Reflections And Memories

REFLECTIONS AND
MEMORIES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

POEMS IN ONE VOLUME
A FACE IN CANDLELIGHT
AND OTHER POEMS
COLLECTED PARODIES
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
THE GRUB STREET NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS
OUTSIDE EDEN

REFLECTIONS AND
MEMORIES

BY

SIR JOHN SQUIRE

WILLIAM HEINEMA/

LONDON

FIRST PUBLISHED 1935

’PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
>J£MILL PRESS, KINGSWOOD, SURREY

To

Robert Lynd

Olirn Meminisse

PREFACE

O F these papers, short and long, some were in¬
troductions to iiitions de luxe (notably that to
Messrs. Macmillan’s sumptuous Marius the Epicurean,
illustrated with etchings by Mr. Thomas Mackenzie),
some were prefaces to other people’s books or an¬
thologies by myself, and some have never before
appeared in book form. I hope they have a
kind of unity, in spite of the diversity of their
subjects.

I thank Messrs. Macmillan, Heinemann, Seeker,
Herbert Jenkins, Cape, the Oxford University Press,
Constable, Arrowsmith, and Longman for permission
to reprint. The Johnson paper was read to the John¬
son Club.

The Memoir to Henry Wheeler was prefaced to the
Wadham College Catalogue, which I saw through the
press after his death; that of John Freeman to his
last poems; those on Flecker to his “Collected Poems,"
and Messrs. Heinemann’s limited edition of Hassan ;
that of Julius West to his remarkable History of the
Chartist Movement. "Women’s Verse” preluded an
Oxford anthology; the “Elizabethan Songs” a
selection from them, published by Messrs. Herbert

vii

PREFACE

Jenkins, and the two bird essays books by Mr.
Massingham and Mr. Hendy.

“A London Reverie” accompanied drawings by
Joseph Pennell dug up years after his death, and
beautifully produced by Messrs. Macmillan.

J. C. S.

viii

CONTENTS

Memories of Youth: page

A London Reverie 3

Duty 45

A Good Little Boy 51

The Gold Tree 57

English Birds:

Birds in Poetry 65

Bird-watching 74

Four Men:

James Elroy Flecker: I. Poems 85

II. Hassan 109

Henry Wheeler 121

The Last of John Freeman 131

Julius West 155

A Miscellany of Books:

Pater and Marius 175

Johnson's Contributions to Other People’s
Works 211

Elizabethan Song 239

Jane Austen .. 254

Women’s Verse / 274

The Diary of a Nobody 303

MEMORIES OF YOUTH

A LONDON REVERIE

London twenty-five years ago. Joseph Pennell
recorded it.

T HAT London, structurally, has in large measure
disappeared. No doubt the majority of the build¬
ings then standing are still standing. But many of
the most central and significant edifices have been
pulled down, and very few of the most central and
significant thoroughfares have remained unaltered.
Regent's Park is still intact, and Kensington Palace
Green. Bedford Row, blessed legacy, is still unchanged;
so, for all I know (or care), is Victoria Street, except
for the recent alterations in the Army and Navy
Stores. I see no change in Northumberland Avenue;
two vile and soulless ranges suitably introduced by
the dull Grand Hotel, which stands where Northum¬
berland House once flaunted its lion. But Regent
Street, Piccadilly, the Strand, Fleet Street, Oxford*
Street, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Circus have all been
substantially modified, some for the worse, some for
the better. Waterloo Bridge, centre of the finest
vista in London, is doomed after years of crutches.
Devonshire House, not externally a beautiful building,

