapidity and staying power which sets the crown on their achievement. When they are out with the hunt, whatever be the quarry, they are as "crabbed leppers" as ever moved the picturesque admiration of an Irish hunt following. They are off at the first cry of the hounds and nothing stops them, they drop over the slaty fences, change feet on the banks, thread the rocky paths of steep ascents and career down the craggy hills, like Flurry Knox's mounts to the discomfiture of staider Saxon hunters. With them, moreover, there is never a check; they gallop hot on the scent from first to last, and run the story to a triumphant death in an ecstasy of unquenchable laughter. Their climaxes are marvellous, led up to as they are by a brilliant and sustained crescendo. Think of the mêlée at the end of "High Tea at McKeown's," or of the "Dane's Breechin'," with its exquisite interlude of the search for the "pin" in the village post-office; think of the finale to "Philippa's Foxhunt," with the Irish clergy and Mrs. Knox pulling the small boy out of the drain; or of Lady Knox's ominous arrival at the end of "Oh, Love! Oh, Fire!" and the escape of Sally in Mrs. Knox's pony-chaise, or of the combined catastrophe that fell upon the Major's household in "A Royal Command." For pure art in narrative construction these finales are unexampled in English literature of to-day, all the more because they are free from all buffoonery. Here is one that starts a movement con brio:

A shout from the top of the hill interrupted the amenities of the check. Flurry was out of the wood blowing shattering blasts upon his horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the "gone away" note that was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind, and jumped across a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the hounds splashed and struggled after him, and as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers broke forth. In a moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful, and soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped, and settled into line.

It is only one of many such. Let me send the reader to his shelf to take down In Mr. Knox's Country, and read "Put Down Two and Carry One," with its account of the events which led to Miss McRory's riding pillion behind the Major into the scandalised sight of Lady Knox, or to expire once more over the mingling of Mrs. McRory's golden butterfly with Philippa's hat-trimming at the harvest festival ("The Bosom of the McRorys"). I am compelled to quote, for its rendering of the purely ludicrous, from the incident of Playboy's nocturnal rescue in "The Conspiracy of Silence" (Further Experiences of an I.R.M.). Major Yeates, as deputy master in Flurry Knox's absence, has taken the hounds over to hunt with Mr. Flynn, who, after a run full of incident, has connived at the secretion of Playboy, a fine hound of the old Irish breed, in a bedroom at the top of the house. The Major is warned of this by the youngest boy, whose gratitude he has earned by giving him a mount that day. The pair thereupon grope their way upstairs to raid the bedroom in its owner's absence:

A dim skylight told that the roof was very near my head; I extended a groping hand for the wall, and without any warning found my fingers closing improbably, awfully, upon a warm human face.

[It was the servant, Maggie Kane, bringing up a drumstick of a goose to pacify the hound. They open the door of the room, and Playboy is revealed tied to the leg of a low wooden bedstead.] He was standing up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as big as a calf. He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of Eugene's bower, and I failed to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in point of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst of suspicion that would waken the house once and for all. We held a council of war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I think it was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer him the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded, almost too well, in fact. Following the alluring drumstick, Playboy burst into the passage, towing me after him on the rope. Still preceded by the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic stairs at a speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while Maggie Kane held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's door I was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too good to inquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the darkness of the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as if to give the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think Playboy must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of the drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to cuckoo with a jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was not Playboy bumped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously muffled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open. We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in our midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its protest from under Maggie Kane's shawl.

And now, if I may close with a recollection of what is, perhaps, the most brilliant of all these brilliant narratives, I will call to the reader's mind the story of "The Pug-nosed Fox," from the same volume. Every gift of language, delineation, vigorous intensity, dramatic gradation, and swiftness of progress over a series of crises to a perfect culmination has been lavished by the authors on this story. From the misguided efforts of the photographer to take a picture of the hounds on a sweltering August day, all through the untimely chase of the old fox to the discovery of Tomsy Flood sewn up in a feather mattress in the loft of the McRorys' stable, and the raid of the hounds upon the wedding breakfast at the moment of the entry of the guests, there is not a moment in which to draw breath. It is life itself, with all the added quickness to its revolutions and intensity to its vision that art can give. With this memory I must leave this little classic to its future, but so that art, rather than criticism, shall have the last word, a typical passage, showing the authors' ease of transition from beauty to comedy, shall close this grateful appreciation:

At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded us a fine view of the Atlantic, also of the surrounding country and all that was therein, with, however, the single exception of the hounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of the reaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and the growl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing, ghost-like, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man in a straw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock with a wooden rake, while a black-and-white cur slept in the young after-grass beside him. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity with a heated demand whether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill glamour from the dog was at first the only reply; its owner took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.

"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to look us up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more than before, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the heat of a summer's day.

"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut up beside him.

"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain does be whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the say from it."

"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round.

FORGOTTEN SATIRISTS

By ALDOUS HUXLEY

All readers of the literary Press must often have noticed that the most ardently contested and the most prolonged controversies, among all those that fill correspondence columns with the rumour of inkpot wars, turn almost invariably upon subjects remote from actuality and of a nature profoundly trivial. Questions of philology and spelling, questions of dates and names and little odd facts--it is on such circumscribed arenas that month-long combats clash and sway and would go on clashing and swaying for ever if it were not for the editor's tyrannically-imposed peace. To the practical man, intent on the immediate, as well as to the philosopher in his abstract world of ideas, this preoccupation with facts that are irrelevant both to the money-maker and the seeker after truth seems at first sight quite incomprehensible. But the explanation is simple. We have leisure and we hate being bored. We must find something that will keep our mind busy without exhausting it. We might, to be sure, occupy ourselves by studying the Einstein theory; but the effort, the agony of trying to think abstractly! No, decidedly the Einstein theory is too much of a good thing. So we fall back on stamp collecting or on what is more absorbing even than stamp collecting--on the inexhaustible past. We turn to history, not for any ambitious Wellsian ideas about humanity, but for the anecdotes, the innumerable bits of Notes and Queryish information which a little patience and curiosity can pick up like shells on a dry beach. How pleasant it is and how restful, after an effort of abstract reasoning (if one has been unwise enough to make that effort), to turn to Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature or to the Literary Recreations of Sir Edward Cook! We are amused, absorbed, instructed, and all without the least expense of spirit. What song the sirens sang, what were Mr. Gladstone's favourite Latin quotations--these things we learn and a thousand more, pleasantly, effortlessly, without tears.

This, then, is my excuse and justification for directing attention to an incident so remote as the Popish Plot, to men so obscure as Settle and Pordage and Flecknoe--their very names are absurd, Dickensian. These long-dead days of controversy fairly bristle with curiosities of literature. We catch glimpses of odd fantastic men performing odd fantastic actions. We see, thrown up by the storm of political passion, strange traits of human psychology that float on the surface like grotesque fishes of the depths dislodged by a submarine earthquake. And so, as we cannot all be Newtons or Empedocleses, let us content ourselves with small things, finding the occupation and amusement we desire in the anecdotes and old wives' tales of history, so pleasant, so futile, so absorbingly human.

Our purpose is to do justice--a little more than justice, it may be--to a few of the minor characters in the drama of the Popish Plot. But with the best will in the world it is impossible not to mention the hero of the piece; Dryden is the Prince of Denmark of the Plot, and without at least a casual reference to his part the play has no sense at all.

Our curtain, then, goes up on the Autumn of 1681; for, in the approved style, we plunge in medias res. The Earl of Shaftesbury is in the Tower on a charge of High Treason. A Bill of Indictment is to be presented against him. It was in anticipation of this event and with the deliberate intention of turning public opinion against Shaftesbury that, on November 17th, Dryden published Absalom and Achitophel.

This was not by any means the first time that Shaftesbury had been attacked. For the past two years the Tory pamphleteers had made him the target of their most envenomed shafts. One at least of these anonymous satires, A Modest Vindication of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a Letter to a Friend concerning his being elected King of Poland, is worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Like almost every pamphleteer of the time, the author of this Modest Vindication seizes on the story that Shaftesbury had offered himself as a candidate for the throne vacated by the death of John Sobieski. The pamphlet opens with an admirable ironic eulogy of the Earl for "his unshaken obedience to every government he has been concerned in or lived under; his steady adherence to every religion that had but hopes to be established." We are now shown the Polish Diet debating on the choice of a king, who shall be capable not only of ruling Poland, but also of conquering and converting the Turk. "Upon these considerations you may imagine the eyes of the whole Diet were turned upon little England, and there upon whom so soon as the little lord of Shaftesbury?" The new king, Anthony I., draws up a list of the attendants whom he proposes to take with him. There is, of course, "Prince Prettyman Perkinoski (Monmouth), to cure the plica or King's evil of this country, in case our own majesty should fail of that virtue"; and finally, at the end of the list, "Jean Drydenurtzitz ... our Poet Laureate, for writing panegyrics upon Oliver Cromwell and libels against his present master, King Charles II."; and to be his deputy no less than Tom Shadworiski" (Shadwell). This tract, it must be remembered, was written after the production of The Spanish Friar and before the publication of Absalom and Achitophel. The author of the "Protestant Play" might still be thought to be a Whig.

The pamphlet ends up with the account of a vision wherein the king-elect sees first the figure of the Whore of Babylon, which changes into that of a murdered Justice of the Peace (Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey), "strangled by a crew of ruffians, who afterwards ran him through with his own sword, that it might be thought he hanged himself." This gives place to a troop of pilgrims armed with black bills (these pilgrims were one of the happiest products of Oates's rich imagination); and they in turn are followed by the hideous vision of the Doctor of Salamanca, Oates himself. All this so deeply impresses King Anthony that he gives up his imperial ambitions, preferring the task of confounding the Pope at home to that of converting the Turks in Poland.

To this same Polish legend and to a certain physical peculiarity, which was the delight of the Tory satirists, Shaftesbury owed one of his most popular nicknames, "Tapski." The "ski" was Polish, but the "Tap" was English and had a real existence. Shaftesbury suffered from an internal abscess, which had to be kept drained by a silver tube let into his side. For the Tories this tap represented all that was most loathsome, most repulsive, most Whiggish. They exulted in descriptions of it. When Shaftesbury wanted to make himself look important, so one pamphleteer assures us, he had only to turn off the tap in order to swell up to a prodigious size. Shaftesbury's Tap and that mysterious Black Box, reputed to contain the certificate of a marriage between Charles II. and Lucy Waters, were the two symbolic objects on which public imagination most greedily seized.

Dryden's satire was issued anonymously. But its authorship was evidently an open secret, for within three weeks of its publication a reply, called Towser the Second, in which Dryden is named as the author, made its appearance. The writer of this piece was the Whig journalist, Henry Care, "whose breeding," says Anthony Wood, "was in the nature of a petty Fogger, a little despicable Wretch, afterwards much reflected upon for a poor snivelling Fellow in the Observators published by Rog: L'Estrange." This person had been the writer of a newspaper entitled The Weekly Paquets of News from Rome, an anti-Catholic journal started in the height of the excitement caused by Titus Oates's evidence. He had been tried in 1680 for libelling Justice Scroggs. His later history is the sadly common tale of the poor Grub Street hack: at the accession of James II. "for bread and Money sake, and nothing else," he passed over to the side in power and turned his pen against the Protestants. Towser the Second is as little and despicable as its author. Towser-Dryden, brother to the original bad dog, Towser-L'Estrange, suffering from a worm "that of the Jebusites smells very strong," runs mad, snarls and snaps at all he meets, treats the whole world, the King included, "à la mode de Billingsgate."

Care's poem is only less stupid than the ponderous Some Reflections upon a late poem, by a Person of Honour, which appeared a few days later. The Person of Honour was Dryden's old enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. Goaded to exasperation by the onslaught made upon him in Absalom and Achitophel, Buckingham set out to overwhelm Dryden under mountains of moral indignation. He succeeded only in proving conclusively that his own share in The Rehearsal, in its own way a masterpiece, must have been extremely small.

Early in 1682 The Reflections were followed by Samuel Pordage's Azaria and Hushai. Twenty years before Pordage had proved himself the possessor of a certain ingenuity by his feat of turning the philosophy of Jacob Boehme into English-rhymed couplets. There are even a few passable passages in the Mundorum Explicatio. But in this satire of his later years he seems to have lost such cunning as he may once have possessed. The sole merit of the piece is a certain dull restraint of language, an avoidance of the drosser scurrilities. He is very temperate, for instance, in what he says of Dryden:

The falling glory of the Jewish stage. Sweet was the Muse that did his wit inspire, Had he not let his hackney Muse for hire. Zimri, we know, he had no cause to praise, Because he dubb'd him with the name of Bayes, Because he durst with his proud wit engage, And brought his follies on the public stage.

But the next Whig satire to appear has real merits. Settle's Absalom Senior is the one good thing produced by the Whigs in their battle with Dryden. Dryden himself had grudgingly to admit that Settle was something of a poet.

Doeg, though without knowing how or why, Made still a blundering kind of melody; Spurred boldly on and dashed through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in; Free from all meaning, whether good or bad And in a word, heroically mad. He was too warm on picking-work to dwell, But fagoted his notions as they fell, And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.

This is not altogether just. The verse of Absalom Senior does more than rhyme and rattle; it has a music of its own, and there are passages that are curiously Elizabethan in their conception and execution. Take, for example, this character of the Duke of York, the Absalom Senior of the poem:

The mercy and the clemency divine, Those sacred sparks, which in mild David shine, Were all put out and left a starless night. A long farewell to all that's good and brave! Not cataracts more headstrong; as the grave Inexorable; sullen and untuned As Pride deposed; not Lucifer unthroned More unforgiving.

It is hardly credible that this should have been written in 1682. It reads like the work of some minor poet in the "giant age before the flood," a contemporary of the grave Lord Brooke. Here again is something no poet of the Restoration has any business to write, a simile in which Settle compares the papist plotter to the alchemist:

Who though he see his bursting limbecks crack, And at one blast, one fatal minute's wrack, The forward hope of sweating years expire, With sad, yet painful, hand new-lights the fire. Pale, lean and wan, does health, wealth, all consume; And for the great elixir yet to come Toils and hopes on.

The poem opens with a history of the ceaseless Catholic efforts, ever since the time of Henry VIII., to recapture England for the old faith. This serves as a preface to the main body of the piece, which deals with the Popish Plot. There is the usual portrait gallery, imitated from Absalom and Achitophel, of the most important figures on either side. This spirited description of Lauderdale is worth quoting:

Let not that hideous bulk of honour 'scape, Nadab that sets the gazing crowds agape; The old kirk-founder, whose hoarse croak could sing The Saints, the Cause, no Bishop and no King. By the triumphant Saul he was employed A huge fang-tusk to gore poor David's side, Like a proboscis in the tyrant's jaw To rend and root through government and law.

Settle mentions Dryden in connection with Amiel, the Duke of Buckingham. It is pleasant to note that, like Pordage, he pays tribute, albeit a somewhat equivocal one, to Dryden's poetical genius:

But Amiel had, alas, the fate to hear An angry poet play his chronicler; A poet rais'd above oblivion's shade, By his recorded verse immortal made. No muse could more heroic deeds rehearse; H' had with an equal, all-applauding verse Great David's sceptre and Saul's javelin praised. A pyramic to his saint Interest he rais'd.

The rest of the remarks about Dryden are not so edifying; they refer to that subject, so fruitful of raillery, the poet's marriage with Lady Howard, whom Settle, repeating scandal, describes as

Laura, in faithful constancy confined To Ethiop's envoy and to all mankind.

The poem ends with a long list of eulogies addressed to the chiefs of the Country Party, dull as such eulogies always are and are always bound to be. For, while we listen to abuse and defamation of almost any kind with pleasure, we are apt to find the recital of a man's virtues extremely tedious; a fact well known to newspaper proprietors, for whom moral indignation--or mud slinging, for the terms are usually synonymous--is spiritual meat and drink, as well as material bread-and-butter.

The publication of Absalom Senior was the high-water mark of Settle's life. In 1673, at the age of twenty-five, he had all the appearances of a great man: he was the author of The Empress of Morocco. But he was very definitely one of those who have had greatness thrust upon them. The success of his fantastic tragedy, gravely judged by the most advanced undergraduate opinion of the day to be superior to anything Dryden had written, was wholly due to the prodigies of log-rolling performed by that shifty and malicious patron of the arts, Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester, who had for a time bestowed his favours upon Dryden, suddenly threw him over and exalted Elkanah Settle in his place. He had The Empress of Morocco specially produced at Court before its appearance on the public stage, and himself contributed a Prologue. The "boom" was so well organised that the public for a time actually took Elkanah seriously. The Empress and her infamous gallant, Grimalhaz, stamped about the stage giving rhymed utterance to sentiments of an unheard of turpitude.

GRIMALHAZ: Have you considered, madam, what you've done?

EMPRESS: Poisoned my husband, sir, and if you need Examples to instruct you in the deed, I'll make my actions plainer understood, Copying his death on all the royal blood.

Loud and prolonged applause, bursting out again with redoubled fury when the Empress hisses into the ear of this new Macbeth:

and your next step t'a throne Must be, dear sir, the murder of my son.

The applause died away and with it the cat-calls of Settle's three envious rivals, Dryden, Crowne, and Shadwell. Then came Absalom Senior, and for its author the deserved laureateship of Whiggery. But a year later things took an awkward turn for the Country Party; Settle recanted and wrote a history of the Popish Plot, in which he gave Oates his full due as a scoundrel. When James II. came to the throne he wrote a fawning Coronation Ode in the hope of placating one whom he had himself so short a time before called "inexorable as the grave." He even went so far as to publish a panegyric of Judge Jefferies. Inch by inch he was sinking deeper into the slough of Grub Street. With the Revolution he gave up politics (they seemed altogether too unsafe) and applied for the post of City Laureate. Lord Mayor's Shows were now immortalised to the extent of "living in Settle's numbers one day more." Grown old and very miserable, he was reduced to writing puppet plays, better works of art--who knows?--than the proud Empress of his youth; and we find him at last "hissing in his own dragon" at Bartholomew Fair. He was seventy-six when he died in 1724, having survived long enough to be the target of Pope's barbed malice.

Absalom Senior closes the first act of the drama. The second opens with Dryden's Medal. This personal attack on Shaftesbury roused more fury among the Whigs than even Absalom and Achitophel. In a single day Edmund Hickeringill wrote and sent to press a long retort called The Mushroom. "... And if any man think or say that it is a wonder if this book and verses were composed and writ in one day, and sent to the press, since it would employ the pen of a ready writer to copy this book in a day--it may be so. But it is a truth, as certain as the sun in the firmament, and which, if need be, the bookseller, printer, and other worthy citizens that are privy to it can avouch for an infallible truth--Deo soli gloria--when a divine hand assists, one of despicable, dull and inconsiderate parts may do wonders, which God usually performs by most weak and unlikely instruments." Hickeringill is a charming character; but he hardly comes within the scope of our article. He is not so much a man of letters as a mental case.

Pordage once again stepped forward and dealt a perfectly ineffective blow. He was followed by a new and more truculent champion, Shadwell. Shadwell laid about him with a will. Of Dryden's poetical powers he says condescendingly: "He has an easiness in rhyme and a knack of versifying and can make a slight thing seem pretty and clinquant." On the other hand, he is wholly lacking in originality, and even in his satires has done nothing but "turn the Observator into rhyme." When he is not writing in rhyme, "in which he has a kind of excellence," he is completely insipid. He has no sense of comedy.

Thou never mak'st, but art a standing Jest.

So much for Dryden's literary reputation; now for his character. At this point Shadwell throws the moral indignation about so freely that we are forced to hold our noses and to avert our eyes.

Left scathless by the clumsy grossness of Shadwell's attack, Dryden retorted murderously with MacFlecknoe.

But enough of Shadwell. He has his meed of fame and recognition. His body lies in Westminster Abbey and his plays have been resurrected in the "Mermaid" Edition. Who was Flecknoe? What manner of man was that grandiose figure who

In Prose and Verse was own'd without dispute Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute?

There must be many who, like myself, have cherished a sneaking hope that this is an ungenerous judgment, that Flecknoe is not so bad after all. Might one not even discover him, edit him, unearth buried beauties? Alas, one has but to read a few of his many works to realise that Dryden was only speaking the modest truth!

We catch our first glimpse of him at some date about the year 1645, when Andrew Marvell, on his travels in Rome, climbed up three pair of stairs and

found at last a chamber, as 'twas said, But seemed a coffin set on the stair's head,

the lodgment of Richard Flecknoe, Irishman, priest, poet, and musician. A strange figure:

as thin He stands, as if he only fed had been With consecrated wafers, and the Host Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast; This basso-relievo of a man-- Who, as a camel tall, yet easily can The needle's eye thread through without any stitch.

No sooner is Marvell within the basso-relievo's clutches than

Straight, without further information In hideous verse, he, in a dismal tone, Begins to exorcise, as if I were Possessed;

and so it goes on

Till the tyrant, weary to persecute, Left off and tried to allure me with his lute.

Desperate measures have now to be taken; Marvell asks the man to dinner and for a little time, at least, secures a respite. But not for long; the poet,

Satisfied with eating, but not tame, Turns to recite; though judges most severe, After the assizes' dinner, mild appear And on full stomach do condemn but few, Yet he more strict my sentence doth renew, And draws out of the black box of his breast Ten quire of paper, in which he was dressed.

It is a sad example of that all too frequent inconsistency between a man's art and life that the best poem Flecknoe ever wrote should be To Silence:

Still-born Silence, thou that art Floodgate of the deeper heart, Offspring of a heavenly kind, Frost oth' mouth and thaw oth' mind.

There is a certain absurd charm about this reckless mixture of conceits, a charm which would have melted Marvell's heart, if he had heard the piece, as it later melted Lamb's. For what is almost the first and the last time, Flecknoe's poetic method, which is the method of Marvell himself and of all the seventeenth-century metaphysicals reduced to the absurd, actually comes off. Only once again was he ever to produce anything faintly resembling poetry, and that is in this stanza about the ant:

That small republique too, at home, Where thou'rt perhaps some magistrate-- Little think'st thou, when thou dost come, There's greater in the world than that.

But this is exceptional; his average poetic level is exemplified by such lines as:

Now to the woodlands, now to th' champains, where With subtile nets and pitfalls slyly made She innocently silly fowls betrayed, While the more lofty inhabitants oth' skies Sh' allured to ground with brightness of her eyes,

or by that astonishing couplet on Phœbus, which runs:

From 's harnessing of 's horses in the East, Unto 's unharnessing of them in the West.

From Rome Flecknoe carried his juvenile verses to Constantinople, to Portugal, to Brazil, to Flanders. But no amount of travel could cure him of his fatal habit of writing. Re-established in England after the Restoration, he turned an unlimited leisure to the worst account. He was the author of four plays, only one of which was put upon the stage, and that was duly damned. He contented himself by printing the others with a list of the actors he would have liked to see in the different parts, if he had been able to get them performed--a touching piece of naïveté which does much to endear him to us.

Of his prose works the most ambitious is a little collection of Enigmaticall Characters, of which perhaps the choicest is this on the Drunkard. The Drunkard's wit "is rather the hog's-head than his own, savouring more of Heidelberg than of Helican and he being rather a drunken than a good companion."

Flecknoe dies, like the lady on whose decease he wrote an ode, "died as having nothing else to do," in the year 1678.

Such was Flecknoe. Shadwell's claim to being ranked as Flecknoe's son is amply substantiated by his own protest that in MacFlecknoe "he had been represented as an Irishman, though Mr. Dryden knew very well that he had not set eyes on the country till he was three and twenty and had remained in it then only for four months."

Dryden followed up MacFlecknoe with the character of Og in the Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel. Shadwell was unable to reply; he could only faintly complain.

With Part the Second of Absalom and Achitophel the drama of the Popish Plot comes to an end. The curtain falls on this last orgy of murder. All the minor characters are now dead--for Doeg and Mephibosheth lie bleeding by the side of the monstrous Og--and only the hero remains alive. Turning with a bow to the audience, he delivers the epilogue, in which he explains, with the best of good humour, exactly why it is that he, Dryden, is still alive and all the rest lie punctured about him.

"How easy it is," so runs the epilogue, "how easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of these opprobrious terms! There is still a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would be kind enough to think it belongs to me."

ARCHITECTURE AS FORM IN CIVILISATION

By PROFESSOR W. R. LETHABY

Towns and Civilisation are two words for nearly one thing; the City is the manifestation of the spirit and its population is the larger body it builds for its soul. To build cities and live in them properly is the great business of large associations of men. The outward and the made must always be exact pictures of the mind and the makers. Not only is this so at any given stage, but it is so all the more in a going concern, for the outward is always reacting again on the inward, so that the concrete becomes a mould for the spiritual. Man builds towns so that the towns shall build his sons. As the old Greek said, "The city teaches the man."

William Morris says somewhere that the religions of antiquity were the worshipping of cities. It may seem strange this idea of city worship, but it explains much in the history of art, and we need something of similar sort even now: this and other worships besides and beyond. Before the recognition of the universal and the national we require a much deepened sense of the civic. Here comes before the Beyond. Almost the greatest question of the time is the one of finding wells for the refreshment of our vitality--the inducing of national spirit, town spirit, and home spirit. Such spirit is a very subtle essence, and yet it dwells in houses and cities are its reservoirs. In the Army it has always been recognised that the foundation of the whole vast violent business is spirit. The children of war are wiser than the children of peace. As an example take this scrap from the experience of a new soldier: "The private is taught from the beginning that the first duty of a soldier is obedience, the second cleanliness, and the third may be gathered from this short dialogue between a drill sergeant and a squad of recruits:

"What is the third duty of a soldier?" asks the sergeant. "Honesty, sobriety, and self-respect," we reply. "And what is self-respect?" "Keeping your buttons bright."

We know that Jerusalem was a sacred city, and so was Athens too in its way. So indeed were all the cities of antiquity, each in its proper status. In the later classical age every one had its impersonation of sculptured image--the Tyche of the City. Fragments of a figure of Silchester were found in the Basilica of the old British town; an image which stood for the genius of the place. London and York were also sacred in those Roman days, and the figure on our pennies is a similar Roman imagination for the whole country, Britannia. A fine inscription from Ephesus in the Central Hall of the British Museum is a delightful example of the forms and ceremonies observed by the proud cities of antiquity--the ritual prescribed for their worship in fact. This marble slab, about 7 feet by 3½ feet, bears in large clear lettering the copy of a letter addressed by Antoninus Pius to the Magistrates and People of Ephesus c. A.D. 140. The emperor approved that the people of Pergamon had written letters to Ephesus correctly addressed with the prescribed titles (First and Greatest Metropolis of Asia, or the like). He thinks that the People of Smyrna had accidentally omitted this from a decree about joint sacrifice, but they will behave correctly in future provided that the Ephesians use the approved titles in writing to Smyrna (pre-eminent in beauty or the like). This is indeed politeness on a high plane.

One of the ways in which civic spirit, pride, and love must be refounded is in the sense of historical continuity. Such a sense of regional reverence is being cultivated in France on a definitely psychological basis, and those alert Americans have already begun to work the ground of their antiquities. A publication of a local historical society, issued as far back as 1900, contains an account of what they in America call "An Old Ipswich House." It begins with some words which I must quote: "The extraordinary production and large circulation of the historical novel is but one of the consequences of the remarkable growth of patriotic societies in this country in the last few years. One of the most admirable results of the movement is the widespread interest in the establishment of local historical societies in the old towns of New England. [Older towns of Old England, please note and copy.] These societies have a very fascinating work before them in the collection of local records, the preservation of old buildings, in the marking of historic sites. This soil is fertile and delving therein bears rich fruit of interest, love for the community, heightened civic feeling, encouragement of local improvement, and a care for the future of the town. In not a few places the local society has taken some old house for its headquarters, adorning it with attractive historical collections. Such a collection is that of the Bostonian Society, to which the city long ago gave the use of the Old State House." What might our English towns still do in this way! Or is it to be that for authentic touch with antiquity we shall soon have to go to America? In passing may I commend this idea to those who have the destruction of the old Dean's House at Wolverhampton in their mind or at least their power?

Germany has long consciously cultivated this field for spirit production, and I remember an official tract on the psychological value of Ancient Monuments in promoting national consciousness. It is in Denmark, however, that an effort to promote national spirit has been most systematically based on a common knowledge of national traditions, arts, and music, and spread by means of their admirable "Folk Schools."

Monumental history is a stirring, vital thing: it can be touched. In every town every child-citizen should know the story and antiquities of that place. This has always been the way until now. "What mean these stones?" the children say, and we answer, "I don't know." The history that can be seen is a strong and stimulating soul-food, entirely different from vague and wearying written history.

The historical starting-post is only one of many ways of approach to fine forms of civilisation; we must not wait on the order of our going, but go at once and from every point at once. Much is being thought and said about Housing and Town Planning; they are both of the greatest possible importance, but they are not all. We need at least a third to go with them--that is a general cleaning, tidying, and smartening movement, an effort to improve all our public and social arts, from music to cooking and games. We must control and tax advertisements to some order, bring pressure on the railway companies to sweep the microbes out of their stations, and we must whitewash our own backyards. The danger is to think of housing and planning as technical matters for experts. It may almost be feared that current talk of town planning and garden cities may harden with a jargon-like political formulæ. Our arts and customs are indexes and pictures of our inner life. Fine bridges, clean, smiling streets, liberal public buildings are not merely shapes and nothing more. They are essential to our sense of order, brightness, and efficiency, to our pride, confidence, and content. A sore protesting slapped-in-the-face feeling cannot be good for the temper and digestion. A civilised life cannot be lived in undisciplined towns.

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More and more we become the victims of our words and live frightened by names. Such a name is Architecture. In its mystery vague and vain pretensions may be shrouded, in its shadows hide many minor superstitions about correct design, the right style, true proportions. High priests arise who are supposed to know subtle doctrines and can point the way to æsthetic safety. And yet all the time there are the streets, Edgware Road and Euston Road, Oxford Street and Holborn; there again are our cities, Leeds and Liverpool, Bristol and Plymouth. Surely these potent and indeed blatant facts might raise doubts as to the dogmas. The mystification about "architecture" has isolated the intimate building art from the common interest and understanding of ordinary men. To talk with a believing architect on his theories is almost as hopeless as to chaff a cardinal. All the ancient arts of men are subject to the diseases of pedantry and punditry--music, painting, poetry all suffer from isolation.

Architecture is human skill and feeling shown in the great necessary activity of building. It must be a living, progressive structural art, always readjusting itself to changing conditions of time and place. If it is true it must ever be new. This, however, not with a willed novelty, which is as bad as or worse than trivial antiquarianism, but by response to force majeure. The vivid interest and awe with which men look on a ship or an engine, an old cottage or a haystack, come from the sense of their reality. They were shaped so by a higher power than whim, by a higher aim than snobbery. So must it again be with our buildings: they must be founded fast on the rock of necessity.

Wordy claims are often made for "Architecture" that it is a "Fine Art," and chief of all the arts. These two claims are indeed incompatible and contradictory. Any mastership in architecture depends on its universality and its service. It is only chief in the sense that he who serves is the greatest. But the "Fine Arts" are by definition free from conditions of human need, and architecture was specially ruled out from among them by Aristotle. Even so, this idea of fine art unconditioned and free for delight was a heresy of the Hellenistic decline. To Plato and the great masters even the "musical" arts were to be not only healthy but health-giving; they were to be foods for the soul and not æsthetic raptures and intoxications.

On the other side of the account it may be objected that bare utility and convenience are not enough to form a base for a noble architecture. Of course they are not if "bare utility" is interpreted in a mean and skimping and profiteering way. All work of man bears the stamp of the spirit with which it was done, but this stamp is not necessarily "ornament." The unadorned indeed can never stand as low as that which is falsely adorned in borrowed, brazen bedizenments. High utility and liberal convenience for noble life are enough for architecture. We confuse ourselves with these unreal and destructive oppositions between the serviceable and the æsthetic, between science and art. Consider any of the great forms of life activity--seamanship, farming, housekeeping--can anyone say where utility ends and style, order, clearness, precision begin? Up to a point, and indeed a long way on, "style" is a utility. We have to begin again and look on architecture as an art of service from the communal point of view. The faces of buildings which are turned outwards towards the world are obviously of interest to the public, and all citizens have a property in them. The spectator is in fact part owner. No man builds to himself alone. Let the proprietor do as he likes inside his building, for we need not call on him. Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can protect us from buildings in the street. It is to be feared that we are learning to protect ourselves by the habit of not observing, that is by sacrificing a faculty. General interest and intelligent appreciation of public arts are a necessity of civilisation. Civic alertness, honest pride, or firm protest are not matters of taste for a few; they are essential activities of the urban mind. In cities buildings take the place of fields, trees, and hedgerows. Buildings are an artificial form of nature. We have a right to consideration and some politeness in buildings. We claim protection from having our faces slapped when we venture into the street. Our cities do not wholly belong to profit-lords, railway companies, and advertisers.

Architecture, however "properly understood," not only concerns the man in the street, it comes home to all householders and households. While our eyes have been strained on the vacuity of correct style, the weightier matters of construction and efficiency have necessarily been neglected. We need grates which will warm, floors which may readily be cleaned, and ceilings which do not crack. These and such as these are the terms of the modern architectural problem, and in satisfying them we should find the proper "style" for to-day. Architecture is a current speech, it is not an art of classical quotation. As it is it is as much burdened by its tags of rhetoric as Chinese literature. It has become a dead language. The house of the future will be designed as a ship is designed, as an organism which has to function properly in all its parts. Does this not concern everyone, not only as economy and comfort, but in the mind? Our houses must be made to fit us like garments and to be larger projections of ourselves. A whole row of ambiguous words, such as design, ornament, style, proportion, have come between us and the immediately given data of architecture. Design is not abstract power exercised by a genius, it is simply the arranging how work shall be well done. The more necessary the work and the more obvious, simple, and sound is the foresight the better the design. It is not a question of captivating paper patterns, it is a question of buildings which will work. Architecture is a pragmatical art. To design in the Classic, Gothic, or Renaissance styles is as absurd as to sculpture in the manner of Praxiteles, paint "like" Holbein, or write sham Shakespeare. We do not really need a waxwork art by Wardour Street professionals. We require an active art of building which will take its "style" for granted, as does naval architecture. Modern building must shake itself free from its own withered and cast-off skins.

It is commonly supposed, and architects themselves in older days believed it, that an architect's business was to be an expert in style. Why he should be so was never explained, except, perhaps, by Philibert de l'Orme. According to this authority the Temple of Jerusalem was built in the Classical style, and this work was designed in heaven; therefore this was the only true or revealed style. An excellent argument; modern practitioners have kept up a "battle of the styles" without any such basis for their logic, or rather their eloquence. But what is or was a style? It is a museum name for a phase of past art. As a means of classifying what is dead and done the style labels are quite useful. It has, however, to be kept in mind that these styles, while they lived and moved, were processes which began, continued, and passed into something else. They were only phases like those of the changing moon. That which now professes to be designed in a style, or, as the still more disgusting slang runs, to be "period work," has not the essence of life. It is, therefore, not actually of the style which it simulates but is only in the "style" of the style.

Indeed, the essence of all the old arts was in their vitality, their response to the natural conditions and the psychology of their times. The better we seem to reproduce their dead images the more we are unlike their soul-selves. There is little more reason for an architect to pretend to work in a style than there is for a chemist. Architects are properly arrangers and directors of certain classes of structures. I would like to say that they were building engineers, were it not that our engineers have failed so shamefully in hiring themselves out for any form of exploitation and in showing no care for orderliness and decency. All the past of architecture, as of engineering and shipbuilding, belongs to us, of course, as race experience, but only as far as the same is true in all fields of science and literature.

The "Orders" of architecture are names for particular forms of ancient Greek temple building. Style-names apply to all past fashions of buildings, Orders only to three--Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The names are useful as history, but that is all. Now that these Orders have become shop advertisements, even the would-be correct may be more ready to give them up.

Style in a modern and universal sense is equivalent rather to "stylish" than to a style; it interpenetrates the whole texture of a work; it is clearness, effectiveness, mastery, often it is simplification. We have to conceive of it in the building art as we do in literature or athletics. "The style is the man"--yes, and it is also the thing itself. It is an informing spirit, the spirit of form, it is not a varnish. We have become so accustomed to architecture looking "dressy" that we have forgotten the logic of clothes and bury buildings good enough in themselves under outgrown rags. It has been a true instinct which calls sham architectural features "dressings."

Another word which the architecturally superstitious whisper with great awe is proportion. In dealing with such a limited field as the "Orders," old scholars examined existing examples by measuring them very carefully to find out their proportions; but, if we had them, Greek chairs and tables might be measured in exactly the same way. No general rule of the Greeks has ever been found out by these measurings, and if it had it would prove nothing for us. Proportion, of course, rests properly on function, material, and size. There maybe a perfect proportion, for instance, for a certain class of ships, but that will only be discovered experimentally, and not by measuring Greek galleys.

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I wish I could find some leverage of argument to bring a sense of citizen responsibility for form in life into the minds and hearts of all, but right and reason are hardy enough. We may, perhaps, hope more in a sense of international rivalry in the works and evidences of life. Civilisation is an Olympic contest in the arts and sciences, a sort of international Eisteddfod. It is admitted that we must have literature and we must have music: we must also have building skill, and we have to aim at inducing a flowing tide in all the things of civilisation. Of words and arguments I am rather hopeless. One thing only I would ask of every benevolent reader: that he would take notice of what he sees in the streets. Do not pass by in a contemplative dream, or suppose that it is an architectural mystery, but look and judge. Is it tidy, is it civilised, are these fit works for a proud nation? Look at Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, and that terrible junction of Tottenham Court Road with Oxford Street. Play a new game of seeing London. We need a movement in the common mind, a longing to mitigate the vulgarity and anarchy of our streets, and the smothering of the frontages with vile advertisements, a desire to clean the streets better, to gather up littered paper, to renew blistered plaster. Some order must be brought into the arrangement of the untidy festoons of telegraph and telephone wires hitched up to chimneys and parapets. These are the architectural works which are needed as a beginning and a basis. The idea of beauty, daily-bread beauty, not style pretences, must be brought back into our life. Every town should set up an advisory committee on its betterment. We must try to bring back the idea of town personality and town worship; we must set up ceremonies and even rituals to bring out a spirit of pride and emulation. If we can only stir up general interest all will yet go well or at least better. By exalting our towns we should make a platform for ourselves. As it is what can great money fortunes buy beyond swine comfort and titles? Man is more than a stomach moving about on legs. A mistake of modern education has been to train for appreciation of the past rather than for present production. Such merely critical learning comes at last to be actually sterilising. As production fails, so even appreciation decays. Full understanding depends on the power to do. Therefore, leaving the things of the past, press forward to produce, to be, to live. Remember Lot's wife. There is much talk of patriotism, but patriotism requires a ground on which to subsist; it must be based on love of home, love of city, and love of country. Let nothing deceive us, civilisation produces form, and where noble form is attained there is civilisation. Life is a process, a flow of being, and where there is this vital activity music, drama, and the arts are necessarily thrown off. Living art comes on a tide of creative intelligence.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS

Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability, answer all queries addressed to him.

GENERAL NOTES

We have just received the catalogue of the library of the late Dr. Daniel, Provost of Worcester, which was bought in its entirety by Mr. Chaundy, of Oxford. Dr. Daniel, who died in the autumn of last year, was born in 1836. From boyhood onwards his favourite hobby seems to have been printing. "As early as 1846 a small hand press at Frome Vicarage, in Somerset, painfully produced a little letter, and in 1852 at least three numbers of the Busy Bee, printed and published by H. and W. E. Daniel, at their office, Trinity Parsonage, Frome." In 1856 two more substantial volumes (Sonnets, by C. J. C., and The Seven Epistles to the Churches, in Greek) were issued from Frome.

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So much for origins. The Daniel Press known to fame only came into existence in 1874, when the little hand press from Frome was set up in Worcester. The first book printed by the Daniel Press, at Oxford, was Notes from a Catalogue of Pamphlets in Worcester College Library, 1874, of which five-and-twenty copies were issued. A copy of this pamphlet is priced at 45_s._ in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue. A New Sermon of the Newest Fashion, printed from a MS. found in the College Library, appeared in 1877. In this volume Dr. Daniel first made use of the fount of type which had been cast for Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ Church, and which had lain forgotten in the Clarendon Press for a century and a half. Henceforth Dr. Daniel was to make use of the Fell type in all his publications.

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The most treasured book of these earlier years is the Garland of Rachel (1881), which consists of poems offered to Miss Rachel Daniel on her first birthday by, among others, Andrew Lang, Austen Dobson, Robert Bridges, John Addington Symonds, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, T. Humphry Ward, and Margaret L. Woods. Only thirty-six copies were printed, one of which is priced in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue at £40.

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In 1882 the old press was replaced by a much more scientific machine, and among the first books to be printed on the new press was Prometheus the Firegiver (1883), by Robert Bridges. A number of the Poet Laureate's poems were to be issued from the Daniel Press. Of the Poems of 1884 one hundred and fifty copies were printed (£3 10_s._ in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue). The Feast of Bacchus (one hundred and five copies) and The Growth of Love, published anonymously in an edition of only twenty-two copies, appeared in 1889. The year 1903 witnessed the publication of two more pieces from Mr. Bridges' pen, namely, Now in Wintry Delights and Peace, an Ode written on Conclusion of the Three Years' War.

In 1884 Dr. Daniel made use for the first time of a number of fine seventeenth-century woodcut ornaments. His printer's mark was a piece of contemporary work, designed by Alfred Parsons, representing Daniel in the lions' den, with the motto, Misit Angelum Suum.

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Noteworthy volumes which issued from the Daniel Press in the nineties were Our Memories, Shades of Old Oxford (1893), a collection of Oxford reminiscences by various hands; The Child in the House (1894), by Walter Pater, published only a month or two before his death; Poems of Laurence Binyon (1895); Keble's Easter Day, of which only twelve copies were printed by Miss Rachel Daniel (1897). Eight years before Miss Daniel had printed The Lamb, by W. Blake, in duodecimo (1889).

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Besides those already mentioned, Dr. Daniel issued a number of reprints of old books. Sixe Idillia, translated from Theocritus by E. D. (possibly Dyer), was reprinted from the unique copy (1588) in the Bodleian Library. Love's Graduate, a comedy, by John Webster, being Mr. Gosse's distillation of what was Websterian in the Webster-Rowley comedy of 1661, appeared in 1885. The Muses Garden of Delights, a reprint of a unique Elizabethan volume, edited with an introduction by William Barclay Squire, was printed by Dr. Daniel in 1901. Another edition, printed by the Clarendon Press, was published in the same year.

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We have mentioned only a few of the Daniel books. A complete bibliography of the publications of the Press during its first thirty years of activity may be found in an article by Mr. Madan, at that time Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian, contributed to the Times Literary Supplement of February 20th, 1903. As we have already had occasion to mention in these columns, the Daniel Press is now in the Bodleian, together with specimens of the books produced on it.

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Contemporary private presses are fairly numerous. The two which produce what are, from a literary point of view at any rate, the most interesting books are the Hogarth Press and the Ovid Press. From the Ovid Press Mr. John Rodker has just issued a very handsome edition of the poems of Mr. T. S. Eliot. Poems by Mr. Eliot have also been published by the Hogarth Press, together with works in verse and prose by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and J. Middleton Murry.

* * * * *

Our French allies seem to be making a serious effort to break with that tradition of bad printing which has for so long oppressed their literature. Several new publishing houses have come into existence with the avowed purpose of producing books that shall be handsome objects in themselves. The directors of the Nouvelle Revue Française have set a higher standard in their publications than most of their rivals. But even in their editions the most horrible atrocities, such as the omission of a whole sheet of sixteen pages in the middle of a book, occasionally happen. But the books produced by La Sirène, by La Belle Edition, and the Société Littéraire de France are worthy of all praise.

* * * * *

The selection of rare and valuable books from the Arbury Hall Library which, as announced in the January number of THE LONDON MERCURY, was to have been offered for sale by auction at Sotheby's on behalf of the owner, Sir Francis Newdigate-Newdegate, K.C.M.G., has instead been sold privately. Neither the name of the purchaser nor the destination of the books has yet been made public. Since the collection contains editions of Elizabethan books of the utmost rarity, and indeed some that are apparently unique, it is to be hoped that it will not pass beyond the reach of students of literature.

* * * * *

Collectors of Swinburniana will be interested in A Catalogue of the Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne in the Library of Mr. Edmund Gosse, London, privately printed at the Chiswick Press, 1919. Only fifty copies of this catalogue have been issued, of which a few can still be obtained from Mr. James Bain, bookseller, 14 King William Street, Strand.

* * * * *

Many items of the greatest rarity are included in Mr. Gosse's collection. Among them we would note one of the fifteen copies of The Devil's Due (1875), preserved by accident when the issue was destroyed; Laus Veneris, Moxon, 1866, one of a few trial copies issued before the poem was included in Poems and Ballads; the essay on William Blake, Hotten, 1868, with the original title-page, afterwards cancelled, ornamented by the vignette of Zamiel from the Book of Job; The Jubilee, The Question, Gathered Songs, all three published by Ottley in 1887, in editions of only twenty-five copies each. Among the Swinburne MSS. in the possession of Mr. Gosse are the holograph of Pan and Thalassia, and the holograph of the first draft of Anactoria.

* * * * *

The new Public Libraries Bill, which received the Royal Assent in the last days of 1919, should do much to assist the development of what is already an important educative force. We look forward in time to a national library system, with a central clearing house of books and a free interchange between the individual libraries. It is surely only in this way that the multifarious needs of an increasingly alert and well-educated society can adequately be met.

* * * * *

Tuesday, March 23rd, is the date fixed for the sale of the second portion of Mr. Henry Yates Thompson's collection of illuminated manuscripts. Thirty-four lots are to be sold--twenty-six MSS. and eight fifteenth-century books, printed on vellum and more or less illuminated, "which mark the transition from writing to printing ... and are an indispensable addition to any complete collection of medieval illumination."

* * * * *

The first fourteen lots are English manuscripts. A twelfth-century book, Hegesippus de excidio Judeorum, is remarkable for its contemporary binding, one of the very few of such bindings which have come down to us. Lot XL. is a fourteenth-century Psalter, which appears to have belonged to John of Gaunt, and subsequently to Henry VI. A similar Psalter, evidently by the same hand, though of a rather later date, exists in the library of Exeter College. These two Psalters are, in Mr. Yates Thompson's opinion, the high-water mark of English illumination, being perhaps second only to the St. Omer Psalter.

* * * * *

The eight printed books range in date from 1466 to 1498, and include a copy of the excessively rare Institutiones of Justinian, printed at Mainz by P. Schöffer, 1468. The twelve MSS. which conclude the sale are of French and Italian origin and have all belonged to famous owners. Among them is an early fifteenth-century MS. of Boccaccio's Des Cleres et nobles femmes, illustrated by miniatures of that Parisian school of illuminators who "almost renounced the use of gold for backgrounds and made use of bright and rich colours in broad masses." The book belonged to the Admiral de Coëtivy, who was killed at the siege of Cherbourg in 1450. Mr. Yates Thompson quotes an extract from one of the Admiral's letters, which proves him to have been an ardent lover of his books. "Envelopez bien mes livres," he writes to his servants, giving directions for the packing and dispatching of his library, "et les faites enfoncer en pippes (casks) en et par manière que s'ilz cheoient en l'eaue, qu'ilz ne se puissent mouller ne gaster en aucune manière."

* * * * *

ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES

An extremely elegant little catalogue of old editions of Greek and Latin authors has been sent to us from the "Aedes Dunsteri, Cantabrigiæ, Novang," or in other words the Dunster House Bookshop, Cambridge, Mass. No word in the vulgar tongue is allowed to pollute these classical pages, where everything, with the exception of the dollar sign in the prices, is the choicest Latin.

* * * * *

We have already had occasion to speak of the Daniel and other private Presses. We are reminded by Messrs. Maggs Brothers' catalogue, No. 385, of the magnificent examples of typography and binding which have issued from the Doves Press and Bindery. A copy of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, two volumes, 1902-1905, printed at the Doves Press and bound by Mr. Cobden Sanderson in tooled morocco, is priced at £120. None of the fifteen Doves Press books mentioned in this catalogue is priced at less than £8 8_s._ Collectors will remember the "boom" in Kelmscott books.

* * * * *

Good prices were fetched at Messrs. Hodgson's sale on January 28th for first editions of Stevenson. An Inland Voyage (1878) was sold for £22; Travels with a Donkey (1879) and Virginibus Puerisque (1881) went for £16 10_s._ each. First editions of the Ebb Tide (1894) and The Wrong Box (1889) may be bought for 12_s._ 6_d._ at Messrs. Davis & Orioli.

* * * * *

Messrs. Sotheran's catalogue of the library of the late Sir Edward Poynter, P.R.A., has just reached us. Out of the many items of the greatest interest which this catalogue contains we can mention only a few, notably a fine set of Piranesi etchings, a collection of 250 caricatures by such masters as Hogarth, Bunbury, Gilray, and Rowlandson (£75), a copy of Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, presented by Mrs. Opie to the French sculptor, David, with the inscription, "This work, remarkable both for its genius and extravagance, is the gift of Amelia Opie to her friend David, whose own genius will make him prize the former, while his excellent taste makes it impossible for him to imitate the latter." A complete set of the Kelmscott publications, seventy volumes in all, is priced in this catalogue at £900. The main bulk of the collection consists of books on the fine arts, and a certain number of original drawings are included.

A. L. H.

CORRESPONDENCE

AMERICAN COPYRIGHT

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--In the second number of THE LONDON MERCURY I note a reference in an Editorial Note to the status of the copyright relations between America and Great Britain.

You emphasize the unsatisfactory status of the American copyright law. It is the case, as you point out, that the provision inserted in the original International Act which went into effect in 1891, and in the amended Act which became law in 1909, makes it a condition that any book, whether by an American or an English author, must, in order to secure copyright protection in the United States, be published in an edition "wholly manufactured" within this country. It has also been the law up to within the past fortnight that the American edition must be brought into the market within a term of not less than sixty days from the date of publication in Great Britain.

This Act, as amended in 1912 and again in December, 1919, represents the largest measure of copyright protection that it has thus far been found practicable to secure for transatlantic authors. The fight to secure any measure of recognition for the property rights of foreign authors had continued from 1837 (when my father organised the first Copyright League) to 1891, when a provision for international copyright first found place in the American statute. I succeeded my father as the Secretary and executive of the International Copyright League.

As a representative of this League (which at that time comprised authors as well as publishers) I took to Washington in 1886 the draft of a Bill which, if enacted, would have enabled the United States to become a member of the Convention of Berne. After four years of effort with two successive Congresses, I was obliged to report to the Copyright League that there was no possibility of securing favourable attention for any international copyright measure that did not make provision for American manufacture.

The Book Manufacturing Union, comprising typesetters, printers, binders, etc., had made clear to Congress that they would block the enactment of any measure that did not include the manufacturing requirement. In this position they were supported by the other unions which had no direct interest in, and in fact no knowledge of, the matter at issue. The unions have, wisely, probably for their own interests, held increasingly to the policy of giving a general support to a claim made by any one union or group.

Our League took the position that it was wiser to secure such measure of recognition for literary property as was then practicable rather than to leave without protection the books of transatlantic authors, and the authors and publishers of Great Britain were in full accord with this decision.

We are obliged to report that the unions have to-day a stronger influence over Congress, and as a rule over the executive, than they had in 1890. There is no possibility of securing the cancellation of the manufacturing requirement unless, or until, the book manufacturing unions can be persuaded to give their assent. There has been an increasing effort to this end, and we hope yet to be able to make clear to the book manufacturing trade that the American printers and binders are now quite strong enough to secure their full share of the work done, and that they do not need this special restriction in their favour.

We have just succeeded in securing the enactment of an amendment, a copy of which is enclosed.

This amendment has two purposes:

First:--The extension of the ad interim term of copyright from sixty to 120 days.

An English author now has four months' time within which to complete the arrangements for his American edition, and there is no reason why any book having value for American readers should not secure the full protection of American copyright.

Second:--The Bill has the further purpose of giving protection to the books of transatlantic authors which, under the special conditions of the years of war and the dislocation of transatlantic mails, had failed to fulfil the requirements of the copyright law. These books, as far as they may not already have been appropriated, are now placed in a position to meet these requirements and to secure copyright for the full term. It is, however, a condition of this special protection that the British authorities shall give reciprocal protection to books by American authors which, under the same war conditions, have failed to meet the requirements of the English statute and have, therefore, forfeited the protection of the British Copyright Act.

The American authors have here a fair ground for complaint against Great Britain.

The British Act of 1912 provides that copyright protection will be accorded only to a book which has been brought into bona-fide publication, and the Courts take the ground that this means placing "adequate supplies" of the book in the market within the term specified, fourteen days. This term is, you will note, very much smaller than the sixty-day term granted in the earlier American Act, or the 120 days which are now available.

In 1916 books were included under the heading of luxuries, the importation of which into Great Britain was prohibited by the embargo Act. Great Britain had, therefore, granted copyright with one hand and with the other, under this embargo Act, had made it impossible for American authors to meet the requirements of the Copyright Act. The copyright arrangement between the United States and Great Britain that went into effect in 1891, and that was confirmed by the Act of 1912, carried with it the obligations of a treaty, and the embargo Act constituted, therefore, as far as copyright was concerned, a violation of the treaty obligation.

I found, in bringing this matter in 1918 to the attention of the Comptroller-General, that this consideration had not occurred to the British authorities at the time of the embargo Act.

I pointed out to the Comptroller-General that as a result of this embargo provision property rights had been lost not only for American authors, but for a certain group of British authors who, not being able under the manufacturing difficulties of the war period to secure prompt publication of their books in Great Britain, had made first publication in the United States. In so doing they had forfeited their British copyright, although it had been their impression that they would be able when the war had come to an end to secure protection for British editions. The Comptroller-General agreed that the condition was unsatisfactory, and agreed further that if the United States would do what was now practicable to protect the publications of the war period a similar protection of books of American authors would be arranged for by the British authorities.

A fortnight back, on the day on which the President signed the Bill, I cabled the report to the Comptroller-General that books by British authors issued during the war period would be protected in America as soon as the British authorities were prepared to grant reciprocal protection. I hope to hear that prompt measures have been taken to such effect. Lord Askwith has, I may mention, interested himself in the matter and will, I understand, take prompt action to initiate the necessary legislation.

I can but think that those who are critical of the present status of the American copyright law should understand that the unsatisfactory provisions in the law do not represent the opinion of the American people, but the disproportioned influence of the manufacturing unions. It would be in order also to give some measure of appreciation to the American publishers and authors who have for many years been doing what was in their power to secure adequate recognition for literary property on both sides of the Atlantic.--Yours, etc.,

GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM.

The American Publishers' Copyright League, Office of the Secretary, 2 West 45th Street, New York, January 3rd.

[Major Putnam's news, which we briefly recorded in our Editorial Notes last month, is excellent hearing. In congratulating him on his work in connection with copyright we must also mention the Authors' League of America and our own Authors' Society, with their respective indefatigable secretaries, Mr. Eric Schuler and Mr. G. Herbert Thring.--EDITOR.]

MR. STURGE MOORE AND FLAUBERT

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--In the review of Mr. W. K. Seymour's Miscellany of Poetry--1919 (LONDON MERCURY, February) the best thing in the book is said to be "a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his Micah so peculiarly rich a poem." This is, of course, a very just remark, but it is a curious thing about Micah that the particular piece of imagery which struck one reader at any rate can be paralleled almost verbatim from Salammbo. I intend no discourtesy to Mr. Sturge Moore when I say that I consider the parallel should have been acknowledged in the text. He has written much about Flaubert and much also about the virtues of joint authorship, and I think nothing but praise for what is apparently a verse translation in Micah would have resulted from the acknowledgment. As the matter stands it seems that an explanation of some sort is wanting, and I suggest that when Micah is published in a collection of Mr. Moore's poetry the point should surely not be overlooked.

The following are the lines referred to:

Salammbo:

"Le toit de la haute maison s'appuie sur de minces colonnettes, rapprochées comme les bâtons d'une claire-voie, et par ces intervalles le maître, étendu sur un long siége, aperçoit toutes ces plaines autour de lui, avec les chasseurs entre les blés, le pressoir où l'on vendange, les bœufs qui battent la paille."

Mr. Sturge Moore:

"The roof of that tall house lightly was raised On slender colonnettes set nigh as close As palings. Micah through these intervals Had oft at leisure from his couch surveyed The plain stretched round him; slingers in the corn The wine-press whither they bring in his grapes. Unmuzzled and well fed, slow oxen trod The terrace threshing-floor."

Yours, etc., H. W. CRUNDELL.

PROSE AND MORTALITY

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--There is a good example of the recurrence of that "one music and one speech" so richly instanced in your article "Prose and Mortality" (January's LONDON MERCURY) in Keats's letter to Brown written on board the Maria Crowther off the Isle of Wight--good because, though the music is not full nor the harmony flawless, it is yet heard unmistakably in a familiar letter, where it rises from the midst of an invalid's colloquial writing. Here it is:

"Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind I may say the bitterness of death is passed."--Yours, etc.,

S. P. J.

Llangollen, February 8th.

[This is a perfect example, as it comes not from a set composition but from a familiar letter.--EDITOR.]

TAMHTAB

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--There is an example of the "Moor Eeffocist" language which is not open to "A. P.'s" very just objection.

When I was very young and had a vivid imagination I was taken into a Chinese Restaurant, where I saw TUO YAW writ large on a glass door. For a long time I thought I knew at least two words of Chinese.--Yours, etc.,

DONALD J. WARDLEY.

25 Elgin Crescent, W.11, February 7th.

THE SONG OF THE MANDRAKE

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--Will you allow me to point out a curious slip in Mr. Walter de la Mare's most wonderful little story, The Creatures, in the current (January) number?

On page 281, eight lines from the bottom, he gives a list of birds--"Gull, mandrake, plover, wagtail, finch, robin." Does Mr. de la Mare really mean his readers to understand that the mandrake is a bird? If so, surely the root must cry aloud as it is dragged from the ground to be hurled into a different Natural Order.--Yours, etc.,

W. WALMESLEY WHITE.

Ellergarth, Budleigh Salterton, January 28th.

THE VERB TO DO

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--Will no one protest against and endeavour to check the ugly and quite unnecessary modernism of "as it does"? I give an example of a sentence, adequate and harmonious as written, which would be spoiled were the favourite journalese "as it does" inserted after the word "embracing."

"The glorious view from this spot, embracing the valley of Ville d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance, was a delight to Balzac."--Martin, Stones of Paris, II., 69.--Yours, etc.,

R. OWEN.

Belmount Hall, Outgate, Ambleside, January 12th.

JOHN DONNE

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--Mr. Robert Lynd in his very readable essay on Donne in your last number has inadvertently fallen into the old error of saying that Donne was in 1612 "making use of his legal knowledge in order to help the infamous Countess of Essex to secure the annulment of her first marriage." It is true that Donne wrote an Epithalamium for the Countess's second marriage, and that is mortifying enough without any further charge. But Professor Grierson pointed out some time since that it was Dr. Daniel Donne (or Dun) who drew up the paper referred to (Grierson's Donne, ii. 94). If further evidence were needed, it might be supplied from MS. Rawlinson 1386 in the Bodleian. On page 201 is the autograph Daniel Dun, and someone, probably Rawlinson, has added "Sr. Daniel Dr of Civil Lawes concern'd in Somerset's Divorce."

Mr. Lynd very rightly insists that John Donne is "the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets." But he implies that the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy is not quite consistent with Platonism. What is Platonism? It is customary to develop a system of philosophy of love from a few famous pages of the Symposium, ignoring the rest, and this more or less hypothetical or mythical Platonism has caused many people to forget Plato's real teaching. A careful study of the Symposium will, I think, show Donne to be much more truly in the genuine Platonic tradition than were some of the poetical Platonists who preceded him. Mr. Lynd is quite right on this point, and I think he might have put it even more strongly.--Yours, etc.,

BEN CROCKER CLOUGH.

Oxford, February 13th.

DOGS

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--Your reviewer in his notice of that interesting book Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish, referring to the "dog-whipper," says, "But why did the dogs of those days show such a church-going disposition?" I would remind him that the dog-whipper's office was not created in the seventeenth century, but in those remoter times when no gentleman appeared anywhere in public without his hawk on his wrist and his hound at his heel. In Barclay's Shippe of Fools (1509) he writes:

One time the hawkes bells jangleth hye

* * * * *

And now the houndes barking strikes the skye

* * * * *

They make of the Church for their hawkes a mewe, And canell for their dogges, which they shall after rewe.

It was the custom to supply a pew (or pen) for the dogs of the Lord of the Manor--the hall-dogs' "pew"--and as people worshipped (in their hats) with the church doors standing open, I suppose the hounds of the lesser gentry and inimitative yeomen would run in and fight and distract attention.

Though in the seventeenth century the hawk had ceased to be an integral part of a gentleman's equipage, the dogs had inherited the tradition of taking their masters to church, maybe. And as the worshipper, even in the seventeenth century, went from Divine service to a bull or bear-baiting, he would like to have his dogs on the spot. And no doubt all the curs of the village would want to follow them into church and ask the news of high life.--Yours, etc.,

G. I. WHITHAM.

Lyneham Cottage, Chudleigh, S. Devon, February 13th.

LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.

THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES

Interest in the Near East is maintained, and a useful lead was given in 1913 by the Cyprus Government, who entrusted Professor Myres, assisted by the Keeper of the Cyprus Museum and Mr. L. H. D. Buxton, with a good round sum to conduct excavations in the island. The results were described at length and illustrated on the screen, the most notable discovery being a ruined sanctuary containing a collection of stone statues with many of the painted surfaces in brilliant preservation, ranging in date from the seventh century B.C. to Greco-Roman times. Elsewhere many antiquities of the Bronze Age were brought to light, but at present there are few, if any, traces of a Stone Age in the island. The first stratified series of Cypriote pottery was provided by a complete section of the Bamboula Hill at Larnaca, and the situation is full of promise.

A marble statuette, now in the Ashmolean Museum, was the text of Professor Langdon's discourse, and gave scope for surmise as well as scholarship. It was found by the 14th Sikh Regiment when entrenching before the battle of Istabalat, eight miles below Samara on the Tigris. The object originally carried on the head has disappeared, but the standing figure still holds a "boomerang" or sceptre, and the dress was made in imitation of the fleece, a fashion to which Aristophanes is supposed to refer in the Wasps, perhaps three thousand years later. Various prehistoric specimens from England exhibited to the Society have an interest of their own, but cannot compete with relics from the cradle of civilisation, and at present the watch-word is Ex oriente lux.

THE EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND

The third of a series of lectures arranged by the Egypt Exploration Fund (to which we referred in our December number) was given at the rooms of the Royal Society at Burlington House on January 23rd, by Professor T. Eric Peet. The subject of the lecture was "El Amarna, the City of Egypt's Heretic King." The lecturer said that from the evidence of the mummy generally supposed to be his, Amenhotep IV. appears to have been little more than a boy when his father died. Nevertheless, as early as the fourth year of his reign, he introduced the worship of the Aton, the Disk of the Sun, and did his utmost to establish it as the State religion, and to suppress the worship of Amon and all other Egyptian gods. The new religion was purely monotheistic in character, for the Aton was regarded as the creator, not of Egypt only, but of the world. The new deity was represented in the art of the period by a picture of the disk of the sun, from which emanated numerous rays, each terminating in human hands, some of which are holding out the sign of life to the worshippers. The king changed his own name from Amenhotep ("Amon is content") to Akhenaton ("The Disk is pleased"), and he shifted his capital from Thebes to El Amarna.

Excavations at El Amarna have brought to light remains of a temple dedicated to the Aton, and a palace erected for the use of the king, with beautifully painted floor, fragments of which show a freedom of drawing and lack of convention which distinguish this period from most other Egyptian art. The remains of many private houses have also been discovered, and from these it is comparatively easy to gather the size, design, and general construction of the houses of the nobles of that time. Most of them seem to have been built on the same plan, and comprise a central hall, with small apartments surrounding and leading from it. Some of these smaller rooms were used as workrooms, and in one house excavated a number of plaster casts were found, obviously taken from living models, proving that the Egyptians of this period were experts in this work. There were also many finished and unfinished statues of the Royal family, some of which were in very natural positions, quite unlike the usual Egyptian statues of other sites.

The tombs of the officials of the Court were discovered in the cliffs behind the town, their walls being covered with sculptured scenes depicting the everyday life of the capital.

At the close of the lecture the Chairman, Colonel H. G. Lyons, F.R.S., pointed out the extreme importance of systematic and scientific excavations in Egypt and other countries, and the gains which might accrue to science.

THE GEOLOGISTS' ASSOCIATION

At the meeting held at University College, Gower Street, W.C.1, on Friday, December 5th, 1919, the following lecture was delivered: "Geological Work on the Western Front," by W. B. R. King, B.A., F.G.S. A short description was given of the geology of that part of Belgium and France over which military operations were conducted by the British Armies between 1915 and the summer of 1918. It was mainly confined to the lithological divisions and did not deal with the palæontological side of the subject. The main physical features were taken, showing how they are connected with the geological structure. The effect of the geology and geological structure on certain questions of military operations was dealt with, notably with regard to water supply and military mining and dug-out construction. Particular attention was paid to the problem of obtaining water from boreholes in the Landenien (Thanet) sands, the causes and effect of the seasonal variation of water-level in the chalk, and the problem of the military mines near Messines, Givenchy-les-la-Bassée, and Souchez. The lecture ended with a description of certain maps which were prepared for the armies in France, and notes on several other problems which had to be dealt with by the geologists attached to General Headquarters.

On Friday, January 2nd, 1920, Dr. A. E. Trueman, F.G.S., read a paper on "The Liassic Rocks of the Cardiff District." The author said that the greater part of South Glamorganshire, from Cardiff westwards to beyond Bridgend, consists of lower Liassic rocks (Hettangian and Lower Sinemurian), which are well seen in some 20 miles of magnificent cliff sections. Only meagre descriptions of these rocks have been hitherto published. A detailed study has been undertaken, first because nowhere else in this country are such continuous sections of these rocks available, and, secondly, because the normal deposits consisting of limestones and shales seen near Cardiff, when traced westwards, pass into a littoral facies of massive limestones and conglomerates. In the present communication an account of the normal Liassic rocks of the Cardiff district is given, as this will form a basis for the correlation of the modified deposits further west. The lecture was illustrated by lantern-slides and specimens.

THE MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

The January number of the Bulletin of the Modern Humanities Research Association contains a summary of the Presidential Address delivered in October, 1919, by M. Gustave Lanson, the famous French scholar and critic. The Association, which, though founded only in June, 1918, numbers nearly 500 members, is now penetrating to some of the remoter quarters of the globe; among the last candidates to be elected were some from Czecho-Slovakia, the Malay States, New Zealand, and Western Canada, and most of these were at once put into touch with members at home belonging to subject groups representing their particular interests. The Hon. Secretary (Mr. E. Allison Peers, 24 Beaufort Road, Kingston-on-Thames) writes in the Bulletin of proposals submitted to the Association that it should produce a comprehensive Bibliographical Annual, a task which a body with so wide a membership seems peculiarly fitted to attempt.

The Modern Humanities Research Association is fulfilling another obligation which rests upon all who speak the English language in its efforts to bridge the Atlantic and unite those on both sides who are engaged in higher studies in Modern Languages and Literatures. Its membership is growing in the United States so rapidly that an American Secretary (Professor M. Blakemore Evans, of the Ohio State University) has been appointed. At its most recent London meeting, on January 6th, too, Professor Carleton Brown, of Minnesota, was among the speakers on "Conditions of Postgraduate Study." Such interchange of help and information as the Association brings about between England and America can have none but good effects.

Among the Vice-Presidents of the Association, prominent names are those of Sir Sidney Lee (its first President), Dr. Walter Leaf, Sir A. W. Ward, M. Jusserand, Signor Farinelli, Professor Jespersen, Professor Oliver Emerson, and Sr. Menéndez Pidal.

THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY

At the January meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society the Rev. E. A. Sydenham read a paper on the "Coinages of Augustus." He began by giving a chronological summary of the various series and groups of coins under Augustus. There were seven species of mints: (a) the Senatorial Mint of Rome; (b) Military Mints; (c) Mints in Senatorial Provinces; (d) Mints in Imperial Provinces; (e) Autonomous Mints (issuing bronze only); (f) the "Imperatorial Mint"; (g) the Imperial Mint. After brief notes on the Senatorial Mint (43-36 B.C.), the military coinage of Octavius in Gaul and Italy (41-39 B.C.), incidentally attributing the S.C. coins to camp mints of Northern Italy, Mr. Sydenham proceeded to discuss the Asiatic coinages (28-15 B.C.) and the Imperatorial Mint (21-15 B.C.). Besides coins generally attributed to Asiatic mints the reader proposed to give the undated silver and gold with CAESAR DIVI F to Asia rather than Rome, and criticised Laffranchi's attribution of certain coins to Phrygia and Gabrici's to Athens. The CA bronze coins he attributed to Asia reading the CA as Commune Asiæ. The coins attributed to the "Imperatorial" Mint are very distinctive in style and were probably issued under direct control of Augustus. These coins had been attributed by Grueber to Rome and by Laffranchi to Spain. Mr. Sydenham gave cogent arguments against these views and added reasons for considering them a distinct Imperatorial issue. A theory on which a good deal of the argument turns is that in 28 B.C. Augustus made a formal surrender of his triumviral office and the extraordinary powers pertaining to it. Included in the powers was probably the right of coinage. The surrender of this right was merely an act of policy which Augustus did not regard as permanently binding. But he held to it to this extent that for five or six years he issued no coins of any sort on his own authority, and even down to the end of his reign he issued no coins in Rome. After an experimental coinage through P. Carisius in Spain (24-22 B.C.) he inaugurated his "Imperatorial" Mint, but confined its operations to the provinces. Finally he fixed the Imperial Mint at Lugdunum (14 B.C.).

THE SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS OF LONDON

The Society of Genealogists of London is collecting lists of books, articles, deeds, MSS., and documents generally in reference to specific families and places. It has many such lists and references to documents, as well as collections of documents themselves, and wishes to add to them to facilitate research. Readers kindly supplying such lists, long or short, are assured that they are filed at once by the Society in such a manner that they are immediately available for reference. An excellent example of the form such lists might take is provided in Mr. Walter Rye's Norfolk Topography. Communications should be addressed to 5 Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1.

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

POETRY

MANSOUL, OR THE RIDDLE OF THE WORLD. By CHARLES M. DOUGHTY. Selwyn & Blount. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

We imagine that there is no difference of opinion, amongst those who have read it, about Mr. Doughty's prose book, now a generation old, Wanderings in Arabia Deserta. It was one of the great prose works of the nineteenth century, a book which (the geographers assure us) was astonishingly accurate as a record of exploration, and which repeatedly soared into passages of description and meditation unsurpassed for muscularity and grandeur. Even that book, however, was the work of a man odd in temperament and outlook and possessing peculiar ideas as to the use of the English language. In the volumes of poetry which he has been producing so rapidly in his old age his eccentricities have been projected very much farther. We should not be surprised to hear that he had never read (barring perhaps Shakespeare and Milton) any poet later than Spenser; we are certain that he habitually reads no one later than Spenser, and the poet with whom a comparison most frequently leaps to the mind is someone earlier still, namely, Langland. There are those, a very few, who swallow Mr. Doughty whole, who enjoy his archaisms, real and "pseudo," who think The Dawn in Britain the greatest poetical work of our time, and will hear nothing against even the topical passages of his poem about the German war. There are more who find him frankly unreadable in bulk, but are willing to turn over his pages for the sake of the occasionally lovely passages of description that they find on them; whilst the average intelligent reader would probably run from any page of any of his poetical works, so stony is the way that the disciple must tread and so vigorous the discipline to which he must subject himself.

For ourselves, we read Mr. Doughty through as in duty bound, and we perceive even in his knottiest and even in his naïvest passages the workings of a powerful and original mind, the observations of an eye which looks at history and the material world as though they had never been looked at before, the strivings of a heart that has always been acutely aware of the world behind the seen. Nevertheless, not even this compensates us fully for a cumbrousness of style, a malformation of shape, and a guttural obscurity of speech hard to equal in all the annals of literature; and we are, we fear, to be most sympathetic to that second class of readers who look to Mr. Doughty only for occasional flowers and remember, out of all they have read of his, only stray images, as of a shepherd on a hill or swallows circling over the fresh meadows in the dawn of the world. Mansoul is all of a piece with the others; we almost think that in a few months it will, in our own memories, have amalgamated with the others. It opens in the familiar mode, the "grand manner," but just a little awry:

As chanced I sate on terrace of an house, In summer season, after sickness past; And fell, surprised my sense, into deep trance; Wherein meseemed, much musing in my thought, I cogitations heard, of many hearts; That came and went, in MANTOWN'S market-place Whereon I looked. And in my spirit I asked; What were indeed right paths of a man's feet; That lacking light, wont stumble in world's murk.

There can be heard the grave voice, there seen the something like majesty of port, there noticed a little of Mr. Doughty's obscurity and some of his, we daresay even unconscious, fads such as the avoidance of particles and the refusal to use the apostrophe 's. Thus it continues for two hundred pages of contortion and clouds with flashes of sunshine coming through them. At one moment we are wondering why on earth Mr. Doughty should call Tigris and Euphrates "Digla" and "Frat" if he has to translate these terms in a footnote; at another we are giving up an unusually dark passage in despair; at another we are wondering whether perhaps his best things do not actually gain something from the mannerisms that normally make our heads ache. The narrative is very hard to follow. The singer, accompanied by Mansoul and one Minimus, peregrinates through the under world, surveys past civilisations, and converses with (amongst others) Nebo, Zoroaster, Socrates, and St. Stephen. The Kaiser (we conceive) is, in anticipation, interviewed:

One crowned, cast lately down unto this place

a Warmonger and a coxcomb whose "werewolfs face" is now blotted by "a loathly leprosy"; and there is a pagan to the soul of all things at the end, the Muse of Britain and Colin (presumed Spenser) being intermittently in mind throughout. Yet at any time Mr. Doughty is liable to break, without the least awareness of writing a purple patch, into a packed passage full of feeling and sweet to the memory. Take one such:

I stayed, where pleasant grassy holms depart; Those streaming waters, bordered all along; With daphne and willow herb, sweep sedge, laughing robin; With woodbind garlanded and sweet eglantine, And azure-hewed in creeky shallows still Forget-me-nots lift our frail thoughts to heaven. Broods o'er those thymy eyots drowsy hum; Bourdon of glistering bees, in mails of gold. Labouring from sweet to sweet, in the long hours Of sunny heat; they sound their shrill small clarions. And hurl by booming doors, gross bee-fly kin; (Broadgirded, diverse hewed, in their long pelts;) That solitary, whiles there light endureth, In summer skies, each becking clover-tuft haunt.

We do not think that Mr. Doughty should be ignored by anyone who wishes to be familiar with all the good work done in poetry in our time. But, in recommending him, we warn readers that they should approach him almost as they would approach Piers Plowman itself; Chaucer is distinctly more easy and modern.

IMAGES OF WAR. By RICHARD ALDINGTON. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

WORMS AND EPITAPHS. By H. W. GARROD. Blackwell. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

The first of these small books seems to have been written on active service, the second on return to Oxford after active service. That Mr. Richard Aldington's verse should have a larger content than before is natural; his pre-war verse, to the non-Imagist eye, consisted largely of sweet nothings starred with Greek names. We have here emotional experiences of a less tenuous kind; the poet is coming nearer a comprehension of Keats' remark that poets should express what all men feel. This in Trench Idyll, Time's Changes, Reverie, and other poems he does; and sometimes he conveys the emotion through the medium of a careful picture, as clear in its way as one of Mr. Kennington's drawings. Here is Picket:

Dusk and deep silence ... Three soldiers huddled on a bench Over a red-hot brazier, And a fourth who stands apart Watching the cold rainy dawn.

Then the familiar sound of birds-- Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks, Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches, And over all the lark Outpiercing even the robin....

Wearily the sentry moves Muttering the one word: "Peace."

Here there is more of a rhythm than usual. But the defect of Mr. Aldington and his Imagist friends is that, although they are quite right, though not original, in emphasising the need for concrete language, they do for the most part lack that rhythm that makes poetry what it is and rememberable. It is not that they write in free verse. Rhyme is no necessary part of verse, and nobody in the world ever contended that all the lines of a poem should be of standard lengths. But a poem in free verse--it is this which chiefly distinguishes Whitman's good from his bad poems--should have a continuous rhythm other than that of prose, and will have it if it is written by a man who is strongly moved and has the gift of musical expression. Mr. Aldington may have that gift, but if so he represses it.

Mr. Garrod's volume bears a picture of a graveyard: therein the tombstones of Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour, Lords Haldane, Northcliffe and Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Carson. This looks sweeping, but on reference to his epigrammatic epitaphs, one finds that he admires the Old "Gang" and deplores the New. His verses are neat but slight. The best are those on Rupert Brooke, on the new invaders of Oxford who vainly attempt to emulate the dead, and on Reconstruction:

O soon you'll build the world again With other and with better men; And I and plenty more will sit, And sit, and see you doing it. In a large West-end hotel Rich non-combatants will dwell; Well-paid hands will ply the art Of binding up the broken heart, A special sub-department deal With the wounds that never heal, Deputy-Controllers pour Government oil on every sore, And a civilian Soldier's Friend Furnish us forms world-without-end God! does a man like me want tape? I've wounds, man, here, that gape, that gape.

We note that Lord Derby is described as vir teres atque rotundus.

SELECTED POEMS. By LADY MARGARET SACKVILLE. Constable. 6_s._ net.

VERSES. By VIOLA MEYNELL. Secker. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, in a lively introduction to the first of these volumes--in the course of which he suggests, provocatively, that blank verse is merely "a dignified kind of prose, pompous in recitation and for common reading dull"--says that "Lady Margaret Sackville is the best, in my opinion, of our English poetesses, at least of the younger generation." It is a good thing that he added the qualification, for, apart from the fact that Mrs. Woods has written poems better than anything that Lady Margaret has yet done, there is Mrs. Meynell, whose too exiguous volume of verse competes for quality with the best work of her generation. If there are scarcely any more exceptions to make we feel that the deduction is that women are at present doing very little in poetry, though there are vast numbers of them who write it. In the Victorian age when Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Browning, both of whom did immortal work, were writing together there was a general impression that these were the first fruits of women's emancipation and that future ages would see women becoming more and more prominent in poetry. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the fact that, at a time when an unusually large number of young men are writing sincerely and strongly, not one young poetess should have won prominence has now led to a general opinion that the peculiar qualities of passion and thought that make poets are, and will always be, more normal in men than in women. Lady Margaret Sackville has a reasonable technical equipment: a fair vocabulary, facility with metre. She never says quite stupid things, she sometimes says pretty things, and at times (as in her war poems) she reveals a certain depth of feeling. But usually she is first and foremost derivative; sometimes from Swinburne direct, more often generally derivative. You feel that she is giving a thin version of something else, even when you cannot say exactly what; and her poems, whether dramatic poems about Dionysus and Pan, or dreams, streams, Springs and things, are just saved from being ordinary verse by the fact that she has a brain and a heart which infuse the bare minimum of reality into them. The only things to be said in her favour is that she is young and that her latest verses are her best.

Something of what we lack in Lady Margaret is present, if intermittently, in the small, charmingly-produced book by Miss Viola Meynell. Her work is uneven, and her handling sometimes awkward, but she has, sometimes, force; she sees vividly, thinks strongly, feels strongly, imagines strongly. The point of view of the whale that swallowed strongly was a remarkable thing to try to adopt, but her poem on this subject, despite a weak ending, contains verses with more bite in them than any in Lady Margaret's book; if she has read Donne she has not read him to her hurt. The Maid in the Rice Fields is charming, and Poppy-seeds sent from the East is more than that:

Travelled here in winter sleep The young wild Eastern poppies keep Their eyelids closed. They nothing know Where is this land they lie in now.

The opening is delightful, and the theme is developed with craft and passion.

DUCKS AND OTHER VERSES. By F. W. HARVEY. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3_s._ net.

Mr. Harvey's first book, A Gloucestershire Lad, appeared when he was in France; his second when he was a prisoner in Germany; this is his third. The sequence has been too rapid to show much development; both his merits and his faults are what they were. He is only occasionally a good workman, and he has not yet succeeded in getting himself naturally and forcibly into his work. This is explicable. He loves his country; he wants to celebrate the old traditional simplicities of a healthy country life and (as propagandist) to restore what we have lost of them; he stands, he says, for Romance, Laughter, and the capacity for innocent Wonder. There is no pretence about this, but when a man feels that he must defend the natural there is comprehensibly an air of awkwardness and self-consciousness about him. The drinking-songs (Mr. Harvey also praises ale) of modern singers are examples: the roysterers always have an eye on the neighbouring teetotaller who they know is watching them and whose opposed philosophy they wish to unseat in the affections of their fellows. Mr. Harvey is best when he is forgetting the general principles for which he stands and simply enjoying himself; and the superiority of his more whimsical verses suggests that his bent, like that of Mr. Graves (with whom he has much else in common), lies more in that direction than towards large utterance or solemnity. The title of his book suggests that he realises this: the poem from which it is taken is certainly his most successful. It is really a close study of ducks made with infinite relish of their quaintness:

From troubles of the world I turn to ducks, Beautiful comical things, Sleeping or curled, Their heads beneath white wings By water cool. Or finding curious things To eat in various mucks Beneath the pool, Tail uppermost, or waddling Sailor-like on the shores Of ponds, or paddling.

He sketches the main outlines of a duck's varied life by barn, stable, and stack:

They wander at their will, But if you go too near They look at you through black Small topaz-tinted eyes And wish you ill.

On the whole, he thinks the duck was the best of God's jokes:

And he's probably laughing still at the sound that came out of his bill.

Of the more serious poems some are a trifle stale; the glorification of one's county, with place-names rhymed, might be given a rest. Requiescat is a moving poem, and the tenuity and familiarity of the idea does not prevent Song from lingering in the memory more than anything else in the volume:

Sweetness of birdsong shall fall upon my heart, Shall fall upon my heart; Nor will I strive to mimic The beauty that I find, But lie in a dream and open wide my heart And let the song of the birds sink down into my mind.

This song is all of a piece, a musical sigh.

NOVELS

THE CLINTONS AND OTHERS. By ARCHIBALD MARSHALL. Collins. 7_s._ net.

PETER JACKSON, CIGAR MERCHANT. By GILBERT FRANKAU. Hutchinson. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

PRELUDE. By BEVERLEY NICHOLS. Chatto & Windus. 7_s._ net.

LIMBO. By ALDOUS HUXLEY. Chatto & Windus. 5_s._ net.

Mr. Archibald Marshall is, we dare to say, one of the good writers most neglected by contemporary critics. He has brought nothing new to the development of the novel. If a general description were necessary, he might be most briefly and accurately classified as a descendant of Anthony Trollope. But his talent in his own generation is unique; and no person who enjoys or studies the fiction of this age can afford to neglect it. In some ways his latest volume is the climax of his performance and displays at their height his peculiar method and gifts. It consists of six stories. One, perhaps the least interesting, describes how John Clinton, a prosperous city merchant in the time of the Regency, rescued the family estates from his elder brother, the prodigal Beau Clinton. The second deals with a scientific peer, innocent and absorbed, who very nearly married a woman scientist, of origin much lower than his own, who was attracted to him only by his wealth and position. The hero of the third is a speculative builder. The fifth narrates the misfortunes of a patient and gentle clerk. The sixth is a story of old Squire Clinton's reactions to the war and of how he was reconciled to the different reactions of those about him. The fourth, which we have removed from its place, tells how Ann Sinclair, a day-pupil at Miss Sutor's school, was sent to Coventry by her companions because she was unjustly suspected of having damaged in malice Mary Polegate's illuminated chart of the kings of Juda and Israel. This is the longest story in the book, occupying over one hundred pages. The principal characters are all school-girls of various ages, and no extraneous interests are introduced. It seems almost impossible with this material to hold a reader's keen attention for twenty odd thousand words, and yet this is what Mr. Marshall has done. All the persons are vividly alive and convincing; and there is a whole range of them, each individualised and given a real personality. The story is an especially good example of what Mr. Marshall can do and how he does it. His narrative is extraordinarily quiet and unemphasised, and shows by its restraint the author's complete confidence in the interest of his subject and in the adequacy of his method. In all these tales events more or less moving take place or are referred to; but the teller never raises his voice or gesticulates. He has no tricks. His characters reveal themselves in speech or action; but if they do not he has no modern prejudices against telling the reader what are their motives and what is going on in their minds. His explanations are so quiet and so straightforward that they immediately carry conviction. When old Squire Clinton was passing through Paris with his daughter to see her husband, wounded and interned in Switzerland, he was displeased that his other daughter should take them to lunch in a restaurant:

He would not have objected to exactly the same meal served in her apartment. He would have eaten and drunk whatever had been set before him, and enjoyed it in spite of his always strongly expressed preference for English food and English cooking. The wine he might have noticed and commented on, because he knew about wines, and because you pleased your host by approving of his taste in them. But this ordering of your meal in public, in consultation with your guests, with a maître d'hôtel standing at your elbow and booking your orders, not without advice of his own, struck him as very like taking part in a mistress's consultation with her servants--almost an indecency. The restaurant habit was, in fact, entirely unknown to him. In his expansive youth it had been unheard of. The nearest he had ever come to it had been in giving luncheons or dinners at one of his clubs--meals as elaborate as this and as carefully arranged, but arranged beforehand, so that the guests should get the right flavour of hospitality, and accept the good things set before them as they would have accepted them at his own table. Neither Joan nor Nancy divined that half his displeasure, which he could not hide, was at being obliged, under Inverell's hospitable pressure, to express his preference for this or that luxury, with the price of it staring him in the face on the menu, when indulgence in any sort of luxury was so far from his mood.

So delicate and exact and truthful is this delineation of a small tract in the old man's character that it would be almost possible to reconstruct the whole without any other guide, as is done in the case of louder roaring monsters than Mr. Marshall's creations.

Mr. Gilbert Frankau's Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, presents a curious contrast to the method of Mr. Marshall. Mr. Marshall's virtues are so quiet and unobtrusive that it is possible to overlook them altogether. Mr. Frankau's defects are so vociferous that they tend to obscure his real merits. He paints in violent colours. He paints his sentimental passages with a yard broom. His style, as Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed of somebody else, is such that even in Carmelite Street the sub-editors would yearn to correct it. He has almost entirely eliminated the conjunction from his own version of the English language: the "ands" and "buts" omitted from this book would, if they were restored, increase its length by a hundred pages or so. Their absence gives the reader the impression that Mr. Frankau is in an enormous hurry and is very short of breath. All these defects are closely woven into the texture of one of the most strident novels ever written; and it is quite impossible to escape from them. Nevertheless this tale of a business man who became a gunner is one of the most lively and credible pictures of the war which we have yet had. It matters little in the end that, whether he is describing the purchase of a cigarette-factory or a love-scene or the battle of the Somme, the author scores exclusively for brass and big drums. This method certainly eliminates the love-scene, but it is not inappropriate to the other subjects; and in his accounts both of war and of business Mr. Frankau produces a huge, crowded chaotic picture which stuns and bewilders the reader, but at the same time convinces him that he is seeing at least one aspect of the truth. Mr. Frankau's high level of verisimilitude and interest in such passages as the description of the Battle of Loos depends to a very great extent on his peculiar power of packing much detail into a small space; and it is to this perhaps that we owe the somewhat regrettable lack of "the smaller parts of speech."

Mr. Beverley Nichols's book is another of the triumphs of precocity--a novel describing the Public School system by a writer with very recent experience of it. And, like other novels on this subject, it is a novel with a thesis. Mr. Nichols is far from disapproving of the system. He sets out, on the other hand, to show that it is capable of receiving and making comfortable the most eccentric of boys if he will only make the least effort of adjustment to his environment that can be reasonably expected of a human being in any circumstances. His hero, Paul Trevelyan, has in an extreme form all the characteristics of the heroes of such books. He has been coddled, he has unusual tastes, he cares nothing for games. But, very refreshingly, Mr. Nichols treats with a firm hand both his characteristics and his sufferings. Paul undergoes just such discomforts as are required to rid him of effeminacy and priggishness, and mould him into a boy capable of taking a place in human society with satisfaction to himself and his companions. The thesis of the book appears to be that the Public School system does not necessarily deprive those who come under it of their individuality, does not necessarily crush or torture those who depart from the normal, does act as a civilising agent on those who are in need of it. As a piece of evidence, the book is interesting and useful. As a novel it is less remarkable than Mr. Waugh's Loom of Youth. That book was not only a contribution to a dispute; it was also a work of fiction astonishingly well put together for its author's years and experience. Its characters and many of its incidents were extremely well observed and drawn. Mr. Nichols fails as a writer of fiction. His characters are vague and unconvincing: they have no fundamental individuality. The construction of his novel is extremely loose and uneven; and the passages of reflection are introduced with a very clumsy hand. Whether he will succeed in correcting these faults it is impossible to predict; but he clearly has gifts which ought to come to something. Precocity in the things he lacks is not always a certain indication of success in maturity.

Mr. Huxley, alone among these writers, betrays traces of exotic influence. The last story in his book, The Death of Lully, might have come from the Contes Cruels, perhaps, in one way, has come thence. Others of the collection show less definite resemblances to French models and are less evenly and carefully composed; but there are in most of them traces of an alien exactitude and an alien wit. Mr. Huxley, as we know already from his verse, can write brilliantly. His defect here, as there, lies in a deficiency of feeling caused by an excess of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness does not make him awkward or effusive. He is far too clever to betray it thus rudely. As in the behaviour of some persons, it manifests itself in his work by an iron rigidity of attitude, an immovable equability of tone. When he invents characters he does not so much describe their actions or let them act as criticise them; he is led to adopt the pose of the satirist more consistently than perhaps he intends. Reaction follows fast on action; and the springs of his writing are laid bare in an extraordinarily ingenious dialogue, called Happy Families, where he exposes the triple personalities, inciting, betraying, checking one another, of a young man and a young woman sitting out together at a dance. This piece, which seems to have unnecessarily puzzled a number of Mr. Huxley's critics, means nothing if it does not express his opinion that in every human being there is a stratum of the animal which is to be distrusted and restrained. But, here and elsewhere, one wonders whether his watchfulness over this stratum has not led him into exaggerating its extent and distrusting things which, to a less suspicious eye, do not look in the least like it. And in another story, so fast are his reactions, we find him mocking the shuddering and ascetic revulsion from the purely animal in man. This is the behaviour not merely of the critic dominant over the artist, but of the critic who leads towards Nihilism by discrediting all human impulses, instead of arranging them in order. Mr. Huxley has, however, too much of the poet for this to be fundamental in him, too much appreciation of bright and vivid things and bright and vivid phrases. And it would be gravely unjust to convey the impression that it spoils his book. The Farcical History of Richard Greenow is an admirable invention, full of possibilities for bitter comedy, most, if not all, of which have been worked out; Cynthia is a good joke, though its title betrays the climax a little too early; and The Bookshop is more human in feeling than its companions. But the important point to notice is that, whatever may be the perversities or the affectations of his thought, Mr. Huxley always writes well, with a style that is never shabby or shoddy, never flamboyant or flat.

BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM

THE MEASURES OF THE POETS. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 5_s._ net.

A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE'S VERSIFICATION. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 16_s._ net.

LESSONS IN VERSE-CRAFT. By S. GERTRUDE FORD. Daniel. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Bayfield's Measures of the Poets is meant to be revolutionary. He finds existing systems of prosody neither complete nor sound, and would sweep them away in order to install his own trochaic scheme. Practically every work of a predecessor is ignored, and the author himself regrets that Lanier's Science of English Verse, published forty years ago, did not come to his notice until the present book was written. He does not mention Professor Saintsbury's History or Manual of English Prosody, nor (among other writings, by recent or living metrists) the essays of Patmore and Mr. Robert Bridges. A great deal of contention is thus avoided, but the probabilities of conversion are also reduced. He asserts that the normal foot of English verse is trochaic, and that the iambus cannot form a metrical foot, because the stressed syllable does not come first; while Professor Saintsbury declares that the iambic is the staple foot of English verse and is common to almost all prosodies.

How, then, let us ask the challenger, is the application of the trochaic system justified? In Mr. Bayfield's scheme the plain norm of the "full blank" verse line is an eleven-syllable arrangement of which the first is a "short," followed by five trochees; and the following line (quoted in his second book, which takes up the subject anew) is given as specimen:

I ⁝ come to | bury | Cæsar, | not to | praise him.‖

But the full line does not happen to be the common form, owing to its feminine ending, and so he admits that the prevailing type is the "checked" form:

To ⁝ sleep; per | chance to | dream: ay | there's the | rub.∧‖

The anacrusis or up-beat, marked off by ⁝, is an integral part of the new system; in reality it is the device by which the author changes iambic to trochaic movement. Here, indeed, is the crucial point of the dispute between iambic and trochaic. Under the first, this up-beat or take-off is neither very frequent nor very rare; under the second, it is common. Mr. Bayfield's idiosyncratic use of it is illustrated by himself thus:

My ⁝ heart | aches, and a | drowsy numbness pains,

and--

Or emptied some dull | opiate | to the drains,

and by--

But ⁝ being too | happy in thine happiness;

the reader being left to discover for himself the reason for the difference of prosodic interpretation. If the ear should be satisfied with this difference (and Mr. Bayfield admits that the ear is judge and jury), what might its verdict be as to the validity of a double up-beat, leaving only semi-syllables for the rest of the line?

And thy ⁝ mouth | shúddering | like a | shót | bírd.‖

Here let it be remarked that his system acknowledges monosyllabic feet, but he is not well informed in denying them a place in the iambic system. He complains of "ragtime scansions," in referring to the fact that the iambic system admits trochees whenever it would break down by refusing them, and seems to deplore a resulting loss of "continuity of rhythm." Yet he himself does not scruple to write of one of his own illustrations: "A striking contrast in rhythm may be noted here. That of the first line and a half ... is markedly trochaic; the other line and a half fall into an equally marked iambic rhythm." He has not, in fact, escaped from the difficulties and inconsistencies which beset the prosodist. He does little more than prove that the music of the poets cannot be defeated or disguised by either system. He gives this as containing a quinquesyllabic foot:

Well, ∧ | Juliet, I will | lie with thee to-night,

and dubiously suggests "hire" as a disyllable in:

And ⁝ hire | post-horses; | I will hence to-night.

He is aware that an alternative scansion may in some cases be correct, but does not sufficiently realise that any prosodic system is but an artificiality, formed to explain, and not dictate, the infinitely variable rhythms of poetry. His own particular system, for all its ingenuities, appears more artificial and arbitrary than the iambic. It is interesting to note that his examples are largely drawn from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, all fruitful ground; while Milton and Coleridge, Campion and Keats are much less used or left alone altogether. Might not these fascinating and delusive excursions into the mysteries of rhythm be extended to certain living poets--at least to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Bridges?

Shakespeare's Versification is a larger book, in which Mr. Bayfield inquires into the validity of the early texts. His purpose is:

First to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure and characteristic features of his dramatic verse, the essential principles of which appear to have been wholly misconceived hitherto, and secondly to show that there are many thousands of lines of it that are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to be delivered, but clipped and trimmed to a featureless uniformity that he would have abhorred.

He finds in Antony and Cleopatra the ideal of verse at which Shakespeare was always aiming, and denounces the depravity of the text as it stands--in this as in many other of the plays. The book has a cumulative, even a dramatic interest, for setting out to prove one thing, Mr. Bayfield frankly ends by proving another. With immense care and patience he has examined and compared Quartos and First Folio, and noted quite innumerable places at which the contraction and condensation of words and lines have distorted or ruined the rhythm; and he contends that if the verse is to be presented as the author meant it to be delivered, these must be expanded into their full forms. He begins by considering Shakespeare's use of the "resolved" foot--that is, a foot of more than two syllables--and discovers a constant tendency to reduce these "resolutions" by abbreviation; the result being, for example, that violent becomes vi'lent, desolate des'late, Demetrius Demetr'us, etc. He contends that from the outset Shakespeare employed resolved rhythms more freely than his contemporaries, and gradually increased the proportion with his later plays; and it is, of course, perfectly true that the growing liberation of style which in Shakespeare expresses a psychological development, is equally noticeable in later poets.

Now in comparing the Quartos with the First Folio Mr. Bayfield finds that of all the differences the most conspicuous is the elimination of resolutions, the tendency shown by the Quartos in this direction being aggravated in the Folio. The position is made clear in a Table relating to fourteen Quarto plays, which shows, e.g., that in Othello the Folio eliminates eighty-six resolutions found in the Quarto, and the latter eliminates fourteen which the Folio displays; while a third figure, 84, "enumerates cases where, guided by the whole investigations and the revelations afforded by the first two columns [figures], I believe that a resolution should be restored." His deduction is that the Folio is a metrical reactionary; if it is unsound to prefer its revision to the Quartos, it is equally unsound to rely upon the Folio for the plays not included in the Quartos. He strengthens his argument by showing that the prose (of Julius Cæsar, for instance), which has no metrical obligations, is far more immune from illicit contractions, although prose, being nearer to ordinary speech, might be expected to show very free colloquial abbreviations. We are not prepared to follow Mr. Bayfield blindly; his trochaic passions, hitched to his resolution to "resolve," do not compel unquestioning obedience; we are not convinced by a line like, "From ⁝ Syria to Lydia and to Ionia," when the received text reads:

From Syria To Lydia and to Ionia, whilst----

and his resort to "Cross Accent" for the scansion of such lines as

Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen

is yet farther from persuading us, and seems, like so many of his arguments and instances, to be the mere expression of his hatred of the iambic. Nevertheless, his abundant recital of divergencies from the Quartos' resolved lines--to consider only that which is a matter of simple enumeration--can be taken quite apart from the soundness or unsoundness of his metrical prepossessions; and what we have called the cumulative interest of this treatise is most plainly felt in the development of this theme as play after play is examined.

It is in the chapter called "Conclusions" that the interest suddenly becomes dramatic. Mr. Bayfield has been arguing that Shakespeare is not printed as he should be printed--that is, with "the clear and uncramped enunciation of trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic feet"--and that the mangling of these was done for and by the players in order to reduce the verse to the common disyllabic type which alone they could comfortably manage. But now he derives a "flood of light" from the 1616 Jonson folio, the proofs of which are presumed to have been corrected by Jonson himself. From the printing of Sejanus he finds that Jonson's resolutions are abridged even where the line makes their full enunciation essential to the rhythm. Space will not permit the tracing of the new argument here, but Mr. Bayfield at length concludes that what he has supposed in the first three hundred pages of his book to be attributable to the perversities of the Press, are after all merely recognised contractions which were never meant to suggest the clipped pronunciations given to them. His charge, in fact, is no longer levelled against the early texts from which his affluence of instances is drawn, but against the interpretation of them; the very apostrophe (with division) being in reality but a signal calling attention to the resolution which generations of editors, readers, and players have supposed it was meant to abolish. The dramatic interest is complete.

Mr. Bayfield claims for his books the authority justly due from forty-five years' application of prosodic principles to English verse. We can but conclude with wishing Shakespeare's Versification a fuller index and a wide study, and suggest to the author that those who are concerned with verse as writers and not as teachers have not always failed to give the full syllabic value to the common abbreviations of the text.

Miss Ford's book is a "practical" treatise and might have been a valuable one. The first sentence tells us that many of her examples of verse-forms are from her own pen, while Mr. Bayfield has at any rate been content with Shakespeare. Why should she write four stanzas in imitation of Love in the Valley? She thinks it too well known to make quotation advisable, yet gives us the commonest things of Wordsworth and Shelley and Coleridge. She misprints Shakespeare and Wordsworth shamefully, thinks that Professor Saintsbury is dead, and, sparing only four pages for "the lyric," devotes twenty-seven to such forms as roundel, ballade, etc. Her book, we think, has been spoiled by haste; yet she has such enthusiasm and brightness as tempt us to regret that haste and to hope for better work.

ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM. By IRVING BABBITT. Houghton Mifflin Company. 17_s._ net.

Metaphysicians have been forced by the impossibility of obtaining from observed nature either confirmation or disproof of their theories to develop a technique the principal aim of which is coherence. So admirable indeed has this technique become in its logic and complexity that it has been adopted by many workers in other fields, on the whole with disastrous results. In this book Professor Babbitt applies it to literature, although he appears quite able to follow more empirical methods. His reading has been extensive, and his judgments are precise. Unfortunately he is not much interested in or amused by books save as the symptoms of moral and metaphysical observations. He eats nothing out of them. He only covers them with his cobwebs.

Like most metaphysicians, Professor Babbitt thinks in twos. The trick is familiar. Define A. Call not-A B. One is very bad, one very good, and the history of life, or of whatever else is under discussion, is the history of their conflict. For this professor, A is an emotional and naturalistic romanticism, and is very bad indeed. Rousseau is its high prophet, the great war its issue, and "smart young radicals" its dupes. We are invited back to ancient Greece, where A is absent, and B, that is to say classicism, has neither artifice nor formality, back to Socrates, back to Aristotle, back apparently to anyone who is a philosopher and not a poet.

Now there is an essential fallacy in grouping writers like politicians, in ringing a division bell for ever in their ears and furthermore doing their voting for them. This talk of schools and of influences and of disciples is extremely prevalent among the academic critics in America. It may safely be said that they have illuminated nothing thereby. Writers may use the language of their times and their friends, but it is as a vestment and not as a foundation. Of course, the romantic revolution, like the spluttering rebellions of our own day, may have induced some subordinates to produce manifestos and call them works of art. Some young men may be so excited by the eccentricity of their form as to forget the necessity of any content. But such works do not usually occupy the critic for long, and valuable appreciation of literature will not be content with a quasi-botanical classification.

What are we to do, for example, with Charles Lamb? Is he a classicist or a romanticist? Professor Babbitt has no qualms in affixing the latter label. Lamb is as romantic as Wordsworth is, he says, but about towns instead of about the country, and as a proof he refers the reader to a letter in which Lamb, writing to Wordsworth, says: "In London I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand ... the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes," and so on. Little can be gained for the appreciation of Elia or of the "Lake School" by saying classic or romantic about this, and if this is indeed a child of Rousseau, we may be certain that he would have dropped it with the rest at the door of the foundling hospital.

Probably, however, the professor does not want to foster appreciation. His incursion into literature is a border foray, and he is off at once with his plunder to his ethical highlands. We remain to count our losses. Milton, who "on the whole is highly serious," is not much injured. But Keats is unwise. Browning is only half-educated. Wordsworth, until he began the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, was betrayed by his "penchant for paradox." Shelley was an emotional sophist, with a nympholeptic imagination, who fell into sheer unreality. These judgments contain truth, but a very little of truth. To write thus is too plainly to adopt the methods of a political opponent. Professor Babbitt warns us that if he had attempted rounded estimates these would have been more favourable, but that as it is he is severe because he is laying down principles, principles of discipline and authority as against the unrestrained individualism of the modern.

One wonders, too, whether this massive series--the present volume is the fourth--will contribute much more to ethics than to literature; whether an intensive study of the West European literature of 1790 to 1850 will indeed, as Professor Babbitt may expect, dissuade readers from surrendering to the emotions; whether the indecorum of Rousseau does threaten civilisation with breakdown; and whether the imitation of Sophocles and Dante would morally improve the character.

It is, in short, not very obvious why this book was written, nor who will take pleasure in reading it, except for the enjoyment of a first-class mind, even when it works in a vacuum.

SPRINGTIME AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Sir FRANCIS DARWIN. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

This is an amiable book of gossipy essays, mostly in the key popular at University Extension meetings. Some of them are reviews and rely a little too much on extracts for any one familiar with the books noticed to derive much excitement from them. The title-essay, however, together with that on a Procession of Flowers, and the paper entitled Recollections are both worth attention. The essay on his boyhood and youth shows that Sir Francis has an eye for character, and no little gift for expressing himself neatly about his friends and acquaintances. Here is an admirable vignette of Parslow, the butler:

He had what may be called a baronial nature: he idealised everything about our modest household, and would draw a glass of beer for a postman with the air of a seneschal bestowing a cup of malvoisie on a troubadour. He would not, I think, have disgraced Charles Lamb's friend Captain Burney, who welcomed his guests in the grand manner to the simplest of feasts. It was good to see him on Christmas Day; with how great an air would he enter the breakfast-room and address us: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a happy Christmas," etc. I am afraid he got but a sheepish response from us.