3

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

but quiet, homely, surrounded by gravelled space,
and guarded by the finest pieces of weathered Port¬
land stone extant, fell yesterday. It gave place to a
building which might have been the legitimate glory
of Dayton, Ohio, or Memphis, Tennessee. Yesterday,
also, fell Grosvenor House, a rather ugly building,
apart from its screen on the side street, but one not
dwarfing the lovely little balconied and bow-fronted
Regency rows which made Park Lane (the rich in
smallish houses, aristocracy temperately putting on
a show of domesticity over the trees and the pastoral
expanse) the pleasantest thing in London, for all the
roar of buses under its windows. A great squat block
of flats has gone up in its place, with a touch of good
taste and restraint about it which only makes its
offence more noticeable. Dorchester House, that im¬
pressive Italianate palace, with its Alfred Stevens
mantelpiece, has been dismantled and replaced by a
structure that looks like cardboard and paint. “Wail,
Park Lane: Wail, Mount Street,” as William Blake
might have said in one of his Prophetic Books. The
transformation, though still local, is as noticeable as
a gap in a man’s front teeth. There are no great
monuments of architecture in Park Lane, and no
buildings so sacred because of their associations that
people will feel obliged to agitate for their preservation.
It was merely a pleasant back-scene over the Park,
with an atmosphere of rus in urbe and urbs in rure.

4

A LONDON REVERIE

Its integrity has gone; buildings have been erected
which stand amid the others like Gullivers among the
Lilliputians; there is no longer any proportion there
and the rest may as well be destroyed. An agreeable
rank of private houses will have disappeared, which
gave a sense of privacy to the loafers in the Park as
well as to the Croesuses who inhabited them; instead
we shall have a pile of expensive blocks of flats,
ephemerally tenanted by "the Argentine, the Portugee,
and the Greek,” which may be frigidly dignified but
will have little that is peculiarly Londonish about
them. The old Park Lane could never have existed
in any other city than London, though its less im¬
pressive kinsmen might be found in comers of Brighton
or Cheltenham. The new, at best, will merely be a
discreet version of Park Avenue, New York, a slightly
more Anglo-Saxon sister of streets in the neighbour¬
hood of the Bois de Boulogne, a rather less blatant
analogue to the grandest boulevards of Charlotten-
burg. Park Lane is in process of evanishment; and
the old walls of the Bank of England have fallen
in clouds of dust. The old Empire Theatre (which
was certainly ugly but was unpretentious and of its
epoch) has gone, whilst the disconsolate statue of
Shakespeare broods over the vacancy; and Exeter
Hall, preserved in Pennell's line, has also gone. Archi¬
tectural treasures these certainly were not, and ea ch
of them had unpleasing associations, though of widely

5

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

differing kinds; but the brave show that each tried to
make was of a kind that must now appear to us
pathetically modest; they were immolated, as much
more will be immolated, on the altar of the Big, the
Broad, and the Cosmopolitan.

Many of Pennell’s drawings are records of streets
and edifices that no longer exist. Not only the physical
appearance has passed. Twenty years in any era will
bring a change: these twenty years, owing to the
interposition of the War, have brought a greater
change than most. This was the pre-War world.
Examine Pennell's pictures, and you will find not
merely buildings that have disappeared, but modes
of costume and transport which have gone, never to
return.

It is the world of the early nineteen-hundreds. It
is a time before the jolly vulgarity of Earl’s Court
had leap-frogged westward to the White City, and
then to Wembley, now in its turn deserted. I cannot
find the exact year (if the drawings do all date from
any one year), because I can never recall the precise
dates and sequences of women’s sleeves and hats.
There was (but this was certainly much earlier) the
leg-of-mutton sleeve, the most repulsive and abnormal
distortion to which the slaves of fashion had subjected
themselves since the days of Queen Elizabeth, wiggish
extravagances being excepted. There were the sleeves
that had a hunch above the shoulders, the sleeves