It has something of the air of those charming pictures of Christmas in the country which Randolph Caldecott used to contribute to the Graphic Special Numbers. Sir Francis's paper on Names of Characters in Fiction does not seem to us an adequate treatment of a really fascinating subject. He just touches the fringe of it, but he appears to us over-lenient to the bad old habit of naming characters after their vices, virtues, or idiosyncrasies. That is tolerable in purely allegorical work, such as Bunyan's, but becomes very tiresome in Thackeray--whom Sir Francis rates far too highly--and frequently absurd both in him and minor authors. Women novelists have here shown more sense; you do not meet such terrible monstrosities as Mantrap, Lollypop, Fitzoof, Portansherry, or Nockemorf in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Mrs. Gaskell. A character's name is not perfect if one can imagine it different, and most of the "typical" names are mere labels which have no real, organic connection with their wearers, as have the names of Flaubert's characters, of Balzac's, or of Henry James's.

DICKENS, READE, AND COLLINS, SENSATION NOVELISTS: A STUDY IN THE CONDITION AND THEORIES OF NOVEL WRITING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. By WALTER C. PHILLIPS, Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Phillips is rather a pathologist of fiction than a critic. His thesis here, broadly speaking, is that Dickens, and after him Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, were drawn into melodramatic invention by the demands of the public and the conditions of publication of their day. His diagnosis is indisputable, though his premises are not. It is not to be denied that Dickens wrote melodrama. He liked that kind of thing, and so did his public. Where Mr. Phillips goes astray is in assuming that Dickens was a tradesman who supplied a craving public. The truth is otherwise. Dickens gained his public with the Pickwick Papers, and after that could do what he pleased. It is quite another thing to say that he was of like mind with his public, and took in melodrama through the pores. It had been in the air for fifty years. But Mr. Phillips sees little else in Dickens, and thereby does his subject and himself injustice. For one false note which that great man struck, the trained ear will detect two dozen true. If some of his monsters--Quilp in particular--are pantomime monsters, and some of his angels pantomime angels, others of them, monstrous or not, have been added to the inhabitants of English-speaking lands, and still walk in our midst. No writer has ever increased the population to the same extent. Mrs. Gamp may be more than woman, or less; she may be a living proverb. It does not matter, since she lives. Dickens, in fact, was a genius. He did what he chose, or what he must, sometimes superlatively well, sometimes incredibly ill. We bolt the bad for the sake of the good. There is no concealment possible of the fact that he had unfortunate and occasionally unwholesome tastes. The worst of them was his pleasure in cruelty. Quilp and his wife, Jonas Chuzzlewit and his, Creakle and his boys, Squeers and his: there is a gloating over such relations which, to our mind, is the worst blot upon Dickens's fame. But Mr. Phillips, absorbed in the commercial aspect of literature, counting the words in the huge novels of that day, calculating circulation, and examining into profits, has not had time for such points. He had been better employed there than in amassing statistics for "The Novelist as Wage-earner." Too much attention has been paid already to the finance of the business. Money-getting did not affect Dickens in the first flights of his genius, when his direction for good and all was determined. It may have stimulated Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade--a very different pair of men. Mr. Phillips is in the right when he hits them off as "virtuosos." "Not even Stevenson," he shrewdly says, "was more exclusively and hopelessly a writer of story-books" than Charles Reade.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

A GALLOPER AT YPRES. By Lieut.-Col. P. R. BUTLER, D.S.O. Unwin. 15_s._ net.

A KUT PRISONER. By H. C. W. BISHOP. Lane. 6_s._ 6_d._ net.

THE ROMANCE OF THE BATTLE LINE IN FRANCE. By J. E. C. BODLEY. Constable. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

Here are three new additions to the colossal pile of "war books"--two of them the personal records of soldiers, the third a more pretentious effort by a civilian. Colonel Butler went out in 1914 with the Seventh Division to Belgium, was engaged in the first battle of Ypres, came home wounded, returned to Flanders, went thence to the Somme (in the days before the Somme became hell), and leaves us finally at Marseilles on his way to "some other theatre of war." The book contains nothing very remarkable, but it is agreeably written, and should give pleasure to the author's friends and to others who care to be reminded again of "Somewhere in France," where they have marched and fought and billeted.

Mr. Bishop's is a modestly told and mildly exciting story of an escape from the Turks. He was an Indian Army subaltern captured at Kut, and interned at Kastamuni. Thence with two companions he got away to the Black Sea coast, was recaptured and rescued again. The rescuers were a handful of diverting brigands, with whose help Mr. Bishop eventually crossed the Black Sea and made his way home viâ Russia. There is no attempt to generalise either about military matters or prison life. We gather, however, that Mr. Bishop and his friends were not on the whole badly treated by the Turks. And there was a time, in 1916, when they lived well--eggs at halfpenny a piece, good white flour at sixpence a pound, and fruit practically gratis! O blessed Kastamuni!

Mr. Bodley is more sophisticated. In the first half of his book he takes us over the battlefields of France, and discourses of the captains and the kings, the priests and politicians of past centuries who fought and played and intrigued there, of the glories and beauties of the old towns and villages of the Somme and the Marne, of Rheims and Verdun and a hundred other places. But he completely changes the angle of his attack in the second half of his volume, which he calls, "An additional chapter on the results of the late war as affecting our national life and imperial interests." His main theme appears to be the necessity or desirability of continuing hostility to Germany. The Germans, he thinks, are still a fundamentally evil race whose worst faults we imitate and whose few virtues we eschew. These virtues are their commercial enterprise, their zest for town-planning and housing, and the comparatively small amount of money they waste in paying lawyers. Lawyers, it appears, are Mr. Bodley's bête noire; he regards them, and especially the political barristers and the overpaid judges and law officers, as the curse of our unhappy country. But what chiefly raises his ire are the abominations which we are said to have copied from Prussia of bureaucracy and the system of "honours"--peerages, baronetcies, knighthoods, Orders of Merit, Orders of the British Empire, poured out in bucketfuls on a motley crowd of corrupt or undistinguished individuals. This is, of course, an indictment which any writer is entitled to make, though some may think that Mr. Bodley occasionally lets himself be carried rather far by his indignation. But the connection with the faults of Germany seems a little far-fetched. There are times, too, in the course of his special pleading when he verges on the ridiculous. Is it not absurd, for example, to say that "the formidable machinery of state socialism" (meaning chiefly Old Age Pensions and National Insurance) is "incompatible with representative government"? And who wants a long argument to prove that Queen Victoria was not responsible for the plague of Germanism which Mr. Bodley thinks has infected English society? The whole of this "additional chapter" is a melancholy illustration of the effect of the war in causing an educated Englishman to lose his sense of proportion.

RECORDS. By Admiral of the Fleet LORD FISHER. Hodder & Stoughton. £1 1_s._ net.

The plain man who walks in the trim garden of literature must feel, in coming upon Lord Fisher in print, as we imagine the shade of Bach might feel confronted by a jazz band, or an elementary drawing mistress before a canvas of Mr. Wyndham Lewis. Lord Fisher has for many months been "the talk of the town"; the respectable reviewer feels that only in the talk of the town can the appropriate comments be found. Records begins thus: "Of all the curious fables I've ever come across, I quite think the idea that my mother was a Cingalese Princess of exalted rank is the oddest! One can't see the foundation of it!" And it ends with a letter from a fellow-Admiral suggesting that Lord Fisher, like Jesus Christ, is an Enigma. Between those two passages there is a roaring torrent of anecdote, of quotations and exclamation marks and capital letters, of criticism (often highly "indiscreet"), of apologia, of confident prediction, of everything that is diverting and irritating and arresting and astoundingly human--a torrent that sweeps the reader off his feet and leaves him gasping and incredulous. The book is a monument of magnificent egoism. One can only use its author's own word of a sermon by Dean Inge and say it is "splendiferous." We are told, in parenthesis, that he got into the Navy by writing out the Lord's Prayer, doing a Rule of Three sum, and drinking a glass of sherry. We are told that he looks like a Christmas-tree when he wears his decorations. We have stories of how, in his shirt-sleeves and with a boot in each hand, he entertained King Edward VII. in his bedroom, and of a comic postcard sent to him by Queen Alexandra. There is one chapter devoted to his views on the Bible, and another containing a reprint of four speeches which he made: one at the Royal Academy Banquet, a second at the Mansion House, the other two (and these would both go on a postcard) in the House of Lords. There are numerous photographs of him standing on his quarter-deck with Kings and Tsars, and gentlemen grotesquely clad in top hats and frock coats; there is a long appendix containing a list of Lord Fisher's "Great Naval Reforms." His style beggars description. He throws epithets such as "lovely" about like a high-spirited schoolgirl. He tells us, with the candour of a schoolboy, that Sir William Harcourt was "a genial ruffian" and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach "a perfect beast." The whole book is ablaze with these bright flowers. And let us not be misunderstood: we say nothing in disparagement of them. Would that more biographies were written so!

But Lord Fisher, we suspect, has suffered, and will suffer, from the defects--or should one say the excess?--of his qualities. It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an Englishman--and above all an official Englishman--to take a man seriously who writes and talks and thinks like this. Hinc illæ lacrimæ! as our author might say (for he loves his tags). And yet there is serious stuff in this book--discussions of the conduct of the war, of naval tactics and education, of submarines and oil-engines and guns, and "Admiralty limpets." He has quarrelled on all these matters--and on a thousand more, no doubt--with many of his colleagues. It is not for us to take sides in such Homeric contests. Even now he is trailing his coat again before the respectable public with a hectic chapter entitled "Democracy." "Democracy," he says, "means 'equal opportunity for all.'" A real Democracy in England would not have permitted secret treaties nor flouted the Russian Revolution, nor "kept true Labour leaders waiting on the doormat." "Hereditary titles," he cries, "are ludicrously out of date ... and the sooner we sweep away all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better." And, in short, this old warrior of seventy-nine, a Peer of the Realm, dressed like a Christmas-tree in his decorations, the intimate of Kings and Emperors, declares himself a Republican, and wants to "sack the lot"! Words fail us; we can only lay the book down and pant for the next!

HENRY FOX, FIRST LORD HOLLAND, HIS FAMILY AND RELATIONS. By the EARL OF ILCHESTER. In two volumes. Murray. 32_s._ net.

The deeplier we study eighteenth-century political history the more satisfied we become that there were but two figures in it with the gleam of statesmanship upon them, and but one with the light of genius. Sir Robert Walpole deserves his son's boast: He did "maintain this country in the enjoyment of the twenty happiest years that England ever enjoyed." Writing when he did, and so far as it goes, that is true. If his methods draw us to a cynical conclusion, the material to his hand--a German King, a discredited opposition, and a horde of rapacious place-hunters to keep fed--must be remembered and allowed for. Pitt was a much more scrupulous man, and a much more gifted man, but he was less successful for those very reasons. He had the honest man's scorn of iniquity, and he had less hold of himself. Sir Robert could keep his temper; Pitt never could. He knew the Duke of Newcastle to be a liar and an old fool, and as good as told him so. "Fewer words, if you please, my lord, for your words have long lost all weight with me." There is not much accommodation about that. Sir Robert suffered fools gladly: he could work with them better. Pitt was fastidious, and would not soil his fingers with the only things they wanted of him. As for all the rest they were a venal crew, timid as rats and greedy as dogs. A month or two ago there came under review in these pages the life of one of them, George Bubb Dodington--remarkable only because, a thorough-paced rogue, he turned himself inside out for the admiration of posterity. Here, at much greater length, done with conspicuous judgment and ability, is the life, in two volumes, of another, Henry Fox, the founder of Holland House and its line of peers.

If a word were needed to explain the rise of the brothers Stephen and Henry Fox, the sons of a creature (whom Horace Walpole called "a footman") of Charles II.'s, it would be the word which explains the whole of eighteenth-century statecraft, the word Patronage. From the King, fountain of honours, this sacred river ran to the Peers, disposers of places, and from them broadened out into a pool where swam the borough-mongers and jobbers, owners of the House of Commons. As for the electorate, wherever there was one, "the business of the people is to choose Us," said young Charles Fox, while he was yet under the influence of his father; and although the capital letter is ours, and not upon record, we may be sure that it was not wanting in delivery. It is indeed but an echo of Henry Fox himself.

Our elections, thank God! do not depend upon the giddy mob. They are generally governed by men of fortune and understanding, and of such our ministers, for this twenty years past, have been so happy as to have a majority in their favour. Therefore, when we talk of people with regard to elections, we ought to think only of those of the better sort, without comprehending the mob or mere dregs of the people.

Such was the nursery-ground of the hero of Lord Ilchester's volumes, from which that hero's son was able to lift himself.

By sitting still and stolidly manipulating his boroughs Stephen Fox served himself better than his more able brother. He did not become so rich, though he never lacked. He had money, he married money, and became an earl. He suffered none of the mortifications and humiliations of the active politician, who made himself the most unpopular man in England, and, after serving his King at the expense of his country, was thrown out and thrown over. To be sure he was Paymaster for eight years, during which time a sum of £46,000,000 passed through his hands to his immeasurable profit; but to do justice to Fox, his riches weighed as nothing beside his sense of the ingratitude of the Rigbys and others of the sort whom he had loved and tried to serve. Though he did not begin so well off as his elder brother, he cannot be said to have been badly off. At twenty-one he dropped into a sinecure office of £450 a year and a capital sum which brought his whole income to something like £900. His first political acquaintance of note was Lord Hervey, and his next, from whom, to his credit, he never swerved, was Sir Robert Walpole. "Fox really loved that man," was said of him, and truly said; and when Sir Robert fell and he was handed over to Henry Pelham he was found faithful again. In all this he differed widely from Bubb Dodington, having a heart as well as a stomach, and if not principles, at least passions. Dodington was merely a merchant of himself, but Fox suffered his feelings to act and react, often to his temporal detriment. As Lord Ilchester shows, he was not wise in his attachments, nor always temperate in his actions. He alienated Scottish sympathies by his vehemence after the Porteous riot; he made an enemy of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke by his opposition to the Clandestine Marriages Act--an opposition which may have been grounded upon the fact that his own marriage had been of that order; he became the friend and ally of the Duke of Cumberland, and obnoxious on that account to Leicester House and the heir-apparent. When George III. succeeded, and Lord Bute became the all-powerful minister, he attached himself there, just in time to lose the friendship of the Duke and to share in the hatred and distrust which the whole nation turned upon the administration. In these mischances his heart rather than his head played him false. Yet, for all his pains, neither of his masters liked him. George II. owned that Fox had never told him a lie, and added that he was the only man who had not. But he never trusted him in spite of that. George III., having after much hesitation given him a barony, steadily refused to advance him higher, though no man had worked harder in his service or, it must be added, more discreditably. It was Henry Fox who set to work, by methods which can only be called flagrant, to form a party in Parliament to be known as "the King's friends." That he did not succeed was not his fault.

Fox directly attacked two separate members of the House of Commons, and with so little decorum on the part of either buyer or seller that a shop was publicly opened at the Pay Office, whither members flocked, and received the wages of their venality in bank bills, even to so low a sum as two hundred pounds for their votes on the treaty. Twenty-five thousand pounds, as Martin, Secretary of the Treasury, afterwards owned, were issued in one morning; and in a single fortnight a vast majority was purchased to approve the peace.

It is perhaps going far to say that nothing more disgraceful was ever done in Parliament, but it is not too much to affirm that no greater act of treachery was ever attempted against the theory of popular representation by a member of the supposed popular House. But he had his barony, and received it three years later than Bubb Dodington obtained his.

It is not Lord Ilchester's fault that much of the intrigue he elucidates is rueful reading. The wonder is that he has found the spirit with which to achieve it. When one's native country, its neighbour states and colonial dependencies, when King, Lords, Commons, Army, Navy, and Church are all seen to have been counters in a great game of grab; when patriotism is as much an unknown quantity as even a rudimentary civic sense, and the only certainty is that of one's own and one's rivals' common dishonesty, it is no wonder that the accidents of his book count for more than the substance. What we get of Charles Fox makes amends for Henry. Everything that Lord Ilchester has to tell us of Charles is good. We have him first as a baby. "He is weakly, but likely to live. His skin hangs all shrivell'd about him, his eyes stare, he has a black head of hair, and 'tis incredible how like a monkey he look'd before he was dress'd." Then he is at a preparatory school, in 1757, where it seems that Charles has more emulation than any boy almost ever had; next at Eton, where he and his brother Stephen entertained their father at a dinner "bespoke from the Christopher: ... boil'd mutton and broth, three large fowls, and a leg of mutton roasted." It was at Eton in 1758, when he was nine years old, that he thus announced his philosophy of life. The father is writing to the mother:

That odd dog Charles said, with a smile, he wish'd his life was at an end. I asked the reason. "Why," says he, "it is a troublesome affair, and one wishes one had this thing or that thing, and then one is not the happier; and then one wishes for another thing, and one's very sorry if one can't get it, and it does not make one happier if one does."

We can follow him to Oxford, and wish we had room for his letter to his father explaining with elaborate pains how he came to knock the bottom out of £150, or for another which announces the loss of eighty guineas at cards, and registers the first of a series of vows that it shall never happen again. All this will be found in Volume II., together with some account of the stormy opening of his parliamentary career--at nineteen; but there or thereabouts we regretfully leave him, the best thing by far that Henry Fox ever made.

If it were asked what this man had done in his days to deserve two biographies on the scale of Mr. Riker's and Lord Ilchester's, the answer would be long in coming. Henry Fox was a man of good but moderate abilities, a bad speaker, a fair debater, one of the few, at any rate, who ever stood up to William Pitt the first. He conducted his War Secretaryship with diligence, his Paymastership with what must be called legal honesty. He robbed his country, but no more than any other Paymaster had done. He enriched himself by trading with the huge balances left on his hands, sometimes lending of them to the country which found them at twenty per cent! Every Paymaster except Pitt, who would have none of it, had done as much, and most of them did worse. But one searches Lord Ilchester's pages in vain for anything definitely done by Fox, except, to be sure, the infamous attempt to betray the constitution by making the third estate of the realm a creature of the first. Even that he did not succeed in doing. It was Lord North who reaped for King George what Fox had sown. And that is about all that one can say, and very much what Lord Ilchester himself says of Henry Fox. What should be added to that is that the book is admirable both for lucidity of style and arrangement, for gallantry of attack, and gaiety in action.

RECOLLECTIONS OF LADY GEORGIANA PEEL. Compiled by her Daughter, ETHEL PEEL. London: Lane. 1920. 16_s._ net.

Lady Georgiana was born in 1836 and is daughter of Lord John Russell. She should have memorable things to tell, and perhaps she has. But Providence, which has given her length of days and illustrious descent, has not conferred the garnering eye or the gift of tongues. It is a pity, for she has seen so much: Holland House and Pembroke Lodge, Bowood in the days of its greatness, Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston, the Duke and Disraeli, Rogers, Tom Moore and his wife, Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, the whole Victorian galaxy. She has danced with the Prince Consort, and found him rather cross; she has heard Tom Moore sing, and seen him weep at his own music; she has helped entertain Garibaldi, and dined with Macaulay. She was not, however, impressed by that pundit, found his monologue a bore, and agreed with Sydney Smith when he said, "very gravely, towards the end of dinner, 'Macaulay, when I'm dead, you'll be sorry you never heard me talk.'" That is something; and here is another thing equally good. When Lord John was about to take John Bright down to stay at Woburn, "a candid friend" wrote to the Duke of Bedford, "Hope you'll count your spoons." Here, once more, is a glimpse into the manners of that stately place, about 1840:

Many were the happy Christmases we spent at Woburn. I remember, to our huge delight, we were allowed to help throw mutton chops out of the dining-room window for whoever cared to pick them up. I think that custom died out. When I was a child each guest was provided with a piece of paper in which to wrap up an eatable for people waiting outside.

God bless the Squire and his relations, And keep us in our proper stations!

No doubt that was as good a way of doing it as any. But such flowers grow rarely in Lady Georgiana's garden, which is indeed something of a hortus siccus where names and dates have to stand for more than they will bear. "I remember Mr. Kingslake coming down to Pembroke Lodge sometimes; I don't think he had then begun his History. He was always very agreeable." So much for Eothen. "In connection with William Warburton, I remember Mr. Matthew Arnold, for he was a great friend of my brother-in-law's, and a comrade in the inspection of schools." And so much for him. Of Dickens we get something more. "In the evening, I remember, he was conspicuous, owing to wearing a pink shirt front embroidered with white." Disraeli, too, expatiated in shirts. "Though he talked incessantly, I remember best his shirt front, which was made of white book-muslin over a very bright rose-coloured foundation, which shone through it." The temptation to stick pins into it must have been severe.

With these grains the reader must be satisfied, and with such powers of evolution as he possesses may extract, no doubt, some more. Here is one of Lady Holland, too good to be passed over. She proposed leaving to Lord John Russell, and did in fact leave him, an estate in Kennington--where the Oval now is. Lord John would only accept it for life, urging the claims of the son and daughter of the house. "I hate my son; I don't like my daughter," said the great lady, and settled it.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM. (Revised Edition, Extended to 1920.) By SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB. Longmans. 21_s._

Twenty-five years ago Trade Unionism was vaguely apprehended in the polite world as a growing force in industry, useful to the working-class and even legitimate if kept within proper bounds. Wise employers recognised its value and treated with it; the unenlightened fought against it or accepted it with a bad grace. Many even of its friends and allies, the Socialists--and not a few of these were themselves Trade Unionists--rated it very low, as being, in fact, a mere "palliative of the Capitalist system." To-day it is safe to assert that there is no institution in the country which bulks larger in the public eye than the Trade Union movement. In numbers, wealth, solidarity, and power it has developed out of all recognition. Its leaders sit and bargain on equal terms with Ministers of the Crown, take their places on public committees and Royal Commissions as of right, even threaten, amid the angry protests of adversaries who were once their masters, to destroy the foundations of the established social order. The aims and activities of the Trade Unions vie with the "crime wave" for first place in the columns of the newspapers; they are discussed in trains and clubs and drawing-rooms. And, in short, the organisation, which but a few years since was regarded as a more or less private affair of workmen and their employers, now appears as the biggest problem that the State has to face--as something that may even, as many will have it, supersede the State itself.

It is hardly necessary, in these circumstances, to dilate on the importance of a new edition, containing an account of the developments during the last thirty years, of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's History of Trade Unionism. When the book appeared in 1894 it was welcomed not only by intelligent minds in the working-class, but by all students of social history, abroad as well as in this country, as a remarkable piece of work; it took its place, and has kept its place, as a classic. Yet it had a far smaller public than it deserved; by 1911 under 10,000 copies had been sold. Of this new volume no less than 19,000 copies in a special edition have been bought by Trade Unionists before publication--a notable sign of the times. We have called this edition a new volume--and that it certainly is, for not only have Mr. and Mrs. Webb revised the work throughout and at some points slightly amplified it, but they have added three chapters, covering actually some two hundred and fifty pages.

The increase of Trade Union membership has been, as everyone knows, enormous. In 1892, after more than two centuries of growth, the number of Trade Unionists in the United Kingdom was not much over a million and a half. At the outbreak of the war it was under four millions; at the present moment it is above six millions--perhaps nearer seven than six--and includes "probably as many as 60 per cent. of all the adult manual working wage-earners." But what is of peculiar interest to note is the increase in certain industries and among certain sections of the community. The organisation of "unskilled labour" has in the last few years been prodigious, and so also has that of women of all sorts from the "braincombers in the learned professions" to domestic servants and the chief "hands" in the sweated trades. The female membership of Trade Unions, which in the year before the war was in round figures 361,000, has risen now to over three-quarters of a million, and it is still rising. Very remarkable also is the increasing organisation of the "black-coated proletariat"--civil servants, clerks, managers, supervisors, technicians, and the rest. This, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb rightly insist, is an important indication of the lines on which industry is likely to be shaped in the future. But with this vast growth of numbers, and a corresponding growth of amalgamation and federation, there has been singularly little change in the central machinery of the movement. The weakest point, indeed, is at the top. The Trades Union Congress, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb put it, "remains, as we have described it in its early years, rather a parade of the Trade Union forces than a genuine Parliament of Labour." Its executive body, the Parliamentary Committee, does not provide that "general staff" which the movement badly needs, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb's criticism both of this and of the whole question of what may be called the Trade Unions' "civil service" is very much to the front.

The history of Trade Unionism in this century, however, is by no means exhausted by the records of its membership and organisation. Side by side with this it has won an enhanced status, and not the least interesting of the three new chapters is devoted to an account of this achievement. Mr. and Mrs. Webb give us an elaborate criticism of the famous Taff Vale judgment; they discuss the Osborne case and the Trade Union Act of 1913, the relations of the Unions and the Government during and after the war. And last, but not least, they describe the "revolution in thought," the influence of Syndicalist and of Guild Socialist theories in shaping the demand for "self-government in industry" and in determining the attitude of the workman to strikes and Parliamentary action.

The final chapter deals with the political side--the rise of the Labour Party, from its stormy birth just over twenty years ago, to the new era which opened for it at the election of 1918. Mr. and Mrs. Webb have much friendly criticism to offer on the subject of the present political organisation of the Labour movement. It suffers, they observe, not merely from a lack of "Party loyalty" on the part of Trade Unionists, but also from a confusion of central machinery. It suffers too (some say these are its chief shortcomings) from a failure to develop a staff of trained political officers and from a scarcity of trained Parliamentary representatives. But these weaknesses, we suppose, are on the way to be remedied, if the Party as a whole, as well as its leaders, is alive to them.

The reader is not to look in this history, as its authors remark, for any argued judgment on the validity of Trade Union assumptions or ultimate ideals. Nevertheless, what little they have to say on this hand is of profound interest. "The object and purpose of the workers, organised vocationally in Trade Unions and Professional Associations, and politically in the Labour Party," they warn us, "is no mere increase of wages or reduction of hours. It comprises nothing less than a reconstruction of Society, by the elimination, from the nation's industries and services, of the Capitalist profit-maker, and the consequent shrinking up of the class of functionless persons who live merely by owning." What form in that reconstructed Society is the organisation of industry to take? Mr. and Mrs. Webb expect to see "the supreme authority in each industry or service vested, not in the workers as such, but in the community as a whole.... The management of industry ... will not be the sole sphere of either producers or consumers, but is clearly destined to be distributed between them--the actual direction and decision being shared between the representatives of the Trade Union or Professional Society on the one hand and those of the community in Co-operative Society, Municipality, or National Government on the other." They do not see eye to eye in every detail with the Guild Socialist. But still less do they see eye to eye with that fabulous monster who stalks through the writings and speeches both of Revolutionaries and Conservatives--the bureaucratic Fabian Webb, harbinger of the Servile State! There may be some, we suppose, who will find a less "detached" outlook in this volume than in the original edition. If there is a difference of outlook, it is natural enough, for Mr. and Mrs. Webb are more "inside" the Labour movement now than they were in 1894, and their judgments and criticisms must inevitably show a subtle difference of tone. But this is not to accuse them of undue partiality. No man can write an "impartial" history that is worth reading of his own time and his own friends. And we need not regret that Mr. and Mrs. Webb, in their detailed descriptions, for example, of the great railway strike or the miners' dispute of last year, put the workmen's case confidently and strongly since they see it as their own case also and that of the nation. The appearance of these three new chapters, we do not hesitate to say, constitutes an event in the world of politics and of letters. The History of Trade Unionism will remain, as it has been, a work which every student of industry and every man of affairs must read and re-read and inwardly digest.

MY SECOND COUNTRY (FRANCE). By ROBERT DELL. Lane. 7_s._ 6_d._

This study of the people and institutions and spirit of France is in a class apart from the volumes of "impressions" of foreign lands with which "week-enders" and passing travellers are prone to favour us. "France," says Mr. Dell, "has been my home for more than twelve years, but it was already my second country long before I went to live there. Indeed I cannot remember a time when France had not a large place in my affections." It is with an intimate knowledge, therefore, as well as with a profound sympathy that he discusses the many phases of French life. But his book is by no means a mere panegyric. He is throughout candid and critical--often bitterly critical. He exposes ruthlessly the undemocratic character of the "Democratic Administration," the impotence of Parliament, the demoralising influence of small property, the evils of the petit bourgeois spirit, the avarice and egotism of the grande bourgeoisie. How far his view of all these things is a just one will be a matter of controversy. Some may say he is violently prejudiced; no one, after reading this book, could deny that many of his judgments are biased. In the final chapters there is really no pretence of impartiality; he argues his case and "maintains his propositions," like Doctor Pancrace in the play, Pugnis et calcibus, unguibus et rostro. Mr. Dell is a Socialist, but not an "Etatiste"; he is a "libertine" and a revolutionary, with an equal dislike of bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie. And his feelings in this matter are so strong that we may venture to doubt his predictions as to how the Revolution will come. For the rest, Mr. Dell is a determined Rationalist. "La France de Voltaire et de Montesquieu," he says with M. Anatole France, "celle-là est la grande, la vraie France." For "religious" France he has no use--neither for "irreligious" orthodoxy, nor political Catholicism, nor Modernism. Bergsonism, too, he holds to be a baneful influence, as reactionary as the Church which eschews it. But the old superstitions and the new philosophies, he believes, are losing their hold; "the spirit of the true France is coming into its own again, and the young intellect of France is returning to the rationalism of Voltaire." In all this, and much else, he may be wrong, but he has given us a book that is at any rate profoundly interesting.

RUSSIA IN RULE AND MISRULE. By Brigadier C. R. BALLARD, C.B., C.M.G., with a Foreword by General SIR WILLIAM ROBERTSON. Murray. 6_s._ net.

This is a curious and nondescript book. Beginning as a history of Russia from the earliest times, it ends rather as the impressions of a soldier who, attached to the Eastern front during the war, saw something of the Russian revolution. It is a soldier's book, breezy, untrammelled by literary and historical conventions, and distinguished by a direct simplicity which disarms criticism. The General gives an interesting account of what happened subsequently to the revolution; but his account often gives only one out of many views of the facts. Thus his chapter on the Kornilov incident is, as he states, merely a summary of Kerenski's book, and cannot therefore be accepted without considerable reserves. On pages 214-216 he gives ten outstanding facts about the Bolshevik régime "which can be proved over and over again if proof be required." We should like to see the General's proof of the first sentence in his tenth "fact," namely, that "there are no elections of any kind...." The General has also succeeded in adding a new complication to the already complicated problem of the spelling of Russian names. The gentleman whose name we have seen spelt variously by other writers Cheidze, Chheidze, and Tshcheidze appears in his book as Cheidsi.

THE PEACE IN THE MAKING. By H. WILSON HARRIS. Swarthmore Press. 6_s._ net.

It would be unfair to compare Mr. Harris's book with Mr. Keynes's, though it covers something of the same ground. Mr. Keynes is analytic and, in the end, constructive, and his subject is the rebuilding of a ruined Europe. Mr. Harris is historical and reminiscent. Like a good journalist--and it is unnecessary to say how good a journalist he is--he tells us how they made the peace rather than what kind of a peace they made and should have made. It is true that in telling us the story of peace-making at Paris he does tell us also what kind of peace they made. In fact his book has a distinct value as a clear summary of the terms eventually hammered out by the three Great Powers and accepted by Germany. But the angle of Mr. Harris's approach to his subject is that of the journalistic historian. The result is a very readable and interesting book. Putting ourselves into Mr. Harris's skilful hands, we are enabled to see, through the various journalistic spectroscopes, something of what took place behind the shuttered and curtained council chamber of the Big Four, which in effect was a Big Three.

LEAGUES OF NATIONS. By ELIZABETH YORK. Swarthmore Press. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.

This is a useful book for those who wish to study the long and slow development of the idea of a League of Nations. The author begins with the idea of a League in ancient Greece and traces it through Dante, the "Grand Design," Grotius, Penn, Saint Pierre, Rousseau, Kant, and Bentham to Alexander I. of Russia and the Holy Alliance. The value of the book is considerably enhanced by its careful documentation, and by the fact that it gives us a translation of the text of many of the schemes and "covenants" which are not easily obtainable by the ordinary reader.

THE NEW OUTLOOK. By LORD ROBERT CECIL, M.P. Allen & Unwin. 1_s._ net.

This brochure has a double claim to interest all who concern themselves with politics. In the first place it is a remarkable revelation of the advancing spirit of democracy, of the new social conscience and widening outlook of our time. For here we have a Cecil, the type of the grand seigneurial family of high Tory traditions, calmly--or rather enthusiastically--offering us a political programme that a few years ago would have been greeted as wildly Jacobin. In the second place the views of Lord Robert derive a peculiar importance from the position which he occupies to-day in the public estimation. His high personal character, his idealism, and his ability single him out among the members of his Party--if indeed he can be said in the present political confusion to be of a Party. He gives us here half-a-dozen short essays dealing with the League of Nations, the industrial problem, finance, the reform of Parliament, and the Irish question. His practical proposals under each of these heads will not commend themselves to everyone in all their details, but none will fail to admire the generous and constructive spirit which underlies them. Those who are pessimistic about foreign affairs may well wish that we had more men of this stamp to put Europe on its feet again. Those who are exercised about the situation at home will look anxiously for the next step of this aristocrat among the democrats.

EMPIRE AND COMMERCE IN AFRICA. By L. WOOLF. Labour Research Department and Allen & Unwin. 20_s._ net.

Mr. Woolf's object in this work is to answer the question: "What has been the result and what the lessons of the application of the power and machinery of the European State to Africa?" He examines very carefully and critically the history of the organisation of the British, French, and German Colonies in North and East Africa, as well as the Belgian Congo. The results both for Europe and for the natives he finds on the whole to be evil. The future, if we are to continue the old policy of economic imperialism, offers no better prospect. There is hope in the League of Nations, but for the mandatory system, as proposed, Mr. Woolf has no enthusiasm. To make the League effective and beneficent its forms and duties must be restated and clearly defined. The book is one which ought to be read by all who are interested not merely in African affairs but in the Colonial policies of the European Powers.

ANTHROPOLOGY

ARCHAIC ENGLAND. By HAROLD BAYLEY. London: Chapman & Hall. 1919. Medium 8vo. pp. 894. 25_s._ net.

The publishers' announcement informs us that "Mr. Harold Bayley by his graduated studies in Elizabethan Literature, Symbolism, and the Renaissance has established his position as an original and interesting thinker." Again, on its paper wrapper the present work is styled, "this profound and far-reaching contribution to English Archæology." If a pill were to be puffed in this way the inference might be drawn that the interested party did not belong to the medical profession. By parity of reasoning one conjectured before opening the book that Mr. Bayley was not versed in the gentle tradition of the archæological fraternity. But to read the introduction almost disarms the critic. Mr. Bayley cannot, he confesses, afford to emulate the Oxford tutor, described in a novel of Mr. Stephen McKenna, who set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic, and thirty years later had satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of Kingship. He complains that his literary hobbies have necessarily to be indulged more or less furtively in restaurants and railway-trains. Nevertheless he tries "to keep on as good terms as may be with the exacting Muses of History, Mythology, Archæology, Philosophy, Religion, Romance, Symbolism, Numismatics, Folklore, and Etymology." Thus circumstances have forced him to become a literary "hustler"; and, since self-advertisement is germane to the hustling temper, and moreover in this case is quite undisguised and naïve, it may almost be forgiven.

Not that Mr. Bayley wants to be forgiven. It would seem that the hustling and the hard-hitting tendencies are naturally akin. For the philologists have attacked him on account of another book. Consequently, in this book he pulverises the philologists one and all; there is nothing left of them. Nor do the anthropologists come off any better. Even sex does not protect them. Miss Jane Harrison, for instance, was rash enough to say that gods evolve from choral dances and similar ceremonies, herein but following the common opinion that in the development of religion ritual is prior to dogma. Mr. Bayley will have none of it. "The theory here assumed," he exclaims, "grossly defies the elementary laws of logic, for every act of ritual must essentially have been preceded by a thought: Act is the outcome and offspring of Thought: Idea was never the idiot-child of Act. The assumption that the first idea of God evolved from the personation of the Sun God in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or fundamentally a mental tracking of that God right home, but rather an inane confession that the idea of God cannot be traced further backward than the ritual of ancient festivals." How can a reviewer proceed to deal with Mr. Bayley's views without trepidation? Fænum habet in cornu.

"To me," says Mr. Bayley, "the divinities of antiquity are not mere dolls to be patted superciliously on the head and then remitted to the dustbin. Our own ideals of to-day are but the idols or dolls of to-morrow, and even a golliwog if it has comforted a child is entitled to sympathetic treatment." It would have certainly been more sympathetic if Miss Harrison had called Apollo or Dionysus a gollywog, and let it go at that. Mr. Bayley goes on to moralise--and the passage illustrates at once his discursive manner and the methods of the symbolistic philology--as follows: "The words doll, idol, ideal, and idyll, which are all one and the same, are probably due to the island of Idea, which was one of the ancient names of Crete. Not only was Crete known as Idæa, but was also entitled Doliche, which may be spelled to-day Idyllic.... We shall also see as we proceed that the mystic philosophy known to history as the Gnosis was in all probability the philosophy taught in prehistoric times at Gnossus, the far-famed capital of Crete. From Gnossus, whence the Greeks drew all their laws and sciences, came probably the Greek word gnossis, meaning knowledge." Why "probably"?

But to proceed to Mr. Bayley's main contention. He would have us take less pride in any connection we may have had with the Anglo-Saxons--were they not Huns?--and, contrariwise, think more of our far more worthy ancestors the ancient Britons. Theirs was a wisdom ultimately derived from the culture-lands of the East. Are not the identities between Welsh and Hebrew "close and pressing." Is it not the fact that "entire sentences of archaic Hebraisms are similarly to be found in the now obsolete Cornish language." Unfortunately the Phœnicians have left no literature. The Greeks have, however, and we are thus able to connect Achill in Ireland with Achilles, and so on. Similarly philology proves the truth of the tale that Brutus with his Trojans landed at Totnes and thence marched to Troynovant or New Troy, now known as London. Not that the Trojans on their arrival found it any easier than it is now to obtain decent lodgings in London. For tre (which is obviously Troy) means in Cornish dwelling, and in French trou means hole. So the earliest Troys "were maybe caves," though they ultimately became towers or tors; witness the number of the same in the West of England. It is likewise obvious that Troy, Tyre, and Etruria are from the same root. So it follows that "the men of Tarshish, Tyre, Troy, or Etruria, towed, trekked, travelled, tramped, traded, and trafficked far and wide." Indeed, it might almost seem that the language in which these culture-heroes were wont to express themselves consisted entirely in the word Troy and its derivatives. But no. Britain was called Albion, and "Albion suggests Albania." Moreover, "by the present-day Turk the Albanians are termed Arnaouts. Whether this name has any connection with argonauts is immaterial." So it evidently is, seeing that "many shiploads of young argonauts from one or another Troy reached the coast of Cornwall." But the proof of this is the fact that so many of the Cornish names begin with tre. So even the Albanians called themselves Troy for short.

There are nearly nine hundred pages composed in this vein, and if the reader wants more he can find it there. Mr. Bayley will not bore him; he wields a facile pen. Again, he has read all manner of books, good bad and indifferent, and may provide useful material for anyone whose critical faculty is sufficiently alert. But Troy and the rest of it--can this punning philology be seriously meant? Mr. Bayley would connect our word pun "with the Hebrew pun, meaning dubious." No doubt pundit comes from the same root; and, if so, Mr. Bayley is welcome to the title.

SCIENCE

IONS, ELECTRONS, AND IONISING RADIATIONS. By J. A. CROWTHER. Arnold. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.

In spite of the subject of his book, Dr. Crowther's index is free from the names of Wien, Lenard, Elster and Geitel, and Stark, to mention a few omissions which are somewhat surprising. It is true that subsequent reading shows that one of these names is casually mentioned, but the pages on positive rays, for instance, are happily free from all reference to the hated Hun and his works--and, in consequence, are somewhat misleading. In the first flush we attributed these omissions to Dr. Crowther's intense patriotism, but further investigation, and a rough classification of other peculiarities, has convinced us that the misfortune of these men lies not in being German, but in not having worked at Cambridge. If the book before us had as a sub-title, "Being the Work of Cambridge Physicists," a source of misunderstanding would be removed. It consists of an account of the work of the Cavendish school, enriched by free borrowings from Sir J. J. Thomson's famous Conduction of Electricity through Gases, with occasional references to the work of "outsiders," not usually acknowledged by name. The chapter on Photo-electricity will illustrate to those familiar with the subject the peculiarities to which we allude. We doubt if many physicists will be disposed to admit the author's claim that the book furnishes "a reasonably complete account of the present state of the subject."

ENGINES OF THE HUMAN BODY. By ARTHUR KEITH, F.R.S. Williams & Norgate. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.

It is a commonplace to talk of the machinery of the body, but it is not widely realised how close are the analogies which can be drawn between every detail of our physical structure and some feature or process of modern mechanical engineering. Professor Keith, realising how very much more most of us know of the working of an engine which comparatively few of us possess, an internal combustion engine, than of the working of the engines which we all possess in our muscles, has written a most informing and entertaining book, in which the mechanism and functions of our bones, muscles, heart, lungs, joints, brain, and other structures are considered in terms of their engineering analogies. It is hard to imagine a clearer or more charming exposition of elementary physiology. The book is based on a course of Christmas Lectures given at the Royal Institution, lectures primarily intended, as every one knows, for children. While there is little in the book which cannot be understood by any intelligent boy--that we do not add "or girl" is due to no reactionary denial of the full equality of the sexes, but to a belief that, at present, girls take less interest in, and so are less conversant with, the working of motor-car engines than boys--few grown-ups, even medical men, will read it without lively interest or without learning much. There is hardly any function or structure in our bodies for which Professor Keith does not find a counterpart in iron or steel--the internal texture of a bone is likened to Fairbairn's crane, a diagram of a force pump compared part by part with the diagram of the left ventricular pump of the heart. The varying length of heel found in different races is considered from the point of view of its mechanical usefulness in different circumstances, the superiority of the ape type of arm to the human type for the tasks which confront an ape is made clear in a few words. A short historical sketch of what Harvey was taught concerning the blood, contrasted with the wonderful new knowledge which he himself discovered, and the road by which he arrived at it, affords an admirable example of scientific method. These are citations at random; the whole book is full of commendable things. The bearings of recent research, such as the work of Haldane on Respiration, Cannon on Adrenalin, Starling on Hormones, are skilfully indicated in simple language. We congratulate Professor Keith on the production of a book of popular science which in clearness, depth of knowledge, and charm of style challenges comparison with the books which his great predecessor, Faraday, founded on his "Christmas Lectures."

PROBLEMS OF COSMOGONY AND STELLAR DYNAMICS. By J. H. JEANS. Cambridge University Press. 21_s._ net.

We welcome the appearance of this book, which is the essay to which the Adams Prize was adjudged in the year 1917. With the exception of Poincaré's well-known Leçons sur les Hypothéses Cosmogoniques there is, we think, no other book of recent date dealing authoritatively with the attractive subject of cosmogony, and in certain respects Mr. Jeans's book is a considerable advance on Poincaré's. The treatment is more systematic, and the author's own extensive contributions to the subject add to its value.

The introductory chapter gives a survey of the scientific problem of the origin of the universe, and points out the various uniformities which we have to explain. It also includes a brief historical sketch of the various theories of cosmogony put forward, from the famous nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace up to modern times. This chapter and the concluding chapter, on the Origin and Evolution of the Solar System, are accessible to the non-mathematical reader, and enable him to put himself in touch with the latest observations and speculations on these fascinating themes. The remainder of the book is highly mathematical, yet the author has presented his analysis so skilfully that a moderate knowledge of the calculus and dynamical principles suffice for the following of all the deductions. The general dynamics and criteria of stability and instability are first developed, and then the classical configurations of equilibrium of a rotating homogeneous mass--Maclaurin's spheroids and Jacobi's ellipsoids--are handled. Further systematic investigation leads up to the study of the oft-attacked, formidable problem of pear-shaped figures of equilibrium, which occupied the attention of Poincaré, G. Darwin, and Liapounoff. So far there has been question of stable configurations of equilibrium: the author now passes to the dynamical problems presented when there is no stable equilibrium, remarking that "a statical problem may or may not admit of solution, but a dynamical problem must always have a solution." Poincaré's "cataclysm" is for him merely a passage from a statical to a dynamical investigation. Soon, after summarising the results for a mass of fluid which is incompressible and homogeneous, he proceeds to consider the case when neither of these conditions pertain. Here we are presented chiefly with the important advances made by Mr. Jeans himself. The evolution of rotating nebulæ and of star clusters, of double and of multiple stars (particular attention being given to the process of fission and the subsequent motion), come up in turn for consideration, and from these gigantic voyages through space we return, at the end of the book, to our relatively minute solar system and its evolution. The book is illustrated with beautiful reproductions of photographs of nebulæ, taken at the Mount Wilson Observatory, and is in every way worthy of its author and its Press.

ARCHIVES OF RADIOLOGY AND ELECTROTHERAPY FOR DECEMBER. Heinemann.

The December number of the Archives of Radiology and Electrotherapy contains an interesting article on the work of the British Association of Radiology and Physiotherapy. One of the first fruits of its activities is that, at its instigation, the University of Cambridge has decided to institute a Diploma in Medical Radiology and Electrology. A knowledge of the properties of the various radiations of electrical origin on nature, of direct and alternating currents, and of electrotechnics in general, is of such importance in modern medicine that we heartily welcome the institution of a Diploma which will guarantee that its possessor has a thorough knowledge of the new and special technique required for the various electric treatments of to-day. The syllabus of subjects and the regulations governing the award, which provide, among other things, that the candidate must hold a recognised medical qualification, are published in full in the number of the Archives under notice. A study of the syllabus of the course of studies provided at Cambridge emphasises the range of physical phenomena, which have a therapeutic value--radiant heat, X-rays, the rays from radioactive substances, electrolysis, direct and high frequency currents, and static electricity, to name some of the most important. Obviously it is time for adequate provision to be made for instructing the medical man in the theory and manipulation of the machines and devices peculiar to this side of his art, since the average M.D. has not a very deep knowledge of physics. The only suggestion we would offer is that some attempt might be made to simplify or standardise the nomenclature of the subject. A glance at this short notice will show the variety of titles given to the new therapeutics, and of these the word "electrology," for instance, is given in Webster as "obsolete or rare." Surely there are sufficient terms already without reviving it.

BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES

By J. H. MASON

"Modern" type is the name by which the design that came into general use in this country between 1800 and 1808 is designated. (It is the type face still used in Blue Books.) To quote Luckombe in his Printer's Grammar, of 1808, "The great improvement which has taken place of late years in the form of printing types has completely superseded the Elzevir shape introduced from Holland by the celebrated Caslon. Everyone must observe, with increasing admiration, the numerous and elegant founts of every size which have with rapid succession been lately presented to the public." And then follow specimens from the Fry Type Foundry, the "Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia, mostra?" so affected by the older founders that it almost became a proverb for "type specimen."

Well, modern opinion has gone strongly back to Luckombe, and with good reason. The only definite quality--not very definite either--which calls forth his admiration is the elegance of the design. I think we may concede this without damaging the case for the old-style types. The letters are well drawn, carefully and finely drawn, and show a good sense of proportion and of colour contrast in the thicks and thins and hair-lines in the size shown, called the Luckombe "French Canon," equivalent to forty-eight point (about two-thirds of an inch). But is elegant drawing the desirable point in type? It is not. It tends to keep the single letters distinct units instead of their coalescing into word, phrase, or even sentence units. For the mind of the reader is partly formed by the mind of the writer, by his own experience in the manipulation of the pen, and feels for the onward flow of the pen in the letter design. And this is found at its best in the Italian writing that developed the Caroline minuscule and formed the model for the early Venetian types. The letter takes its character from the pen in the hands of a master of his instrument, and the ink and paper or vellum play their part--it is not deliberately drawn and passed on, but arrives in the continuous flow that strives to keep pari flumine with the stream of thought. The serifs or finishing strokes, e.g., of the capital C or T in "modern," are perpendicular palings that shut off relations with their neighbours; in old style they reach towards their neighbours, as though to join hands with them. The onward flow is felt in the curves, e.g., of the small m of old-style type, but in modern it stands almost coldly self-centred, the elegance strikes us as primness. The fine lines too are unsuitable for letterpress printing as they are easily damaged and then the type becomes unsightly. In engraver's lettering on copperplates, of course, this does not happen, as the fine line is printed from a sunken scratch, not a knife-like edge in relief. The engraver as a rule only used small groups of words, not pages of continuous text. (I do not forget Pine--his Horace dates 1733--but of him another time.) I cannot help thinking that modern type is the outcome of a mistaken standard, that of the engraver; as if the finish of delicate gold-smithing were adopted for carving in sandstone. To the engraver the hair-line is perfectly simple, to the typefounder it is a tour-de-force. The old-style design continued the manuscript tradition of form, with only such changes as the process of typefounding involved, such as the elimination of ligatures or tied letters. It continued in use till the end of the eighteenth century, when "elegance" displaced it. In forty years (a short time compared with the three-and-a-half centuries of old style) old style was revived in the Chiswick Press Juvenal and Lady Willoughby's Diary, and was enthusiastically received. New versions of the old-style design were cut, and it has continued in favour ever since.

A LETTER FROM FRANCE

THE YOUNG REVIEWS

Paris, February, 1920.

When among us a reader of literary tastes wishes to obtain a bird's-eye view of the literature of the moment, to see it mapped out with all its currents, he thinks of the reviews. I mean by that not the old-established reviews, which after all are no more than magazines of the first class, but the living, active, combative reviews, which are the organs of groups, of literary and intellectual parties.

While the old reviews, in France as in England or in Germany, continued faithfully during the war to provide their usual articles on contemporary affairs, all the young French reviews found themselves cut off, the greater part of their staffs having been mobilised. Since the war they have reappeared, new reviews have been born, and important additions are announced for the spring. But, taken as a whole, the complexion of the world of the new reviews shows an aspect sufficiently different from what it had before the war and above all from what it had twenty years ago.

* * * * *

The Nouvelle Revue Française has begun publication again since June 1st. The members of its pre-war staff meet again intact, because for the most part they belonged to a generation which reached, or had just passed, its fortieth year in 1914. The most important among them, the figure round whom the group was first assembled, was André Gide, and, like Gide, most of them had gone through the Symbolist Movement between 1890 and 1900. But they were no longer at the age of enthusiastic and violent prejudices; they cared much for analysis and intelligence and sought above all to see clear. Hence came their taste for psychological detail and for the literature of introspection, of which Jean Schlumberger produced poignant examples and which made the Nouvelle Revue Française the natural country of Marcel Proust. Hence also, and above all, the importance of its critical work, and that state of attentive and impartial clairvoyance which it has constantly striven to preserve. This clairvoyance did not exclude ardour or passion; the influence of Péguy, still more that of Claudel, was obvious in the fiery intellect of Jacques Rivière, now the editor of the review.

Unlike other reviews with an æsthetic bent, the Nouvelle Revue Française did not confine itself to the defence and the illustration of some definite artistic method. It welcomed, like the Mercure and the Revue Blanche of old days, everything which seemed to it interesting, original, and bearing the marks of authentic art. Obviously, for it, the centre of the artistic landscape was filled by the most illustrious of the whilom Symbolists, those who devoted themselves in solitude to build according to those mysterious ideal diagrams, drawn by Mallarmé upon a heroic and legendary sand: Gide, Claudel, Valéry. But the review became the home also of Charles Louis Philippe, that master of sorrowful tenderness and rending pity--of Pierre Hamp, who, in his stories of industrial life, has drawn the world of labour with a power frequently humorous and sometimes as original as Constantin Meunier's; of Jules Romains, the picturesque and powerful creator of "Unanimist" prose and poetry.

The Nouvelle Revue Française has emerged from its five years' concealment with the same characteristics. It still attempts to be a milieu of pure art and disinterested literature. But it is almost impossible, in France, for artists to-day to divest themselves of political preoccupations. They are divided, often fiercely, over this problem: "Should French thought to-day preserve or abandon its war attitude? Should it remain defiant towards the foreigner and subordinate everything to the continuance of the intellectual struggle against Germanism?" The editors of the Nouvelle Revue Française, who are divided on that question, endeavour in their review itself to elucidate it by discussions amongst themselves.

* * * * *

The Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres has also just reappeared. It was the organ of a younger generation than that of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and that is why the majority of its old conductors no longer respond to the call. More than twenty of them, and notably Pierre Gilbert, who was the heart and soul of them, were killed in action. As its name indicates, this review is above all concerned with criticism. You find in it few poems and no novels. The young men who united around it aimed at restoring to French literature a classic discipline, and fighting all the remains of romanticism from democracy to symbolism. That is why the review published special numbers dedicated to Richelieu, to Stendhal, to Mistral, and on the occasion of Rousseau's centenary a special number of another kind, remarkably violent, devoting to execration the Genevese whom they held to be the father of French romanticism and the Æolus of all the storms.

The Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres was profoundly influenced by Charles Maurras. It was the literary organ of the ardent, patriotic generation aroused in France by his influence and that of Maurice Barrès. Nevertheless, some months before the war it broke away from L'Action Française; or rather it was that paper, the organ of M. Maurras, which declared itself unable any longer to commend without reserve the tendencies of the Revue Critique. This cleavage arose out of some articles in the Revue Critique which praised the philosophy of M. Bergson. Now L'Action Française had opened war long before on Bergsonism for reasons which were not philosophic. That is why the Revue Critique, although still benevolently watched by M. Maurras, was considered by him as a lapse from orthodoxy.

In its resurrected form it has kept its classical tendencies, its taste for pure criticism, the intellectual discipline which made it subordinate everything to the national point of view. But on the other hand it shows an inclination to broaden, to become more elastic, to take a less rigid and combative attitude than of old. Although most of its editors are friends of M. Maurras and L'Action Française, it preserves its intellectual autonomy intact and is no longer attached to a political party. Its rôle seems to be to revive the old tradition of French classicism. It maintains especially those discussions on the problems of the day and the eternal problems, those intelligent and passionate debates which have always given so much animation to young French reviews.

* * * * *

A new review, the work of which will often be in accord with that of the Revue Critique des Idées et des Livres, is announced for the month of March, and that announcement has already aroused much interest. This is the Revue Universelle, the organ of the "Parti de l'Intelligence." This party, which might well have found a less naïve title, is a nationalist group which proposes to keep the intellect of France in the channels of national tradition and civic vigilance. It includes almost all the monarchists of the Action Française, but also a certain number of patriotic writers who are not royalists, including Camille Mauclair, Daniel Halévy, Edmond Jaloux, Henri Ghéon, and Henri Massis. It has been founded in opposition to the "Clarté" group of Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Georges Duhamel, and Pierre Hamp, which unites intellectuals with socialist and pacifist leanings. It is, in the world of letters, a resurrection of the old leagues of the "Patrie Française" and the "Droits de l'Homme," which flourished at the time of the Dreyfus affair. But up to the present the majority of French writers have not enrolled themselves in either body.

The title of the Revue Universelle is based on the desire of the "Parti de l'Intelligence" to make it an organ for propagating French intellectual influence abroad, for ensuring the dissemination and establishing the primacy of the classic culture which is bound up with the French genius. The Revue Universelle will attempt to give to French nationalism, which has hitherto confined its propaganda to France, an influence over the world. It is patently a difficult enterprise and one essentially a little paradoxical. But it will certainly be very interesting and will deserve to be closely watched abroad. The Revue Universelle will be directed by the clearest and strongest head amongst contemporary French students of foreign politics, M. Jacques Bainville. The names of the chief members of the "Parti de l'Intelligence" assure from the start a staff of the first order. The "Clarté" group has not yet announced its intention of founding a similar organ.

In the spring there will appear a review in French which will fill a place at present empty: the Revue de Genève, whose editor will be M. Robert de Traz. This will be a review essentially European, which will aim at giving an exact picture of intellectual Europe to-day, and will examine objectively æsthetic, political, religious and moral, national and international tendencies. Its founders believe that an authoritative position is assured.

* * * * *

Most of these reviews are or will be reviews of ideas. In contrast to what was the case twenty years ago the reviews which are devoted to new and bold artistic manifestations remain on a lower level. Before the war the Phalange was a very live and picturesque review around which were grouped a number of the old-time Symbolists and newer writers, from Francis Viélé-Griffin to Guillaume Apollinaire. Almost all the young made their débuts in the Phalange. It is regrettable that its director, M. Jean Royère, has decided not to revive it after the war.

The literature which is attached to Futurist and Cubist art has for organ the review Littérature, rather slender but curious. During the war there began to appear a very sumptuous Cubist review of literature and art, L'Elan, which was very interesting but did not survive its fourth number.

* * * * *

It does not come within my present scope to refer to the old reviews, which are well enough known to English readers. But I must mention that in the last year a new one has been added to these, the Minerve Française, classical and traditional in tenets and of an excellent literary standard. Finally, as for the weekly papers, half way between the dailies and the reviews properly so called, they are not so important in France as in England. L'Opinion and L'Europe Nouvelle are at present the most alive; those and the Revue Hebdomadaire, which is in another category.

In fine, the young French reviews to-day are preoccupied with ideas first and art second. It is difficult for them, even when they are willing, to avoid a definite orientation towards politics and the problems of politics. They are the natural voices of a generation which is prevented by actual events from indulging in detached speculations. But that period of transition will pass and will no doubt soon help forward a movement in France for the recovery of the precious privileges of spiritual liberty.

ALBERT THIBAUDET

BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS

MAURICE HEWLETT

Verse

A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES. Dent. 1895.

SONGS AND MEDITATIONS. Constable. 1896.

ARTEMISION, IDYLLS AND SONGS. Elkin Mathews. 1909.

THE AGONISTS--A TRILOGY OF GOD AND MAN--MINOS, KING OF CRETE, ARIADNE IN NAXOS, THE DEATH OF HIPPOLYTUS. Macmillan. 1911.

HELEN REDEEMED AND OTHER POEMS. Macmillan. 1913.

SINGSONGS OF THE WAR. Poetry Bookshop. 1914.

THE SONG OF THE PLOW: BEING THE ENGLISH CHRONICLE. Heinemann. 1916.

GAI SABER: TALES AND SONGS. A Collection of Poems. Elkin Mathews. 1916.

THE LOVING STORY OF PERIDORE AND PERIVALE. A Poem. Collins. 1917.

THE VILLAGE WIFE'S LAMENT. A Poem. Secker. 1918.

Prose

EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY. Being Impressions and Translations. Dent. 1895.

THE FOREST LOVERS. A Romance. Macmillan. 1898.

PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD. A Pastoral. Lane. 1898.

LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY. Chapman & Hall. 1899.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RICHARD YEA-AND-NAY. Macmillan. 1900.

NEW CANTERBURY TALES. Constable. 1901.

THE QUEEN'S QUAIR, OR THE SIX YEARS' TRAGEDY. Macmillan. 1904.

THE ROAD IN TUSCANY. Macmillan. 1904.

QUATTROCENTISTERIA: HOW SANDRO BOTTICELLI SAW SIMONETTA IN THE SPRING. Mosher, Portland, Maine. 1904.

[Taken from Earthwork out of Tuscany.]

FOND ADVENTURES. Tales of the Youth of the World. Macmillan. 1905.

THE FOOL ERRANT. Heinemann. 1905.

THE STOOPING LADY. Macmillan. 1907.

THE SPANISH JADE. Cassell. 1908.

HALFWAY HOUSE. A Comedy of Degrees. Chapman & Hall. 1908.

OPEN COUNTRY. A Comedy with a Sting. Macmillan. 1909.

LETTERS TO SANCHIA UPON THINGS AS THEY ARE. Macmillan. 1910.

[Reprinted from Open Country.]

REST HARROW. A Comedy of Resolution. Macmillan. 1910.

BRAZENHEAD THE GREAT. Smith, Elder. 1911.

THE SONG OF RENNY. Macmillan. 1911.

MRS. LANCELOT. A Comedy of Assumptions. Macmillan. 1912.

LOVE OF PROSERPINE. Macmillan. 1913.

BENDISH: A STUDY IN PRODIGALITY. Macmillan. 1913.

THE LITTLE ILIAD. A Novel. Heinemann. 1915.

A LOVERS' TALE. Ward, Lock. 1915.

LOVE AND LUCY. Macmillan. 1916.

FREY AND HIS WIFE. Ward, Lock. 1916.

THORGILS OF TREADHOLT. Ward, Lock. 1917.

GUDRID THE FAIR. Constable. 1918.

THE OUTLAW. Constable. 1919.

He has also written introductions to Bidder's In the Shadow of the Crown (1899); to Cynthia (1918); to Twelfth Night (Vol. 2, Renaissance Edition of Shakespeare); to Stendhal's The Chartreuse of Parma; and to Wilfred Thorley's Confessional and other Poems.

MAX BEERBOHM

THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE. A Fairy Tale for tired men. Bodley Booklets. 1897. [In 1918 Mr. Lane published a new edition with coloured drawings by GEORGE SHERINGHAM.]

THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM. Lane. 1898.

MORE. (Essays.) Lane. 1899.

THE POET'S CORNER. (Caricatures.) Heinemann. 1904.

YET AGAIN. (Essays.) Chapman & Hall. 1909.

ZULEIKA DOBSON, OR AN OXFORD LOVE STORY. Heinemann. 1911.

A XMAS GARLAND. (Parodies.) Heinemann. 1912.

FIFTY CARICATURES. Plates. Heinemann. 1913.

THE SECOND CHILDHOOD OF JOHN BULL. (Cartoons.) Swift. 1912.

CATALOGUE OF AN EXHIBITION OF CARTOONS BY M.B. (Leicester Galleries.) 1913.

SEVEN MEN. Heinemann. 1919.

DRAMA

MARRIAGE À LA MODE

It was impossible to know from the reception of Marriage à la Mode at the Phœnix Society's production last month whether the numerous complaints of the behaviour of the audience when The Duchess of Malfi was performed had had effect or not, for Dryden's comedy puts no strain of any sort on the audience. It is a sign both of Dryden's greatness and of his weakness. For that "superhuman craftsmanship" of which Professor Saintsbury speaks is the privilege of a writer whose imagination does not outrun his powers. There is nothing in his mind that he finds difficult to express. And the difference in merit between one Dryden play and another is not a difference of degree in technical accomplishment--of success in expression--as it is with greater poets, but a difference in the value of the subject-matter. When Dryden gets hold of a good dramatic idea he writes a good play, when his material is deficient in interest his play is inferior. There are no violent ups and downs in any one play, whereas a poet of more passion and imagination does more mixed work. Some of Shakespeare's finest scenes and passages are in his least satisfactory plays, and though Shakespeare's natural genius for language was immeasurably greater than Dryden's so that it was impossible for him to write at any length without writing here and there wonderfully, yet he had, almost necessarily, less absolute command of it. Dryden's was an intellectual mastery that practically never failed him either in prose or verse. He is not considered to have had any natural gift for comedy. Hazlitt says: "Dryden's comedies have all the point that there is in ribaldry, and all the humour that there is in extravagance. I am sorry that I can say nothing better of them. He was not at home in this kind of writing, of which he was himself conscious. His play was horse-play. His wit (what there is of it) is ingenious and scholar-like, rather than natural and dramatic," and more recent critics have suggested that Dryden was unfitted for the new comedy that became universal after the Restoration--the comedy that held a mirror up to Society rather than to Nature--since Dryden "was not much a man of society."

It seems to me that this last criticism is largely true, but if he is not witty in the sense that Congreve and Sheridan are witty, he is often quite as amusing, and I cannot altogether agree with Hazlitt's pronouncement that his wit was "ingenious and scholar-like rather than natural and dramatic." Nothing could be more natural, for example, than the Epilogue to Marriage à la Mode, spoken by Rhodophil, which convulsed the house at the Lyric Theatre, and I doubt if it would be possible to find among all the Restoration Comedies an Epilogue so "dramatic"--revealing such insight into the feelings aroused by the play in the audience, and making such effective use of that knowledge. When Rhodophil says:

There are more Rhodophils in this theatre, More Palamedes, and some few wives, I fear: But yet too far our poet would not run; Though 'twas well offered, there was nothing done. He would not quite the women's frailty bare, But stript them to the waist, and left them there: And the men's faults are less severely shown, For he considers that himself is one-- Some stabbing wits, to bloody satire bent, Would treat both sexes with less compliment; Would lay the scene at home; of husbands tell, For wenches taking up their wives i' the Mall; And a brisk bout, which each of them did want Made by mistake of mistress and gallant. Our modest author thought it was enough To cut you off a sample of the stuff: He spared my shame, which you, I'm sure, would not. For you were all for driving on the plot: You sighed when I came in to break the sport, And set your teeth when each design fell short.

The audience at the Phœnix Society rose with uproarious laughter to each hit, it was so palpable. Again I find all the comedy scenes, the scenes between Palamede, Doralice, Rhodophil, and Melantha wholly admirable and exhilarating to a degree. I would almost gladly give up the whole of Congreve and Sheridan for this poetical, extravagant and romantic humour. The name of poet still clung to dramatic wits in the time of Congreve, and Congreve had perhaps some slight excuse for calling himself a poet, but when the eighteenth century had really arrived, when the abominable Sheridan came we had got into a prose age indeed. And yet I have no wish to call Sheridan--and still less Congreve--abominable, except by comparison with Dryden. We also have to acknowledge that the cultivation of verbal wit, of repartee, of elaborate social rococo, was the expression of the poetic fire instinctively preserving itself in an age so spiritually unfavourable to romance that it had to make itself externally romantic. Having lost imagination it fell back on decoration. A whole elaborate social ritual was built up to provide stimulants to the imprisoned senses. When in The Way of the World Mrs. Millamant says to Mirabell:

Good Mirabell, don't let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis: nor go to Hyde Park together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and whispers, and then never to be seen there together again; as if we were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one another ever after. Let us never visit together nor go to a play together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.

It is a cri-de-cœur. It is of the very essence of poetry in a narrow and worldly age. It is such passages in Congreve that justify Hazlitt in declaring--by comparison--that Dryden's wit was scholar-like rather than natural, for there is not a passage in Dryden's comedies so real, in the sense of being so local an expression of that passion for beauty which haunts the human heart and which in a society of the kind in which Mrs. Millamant moved will find such odd embodiment and be to ordinary eyes so completely disguised. In such a passage Congreve proves his right to be called a poet. What poetry there is in the society with which he is dealing he has expressed; for that appeal of the fine lady to Mirabell was a clutching at straws, a last despairing attempt at the preservation of some particle of beauty, of romance in the sordid life in which the married woman of fashion was about to be engulfed.

The poetry of this scene reaches back to the beautiful scene in Marriage à la Mode between Palmyra and Leonidas, though, as I have said, Dryden is more romantic, and so neither Palmyra nor Leonidas are of any age, they are merely the youth of all time. But surely no one can read the following passage without being moved to admiration of its beautiful ease, its romantic simplicity as contrasted with the romantic luxuriousness of the Elizabethans:

LEON.: How precious are the hours of love in courts! In cottages, when love has all the day, Full, and at ease, he throws it half away. Time gives himself, and is not valued, there; But sells at mighty rates, each minute, here: There, he is lazy, unemployed, and slow; Here he's more swift; and yet has more to do. So many of his hours in public move, That few are left for privacy and love.

PALM.: The sun, methinks, shines faint and dimly, here; Light is not half so long, nor half so clear: But oh! when every day was yours or mine, How early up! what haste he made to shine!

LEON.: Such golden days a prince must hope to see, Whose every subject is more blessed than he.

PALM.: Do you remember when their tasks were done, How all the youth did to our cottage run? While winter-winds were whistling loud without, Our cheerful hearth was circled round about: With strokes in ashes, maids their lovers drew; And still you fell to me, and I to you.

LEON.: When love did of my heart possession take, I was so young my soul was scarce awake: I cannot tell when first I thought you fair; But sucked in love, insensibly as air.

PALM.: I know too well when first my love began, When at our wake you for the chaplet ran: Then I was made the Lady of the May, And, with the garland, at its goal did stay: Still as you ran, I kept you full in view; I hoped, and wished, and ran, methought, for you. As you came near, I hastily did rise, And stretched my arm outright, that held the prize. The custom was to kiss whom I should crown; You kneeled, and in my lap your head laid down: I blushed, and blushed, and did the kiss delay; At last my subjects forced me to obey: But, when I gave the crown, and then the kiss, I scarce had breath to say, Take that--and this.

The whole of this beautiful scene was delightful on the stage, and by Palmyra (Miss Rita Thom), in particular, the verse was exquisitely spoken. One had that experience, rare indeed in the modern theatre, of subconsciously feeling that the whole audience was hanging on the words.

Again, what could be finer in its way than the scene--greatly helped by the stage-production at the Lyric Theatre, and by Mr. Norman Wilkinson's setting giving it an appropriate atmosphere of masquerade--where Doralice and Melantha are in boys' habits? Here Melantha's French affectation is used with the greatest skill to bring about a scene which is the very essence of romantic swagger. There are few scenes, if any, in Congreve or Sheridan that equal in wit this repartee between the pretended boys, Doralice and Melantha, egged on by Palamede and Rhodophil, leading up to Melantha's final extravagance:

I'll sacrifice my life for French poetry,

and the audience rocked with laughter at Miss Athene Seyler (Melantha) and Miss Cathleen Nesbitt (Doralice), who were superb in their representation of the parts.

Whenever these old comedies are revived there is always bound to spring up from somewhere a demand that they should be bowdlerized. Really the misplaced squeamishness of some men and women is something to marvel at! I have seen nearly every revue, musical comedy, and play that has been produced in London during the last two years, and I declare unhesitatingly that there is something radically wrong with the mentality of the people who can go habitually to the London theatres and music-halls and yet find that there is anything "filthy" about Dryden. Certainly there is no innuendo in Dryden, he is frankly outspoken. But filthy! Shade of Charles Lamb! What is to be done with such people? Not once during the whole performance of Marriage à la Mode was there an occasion when the most sensitive of young girls could have felt even momentarily uncomfortable. Such was far from being the case with a play that had quite a long run at a London theatre not long ago, to which, as far as I know, no one objected!

But I do not want to resist any attempt to make the Phœnix Society bowdlerize Dryden on that ground. Dryden--even more than Congreve--is inoffensive. There are dramatists with dirty minds; we often have had their works performed in London--adapted from the French or in their native English--but even these no one, I hope, would suppress. Dryden emphatically is not one of this class. A cleaner, more wholesome writer never put pen to paper, and the morbid squeamishness that objects to Dryden is the squeamishness of ill-health. It is a case for the doctor, for it is expressive of a pathological malady. On the subject as a whole it would seem an apt occasion to quote some sentences of Lamb's celebrated defence of Congreve, Farquhar, and Wycherley, as there appear to be people who have not heard of it. Lamb explains that these comedies have disappeared from the stage of his day--and he lived at the beginning of the age of Mrs. Grundy--because "the times cannot bear them." It is not alone, he adds, the occasional licence of the dialogue, it is that they will not stand the moral test that is so ridiculously applied to them. The age screws everything up to that. "Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or a guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left." Pursuing this idea, he adds: "We carry our fireside concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades." Here Lamb with the extraordinary penetration characteristic of that rare mind hit upon one of the principal causes of the bankruptcy of the theatre during the hundred years that were to follow him. We are, even at this moment, struggling to get free from that literal-mindedness which is the soul of materialism and which would fetter us down to what it calls realism and will have no extravagance of thought or language, and for whom an escape into the free speech of the theatre--an escape most necessary and most salutary--is, if you please, filth! "All that neutral ground of character," laments Lamb, "that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning--the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted Casuistry--is broken up and disenfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold we wrap it up in a great blanket just out of precaution against the breeze and the sunshine. I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad of a reason to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience--not to live always in the precincts of the law courts--but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions--to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot follow me." And concludes Lamb, with fine common sense, "I come back to my cage and my restraint, the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom."

It is not often given to any one man to have said the last word on a subject, but I think that on this question Charles Lamb has said the last word. Modern science lends its support to his judgment. The psycho-analyst is beginning to realise that the damage inflicted by socially necessary inhibitions can only be cured by art. It is to be hoped that we will hear less and less of this canting nonsense of "filth" applied to such noble and beautiful work as Dryden's. It is also to be hoped that the Phœnix Society may have a long life, for in the two productions it has so far given us it has more justified its existence than has any society I know of founded in the last dozen years.

W. J. TURNER

THE FINE ARTS

The National Gallery

The National Gallery nowadays is a constant source of novelty. The familiar pictures which have been hidden so long are reappearing in brighter and more deliberate surroundings, and we are compelled to see them anew instead of merely battening on our past impressions. Not all the rooms are equally successful in their mural decoration, but nearly everywhere an improvement has been effected on the old gloomy colours. The function of decorations in a gallery is unostentatiously to show the works of art in the best contemporary light. For it is one of the paradoxes of classical art that, although its beauty is immortal, each generation sees this beauty from its own point of view. In fact, the immortality consists precisely in the possibility of continual recreation, and the environment is an outward assistance to such a process. Mr. C. J. Holmes is only obeying the spirit of the period in introducing the clear colours of full daylight. It is to be hoped that the British Museum authorities will follow suit and make their sculpture rooms slightly more exhilarating.

Among the most interesting recent additions are the purchases made at the sale of the Degas Collection in 1918. Many of them have been exhibited already for some time, but a few have only appeared lately, and several are still in the background. The later appearances include the large and rather prosaic study of soldiers, by Manet, and a finely-drawn but photographically-painted portrait by Ingres. In the neighbourhood of the Manet is an interesting comparison between two Corots, one painted in Italy early in his career, the other in his later, more typical period. The early landscape reveals an aspect of Corot that is little known in England. The conception has a clearness and thoroughness that is often lacking in his twilight fantasies, which are inclined to be stereotyped. From the Studd Bequest we have two interesting but oversweet figure and landscape sketches by Puvis de Chavannes.

Our collection of French paintings is growing, but we want many more--if not permanently, then on loan; why not?

The most notable English additions during 1919 are the three Whistlers from the Studd Bequest. The Lady with the Fan is inclined to be sentimental; the River Nocturne has considerable charm, but it is on too large a scale for so slender a theme. The Nocturne with the fireworks is the most nearly perfect.

When the rearrangement of the Gallery is complete many pictures may have to be kept downstairs. There are several at present on view in the English rooms which one hopes will be reserved for the curious and the importunate. There is also a large and unfortunate compilation by Holman Hunt hung in one of the approaches which might be better elsewhere.

The new El Greco is a very important acquisition, although it was probably not a quarter the price of the family group by Romney. It contains the quintessence of El Greco's nervously hard and dramatically intense vision (no, Mr. Roger Fry,[29] not melodramatic!), and it is not subject to exotic Venetian influences, as is his other composition on the same wall. It has been carefully cleaned, and the result is a triumph. Apparently under the old blackened varnish the colours were preserved with all their original purity and poignancy. The picture looks as though it were painted yesterday. In another sense too it is very modern. I say this reluctantly because I am opposed to an arbitrary division into ancient and modern, which implies an unwarranted depreciation of the "ancient." Obviously the "modern" is a mere passing phase, a torch which is hurried through the darkened rooms of the past, lighting up now this room, now that. It is in fact a question of temporary interest and relevancy, not of objective merit, although the latter may only be fully understood through the medium of the former.

[29] Mr. Fry is compelled to admit a dramatic content. But, he says, it is "melodramatic" (implying it should not be there). This is a subtle evasion. For what if it were not melodramatic?

Recent Sculpture by Jacob Epstein: Leicester Galleries

Mr. Epstein is a great portrait sculptor. He has a wonderful power of "living into" his models. He produces not only a likeness, but also that kind of likeness which we can enjoy without knowing the original, and in a certain sense even more than the original when known. For he sees what we should scarcely be able to see without his vigorous assistance. Standing before one of his portrait heads we have the consciousness of some magnetising influence, evoking all kinds of subterranean thoughts and emotions; we are drawn out of ourselves into our external objective vortex.

It is objective and yet essentially the creation of Mr. Epstein's "realistic" vision. Realistic is a difficult and dangerous word, but we know what is meant by it, although often when we try to explicate that knowledge still further we arrive at something which the word does not, or should not, or need not, mean. It should not mean, for instance, photographic, or immoral, or ugly. It may contain a consciousness of all these elements without being them, for to be conscious of them surely means to supersede and dominate them. "Realistic," of course, might be extended so as to cover everything, but in the present instance of ordinary usage it is limited to one particular aspect of things, which, curiously enough, is rather a negative than a positive one. It is the positive consciousness of negatives such as difficulty, failure, struggle, pain: it is the intense and overpowering desire to know them fully, to drain the imaginative experience of them to the dregs, because once they have taken a hold on our awareness, only by that means can we triumph over them.

Not only does Mr. Epstein endeavour to bring home to himself and to us in his character studies a sense of individualised conflict (though he is never gloomy), he often approves of sternness and ruggedness as good in themselves; he enjoys the titanic groping of life. And it is perfectly true that without some sort of a fight existence would be hopelessly inert and hyper-æsthetic; but we do want sometimes the calm and untroubled pleasure of attainment. Indeed only the complete process conjoining the two opposites is completely good, yet we inevitably stress now the one, now the other facet, placing in the centre of our consciousness either the fact of struggle and failure or the fact of success: for art is itself part of the process. And Mr. Epstein's art stresses the "realistic" side, not only in the sense that he is in desire revolting from it, but also that he appreciates it, enjoying the process as much as the arrival at the goal. For instance, he has made several studies of his own baby, over whom he has kept his head severely. Indeed he seems to have been too ferociously interested in the animalism and precocious ugliness of a small baby to have been at all tempted to idealise; at the same time he is impressed with the baby's vigour and vitality.

Sometimes it seems to me he loses sight of the whole in the elaboration of expressive detail. In the bust of Lord Fisher in the War Museum Exhibition he has obviously attempted to produce the leathery, wrinkled texture of an old man's skin, because he saw it as a significant feature. But in the effort to get this difficult effect he has lost sight of the significance and produced a mere verisimilitude of wrinkledness. Similarly in his Christ, the feature which arrests us most is the clay-like gruesomeness of the loosened wrappings. We shudder at the faint suggestion of decomposition and we are wounded by the slit in the opened palm of the hand. But practically the whole force of the composition has spent itself in these subsidiary details.

Paintings by Duncan Grant: Wm. B. Paterson and Carfax & Co. Ltd., 5 Old Bond Street

This is a very important exhibition, and confirms the report which has been current for some time that Mr. Duncan Grant is an artist of unusual originality. I am deliberately emphatic, not only because I am very enthusiastic about some of these pictures, but also because I feel sure that many people will have been "put off" from the first by a few of them, in which Mr. Duncan Grant, under the influence of the modern abstractionist and pattern-making theories, has taken undue liberties with the human body. Even in these pictures there is much that is very fine, but it is quite independent of the stupid distortions which only have a marring or comic effect. But consider, for instance, the Still Life No. 23, Bowl, Skull, and Jar. Whatever other criticism may be levelled against it, it is immune from the charge of arbitrariness. Personally, I have nothing but praise for it, as being a magnificent piece of lyrical painting. There are several other pictures--landscapes, still lives, interiors--possessing the same exquisite qualities, notably Nos. 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 21. The last named, styled Juggler and Tight Rope Walker, which is in many ways the most brilliant of the whole collection, does evince here and there a certain exaggeration. This, however, can be overlooked because it does not rivet our attention.

On the other hand, in No. 29, Venus and Adonis, the placing of the lady's neck on her left-hand shoulder, with the consequent elongation of the right-hand shoulder, stirs up in our minds a whole swarm of general reflections, so that our æsthetic enjoyment of other real values in the picture is practically swamped. It is true that in caricatures we allow without cavil all sorts of liberties. But only because the result is expressive, and actually where we appreciate the caricature we do not notice any distortion, we see the work as convincingly true.

The Black Country. Drawings by Edward Wadsworth: The Leicester Galleries. (January.)

Mr. Wadsworth has almost found himself in his Black Country pictures, or better he has found a real object which coincides with his particular "vorticist" predilection. Continually is he obsessed with a certain forked-lightning pattern which zigzags over the world. Where it does not he often puts it there and, partially removing the world, leaves a pattern. However, in the slag heaps and belching chimneys and curved canals and splintered roofs of the Black Country, at any rate sometimes, this pattern comes back to earth, and the result is a striking picture. Vorticism and Futurism, in so far as they are art tendencies, represent the scientist and business man of the nineteenth century emerging painfully into emotional expression. Mr. Wadsworth and the "Futurists" have not been the first to discover science and industry artistically, but hitherto stress has been laid on the general impressiveness, the mystery and atmospheric volume of the subject. Mr. Wadsworth's particular contribution concerns the sheer joy in brutal mechanical movement and in the deadly bulk and solidity of industrial products and by-products. His best drawings are of ladle slag heaps, consisting of metallic-looking boulders hurled out into a desolation that yet teems with the energy that made and discarded them.

* * * * *

We have to congratulate Mr. D. Y. Cameron and Mr. George Henry on their election as Associates of the Royal Academy.

HOWARD HANNAY

MUSIC

THE RESURRECTION OF AN OPERA

It was Dr. Vaughan Williams who, sometime about 1912 or 1913, suggested Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen for performance at Cambridge. In 1911 Mr. Clive Carey and a few others had organised at Cambridge a performance of The Magic Flute. Mozart's last and greatest work for the stage was in those days not so familiar to English audiences as it is now. It had not been seen in this country, as far as I am aware, since it was given by the students of the Royal College of Music about twenty years ago. That it should be attempted by Cambridge amateurs was regarded as preposterous--even Covent Garden had shied at it. But the promoters of the Cambridge opera were less nervous. If they had confidence, it was a confidence in Mozart and in the opera rather than in themselves. They knew the opera intimately enough to have convinced themselves that the chief difficulty of The Magic Flute lay not in the extreme compass of the two parts of Sarastro and the Queen of Night, but first in the necessity for a clear and logical exposition of the story, secondly in the complication of the ensemble numbers, and thirdly perhaps in the psychology of what is really the most difficult part of all, the Orator (Der Sprecher). If singers could be found who were prepared to sing the parts of Gabriel and Raphael in The Creation, they could make at least a decent show of Sarastro and the Queen. Ensemble singing was merely a matter of musicianship and hard work; the personality of the Orator was of necessity a question largely of luck in finding the right man and coaching him intelligently. The producers of the Cambridge performance were guided by two principles, to aim at clearness and unity of style rather than at magnificence, and to pin their faith to a great dramatic composer rather than to a star cast.

The reception given to The Magic Flute encouraged them to consider the possibility of performing another opera in 1914. Several operas had been passed in review when Dr. Vaughan Williams made his brilliant suggestion, a suggestion which was very quickly adopted. The opera was prepared for performance and put into rehearsal in the summer of 1914, with a view to bringing it out in December of that year. The musical portions of the first three acts were well in hand and most of the dresses designed at the moment when war was declared. As soon as the war was definitely over, and Cambridge had begun to resume something of its normal aspect, the opera was resumed, although a bare half-dozen of the original cast remained, and The Fairy Queen was finally presented for the first time to a modern audience on February 10th of this year.

Purcell and Shakespeare

It may be of interest to those who witnessed the performance to learn something of the peculiar problems which confronted the producers and of the principles on which they tried to solve them. The only material available at that time was the Purcell Society's full score and a copy of the original libretto of 1692. The British Museum possessed also the second edition of the libretto (1693). The first thing to do was to prepare and print an acting version and a vocal score. It must not be supposed that The Fairy Queen is an opera in the modern sense, like Dido and Æneas. It is an abridged and altered version of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, into each act of which is introduced a sort of ballet-divertissement with songs and choruses. These musical episodes have practically nothing to do with the play. In Act I. Titania enters with her fairies and orders music to entertain the Indian Boy. This is interrupted by the appearance of a drunken poet, who is blindfolded and pinched by the fairies. In Act II., instead of "Ye Spotted Snakes," there is a long allegorical scene introducing Night, Secrecy, Mystery, and Sleep. In Act III. a divertissement of a broadly comic character is commanded by Titania for the amusement of Bottom. In Act IV. Oberon summons up a pageant of Phœbus and the Four Seasons in honour of his reconciliation with Titania, and lastly the fairies provide in Act V. the most magnificent and extravagant show of all to celebrate the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta. It will be seen that there is a certain amount of dramatic reason and also of artistic unity and contrast about these musical episodes. The first, for the Indian Boy, is fantastic and childlike; the second, for Titania, voluptuous and mysterious; the third, for Bottom, half-comic and half-erotic; the fourth, for Oberon, is a sort of Sun-God's festival; the last, for Theseus and Hippolyta, an epithalamium.

The first difficulty to be faced was that of the Shakespeare dialogue, which is all spoken, not sung. Should the librettist's textual alterations be kept, or the original restored? Had the textual alterations been violent enough to stamp the whole play as belonging definitely and unmistakably to the age of Dryden we should have had no hesitation in sticking to them. We were quite clear from the start that we meant to produce Purcell's opera and not Shakespeare's play. But the alterations to the text of Shakespeare were just enough to be irritating to an audience whom we assumed to be familiar with Shakespeare, and troublesome to actors who were probably in the same case. The chances were that the actors would forget the alterations here and there and return unconsciously to the original, and that the audience would merely suppose that they had not learnt their parts properly. Besides, the opera was so long that drastic cuts were imperative. Here again we at once decided that as far as was practicable it should be Shakespeare and not Purcell that was to be cut. We therefore started by restoring the original text of Shakespeare in all the scenes which had not been cut altogether by the librettist, and then proceeded to prune the Shakespeare down until we had reached either our time-limit or the limit of intelligibility. The latter was reached first, and on that we proceeded to cut down Purcell. An obvious course was to adopt the version of 1692, rejecting the scene of the Drunken Poet, and the two songs, Ye Gentle Spirits and The Plaint, which were added in 1693. But the scene of the Drunken Poet was too good to throw away. The two songs we abandoned with some reluctance on account of their singular beauty; but they could easily be spared from the point of view of the stage. Indeed The Plaint would have been impossible to accept; it is dragged in for no reason by special request of Oberon, and is not only extremely long, but profoundly melancholy and totally inappropriate to the cheerful atmosphere of the Epithalamium.

One of the librettist's alterations was to transfer the whole of Pyramus and Thisbe to the rehearsal scene in the wood. The players act it "in our habits as we shall play it before the Duke," and the interruptions of Theseus and the rest are assigned to Puck. Here again we restored the original, if only to save time. The idea then occurred to us to save the play by having it acted in dumb show during the Entry Dance of Act V. This solved the problem of what to do with this particular dance-tune; it gave us additional time to prepare the Chinese scene behind the tableau-curtain, it saved the time occupied by the play, and spared us the very tedious mirth of all the knockabout business which in A Midsummer-Night's Dream has now become traditional. Further, it brought the clowns in again at the appropriate moment, and, what was more important, it associated Shakespeare more closely with Purcell's music. The little pantomime was worked out at rehearsal entirely by the actors themselves. They first walked through the directions of the Pyramus and Thisbe play; then the music was played and the action tried with it. No further alteration was needed at subsequent rehearsals, for it so happened that every one of the actors was musical, and they stepped and moved to Purcell's notes by natural instinct.

There remained still a few bits of music to be disposed of. In the seventeenth century people had to sit in the theatre for a long time before the play began, and to pass the time a concert was provided, consisting of a First Musick, or Second Musick, and lastly the Overture. Under modern conditions it would have been more in accordance with the spirit of Purcell to send our orchestra out into the street to play the First and Second Musick to the queue that was waiting to enter the pit and gallery, but since we could not imagine that police regulations would permit this, we utilised the four little pieces at different points as incidental music to the play. In so doing we knew that we were untrue to the strict traditions of Purcell's day; but we did not wish to cut these pieces out altogether, and we further thought that they would help to Purcellize the Shakespeare. We were somewhat surprised to find that several of the audience seemed to expect A Midsummer-Night's Dream in its entirety, once the play had started. Our assumption, which apparently was wrong, was that everybody knew Shakespeare's play practically by heart, and that we need do no more than just indicate its outlines, leaving the rest to be filled up by the imagination under the inspiration of Purcell's music.

Purcell and His Orchestra

The opera is scored for the usual Purcell band. In the big instrumental numbers two trumpets, kettle-drums, and two hautboys are added to the string. A few numbers have two flutes, but flutes and hautboys never occur simultaneously, which leads me to think that in Purcell's days the flutes and hautboys were generally played by the same players. The solos are accompanied sometimes by violins and bass in three parts, more often by the harpsichord and bass alone, the other instruments playing no more than the ritornelli. On the question of orchestration we never had a moment's hesitation. We were determined from the very first that we would not add a single note to Purcell's score. This meant, of course, that a very serious responsibility would be thrown on the harpsichord. We had experimented once with a harpsichord in a Bach Concerto at a concert, with the very embarrassing discovery that the harpsichord player could hardly hear a note that he played, while the unfortunate conductor could hear nothing else but the harpsichord. To the audience, as a matter of fact, the result was quite satisfactory. The harpsichord in the theatre was a more perilous problem, especially as we were not able to have any rehearsal of any kind in the theatre until the day before the first performance. Would the harpsichord be audible in the audience? Would it be audible on the stage? Would it stay in tune under the very variable conditions of temperature? Would one harpsichord be enough, or ought we to have two, as Hasse had at the Dresden Opera House? Would the harpsichord be monotonous as well as inadequate? Ought we to have in addition a pianoforte or possibly a harp? We decided to do the very best we could with one harpsichord and chance it. In view of the probability that the harpsichord might become amazingly monotonous, the harpsichord part was considered with the greatest possible care and no pains spared to make it as varied, as effective, and as expressive as possible. Once in the theatre, the instrument was tried in various positions until the right place for it was found. It was clearly audible both on the stage and in all parts of the house without ever becoming too insistent. Here I must say how deeply we were indebted to the sensitive musicianship of the player, an undergraduate in his first year, who, although he had never placed his fingers on a harpsichord until about a fortnight before the performance, was gifted with exactly that fine sense of scholarship in music which is the first essential of the complete maestro al cembalo.

EDWARD J. DENT

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THE LONDON MERCURY

Editor--J. C. SQUIRE Assistant-Editor--EDWARD SHANKS

Vol. I No. 6 April 1920

EDITORIAL NOTES

Last month we referred here to the fact that a deputation was to wait on Mr. Fisher to press the claim of the drama to State encouragement. The deputation, which included critics, actors, and representatives of all the most important societies concerned, was received on March 13th. Whatever may or may not come of it, its mere reception in Whitehall is an event which marks an important step in the evolution of the official attitude towards the drama, which, until recently, was conceived as a thing with which the State had no relations save that of blue-penciller. For this we may chiefly thank the new and vigorous British Drama League and its secretary, Mr. Geoffrey Whitworth. Several resolutions were laid before the Minister. With some of the proposals commended to him he had, as Minister of Education, nothing to do; but his reply to the deputation was very sympathetic in tone and showed full cognisance of the part that dramatic representation might play in national life.

* * * * *

We do not propose to dwell at length upon all the suggestions which, tentatively or confidently, were made by the deputation or the Conference which instructed it. One of them we frankly dislike, and that is the proposal that the Universities should recognise the new status of the drama by establishing faculties of the drama. Those who propose this cannot mean merely that our dramatic inheritance should be studied as literature; for the encouragement of such study falls within the scope of the English schools, which are becoming more important and more intelligently conducted every year. They cannot mean, either, we suppose, that dramatic representation should be encouraged; that is not the job of a faculty unless a Doctorate or Baccalaureate of Histrionics be contemplated. They can only intend that a theoretical and practical training in the dramatist's art should be given, that a scientific study of the principles--technics or some such thing would be the word--of dramatic writing, based on the analysis of admitted masterpieces and (perhaps) admitted failures, should be followed, or accompanied, by the writing, under surveillance, of new dramatic works. It is conceivable. We met recently a lady who had won the Doctorate of Philosophy in an American University. She had nothing about her of the grey sobriety of the metaphysician or the ethicist; and, questioned, she stated that she had taken her degree in the School of Short-Story Writing. Well, we know those American academic treatises on short-story writing: champion instruments for taking the bloom off any work of art and killing the artistic impulses of any student simple enough to surrender himself to them. And though we do not know, and we don't think posterity will know, the plays written by those graduates of American Universities who have gone out into the world as dramatic writers of approved competence, we have seen some of the manuals on which they also have pastured: manuals admirable only as subjects for burlesque. In the teaching of literature criticism of the drama, examination (if you like) of the elements of dramatic construction, has its place with other forms of criticism; the history of the drama with other sorts of history. There is no harm done, and a certain stimulus may be given to the talented, if students are encouraged to write "original" works, and if a certain amount of academic credit is given for such works. But a school of dramatic production, or of novel-writing, or of poetical composition ... may we be saved from that! The way in which teachers may develop dramatic, as other literary, talent is by encouraging the intelligent reading of good literature, and by demonstrating the grand truth that its roots lie in life fearlessly observed and passionately felt.

* * * * *

The more amateur dramatic performance--of works which have some imaginative quality in them--the better. If the Board of Education, which has already (we think) done a good deal to encourage both music and mimetics in the schools, can still further humanise the curriculum, all the richer will be the community, all the more amusing will be the lives of the children, and, in the end, all the richer will be our art. The Universities may probably be left to take care of themselves. Very likely a word of encouragement from a Minister of Education, a Prime Minister, or an Archbishop of Canterbury might in some places remove obscurantist opposition or secure facilities which have not been forthcoming. But young men are not children. They can arrange things for themselves, with the assistance of sympathetic and not necessarily official elders. And that the junior members of the Universities, since the war, have been taking with a new zest to dramatic production is a matter of common observation. If we go no farther than Oxford and Cambridge we have seen during the present term--eight weeks old as we write--the successful production of Mr. Hardy's Dynasts by the O.U.D.S., and at Cambridge the Marlowe Society's production of The White Devil and the revival of Purcell's Faerie Queene, organised by Dr. Rootham, Mr. Clive Carey, and Mr. Dent. This last was an imposing operation: a large acting cast, a ballet, an orchestra, dresses and scenery were supplied by junior members of the University and local ladies. Next term the A.D.C. are performing a modern comedy, and Comus is amongst the other things mooted for May Week. Organisation from above is nothing as good as this, especially if it takes the form of organisation of an academic course.

* * * * *

But the place of the drama in education is too large and difficult a subject to be dealt with in detail here: what we do wish to say a few words about is what, after all, was the main object of the deputation's visit to Whitehall, though it had little to do with the Minister of Education, as such--we mean the National Theatre. It was to this that the speakers for the deputation, particularly Dr. Courtney and Sir Sidney Lee, chiefly addressed themselves. Here also we have a subject which invites extended treatment if we begin to contemplate the possible relations between public authorities generally and the drama. It is reported that in South London a Town Council desires to give help out of the rates to the new operatic venture at the Surrey Theatre; and before long we shall probably hear suggestions that where local authorities wish to maintain theatrical enterprises they should obtain grants-in-aid from the Government. That is a large and a complicated, not to say a controversial, matter. But the National Theatre question can be strictly localised. All we need ask is: Ought there, or ought there not, to be a permanently endowed institution in London where the best English plays should be produced regardless of commercial risks, and ought, or ought not, the State to lend its moral and financial support to such an institution? And since there exists already a National Theatre Fund, which has acquired a site for a playhouse, we are faced ultimately with the question whether the Government should take a direct financial and administrative interest in that scheme.

* * * * *

The National Theatre scheme grew out of the preparations for commemorating the Tercentenary of Shakespeare's death--which fell in 1916, during the war. In 1904 a committee was organised, and in 1905 it was resolved, at a Mansion House meeting, to collect funds for an architectural memorial and, if possible, for a small theatre in which Elizabethan and other plays could be performed. In 1908 another Mansion House meeting was held, at which it was proposed to erect a statue in Portland Place (so convenient because it is very wide and nobody ever goes there) at a cost of not less than £100,000. Such an expenditure on such an object horrified a great many people. For some time--notably after the publication of an admirable book by Messrs. Granville Barker and William Archer--interest had been growing in the proposal for a National Theatre. The £100,000 statue scheme naturally led to the suggestion that a theatre would be a better memorial than a statue, and that two birds could be killed with one stone if the National Theatre were to be the Shakespeare Memorial. The notion was accepted; the two movements were amalgamated; and a fund for a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was opened by a committee of which Lord Plymouth was chairman and Sir Israel Gollancz secretary. The public appeal was not so successful as it might have been. By 1910 the sum of £90,000 had been collected, of which £70,000 came from a single donor, Sir Carl Meyer. The committee spent £61,000 on a site in Gower Street, from which a certain revenue has since been received. Then came the war. The collection of money stopped, and it has not (so far as we are aware) been made clear to the public what the committee has been doing since the Armistice, what it proposes to do in the near future, and when it intends to make a bid for the rest of the four or five or (it may now be) six or seven hundred thousand that is required for the erection and endowment of a theatre.

* * * * *

Now it is evident that sooner or later the project must be resumed and a further appeal made to the public. It is possible that this appeal will be more successful than the last. After all, we hear of twenty new millionaires in Bradford alone, and any one of these could contribute a large portion of the whole sum required, thereby earning fame and, very likely, a public honour better deserved than some. It is obvious on the face of it that if the Government is known to look on the scheme with a benevolent eye its chances of success will be brighter. Is it impossible that, should the whole sum not be raised from private persons, the Government should guarantee a subsidy? This would, of course, involve some measure of Government control, and the presence of Government representatives on the permanent body of Trustees, who would sit there precisely as do the two Government directors recently appointed to the Board of a Cellulose Company. We say this without prejudice to the general question of the relations between the community and the theatre. The idea has been mooted that municipalities should subsidise theatres and that the Government should assist them with grants-in-aid. It is attractive, and a Whitehall Committee might well be appointed to explore it. But the National Theatre is a distinct and peculiar proposal. What we desire is that there should be in the capital one house with a position resembling that of the Comédie Française, or the Old Imperial Opera House in Petrograd, a house devoted to the production of good plays, provided with a stock company, and guaranteed against all the fluctuations of fortune. In brief, the revival of the English classic plays should be systematised. It should not be left to chance whether an Englishman should live and die without having an opportunity of seeing a competent, or indeed any, performance of Troilus and Cressida, of Marlowe's Faustus, of The Duchess of Malfi, of The Critic, of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, of The Way of the World, of The Broken Heart: to mention but a few of the interesting plays that ordinary managers can scarcely ever be expected to put on. For the ordinary manager must almost always build on hopes of a long run. These plays probably would not hold the stage for long runs; and if one of them did have a long run, it would only mean that during that run no other play would be visible at the theatre where it was being produced. Some of Shakespeare's plays have scarcely any prospect of being produced in our time in a London theatre, save only at the "Old Vic.," which has so finely struggled for existence, and so gloriously (though how far does its permanence rest on the continuance of a single life?) succeeded. Theatres are limited in number. They have become the subjects of violent speculation. Even if a private man with the most ambitious of plans obtained a theatre we should have no guarantee that he would not pass his theatre on next day to somebody who was willing to give him a handsome profit for his lease and hoped to recoup himself by a year's run of revue or American melodrama. We conceive that if publishing houses were like theatres, and could issue only one work at a time, Messrs. Methuen (we hope they will allow us to use their name as an illustration) might well be excused if, as between Shakespeare (of whom they publish admirable editions) and Tarzan of the Apes they chose, at this moment, the latter. There is a public for both kinds, but the smaller at any given moment (though over a long period the larger) is very badly catered for in the theatrical world, where everybody is bidding for the great rewards that the larger public can bestow, and is, at present, under the necessity of paying a "shortage" rent, which will not go down unless some prodigiously rich and adventurous syndicate starts building new theatres wholesale.

* * * * *

How far a National Theatre, especially a State-assisted National Theatre, can be expected, or will consider it its duty, to produce new plays of merit is doubtful. If that is one of its functions it will not be its chief function; were it so its work would be the centre of perpetual tempests of controversy, and its controllers would learn what lobbying means. It will have quite enough to do if it concentrates on the systematic revival, on repertory lines, of the best classic plays, with occasional production of foreign plays and of old plays of historical interest. That, surely, is a thing which should be done, a work which should be continually maintained and developed, a work which should as certainly be maintained at the public expense (if necessary) as should, say, the Encyclopædia Britannica or the Dictionary of National Biography, should there ever come a time when no publisher felt able to spare the capital required to keep those great compilations going. After all, what is there to differentiate the cases of these enterprises from that of the British Museum, which nobody, whatever his opinion about public undertakings generally, suggests should be, or ever could be, stablished and maintained on its present scale by private enterprise?

* * * * *

The binding-case for Vol. I. of THE LONDON MERCURY will be ready early in April. The case is of black cloth, with a white label in a sunk panel. It is designed to hold the six numbers plus an eight-page index (which will also be ready early in the month) and minus the six wrappers and the advertisement pages. Binding-cases will be supplied from this office at 3_s._ 6_d._ post free. If readers prefer that we should bind their numbers for them, they may send them here and pay an inclusive 6_s._, which will cover the cost of the case, the work of binding, and the return postage. The volume will be rather a fat one, but we felt that readers would think that twice a year was quite often enough to have this labour imposed on them.

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE

Arthur Henry Bullen died suddenly on February 29th, 1920, in his sixty-third year, at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had lived since 1906. He used to say that in his boyhood, as the son of Dr. George Bullen, Keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum, he ran about the Library and browsed at pleasure, cultivating in his teens a taste (no doubt inherited) not only for the best in literature, but for the best in books too. He went to the City of London School and to Worcester College, Oxford, as a scholar; but, to judge from his mature habits, he must have been almost completely self-educated. A pleasant glimpse of him at Oxford may be seen in Professor Poulton's Viriamu Jones. He was already a man of very wide reading; within a few years of going down from Oxford he began to make himself known as an editor of Elizabethan drama and anthologies. Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books and its sequels no doubt are the most popular of his books; he rediscovered Thomas Campion, and poured out reprints of Old English Plays (two series), and the works of John Day, Marlowe, Marston, Middleton, and Peele. To edit a book, however, did not suffice him. For the last decade of the nineteenth century the firm of Lawrence & Bullen published a large number of remarkable works, ancient and modern, including not only familiar successes like Miss Harraden's Ships that Pass in the Night and Mr. W. W. Jacobs' Many Cargoes, half-a-dozen of the novels of George Gissing (a close friend of Bullen's), and early works of Mr. H. G. Wells, Moira O'Neill, and the authors of the Irish R.M., but also sumptuous and beautiful books, such as Botticelli's Illustrations to Dante, William Strang's Death and the Ploughman's Wife, and illustrated translations of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Straparola, Masuccio, and Ser Giovanni. Bullen's special taste was shown in the "Muses' Library," which began with Herrick, and included Keats (with an incomparable introduction by Robert Bridges) and William Blake (edited by W. B. Yeats).

* * * * *

Early in the present century he left the firm to continue publishing under his own name. To this period belong the Irish Plays and Ideas of Good and Evil of Mr. Yeats, whose Celtic Twilight and Secret Rose Bullen took over, with other books, from Lawrence & Bullen Ltd.; and such characteristic contributions to Elizabethan research as Dr. W. W. Greg's edition of Henslowe's Diary and Mr. R. B. McKerrow's Works of Thomas Nashe. In 1903 he dreamed one night that some one offered him a Shakespeare "printed at Stratford-on-Avon"; and within a year he had started the Shakespeare Head Press in order to realise the dream, which resulted in the "Stratford Town" Shakespeare in ten finely-printed volumes. Settling in Stratford, he devoted himself to printing and publishing, chiefly scholarly works of Shakespearean lore; but he also printed the handsome Collected Edition of the works of W. B. Yeats. About 1906, in addition to his other labours, he made a gallant effort as editor of the Gentleman's Magazine to revive its ancient glories, and managed to collect a wide variety of excellent articles. The best memorial to Bullen would be the realisation of a scheme long planned and fostered by him to make the Shakespeare Head Press at Stratford-on-Avon a properly subsidised centre of British Shakespearean scholarship.

* * * * *

In person he bore, especially in later years, a striking resemblance to Mark Twain; indeed, at the time of Mark's last visit to London, Bullen humorously complained of the awkwardness of being publicly recognised as someone else. He loved tramping and rambling--not exactly walking--whether in country or town; and as a young man had acquired a knowledge of the high-roads and antiquities of England and Wales that was outdone only by his extensive and peculiar knowledge of various brewages obtainable along the road. Here is a characteristic piece of Bullen's writing--an Editorial Note in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1906:

Sylvanus Urban, then but a boy, had started from Chepstow on a solitary walking tour, and was soon caught in a rattling thunderstorm on the Wyndcliff. Tintern Abbey and Raglan Castle are fresh in his memory to-day. A mile or two out of Monmouth he came upon some excellent nutty-hearted ale that George Borrow would have immortalised. As he pursued his way to Raglan Castle he pondered on the ale--"this way and that dividing the swift mind"--until at length, in despair of meeting an equal brew, he turned back again and had another tankard. Heavens, what days were those! In his pack he carried the Essays of Elia and read them in an old inn at Llandovery, where the gracious hostess lighted in his honour tall wax candles fit to stand before an altar. After leaving Llandovery, he lost his way among the Caermarthenshire hills, and was in very poor plight with hunger and fatigue when he reached the white-washed walls of Tregaron. At Harlech he rested for a couple of days, and then covered the way to Beddgelert--twenty miles, if he remembers rightly--at a spanking pace; proceeding in the late afternoon to climb Snowdon, and arriving at Llanberis an hour or so before midnight. Back to London, every inch of the way, walked the young Sylvanus. He indulges the hope that he may yet shoulder his pack again.

He read and re-read unendingly; he loved to talk of men and books with a boon companion, pacing to and fro, ruffling his grey mane and smoking continuously. On such occasions he would stagger his friends with an unexpected display of familiarity with recondite literature, or charm them with impromptu quotations, often at great length, declaimed with a loving appreciation of sound and rhythm. Everything that was old and ripe with goodness he loved, whether literature or furniture; in poetry above all his instinct for the best was infallible. In English, from 1550 to his own day, he seemed to have read and judged everything; but the atmosphere of antiquity that he breathed shut him off from appreciating many contemporary writers. He would keep Epictetus by his bedside, and chant Mrs. Browning's Pan while he dressed; he championed Coventry Patmore and could not admire Meredith. His very craftsmanship was antique; he could not ride a bicycle, infinitely preferring to walk; a typewriter was offensive to one who wrote innumerable letters all in his own hand; he did not even shave himself, finding, no doubt, a daily pleasure in visiting the barber. He was equally sound in his judgments on mezzotints or mutton, and preferred old English fare, with beer, to "Frenchified fuss." A chivalrous and generous scholar and gentleman; those who knew him will call to mind the phrase in which Bullen would refer to a dead friend--"now with God."

* * * * *

Mr. G. D. Smith, the prince of book-dealers, died suddenly in America early in the month. He had but recently been in England, and a few days before his death was cabling to England offers for an important library, which he had tracked down just before leaving. It was he who purchased the famous Venus and Adonis for £15,100 in the winter; he bought largely for the Huntingdon Library, and when he, or one of his millionaire clients, really wanted a book in the English salerooms the prices might break records, but there was no doubt about the book's destination. Mr. Smith was not, to put it mildly, a reading man, but he had a wonderful nose for a good thing, and he was an agreeable man to deal with--a good business man, but not one who attempted to trade unduly upon people's ignorance.

POETRY

"Skindle's" in Poperinghe

(The Salient, 1917)

Shut the door, Jameson, shut the blasted door-- The whole road's blocked as far as Elverdinghe. Four Bridge would hold you up an hour or more So don't go crashing up to-night, old thing-- What weather! Hall-marked Flanders wind and rain! Come on inside. My groom will take your mare Round to the smithy on the Market Square. Let's have a dekko at the carte again. It's a posh lunch to-day, Suzanne's a vision, And the room's lousy with the old Division.

Just now MacMartin stopped me on the street With news from Amiens. (And Marguerite Sends you her love. Oh, it's a bonzer war In cushy billets at the Poisson D'Or!) Mac is the same old swinger--he "mistook" His indicated route, and lost his bunch, Jumped on a tender down from Hazebrouck And blew in here with Willy Braid for lunch. They're in the bar with Tupper, back from Blighty, Capping his yarns of Baths and Aphrodite.

Yes--I go back at dawn. We're on the ridge Over the Steenbeek by the corduroy bridge, Past the big pill-box with the double cleft To the main route stumps on the sky-line--then half-left. It's about an hour from the lorry-stand, unless You take the duckboards near the R.E. shaft. Quicker that way, of course, but badly strafed. You'll see a stranded tank there--that's the Mess. What is it like now? Smelly, Jim, and muddy-- Under restraint, I call it fairly bloody.

Nothing like Nieuport. Why, it seems an age-- And yet the year is barely four months older, Since we got rounds up on the narrow-gauge And visited Belgian outposts in the polder. That was the life, old Jimmy! Now it's a black And gory business, slogging away by pack-- Most of it salvage--while the five-nines crump Our half-drowned hairies staggering from the dump. (Well, here's luck, Jim! Gone dry? Why, I'd forgotten-- Another brand, Suzanne! This sweet stuff's rotten.)

There's a new mob to-night about the town-- The whole back area's stiff with guns and troops, And Proven road's chock-full with "heavy groups" From six-inch up. They've put the tape-lines down And moved the forward dumps to Poelcapelle. Battle-headquarters' somewhere near the Bower, All day and night we're brassing off like hell-- It's going to be a "Brock's" at zero hour! The Hun's not loafing though--he's getting windy, Listen! Even from here you can hear the shindy.

Two nights ago we caught it hell-for-leather. The new relief had just gone on ahead, Leaving the altered signal "green-over-red." There was a little mist, and some soft weather-- All quiet at nine o'clock. Hardly a sound. I took my gum-boots for a last look round. Nothing was doing beside the usual cracks Of long-range shrapnel on the duckboard tracks, And a crooning eight-inch, humping along a load Meant for the siding on the Pilkem road.

Clusters of Very lights along the line Flickered and plunged. They helped my eyes to mark Our barrage-lines across the battery-arc. The pools were hoared with silver in the shine. Peaceful it was. I strolled and smoked and stared-- There came a quickened rumble in the East, Down the battalion front the lights increased. Machine guns raved and stuttered. A rocket flared-- Scarlet and golden-rain spouted and spread, Flares and skysigns and stars, and Green-over-red!

_Watch for it, Sentry! There again. Yes! Battery-Action! S.O.S.! Shadowy man after man leaps to a gun. Flash from the centre--five then flash as one. All round are flashes, lighting the livid Faces of straining gun-crews. Vicious and vivid Fire spirals and cataracts--knives, spikes Of fire stabbing the dark. Batters and strikes On the ears the unutterable, profound Debauchery of sound-- The roar and clutter and whinny--sustained, obscene As if the dead beasts of the Pleistocene, Spawned of the essence Of ravaged earth's womb and her churned putrescence Were howling over the mud their lusts unclean._

Then--well, when every hollow's a belching mass Of wrangling guns, guns bellowing to guns-- You cannot tell a burst of ours from the Huns'-- Suddenly through the cordite I smelt the gas. Down went the warning through the roar and screech-- The spitting splinters ploughed us like a squall, Half-blinded gunners wrestled with the breech, Gas-helmeted, smoke-drenched--you know it all-- Then the five-nines began. A salvo came, And Number Four went up in a gust of flame.

I thought the whole of the line was smashed and finished-- And then, through the reek of the fog and the dropping mire, From the right flank, steady and undiminished, Came the assuring crashes of section-fire, Timed and checked and re-laid. We groped and plunged To pull the stricken out. Still droned the steady Voice of the sergeants at the "set and ready." Number One, fire! The muzzle flamed and lunged. Number Two, fire! By God, those chaps are stunners! Search France, you'll find no better than my gunners.

But some good men went West--some of the best. Horses or men, the best must always go-- Jim, it's a mad-blind, lunatic, filthy show-- Destiny's pitch-and-toss made manifest. I'm sick to death of it. And yet--and yet There's a hold somehow in this crazed eclipse Of the normal orient--a hold that grips-- Nothing in life, I suppose, lacks credit and debt-- The battered brain may hanker for surcease, But under the brain--its curious--there is peace.

Hold on a bit. Last leave I met a fellow Who cornered me at the club and hiccupped crude Optimist zeal and tub-worn platitude-- You know the sort. Slug-bellied, slushy, mellow. He winked, and wagged his tubby hands, and spouted-- "Break through next time, old boy!" He knew, he knew-- The final trap was laid--the Hun was outed-- He'd had it straight from Jones at G.H.Q.-- And--"Then we'll see you sportsmen back at Dover Covered with glory--sorry it's all over."

So I let fly. I fed the blaze with faggots-- Hinted that on the whole we liked the Hun-- Roughed out a sketch of charnel-heaps and maggots-- The side of war that isn't sport nor fun; Flung a few phrases chosen from the camps At itch-struck females dashing about in cars To pose in sketchy frills at snide bazaars-- At fat old profiteers and statesmen's ramps-- Oh, yes! I piled it on. He loathed the pill, And barged his way out, rosy round the gill.

But was the swine half-right? It sounds like bliss To sleep serene o' nights without surmise Of S.O.S. lights screaming to the skies, Deep in the warmth of Blighty out of this-- It sounds like bliss to forget the dug-out's reeking, The bitter fog in the eyes, the life on a thread, The crazed crescendo of the mortars seeking Half-callous living and the unheeding dead, And drowse in everlasting furloughs, under The placid roofs of peace-time. Well, I wonder!

If we get through it--if the Immortals choose To grant a span again, when this be ended, Of ordered life, impenetrably fended By small restraints and sanctions and taboos-- Shall the recovered cares and leisures grip The flabbier soul, or shall desire return Back to the dug-out's care-free comradeship And battle-time's magnificent unconcern For dim to-morrows? Shall we find, once more, Peace has its surfeits too as well as War?

Not the drab shadows only we'll remember, But all the colour there was--the browns and blues Down the deep shaft of Flemish avenues; The swaying harvests gold-drenched with September; And frosty mornings in the Spring retreat When the scrap opened out, and it was good To choose a gun-park in the greening wheat And pitch a hidden tent in Holnon Wood-- Jimmy, old son, it made the pulses dance To see those Devon daffodils in France!

We shall recall the eager clank and jingle Of gun-teams on the pavé, moving South, The long off-saddle in the midday drouth, "Feed" in the cowslips by the wayside dingle; The journey's welcome end amid the cool Clutter of sun-warmed barns and straggling pines; The urgent fuss around the wagon-lines; Sweat-roughened horses drinking at the pool-- And then the morning start, with head-chains ringing Swinging along at ease, the drivers' singing....

And moments better still. I thank the gods For one white, perfect hour at Conteville, With Bosches massing on the nearer hill, And open sights as near as makes no odds. Young Grant was with us then. The boy was daft, Blind to the snipers, yelling like the damned: Oh, good! Oh, bloody good! at every waft Of three-rounds-gunfire. Then left section jammed, And back the buzzers' private signal rolled: Sweat on it, chum! We've got the bastards cold!

Such memories blaze their imprint under the traces Of darker records on the palimpsest. The blacker the time the deeper bites the zest Of sudden sunshine on the open spaces. There's a rough justice fingering the scale Where greater guerdons risk the longer price-- Hazard your neck, and savour your cakes and ale-- Seek Eden-fruit, and stake your Paradise. For though smooth road's good going, Jim--a kiss Snatched at the edge of Hell is tenfold bliss.

One thing is sure. This crazy round-about Destroys the introspective attitude. Action uproots the dreamy Hamlet-mood, And blithely cuts the yellow throat of Doubt. Your job is clear before you, catalogued From dawn to dawn. You cannot miss the greens, Slice as you will--the fairway lies undogged By furtive may-be-sos and might-have-beens-- Flank unto flank no hesitation ghosts The crude commands of Corps Direction-Posts.

Leave it at that, then. On your toes, old son! Still with a grin for plagues we can't abolish-- The super-fatted Staff; the wily Hun; The Army's tribal god of Spit-and-Polish. Blight seize 'em all! I'll wander now and borrow A couple of blankets from the R.T.O., You can doss down with me an hour or so. We'll trek together to the guns to-morrow. Finish your swipes, old Jimmy, while you can-- Walk--March! The blooming ride! Bonne chance, Suzanne!

L. M. HASTINGS

Nobis cum Pereant

_Nobis cum pereant amorum Et dulcedines et decor, Tu nostrorum præteritorum, Anima mundi, sis memor._

On the mind's lonely hill-top lying I saw man's life go by like a breath, And Love that longs to be love undying, Bowed with fear of the void of death. "If Time be master," I heard her weeping, "How shall I save the loves I bore? They are gone, they are gone beyond my keeping-- Anima mundi, sis memor!

"Soul of the World, thou seest them failing-- Childhood's loveliness, child's delight-- Lost as stars in the daylight paling, Trodden to earth as flowers in fight. Surely in these thou hast thy pleasure-- Yea! they are thine and born therefor: Shall they not be with thy hid treasure?-- Anima mundi, sis memor!

"Only a moment we can fold them Here in the home whose life they are: Only a moment more behold them As in a picture, small and far. Oh, in the years when even this seeming Lightens the eyes of Love no more, Dream them still in thy timeless dreaming Anima mundi, sis memor!"

HENRY NEWBOLT

Beechwood.

Hear me, O beeches! You That have with ageless anguish slowly risen From earth's still secret prison Into the ampler prison of aery blue. Your voice I hear, flowing the valleys through After the wind that tramples from the west. After the wind your boughs in new unrest Shake, and your voice--one voice uniting voices A thousand or a thousand thousand--flows Like the wind's moody; glad when he rejoices In swift-succeeding and diminishing blows, And drooping when declines death's ardour in his breast; Then over him exhausted weaving the soft fan-like noises Of gentlest creaking stems and soothing leaves Until he rest, And silent too your easied bosom heaves.

That high and noble wind is rootless nor From stable earth sucks nurture, but roams on Childless as fatherless, wild, unconfined, So that men say, "As homeless as the wind!" Rising and falling and rising evermore With years like ticks, æons as centuries gone; Only within impalpable ether bound And blindly with the green globe spinning round. He, noble wind, Most ancient creature of imprisoned Time, From high to low may fall, and low to high may climb, Andean peak to deep-caved southern sea, With lifted hand and voice of gathered sound, And echoes in his tossing quiver bound And loosed from height into immensity, Yet of his freedom tires, remaining free. --Moulding and remoulding imponderable cloud, Uplifting skyey archipelagian isles Sunnier than ocean's, blue seas and white isles Aflush with blossom where late sunlight glowed-- Still of his freedom tiring yet still free, Homelessly roaming between sky, earth and sea.

But you, O beeches, even as men, have root Deep in apparent and substantial things-- Earth, sun, air, water, and the chemic fruit Wise Time of these has made. What laughing Springs Your branches sprinkle young leaf-shadows o'er That wanting the leaf-shadows were no Springs Of seasonable sweet and freshness! nor If Summer of your murmur gathered not Increase of music as your leaves grow dense, Might even kine and birds and general noise of wings Of summer make full Summer, but the hot Slow moons would pass and leave unsatisfied the sense. Nor Autumn's waste were dear if your gold snow Of leaves whirled not upon the gold below; Nor Winter's snow were loveliness complete Wanting the white drifts round your breasts and feet. To hills how many has your tossed green given Likeness of an inverted cloudy heaven; How many English hills enlarge their pride Of shape and solitude By beechwoods darkening the steepest side! I know a Mount--let there my longing brood Again, as oft my eyes--a Mount I know Where beeches stand arrested in the throe Of that last onslaught when the gods swept low Against the gods inhabiting the wood. Gods into trees did pass and disappear, Gigantic beeches opened and received, Then closing, body and huge members heaved With energy and agony and fear. See how the thighs were strained, how tortured here. See, limb from limb sprung, pain too sore to bear. Eyes once looked from those sockets that no eyes Have worn since--oh, with what desperate surprise! These arms, uplifted still, were raised in vain Against alien triumph and the inward pain. Unlock your arms, and be no more distressed, Let the wind glide over you easily again. It is a dream you fight, a memory Of battle lost. And how should dreaming be Still a renewed agony? But O, when that wind comes up out of the west New-winged with Autumn from the distant sea And springs upon you, how should not dreaming be A remembered and renewing agony?

Then are your breasts, O unleaved beeches, again Torn, and your thighs and arms with the old strain Stretched past endurance; and your groans I hear Low bent beneath the hoofs by that fierce charioteer Driven clashing over; till even dreaming is Less of a present agony than this.

Fall gentler sleep upon you now, while soft Airs circle swallow-like from hedge to croft Below your lowest naked-rooted troop. Let evening slowly droop Into the middle of your boughs and stoop Quiet breathing down to your scarce-quivering side And rest there satisfied.

Yet sleep herself may wake And through your heavy unlit dome, O Mount of beeches, shake. Then shall your massy columns yield Again the company all day concealed.... Is it their shapes that sweep Serene within the ambit of the Moon Sentinel'd by shades slow-marching with moss-footed hours that creep From dusk of night to dusk of day--slow-marching, yet too soon Approaching morn? Are these their grave Remembering ghosts? ... Already your full-foliaged branches wave, And the thin failing hosts Into your secrecies are swift withdrawn Before the certain footsteps of the dawn.

But you, O beeches, even as men have root Deep in apparent and substantial things. Birds on your branches leap and shake their wings, Long ere night falls the soft owl loosens her slow hoot From the unfathomed fountains of your gloom. Late western sunbeams on your broad trunks bloom, Levelled from the low opposing hill, and fold Your inmost conclave with a burning gold. ... Than those night-ghosts awhile more solid, men Pass within your sharp shade that makes an arctic night Of common light, And pause, swift measuring tree by tree; and then Paint their vivid mark, Ciphering fatality on each unwrinkled bark Across the sunken stain That every season's gathered streaming rain Has deepened to a darker grain. You of this fatal sign unconscious lift Your branches still, each tree her lofty tent; Still light and twilight drift Between, and lie in wan pools silver sprent. But comes a day, a step, a voice, and now The repeated stroke, the noosed and tethered bough, The sundered trunk upon the enormous wain Bound kinglike with chain over chain, New wounded and exposed with each old stain. And here small pools of doubtful light are lakes Shadowless and no more that rude bough-music wakes.

So on men too the indifferent woodman, Time, Servant of unseen Master, nearing sets His unread symbol--or who reads forgets; And suns and seasons fall and climb, Leaves fall, snows fall, Spring flutters after Spring, A generation a generation begets. But comes a day--though dearly the tough roots cling To common earth, branches with branches sing-- And that obscure sign's read, or swift misread, By the indifferent woodman or his slave Disease, night-wandered from a fever-dripping cave. No chain's then needed for no fearful king, But light earth-fall on foot and hand and head.

Now, thick as stars leaves shake within the dome Of faintly-glinting dusking monochrome; And stars thick hung as leaves shake unseen in the round Of darkening blue: the heavenly branches wave without a sound, Only betrayed by fine vibration of thin air. Gleam now the nearer stars and ghosts of farther stars that bare, Trembling and gradual, brightness everywhere.... When leaves fall wildly and your beechen dome is thinned, Showered glittering down under the sudden wind; And when you, crowded stars, are shaken from your tree, In time's late season stripped, and each bough nakedly Rocks in those gleamless shallows of infinity; When star-fall follows leaf-fall, will long Winter pass away And new stars as new leaves dance through their hasty May? But as a leaf falls so falls weightless thought Eddying, and with a myriad dead leaves lies Bewildered, or in a little air awhile is caught Idly, then drops and dies.

Look at the stars, the stars? But in this wood All I can understand is understood. Gentler than stars your beeches speak; I hear Syllables more simple and intimately clear To earth-taught sense, than the heaven-singing word Of that intemperate wisdom which the sky Shakes down upon each unregarding century, There lying like snow unstirred, Unmelting, on the loftiest peak Above our human and green valley ways. Lowlier and friendlier your beechen branches speak To men of mortal days With hearts too fond, too weak For solitude or converse with that starry race. Their shaken lights, Their lonely splendours and uncomprehended Dream-distance and long circlings 'mid the heights And deeps remotely neighboured and attended By spheres that spill their fire through these estranging nights:-- Ah, were they less dismaying, or less splendid! But as one deaf and mute sees the lips shape And quiver as men talk, or marks the throat Of rising song that he can never hear, Though in the singer's eyes her joy may dimly peer, And song and word his hopeless sense escape-- Sweet common word and lifted heavenly note-- So, beneath that bright rain, While stars rise, soar, and stoop, Dazzled and dismayed I look and droop And, blinded, look again.

"Return, return!" O beeches sing you then. I like a tree wave all my thoughts with you, As your boughs wave to other tossed boughs when First in the windy east the dawn looks through Night's soon-dissolving bars. Return, return? But I have never strayed: Hush, thoughts, that for a moment played In that enchanted forest of the stars Where the mind grows numb. Return, return? Back, thoughts, from heights that freeze and deeps that burn, Where sight fails and song's dumb. And as, after long absence, a child stands In each familiar room And with fond hands Touches the table, casement, bed, Anon, each sleeping, half-forgotten toy; So I to your sharp light and friendly gloom Returning, with first pale leaves round me shed, Recover the old joy Since here the long-acquainted hill-path lies, Steeps I have clambered up, and spaces where The Mount opens her bosom to the air And all around gigantic beeches rise.

JOHN FREEMAN

Shobeensho

(From the Irish Gaelic)

For my Granddaughter Jenny

O not as the wife of a churl would wrap you, In coarse country woollens so roughly to hap you; Between two sheets of the silk I'll lay you, A cradle of gold in the wind to sway you.

I'd rock you to rest, my bright new-comer, One dreamy day in the height of summer, Under the eaves of whispering leaves, Drowsed by the drone of the wee bee-drummer.

May a dream of delight steal into your slumber; Till evening makes way for the Starry Number, And with God's bright angels around to mind you, No finger of death I pray may find you!

ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES

Storm and Stars

Naked night; black elms, pallid and streaming sky? Alone with the passion of the wind, In a hollow of stormy sound lost and alone am I, On beaten earth a lost, unmated mind, Marvelling at the stars, few, strange and bright, That all this dark assault of surging air, Wrenching the rooted wood, hunting the cloud of night, As if it would tear all and nothing spare, Leaves supreme in the height.

Against what laws, what laws, what powers invisible, Sought not, yet always found, Cries this dumb passion, strains this wrestle of wild will, With tiger-leaps that seem to shake the ground? Is it the baffled, homeless, rebel wind's crying, Or storm from a profounder passion wrung? Ah, heart of man, is it you, the old powers defying, By far desires, by terrible beauty stung, Broken on laws unseen, in a starry world dying, Ignorant, tameless, young?

LAURENCE BINYON

THE FORESHORE OF LONDON

By H. M. TOMLINSON

It begins on the north side of the City, at Poverty Corner. It begins imperceptibly, and very likely is no more than what a native knows is there. It does not look like a foreshore. It looks like another of the byways of the capital. There is nothing to distinguish it from the rest of Fenchurch Street. You will not find it in the directory, for its name is only a familiar bearing used by seamen among themselves. If a wayfarer came upon it from the west, he might stop to light a pipe (as well there as anywhere) and pass on, guessing nothing of what it is and of its memories. And why should he? London is built of such old shadows; and while we are here casting our own there is not much time to turn and question what they fall upon. Yet if some unreasonable doubt, a suspicion that he was being watched, made a stranger hesitate at that corner, he might begin to feel that London there was as different from Bayswater and Clapham as though deep water intervened. In a sense deep water does; and not only the sea, but legends of ships that have gone, and of the men who knew them, and traditions of a service older than anything Whitehall knows, though still as lively as enterprise itself, and as recent as the ships which moved on to-day's high water.

In a frame outside one of its shops hangs a photograph of a sailing ship. The portrait is so large and the beauty of the subject so evident that it might have been the cause of the stranger stopping there to fill his pipe. Yet how could he know that to those groups of men loitering about the name of that ship is as familiar as Suez or Rio, even though they have never seen her? They know her as well as they know their business. They know her house-flag--it is indistinguishable in the picture--and her master, and it is possible the oldest of them remembers the Clippers of that fleet of which she alone now carries the emblem; for this is not only another year, but another era. But they do not look at her portrait. They spit into the road, or stare across it, and rarely move from where they stand, except to pace up and down as though keeping a watch. At one time, perhaps thirty years ago, it was usual to see gold rings in their ears. It is said that if you wanted a bunch of men to run a little river steamer, with a freeboard of six inches, out to Delagoa Bay, you could engage them all at this corner, or at the taverns just up the turning. The suggestion of such a voyage, in such a ship, would turn us to look on these men in wonder, for it is the way of all but the wise to expect appearance to betray admirable qualities. These fellows, though, are not significant, except that you might think of some of them that their ease and indifference were assumed, and that, when trying not to look so, they were very conscious of the haste and importance of this great city into which that corner jutted far enough for them. They have just landed or they are about to sail again, and they might be standing on the shore eyeing the town beyond, in which the fate of ships is known by those they never see, but who are inimical to them, and whose ways are inscrutable.

If there are any inland shops which can hold one longer than the place where that ship's portrait hangs, then I do not know them. That comes from no more, of course, than the usual fault of an early impression. That fault gives a mould to the mind, and our latest thoughts, which we try to make reasonable, betray that accidental shape. It may be said that I looked into this window while still soft. The consequence, everybody knows, would be incurable in a boy who saw sextants for the first time, compasses, patent logs, sounding-machines, signalling-gear, and the other secrets of navigators. Not only those things, either. There was a section given to books, with classics like Stevens on Stowage, and Norie's Navigation, volumes never seen west of Gracechurch Street. The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and were sorted by chance. Knots and Splices, Typee, Know Your Own Ship, the South Pacific Directory, and Castaway on the Auckland Islands. There were many of them, and they were in that fortuitous and attractive order. The back of every volume had to be read, though the light was bad. On one wall between the windows a specimen chart was framed. Maps are good; but how much better are charts, especially when you cannot read them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering! About the coast line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lines which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart is blank, being beyond soundings. At the Capes are red dots, with arcs on the seaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real lights at night. Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and mates' receipts in their pockets, being on errands to ship-owners, look outward, and only seem to look inward. Where are the confines of London?

Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or there used to be, an archway into a courtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with half-models of sailing ships. I remember the name of one, the Winifred. Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on each. There was a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand, desks made secret with high screens, and a silence that might have been the reproof to intruders of a repute remembered in silence and dignity behind the screens by those who kept waiting so unimportant a visitor as a boy. On the counter was a stand displaying sailing cards, announcing, among other events in London river, "the fine ship Blackadder for immediate dispatch, having most of her cargo engaged, to Brisbane." And in those days, just round the corner in Billiter Street, one of the East India Company's warehouses still remained, a sombre relic among the new limestone and red granite offices, a massive archway in its centre leading, it could be believed, to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth century and forgotten. I never saw anybody go into it, nor come out. How could they? It was of another time and place. The familiar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly as well, the Cathedral which certainly existed, for it could often be seen in the distance, and the Abbey that was little more than something we had heard named, they were but the scenery close to the 'buses. Yet London was more wonderful than anything they could make it appear. About Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street waggons could be seen going east, bearing bales and cases, and the packages were portmarked for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo, and Santos--names like those. They had to be seen to be believed. One could stand there, forced to think that the sun never did more than make the floor of asphalted streets glow like polished brass, and that the evening light was full of glittering motes and smelt of dust, and that life worked itself out with ink in cupboards made of glass and mahogany; and suddenly you learned, while smelling the dust, that Acapulco was more than a portent in a book and held only by an act of faith. Yet that astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messenger forget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with his eyes so casual an acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of a fable, is nowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to our capital, though you may learn how Cornhill got its name.

For though Londoners understand the Guildhall pigeons have as much right to the place as the Aldermen, they look upon the seabirds by London Bridge as vagrant strangers. They do not know where their city ends on the east side. Their river descends from Oxford in more than one sense, and ceases to lose their respect in the neighbourhood of Westminster. It has little history worth mentioning below that. To the poets the river fails them, it becomes flat and songless where at Richmond the sea's remote influence just moves it; and there they leave it. The Thames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, a featureless monotony where men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and goes out through fogs to nowhere in particular. But there is a hilltop at Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our river, the burden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York and Sydney, can be seen for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the ships upon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of the City. And surely some surmise of what our river is comes to a few of that multitude which crosses London Bridge every day? They favour the east side of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a pause to stare overside to the Pool. Why do they? Ships are there, it is true, but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up which their cargo is hauled piecemeal to vanish instantly into mid-air caverns; London absorbs all they have as morsels. Anyhow, it is the business of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below, with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing, though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory of a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by the frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some moods, they are merely remembered. Only the men busy on the deck of the ship below are real. Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow and that all you people there are being drawn down resistlessly into that lower world of shades. You release yourself from this spell with an effort and look at the faces of those who are beside you at the parapet. What are their thoughts? Do they know? Have they also seen the ghosts? Have they felt stirring a secret and forgotten desire, old memories, and tales that were told? They move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in the suburbs. A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the Tower Bridge gates to be opened for her. She is going. We watch the eastern mists which take her from us. For we never are so passive and well disciplined to the routine of the things which compel us, but rebellion comes at times--misgiving that there is a world beyond the one we know, regret that we never ventured and made no discovery, and that our time has been saved and not spent. The bascules descend again.

There, where that ship vanished, is the highway which brought those unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere. It is our oldest road, and now has many by-paths. Near Poverty Corner is a building which recently was dismissed with a brief humorous reference in a new guide to our City--a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a brick-front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would guess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wilderness of tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and scored as though by a withering heat. Nothing grows there; nothing could live there. Smoke still pours from it, as though it were volcanic, from numberless vents. The region is without sap. Above its plains project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapours dissolving great areas. When the train descends slightly, then holes appear in that cliff which runs parallel with your track. The desert is actually burrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation. Something does live there. That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunnelled and inhabited; the unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke moving over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen. It is the beginning of Dockland. That the life is in upright beings, each with independent volition and a soul; that it is not an amorphous movement, flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the idea of height, of rising, is difficult to believe. It has not been believed. If life, you protest, is really there, has any sense which is better than that of extending worm-like through the underground, then why, at intervals, is there not an upheaval, a geyser-like burst, a plain hint from a power usually pent, but liable to go skywards? But that is for the desert to answer. As by mocking chance the desert itself almost instantly shows what possibilities are hidden within it. The train roars unexpectedly over a viaduct, and below is a deep hollow filled with light, with a floor of water, and a surprise of ships. How did that white schooner get into such an enclosure? Is freedom nearer here than we thought?

The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which the long spokes of cabbage-fields radiate from the train and revolve, and what is the grotesque suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps in a nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The journey ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on the far side by the rigging and smoke-stacks of great liners. There is no doubt about it now. At the corner of one shed, sheltering from the weather, is a group of brown men in coloured rags, first seen in the gloom because of the whites of their eyes. What we remember of such a day is that it was half of night, and the wind played castanets with the sheet iron, hummed in the cordage, and swayed wildly the loose gear aloft. Towering hulls were ranged down each side of a lagoon that ended in vacancy. The rigging and funnels of the fleet were unrelated; those ships were phantom and monstrous. They seemed on too great a scale to be within human control. We felt diminished and a little fearful, as among the looming urgencies of a dream. The forms were gigantic but vague, and they were seen in a smother of the elements; and their sounds, sonorous, melancholy, and prolonged, were like the warning of something alien, yet without form, which we knew was adverse, but could not recall when awake again. We remember, that day, a few watchers insecure on an exposed dockhead that projected into a sullen dreariness of river and mud which could have been the finish of the land. At the end of a creaking hawser was a steamer canting as she backed to head down stream--she was obviously exposed now to a great adventure--the tide, rapid and noisy on her plates, the reek from her funnel sinking over the water. And from the dockhead, in the fuddle of a rain-squall, we were waving a handkerchief, probably to the wrong man, till the vessel went out where all was one, rain, river, mud, and sky, and the future.

It is afterwards that so strange an ending to a brief journey from a city station is seen to have had more in it than the time-table, hurriedly scanned, gave away. Or it would be remembered as strange, if the one who had to make that journey so much as thought of it again; for perhaps to a stranger occupied with more important matters it was passed as being quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and rather dismal, the usual boredom of a duty. Its strangeness depends, very likely, as much on an idle and squandering mind as on the ships, the river, and the gasometers. Yet suppose you first saw the river from Blackwall Stairs, in the days when the windows of the Artichoke Tavern, an ancient weather-boarded house with benches outside, still looked towards the ships coming in! And how if then, one evening, you had seen a Blackwall liner haul out for the Antipodes while her crew sang a chanty! It might put another light on the river; but a light, I will admit, which others should not be expected to see, and if they looked for it now might not discover, for it is possible that it has vanished, like the old tavern. It is easy to persuade ourselves that a matter is made plain by the light in which we prefer to see it, for it is our light. One day, I remember, a boy had to take a sheaf of documents to a vessel loading in the London Dock. She was sailing that tide. It was a hot July noon. It is unlucky to send a boy, who is marked by all the omens for a city prisoner, to that dock, for it is one of the best of its kind. He had not been there before. There was an astonishing vista, once inside the gates, of sherry butts and port casks. On the flagstones were pools of wine lees. There was an unforgettable smell. It was of wine, spices, oakum, wool, and hides. The sun made it worse, but the boy, I think, preferred it strong. After wandering along many old quays, and through dark sheds with wide doors that, on such a sunny day, were stored with cool night and cubes and planks of gold, he found his ship, the Mulatto Girl. She was for the Brazils. Now it is clear that one even wiser in shipping affairs than a boy would have expected to see a craft that was haughty and portentous when bound for the Brazils, a ship that looked equal to making a coast of that kind. There she was, her flush deck well below the quay wall. A ladder went down to her, for she was no more than a schooner of a little over 100 tons. If that did not look like the beginning of one of those voyages that are reputed to have ended with the Elizabethans, then I am trying to convey a wrong impression. On the deck of the Mulatto Girl was her master, in shirt and trousers and a remarkable straw hat more like a canopy, bending over to discharge some weighty words into the hatch. He rose and looked up at the boy on the quay, showing then a taut black beard and formidable eyes. With his hands on his hips, he surveyed for a few seconds the messenger above without speaking. Then he talked business, and more than legitimate business. "Do you want to come?" he asked, and smiled. "Eh?" He stroked his beard. The Brazils and all! A ship like that! "There's a berth for you. Come along, my son." And observe what we may lose through that habit of ours of uncritical obedience to duty; see what may leave us for ever in that fatal pause, caused by the surprise of the challenge to our narrow experience and knowledge, the pause in which we miserably allow habit to overcome adventurous instinct! I never heard again of the Mulatto Girl. I could not expect to. Something, though, was gained that day. It cannot be named. It is of no value. It is, you may have guessed, that very light which it has been admitted may since have gone out.

Well, nobody who has ever surprised that light in Dockland will be persuaded that it is not there still, and will remain. What the foreshore of London is to some of us, and what those lights are which we see as reflections coming down the waters from a far adventure, to others would be what they are. The foreshore to them is the unending monotony of grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always reticent and sullen, that might never have seen the stars or heard of good luck; and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a high gas bracket on a dank brick wall in solitude, its glass broken, and the flame within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned and crippled moth trying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and the wind. The narrow and forbidden by-way under that glim, a path intermittent, and depending on the weight of the night which is trying to blot it out altogether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs. Prince Rupert once went that way. The ketch Nonsuch, Captain Zachary Gillam, was then lying just off, about to make the voyage which established the Hudson's Bay Company.

It is a path, like all those stairs and ways that go down to the river, which began when human footsteps first originated London with rough tracks. It is a path by which the successors of those primitives went out of London, when projecting the original enterprise of their ancestors from Wapping to the Guinea Coast and Manitoba. Why should we believe it is different to-day? The sea does not change, and seamen are what they were, if their ships are not those we admired many years ago in the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to see those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow the river, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to the Deptford Docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. What could they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, pawnshops, neglected and obscure churches, and houses that might know nothing but ill-fortune.

So they are; but those ways hold more than the visible shades. The warehouses of that meandering chasm which is Wapping High Street are like weathered and unequal cliffs. It is hard to believe sunlight ever falls there. It could not get down. It is not easy to believe the river is near. It seldom shows. You think at times you hear the distant call of a ship. But what would that be? Something in the mind. It happened long ago. You, too, are a ghost left by the vanished past. There is a man above at a high loophole, the topmost cave of a warehouse which you can see has been exposed to commerce and the elements for ages; he pulls in a bale pendulous from the cable of a derrick. Below him one of the horses of a van tosses its nosebag. There is no other movement. A carman leans against an iron post, and cuts bread and cheese with a clasp knife. It was curious to hear that steamer call, but we know what it was. It was from a ship that went down, we have lately heard, in the war, and her spectre reminds us, from a voyage which is over, of men who have gone. But the call comes again just where the Stairs, like a shining wedge of day, holds the black warehouses asunder, and shows the light of the river and a release to the outer world. And there, moving swiftly across the brightness, goes a steamer outward bound.

That was what we wanted to know. She confirms it, and her signal, to whomever it was made, carries farther than she would guess. It is understood. The past for some of us now is our only populous and habitable world, invisible to others, but alive with whispers for us. Yet the sea still moves daily along the old foreshore, and ships still go and come, and do not, like us, run aground on what now is not there.

OF PROSE

A FRAGMENT[30]

[30] Translated from the Dutch by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.

By LODEWIJK VAN DEIJSSEL

I love the prose that comes towards me like a man, with sparkling eyes, with a loud voice, breathing hard and with great gestures of the hands. I want to hear the writer laugh and cry in it, to hear him whisper and shout, to feel him sigh and pant. I want his language to loom up before me like a tangible and resounding organism; I want him, when I read him in my room, to reveal to me, from the characters that shimmer before my eyes, a spirit that enters into me and seems to ascend within me from out of his pages.

I love the prose that comes rolling up from the infinity of the artist's soul, like a sea of sound, flowing calmly with its wide waves, drawing nearer, nearer, ever nearer, smooth and broad, suddenly illumined by intense gleams of light.

I love the prose that clashes towards me, rushes up to me, thunders down upon me in a raging torrent of passion.

I love the prose that is motionless and awful as mountain ridges.

I love the prose that plays and rejoices like a waving forest filled with birds in summer.

I love the prose which I see standing there before me, with its sentences, like a city of marble.

I love the prose that descends upon me like a golden shower of words.

I love the sentences that march like troops of broad-backed men, walking abreast, shoulder to shoulder, following one on the other in ever-widening ranks, up hill, down dale, with the tramp of their footsteps and the heavy movement of their strides. I love sentences that sound like voices underground, but come rising, rising, louder and in greater numbers, and pass and rise and ring and echo in the heavens.

I love words that arrive suddenly, as though from very far, shooting forth in golden brilliancy from a rift in the blue sky, or toppling high in the air, like dark rocks discharged from a straining volcano.

I love words that bang down upon me like falling rafters, or words that hiss past me like bullets.

I love words which I see standing there unexpectedly, like poppies or blue cornflowers in a field.

I love words that suddenly waft a perfume to me from the course of the style, like incense from a church-door or scent from a woman's handkerchief in the street.

I love words that in a moment rise softly, like a child's murmuring voice, from under the droning style.

I love words that just gurgle, like little stifled sobs.

I love the prose that blazes its joy and its rapture like stars above me, that lights glowing suns of love, that carries me over the thin ice of its disdain, through the rough black nights of its hatred, that clangs down upon me the green, copper voice of its irony and its laughter.

If you would please me, then stretch over my head a rainbow of language in which I shall see red anger raging, blue gladness rejoicing and yellow mockery laughing.

Take me up and carry me where you will: I crave for nothing more than to be powerless against the power of your Word.

Strike me with your Word, torture me with your Word and then let your Word fall down upon me like a rain of kisses....

HENRY JAMES

By EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

I

Voluminous as had been the writings of Henry James[31] since 1875, it was not until he approached the end of his career that he began to throw any light on the practical events and social adventures of his own life. He had occasionally shown that he could turn from the psychology of imaginary characters to the record of real lives without losing any part of his delicate penetration or his charm of portraiture. He had, in particular, written the Life of Hawthorne in 1879, between Daisy Miller and An International Episode; and again in 1903, at the height of his latest period, he had produced a specimen of that period in his elusive and parenthetical but very beautiful so-called Life of W. W. Story. But these biographies threw no more light upon his own adventures than did his successive volumes of critical and topographical essays, in which the reader may seek long before he detects the sparkle of a crumb of personal fact. Henry James, at the age of seventy, had not begun to reveal himself behind the mask which spoke in the tones of a world of imaginary characters.

[31] Messrs. Macmillan are about to publish Mr. Lubbock's edition of James's Letters.

So saying, I do not forget that in the general edition of his collected, or rather selected, novels and tales, published from 1908 onwards, Henry James prefixed to each volume an introduction which assumed to be wholly biographical. He yielded, he said, "to the pleasure of placing on record the circumstances" in which each successive tale was written. I well recollect the terms in which he spoke of these prefaces before he began to write them. They were to be full and confidential, they were to throw to the winds all restraints of conventional reticence, they were to take us, with eyes unbandaged, into the inmost sanctum of his soul. They appeared at last, in small print, and they were extremely extensive, but truth obliges me to say that I found them highly disappointing. Constitutionally fitted to take pleasure in the accent of almost everything that Henry James ever wrote, I have to confess that these prefaces constantly baffle my eagerness. Not for a moment would I deny that they throw interesting light on the technical craft of a self-respecting novelist, but they are dry, remote, and impersonal to a strange degree. It is as though the author felt a burning desire to confide in the reader, whom he positively button-holes in the endeavour, but that the experience itself evades him, fails to find expression, and falls still-born, while other matters, less personal and less important, press in and take their place against the author's wish. Henry James proposed, in each instance, to disclose "the contributive value of the accessory facts in a given artistic case." This is, indeed, what we require in the history or the autobiography of an artist, whether painter or musician or man of letters. But this includes the production of anecdotes, of salient facts, of direct historical statements, which Henry James seemed in 1908 to be completely incapacitated from giving, so that really, in the introductions to some of these novels in the Collected Edition, it is difficult to know what the beloved novelist is endeavouring to divulge. He becomes almost chimæra bombinating in a vacuum.

Had we lost him soon after the appearance of the latest of these prefaces--that prefixed to The Golden Bowl, in which the effort to reveal something which is not revealed amounts almost to an agony--it would have been impossible to reconstruct the life of Henry James by the closest examination of his published writings. Ingenious commentators would have pieced together conjectures from such tales as The Altar of the Dead and The Lesson of the Master, and have insisted, more or less plausibly, on their accordance with what the author must have thought or done, endured or attempted. But, after all, these would have been "conjectures," not more definitely based than what bold spirits use when they construct lives of Shakespeare, or, for that matter, of Homer. Fortunately, in 1913, the desire to place some particulars of the career of his marvellous brother William in the setting of his "immediate native and domestic air," led Henry James to contemplate, with minuteness, the fading memories of his own childhood. Starting with a biographical study of William James, he found it impossible to treat the family development at all adequately without extending the survey to his own growth as well, and thus, at the age of seventy, Henry became for the first time, and almost unconsciously, an autobiographer.

He had completed two large volumes of Memories, and was deep in a third, when death took him from us. A Small Boy and Others deals with such extreme discursiveness as is suitable in a collection of the fleeting impressions of infancy, from his birth in 1843 to his all but fatal attack of typhus fever at Boulogne-sur-Mer in (perhaps) 1857. I say "perhaps" because the wanton evasion of any sort of help in the way of dates is characteristic of the narrative, as it would be of childish memories. The next instalment was Notes of a Son and Brother, which opens in 1860, a doubtful period of three years being leaped over lightly, and closes--as I guess from an allusion to George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy--in 1868. The third instalment, dictated in the autumn of 1914 and laid aside unfinished, is the posthumous The Middle Years, faultlessly edited by the piety of Mr. Percy Lubbock in 1917. Here the tale is taken up in 1869, and is occupied, without much attempt at chronological order, with memories of two years in London. As Henry James did not revise, or perhaps even re-read, these pages, we are free to form our conclusion as to whether he would or would not have vouchsafed to put their disjected parts into some more anatomical order.

Probably he would not have done so. The tendency of his genius had never been, and at the end was less than ever, in the direction of concinnity. He repudiated arrangement, he wilfully neglected the precise adjustment of parts. The three autobiographical volumes will always be documents precious in the eyes of his admirers. They are full of beauty and nobility, they exhibit with delicacy, and sometimes even with splendour, the qualities of his character. But it would be absurd to speak of them as easy to read, or as fulfilling what is demanded from an ordinary biographer. They have the tone of Veronese, but nothing of his definition. A broad canvas is spread before us, containing many figures in social conjuncture. But the plot, the single "story" which is being told, is drowned in misty radiance. Out of this chiaroscuro there leap suddenly to our vision a sumptuous head and throat, a handful of roses, the glitter of a satin sleeve, but it is only when we shut our eyes and think over what we have looked at that any coherent plan is revealed to us, or that we detect any species of composition. It is a case which calls for editorial help, and I hope that when the three fragments of autobiography are reprinted as a single composition, no prudery of hesitation to touch the sacred ark will prevent the editor from prefixing a skeleton chronicle of actual dates and facts. It will take nothing from the dignity of the luminous reveries in their original shape.

Such a skeleton will tell us that Henry James was born at 2 Washington Place, New York, on April 15th, 1843, and that he was the second child of his parents, the elder by one year being William, who grew up to be the most eminent philosopher whom America has produced. Their father, Henry James the elder, was himself a philosopher, whose ideas, which the younger Henry frankly admitted to be beyond his grasp, were expounded by William James in 1884, in a preface to their father's posthumous papers. Henry was only one year old when the family paid a long visit to Paris, but his earliest recollections were of Albany, whence the Jameses migrated to New York until 1855. They then transferred their home to Europe for three years, during which time the child Henry imbibed what he afterwards called "the European virus." In 1855 he was sent to Geneva for purposes of education, which were soon abandoned, and the whole family began an aimless wandering through London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Newport, Geneva, and America again, nothing but the Civil War sufficing to root this fugitive household in one abiding home.

Henry James's health forced him to be a spectator of the war, in which his younger brothers fought. He went to Harvard in 1862 to study law, but was now beginning to feel a more and more irresistible call to take up letters as a profession, and the Harvard Law School left little or no direct impression upon him. He formed a close and valuable friendship with Mr. Howells, seven years his senior, and the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, of which Mr. Howells was then assistant editor, were open to him from 1865. He lived for the next four years in very poor health, and with no great encouragement from himself or others, always excepting Mr. Howells, at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Early in 1869 he ventured to return to Europe, where he spent fifteen months in elegant but fruitful vagabondage. There was much literary work done, most of which he carefully suppressed in later life. The reader will, however, discover, tucked away in the thirteenth volume of the Collected Edition, a single waif from this rejected epoch, the tale called A Passionate Pilgrim, written on his return to America in 1870. This visit to Europe absolutely determined his situation; his arrival in New York stimulated and tortured his nostalgia for the old world, and in May, 1872, he flew back here once more to the European enchantment.

Here, practically, the biographical information respecting Henry James which has hitherto been given to the world ceases, for the fragment of The Middle Years, so far as can be gathered, contains few recollections which can be dated later than his thirtieth year. It was said of Marivaux that he cultivated no faculty but that de ne vivre que pour voir et pour entendre. In a similar spirit Henry James took up his dwelling in fashionable London lodgings in March, 1869. He had come from America with the settled design of making a profound study of English manners, and there were two aspects of the subject which stood out for him above all others. One of these was the rural beauty of ancient country places, the other was the magnitude--"the inconceivable immensity," as he put it--of London. He told his sister, "The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad bipeds and quadrupeds." From his lodgings in Half Moon Street, quiet enough in themselves, he had the turmoil of the West End at his elbow, Piccadilly, Park Lane, St. James's Street, all within the range of a five minutes' stroll. He plunged into the vortex with incredible gusto, "knocking about in a quiet way and deeply enjoying my little adventures." This was his first mature experience of London, of which he remained until the end of his life perhaps the most infatuated student, the most "passionate pilgrim" that America has ever sent us.

But his health was still poor, and for his constitution's sake he went in the summer of 1869 to Great Malvern. He went alone, and it is to be remarked of him that, social as he was, and inclined to a deep indulgence in the company of his friends, his habit of life was always in the main a solitary one. He had no constant associates, and he did not shrink from long periods of isolation, which he spent in reading and writing, but also in a concentrated contemplation of the passing scene, whatever it might be. It was alone that he now made a tour of the principal English cathedral and university towns, expatiating to himself on the perfection of the weather--"the dozen exquisite days of the English year, days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap." It was alone that he made acquaintance with Oxford, of which city he became at once the impassioned lover which he continued to be to the end, raving from Boston in 1870 of the supreme gratifications of Oxford as "the most dignified and most educated" of the cradles of our race. It was alone that during these enchanting weeks he made himself acquainted with the unimagined loveliness of English hamlets buried in immemorial leafage and whispered to by meandering rivulets in the warm recesses of antiquity. These, too, found in Henry James a worshipper more ardent, it may almost be averred, than any other who had crossed the Atlantic to their shrine.

Having formed this basis for the main predilection of his English studies, Henry James passed over to the Continent, and conducted a similar pilgrimage of entranced obsession through Switzerland and Italy. His wanderings, "rapturous and solitary," were, as in England, hampered by no social engagement; "I see no people to speak of," he wrote, "or for that matter to speak to." He returned to America in April, 1870, at the close of a year which proved critical in his career, and which laid its stamp on the whole of his future work. He had been kindly received in artistic and literary circles in London; he had conversed with Ruskin, with William Morris, with Aubrey de Vere, but it is plain that while he observed the peculiarities of these eminent men with the closest avidity, he made no impression whatever upon them. The time for Henry James to "make an impression" on others was not come yet; he was simply the well-bred, rather shy, young American invalid, with excellent introductions, who crossed the path of English activities, almost without casting a shadow. He had published no book; he had no distinct calling; he was a deprecating and punctilious young stranger from somewhere in Massachusetts, immature-looking for all his seven-and-twenty years.

Some further uneventful seasons, mainly spent in America but diversified by tours in Germany and Italy, bring us to 1875, when Henry James came over from Cambridge with the definite project, at last, of staying in Europe "for good." He took rooms in Paris, at 29 Rue de Luxembourg, and he penetrated easily into the very exclusive literary society which at that time revolved around Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt. This year in Paris was another highly critical period in Henry James's intellectual history. He was still, at the mature age of thirty-two, almost an amateur in literature, having been content, up to that time, to produce scarcely anything which his mature taste did not afterwards repudiate. The Passionate Pilgrim (1870), of which I have spoken above, is the only waif and stray of the pre-1873 years which he has permitted to survive. The first edition of this short story is now not easy of reference, and I have not seen it; the reprint of 1908 is obviously, and is doubtless vigorously, re-handled. Enough, however, remains of what must be original to show that, in a rather crude, and indeed almost hysterical form, the qualities of Henry James's genius were, in 1869, what they continued to be in 1909. He has conquered, however, in A Passionate Pilgrim, no command yet over his enthusiasm, his delicate sense of beauty, his apprehension of the exquisite colour of antiquity.

From the French associates of this time he derived practical help in his profession, though without their being aware of what they gave him. He was warmly attracted to Gustave Flaubert, who had just published La Tentation de St. Antoine, a dazzled admiration of which was the excuse which threw the young American at the feet of the Rouen giant. This particular admiration dwindled with the passage of time, but Henry James continued faithful to the author of Madame Bovary. It was Turgenev who introduced him to Flaubert, from whom he passed to Guy de Maupassant, then an athlete of four-and-twenty, and still scintillating in that blaze of juvenile virility which always fascinated Henry James. In the train of Edmond de Goncourt came Zola, vociferous over his late tribulation of having L'Assommoir stopped in its serial issue; Alphonse Daudet, whose recent Jack was exercising over tens of thousands of readers the tyranny of tears; and François Coppée, the almost exact coeval of Henry James, and now author of a Luthier de Cremone, which had placed him high among French poets. That the young American, with no apparent claim to attention except the laborious perfection of his French speech, was welcomed and ultimately received on terms of intimacy in this the most exclusive of European intellectual circles is curious. Henry James was accustomed to deprecate the notion that these Frenchmen took the least interest in him: "they have never read a line of me, they have never even persuaded themselves that there was a line of me which anyone could read," he once said to me. How should they, poor charming creatures, in their self-sufficing Latin intensity, know what or whether some barbarian had remotely "written"? But this does not end the marvel, because, read or not read, there was Henry James among them, affectionately welcomed, talked to familiarly about "technique," and even about "sales," like a fellow-craftsman. There must evidently have developed by this time something modestly "impressive" about him, and I cannot doubt that these Parisian masters of language more or less dimly divined that he too was, in some medium not by them to be penetrated, a master.

After this fruitful year in Paris, the first result of which was the publication in London of his earliest surviving novel, Roderick Hudson, and the completion of The American, Henry James left his "glittering, charming, civilised Paris" and settled in London. He submitted himself, as he wrote to his brother William in 1878, "without reserve to that Londonising process of which the effect is to convince you that, having lived here, you may, if need be, abjure civilisation and bury yourself in the country, but may not, in pursuit of civilisation, live in any smaller town." He plunged deeply into the study of London, externally and socially, and into the production of literature, in which he was now as steadily active as he was elegantly proficient. These novels of his earliest period have neither the profundity nor the originality of those of his middle and final periods, but they have an exquisite freshness of their own, and a workmanship the lucidity and logic of which he owed in no small measure to his conversations with Daudet and Maupassant, and to his, at that time almost exclusive, reading of the finest French fiction. He published The American in 1877, The Europeans and Daisy Miller in 1878, and An International Episode in 1879. He might advance in stature and breadth; he might come to disdain the exiguous beauty of these comparatively juvenile books, but now at all events were clearly revealed all the qualities which were to develop later, and to make Henry James unique among writers of Anglo-Saxon race.