6

A LONDON REVERIE

that ballooned below the shoulder and were then
tight, the sleeves that were tight all the way down
until they came to a widening at the wrist. Skirts
were always long, and had to be held up, gracefully or
awkwardly; hats were usually large, either towering
like wedding-cakes or undulant and plumy like the
hat of Gainsborough’s Duchess. In the country,
yokels were still sitting on the benches outside village
inns and drinking the healths of General French and
(in the west of England) General Buller. In London,
dominated by the bonhomie of Le Roi Bdouard VII,
the Man about Town, silk-hatted, full-moustached,
gardenia’d, stilldecorated Pall Mall; and the “Johnny,”
whose ^popular name was also “Algy,” leant, fair¬
haired, high-foreheaded, monocled, spruce, on the
Criterion bar, or took the chorus out to supper. The
traffic, commerce apart, consisted of horse-buses—
the Monster, the Royal Blue, the Fulham White, and
so on—and jingling leisurely hansoms. A dozen or so
of these still remain amongst us, almost as odd as sedan-
chairs. Now and then some sentimentalist, having
a quarter of an hour free, will take one of them, and
recover, with a twinge of the heart, the sensations of
his youth. In those days, beyond all things, they were
fleet. There were the buses; there were the four-
wheelers; but the hansoms were the Atalantas. These
poor jog-trotting survivals (as we think them) seemed
then to be prodigies of perfect springing, elimination

7

B

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

of friction, balance, comfort and speed. We had
hardly started (the horse’s feet dumping merrily, the
wood-and-glass apron-doors shut cosily, the body
jigging with the resilience of an air-cushion, the bells
ringing), than we drew up before the dim-lit portico,
sprang out to assist our whitely vol umin ous be-boa’d
lady to alight, rang a bell or watched a latch-key
turning, shook a reluctant parting hand, heard a door
bang, and trotted off again into the empty dim-lit
streets. A hansom now! I take one sometimes; I
wonder if any of my readers do! It is thrilling to get
in, thrilling to jog alone with the horse’s back and
ears in front, and the animal steam rising; thr illing to
hear the jingle, the creak of harness, to see the shafts
wobbling in the harness, to be aware of that tough
old man on the box behind and above the dark com¬
partment, who suddenly will slacken his horse’s pace,
lift the little high shutter, and ask for a specific
direction. But what crawling, what miscalculation
of times! Everything passes us, our lamps are faint
to the point of exhaustion, our driver is a withered
survival; the jolting is fatiguing. All is tolerable
merely as an anachronism that stimulates the memory.

The motor-car, though rare, existed; there were
even motor-buses: the "Arrow,” the "Pioneer,” and
such, which frequently broke down and left their
passengers in the lurch, thereby indicating that the
new age, which was hying to arrive, had not yet

8

A LONDON REVERIE

arrived. Otherwise means of transport were still
Victorian, Dickensian even. And the social and politi¬
cal structure were survivals also. In the year 1900
there was a great discussion as to whether the nine¬
teenth century had begun in that year or was to begin
the next; the Kaiser, who was incapable of under¬
standing that there never had been a year O, character¬
istically pronouncing in favour of 1900. In point of
fact, the twentieth century began in 1914 if we are to
consider centuries as eras. Much, no doubt, had gone
which had been in evidence during Victoria’s prime.
Dukes no longer wore their garters, nor rustics their
smocks; hatchments were no longer displayed outside
houses of death, though tan or straw was still laid
outside houses of sickness, and hearses were still
cornered by the panoply of plumes. Yet every line
regiment had its scarlet uniform and peculiar facings.
The King’s cousins were still encumbered by German
names, Schleswig-Holstein, Battenberg, and Teck;
and they seemed very thick on the ground.

In 1905 Mr. Balfour was Prime Minister; Mr. George
Wyndham, young and handsome, was getting into
trouble about Ireland; Mr. Alfred Lyttelton, not long
since an England cricketer, was in trouble about
Chinese indentured labour meant to work the mines
in the newly conquered Transvaal, the Union of South
Africa and the Dutchmen’s Revenge not having been
thought of. The social and imperial organisations

9

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

which Disraeli had known were still intact. The
debates of the House of Lords were still followed with
close interest, not to mention those of the House of
Commons. A Peer might be Prime Minister; Lord
Salisbury had only recently left office. None of the
Victorian political threads had yet been followed to
the middle of the maze. The destruction, by taxation,
of the squirearchy had been merely begun; Home
Rule was still being argued in relation to the incidence
of taxation and the precise number of Murphys and
O’Connors who were to represent Cork and Limerick
at Westminster; the Welsh were agitating for Dis¬
establishment; a small minority of the adult population
was on the electoral roll; the "latch-key” voter was
an object of keen controversy; and the women, content
with the prospect of a municipal vote as widow-
householders, had not begun that campaign of
burning, whipping, and picture-slashing which was
finally to prove to both Front Benches their eligibility
for the franchise. The Coaching Club was going strong;
no American had as yet successfully invaded Wimble¬
don; the ragged and bare-footed urchins of Bamardo’s
advertisements still infested the doorsteps of the
slums.

Thus, apparently, it was going on “from precedent
to precedent.” Ireland would always be a source of
trouble, but it was an agreeable place to hunt in.
Babus would get ideas into their heads, but the

io

A LONDON REVERIE

Mutiny had taught its lesson and the redcoats had the
situation well in hand, except for the perennial sharp¬
shooting on the North-West Frontier. A clever public-
school boy could not do much better than enter the
Indian Civil Service at the age of twenty-three,
govern half a kingdom, and retire, still young,
with a pension of a thousand a year, which in
those days, and with those prices and taxes, meant
luxury. We had the trouble with the French at
Fashoda, but Rdouard le Bien-Aime was the adored
of the boulevards, and all was well. The Russians
had been momentarily dangerous, but the young Czar
had shown idealism with his peace-rescript, he might
be trusted gradually to liberalise the country (un¬
deterred by the bombs of the Nihilists), and the cut
of his features and of his beard made him extra¬
ordinarily like the Prince of Wales. Russia was well
on the way to taking its full share in the civilisation
of Western Europe, backward though the moujiks
undoubtedly were. The volatile German Emperor,
with his flashing eyes and upturned moustaches, was
doubtless magniloquent and bombastic, and did talk
a little too much about his new toy, the German Navy,
a thing that Germany could not possibly need; yet he
always appeared, and friendlily smiled, on occasions
of family grief or rejoicing, a gallant figure on his
proud charger, in processions. Change was ahead of
us. The aged and side-whiskered Franz Josef must

ii

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

some day die, and then “the Break-up of the Dual
Monarchy” would, in some mysterious but innocuous
way, take place. The Sick Man of Europe was also
indeterminately doomed. China, too, might break up.
But all was for the best; the clouds were no bigger
than a man’s hand; never did we think of aeroplanes
over cities, tanks, poison-gas, thousand of miles of
trenches, four years of wax, many millions dead, the
crashings of thrones, the obliteration of the old map
of Europe. It was the calm before the storm; and its
storms were storms in a teacup of Wedgwood. There
wasno international menace thatmightnot beremoved
by a Lord Mayor’s banquet preceded by a blaring
procession to the Guildhall—the Czar, the Kaiser,
the French President, the Shah of Persia, the King of
Siam, they were all one to the cheerful Cockney
populace, and were all heartily cheered.

* * * * *

London was then as it is now, unique among
capitals: concentrating so many functions, being the
seat of so many activities. It is the seat of the Court
and of the Government and Parliament; it is the
unchallengeable centre of social life; it is the head¬
quarters of all the learned professions; it is an immense
manufacturing society; it is the financial centre of the
Empire; it is Britain’s greatest port. A man may
possibly regret the agglomeration of so many energies

12

A LONDON REVERIE

and so many populations. In Germany the old
capitals still retain some importance; the publishers,
for example, of Munich vie with those of Berlin.
Paris is not a port, and New York is not the seat of
Government; Edinburgh and Glasgow have different
characters. A pity, it may arguably be, that the kings
of England and their Parliaments did not choose to
remain at Oxford or Winchester or even Reading,
relieving London of part of its present congestion.
There are those who hate all cities so large that an
hour’s walk cannot bring you to the edge of them.
Cobbett, who invariably called London "the Wen,”
was one of them: he believed in grass, com, oats, fresh
air, and enlightened feudalism. Willia m Morris was
another. He wrote:

Forget six counties overhung with smoke.

Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke.

And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens
green. . . .

These men were sorry for what had happened; yet
were they also sorry that it had happened to London.
Mr. Chesterton once said that the statement "my
aunt has tremendously changed” was a positive affirm¬
ation that she was still "my aunt.” "Dream of
London,” Morris still had to say when he was thinking
of abolishing modem London; and Cobbett, for all
his hatred of the creeping scrofula of the houses on

13

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

the outskirts, would, if pressed (like the patriot anc
poet that he was), have made many exceptions ir
favour of institutions and buildings that he knew
He may have seen (if they were there in his day) the
shining and stalwart sentries on their black steeds
outside the Horse Guards; he may have leisurely
floated down the Thames for a fish dinner at the Ship
Greenwich. No man who has once lived in London
wandered about it, examined its nooks and crannies
entered into its variegated and richly traditional life
could honestly say that he wished it all wiped out
even if he shared Cobbett’s and Morris’s views aboul
industrialism, paper money, and the decay of rura
England. There would be many things that he coulc
not bear to destroy. And for every man there woulc
be different things; the place, the city, the congeries
of history being so vast.

* * * * *

How vast it is! I, who have lived in London foi
twenty-five years and constantly explored it out o
curiosity, suddenly check myself and realise whal
great lacunae there are in my knowledge of it. Mj
map of London contains as many blank spaces as die
the map of Africa in Mungo Park’s day. It is perfectly
true that I know the centre of London (though there are
still streets between Piccadilly and Oxford Street intc
which I have strayed once or never at all, and whicl

14

A LONDON REVERIE

may contain the oddest and most charming unknown
thing s), and that I have visited most of the hidden
Churches of the City. It is true that the East Central
district has few secrets which I do not share: that I
know the Adelphi Arches, that I have paused in
Neville’s Court hundreds of times, that I have visited
the Roman Bath off the Strand, that I have lunched
at the George and Vulture, and penetrated the Crypt
of St. Mary-le-Bow. It is true that I know Chelsea,
Kensington, Hammersmith, Chiswick, and Kew on
the west, and have explored the environs of Gunners-
buiy Park. It is true that I have taken my pleasure
in the Georgian fronts of the North Side, Clapham
Common, and of Church Row, Hampstead; that I
have walked through the Blackwall Tunnel and slept
in a slum at Walworth. I know Southwark Cathedral
and the lovely inn-yard which adjoins it; the Inns of
Court, every court of every inn; the library of St.
Paul’s, the cellars of the Bank, most of the panelled
rooms and Samuel Scotts of the City Companies. I
have been in Barking Church, and Tottenham Church¬
yard; I am familiar with Gilbert Scott’s magnificent
new church at Northfleet, and with Rahere’s; with
the Minories, the environs of the Tower, the whole
length of Little Thames Street, and more than one
old riverside public-house at Wapping. I have watched
the deer cantering at Richmond, and the masts
spiring over the houses on both banks of the River in