His welcome into English society was remarkable if we reflect that he seemed to have little to give in return for what it offered except his social adaptability, his pleasant and still formal amenity, and his admirable capacity for listening. It cannot be repeated too clearly that the Henry James of those early days had very little of the impressiveness of his later manner. He went everywhere, sedately, watchfully, graciously, but never prominently. In the winter of 1878-79 it is recorded that he dined out in London 107 times, but it is highly questionable whether this amazing assiduity at the best dinner-tables will be found to have impressed itself on any Greville or Crabb Robinson who was taking notes at the time. He was strenuously living up to his standard, "my charming little standard of wit, of grace, of good manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what makes an easy and natural style of intercourse." He was watching the rather gross and unironic, but honest and vigorous, English upper-middle-class of that day with mingled feelings, in which curiosity and a sort of remote sympathy took a main part. At 107 London dinners he observed the ever-shifting pieces of the general kaleidoscope with tremendous acuteness, and although he thought their reds and yellows would have been improved by a slight infusion of the Florentine harmony, on the whole he was never weary of watching their evolutions. In this way the years slipped by, while he made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen durable friendships. It is a matter of pride and happiness to me that I am able to touch on one of the latter.

It is often curiously difficult for intimate friends, who have the impression in later years that they must always have known one another, to recall the occasion and the place where they first met. That was the case with Henry James and me. Several times we languidly tried to recover those particulars, but without success. I think, however, that it was at some dinner-party that we first met, and as the incident is dubiously connected with the publication of the Hawthorne in 1879, and with Mr. (now Lord) Morley, whom we both frequently saw at that epoch, I am pretty sure that the event took place early in 1880. The acquaintance, however, did not "ripen," as people say, until the summer of 1882, when in connection with an article on the drawings of George du Maurier, which I was anxious Henry James should write--having heard him express himself with high enthusiasm regarding these works of art--he invited me to go to see him and to talk over the project. I found him, one sunshiny afternoon, in his lodgings on the first floor of No. 3 Bolton Street, at the Piccadilly end of the street, where the houses look askew into Green Park. Here he had been living ever since he came over from France in 1876, and the situation was eminently characteristic of the impassioned student of London life and haunter of London society which he had now become.

Stretched on the sofa and apologising for not rising to greet me, his appearance gave me a little shock, for I had not thought of him as an invalid. He hurriedly and rather evasively declared that he was not that, but that a muscular weakness of his spine obliged him, as he said, "to assume the horizontal posture" during some hours of every day in order to bear the almost unbroken routine of evening engagements. I think that this weakness gradually passed away, but certainly for many years it handicapped his activity. I recall his appearance, seen then for the first time by daylight; there was something shadowy about it, the face framed in dark brown hair cut short in the Paris fashion, and in equally dark beard, rather loose and "fluffy." He was in deep mourning, his mother having died five or six months earlier, and he himself having but recently returned from a melancholy visit to America, where he had unwillingly left his father, who seemed far from well. His manner was grave, extremely courteous, but a little formal and frightened, which seemed strange in a man living in constant communication with the world. Our business regarding Du Maurier was soon concluded, and James talked with increasing ease, but always with a punctilious hesitancy, about Paris, where he seemed, to my dazzlement, to know even a larger number of persons of distinction than he did in London.

He promised, before I left, to return my visit, but news of the alarming illness of his father called him suddenly to America. He wrote to me from Boston in April, 1883, but he did not return to London until the autumn that year. Our intercourse was then resumed, and, immediately, on the familiar footing which it preserved, without an hour's abatement, until the sad moment of his fatal illness. When he returned to Bolton Street--this was in August, 1883--he had broken all the ties which held him to residence in America, a country which, as it turned out, he was not destined to revisit for more than twenty years. By this means Henry James became a homeless man in a peculiar sense, for he continued to be looked upon as a foreigner in London, while he seemed to have lost citizenship in the United States. It was a little later than this that that somewhat acidulated patriot, Colonel Higginson, in reply to some one who said that Henry James was a cosmopolitan, remarked, "Hardly! for a cosmopolitan is at home even in his own country!" This condition made James, although superficially gregarious, essentially isolated, and though his books were numerous and were greatly admired, they were tacitly ignored alike in summaries of English and of American current literature. There was no escape from this dilemma. Henry James was equally determined not to lay down his American birthright and not to reside in America. Every year of his exile, therefore, emphasised the fact of his separation from all other Anglo-Saxons, and he endured, in the world of letters, the singular fate of being a man without a country.

The collection of his private letters, therefore, which is announced as immediately forthcoming under the sympathetic editorship of Mr. Percy Lubbock, will reveal the adventures of an author who, long excluded from two literatures, is now eagerly claimed by both of them, and it will display those movements of a character of great energy and singular originality which circumstances have hitherto concealed from curiosity. There was very little on the surface of his existence to bear evidence to the passionate intensity of the stream beneath. This those who have had the privilege of seeing his letters know is marvellously revealed in his private correspondence. A certain change in his life was brought about by the arrival in 1885 of his sister Alice, who, in now confirmed ill-health, was persuaded to make Bournemouth and afterwards Leamington her home. He could not share her life, but at all events he could assiduously diversify it by his visits, and Bournemouth had a second attraction for him in the presence of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he had by this time formed one of the closest of his friendships. Stevenson's side of the correspondence has long been known, and it is one of the main attractions which Mr. Lubbock holds out to his readers that Henry James's letters to Stevenson will now be published. No episode of the literary history of the time is more fascinating than the interchange of feeling between these two great artists. The death of Stevenson, nine years later than their first meeting, though long anticipated, fell upon Henry James with a shock which he found at first scarcely endurable. For a long time afterwards he could not bring himself to mention the name of R. L. S. without a distressing agitation.

In 1886 the publication of The Bostonians, a novel which showed an advance in direct or, as it was then styled, "realistic" painting of modern society, increased the cleft which now divided him from his native country, for The Bostonians was angrily regarded as satirising not merely certain types, but certain recognisable figures in Massachusetts, and that with a suggestive daring which was unusual. Henry James, intent upon making a vivid picture, and already perhaps a little out of touch with American sentiment, was indignant at the reception of this book, which he ultimately, to my great disappointment, omitted from his Collected Edition, for reasons which he gave in a long letter to myself. Hence, as his works now appear, The Princess Casamassima, of 1886, an essentially London adventure-story, takes its place as the earliest of the novels of his second period, although preceded by admirable short tales in that manner, the most characteristic of which is doubtless The Author of Beltraffio (1885). This exemplifies the custom he had now adopted of seizing an incident reported to him, often a very slight and bald affair, and weaving round it a thick and glittering web of silken fancy, just as the worm winds round the unsightly chrysalis its graceful robe of gold. I speak of The Author of Beltraffio, and after thirty-five years I may confess that this extraordinarily vivid story was woven around a dark incident in the private life of an eminent author known to us both, which I, having told Henry James in a moment of levity, was presently horrified and even sensibly alarmed to see thus pinnacled in the broad light of day.

After exhausting at last the not very shining amenities of his lodgings in Bolton Street, where all was old and dingy, he went westward in 1886 into Kensington, and settled in a flat which was both new and bright, at 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where he began a novel called The Tragic Muse, on which he expended an immense amount of pains. He was greatly wearied by the effort, and not entirely satisfied with the result. He determined, as he said, "to do nothing but short lengths" for the future, and he devoted himself to the execution of contes. But even the art of the short story presently yielded to a new and, it must be confessed, a deleterious fascination, that of the stage. He was disappointed--he made no secret to his friends of his disillusion--in the commercial success of his novels, which was inadequate to his needs. I believe that he greatly over-estimated these needs, and that at no time he was really pressed by the want of money. But he thought that he was, and in his anxiety he turned to the theatre as a market in which to earn a fortune. Little has hitherto been revealed with regard to this "sawdust and orange-peel phase" (as he called it) in Henry James's career, but it cannot be ignored any longer. The memories of his intimate friends are stored with its incidents, his letters will be found to be full of it.

Henry James wrote, between 1889 and 1894, seven or eight plays, on each of which he expended an infinitude of pains and mental distress. At the end of this period, unwillingly persuaded at last that all his agony was in vain, and that he could never secure fame and fortune, or even a patient hearing from the theatre-going public by his dramatic work, he abandoned the hopeless struggle. He was by temperament little fitted to endure the disappointments and delays which must always attend the course of a dramatist who has not conquered a position which enables him to browbeat the tyrants behind the stage. Henry James was punctilious, ceremonious, and precise; it is not to be denied that he was apt to be hasty in taking offence, and not very ready to overlook an impertinence. The whole existence of the actor is lax and casual; the manager is the capricious leader of an irresponsible band of egotists. Henry James lost no occasion of dwelling, in private conversation, on this aspect of an amiable and entertaining profession. He was not prepared to accept young actresses at their own valuation, and the happy-go-lucky democracy of the "mimes," as he bracketed both sexes, irritated him to the verge of frenzy.

It was, however, with a determination to curb his impatience, and with a conviction that he could submit his idiosyncrasies to what he called the "passionate economy" of play-writing, that he began, in 1889, to dedicate himself to the drama, excluding for the time being all other considerations. He went over to Paris in the winter of that year, largely to talk over the stage with Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, and he returned to put the finishing-touches on The American, a dramatic version of one of his earliest novels. He finished this play at the Palazzo Barbaro, the beautiful home of his friends, the Daniel Curtises, in Venice, in June, 1890, thereupon taking a long holiday, one of the latest of his extended Italian tours, through Venetia and Tuscany. Edward Compton had by this time accepted The American, being attracted by his own chances in the part of Christopher Newman. When Henry James reappeared in London, and particularly when the rehearsals began, we all noticed how deeply the theatrical virus had penetrated his nature. His excitement swelled until the evening of January 3rd, 1891, when The American was acted at Southport by Compton's company in anticipation of its appearance in London. Henry James was kind enough to wish me to go down on this occasion with him to Southport, but it was not possible. On the afternoon of the ordeal he wrote to me from the local hotel: "After eleven o'clock to-night I may be the world's--you know--and I may be the undertaker's. I count upon you and your wife both to spend this evening in fasting, silence, and supplication. I will send you a word in the morning, a wire if I can." He was "so nervous that I miswrite and misspell."

The result, in the provinces, of this first experiment was not decisive. It is true that he told Robert Louis Stevenson that he was enjoying a success which made him blush. But the final result in London, where The American was not played until September, 1891, was only partly encouraging. Henry James was now cast down as unreasonably as he had been uplifted. He told me that "the strain, the anxiety, the peculiar form and colour of the ordeal (not to be divined in the least in advance)" had "sickened him to death." He used language of the most picturesque extravagance about the "purgatory" of the performances, which ran at the Opera Comique for two months. There was nothing in the mediocre fortunes of this play to decide the questions whether Henry James was or was not justified in abandoning all other forms of art for the drama. We endeavoured to persuade him that, on the whole, he was not justified, but he swept our arguments aside, and he devoted himself wholly to the infatuation of his sterile task.

The American had been dramatised from a published novel. Henry James now thought that he should do better with original plots, and he wrote two comedies, the one named Tenants and the other Disengaged, of each of which he formed high expectations. But, although they were submitted to several managers, who gave them their customary loitering and fluctuating attention, they were in every case ultimately refused. Each refusal plunged the dramatist into the lowest pit of furious depression, from which he presently emerged with freshly-kindled hopes. Like the moralist, he never was but always to be blest. The Album and The Reprobate--there is a melancholy satisfaction in giving life to the mere names of these stillborn children of his brain--started with wild hopes and suffered from the same complete failure to satisfy the caprice of the managers. At the close of 1893, after one of these "sordid developments," he made up his mind to abandon the struggle. But George Alexander promised that, if he would but persevere, he really and truly would produce him infallibly at no distant date, and poor Henry James could not but persevere. "I mean to wage this war ferociously for one year more," and he composed, with infinite agony and deliberation the comedy of Guy Domvile.

The night of January 5th, 1895, was the most tragical in Henry James's career. His hopes and fears had been strung up to the most excruciating point, and I think that I have never witnessed such agonies of parturition. Guy Domvile--which has never been printed--was a delicate and picturesque play, of which the only disadvantage that I could discover was that instead of having a last scene which tied up all the threads in a neat conclusion, it left all those threads loose as they would be in life. George Alexander was sanguine of success, and to do Henry James honour such a galaxy of artistic, literary, and scientific celebrity gathered in the stalls of the St. James's Theatre as perhaps were never seen in a playhouse before or since. Henry James was positively storm-ridden with emotion before the fatal night, and full of fantastic plans. I recall that one was that he should hide in the bar of a little public-house down an alley close to the theatre, whither I should slip forth at the end of the second act and report "how it was going." This was not carried out, and fortunately Henry James resisted the temptation of being present in the theatre during the performance. All seemed to be going fairly well until the close, when Henry James appeared and was called before the curtain only to be subjected--to our unspeakable horror and shame--to a storm of hoots and jeers and catcalls from the gallery, answered by loud and sustained applause from the stalls, the whole producing an effect of hell broke loose, in the midst of which the author, as white as chalk, bowed and spread forth deprecating hands and finally vanished. It was said at the time, and confirmed later, that this horrible performance was not intended to humiliate Henry James, but was the result of a cabal against George Alexander.

Early next morning I called at 34 De Vere Gardens, hardly daring to press the bell for fear of the worst of news, so shattered with excitement had the playwright been on the previous evening. I was astonished to find him perfectly calm; he had slept well and was breakfasting with appetite. The theatrical bubble in which he had lived a tormented existence for five years was wholly and finally broken, and he returned, even in that earliest conversation, to the discussion of the work which he had so long and so sadly neglected, the art of direct prose narrative. And now a remarkable thing happened. The discipline of toiling for the caprices of the theatre had amounted, for so redundant an imaginative writer, to the putting on of a mental strait-jacket. He saw now that he need stoop no longer to what he called "a meek and lowly review of the right ways to keep on the right side of a body of people who have paid money to be amused at a particular hour and place." Henry James was not released from this system of vigorous renunciation without a very singular result. To write for the theatre the qualities of brevity and directness, of an elaborate plainness, had been perceived by him to be absolutely necessary, and he had tried to cultivate them with dogged patience for five years. But when he broke with the theatre, the rebound was excessive. I recall his saying to me, after the fiasco of Guy Domvile, "At all events, I have escaped for ever from the foul fiend Excision!" He vibrated with the sense of liberation, and he began to enjoy, physically and intellectually, a freedom which had hitherto been foreign to his nature.

(To be concluded)

A CASE FOR RECORDS

By HILARY JENKINSON

It has long been a commonplace of depreciation to say that England possesses more valuable collections of historical documents than any other country, and displays more indifference to them. "En Angleterre tout est en désordre," says an eminent French critic: and the Times Literary Supplement quotes him.[32] Since the middle of last century the declared classes of public records in this country (those of the Central Government) have, it is true, had a settled habitation, a staff to look after them, and a good deal of attention from a small section of the public; also a considerable, though relatively small, number of publications has been devoted to them and some of the clamorous interests, the genealogist's, for example, fed if not sated. The same amount of good fortune, except by the hazard of their coming into the hands of an enthusiast, has not in many cases befallen the records belonging to local bodies; still less has it come to the enormous private collections originally accumulated in connection with the descent of real property, and now, since the invention of "short title," no longer in any demand for their primary purpose. If the public records of the past may in our day be considered to have found safety, it is still possible to witness in this country the unedifying spectacle of the museum or the rich collector buying up the pretty specimen from a collection of manorial records, while the remainder, of which it should form an integral part, after the lesser lights of the collecting world have taken gradual toll of it, goes without protest from any one to the tambourine-maker or the glue merchant. It is as though an anatomist, having exhumed his great-grandfather, should add to that injury the insult of preserving an interesting metacarpal in his cabinet, while he distributes the rest of the body to various colleagues, with remainder to the manufacturer of fertilisers: one is tempted to send science to blazes and wish the poor old gentleman might have been left intact, if useless, underground.

[32] November 27th, 1919.

I have spoken in this first paragraph of the unhappy state of the small collections in England because that state is an obvious and striking result of the same cause which has produced most of our mistakes in the preservation, sorting and editing of documents in the past; because the distinction at present existing between the public and the private collections is so symptomatic of our worst failure in this field: in effect, in all these years during which historical documents have met with a certain amount of appreciation, it has apparently never occurred to us to make definite search for the essential features common to all records, high or low, and to apply to all records a treatment based on the examination of those features. But the most interesting archive question of the present time seems to me to be the question of the records we ourselves are producing. If our shortcomings as owners of archives have affected adversely our treatment of what the past has left to us, are they not capable of doing quite as much harm to that which we ourselves are to bequeath to the future? And, further, if England, owing to its wealth of records, provides a particularly large number of examples of things to be avoided, is it not possible that the application of the warning derived from these may prove to be common to other countries? It is, indeed, no new criticism of the French School, the acknowledged leader of the world in this matter, to say that the circumstances under which the French national collections were put together have led it sometimes to consider the isolated document rather to the exclusion of that record which forms only a single link in a long chain.

We are led, therefore, to inquire how far certain generalisations, based on the character of our existing English records, maybe applied as criteria to the treatment of those records which are accumulating in our own time in England and perhaps in other countries.

A record, if we may venture here to give definition to a loosely-used word, is a document drawn up, or at any rate made use of, in the course of an administrative process, of which itself forms a part, and subsequently preserved in his own custody for his own reference by the administrator concerned or his successors. The process and the administration may be as important or unimportant as you please; the result may be the Rolls of Chancery or the deed-box of a manor: the essential features are the same in both cases--the administrative origin, the administrative reason for preservation, the preservation in administrative custody: so also are the results the same from the point of view of the subsequent 'ologist--the two priceless qualities of authenticity and impartiality; the first proceeding from the fact that the records have been always in custody,[33] and in a certain relationship one with another, the second derived from the fact that they were not drawn up for the information of posterity,[34] and, therefore, have no bias to one side or the other of posterity's problems. Any number of interesting instances[35] might be adduced from the records of the past, both of the value of these qualities and of the ease with which they may be flawed; but let us here leave for the time consideration of the records the past has bequeathed to us and inquire how far the qualities which, with all its historical faults, it gave us in most of its documents are going to be found by our descendants in those we leave to them. The unprecedented mass of documents which the various executive departments must have accumulated during the war may well frighten us into a serious consideration of this subject at the present moment.

[33] The licence of high officials has sometimes violated this, a practice much to be deprecated. I refer to this again below.

[34] This fact may, of course, lead in ignorant times, such as was the early nineteenth century, to destruction.

[35] A well-known case is the volume, belonging to the records of the Master of the Revels, which, if it is genuine, dates one of Shakespeare's plays: unfortunately it was for a considerable time out of official custody, and doubts have been cast on the authenticity of the most important page.

Now, the rules for safe preservation and custody are simple things, matters of proved experience, a number of which are set out in a small book recently published in England, and at more length in the well-known Continental treatise;[36] and though the standard of archive-keeping by local authorities is at present very uneven, we may, for the shortening of this article, dismiss that side of the question with pious hopes. Assuming, then, that the documents of our own time, when they come to the state of archives, will be preserved in suitable places and under proper rules of custody, assuming further that we are able to drill archivists into leaving their charges as far as possible in the physical order and state in which they find them (so as to preserve the old association of document with document), we have to face as our chief danger a threat not so much to the authenticity of the record as to its impartiality--the most important of all its qualities and one which, once damaged, cannot be restored. Interference with impartiality may occur at two points: in the first place it may occur, as indeed it has sometimes done in the past, at or near the time of the document's making; the administrator who makes it may himself have an eye on posterity. We shall have to recur to this again, but for the moment let us turn to the second, which is the more serious because it brings us up against the great modern record problem, bulk: impartiality may be--rather, is--impugned when we come to the selection of documents for preservation.

[36] C. Johnson: The Care of Documents (S.P.C.K. Helps for Students of History); and Muller, Feith, and Fruin: Manuel pour le Classement des Archives.

The obvious remedy for this is not to select--to preserve everything; but this is in practice an equally obvious impossibility: the instance already quoted of the accumulation of our war records[37] would no doubt supply apt illustration, but the custodian of county records is faced on his small scale with exactly the same difficulty: we are all confronted, in fact, with this main problem--how are we to reconcile our desire to preserve in our records certain qualities which have accompanied in the past an uncontrolled accumulation with the necessity of our own day for restriction? Up to now, in face of this problem, and in face of the system of selection, or destruction, which is actually in use, no one (not even the Royal Commission, which has obviously devoted much attention to the subject) has really gone further than to tell the selectors that they must be very careful. But can they? Let us take a case of public records, an imaginary class of, say, 200,000 pieces to be dealt with in a limited space of time by a limited number of people who have probably other work waiting to be done: how can they possibly say (since they have not the time to make a detailed comparison) that all the information contained in certain documents which they propose to condemn is to be found elsewhere? Or, taking another criterion, how can they say that certain documents are going to be without interest for the future? There are classes of documents in the Public Record Office now frequently used and highly valued which little more than fifty years ago might well have been destroyed as having no interest for any branch of human study then known.

[37] Records so vast that in its last report (1919) the Royal Commission has found it necessary to alter its original (1914) recommendations regarding the provision of new repository accommodation.

At this point the natural thing is to seek the advice of the historian, who is indeed, being an enthusiast, anxious to give it. Now, the historian may fairly claim to have done much for records in the past. He is mainly responsible for the recognition of public records as things valuable and to be kept carefully for other reasons than that of mere antiquity; and he has done something in England (one always hopes that he will do more presently) for local and private collections. But he cannot predict the needs of future research workers (who may not be historians at all) any more than he was able to predict in the time of the old Record Commission the needs of our own day: witness the indexes, quite useless to an economic historian, of the very important Chancery Rolls of King John, published about 1830. Even if we grant that he may make a better guess than other men, we are met by a still graver objection in the fact that we cannot rule out at least the possibility (since he is human and an historian) of his having a predilection for the evidence which will establish a certain view or emphasise a certain line of inquiry. The use of an historian, or of any other person who uses records for research purposes, as a selector seems to me incompatible with the preservation of their characteristic impartiality: there will be a possibility--and the mere possibility is enough--of suppressio veri, if not of suggestio falsi; and what should have been a record, preserved by circumstances which do not affect its value as evidence, will become no more than the narrative or at most the pièce justificative of a specialist; you might as well allow a botanist to produce a hybrid in order to prove not its possibility but its existence as a natural form.

But if we cannot use the historian for our purposes we may perhaps call in the trained archivist. I am afraid that here again we shall find no help. The archivist may take an interest in any of the subjects upon which his collections furnish evidence; but such interests have nothing to do with (indeed they sometimes impede) the duties that are his of safeguarding, arranging, and making accessible and of basing himself for all these duties on the internal structure of the classes of documents in his charge: with the possible exception of the last there is nothing in these qualifications to make him more fit than the historian for the work of selection--and destruction.

Is there, then, no possible way--we will not say of dealing with our present accumulations; they, it may be, on account of their sheer bulk must be dealt with by such ad hoc methods as the circumstances admit of; and into those methods it is not our province here to enter--but merely for our guidance in the future, is there no chance of reconciling the requirements of ourselves and posterity (so far as these can be foreseen) with the intrinsic interests of the records themselves--the external with the internal--or rather perhaps of finding some method of treatment which will give to our records a reasonable bulk while preserving their important characteristics, and at the same time will at least not sacrifice unduly the interests of the research-worker? Perhaps an indication of such a possibility is to be found in the words "our present accumulations" which we used above. How would it be if we set ourselves in the future to prevent accumulations?

A certain amount of contemporary destruction of the more obviously ephemeral papers--notes from one department of an office to another saying, "Passed to you, please," and perhaps documents of a more advanced type--does, of course, in our own days sometimes take place in large offices. And there are not wanting indications that a perception of the need of something more, especially in regard to public offices, has been growing since the Act of 1877, provided that the Master of the Rolls might make rules respecting the disposal by destruction or otherwise of documents which are deposited in or can be removed to the Public Record Office (note the lack of any distinction between the two classes) and which are not of sufficient public value to justify their preservation in the Public Record Office. Such an indication is seen in the desire expressed by the late Royal Commission on Public Records[38] for the substitution in Government offices of destruction and preservation of documents according to well-considered principles for destruction founded on arbitrary, varying opinions; and for the relief of the Public Record Office Repository from a cumbersome mass of useless or unnecessary documents. But no one, so far as I am aware, has yet summed up and balanced, for the benefit of all records and record-keepers, whether public or private, the merits and demerits of the various systems of destruction, either in the light of the intrinsic character of records themselves or in that of the experience gained from a study of our ancestors' methods. And the accumulations of documents, many of which are subsequently judged not to be material, continue.

[38] First report, p. 41; cp.: second report, p. 71, etc.

Now we may assume, indeed we know, that from the earliest times not only selections of subjects for representation in permanent records but also actual destruction of documents has been practised by the administrators who have left us their collections. Only--and here is the distinction--since the question of bulk did not trouble them as it does us, they were able to act solely on the ground that the record in question was not required for their current administrative purposes. Note that in this their impartiality was not affected by the external considerations of either this world or the next, neither by any interest in the history-writing of the future, nor by the exigencies of floor-space in the present. Any subsequent destruction, direct or indirect, by our ancestors was quite a different matter: such destruction has invariably been the subject ultimately of adverse criticism, though no doubt the person responsible saw no particular harm in it. For example, take the case of the burning of the Exchequer tallies in 1834. The position of contemporaries is probably represented tolerably by that of Charles Dickens, who criticised the proceeding on the ground not only that it burned down the Houses of Parliament, but also that it was a wanton waste of firewood which might have been given to the poor: yet already we, not a hundred years after, are regretting it. On the other hand, though historians are in the habit of saying vaguely that much which was of incalculable value must have been lost, they refer always to the losses due to various forms of carelessness. I have never heard anyone venture to criticise the Chancery, for example, because it did not preserve full copies of non-returnable writs or the Exchequer because certain draft accounts were destroyed.

What, in fact, are the principal gaps in old records which affect us moderns? If we take two of the documents which have thrown light on the personal history of Shakespeare (not a matter of much moment to his contemporaries) we shall arrive at a clear distinction between two different kinds of destruction, or shall we say failure to preserve? On the one hand, we have a document signed by Shakespeare as a witness: all that mattered to the court here was that certain evidence had been given by some indifferent person and accepted. Could we have blamed it if it had failed to preserve this signature which we find so intriguing, or had allowed it (as was sometimes done) to be written in by the scribe who took down the deposition? Or if it had preserved the whole document only in the form of a summary? Most certainly we could not: how was the court to know that we should be interested in Shakespeare's life and handwriting? On the other hand, take the case where Shakespeare himself was party to a fine: had the court of Common Pleas failed to preserve the "foot" of that fine, which was a recognised form of evidence of its own transactions, we should legitimately criticise its carelessness.

It appears, therefore, that the only criticism posterity will be able to pass on us, if we adhere to the practice of our ancestors, will be one based on the extent to which we leave record behind us of the work of the various administrations; and our further queries then resolve themselves into two:

(1) Can we train our administrator so to keep his records at the time they are made that they will give a fair picture of the activities of his office, and this without desiring him to do it for the benefit of posterity, without making an historian of him?

(2) Can this be done so economically as to get rid of the bulk difficulty in connection with preservation?

If the answer to each of these questions is "Yes," then our problem is solved.

It is not, of course, possible to answer them in detail here, because to do so would involve inserting a detailed scheme for the keeping of archives in a modern office; it would also involve going into such highly technical, and in some cases controversial, matters as the use and abuse of flimsies, the whole position of the typewriter in record-making (with an excursus on carbons and inks), the comparative merits of various filing systems, and, as regards this country at least, liaison between Government departments. But we may perhaps try in the most general terms to lay down a few first principles and see how far they indicate the possibility of an answer. We may premise that while no two accountants differ radically in their methods, the name of the various filing systems and practices is legion; while we have had double-entry for three or four hundred years, no one has yet hit on a system of filing correspondence and the like which commands general approval; from which we may draw the corollary that almost everywhere there are large redundancies.

If, then, we are to educate our administrator we should begin

(1) By explaining the trouble that has been caused by accumulations of records in the past and the impossibility of dealing with them reliably and satisfactorily in the present. This trouble we require him to prevent in the future by a system of personal attention and studied economy. (He would, of course, say at once that this could not be done; the reply is "Have you tried?")

(2) The next point is concerned also with authenticity, but it is in every way of primary importance.[39]

[39] How important may be judged from the perusal of more than one modern volume of more than one great statesman's "Private Papers"--many of them public records which have been taken out of custody. Perhaps the new diplomacy may do something to remedy this evil.

Every office, no matter how small, must have a registry;[40] i.e., must be divided up, qua records, into two branches, administrative and executive; it must have a small branch which keeps and controls, distinct from the large which makes and uses, documents. Registry, the keeper and controller of office papers, is to lay down the way in which letters are to be written and whether copies are to be made. When they are made (or received, if they come from without) all office documents are the property of registry, which is responsible for destruction or preservation (with, of course, the advantage of advice from the executive side in a large office) and for safeguarding and methods of arrangement.

[40] I hope I shall not be accused of ignorance of the fact that registries do exist in some offices. The point is, first, that their existence is not universal; second, that they have not yet been turned towards those functions which it is here suggested they should fulfil.

(3) The golden rule for administrators is: in preserving and arranging documents keep in view a single purpose, that of enabling an ignorant successor by their means to carry on if you and the whole of your staff were blotted out. We depend largely on this rule for an answer to the historian's objection that the administrator if left to himself will destroy all the valuable things--lose the Shakespeare fine, in fact. It is not, however, inserted here for that purpose, but because it is obviously sound.

(4) Apart from this rule the first principle should be economy; and economy, if registry is not to be overburdened with work, must consist largely in rules carefully thought out concerning not the documents which are to be destroyed, but the documents which are never to be made: for example, probably at least 50 per cent. of the copies of out-letters which are preserved in a big office record nothing more than despatch, which could be done in two words or less in a general register.

(5) The ideal subject index, it has been said, would have only one entry and any quantity of cross-references; similarly there is an ideal of a single master series in records: being an ideal, neither of these things is realisable, but it is possible to get near to them. For example, registry can and should have a record of its own, a single general register, and a properly made entry in this would be amply sufficient record of many transactions which are at present dignified with a dossier.

(6) In this connection we may refer to the necessity for the intelligent use of mechanical devices: many duplicates and unnecessary documents are habitually kept owing to a failure to appreciate the merits as distinguishing features of a red pencil and a blue, the opposition of left to right, the possibilities of the first and the second column, not to mention the third, fourth, and fifth....

(7) Registry should have a clear conception of the nature of records--that there are only three kinds: In-letters, out-letters, and memoranda (including accounts). A realisation of this and of the way in which records work into each other means economy in internal arrangement, and in the case of Government offices might, if liaison were close and a single system of record-keeping in general use, make new economies possible as between departments.

(8) So far we have been considering the possibilities of an economy which consists in not making documents; but we have, of course, to consider also actual destruction, of which there are three kinds: (a) First, there is what we may call posthumous destruction, the kind which is now most in vogue, and which we want to stop altogether: that is the destruction which deals with an accumulation formed perhaps years before--destruction for its own sake, because of over-great bulk. Then (b) there is immediate destruction, which gives effect to the judgment passed at the earliest possible moment on a document: you wait only until a letter (let us say perhaps a letter making an appointment) is acknowledged, and then, since its actual terms concern only the person addressed, and for your office's purposes you have sufficient evidence in your registry, you destroy. (c) Finally, there is deferred destruction, the kind which comes into operation where a document, already condemned, so far as concerns the purposes of the office, is temporarily preserved for some purely external reason; for example, in connection with the provisions of the Statute of Limitations.

(9) A primary rule of destruction is that no letter-in, copy of letter-out, or draft of office memoranda shall be kept which does not mean a stage in advance for the office's business. But it is particularly necessary that this destruction should take place at the earliest possible moment, while the business is fresh in the minds of those concerned; because there are documents which, though they have no direct result themselves, yet by that very fact mark an advance in the policy (let us say) of a department, and delay in the consideration of these might conceivably be dangerous.

(10) For the purposes of deferred destruction some system of automatic working will be necessary; for instance, if large masses of papers, valueless otherwise to the office, have to be kept, say, for six years for legal reasons, there should be a regular system by which every day the register of six years back should be examined and the papers there marked (let us say) D.D., for deferred destruction, should be at once drawn, disposed of, and marked off. It is possible that some system might be introduced to cover doubtful cases, which could be given a short lease of life--some statutory number of months, pending a decision by circumstances upon their value. This would be a good safeguard against careless destruction, though that should never occur.

(11) Finally, lest this compromise should let in abuses, there must be a short time of probation for documents fixed, perhaps not more than a year; and, as soon as any document has passed through that, it should automatically go to the record class, where no further destruction is permitted; it would probably in practice be subjected to a final scrutiny a few days before it reached this happy state. As many such documents might still be needed for reference, they would possibly remain with those still on probation or go only to some intermediate muniment-room, not to the final record repository, but they would be records, full-fledged.

The above suggestions are offered only as suggestions, susceptible of much revision and needing much more expansion. The only claim made for them is that they do face the real difficulty of the record situation, and do sketch lines along which the reasonable requirements of the historian, or any other worker who may be destined in the future to pursue strange learning along unthought-of paths, are adequately met; the question of bulk is met, and the present system of dealing in a hopeless kind of way with accumulations already formed and hardened is got rid of; and violence is not done to the structure of the records themselves.

Criticism of the proposed system will probably be divided between statements that it does too much and that it does too little. We may reply that there is no inherent impossibility in the via media, that all alternative systems are destructive of the most essential qualities of records, and that ours is, therefore, at least worth a trial.

Attempts are from time to time made in most large offices to secure the keeping of documents in a manner convenient to those who use them for official purposes. But why not something longer sighted, a little care for the records themselves? Why not a Manual of Record Making and Keeping for Clerks in Government and other Offices?

ON INTERPRETATION IN MUSIC

By SIR GEORGE HENSCHEL, Mus.Doc.

The question of interpretation, especially in the field of music, and more particularly as regards song, has been prominent of late. Lectures on interpretation, books on the subject have been announced in the papers under more or less attractive titles, but I fear I have never read the latter, nor gone to any of the former. Indeed I confess that throughout my life I have given little, if any, thought to interpretation: a fact not easily accounted for, unless it be that when I was young, people must have been more unsophisticated. Interpretation in music was a thing rarely spoken of. If, for instance, there was a Beethoven symphony on the programme of a concert, people went because they wanted to hear the symphony, not how a conductor interpreted it. It evidently sufficed these good people to have confidence in the musicianship and skill of the members of an orchestra and in the loyalty of their conductor as regards carrying out the composer's wishes as to tempo and expression, confidence altogether in the efficiency of any artist ready to brave the test of publicity. Moreover, conductors were then stationary; the fashion of prima-donna conductors, travelling from one place to another, each trying to outdo his rival in so-called originality, had not come into being, and there was little opportunity for a comparison.

Of course, I had read or heard of points in law being capable of different interpretation by different lawyers, also was aware of the fact that interpreters are persons who, being masters of several languages, act between two people ignorant of each other's tongue, or whose office it is to translate orally in their presence the words of parties speaking different languages, but I never connected the term with music, which, I thought, being a language spoken and understood all the world over, did not require the services of an interpreter. This, of course, was a very youthful notion. But even in later years the question did not interest me very much, and it was not until three or four years ago the editor of an American musical magazine asked me to write for his paper an article which he wished to be entitled "Some Elementary Truths on Song-Interpretation" that the matter attracted my serious attention. I remember answering the gentleman: "My dear sir,--Since we are still waiting for a satisfactory answer to the ancient question 'What is truth?' I must confess myself utterly incompetent to gratify your flattering desire; indeed, without immodesty, I hope, should be reluctant to accept any mortal's opinion regarding a question of art as truth." Somehow or other, however, the thing got hold of me and I began to be curious to see what could be said, or at any rate what I might be able to say on the subject. So, first of all, I consulted the Oxford Dictionary to see whether among the various definitions of the word "Interpretation," which that wonderfully complete book was sure to offer, there might not be one applicable to music, or altogether to art. And there I found that "To interpret" may mean:

Expound the meaning of, bring out, make out the meaning of, explain, understand, render by artistic representation or performance.

Well, this was something to start from, anyhow. Let us see: "Expound the meaning of."

From the oracles of old, not infrequently more obscure on purpose to give them greater importance, down to a speech from the front benches, utterances in words may, and indeed often do, need expounding the meaning of, but it seems to me in music, and, perhaps, in art altogether, the necessity for explanation nearly always indicates a certain degree of inferiority. I cannot imagine anyone looking at a Velasquez, or Titian, or Rembrandt, or Michelangelo asking "What does it mean?" but I am sure we all have heard that question, very likely emphasised by the addition of two little words, like "on earth," or something stronger, at exhibitions of Futurist art.

So in a piece of absolute music, i.e., music without words, for an orchestra or a solo instrument, any attempt at expounding the meaning of, make out the meaning of, must, in my humble opinion, always be more or less of a failure, whilst, of course, there can be no need of such an attempt at all if the music be programme music, or if, by the title given to it, like, for instance, Elegy, Reverie, Humoreske, Nocturne, Barcarolle, and so on, the composer clearly has indicated his intention. There is no need asking what Bach, Beethoven, Brahms meant by their symphonies, their fugues.

You might as well ask what the meaning of a cathedral. These things are there for us to wonder at the greatness and power of the human mind, to lose ourselves in admiration of the various forms of beauty in which they reveal themselves, to bow down, to worship. On the other hand, in music with words, the poems chosen by the composer are rarely sufficiently obscure or eccentric to require "expounding the meaning of."

It seems to me, therefore, that the only definition of the word interpretation with which we need concern ourselves is "Render by artistic representation or performance." And that would seem simple enough were it not that when it comes to a song we have to deal with a compound of poetry and music which complicates matters inasmuch as there is art required for reciting a poem as well as for singing the music.

That the music of a song, as such, may be beautifully rendered by an instrument other than the voice we all know. Who--to quote only one example--has not heard Schubert's Ave Maria played on a 'cello? And the words of a song detached from the music may find an ideal interpreter in the person of a talented reciter, who, as regards music, may not know one note from another. The perfect interpreter of a song, therefore, would have to combine in him or herself the talents and qualities of both a reciter and a singer, and it will be seen at once that, as in song the music is of the first importance, not only should an intending singer make a point of studying music as well as singing, but the study of theory, harmony, counterpoint, etc., that is to say, of music as a creative art should always be made the foundation on which all special studies for expressing that art should rest.

I have just said that in a song the music is first in importance. Should, therefore, by any chance a composer have failed, as some of the best have been known to now and then, to make the music fit the words completely, it would be the duty of the singer to consider the musical phrase in the first instance and fit in the words as well as possible under the circumstances, even at the risk of breaking between two words which otherwise it would be better not to separate.

The question of breathing is altogether one which puzzles a great many singers. Take, for instance, a Bach or Handel aria, with semiquaver runs, often extending over half-a-dozen bars or more. There are singers who deem it beneath their dignity to breathe during such a run, and go on until they are red in the face, or else, if they see they must after all, put in additional words. This is quite unnecessary. Such occasions should be treated instrumentally. Give such a run to, say, an oboe player and you will find that he now and then will take an instantaneous little breath which enables him to do justice to every note and carry the thing through successfully and without exhaustion. It is generally the childish fear of being thought lacking in physical strength which induces some singers to delay breathing until the thought of their bursting a blood vessel remains the only one left in the poor listener, rendering anything like interpretation and, therefore, artistic enjoyment of such a performance utterly impossible. If you know how to breathe, i.e., how to replenish your lungs in the twinkling of an eye and imperceptibly, you cannot really breathe too often, for by such judicious breathing you are infinitely better able to satisfactorily accomplish the task before you. I remember being asked, years ago, to hear, with a view to giving my opinion on her talent and voice, a young singer, now quite famous, and being horrified at her utterly mistaken idea as to breathing. Disregarding all thought of intelligent phrasing, she actually never breathed unless positively obliged to do so. I stood it as long as I could and then got really angry. I stopped her short and said, "My dear young lady, do you wish to show the people what wonderful lungs you have, or what a beautiful song it is you are singing?" You can only do one of the two things at a time. Supposing even your breathing be good, which, being neither inaudible nor invisible, I am sorry to say it is not; you will have to learn that an accomplishment, be it ever so great, in anything pertaining to a detail in the mere technique of an art becomes a fault the moment attention is drawn to it. A singer who after the singing of a beautiful song is complimented on the excellent management of his breath or the wonderful articulation of his words should go home and resolve to do better next time, and not rest satisfied until he feels that the singer's highest aim should be the full appreciation and enjoyment on the part of the listener of the work interpreted. That aim being achieved he need wish for no greater praise.

For an intelligent and thoroughly satisfactory rendering of a song it is absolutely imperative that the vocal technique of the singer--and the breathing is as important a part of it as the actual singing--be developed to a state of efficiency, such as to need no more thought than, for instance, a pianist interpreting a Beethoven sonata should have to give to the fingering. All technical difficulties should have been overcome once for all and technique itself become a matter of course before an attempt at interpretation is made.

The two principal factors in the technique of singing are vocalisation and articulation, the one referring to music, the other--articulation--to speech, each complementing the other, though I hold that of the two articulation is the more important, since it is not the vowels but the consonants which enable a singer to "bring out the meaning of," i.e., to interpret a word. You may sing the vowel, for instance, of the word "soul" ever so beautifully, it is not until you add the "l" with the same intensity of purpose that the word puts on flesh and blood, as it were, and becomes a living thing. Or take the word "remember." No actor, impersonating, for instance, the ghost of Hamlet's father, could make an impression with the word by dwelling on the vowel "Reme-e-e----," but leaving the vowel quickly and continuing to sound the "m" a good actor could walk almost across the whole stage holding on to that consonant without exaggeration--"Remem-m-m-ber." It is the consonants, as I said before, which convey the meaning of a word, and they should be made the subject of special study. If you wish to interpret you should, in the first place, strive to make yourself understood, and that, with the best vocalisation in the world, you can do only by a mastery of the consonants, i.e., by a perfect articulation. You all know that delicious story of the dear old lady coming home from a village concert, where the hit of the evening had been made by a girl singing, "Wae's me for Prince Charlie." Being asked whether she had enjoyed the concert, she said, "Not very much; I couldn't understand half the people who sang, except one girl who sang a nice funny song." "Do you remember the title?" "No, but she kept on asking 'Where's me fourpence, Charlie?'" This singer evidently had not made a special study of consonants.

In vocalisation, too, there are certain details which often fail to receive, on the part of the singer, the attention which should be paid to them. One of them, and, in my opinion, a very important one, because of its great help towards interpretation, is the colouring of the tone. I have heard many an otherwise good singer whose singing became exceedingly monotonous after a while by reason of a lack of variety in tone-colour, and I remember one lady in particular, the possessor of a beautiful rich contralto voice, from whose singing--had it not been for the words--you could not possibly have told whether what she sang was sad or cheerful. And yet our five vowels A, E, I, O, U being what we may call the primary colours of the voice, a singer should be able, by skilful and judicious mixing of these colours, to produce as many different shades of, let us say, the vowel A as a painter of the colour, say, of red. I have in my long experience of a teacher found it of the utmost value to make a pupil sing even a whole song on nothing but the vowels of the words, with the object of expressing the character of the music by mere vocalisation. We all love that glorious aria in the Messiah, "He was despised." Well, let a student try to convey its sadness, its deeply religious feeling in that way, i.e., without words, by the instrument of the voice alone, and, if after a while she succeeds, she will have taken a very big step toward realising, i.e., toward interpreting, the full beauty of that exquisite blending of words and music. For a thoroughly artistic rendering of emotional songs of that kind or of songs of dramatic character, such as ballads in which the singer has to impersonate character and run up and down the gamut of passion, it is of the greatest importance that the singer should have under perfect control not only his technique, but his feelings too. If your feelings get the better of you before the public, you are apt temporarily, and for physical reasons, to lose the mastery of your technique. There is a story told of the famous American actor, Edwin Booth, whose daughter, his severest critic, always, at his request, had to be in the stage-box where and whenever he acted. On one occasion the play was Victor Hugo's The King's Jester, known to us all from Verdi's Rigoletto. The part of the Jester was considered one of the best of Booth's many fine impersonations. When the harrowing scene came in which the poor man finds the body of his murdered daughter in the sack, Booth on that night for some reason or other was so overcome by the situation that actual tears ran down his cheeks, and he thought he had never acted that scene better or with greater feeling. The first thing his daughter said to him as they met in his dressing-room after the play was, "Were you quite well, father?" "Quite. Why?" "Because that scene with Gilda's body never made so little impression on me and on the people, as far as I could see."

And naturally. When you lose control of yourself you must not expect to be able to control your audience.

On the other hand, there was a great singer, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient, the greatest exponent of the part of Leonora in Beethoven's Fidelio. In that wonderful scene in the underground prison when, disguised as the jailor's boy, and unrecognised by her unfortunate husband, the chained prisoner Florestan, she hands the starving man a crust of bread, singing to Beethoven's touchingly appealing notes, and in a voice choked with emotion, "There, take this bread, thou poor, poor man," that great singer was often known to actually crack a little aside joke with old Rocco, the jailor, whilst the front of the house was in tears. That is what I call art. Very likely she had cried herself many a time over that same scene when studying it.

Of course the actor--and by that I mean the operatic-singer as well--has a not inconsiderable advantage over the concert-singer, in that he possesses in facial expression and gesture two additional aids to interpretation, both important and powerful. I say two, although facial expression is available to the concert-singer as well, but whilst that and gesture form an essential part in the training of the actor, facial expression is hardly ever systematically studied by the singer of songs who, in this respect, is left to his own resources with often rather curious results. I have listened to many a singer--I am sorry to say mostly of the fair sex--who, very likely for fear of making grimaces, maintained throughout a whole song, and heedless of the varying moods and sentiments expressed in it, a sickly, inane, apologetic sort of a smile, whilst, on the other hand, I remember hearing a famous singer who, in Schubert's great song, Der Doppelgänger, allowed his features already during the short prelude to the song to assume a most ghastly expression of pain and terror which, quite apart from such a proceeding being apt to have the opposite effect, was in this case quite the wrong thing to do, for the opening of the song is merely a sad recollection, on the part of the unfortunate lover, of happier times when his beloved was still inhabiting the house he is passing. "The night is still, the streets are silent, 'twas in this house my true love lived." The tragedy and horror only commence with "There too stands a man and gazes up on high, and wrings his hands in agony of pain," reaching the climax with the words, "I shudder when I behold his face, the moon reveals to me my own image." But when this climax came it was robbed of much of its impressiveness by the singer having anticipated it. He evidently took it for granted that his listeners knew Heine's poem and Schubert's song, or had made themselves acquainted with the words beforehand by looking into the book of words. That is a great mistake. You should always sing as if the song you are interpreting had never been known or sung before, and you were the first to make it public. Every one of you, I am sure, has at one time or other told a little fairy-story to a child. You know how deliberately such a story should be told, how distinctly the pronunciation of every syllable, every consonant, in order that the little ones may grasp the meaning of what you are saying the very moment you are saying it, so as not to lose the thread of the tale, to break the spell. Well, that's the way you should sing. Even if you know that what you are singing is the most well-known, popular, hackneyed thing, always imagine one person in your audience--sitting in the very last row--to whom it is something absolutely new, and that imaginary person should be the child to whom you are telling a story. So you see all these little details have to be thought out. The singer should even be careful in the selection of his songs. (When I speak of "him" and "his" I, of course, mean "her" and "hers" as well.) The greater the singer's art the more will he be able to force his hearers into forgetfulness of a possible discrepancy between, for instance, his personal appearance and the sentiment or character he is endeavouring to represent. But here, too, some discretion should be exercised. A lady, for instance, weighing fourteen stone and a half should not, as I have heard one do, put the audience's capacity for self-control to too severe a test by singing baby-songs like, "Put me in my little bed, mother," or "If nobody ever marries me and I don't know why he should." Yes, even the time of day, and the scene and the occasion should find a place among the questions to be considered by a singer when choosing a song for performance, as under circumstances the best interpretation may not only fail to be appreciated, but even produce an effect utterly unlooked for.

It was many years ago, two or three nights after Gilbert and Sullivan's incomparable Mikado had been launched on its triumphal career at the Savoy, that there was a big evening party at Sullivan's flat, to have the honour of meeting the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh. An excellent little programme of music had been gone through, and just after midnight, supper being over, the whole party once more repaired to the drawing-room for some jollier things. Nearly all the principal singers from the Savoy had come over in their Mikado costumes and, with the composer at the piano, delighted the guests with excerpts like "Three little Maids from School" and "The flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra-la," doubly fascinating then on account of the novelty of the thing.

Everybody, and none the least so the two Royal guests, who occupied two armchairs in front, with the programme in their hands, enjoyed the entertainment to the utmost, and the fun was at its height when one of the guests, a celebrated contralto, famous for her rendering of ballads--I mean the style of ballads in vogue thirty-five years ago--was asked if she wouldn't sing one of them. She, of course, readily consented, solemnly mounted the little platform, and there was a hush as she stood there, motionless like a statue, her face expressing a seriousness so strangely in contrast with the mirth and laughter that had pervaded the room but a few minutes before, that I noticed the two Royal programmes being brought somewhat nearer the Royal faces. Then the accompanist struck the first chords of the introduction and--could we really believe our ears?--the lady began to sing--you'll never guess--"The Three Fishers!" Higher and higher up went the Royal programmes, a dead silence reigned in the room until it came to the "Three Corpses," when, little by little, small noises like half-suppressed sneezes or sobs could be heard here and there, increasing in frequency and volume, and when it came to the refrain--it was now a little after 1 a.m.--"The sooner it's over the sooner to sleep," the last "moa-oa-oa-ning" was drowned in a vociferous applause of a character such as I am sure that ballad had never before evoked.

And now I should like to mention another factor in the rendering of music, the importance of which is often underrated, and that is the tempo. Good music, I have found, not only does not lose but rather gains by the tempo, whatever it might be, being taken with deliberation. There are degrees in any designation of time, and one is apt to forget that the Italian words in common for that purpose may refer, not only to the metronomic measure, but also to the character, the mood of a piece. Allegro means lively. But there are degrees of liveliness. An elephant may be lively, but I take his liveliness to be of a somewhat different kind from that, for instance, of the frisky little chap whose antics are so deliciously and humorously described in Goethe and Berlioz's immortal "Song of the Flea" in Faust. I remember once hearing Schubert's Erlking taken at such a break-neck speed that I wondered both father and child were not killed before the end of the first stanza. It reminded me of a rather amusing series of telegraphic versions of celebrated poems, which many years ago appeared in the Fliegende Blätter--the Continental Punch--and of which that of the Erlking might be rendered in English by something like this: "Night wild--Father and child--Ride through the dark--Erlking out for a lark--Boy frightened--Father's grip tightened--Father, ride on--Yes, my son--Reach home in fear and dread--Father alive, child dead."

When we recall the definition of the word Interpretation as it refers to music and poetry, viz., Rendering by artistic representation or performance, we shall find that that little qualification "artistic" makes all the difference in the world, inasmuch as it clearly shows that a mere representation or performance may not necessarily be an interpretation and that it requires an artist to make it such. And it follows that there must be any amount of variety in the interpretation of one and the same thing. An old Latin proverb says: "Duo si faciunt idem, non est idem." When two people do the same thing, it isn't the same thing. Well, if that be true in any undertaking, how infinitely great must be the possibility of such variety when the two people of the proverb are artists! For though we speak of the artistic temperament as if it were something absolute and definable, we know in how many different ways such a temperament may manifest itself.