15

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

the east. I am acquainted with Dirty Dick’s, the
Hole in the Wall, the Soane Museum, the Dulwich
Gallery, Browning Hall, and Ruskin Park; with the
new road to Sidcup and the new cut to Esher; and
with most of the main roads by which a motor-car
can pass out of London into England, wild nature,
and the established past. Yet, if I look at a map, I
find myself immediately confronted with wide districts
of which I know only the names, and perhaps a few
historical associations. Edmonton and Ware: they
occur in John Gilpin, and they have apparently grown
enormously; what remains of antiquity there may be
in them, what relics of Gilpin’s and Cowper’s day,
what new creations of modem art, what passions of
local patriotism, I know not, nor even, very accurately,
where these places are. “Walthamstow” and “Ilford”:
on Election nights I have waited long to see the
figures for these celebrated boroughs of outer London
thrown upon the screen, and have cheered or groaned
according to the results; but as to their configuration
I know no more than Sir Thomas Browne knew about
the songs the Sirens sang, and the name that Achilles
took when he was in Scyros, amongst the women.
Willesden Junction I know, but not the Willesden;
Brondesbury as a station on the railway, but not as
the possible site for a story by Mr. Chesterton; of
Highgate I can only recall the Church spire, the Arch¬
way, the Archway Tavern, and a neighbouring book-

16

A LONDON REVERIE

shop; of Hackney I know nothing; and there, to the
North-East and South-East, my imagination travels
into regions of which I can “picture” only small
isolated spots. With at least half London I am totally
unacquainted; and I am not less curious than most.

Every Londoner-born, every provincial who comes
to live in London, has his own London. For no two
individuals, probably, is this unconscious selection
the same: there is a London for every man in London.
London is almost “as large as life.” There are probably
tens of thousands of Jews in Whitechapel who have
never seen, or heard of, Portland Place; there are
certainly many people in Portland Place who have
vaguely heard of Whitechapel, but only as an out¬
lying territory, like the Andamans or the Solomon
Islands, which has to be administered, and may, at
any moment, be liable to give trouble. There is a
London of the Unthinking Rich: bounded on the east
by the Savoy and on the west by Kensington High
Street. There is a London of the Colonial, a congeries
of great hotels and famous “sights.” There is a
London of the stupid American, and a London of the
cultivated American, who goes far and wide in search
of a background with which his own country does
not yet provide him. There is a London of the Chelsea-
ite and the Bloomsburyite; there is a London
frequented and beloved by Mr. W. W. Jacobs and Mr.
H. M. Tomlinson, and intimately known by Conrad,

*7

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

which begins at Tower Hill and goes eastwards; a
marine London, a London of docks, and spars,
returned and battered ships, crimps and Chinamen,
merchandise and anecdotes from the Seven Seas, tea-
chests, bales and anchors, the smells of salt, tar,
bilge-water and river mud. A man knows and loves
Acton, but hardly knows where Tottenham is; a man
regards Streatham as the secondary centre of the
universe, the City being its only superior; a man lives
in Tooting, and finds it difficult to believe that Finchley,
with its glitter of trams and shops, exists. Yet for all
of them, however widely London may spread, how¬
ever discrete its parts may become, there is a general
awareness of London, and there is a central and nodal
part of London which they regard as common
property, symptomatic and symbolical of the whole
chaotic and magnificent business. In exile they feel
it acutely. Wherever the Londoner abroad comes
from, it isn’t the Balham Town Hall or the Forest
Hill Waterworks that most arouses his emotion. After
the Union Jack it is Trafalgar Square, or Piccadilly,
or Saint Paul’s. It is even possible to imagine a group
of British exiles, in the middle of the Gobi Desert,
giving (were a sudden picture or wireless message to
be encountered) three cheers for the British Museum.
London is a hotch-potch, but it still has a heart and
a soul. Even the most sprawling octopus has organs.

*****

18

A LONDON REVERIE

They very seldom pull down anything ugly in
London. When they do, as in the Strand, old shoddy
is usually replaced by new. Yet, whatever disappears,
men will, as time goes by, regret it; and what had not
even the humblest grace of form will take m memory
a presence, a bloom, a luminosity from that vanished
youth with which it was associated. There are men
of my generation who, at this moment, when that
flimsy and dingy little restaurant of Appenrodt's has
just been demolished, will merely remark that it is an
ugly obstruction and ought to go in the interests both
of traffic and the eye; yet who, when it has gone, will
feel, if it be casually mentioned, the pang it cannot
give them now. Life is a tissue of farewells, and every
change is a reminder of it; but here, in the death of
such a building, is a symbol of a death which even in
life we have experienced, our own death which we
have survived, the death of our youth. Before the
century is out there will be greybeards to whom the
Bush Building will be a part of the old London they
first knew—what the County Fire Office, with its
arcade and its Britannia, was to us. To-day it is too
new to have become firmly part of anyone’s fabric of
retrospect. Its site for some is haunted by the phantom
of an old maze of streets: Holywell Street and Book¬
sellers’ Row, streets dark with the shadows of seven¬
teenth-century gables and littered with books, fruit,
and “old junk.” To others that great white recti-

19

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

linear block stands upon an empty triangle of waste,
where for years no foot trod behind the palings, and
the rubble-covered earth was clothed with sparse
grass, and then, invisible seeds coming one by one on
the invisible wind, a tangle of vagrant weeds grew
there, a garden for untidy Nature in the heart of the
smoke and the bricks. Flora Londiniensis reconsti¬
tuted—fifty sorts of flowers, with pink swathes of the
rose-bay willow-herb spiring over all. Demolition and
"improvements" are incessant in London. Every hour
old beams, newly naked to the sky, are battered down
in pathetic ruin, a fresh gap is opened in one of our
ten thousand streets, foundations are dug, bricks are
laid, new signs stuck up. Every year the fringes of
London extend: what was a placid country house
yesterday is a grimy building plot to-day. London is
in perpetual flux. Yet, in retrospect, it is not a
shifting background one sees, but a fixed one, mys¬
teriously arrested at some moment and seeming to
have been immutable for years: a picture which, for
all one knows, may include things which actually
were never co-existent in time, one fa$ade falling
before another was built.

This London that has gone, though relics of it
surround us on every side, saw our youth and was a
part of our youth, our youth that is a country which
is lost. There are other provinces, and for no two
persons is that whole country the same. For me,

20

A LONDON REVERIE

inhabited for an epoch of childhood, there were the
blue seas, shell-covered beaches, fishermen’s churches
at evenfall with the wind howling outside, and
"Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow” filling
the nave bright with hanging oil-lamps—the streets
of a garrison town with every other promenader a
blue-jacket or a soldier in scarlet with a swagger cane
—farms, weather-slated, with little front gardens
full of Canterbury-bells, sweet-williams, stocks, with
flat-faced flame-petalled sunflowers guarding the wall,
and borders edged with low box, or button-daisies, or
the white of arabis and the yellow of calceolaria, and
orchards behind, where gnarled grey trunks stood in
long grass—wet boulder-scattered slopes of sunlit
Dartmoor, the crested tors standing silently round,
and two boys with small rods mounting past patches
of heather, tufted rushes, and whortleberry clumps
with their purple bloom-pallid berries hidden under
bushy leaves, from pool to pool of a streamlet’s noisy
descent, crouching with thrilled hearts to entice the
trout, trout that were so browny-bright, so spotted,
and flapped so noisily in the basket when they ought
to have been dead. How ample a province! What
market squares full of gaitered farmers, traps, and
cattle! what thatched and pink-washed cottages! what
cobbled streets straggling down to little harbours
where the fishing-boats were beached and the quays
stank at low tide of fish and marine slime, and the mud