There are no two painters who, put before the same landscape, would paint it, i.e., interpret it, in the same way. Neither, I maintain, are there two actors who would interpret Hamlet, or two singers who would sing the same song exactly alike. They each have, when they have attained maturity, their own style, and style, as an eminent painter of the last century has admirably expressed it, is the leaving out of everything superfluous, a definition which fits our subject equally well. No two artists will think the same thing superfluous; indeed, what the one considers so, the other may deem essential. Here, too, the actor--to come back to poetry and music--is better off than the musician. He has a far greater scope, i.e., a far wider outlet for his imagination. He is given the words to do what he likes with. One actor--to keep to Hamlet--might after long study have come to the conclusion that, for instance, the last lines of that fine monologue at the end of the second act should be triumphantly exclaimed in a loud voice:

The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Whilst another, equally eminent, would make an equally great impression by almost whispering the words to himself, as if afraid of betraying the secret: "The play's the thing...." Who could say of the one or the other interpretation "This is right," or "This is wrong"? In this case the same result is arrived at by different means. On the other hand, I remember a little story my father told me when I was a boy, of a man who had been made very angry by a letter from his son at the University asking him for money. In that mood he is met by an old friend who asks him, "What's the matter? Why are you thus out of sorts?" "Well," says the other, "look at this impertinent letter I've just got from my son, 'Father, please send me money!'"--reading out the words in a quick, impatient, commanding voice. "Of course," he adds, "I shan't do anything of the kind."

"Let me see the letter," the benevolent friend asks--he was very fond of the boy--and, reading the words with a gentle, pleading, affectionate inflexion of the voice, he says, "Why, my dear fellow, it's a very charming letter. He writes, 'Father, please send me money.'" "Ah," says the father, "if he writes like that, he shall have it!" Here, without doubt, the different interpretation had a different result. Certainly the son will have thought so.

Varieties such as just quoted are, however, quite impossible in music. Here we are faced by absolute orders given by the composer who says: "This is to be forte, this piano; here you must increase, there decrease; here hurry, there retard." But this apparent clipping of the interpreter's wings is only a blessing in disguise, for it makes it possible for even a singer of inferior intelligence to render by artistic representation or performance, i.e., to interpret a song; so that, whilst we would not listen to a representation of the character of Hamlet by a stupid or uneducated man, we may thoroughly enjoy the rendering of a song by a singer with a fine voice, even if he be a most uninteresting, commonplace person otherwise, as long as he masters the technique of his art and loyally and conscientiously follows the directions given by the composer.

A loyal, reverent attitude to the author is a thing on which too great stress cannot be laid. A work deemed worth performing should be rendered as the author wrote it. By this I do, of course, not mean that an orchestral work or an organ fugue or a string quartet should not be played on the pianoforte. Quite the contrary. Skilful transcriptions and arrangements are indeed as great a boon as are reproductions of the famous masterpieces of painting or sculpture, without which our knowledge of the art would be lamentably defective. There have also been cases where one great master has thought it desirable to complement the work of another, either by writing accompaniments to originally unaccompanied instrumental works, as Schumann did to Bach, or by strengthening the accompanying orchestra in a choral work, as Mozart did to Handel's Messiah. As far as I know the original text has in all such cases been allowed to remain intact; and works thus treated being obtainable in the original as well as in the complemented version, the choice is left to the personal taste of the musicians responsible for the performance. What I mean is that the text of the composer should not be tampered with. There have now and then attempts been made at improving Beethoven's scores on the plea that some instruments employed by the master--like, for instance, the flute--have been developed so as to allow notes to be played on them now which were impossible at the time Beethoven wrote, and that very likely, had these notes been at the master's disposal, he would have made use of them. This may or may not be so, but it seems to me a dangerous theory to work upon, for once you commence meddling with a master work it would be difficult to know where to draw the line, and there is no saying whither it would lead. Besides, every great period in the history of art has its own characteristics. A so-called full orchestra in Beethoven's time was a very different thing from what we are accustomed to consider one to-day, when woodwind, brass, percussion, harps, and what not often alone outnumber the entire personnel of a grand orchestra a century ago. Moreover, if you leave Beethoven's scores untouched, his mastery of orchestration becomes all the more wonderful. There are instances--just think of that glorious climax in the Third Leonora Overture, or the end of that to Egmont--where, even considering only the mere physical power of sound, he gets results from his orchestration that no modern writer has as yet surpassed.

It is hardly credible that, arrogant enough as such attempts at improving Beethoven's orchestration are, there exist people who go further still and actually alter a great composer's directions as to expression. Most of us know how particularly fond Beethoven was of interrupting a seemingly increasing fortissimo by a sudden pianissimo. You will recall that splendid scherzo in the "Seventh Symphony," where he commences with an exultant fortissimo, evidently meaning to continue in that vein, when all of a sudden the ft on the last crotchet of the second bar is followed by a pp on the first crotchet of the third, the result is simply marvellous.

Well, some years ago I had to conduct that symphony as a deputy for the regular conductor, who was prevented from being at his post on that occasion. Can you imagine my surprise and disgust when, at the rehearsal, commencing with the Scherzo, and looking forward to that sudden pp on the first note of the third bar, that pp appeared already on the last note of the second bar, which should have still been ft. Stopping the orchestra indignantly, I asked, "What on earth are you doing, gentlemen?"

"We have got it so in our parts," was the answer. "Impossible," I said. "Let me see!" The leader handed me the part, and there, to be sure, I was flabbergasted to find the mark of pp on the first note of the third bar actually transferred in blue pencil to the preceding note, thus not only completely spoiling Beethoven's fun, but altering and weakening the subject, which, as anybody might see, commences with the down, not the up beat. I wonder if one should envy a man or pity him for a degree of self-estimation which could render him capable of blue-pencilling Beethoven!

He certainly has arrived at what a witty American friend of mine would call the "Shoehorn stage." To my enquiries about a mutual acquaintance, that gentleman answered, "He? Why, he's that big now he has to use a shoehorn to put on his hat!"

But this is by no means an isolated example of the lamentable lack of reverence in this country toward the works of the great masters of music. However much one might be horrified at the utterly mistaken tempi one often has to listen to in the rendering of the classics, especially Mozart and Beethoven, that, after all, sad and deplorable as it is, may only be the consequence of ignorance or the result of insufficient musical training on the part of the performer. It is the wanton, deliberate tampering with the text of a great composer which is unpardonable. No one among the classics was more explicit or exacting as to the way he wished his works to be rendered than Beethoven. Take once more that surpassingly beautiful Leonora Overture No. III. Who has not been thrilled to the innermost depths of his soul by those distant trumpet-calls, each ending with a long pause on the last note, and followed immediately, i.e., without any further pause and whilst that last note still lingers in one's ears, by one of the most divinely inspired phrases ever penned by even that great master? After the first call the orchestra plays it, in a mysterious pianissimo, in the same key as the call itself--B flat; after the second, more impressive still, a third lower, in G flat. Well, at a recent performance of that great work the conductor, according to the papers an "acknowledged authority" on Beethoven, coolly added a "general pause" on to each of those two pauses on the last note of the trumpet-call; that after the second call lasting for fully ten seconds. No words can express my disappointment, my indignation, for, of course, the sublime beauty of that low G flat with which the double-basses and 'celli enter whilst the high B flat of the trumpet-call is slowly dying away in the distance was lost completely. Indeed it would have mattered little now in what key the orchestra had come in--the thing was irretrievably spoiled.

Anywhere on the Continent the audience would have given unmistakable signs of their disapproval, and the Press been unanimous in the condemnation of such practices on the part of the conductor. Here that gentleman was vociferously applauded by the audience and--with, I think, one solitary exception--lauded to the skies by the Press, the one or two papers which were bold enough to timidly admit his "occasionally taking liberties with Beethoven" declaring such liberties to be those of "an intimate, an adept."

Intimate indeed! If a hundred years ago an intimate of Beethoven's had dared to do such a thing in Beethoven's presence, the master, as we know him from his letters, would have flung the score at his head, thundering, "Knave, canst thou not read? Dost thou think if I had wanted those two general pauses, I did not know how to put them in my score?"

What are we coming to? Irreverence, contempt of traditions, breaking with a glorious past, disregard of law, of form--are they also in the realm of music a sign of the times, a sort of Bolshevism?

Fancy an actor, tired of that everlasting "To be or not to be," and thinking it too hackneyed, surprising the audience by commencing the great monologue for a change with "To exist or not to exist"; or another, going one better, and considering the absence of rhyme in that monologue rather a mistake of Shakespeare's, hitting on the happy and original idea of correcting it into something like:

To be or not to be-- That is what staggers me.

And yet that would not be one whit less of a sacrilege.

And take a song or an aria; how often does one not hear even good singers change a note into a higher one, with the object of showing the voice to better advantage, or of making a phrase, generally the final cadence, more effective, so as to get a few more handfuls of applause, or perhaps even an additional recall at the end?

"That's villainous," says Hamlet, "and shows a most pitiful ambition."

This altering of notes brings me upon a question which has ever been the subject of much controversy among musicians: Are there any rules as to the singing of recitatives or, rather, to the substituting now and then, in the singing of recitatives of notes other than those written by the composer? Should, for instance, the phrase in the Messiah

My answer as regards the first of these two examples is as decided a "No" as my "Yes" is in regard to the second. This may, perhaps, be considered somewhat arbitrary and entirely a matter of taste, but I venture to hope that after what I have to say on the subject it will be found to be only partly a matter of taste, and of arbitrariness not at all. I base my objection to the alteration in the first, and my approval of that in the second example on a theory which seems to me to commend itself by its simplicity, and may be explained in the shape of a rule something like this:

Take the note as to the changing of which into a higher or lower you are in doubt, and look first at the note preceding and then at the note following that doubtful note. Then see if the note you wish to substitute for the printed note lies on the way from the preceding to the following note. If it does, you are justified in making the change; if not, leave it alone. Here is our first example:

The doubtful note is the C on "shep," the preceding one is the G below, the following is the C. Now, does the D you wish to substitute for the C on "shep" lie between that "G" and that "C" on the second syllable of shepherd? No, let the phrase therefore remain as written. In the second example:

The questionable note is the A on "Da" and does lie on the way from the C sharp to the A on the second syllable of David; it is, therefore, not only perfectly legitimate, but even good to make the change, and the phrase should be sung:

The question of taste enters when it comes to the exception to the rule. According to that it would be legitimate, taking yet a third example from the Messiah:

In this case, however, it would be decidedly better to leave the phrase unchanged, for we have had four B flats already in that short sentence, and the A, coming pat on the F major chord, is rather relieving and refreshing. Here, as in many other cases, "let your own discretion be your tutor." Of an exception to the rule as regards the first of these three examples being either justifiable or advisable I know no instance. Of course, all I have said on this subject refers to the slow, deliberate, serious recitative in oratorio and other sacred music only, and not at all to what is called "secco" recitative in opera, which is practically no more than speech somewhat rapidly delivered in specified musical terms. There you should change the doubtful note into one above or below it at every opportunity, for by doing so you impart a certain spontaneity and freedom to the sentences, emphasising their resemblance to the spoken word. Here is an example in the style of Mozart:

But I am reaching the limit of the space allowed for this article and fear my chat has been on "kindred topics" rather than on the alleged main theme of interpretation. But surely none of my readers expected me to answer the question "How to Interpret"? If so, I should be as truly sorry for having disappointed them as I was some years ago to have been obliged to disillusion the organist of the little Parish Church of Alvie. I don't mean myself, for I only officiated there in that capacity during the summer months, when I was at home. I mean the regular, appointed, salaried, real organist. She was a young girl of sixteen, a native of the parish, who, fond of music, like all Scots people, could strum two or three tunes on the piano, and to whom I had given a few lessons in the managing of the American organ in the church. At the request of my old friend, the Rev. James Anderson, our late and much lamented minister, I had introduced the playing of a voluntary during collection, always, of course, improvising on the Psalm or hymn tunes of the day's service, or on whatever came into my head. Well, a week after I had left Alvie for London, the first year of that innovation, I received a letter from the young lady, consisting of the following five lines: "Dear Mr. Henschel--Mr. Anderson wishes me to play voluntaries during collection, just as you did. Would you please let me know how you do it?"

I was touched by so much faith and innocence. The playing of an instrument--and singing, as such, is but playing on the vocal instrument in our throats--may be taught and, with patience and perseverance, brought to as near a degree of perfection as humanly possible; that is a matter of craft, of physical, I may say muscular, skill. The mystery of what is best, imperishable in any art, lies in the soul and in the brain. If dormant, it may be awakened and fostered; if absent, it cannot be acquired by teaching. Interpretation, though but recreative, certainly is an art, or at least part of one. And art is long and life is short, and of learning there is no end.

To have a chance of becoming an artist in the true sense of the word, the student, fortunate in the possession of the heavenly gift of talent, should from the outset resolve to strive for none but the highest ideals, refuse to be satisfied, both in taking and giving, with anything but the best and purest, and last, though by no means least, resist the temptations which the prospect of popularity and its worldly advantages, frequently the result of lowering that high standard, may place in his way.

ROBERT BRIDGES'S LYRICAL POEMS[41]

[41] October and Other Poems. By Robert Bridges. Heinemann. 1920. 5_s. net. Poetical Works, Excluding the Eight Dramas_. By Robert Bridges. 1912. Oxford University Press. For other works see "Bibliography" in current issue.

By J. C. SQUIRE

I

Mr. Bridges's new volume of poems (the first that he has published since he became Poet Laureate) must be read for what it is, the work of a man seventy-five years of age. This statement is not made as an excuse: there are weak--occasional and patriotic--poems in the book, but some also which are beautiful additions to his canon. But some of his critics, so inadequate is still the recognition of what he has done, have treated the book as though his claim to be a great poet rested partly upon it, failing to read it, as they should, in the light of all that has gone before it. Properly regarded, it awakes not disappointment, but wonder that a poet so old should still sometimes have the genuine impulse, should still keep his spirit fresh, and should still be capable of ingenious and fruitful experiments in technique--experiments moreover in which the content is never subordinated to the form, however exacting and interesting the form may be. October, Noel, Our Lady, Flycatchers, The West Front, Trafalgar Square, and Fortunatus Nimium are all poems that any man might be proud to write in his prime; and beyond these there is the delicious invention of The Flowering Tree:

What Fairy fann'd my dreams while I slept in the sun? As if a flowering tree were standing over me: Its young stem strong and lithe went branching overhead, And willowy sprays around fell tasselling to the ground All with wild blossom gay as is the cherry in May ...

The sunlight was enmesh'd in the shifting splendour And I saw through on high to soft lakes of blue sky:...

So I slept enchanted under my loving tree Till from his late resting the sweet songster of night, Rousing, awakened me: Then! this--the birdis note-- Was the voice of thy throat which thou gav'st me to kiss.

The occasion may suitably be seized to make a few notes on Mr. Bridges's shorter--never mind the title and the word "lyrical"--poems as a whole.

II

Mr. Bridges is often written of as though he were primarily a technician. He has always taken a keen interest in prosody; he has written books, and formulated theories, about it; his experiments in classical metres and his notions about English spelling have, to those who have not troubled to discover the intellectual strength and the strong common sense which commonly marks his linguistic writings, given him something of the air of a pedant. But the theoriser and the innovator of the "shorter poems" has nothing to do with pedantry. There are poems in which the scrutinous eye may detect very elaborate pains. April 1885 is a fabric of internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration which it would be hard to parallel in English:

Wanton with long delay the gay Spring leaping cometh; The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May: All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth: The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth: On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.

That may be called a tour-de-force; as a rule, though Mr. Bridges's variety of stanza and rhythm is immense, the craftsman never intrudes. His ingenuities merely serve their purpose; his music cannot be separated from his sense; his rhythms are sought, and found, as the only suitable rhythms for the words and the scenes that are being expressed and described. How otherwise than in the beautiful movement used can we imagine the picture of A Passer By?--the fresh blue day, the crowded sail, the vision of a queenly progress across the world to a far harbour in the south? It is one of fifty such feats, triumphs of fastidious art, never completely understood until the poems are read aloud. His power of music has developed steadily throughout his career, but scarcely a poem of any period can be quoted without illustrating his surpassing technical gifts. We shall come to many presently; here, when we are thinking primarily of the skill with which he weaves a close-fitting garment of sound for his thought, we may take as a single example, London Snow:

When men were all asleep the snow came flying, In large white flakes falling on the city brown, Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying, Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing; Lazily and incessantly floating down and down: Silently sifting and veiling road, roof, and railing; Hiding difference, making unevenness even, Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing. All night it fell, and when full inches seven It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness, The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven....

The accuracy of the description is extraordinary and continues as the town awakes, and boys go snowballing to school, a few carts creak along, and the pale sun rises to awake the noisier day. But the observation, the accuracy, the response of the heart to the beauty of the scene, might have been found elsewhere: the astonishing management of the rhythms, which, even when divorced from the meaning of the words, translate the steady falling, the wayward criss-crossing, the lightness and crispness, and soothing persistence of snow in an almost windless air, is peculiar to Mr. Bridges. Words and music are with him always inseparable: he is at the opposite pole from the man, often not unintelligent in other ways, who forces his material into a strait-jacket of jingle. In this respect his taste is as flawless, his subtlety as unfailing, as any in the records of literature.

III

It is possible, and it has often been stated, that Mr. Bridges will chiefly live as a poet of the English landscape. Certainly he would live if only his landscape poetry were preserved. It may seem a large assertion, but no Englishman has written so large a body of good landscape poetry. There are two obvious things to be said about it.

The first is that his landscape is the landscape of the South of England, more particularly of the Thames Valley and the downs by the sea--two regions which he significantly chooses as typical, when, in The Voice of Nature, he wishes to point an argument. He never describes foreign or remote scenes; and--it may be regarded as symbolic of his attitude to the more violent things of life--he never leaves the land for the sea. Even British territorial waters he never sails; there is much of the sea in his work, but it is the sea as seen from the shore, blue and smiling and dancing, or whipped by the wind, caught in a narrow peep between shoulders of the downs or watched from a hill through a telescope:

There many an hour I have sat to watch; nay, now The brazen disk is cold against my brow, And in my sight a circle of the sea Enlarged to swiftness, where the salt waves flee, And ships in stately motion pass so near That what I see is speaking to my ear.

Mr. Bridges's landscape is bounded by the English Channel; his hills are the Downs; his rivers are clear and gentle streams; his trees oak and beech, elm and larch; he is as surely of the South of England as Wordsworth is of the North. And the second obvious thing is that, being a true landscape poet and not a romantic who exploits nature to find backgrounds for his passions, it is of ordinary landscapes that he writes. Tennyson, too, was an observer, but many of his best-known landscapes are of the selected kind. It is one thing to write of the sort of natural scene traditionally approved as remarkable: sunset on a marsh, sunrise on the Alps, stupendous cliffs, high cataracts, and breakers in the moon. It is another to describe, giving the breath of life to your description, what any man, going out on any day in any season, will see when he looks over a five-barred gate or takes a footpath through the woods. Mr. Bridges writes of nature like a countryman. His abnormal scenes are rare; he sees the beauty in the normal. He sings of nightingales when he hears them, but rooks are far more frequent in his verse; his suns seldom go down in flaming splendour, but drop red into the grey or die invisibly. One by one scenes from his familiar landscape have moved him to verse, until his books contain a complete catalogue of the English rural year, all its ordinary recurrent colours, and scents and sounds, trees, flowers, birds, skies and waters.

Spring. A village in the downs, and men winnowing in a barn. The palm-willows and hazels. The first flowers, primroses and green hyacinth spikes, shooting up amid moss and withered undergrowth. Brisk ploughmen. Birds happily courting in the jocund sun.

Summer. The garden, with bees on the flowers and in the overhanging limes, and rooks cawing in the elms. The hayfields in the sun; fields green with waves of rustling wheat; the hum of insects and the song of larks in a sky pure blue, or heaped with "slow pavilions of caverned snow," "sunshot palaces of cloud"; the downs, starred with small flowers, where rabbits nibble the grass; the noise of scythes. The river: still water, the dip of oars, a boat that glides with its reflection past flowering islets and dipping branches and meadows, where "the lazy cows wrench many a scented flower"; bathers; fish leaping in the pools; the peace of evening as it falls over water and trees; moonlight on the flashing weir. There are storms that blacken the sea and beat down the corn, but they pass and the sun comes out again, gathering strength.

Autumn. The garden in September, with late flowers. The ripe orchards and fields where "the sun spots the deserted gleanings with decay." The winds of October that come and fill ruts and pools with golden leaves. The later storms that mingle the leaves with snow.

Winter. The short days and the infrequent sun on lonely songless lands. Rooks after the plough, the team against the skyline. A rough sea and snow on the beach. Robin on the leafless bough. Dark afternoons and evenings by the fire, companioned or alone.

All those signs of the seasons and hundreds more could be illustrated from Mr. Bridges. One cannot do more here than huddle together a few characteristic fragments from which the whole may be deduced. If the first three are records of the shape, colour and movement of clouds, it is fitting: all Mr. Bridges's landscapes have skies, and most of his skies (being English) have clouds:

From distant hills their shadows creep, Arrive in turn and mount the lea, And flit across the downs and leap Sheer off the cliff upon the sea;

And sail and sail far out of sight. But still I watch their fleecy trains, That piling all the south with light, Dapple in France the fertile plains.

And o'er the treetops, scattered in mid-air, The exhausted clouds laden with crimson light Floated, or seemed to sleep; and, highest there, One planet broke the lingering ranks of night.

The upper skies are palest blue Mottled with pearl and fretted snow: With tattered fleece of inky hue Close overhead the storm-clouds go.

Their shadows fly along the hill And o'er the crest mount one by one: The whitened planking of the mill Is now in shade and now in sun.

With gentle flaws the western breeze Into the garden saileth, Scarce here and there stirring the single trees, For his sharpness he vaileth: So long a comrade of the bearded corn Now from the stubbles whence the shocks are borne, O'er dewy lawns he turns to stray, As mindful of the kisses and soft play Wherewith he enamoured the light-hearted May, Ere he deserted her; Lover of fragrance, and too late repents; Nor more of heavy hyacinth now may drink, Nor spicy pink, Nor summer's rose, nor garnered lavender, But the few lingering scents Of streakèd pea, and gillyflower and stocks Of courtly purple and aromatic phlox.

And at all times to hear are drowsy tones Of dizzy flies, and humming drones, With sudden flap of pigeon wings in the sky, Or the wild cry Of thirsty rooks, that scour ascare The distant blue, to watering as they fare With creaking pinions, or--on business bent, If aught their ancient polity displease-- Come gathering to their colony, and there Settling in ragged parliament, Some stormy council hold in the high trees.

In the golden glade the chestnuts are falling all; From the sered boughs of the oak the acorns fall; The beech scatters her ruddy fire; The lime has stripped to the cold, And standeth naked above her yellow attire; The larch thinneth her spire To lay the ways of the wood with cloth of gold.

Out of the golden-green and white Of the brake the fir-trees stand upright In the forest of flame, and wave aloft To the blue of heaven their blue-green tuftings soft.

Out by the ricks the mantled engine stands Crestfallen, deserted--for now all hands Are told to the plough--and ere it is dawn appear The teams following and crossing far and near, As hour by hour they broaden the brown bands Of the striped fields; and behind them firk and prance The heavy rooks, and daws grey-pated dance: As awhile, surmounting a crest, in sharp outline (A miniature of toil, a gem's design) They are pictured, horses and men, or now near by Above the lane they shout lifting the share, By the trim hedgerow bloom'd with purple air;

The long dark night, that lengthens slow, Deepening with Winter to starve grass and tree, And soon to bury in snow The Earth, that, sleeping 'neath her frozen stole, Shall dream a dream crept from the sunless pole Of how her end shall be.

The best of all (such as The Downs and The Storm is Over) cannot be quoted except entirely; they are landscapes complete, earth and sky. But let it not be supposed that Mr. Bridges is ever a mere describer who sits down mechanically in front of any scene with his little box of water-colours. We have known such, and sometimes they have been learned in botany; their exactitude of detail is dull, their serried statements useless; only the man who is touched by the beauty in a scene, or aroused by a scene to an awareness of beauty behind it, will fuse the several things he sees into a whole. The writer who has felt no emotion communicates none, and the greatness of Mr. Bridges's poems of landscape is derived not solely from his knowledge of landscape, the wary eye, but from his feeling for it, the eye of love. His scenes are precise, but they are never photographs; there is no doubt about the sentiment that he felt when he saw them.

IV

And Mr. Bridges, even when at his best, is not only a landscape poet, but a poet cunning in the experiences of the heart. Very many of his poems are love poems and many of them are beautiful: if the fact has not been widely observed it must be because they are happy love poems, or at least because they are not excessive in expression. The proclivity that makes him, in another sphere, write not about storms but about calms after storms, is seen always: he has no violence, no vehement abandonment. But there is little of that in Wordsworth and other poets the depth of whose affections, the reality of whose suffering, cannot be doubted. Mr. Bridges's love-poetry makes no brutal assault on us. His constant reference to Virgil, Mozart and the old composers is significant. He never declaims, never raves, despairs, or burns in print: but he knows the ways of lovers' hearts, and his quiet stanzas, whether their subject be the pain of doubt, or separation, or the joy of union, or calm affection by the warm domestic hearth, have a truth and strength which outwear the ardours of many poets. In When My Love was Away, My Spirit sang all day, I will not let thee go, and twenty more he lover's calendar is written as that of the seasons elsewhere, and if his praise is soft and measured like the old music in which he so constantly delights, love's fine extravagance is, for all the tempered sound, nevertheless there:

Her beauty would surprise Gazers on Autumn eves, Who watched the broad moon rise Upon the scattered sheaves.

He is self-controlled and never shouts; he does not hunt the universe for new and strange sorrows nor harrow himself overmuch with the problems of existence; but those griefs that fall to the common lot of mankind have come to him and drawn beautiful poetry from him. Many poets have written habitually of Death; few have said as little about Death as Mr. Bridges; but he has said all he has to say and need say about death, loss, and sorrow in two poems, the poem which begins:

I never shall love the snow again Since Maurice died,

and the other On a Dead Child: "Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee...."

So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing-- Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed-- Propping thy wise, sad head, Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.

So quiet! doth the change content thee?--Death, whither hath he taken thee? To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this? The vision of which I miss, Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee? Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark, Unwilling, alone we embark, And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.

In Winter Nightfall there is all the complaint of ailing old age, in Pater Filio the passionate anxiety of parent for child; the normal, inevitable griefs and dejections are all here, expressed with gravity, yet always with poignancy. But normal and inevitable they are. One gets the impression that, beyond the "common lot," the poet has had few distresses. Intense joy--nobody has given it better definition than he--is as rare as intense sadness, but ordinarily he is happy, or at worst not uncomfortably melancholy, and the happiness has become more pervasive as he has grown older. He is the poet of a leisured country life, led by a sensitive physically healthy man, with whom the major things of life have gone well and who, in those circumstances, is temperamentally inclined to a grateful contentment.

V

Mr. Bridges has not made the easy appeal by violence of expression; and he has not made the easy appeal by violence of doctrine. If he has been less discussed than many inferior writers, it is not so much that he is without doctrine as that he is without novel doctrine and has never been a doctrinaire. Any noisy demonstrator with a new lie may attract attention, if it is only the attention of those who wish to dispute with him; and it is easier to dispute (or agree) with the man whose "views" are explicit than with him who leaves them implicit. The mere fact that Mr. Bridges's practical philosophy has been held by hundreds of millions of ordinary people in many ages does not prove that he has no philosophy. He is a Christian, but he says little about that. He is politically sceptical of systems, but he says little about that. He accepts life, with its pains and pleasures, and he is happy that his life has been cast in an ordered traditional civilisation. He sees life in proportion, with the greater goods clear: childhood, the love of a woman and of children, the beauty of the earth, days of peace, joyful work, friendship. He does not proclaim a way of life, but it will be easy for his critics to deduce one from his poetry: if he does not tell people how to enjoy life it is because he is too busy enjoying it himself, and if he does not expound his religion, it is because he probably holds it to be "the religion of all sensible men." He never loses hold of his settled philosophy. In depression he does not imaginatively revel in the gloom of a Universe gone black, but consoles himself out of his knowledge:

O soul, be patient: thou shalt find A little matter mend all this, Some strain of music to thy mind, Some praise for skill not spent amiss.

In the peace of a churchyard he can write:

Nay, were my last hope quenched, I here would sit And praise the annihilation of the pit.

He lives through the moments of dejection and awaits, with sure hope, those moments when

Life and joy are one--we know not why-- As though our very blood long breathless lain Had tasted of the breath of God again.

There are times when he is at almost that pitch of bliss for days together, and he says with each evening:

That I have known no day In all my life like this.

And with any dawn may come the exhilaration and the resolve

I too will something make And joy in the making.

Very rarely some slight dogmatic statement is actually present, the affirmation of something which is not necessarily false because it is as old as man, and modestly put. "For howso'er man hug his care, The best of his art is gay." He sees Spring in Winter more often than Winter in Spring:

And God the Maker doth my heart make bold To praise for writing works not understood, Who all the worlds and ages doth behold, Evil and good as one, and all as good.

It may by some be called an easy acceptance; by others the answer will be made that the refusal to accept does not get us much further. Mr. Bridges's own answer would perhaps be Lycomedes':

men who would live well Weigh not these riddles, but unfold their life From day to day.

No attempt has been made in these brief notes to do more than indicate the artistic virtues and the outlook of Mr. Bridges: the elucidation is scant enough, and there was no space for reasoned criticism or for discussion of the qualities which he lacks and which other poets have possessed. But it may, in conclusion, be repeated that he is, as an artist, as careful and skilful as any poet who has ever written, and that as a man he has never lied, never posed, never assumed a factitious mood because it might impress or a factitious opinion because it might startle. He is sensible, and he is (in the best sense) commonplace in his outlook and in his affections and admirations; the changing conditions of our times have affected him little; he thinks more of the "man harrowing clods" than of the "breaking of nations"; the river, the cornfields, the village church, the domestic fireside, do obscure for him the mental and physical struggles of our world; he has his ideal of the sound mind in the sound body, and he cannot see why anything should modify it. But his philosophy will not stale when many of our controversialists have gone the way of Godwin and Malthus; and a reader who went to him for knowledge of how to live would certainly not be led on the rocks, little as Mr. Bridges may directly say on the subject. Nobody could be less like an apostle, but serenity, delight, cleanliness, and honesty are in him--and courage. The thought of death does not appal him, it braces him to work and joy. "Man hath his life," says Thetis in one of his dramas, "that it must end condemns it not for naught." The same certainty is in the lyrics:

Daily thy life shortens, the grave's dark peace Draweth surely nigh, When good-night is good-bye; For the sleeping shall not cease.

Fight, to be found fighting: nor far away Deem, nor strange thy doom. Like this sorrow 'twill come, And the day will be to-day.

The greatest of practical truths could not be put more stoutly, nor with a finer imaginative touch.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS

Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability, answer all queries addressed to him.

MR. YATES THOMPSON'S ILLUMINATED BOOKS

These lines are written before the date at which the second portion of Mr. Yates Thompson's illuminated books are to be sold at Sotheby's. They have no reference therefore to the relative value of the books as realised under the hammer. The intrinsic value of books, however, should not be measured merely by their market price. Splendid as are the French and Italian manuscripts and the eight printed books which are included in the sale, the greatest interest of all has its centre in the fourteen books which show the gay piety of English illumination between the last quarter of the twelfth century and the middle of the fifteenth. Indeed, no other group in all the hundred books to which Mr. Yates Thompson definitely limited his famous collection has quite the same claims of artistic and historical interest as these. They do not, of course, cover the whole range of English illumination. There is no example of the art of outline drawing, which flourished with amazing vigour in England for a century and a half before the Norman Conquest, convicting Mr. G. K. Chesterton of inexactitude when, in a recent number of THE LONDON MERCURY, he suggests that mediæval illuminators used their paints before they had learned how to draw. The vivacity and grace shown in those early drawings, chastened but not subdued by Continental and Byzantine influences, left traces in English books, and continued to afford a firm groundwork for English illumination for more than three centuries. There are but few examples of them in private hands. Neither has Mr. Yates Thompson any example of the great Winchester School, represented in the tenth century by the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, now the property of the Duke of Devonshire, and in the twelfth by the great Bible at Winchester Cathedral. But English art had its flowering time in the fourteenth century, and its late summer in the fifteenth; and amongst the books offered for sale at Sotheby's are brilliant examples of both these periods.

* * * * *

Taking the more important of these English books in the order of their date, we have first the Life of St. Cuthbert, with its series of fifty-six lovely full-page miniatures, probably painted at Durham about 1180, a delightful example of a rare type of book. The Apocalypse has an important chapter to itself in the history of painted books, and the late thirteenth-century copy in the collection is one of the finest surviving copies of that favourite picture-book of the Middle Ages. It has much in common with the copy at Lambeth, and Dr. M. R. James traces them both to the same birthplace, probably St. Augustine's at Canterbury. The copy in the sale has no less than 152 miniatures, some of which seem to have been painted in Italy, whence more than six centuries later Mr. Yates Thompson brought it back to England.

* * * * *

The three fourteenth-century manuscripts in the group are a Psalter of Northern origin, probably written for a member of the Yorkshire family of de la Twyere; an early Sarum Missal, with historiated initials, in which some of the figure-drawing recalls that of Queen Mary's Psalter in the British Museum; and the Psalter of John of Gaunt, to whom it is believed to have been given, perhaps on his marriage with Blanche of Lancaster in 1359. Many of the miniatures in this splendid book are enshrined in Gothic canopies and painted in gold and silver; and the silver, so apt to turn black through oxydization, has on most of these pages kept its lustre. This Psalter is one of the finest examples of English work which has survived from the second half of the fourteenth century. Mr. Yates Thompson confesses that it cost him a bigger price than any other of his books.

* * * * *

The Hours of Elisabeth y^e Quene, so called from the signature of the Queen of Henry VII. written at the foot of one of the pages, is a very rich and beautiful example of that new spirit in English illumination which has been connected with the marriage of Queen Anne of Bohemia to King Richard II. in 1382. Dating from that event, English work for almost the first time takes a character which is quite distinct from contemporary French or Flemish illumination, and the change is attributed to the work and influence of the artists whom the Bohemian princess brought in her train. The strong, clear outline, made by pen or pencil, which had been a tradition from the beginning of English pictorial art, now yields place to soft brushwork. The human figure, which has hitherto been represented by types, assumes individuality and realism. There is found, too, a new character in portraiture, with the features carefully and delicately moulded. The rich borders of books of this period have details unknown in the French work, which, hitherto, has been so nearly akin to that done in England. The kinship can be traced rather to contemporary books painted in Italy and Southern Germany. These English borders are apt to have a certain heaviness in design, especially when compared with the graceful ivy-leaf pattern in French illumination of the same date. Thanks, however, to the greater brilliancy and gaiety of the colouring, which is also a note of the new English style, this heaviness in design is hardly felt. In this Book of Hours the colours, which for the most part are delicate shades of red and blue, heightened with white, and richly gilt, are especially brilliant. The class of illumination which it represents belongs to a limited and distinct period of English art which has yet to be fully explored.

* * * * *

The group of eight books printed on vellum which follows the English books in the order of lots, and in the catalogue is sandwiched between them and the French and Italian manuscripts, is quite worthy of such good company. These printed books show how deliberately and how successfully the first printers sought to copy the manner and also the special beauty of the finest manuscripts of their own age. Amongst these fine volumes are the Mainz de Officiis of 1466; Peter Schoeffer's Justinian of 1468; an illuminated copy of Jenson's Pliny of 1472--the type of which had so notable an influence on the work of the Kelmscott and Doves Presses; John of Verona's Valturius of 1472, the earliest book to be printed in Italy with Italian woodcuts--and this copy is illuminated too. The group shows how far from vain even in an artistic sense was the boast made in the colophon of one of the earliest Venetian printers that already by his new craft

"Calami superaverat artem."

B. H. N.

GENERAL NOTES

Messrs. Dobell's catalogue for March, 1920, contains mention of a very curious and beautiful book of designs made exclusively of feathers. There are about one hundred and fifty of these designs, which were made, according to the inscription on the title-page, by "Dionisio Minaggio Giardinero Di s^a e^a Guobernator Del Stat di Milano. Inventor et Feccit Lano Del 1618." His Excellency the Governor of the State of Milan was fortunate in possessing so talented a gardener. Dionisio Minaggio was, in his way, a remarkable artist. His feather pictures, which include a beautiful series of birds portrayed in their own plumage, a series of hunting scenes, illustrations of musical instruments, and a number of charming figures from the Old Comedy, are often quite enchanting. The designs are reminiscent of the best sampler work, while the feathers give a richness, variety, and unexpectedness of colouring such as no sampler has ever possessed. Feather work of a much later period is not uncommon; but we should imagine that so large a series of such an early date is something quite unique. The book is priced at £200.

* * * * *

The catalogue of the library of Mr. Walter Thomas Wallace, which is to be sold in the last days of March by the American Art Association, in New York, has just reached us. Mr. Wallace's astonishingly rich collection includes copies of the four Folios of Shakespeare and of several of the Quartos. Among the Elizabethan rarities are The Palace of Pleasure, Sidney's Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, and other poems of Spenser. Among the eighteenth-century treasures is to be found one of the two known copies of Goldsmith's Threnodia Augustalis. Keats and Shelley are well represented. There is a very complete collection of Tennyson first editions and an almost unique series of Lamb books, including a copy in the original binding of the almost extinct first edition of Poems for Children (1809). There are also remarkably complete sets of first editions of such American authors as Poe, Bryant, Longfellow. We anticipate some new records in the way of prices.

* * * * *

As we go to press the first reports of the beginning of the Buxton Forman sale at the Anderson Galleries, New York, reach us. They emphasize the present flourishing condition of what the late owner of the books in question once, in an unguarded moment, called "The Keats and Shelley" business. Two copies of books by Keats, which belonged to Fanny Braune (afterwards Mrs. Lindon), were included in the first day's sale. The Poems (1817), inscribed with her name, "Frances Lindon," and presumed to be a presentation copy from the poet, and a first edition of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, etc. (1820), inscribed on the title-page "to F. B. from J. K." These two books fetched $1750 and $4000, and, at the normal rate of exchange, £350 and £800 respectively. Even a series of eighteen letters from George Keats sold for $1800. Apparently it is better to be a poet's brother than oneself a poet, for an eight-page autograph manuscript of William Blake's poem Genesis, which is still unpublished, was bought by the Rosenbach Company, of Philadelphia, for $1350.

* * * * *

Other items in this sale were Browning's Pauline, first edition (1833), an uncut copy with the original boards and paper label intact ($2560) and the MS. of Colombe's Birthday, title and fifty-nine folio pages ($1200). Eight hundred dollars, normally the equivalent of £160, was the price paid for a copy of the first edition of Adam Bede (1859), presented by George Eliot to Thackeray.

A. L. H. and I. A. W.

CORRESPONDENCE

AMERICAN COPYRIGHT

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--I trust you will find room to insert this letter after the space you have given to Mr. G. H. Putnam. We are all grateful for the work that Mr. Putnam has done, but--to use an American phrase, which no doubt he will appreciate--"there are others" who have worked equally hard, and not infrequently with a more satisfactory result. We must thank you, therefore, for your brief Editorial Note in the March issue.

The real reason, however, for this letter is to correct some of the statements made by Mr. Putnam. He glorifies the new American Act because of its liberal allowance of 120 days' "interim" copyright. He has understated his own case. The Act gives sixty days from the publication abroad in which to deposit a copy at Washington, and four months from the date of deposit in which to take up the copyright, subject to the numerous harassing technicalities of the Act. An author, therefore, has 180 instead of 120 days.

In Mr. Putnam's second statement he tries to score a point against Great Britain. As in the former paragraph he understated his case, in this he would overstate it.

He complains that American authors have to make a bona-fide publication in Great Britain within fourteen days of the publication in the United States. He italicises bona fide. He must have overlooked the fact that publication is an essential part of copyright in the States just as much as it is in Great Britain. This item then can be ruled out.

He contrasts, however, the meagre allowance of fourteen days under the British Act against the liberal allowance of 180 (not 120) days under the American Act. It must be pointed out with due emphasis that when the author is not hampered by typesetting clauses, printed copyright notices, and filing difficulties, time in the matter of publication is really of little account. The American publisher has merely to ship off a consignment before he publishes the book in the States and to await instructions from the London house that the consignment has arrived. There is no difficulty in this step. So long as the technicalities of United States Act still stand we are sick of these counter-irritants, which, now the war is over, "cut no ice."

We have heard that the Typesetters' Union--of which Mr. Putnam seems unduly alarmed--could be made to understand from statistics supplied that they are standing in their own light. But, perhaps, if they are still obdurate on the practical side, they might be influenced by the argument of the idealist "that it is a disgrace to a civilised nation to stand outside the intellectual Union of other civilised Nations." The Americans have had the opportunity of joining the revised Convention of Berne for many years, but have neglected to do so.

It is not astonishing, therefore, that President Wilson cannot influence them to follow him into the League of Nations under the Peace Treaty.

For the last paragraph of Mr. Putnam's letter--his ἀπολογία {apologia} for American authors and publishers--all authors in Great Britain are grateful. If British authors have not followed with appreciation the efforts of their brothers in the States, they should have done so. We gladly now pay tribute to the work of those who so long and earnestly, yet unsuccessfully, have struggled to bring the United States to join the ranks of other civilised nations.--Yours, etc.,

G. HERBERT THRING.

March 11th.

[Perhaps Major Putnam will reply.--EDITOR.]

FLAUBERT AND MR. STURGE MOORE

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--Mr. H. W. Crundell thinks that I should explain the absence of a note to my poem Micah; the presence of the one he suggests would have appeared to me an impertinence. Did Gray and Arnold call attention by notes when they adapted a few lines from Pindar? Did Tennyson thus docket what he owed to Homer and Virgil? To me the explanation seems rather due from Mr. Crundell: why he wrote his letter, and from you, why you printed it. However, obviously you think differently, so this occasion may as well serve me to allay an innocent curiosity that I neither intended to provoke nor to baffle. Besides Mr. Crundell's find there is a longer passage from Salammbo in my Mariamne. I put a line from Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer into my Rout of the Amazons, a phrase from Myers' translation of Pindar into At Bethel, and a phrase from Milton into Love's First Communion. Excepting the usual array from the Bible, I believe these to be all my verbal and literal appropriations.--Yours, etc.,

T. STURGE MOORE.

P.S.--I have forgotten an unintentional one, a line from Keats in Mariamne.

[By printing Mr. Crundell's letter we didn't mean to suggest that we agreed with his argument; we were merely interested in the derivation of a beautiful passage in a beautiful poem.--EDITOR.]

* * * * *

"MANSOUL"

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--Your review of Mr. Doughty's Mansoul reveals an attitude somewhat similar to that of Jeffrey towards Wordsworth. May a humble reader hesitatingly retort the phrase--This will never do? Your reviewer does not think Mr. Doughty should be ignored, but he finds Chaucer easier and more modern, and considers this poetry at best a thing of tough shreds and purple patches.

With this opinion I do not contend, for I do not clearly understand upon what principle of criticism your reviewer is acting; but I should like to suggest that his opinion springs from a misconception which ought not to be nourished by the LONDON MERCURY. He seems to think that Mr. Doughty's "guttural obscurity of speech," his style in general, is a vital fault. I submit that he assumes rather than proves such a degree of obscurity, and that he puts an excessive value upon the merely formal and conventional graces of English blank verse. He does not recognise that Mr. Doughty is making not only his own poem, but his own style, and that the poetry is to be judged not exclusively by its conformity with traditional verse--the false standard of the eighteenth century--but by the success with which its style empowers and lucidly presents the author's conception. Casual wrynesses, unaccustomed inversions, idiosyncratic punctuation (forgive, dear Cobbett, the long words) do not affect this central question. Your reviewer admits the greatness of the poet's conception, admits that it has the substantial elements of noble poetry--I mean such elements as we find in Paradise Lost and The Dynasts--but is unwilling to admit that his form is his natural form, the form that expresses not only his explicit intention but his implicit character, and, therefore, a good form. I submit that Mr. Doughty's style in poetry is the inevitable expression of his mind at work upon imaginative themes. I submit that a true poet does not and cannot choose his style, and that the test of his style is not its degree of conformity with Chaucer's simplicity, Milton's lofty sweetness, Tennyson's effusive delicacy, but the fullness with which it expresses his own imaginative vision. Mr. Doughty has written, not a few miscellaneous lyrics, but a vast body of poetry in which a perfectly clear apprehension of past and future is presented. His themes are unfolded with such fullness as enables us to judge whether the expression of them, unusual as it may seem, ruins them or preserves them unspoiled, sustains or dulls their brightness. With extreme diffidence I suggest that your reviewer has not addressed himself to this proposition, and that this proposition remains an elementary principle of criticism. And I would remark that Mr. Doughty's own observations upon his style (note to The Dawn in Britain, Volume 6) might suitably be referred to for a precise statement of his attitude towards the English language.

The principles of criticism do not change, but may be eclipsed or clouded. They are familiar, yet need constant reassertion and illustration. Difficult as it may be to reduce these abstractions to clear and useful formulæ, I think it would be a service to letters if you, Sir, would state and clarify them afresh. Wanting definition and illustration, creation and criticism may become discordant, with unhappy results for each. It is my suspicion of a faint discord that must form the apology for the length of this letter.--Yours, etc.,

S. E.

[We did not dispute that Mr. Doughty's style is natural to him. We merely said that that is his and our misfortune.--EDITOR.]

* * * * *

JOHN DONNE

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--After reading the most interesting paper on John Donne in the last number of THE LONDON MERCURY, I wonder whether Browning had not him in mind when he wrote The Grammarian's Funeral. "An hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages" consumed the "soul by-droptic" grammarian no less than Donne; like Donne even to the crumbs he'd "fain eat up the feast, Aye, nor feel quaesy." He knew nothing, it is true, of "the quaesy pain Of being beloved and loving"; his was a passion of mind only, though, like Donne, he knew the sickness of the body overwrought. The analogy could be traced further.

For more reasons than the tracing of remembrance of Donne in one poem it would be interesting to know how "longe" Browning "hadde ygo" to the earlier poet.--Yours, etc.,

J. R. RACKHAM.

Queen Mary High School for Girls, Anfield Road, Liverpool, February 13th.

* * * * *

A POINT IN SHERIDAN

(To the Editor of THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--In one of the scenes of Sheridan's School for Scandal occurs the following passage: "You may see her on a little squat pony with her hair plaited up behind like a drummer's...." (Act 2, sc. 2.)

I presume that the underlined words, which have often puzzled me, are an allusion to the manners of the time, with which I am insufficiently acquainted. As none of the editions I have been able to consult give any explanation on the point, perhaps one of your readers would oblige me by throwing some light on the matter.--Yours, etc.,

F. PELLISIER.

Remiremont, Vosges, February 16th.

LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.

THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES

Vandalism in Egypt is deplored in London, but in the present circumstances we cannot throw stones. Rubbish-heaps are often romantic, and those of Fostât (Old Cairo) contain masses of mediæval pottery and other treasures well worth preserving; but the local authorities propose to create a new suburb by erecting workmen's dwellings all over them. Systematic excavation cannot be hurried, and careful search might throw light on the origin of maiolica.

For the first time perhaps in its long history, the Society has devoted an ordinary meeting to the discussion of Ways and Means. The following are the principal alternatives: (i) To raise the subscription and invite donations; (ii) to extend the franchise and popularise the Society; and (iii) to economise further and lower the output. The argument that thousands are waiting to join in the work of the Society is not convincing; and as about ninety per cent. of the Fellows do not attend the meetings, the publications are their only tangible reward. If the standard is to be maintained, few would expect the same return for half the subscription they paid on joining, but to double the annual levy would be a drastic reform; yet the Society is further committed to field-work of considerable public interest. The rich we have always with us, but their presence is not felt so much here as in America.

THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS

During the last few weeks the restoration of the Lady Chapel of Worksop Priory has been in progress. It was a roofless ruin, retaining much fine thirteenth-century work. It is being re-roofed, the fallen portions rebuilt, and missing parts renewed in the style of the original building, the new work being made to resemble as nearly as may be what the old is believed to have been.

This on the face of it sounds reasonable enough, but experience has shown that in practice the result of such treatment is the reverse of satisfactory. It is exactly what the restorers of the last century did, and what people with any knowledge or love of old buildings deplore to-day, whenever it comes to their notice. It is just such a case as this which goes to the root of the matter in which the Society interests itself, and its customary ruling thereon may be stated in the following way:

1. The ruin should be subjected only to repairs needed for its upkeep.

2. If the site is absolutely necessary to the community for the purposes of its daily life, it has a right to use such ruins and even in extremity to demolish them.

3. Confronted by a similar necessity it may be justifiable to incorporate an old building in a new one. The danger in this case lies, however, in the fact that the desire to restore for the sake of restoration may outrun the actual need of a new building designed to fulfil some special purpose.

Having made this concession to a genuine demand, the Society still stands out against restoration. The new work should be good and in harmony with the old, but it should also be living architecture and not a study in dead style.

As Professor Lethaby expressed it, "Architecture is a current speech, it is not an art of classical quotation."

But the Lady Chapel of Worksop Priory is actually being restored. So, though much more might be said, the case ends here, save for the thought that with better guidance different conclusions would have been reached.

The promoters of the scheme, having so far determined to make use of the ruin, might have asked the advice of a selected group representative of our best men--a group which should include within it one real authority versed in the building methods of the same period as that of the ruin, an acknowledged authority on modern architecture, a representative both of the Society of Antiquaries and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. To these one would add a local architect or builder conversant with the local conditions and material.

To such an advisory board would be committed the task of choosing an architect, whose plans would be submitted for approval before being recommended to the promoters.

The scheme may seem to savour too much of the ideal which has no part in actual life, yet it is worth consideration, for from it, one might say almost inevitably, good work must result.

As a matter of fact the Committee does comprise within itself the qualities of such an advisory board, but the above suggestion is made for those who may prefer, for one reason or another, to ask advice elsewhere.

THE EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND

The work of this Society has two main branches: the first is the excavation of Egypt's buried treasures and the publication of careful records of the finds; the second is the preservation and translation of the inscriptions, including papyri found in the course of excavation. The Society has already published hundreds of papyri, the most important being included in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri edited by Professors Grenfell and Hunt.

In a lecture given at the rooms of the Royal Society, Burlington House, on Friday, February 20th, on "The Historical Value of Greek Papyri," Mr. H. Idris Bell, a member of the staff of the British Museum, gave a scholarly review of the work already done in the publication of papyri, both in this and in other countries, and laid stress on the necessity for further work in this direction. He pointed out that, although this country was holding its own in the matter of publication of fresh material, it was falling behind other countries in the work of comparing and computing results and the tabulation of the information thus obtained.

The lecturer said papyri help to correct the false perspective in which we see history. We tend to see it as a succession of dramatic events and of great personalities, and economic processes attain a precision and clearness which is not obvious to contemporaries. But this is not our attitude towards our own time, and documents show us that it was not that of our predecessors. Great events of history occur but seldom, and when they do they are recorded from the purely personal point of view. The historian cannot chronicle minor interests, but the papyri serve as the "acid test" of the objectivity of his narrative, and for this reason it is well that the student should supplement his reading of history by some study of documents, and for no department of ancient history have we a body of documentary evidence comparable to the papyri.

Papyri make us acquainted with the ordinary man, his style of living, his domestic relations, and his family life; it thus becomes possible to study the popular psychology of Græco-Roman Egypt, and so, by analogy, to some extent, the Græco-Roman world.

With regard to administration papyri show us the actual working, not the theory, of administration, and the two rarely exactly coincide. So too with law; the practice of the law usually differs from the theory of law, and papyri reveal the practice and show us the applied law.

Turning to religion, papyri mostly illustrate the popular attitude towards religion; there is not much on mystery cults, but they show the attitude of the individual towards the deity. It is also possible from them to trace the borrowings of Christianity from Paganism and to contrast the Christian and the pagan attitude.

The lecturer gave many interesting illustrations from papyri, including letters from parents to children and children to parents, letters of condolence, letters from men engaged upon business or war to their wives and families, which give a vivid picture of the life of the time.

Sir Frederic Kenyon, K.C.B., who was in the chair, in thanking the lecturer emphasised the importance of the study of papyri and the scope this branch of research opened for original work. Here is a vast field of labour, at present only superficially worked; the harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; certainly they are indefatigable, but more workers are needed if the full value is to be extracted from these papyri. Other countries are alive to the importance of the work, but our own Universities are somewhat apathetic and need arousing.

THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY

At the monthly meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society on February 19th, Mr. Percy H. Webb exhibited a portion of a find of late Roman coins from Egypt. The find covered the period A.D. 298-313, Domitius Domitianus--Maximinus Daza, and was, said to have comprised nearly two bushels of coins. The coins which Mr. Webb had been able to examine belonged to the last five years of the period, and were of three rulers only, Galerius Maximian, Galeria Valeria, and Daza. The bulk of the coins were of the Alexandria mint, although Antioch, Cyzicus, and Nicomedia were also represented. The find presented a number of interesting features and afforded an interesting opportunity of testing M. Jules Maurice's work, which it supported in every detail.

Mr. G. C. Brooke read a paper by Mr. R. C. Lockett on "The Coinage of Offa." The most reasonable suggestion for the date of the beginning of the Mercian coinage was after the battle of Otford in 774, but it might be as late as the Council of Chelsea, 786. The mint was probably Canterbury, as seven of his moneyers struck coins for Coenwulf, and three of these worked for Eadberht, Cuthred, and Baldred. Coins bearing the name Eadberht were probably to be attributed to Eadberht, Bishop of London, 772-787. Another penny with the name hitherto not read satisfactorily should probably be attributed to Higberht, Bishop of Lichfield, who was made Archbishop in 787. Cynethrith's coinage was evidently struck in Offa's lifetime, either as a complimentary issue, or in a period of regency during Offa's absence. A classification of the pennies of Offa was proposed, based on their affinity to the coinage of Jaenberht and Æthilheard.

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

POETRY

FLOWERS IN THE GRASS. By MAURICE HEWLETT. Constable. 5_s._ net.

In recent years Mr. Hewlett, who earned his first fame as a romancer, has been devoting himself most seriously to verse. And he has done a very remarkable thing. Two or three years ago, with perhaps twenty novels and several books of poems behind him, he brought out a long poem--The Song of the Plow--which was a new thing in poetry, and which was indisputably the finest thing he had done in either "harmony," an epical poem, which was as easy to read as an excellent novel, and as good to read the third time as the first. There were lovely detachable things in it, but it was most striking when taken as a whole, racy, muscular, original. He followed it with The Village Wife's Lament, a tragedy of the war, only less striking in so far as it was less long. We have here a collection of his recent lyrics. They have not the outstanding merit of those works on the larger canvas, but they are far superior to his early lyrics, and bear new witness after their manner to his late poetic flowering.

The poems are all rural: mainly Wiltshire, the ancient downs, the valleys, the villages, the spire of Salisbury. But, save for a few delicious fancies about flowers, they all contain the human too. Landscape for Mr. Hewlett, however beautiful, however forbidding, is always a background for human character and human history. On that great hill the ledges were planted with corn by primitive men; on that other the Roman sentries stood; in that field there is a ploughman whose eyes and hair and thews are Saxon. Quotation from him is difficult, because of the very largeness of his imagination; his details are so subordinate that, though he usually gets the phrase right in its context, he seldom gets the phrase arresting out of its context. Now and then he is gentler, his language more honeyed, his rhythms less rugged, and in poems like Summer Night he falls into a beautiful and a very "contemporary" music.

That, and Jacob's Ladder, and The Cedar, and the uncanny and impressive Chelsbury are among the best things in the book; the last two show his historic imagination at its best, economical though the expression is. But the best of all, we think, is In the Fire.

The fire burns low; Now the dying embers Twinkle and glow Like village lights, Seen from the heights In dark Decembers.

There's the foggy gleam From the Horse and Groom, Where topers dream In front of their liquor, And candles flicker As pipes allume ...

The whole village passes across the vision: the smithy, a pair in a farm, an amber blind with girls' shadows on it, a candle and one reading in a loft: the lights go out one by one till all is dark. It is a charming picture, and the stanza is beautifully suited to it. It is a pity that Mr. Hewlett mars it in places with a stumbling-block word or rhyme.

COUNTRY SENTIMENT. By ROBERT GRAVES. Martin Secker. 5_s._

It must be confessed that the very title of Mr. Graves's new book awakes in us a feeling of pleasure. Mr. Graves has a flair for titles. We remember his Beside the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers with a sense that the author has always succeeded in getting a suggestion of his individual quality into the names of his books. In the volume before us Mr. Graves repeats some of his former successes. The poem A Frosty Night is a good example of that dialogue form which Mr. Graves uses with great skill, and in which we may see the influence of the old ballads:

MOTHER.

Alice, dear, what ails you, Dazed and white and shaken? Has the chill night numbed you? Is it fright you have taken?

ALICE.

Mother, I am very well, I felt never better. Mother, do not hold me so, Let me write my letter.

It is a quiet beginning, and it looks very easy to do, but that appearance is deceptive. To write with economy and in an almost conversational tone without becoming flat and banal is extremely difficult, but Mr. Graves's hand rarely loses its cunning in those awkward passages of low emotional pitch which are unavoidable in any sort of narrative verse. When the pitch rises he has a remarkably sure touch and can give us a vivid picture without any of the elaborate, detailed word-painting which is the bane of so much modern poetry. What could be finer, for example, than the stanzas that follow those already quoted:

MOTHER.

Sweet, my dear, what ails you?

ALICE.

No, but I am well; The night was cold and frosty, There's no more to tell.

MOTHER.

Ay, the night was frosty, Coldly gaped the moon, Yet the birds seemed twittering Through green boughs of June.

Soft and thick the snow lay, Stars danced in the sky. Not all the lambs of May-day Skip so bold and high.

Your feet were dancing, Alice, Seemed to dance on air, You looked a ghost or angel In the starlight there.

Your eyes were frosted starlight, Your heart fire and snow. Who was it said, "I love you"?

ALICE.

Mother, let me go!

Mr. Graves resembles Mr. W. H. Davies in the quiet freshness of his best work. If he has a fault it is that he is rather too apt to point a moral. He may have caught this--along with much of his rhythmic subtlety--from his study of nursery rhymes, but there is very little of it in the present book, which is full of the most charming fancy. Perhaps Mr. Graves's most characteristic work is to be found in such a poem as Vain and Careless, which begins:

Lady, lovely lady, Careless and gay! Once when a beggar called She gave her child away,

and which continues in a quaint fantasy of thought and expression that is entirely Mr. Graves's own, and is an original contribution to modern poetry. One of the best poems in the book is called Thunder at Night, and it describes two children into whose dreams the real thunderstorm outside their house enters. The boy is dreaming of a bear, the girl of monkeys and snakes. The hot, confused feeling of the night is vividly suggested and then the poem suddenly ends with a stanza that is a complete change in temperature and beautifully suggests the approaching dawn:

They cannot guess, could not be told How soon comes careless day, With birds and dandelions gold, Wet grass, cool scents of May.

The book is well named Country Sentiment, for it has much of the beauty and the fragrance of the countryside.

LINES OF LIFE. By HENRY W. NEVINSON. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._

THE PEDLAR, AND OTHER POEMS. By RUTH MANNING-SANDERS. Selwyn & Blount. 3_s._ 6_d._

SKYLARK AND SWALLOW. By R. L. GALES. Erskine Macdonald. 5_s._

Of the authors of these three books of verse Mr. Henry W. Nevinson is the only one who has made a reputation as a prose-writer, and it is not surprising that his work should show the widest range of thought and expression. His poems maintain a high level of accomplishment; here, for example, is a sonnet:

A GERMAN WINTER.

On leagues of solid land the snow lies deep, The snow falls crumbling from the leaden sky; All but the fir is white; with timorous eye Strange little birds in at the window peep, From frozen forests come; black rivers creep, Shrunk with the cold till half their bed is dry, Along the ice-hung ozier reeds, and by The wooden villages with gables steep, Huddled around their spires.

Oh, far away A purple mountain rises from the sand The golden sand beneath the golden day; Down the bright steep the waterfall plunges free From ledge to radiant ledge, and on the strand Sounds the long murmur of the eternal sea!

But it is the accomplishment of a sensitive and highly-trained mind, accustomed to literary expression rather than the work of an original poet; none the less it reveals sympathies and perceptions which the author has not been able to put into his prose.

Mr. R. L. Gales is an old hand who has written a great deal of charming verse, which has been widely enjoyed by those who can appreciate smoothness and sweetness better than music, colour, and imaginative power. Mr. Gales has a genuine vein of feeling and real skill, as the following extract will show:

Long ago In their towers The clocks struck Old hours That went so slow

Long ago In George Hubert's parsonage The wood-fire of old apple-trees It flamed and flared and flickered so.

Long ago At Hampton Court in the mild sun In the tall limes great clumps were hung Of mistletoe

* * * * *

Long ago Peace has fallen upon the pain The grief, the madness of these twain, Lovely lovers by Love slain, Long ago.

In some ways Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders' work is more ambitious than Mr. Nevinson's or Mr. Gales'; but if she essays more, she performs, if anything, less. There is evident in her work an ardent searching of the spirit and a philosophical tendency that are worthy of praise, but nowhere are her emotions and thoughts transmuted into poetry's gold by any magical touch. We have, in other words, much of the raw material of poetry spread out before us, but not poetry itself. Nevertheless, there is a distinctive quality in her work which has affinities with some seventeenth-century poems; it is present in the poem entitled Emotions, which begins thus:

Spirits to whom my lady's little world Is but a tree of rest, Whence birdlike free, ye rise and soar Each on your several quest Above the heavy hills that close around My strip of ground,

but does not keep at that level.

It may be that Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders will achieve considerably more than she has so far succeeded in doing.

KOSSOVO: HEROIC SONGS OF THE SERBS. Translated from the original by HELEN ROOTHAM. Introduction by MAURICE BARING. Historical Preface by JANKO LAVRIN. Frontispiece by TOMA ROSANDIĆ. Blackwell. 4_s._ 6_d._ net.

The frontispiece of this volume is as crowded with names as a modern theatre programme; we looked at the top for "licensee" and "lessee." But, unlike the plays, the book is good. Serbia, which has several great cycles of epic-ballads, is the one country where the creation of poetry on primitive lines still flourishes; a cycle seems to be developing out of the retreat through Albania. The greatest group of all, however, is the group which grew out of the defeat (in 1389) by the Turks on the "Field of Blackbirds." The originals (and Miss Rootham's versions) are all in trochaic decasyllabics. They deal with one group of figures: the Tsar Lazar, who was killed; his wife Militsa; the hero Milosh Obilish, who stabbed the victorious Sultan in his tent; Jug Bogdan, his ten sons, and the traitor Vuk Brankovitch. The warriors march off, they are defeated, they die: ravens or other messengers carry the news to the stricken Tsaritsa in her tower: teamsters years after find the Tsar's head, still preserved in a well, and it miraculously joins the body. All a nation's sorrow is in these songs, all the great memories and defiant resolve, that kept the race alive and proud, and led the recapturers of Kossovo, in our own day, to fall to their knees on the sacred ground. The translation seems very good; the fire remains in the whole, but the magic has inevitably escaped from the parts. We can only quote a specimen at random:

To his feet leaps Milosh, that great warrior, To the black earth bows himself, and answers: "Tsar Lazar, for this thy toast I thank thee, Thank thee for the toast and for the goblet, But for those thy words I do not thank thee. For--else may the truth be my undoing--Never, Tsar Lazar, was I unfaithful, Never have I been, and never will be. And to-morrow I go to Kossovo For the Christian faith to fight and perish.

FLEURS-DE-LYS. A Book of French Poetry freely translated into English verse. By WILFRID THORLEY. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.

We may heartily congratulate Mr. Thorley upon his ambition and his industry. He conceived the prodigious idea of giving English versions of poems by all the representative French poets from the earliest age until our own time. He has translated three hundred, and he has increased his labours by doing the earlier ones into archaic English. For example, his first specimen (twelfth century) is entitled The Twa Systres, and begins:

The mirk did fa' lang syne, lang syne, When twa fond systres wi' hands that twine Went down to bathe whaur the waters shine.

And Villon's most famous ballade opens:

O tell me where and in what lande Is Flora and the Roman lass?

He knows his ground, and his selection of originals is admirable. But his versions usually take the bloom off. Baudelaire's

O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps, levez l'ancre

becomes

Haul up the anchor, captain old, O Death, for it is time:

which is the same thing with a difference. Sometimes he even fails to get essential parts of the sense. In recommending his book, therefore, to those many to whom such a survey in English would be useful, we warn them that the translations at best are graceful versifying. Mr. Thorley, happily, is usually on his own highest level, and the book can be read with very little annoyance and a certain amount of edification.

THE PATHS OF GLORY. A Collection of Poems written during the War, 1914-1919. Edited by BERTRAM LLOYD. Allen & Unwin. 4_s._ 6_d._ and 3_s._

The title of this anthology is presumably ironical. He who would have a comprehensive selection of war poems reflecting the sentiments of the mass of our people, and most of the British soldiers, must go to Miss Jacqueline Trotter's Vision and Valour (Longmans'), which we shall review in our next issue. This collection is a collection with an avowedly propagandist aim. It contains poems exposing the cruelty and filth of War in general, which were inspired by the late War. It is not yet complete. For instance, Major Brett-Young's Bête Humaine might suitably have been included. But most of the poems included are genuine and well written. Amongst the authors "covered" are "A. E.," Paul Bewsher, Geoffrey Dearmer, Walter de la Mare, Wilfrid Gibson, Laurence Housman, Margaret Sackville, Siegfried Sassoon, Dora Sigerson, and Alec Waugh.

NOVELS

AN IMPERFECT MOTHER. By J. D. BERESFORD. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

ELI OF THE DOWNS. By C. M. A. PEAKE. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.

THE BANNER. By HUGH F. SPENDER. Collins. 7_s._ net.

ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM. By EDNA FERBER. Methuen. 6_s._ net.

In An Imperfect Mother Mr. J. D. Beresford has set himself the extraordinarily difficult and delicate task of describing a mother's unorthodoxy as seen by her grown-up children. Of Mr. Beresford it can generally be said that he is quite fearless of the troubles he makes for himself. Yet in this particular instance some doubt might be left in the reader's mind as to whether his designing of the book was hurried or certain obvious issues deliberately shirked. Some compromise may be arrived at between the two alternatives when we consider the overwhelming evidence of this author's sincerity and his inflexible allegiance to his art. Here the reader cannot fail to ask himself--what would I do--what could I say, if my mother had run off with someone?--well knowing that in an enormous preponderance of cases such a question is comfortably absurd. It is even indecent to put such a question to yourself, is it not? It is the defilement of a sacred place? Exactly. So is the book condemned at the very outset because its theme is "disagreeable" or "delicate" or "unusually unpleasant"? That is where one's first doubts of Mr. Beresford's complete fearlessness are bred. In his treatment of that disagreeable idea there is nothing disagreeable. You feel that there should be. Mr. Beresford has gilded his pill with a sugar of a too vigorous refinement. He has been at pains too great to disguise the fact of its nastiness.

What did these children think and do? The boy Stephen, just leaving school, is the only one that counts for much, though his two sisters, sketchy as is their appearance in the story, are excellently considered. Before the actual crash comes they whisper together about their mother's goings on, try to make their father speak of what they believe should be uppermost in his mind, and insist on a full discussion with Stephen. One of them was a school teacher, the other subsequently married an elderly chemist. In a way they enjoy the scandal; you feel that some excitement has come into their dull lives, with the piquancy of self-righteousness added to outraged innocence. They want to make the most of it. They are not genuinely ashamed.

Emily turned the embarrassment of her steady gaze immovably upon her father.

"I don't know what's come to mother lately," she said.

Mr. Kirkwood began to fidget with his sparse little beard. "She's a little out of sorts, perhaps," he hazarded feebly.

"Well, oughtn't we to do something, father?" Emily continued, still pinning him with her stare.

"Oh! What can you do?" put in Stephen irritably....

Emily turned herself about and focused her attention upon her brother. "If she's out of sorts she ought to see a doctor," she said.

"That wouldn't be any good," Stephen returned without hesitation.

"Well, but why wouldn't it?" Emily inquired, with a meaning in her tone that could not be mistaken.

"No good asking me," was Stephen's evasion.

"Well, I think it's time something was done," Emily said, sharpening the point of her now obvious intention.

"I don't know what you mean, Emily," little Kirkwood put in nervously.

Emily knew, they all three knew, that their father's remark had been intended as a reminder that any open discussion of a mother's failings was impossible between father and children; but Emily had made up her mind that the time had come when they must, in her own phrase, "face the facts."

"I don't think it's right for us to let things go on and not make any effort to stop them," she said in a low but determined voice. "I don't see the good of our going on pretending, when we all know perfectly well what's happening. Do you, Hilda?"

"No, I don't," Hilda emphatically agreed.

But with Stephen it is different. He really cares very little about appearances, though he dreads facing his schoolfellows. He is wounded because his mother prefers another man to his father and himself. And there is an occasion when he might have changed his mother's decision had he known. Does he really want her, does he need her? she asks herself. And just on that very day Stephen had been smiled upon by the little daughter of his headmaster. She is fourteen, he seventeen. Impossible dreams fill his mind. He has said nothing to his mother, but she knows. As though she had seen the whole of the little trifling play enacted--for it was no more than one bright smile cast over a dainty shoulder; no word had been spoken--she knew that another interest had come, since yesterday, into the boy's life. He doesn't need her any more. His protestations would have been passionate had they been genuine. She goes.

The view of the children towards the problem must depend entirely upon their upbringing and the degree of sensitiveness in their relation to their mother. In regard to Cecilia Kirkwood's family, Mr. Beresford has expected a good deal of our faith in him. They were born and bred in a small cathedral town, their father was a bookseller, their degree was humble but respectable. Yet from beginning to end Stephen can only find it in his heart to think of his mother's flight as a callous desertion. He appears to be completely oblivious of the moral involved and of all that is implied by his mother's running away with the handsome organist. A closer scrutiny would have been horrible! Yes: but would not Stephen have made it, and, unpleasant or not, should there not be in the story some indication that he did make it?

To speak of a "handsome organist" is, in passing, liable to misconstruction, for Dr. Threlfall was not only good-looking but clever and accomplished in manner; not only an organist, for when he left Medboro' he gave up playing the organ for the composition of light opera, and became an emphatic success. Taking Cecilia for granted, we can well imagine that she would run away with Threlfall, and would do all the other things that Mr. Beresford makes her do, and talk as she does. But it is hard for the reader to take her for granted, just as it was hard for her neighbours in Medboro'. Cecilia's father was a philosophic tuner of pianos. He had been against her marriage in the first instance, but he rather approves of her adultery ... but it is understood that the nature of piano-tuners is warped.

Cecilia was an amazing wife for a country bookseller, and she tries, one sometimes thinks, to be grande dame in conversation, setting the whole of the little provincial town by the ears with her outlandish brilliance and daring, making it grovel at her feet because of her beauty and amiability.

Can a lady kiss her toe?

Yes; she might--she might do so--sang another novelist, who indulged in rhyme. So it is with Cecilia; she might, she might have done so, but Mr. Beresford has failed to make it inevitable of her.

Old Kirkwood, the father, dies insane, and Stephen, adopted by a rich builder who was sympathetic because his own wife was a little difficult, works hard and finally superintends the erection of a big newspaper office in London. There he falls in with his mother once more, and with the schoolmaster's daughter who had smiled upon him long ago. The old tussle is re-enacted. The mother is jealous of the girl. She sees her son blundering in his courtship, and she only has to hold her tongue to keep him by her side, a devoted slave. She is not happy. Her organist-composer is jovial, but unfaithful. She longs for the fealty of Stephen. At this point Mr. Beresford introduces a little Freudian interest in the explanation of what was, for all he says about it, a matter of secondary importance to Stephen--his disgust at his mother's hysterical and untimely laughter, and we feel that, whilst he was about it, he might have examined Cecilia's psyche a little more thoroughly. There were one or two dark places in her character and disposition upon which a more searching light might, with some profit to the story, have been thrown. There is much enjoyable reading in An Imperfect Mother, but on the whole, coming from Mr. Beresford, it is a little disappointing.

In Eli of the Downs Mr. C. M. A. Peake introduces himself to the public with a distinguished piece of work. He has been content to make his own variation of the archetype of great stories--the joys and sorrows at home, the adventures, and, finally, the return of the wanderer. This is the story of Eli Buckle, as gleaned by the teller from Eli himself, and from his old friend and neighbour Anne Brown, and it is the story of a perfectly simple and sincere man, a shepherd, who is perfectly happy in the remote solitudes which his calling entails upon him, with the wild flowers which arouse feelings his creator does not try to make him express. He is proud and happy when as a boy of twenty-one he has saved five pounds. These facts are simply stated, and yet there is not the least hint of sentimentality or of bathos. He marries the girl of his heart, and unexpectedly the knowledge comes to him of what he has been in need. "Oh, Mary, my dear, my dear!" he whispered. "You won't never know how lonely I've a-been." A little while goes by and he is lonely again, for while he is out in the night in the lambing season Mary falls from a chair, and by the time Eli gets home she and the child that should have been born to them are dead.

After that, in sheer desperation, Eli leaves his old home and goes away to sea. His is the old quest of a wounded man for the purpose which lies behind all events. Once before, when Mary had told him that he could be a preacher if he had the ambition, he had for a moment found his voice.

"... I believe I could study fast enough, and I know I could preach. I could make them listen to me; aye, have 'em all gaping after me like a nest of young thrushes, if I chose. But I'd have to tell 'em what they wanted to hear, an' dress it up the way they likes, which is what they mean by the Gospel and the Truth. But that I won't do, for I'm not sure that their Gospel is my Gospel, or their Truth any Truth at all for the matter o' that. And about God, my dear. Whether He is, or whether He isn't, what folks say, I can't testify till I know, know of my own knowledge, and not because I read it in a book or someone told me."

Occasionally the narrator of the story makes a little confidence to the reader which, apart from its humorous candour, serves a definitely useful purpose.

Now the scenes of Eli's childhood were the scenes I lived among when I too was a child, and the land where he spent the years of his middle age I knew and loved, as youth and man, but though I have crossed many waters, I am no sailor, and I cannot see the ocean as a mariner sees it.

In the course of his life as a sailor Eli has many adventures, which are wonderfully told, dramatic without one word of melodrama. Here the author who can lovingly describe the wild flowers in the lost corners of the Downs excels again, for in a few words he can truthfully describe how a particular species of liar describes himself, or how nervousness passes into wild terror in the eyes of a San Francisco crimp who is discovered trying to drug his victims. But well as Mr. Peake describes the rascalities of the adventurous life, he is more at home with the kindlinesses of the countryside and the gentle wisdom of Cathay. This is a novel, uneven in quality to be sure, but touching at certain points real beauty.

Mr. Hugh F. Spender in The Banner describes a revolution in England, organised by the League of Youth, backed by the People's Army, and inspired by Helen Hart, daughter of a millionaire, who has a bias against the landed gentry. Most elderly people in the book come in for a good deal of facetiousness directed against their ponderously old-fashioned views. One young lordling, deaf and dumb from shell shock, has his senses restored by the mere sight of the new Joan of Arc, and falls in love with her. She refuses him at first because she is vowed to The Cause.... "For a moment she resisted, resisted almost fiercely, and then she lay passively like a child in his arms." Mr. Spender has invented a young man who willingly throws up both title and title-deeds at the call of the People and becomes plain Citizen; but it is a pity that the author in creating another peer should have given him an existing name. Regarded either as fiction or as propaganda this is a poor book.

Roast Beef, Medium is the curious title that Miss Edna Ferber has given to the Business Adventures of Emma McChesney. This American authoress, who writes vivaciously in her own language, gives bright and cheerful expression to her belief that people should be earnest and good and that Roast Beef (not too underdone is conveyed by "medium") should as a staple diet take precedence of flaked crab meat with Russian sauce. These business adventures are certainly not caviare. Emma McChesney is a bagwoman, representing T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. Rivals make love to her and try to get the better of her alternately, and she has a young cub of a son to support. Very sick of hotel life, she longs for a house of her own--especially a kitchen. In the last chapter she gets them. The book is full of homely advice. Emma was fresh and wholesome in appearance, though not so young as the picture on the wrapper deceitfully indicates. But she was a good sort and refused to Marry T. A. Buck himself because she didn't love him. She was, in fact, a "worth-while" woman.

BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM

AN INTERPRETATION OF KEATS'S "ENDYMION." By H. CLEMENT NOTCUTT. Printed for the Author by the S.A. Printing Co., Capetown.

Mr. Notcutt, who is professor of English in the University of Stellenbosch, believes that Endymion enshrines an allegory, or at least that it contains, in a clear unbroken stream beneath the surface, a meaning that corresponds with the ideas that filled the poet's mind. The alternative can hardly be impugned; it is as true of Keats as of most poets, and in the interpretation of Professor Notcutt it appears to mean little more than that there is a general reflection of the ardour of the poet's mind and his desire of beauty and beauty's immortality. If it is a question of allegorising to a greater extent than that vague generality, then Keats is surely the last poet who can be taxed with it. Professor Notcutt recognises some of the objections and says that the reason why Keats did not explain his allegory was that he was dissatisfied with the poem and discouraged by its reception; but that does not explain why, in the intimacy of his letters (many of which allude to Endymion) he did not give a hint to anybody that there was an allegory to explain. The letters, indeed, with which Professor Notcutt shows an excellent familiarity, speak freely of imagination and invention, in reference to Endymion, but of recondite suggestions and esoteric gospelling there is nothing. Nor can we regret this. A heavenly meaning attached to the earthly story would not have made Endymion a better but a worse poem. It is one of the most beautiful, if one of the most faulty, poems in the language. It was Keats's privilege to see and create beauty and present it as a finer reality in the midst of the crude and half-unreal realities of common life. Had he lived he might have enlarged even this office in fulfilling it, but it is sufficient that Endymion shows that he could fulfil it.

CERVANTES. BY RUDOLPH SCHEVILL. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

TOLSTOY. By G. RAPALL NOYES. Murray. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

For most of us Cervantes is Don Quixote: even if we are familiar with The Exemplary Novels and the Journey to Parnassus, we do not get from them any idea of personality which infringes on the overwhelming effect produced by the Knight of La Mancha. Even Mr. Schevill, who is a Professor of Spanish Literature in the University of California, in his effort to give us an idea of Cervantes only succeeds in producing an idealised portrait of Don Quixote. How odd this is can be realised if we try to think of other imaginative authors in the terms of their characters. If we are tempted to think of Shakespeare as Hamlet, we immediately correct ourselves by recollections of Falstaff, of Prospero, of Coriolanus, or Juliet. No one, however much he may be persuaded that the Papers of the Club are the author's best book, begins to compare Dickens with Pickwick; nor, to take an author nearer Cervantes in time, has one any inclination to identify Rabelais with Pantagruel.

Two explanations of this odd fact about Cervantes are possible: one is that he had exhausted his capacity for creative, imaginative work in the writing of Don Quixote--but this view cannot be upheld by anyone who loves the Exemplary Novels. The other is the simple one that Cervantes was Don Quixote. It is a commonplace of psychology, especially of Catholic psychology, that men of fine temperament will always be severer on faults which are their own. Cervantes found in himself the exaggerated chivalry which he starts to mock, but still loves in Don Quixote. He had the Crusader's heart, but he lived in a time when--pace Mr. Chesterton--the Crusading spirit was dead, or knew the uglier ends. So in his immortal story Cervantes presents the last knight with tonic humour and loving laughter. Ultimately nothing can make anyone ridiculous but success and prosperity; and from these Cervantes preserves his hero. Mr. Schevill's book is not very lively reading. He gives us the facts of Cervantes' life, and his treatment of Cervantes' art in comparison with other Spanish popular works of the period has no like value for English readers. At one time Spanish literature was well known in England, but to-day we have no doubt that Mr. Schevill's detailed accounts of La Lazarillo and La Celestino are necessary.

Tolstoy himself might have been imagined by Cervantes. That is the thought that occurs in reading Mr. Noyes's book directly after Mr. Schevill's. Apart from that, no two great artists could be more dissimilar. Tolstoy is always uneasy. It is his uneasiness which caused his quarrel with Turgenev. It is his uneasiness which makes it impossible for him to remain steadfast to his own convictions. For years there was a false idea of Tolstoy, which is only gradually yielding to the facts. He was neither saint nor prophet; but an ordinary man with a capacity for self-analysis enormously magnified--so magnified that he seems a giant. It is this huge quality which makes so many critics, as Mr. Noyes, class him far beyond Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and put him in a position which he is willing to occupy in the future. Of direct personal criticism Mr. Noyes gives us little. He is overcome by the amount of his material, and is too fond of approaching his subject through the books of other critics. For instance, he quotes Mereshkovsky's comment on the end of War and Peace, as if it was a locus classicus on Natasha's psychology, instead of a piece of ill-natured criticism on a great artist by a showman. The end of War and Peace, which shows us Natasha absorbed in Cervantes' life, is the same criticism on wars, grandeurs, and world-spooks as is made by Hardy's poem on The Breaking of Nations; and neither has any cynicism in it. Mr. Noyes's picture of Tolstoy the man adds nothing to Aylmer Maude's exhaustive volumes; and he values too seriously and literally a great deal of Tolstoy's detailed religious writing. His book is, however, worth having, even if only for the superb lines written by Tolstoy to some abject person who objected to Resurrection as "smutty." We will not give his name, but he was, alas! English. Tolstoy, writing in English, defends himself and then says:

When I wrote the book I abhorred with all my heart the lust, and to express this abhorrence was one of the chief aims of the book. If I have failed in it I am very sorry, and I am pleading guilty if I was so inconsiderate in the scene of which you write that I could have produced such a bad impression on your mind. I think that we will be judged by our consciences and by God, not for the results of our ideas, which we cannot know, but for our intentions, and I hope my intentions were not bad.

Did ever great artist humble himself so generously? His attacker, with his unpleasant mind, will be numbered with the excellent Mr. Hyde, who inspired Stevenson to his defence of Damien.

BOOKS IN THE WAR. By THEODORE WESLEY KOCH. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

VILLAGE LIBRARIES. By A. SAYLE. Richards. 5_s._

Mr. Koch's amply illustrated book is, in the main, a record of the achievements in the war of the American Library Association. As such it is exhaustive, if rather wanting in variety. The soldiers' demand for books, after all, and gratitude for their bestowal, were much the same in America as in France, in the trenches as in hospitals, so that by the time he has finished this book the reader is somewhat wearied by the repetition of feats of distribution, surveys of the vast literary field covered, instances of literary recalcitrance overcome by deft suggestion and so forth. Nevertheless, it is a book of considerable interest and will bear permanent witness to the fact that, in all future wars, libraries will have to be mobilised with the armies. Over and over again the fact, which we have all learned, is insisted on that food for the mind is one of the most important sustainers of moral. Not only is reading an anodyne, but it is a disinfectant and a prophylactic, as necessary in war as chloroform, lysol, and anti-typhoid vaccine. In all that vast organisation of intense welfare--work which, spasmodic and fragmentary in peace, was by a supreme irony perfected in war--the supplying of books to soldiers and sailors held a high place. Every taste had to be catered for, every degree of education given its appropriate food. To some the Army was an elementary school, to others it almost fulfilled the functions of a university, especially after the Armistice, when ambitious educational schemes were set on foot to calm idle and chafing warriors, and when our own War Office deluged France and Germany with piles of lofty literature, very little of which, we believe, was read.

The belligerent nations learned at last that it was just as worth while to tempt a soldier to read as to teach him to shoot. The question now remains what fruit this discovery is going to bear in peace, where the problem, apparently simpler, is really harder. Soldiers at war had not the opportunity of using their leisure as they wished; they were circumscribed in place and opportunity. The free citizen is less fettered, and, being more scattered, is less amenable to propaganda. Yet for citizens at peace, no less than for soldiers at war, propaganda, tactful and patient, is necessary if they are to be induced to apply the medicine of reading to their minds. From a quite different point of view this truth is made clear by Miss Sayle's little book, which is a development of an attractive article in the New Statesman describing the beginning and development of a library in a small Hampshire village. It is a book which all who have similar ambitions for their villages should read, for it will save them many natural and fatal errors, besides telling them all they need know about organisation, finance, book-buying and book-housing, in plain words with plenty of humour.

Miss Sayle very strongly insists on it that a village library must be simply and solely a circulating library, stocking the books which its members want to read and no others. More ambitious efforts may be made wherever the Public Libraries Act is applied, but a village library will almost always be supported by voluntary subscriptions, and can only afford books which pay their way. She shows how much propaganda is needed to start even such a library and to keep it going--a library from which practically every book that was not agreeable fiction had to be ruthlessly weeded. In twelve years the one visible sign of progress has been the tendency of Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick to replace Mrs. Henry Wood as the favourite. Yet she holds that it has been worth while, and we agree. A small agricultural community has been induced to own, manage, and take a pride in a library, and even the fact that "father went less often to the 'Anchor' as the result" is a solid testimony to its value. If life of villages in the future regains its old vigour without becoming entirely urban in character, enterprises of this kind will be a duty incumbent on their more enlightened members. And they will only be successful if Miss Sayle's maxims are followed. Her "dont's" are admirable, and the biggest one of all is "don't get slack." She might have added the lesson of Mr. Koch's book and of the whole war: "don't forget that any reading is better than a vacant mind."

FROM FRIEND TO FRIEND. By LADY RITCHIE. Murray. 6_s._ net.

Perhaps the most distinguishing of the pleasant Victorian characteristics was the combination of dignity with charm, and few of the artists of the period had that combination to a greater degree than Thackeray's daughter. This last volume of hers is entirely civilised and urbane in its appeal, and yet has, with its urbanity, a warmth of affection and a genuine love for and interest in others which are often lacking in the better, more highly-coloured works of contemporary art. It is a book of memories, and what Lady Ritchie remembers is not mere gossip, not what can be had by observation, but the deeper things of friendly intercourse, and the light thrown on character by circumstance and intimacy. The title-essay is mainly concerned with that remarkable woman, Julia Margaret Cameron, who was the friend of all the great men of her day, and the first woman to attempt artistic portraiture in photography. In telling of her Lady Ritchie cannot avoid a certain kindly humour; but the Victorians' laughter was not cruel, and though Mrs. Cameron must have been at times rather a burden, one can feel sure no one of her friends let her guess it. Certainly worse fates might overcome one than to be nursed by her. Mr. Cameron was ill and his wife gave him "home care and comforts." During the crisis he had "strong beef-tea thickened with arrowroot six times a day," and when he was convalescent,

The patient has poached eggs at night, gets up at eleven, has his dinner (gravy soup and curry) at one, mulligatawny soup and meat at five, a free allowance of port wine, averaging a bottle a day. Ten drops of Jereme's opiate every morning, a dose of creosote zinc and gum arabic before his meals, and a dose of quinine after each meal.

There are essays on Mrs. Sartoris and Mrs. Kemble, a brief note on a Roman Christmas, when she saw Lockhart driving with Frederic Leighton, a few slighter pieces, and then, last of all, a tale--Binnie--belonging to the Mrs. Williamson series. Not many people, one supposes, now read Old Kensington or "Miss Thackeray's" other novels, but there should be something of a demand for them by those who first meet her lucid, gentle narrative talent in the story of Binnie.

ONE HUNDRED PICTURES FROM EDEN PHILLPOTTS. Selected by L. H. BREWITT. Methuen. 6_s._ net.

The snare of descriptive writing in novels is as the snare of decorative passages in an imaginative painting; the descriptions may fail to combine, remain detached from the meaning and purpose of the novel, and finally the novelist may be tempted by his skill in such writing to indulge in it at the expense of his proper task. French novels, the worst of which have as a rule a composition too often absent from ours, rarely abound in purple passages--certainly with no French novelist of equal standing could an admirer do what Mr. Brewitt has done with Mr. Phillpotts. Here are a hundred of Mr. Phillpotts's best decorations, full of observation, sensitive at times to another beauty than the merely observed, but rarely fused by that imaginative ardour which makes some of Mr. Hardy's and Mr. Conrad's descriptive passages an essential part of the novel. Sometimes, especially in his description of violence, Mr. Phillpotts's meaning is obscure: for instance, in the account of the Flood from one book you have a simile which is of no assistance to the picture--"Yelling, like some incarnate and insane manifestation of the elements massed in one, the hurricane launched itself upon the valley." He is more successful as a rule when he catches nature in softer moods, quick with spring or flushed with summer: there is a genuine charm of fancy, if no imaginative depth, in this pastel of a sleeping forest:

The trees indeed sleep, but they also dream. In the heart of every leafless oak a dryad whispers that the days are fleeting; that the icy-footed winter hours are drawing into the snow-wreaths away in their chill processions; that the fountain of the sap will soon rise again to spring's unsealing; that swiftly will the bud-sheath swell and pale and shimmer silkily down, like a cast-off veil at the feet of the vernal beeches.

Mr. Phillpotts rarely drops into that snare of the writer of picturesque prose, the rhythm of blank verse; but his style is not always equal to the demands he makes upon it. It never has the sombre, heavy-hearted gravity of Hardy's, nor the gloomy colour and triumphant ecstasy of Ruskin's. This is indeed a photograph album rather than a book of pictures.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

THE STORY OF PURTON. A Collection of Notes and Hearsay gathered by ETHEL M. RICHARDSON. Bristol: Arrowsmith. 1919. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mrs. Richardson, something of a new-comer to Purton, as it would appear, makes no pretensions to original research, and has contented herself so far with giving rather a guide to Purton than a history of the village, a pleasant, ample, and leisurely place in North Wilts, with a fine church and an unusually fine stone-built manor house to its name. Her explanatory sub-title, "Notes and Hearsay," prevents the expectation of anything exhaustive. The notes, though excellent as far as they go, might have been considerably extended with advantage to the book; and as to the hearsay, it must be owned that, so far, she has not heard of much--nothing, we will engage, to what she will hear if she lives in Purton long enough to be accepted by the natives. There is abundant material in every old village in England for a good and useful contribution to history, and, if Mrs. Richardson looks forward (as it is to be hoped she may) to a new edition of her little book, we would recommend to her notice Kingham Old and New, by W. Warde Fowler, which was published by Mr. Blackwell, of Oxford, in 1913, and is a model for any such work. Another which might help her is How to Write the History of a Parish, by the Reverend John Charles Cox, of which a fifth edition was published in 1909. Her first care should be to get hold of the Enclosure Award and Tithe Commutation Map, which ought to be in the vestry. One will give her the names of the Common Fields; the other, compared with the large-scale Ordnance map and helped by local knowledge, should enable her to find them all. Then, with the Parish Registers and, with luck, some Court Rolls, she should be able to get well back in the centuries, and might then make arrangements for a prolonged stay in London and daily attendance at the Public Record Office. What she might find there, or fail to find, there's no telling. If she were fortunate she would light upon some great old Chancery or Exchequer suit--better than the one in the Star-chamber, good as that is, which concerns the adventures of the image of Saint George, and is one of her happiest discoveries--in which the pleadings would be written in pure Shakesperean prose, and the depositions of witnesses record very often the ipsissima verba of the peasantry of its time. Behind all that--since Purton belonged to Malmesbury Abbey--she would find very much more than she has found so far concerning the economy, temporal and spiritual, of her parish and manor. She should undoubtedly find Subsidy Rolls which would record the names and status of the villagers back to the day of the Poll Tax. Some of the early Court Rolls may be there, and possibly also a Survey or Extent, which would give her the services and "boon-works" due from the bondsmen to their lords. There is no limit to be set to what diligence, and help from Mrs. Story-Maskelyne (whose chapter on Braden Forest and the parish boundaries is the best in the book), may recover from the Mausoleum in Fetter Lane. To that adventure we heartily commend Mrs. Richardson, that of a good book she may make a better.

THE MANNERS OF MY TIME. By C. L. HAWKINS DEMPSTER. Richards. 1920. 10_s._ 6_d._

Miss Dempster, who died in 1913, was authoress in her day of certain novels, of which one, called Vera, was translated into Russian, and another, Blue Roses, was to be found on every bookstall in America. It met, she tells us here, with the favour of the late Duke of Albany. "Ah," said his Royal Highness, "that is a wonderful book! But why did you make it so sad? Please to make your next one end well." "The next one will be all right, sir. It is a Scotch story, and it does end well." That was at Cannes, where Miss Dempster lived and moved in a society of exiled kings, Russian grand dukes, princes, statesmen, high ladies and clergymen. The manners of such folk are without doubt as worthy of record as those of any other people whomsoever; but Miss Dempster, in the letters to an unnamed uncle, of which her book chiefly consists, contents herself for the most part with recording their names, entrances and exits upon the scene of the Riviera. We are irresistibly reminded of Captain Sumph in Pendennis.

"I remember poor Byron, Hobhouse, Trelawny, and myself dining with Cardinal Mezzocado at Rome," Captain Sumph began, "and we had some Orvieto wine for dinner, which Byron liked very much. And I remember how the Cardinal regretted that he was a single man. We went to Aix-la-Vecchia two days afterwards, where Byron's yacht was--and, by Jove, the Cardinal died within three weeks; and Byron was very sorry, for he rather liked him."

Incidentally, one may call attention to the letterpress. On page 148 a lady is referred to in a note as "a grandchild of Mr. Nassau, senior, now married to Mr. St. Loe Strachey." It is not, we believe, even true of that particular grandchild of Nassau senior's. We read of "the great coups de logis" of a castle in Normandy, of "the causus belli of the Franco-Prussian War." On page 213 we have an epitaph which is worth preservation:

LIC JACIT CASPARUS HAÜSER ÆNIGMA PIÙ LEMPORIS IGNOTO NATIVITAS OCCULTA MORS 1883.

Sic, or lic, at any rate jacit, or lies, the record of the unfortunate Caspar in this work.

THE BRITISH ACADEMY: SEALS AND DOCUMENTS. By REGINALD L. POOLE. Oxford University Press, 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

Recently an important transaction was nearly stopped because one of the parties saw on an official document what he took to be the initials of a particular person. The letters were, however, only an indication where the seal should be affixed. Dr. Poole's Seals and Documents, an offprint from the Transactions of the British Academy, deals with earlier days, and may induce similar ignorance. It is but twenty odd pages long, but full of matter which the judicious reader will value as from a master of diplomatic. It summarises much learning, and suggests, by the way, several inquiries, e.g., as to the displacement of papyrus by parchment; the period at which a seal to close a secret letter--like our modern sealing-wax--went out of fashion; and the use of the diminutive sigillum instead of the classical signum for seal. Dr. Poole shows how easy it was for a seal to be lost, and mentions that a unique document in the Bodleian has been "irreparably mutilated" under the direction of the late Librarian. When parchment was used, thin pieces of the actual material could be stripped from it to tie it up with a seal affixed. It is odd that this simple practice has not been carried further back. Much of interest is given concerning the Papal bull, a bulla of lead used in warm countries where wax would not retain its distinctness. Bulls employed by the universal "Papa" remind us of the classical "bulla" worn by boys. The most ancient in existence is that of Pope Deusdedit (615-8). In England the bull is earlier than the wax seal, but the double-pendent seal which led to the Great Seal is an English invention. The whole subject is confused by the existence of forgeries, which need erudition like Dr. Poole's to dismiss.

THE STONES AND STORY OF JESUS CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE. Traced and told by IRIS and GERDA MORGAN. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 21_s._ net.

Jesus College, Cambridge, has a unique beginning, as it grew out of a Benedictine Nunnery, and Bishop Alcock, of Ely, its founder, when he did away with the discredited sisterhood, adapted their ruined buildings instead of destroying them. The college was erected to the honour of the Blessed Virgin, St. John, and St. Radegund, but Alcock added the new title which it still bears. The names of Prioresses are preserved from Letitia, circa 1213, to Joan Fulbourne, 1493. Though we do not know precisely when the nuns began, there is an unusual amount of records left concerning them which tend to show that they were distinguished in family rather than learning, and given to hospitality as well as good works. They owed their butcher £21 at a time when a sheep cost a shilling. Let us hope that the good man's daughters learnt something as boarders in the St. Radegund Guest House. What can be gathered concerning early days is told pleasantly. It may seem odd that a nunnery should exist in Cambridge, quite near the site of the famous Sturbridge Fair; but the ladies started before the colleges began, and they were some way off the nucleus of academic buildings. The excellent sketches are a great addition to the book. The beautiful piscina figured on page 286 has long been familiar to lovers of Cambridge architecture, but new discoveries have been made since Le Keux published his Memorials in 1845. Jesus has been lucky in its antiquaries and historians, also in escaping the full fervour of that debased Gothic which flourished in the nineteenth century. The discovery of the Chapter Arches by the Rev. Osmond Fisher in 1893 is quite a romance. He was able to supplement many years earlier the indolence of a Master and save the Tower from falling.

The notes, other than architectural, chronicle the varying fortunes of the foundation, with details of the plague, plays in English and Latin, militant and destructive commissioners, and worthies like Tobias Rustat, Yeoman of the Robes to Charles II. Cranmer's is the first name in the college lists, and it has always been distinguished in theology, though for most people its main modern reputation is for athletics. This side of the college is, however, not touched by the authors, who deal with reverend signiors and men famous in literature.

The college can boast of Sterne, whose grandfather was one of its masters; but nothing is known of his academic behaviour. This is just as well, since his associate Hall-Stevenson can hardly have been a model young man. Coleridge, the only poet, we think, who ever won an academic prize for a Greek Ode, was decidedly eccentric, and had a reputation for saying good things, as we learn from the lively pages of Gunning. He was treated with great leniency by the dons of Jesus, and left through his own perversity. His poetry at this time is negligible, and his lines "to a young Jackass on Jesus Piece," whom he wished to take with him,

in the Dell Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell,

reveal the coming exponent of Pantisocracy. We do not think that his rowdiness at the trial of Frend in the Senate House is to his credit, in spite of his explanations.

The work of both writer and artist shows a genuine enthusiasm for the college and its memories. Both illustrations and print gain by the ample page; but a book weighing well over two-and-a-half pounds will hardly do as a "handbook."

COMRADES IN CAPTIVITY. By F. W. HARVEY. Sidgwick & Jackson. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Harvey's book strikes one immediately as amazingly truthful. He not only gives one facts about his prison life in Germany, he avoids giving too many facts. Deliberately he refuses to be preoccupied with the mere horrors, or the beastliness of some of his captors, or the nervous strain on the prisoners. And this surely is artistically right, if one is to get a picture of what prison life meant to the average normal prisoner. The men who wished to retain sanity had to keep out of their minds, so far as they could, the things which Mr. Harvey leaves out of his book. They endeavoured by work, by lectures, by concerts, by games, by theatrical performances to recall continuously to themselves that normal life still prescribed in spite of their untoward fate. And nobly most of them succeeded. Perhaps some of their efforts were a little uncalled-for. For instance, Mr. Harvey tells us that on their first arrival at Guterslob new prisoners were treated quite formally by their fellow-countrymen:

New arrivals were not ignored by the British. There was a system whereby they even fed (German food being totally inadequate) until their own parcels began to arrive. Clothes, too, were served out to those who seemed in need. And there were invitations to tea with senior officers and officials. Such preliminaries accomplished, however, one was dropped like a hot coal--for a time, that is, until one had proved oneself.

And he also states that when at Crefeld all prisoners other than British were turned out. "We thought it damnable." The truth is our Allies had been, far more than we realised, an interest and diversion in captivity. Certainly it must have seemed odd to be made welcome by Russians and French rather than by one's fellow-countrymen, and we think it is due not, as Mr. Harvey, "to the national tradition," but to the public school and university tradition of the new boy and the freshman. Mr. Harvey enlivens his book with specimen lectures--including an excellent one of his own on Shaw--poems and anecdotes; and there are amusingly rough sketches by Mr. C. G. B. Bernard.

WILLIAM SMITH, POTTER AND FARMER, 1790-1858. By GEORGE BOURNE. Chatto. 1920. 6_s._ net.

Mr. Bourne has written a beautiful and sensitive little book about his grandfather, and his own memories of his grandfather's village. It has in it that deep and still appreciation of English country and of the ways of English peasants, which is so common to all who know and love them, and so very rarely expressed. It has the quality of Jefferies at his best, and of Mr. Hudson too. The scenes which he evokes--the broad green spaces, the silence, the interminable round of tasks, the handling of the earth and its store--will never come again in the places of which he tells us. Farnborough, Frimley, Camberley, Yateley are suburbs of London, over-run by the spawn of Aldershot and the railway. Nowadays one must go further afield to realise the presence of Saint Use; and a term seems to be set even there. It is not that, in the Roman poet's phrase, Nos patriæ fines et dulcia linquimus arva: rather that those fair fields are flying further from us--as well they may, seeing what we make of them. Such a book as Mr. Bourne's will be treasured hereafter for the sake of the quiet beauty and homely virtues which it records, but very much also for the tenderness and fidelity with which it does its work.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

COAL MINING AND THE COAL MINER. By H. F. BULMAN, M.I.Min.E., Assoc. M. Inst. C.E., F.G.S. Methuen. 15_s._

NATIONALISATION OF THE MINES. By FRANK HODGES, Secretary of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. With Foreword by the Right Hon. J. R. CLYNES, M.P. Leonard Parsons. 4_s._ 6_d._

Mr. Bulman is a mining engineer who has been a colliery manager and a director of colliery companies, and he has a wide knowledge of the subject. He has much of interest and value to say about the getting of coal, the technical processes and the machinery, the work of the miners and their dangers. But he does not confine himself to these matters; he deals with many of the controversial questions that are exercising the public mind at the moment. His book was written unfortunately--or fortunately--before the Coal Commission, as he puts it, "commenced its novel proceedings," and his allusions to the evidence it took and the reports it issued are confined to a note or two here and there. There is no doubt, however, which side he is on. Though sympathetic enough to the miners, he has plenty of hard words to say of their Trade Unions. He deplores the prevalence of ca'canny, of absenteeism, of the aggressive spirit shown towards the employers. Over Government interference he waxes very bitter; many of the rules and regulations imposed on the management for the safety of the miners rouse his ire, whilst the Minimum Wage Act he regards as utterly mischievous, since it "encourages the indolence which is so prominent a characteristic of human nature." The longest chapter in the book discusses in considerable detail--and with many attractive plans and pictures--the housing of the miners. Mr. Bulman thinks that it is very unfair to throw the blame for bad housing conditions on the colliery owners, who, he says, have done more than most employers to provide houses for those they employ. But many, we think, who have read the evidence given to the Royal Commission, whatever may be their views on the proper method of running the coal industry, will find themselves at issue with Mr. Bulman on that point.

Mr. Hodges makes a direct and ably-reasoned appeal for the nationalisation of the mines. He is, we think, at rather needless pains to disclaim "politics" in his book. His main emphasis is certainly on the economic aspect of the problem; but he cannot avoid being "political" in the largest sense. He exposes, with a good deal more stress than Mr. Bulman, the wasteful methods of coal production by the 3300 British collieries operated by 1452 companies, and subject to the "dead-hand" of 4000 royalty owners, as well as its wasteful methods of consumption at the collieries and further afield. He discusses the decrease of output, the main reason for which he will by no means admit to be the naughtiness of the miners. And he directs the notice of the unhappy general public to the fact that we are faced at the same time with a decline in production and a large increase in profits. What, then, does Mr. Hodges want? He sees "no other remedy except that of National ownership of the entire industry, with joint control by the full personnel of the industry and representatives of the whole community." The miners, he avers, are as much opposed to bureaucracy as the most extreme of "anti-nationalisers." Both the Sankey scheme and the original scheme of the miners ("The Nationalisation of Mines and Minerals Bill," which is printed as an Appendix to the book) guard against this. The State is to own the industry, but the machinery of Pit and District Committees and a National Mining Council would mean management by those engaged in the industry, together with representatives of the consumers. This last part is important, for the Syndicalist idea of the "Mines for the Miners" is, in Mr. Hodges' view, antisocial and "repugnant to our communal instincts." Nor will he allow that there is any substance in the fear that the initiative secured by private ownership will be lost. If this initiative really exists to-day, it will be increased a hundredfold, he argues, when scope is given to the brain-workers who are responsible for the running of the industry. Altogether the book is one which is worthy of the most careful study by nationalisers and anti-nationalisers alike.

SOCIAL THEORY. By G. D. H. COLE. Methuen. 5_s._

It is a commonplace of our sceptical and disillusioned age that all our cherished institutions are in the melting-pot. The old economic order is tottering; the finger of scorn is pointed at the hollowed principle of Parliamentary Government. Eager reformers preach Democracy and yet more Democracy. But the discontented citizen finds himself getting ever a larger portion of the shadow of Democracy and ever less of the substance. To him in his perplexity comes Mr. Cole, offering a new social theory, to explain the causes of the evil and its true remedy. What is wrong, he asserts, is the false doctrine that endows the State with sovereign attributes and makes it supreme in every sphere. His treatment of Leviathan is drastic. He is not merely for curbing it, nor, on the other hand, for its complete destruction. What he wants is to deflate the monster, so to speak, and reduce it to the status of a decent domestic animal with a carefully limited sphere of usefulness.

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