21

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

was strewn with half-buried tins, crockery, chains,
and rusty flukes of forgotten anchors! What drives
at night between hedges, with the horse's feet clopping
and rings of light from the square lamps hovering
along the broken gathering darkness at each side!
Days—no, not days, for the divisions of days are
forgotten—of climbing, sailing, swimming, picnicking,
games in empty houses, or candles and books in bed
at night, the creak of footsteps on the stairs. A great
organ, like a painted Giant’s Causeway, thundering
in the Guildhall, while the massed choir (ladies all in
white, sopranos with red sashes, contraltos with blue)
sang choruses of the Messiah. Racks in railway
carriages and the notices under them, “Five Seats”
laboriously altered by a wag into “Five Cats.” The
Salvation Army bands lugubriously braying in the
empty streets, or suddenly encountered, marching,
with a rabble behind them, round a comer. Dim
Queen Victoria’s first Jubilee and the unveiling of a
monument; a golden tip from a strange gentleman
whose head was high out of sight. A wain of red
clover in the dusk of an archway; runnels of water
threading the star-patterns on the yellow bricks of a
stable-yard; horses in loose boxes; a dog that lost
its puppies; a water-ford with the wheels axle-deep,
the ragged pinnacle of a ruined castle emerging from
steep woods; air-gun practice in a shed; a warm
chaffinch, stone-dead, its ruddy breast so smooth,

2 2

A LONDON REVERIE

its white-barred wings lifted to find the bloody hole;
a stab of remorse. A heavy dirty-jacketed rook, dead
in a furrow, dingy black, maggoty when it was turned.
Daisy chains, ripe apples from the tree, bird’s-foot
trefoil (that is a lotus), wet red moss-rose. Scented
coffee grinding in one window, waxen barbers' busts
in the next, the beauty of an ironmonger’s and a
corn-chandler’s, the little sailor-suited figures in a
tailor’s window, cheese, oranges, the desiccated rings
of grocers’ apples.’ Thus will the endless chain of
association draw bright images from that inexhaustible
well.

Then older clays at school, and an imperceptible
frontier had been crossed, never to be traversed
again. At a certain time childhood was behmd and
we were shamed of ever having been children, un¬
learned, undisciplined simpletons, silly little fools
and asses. To evade the opprobrium we put the past
out of mind, and, if it had to be recalled, exaggerated
a few years into “long ago.” It seemed long ago
perhaps, for time moved so slowly then; and it was
truly “far away,” if not "long ago”; for the first
sharpness of impression had gone, the senses had
reaped their main harvest and had but gleaning to do
henceforth, and the dawn of generalisation had set
in, though information about the world and other
men’s notions was very scanty. Childhood had given
place to first youth; we had learned to curb our

23

c

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

suffering; but no shock-absorber, alas, was needed
to mitigate the force of the assaults of beauty and
of fact. It was in childhood that we apprehended,
with awed delight, the heavenly bodies, the seasons
and weather, earth, sea and sky, the kinds of people
and of animals, flowers and trees, and received most
sharply the treasures of sight, sound, scent, taste
and touch. Mr. W. H. Davies has written:

I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick—

But not one like the child did pick.

A hundred butterflies saw I—

But not one like the child saw fly.

I saw the horses roll in grass—

But no horse like the child saw pass.

My world this day has lovely been—

But not like what the child has seen.

That is not sentimentality: it is truth. Every category
of impressions came to us in childhood with a vivid¬
ness and poignancy not to be recovered: the new
sensations of later life are but pale supplements and
extensions of these, and our mere memories of these
are stronger than anything we can receive from the
actual presence of their successors. We may “admire"
and be touched to melancholy or reverence by a
sunset, gorgeous or soft; but our feelings are but faint
reflections of those which we experienced when the
first great sunsets were unfolded for our virgin

24

A LONDON REVERIE

souls. It was then that we learnt the solitude of the
hills and the sweet companionship of the rivers, the
wonder of wide primroses in the woods and hard
blackberries in the brakes, looked first at trout lying
in a bridge's shadow, drank through our nostrils
the strange empty savour of river water as we swam.
It was then that with intensest pleasure we watched
the rooster crow from his dunghill, fed from our
fingers the sucking calf, patted the bristly hide of
the lazy sow. It was then we learnt how hot the
sun can bake great stones by the sea, and how rapidly
on such hot stones the wet stamp of a bathing dress
will dry; that we tasted with irrecoverable sharpness
the aromatic mustard of nasturtium seeds, and felt
the strong, tight, flexible armour of the seeds of the
sunflower; saw glow-worms, green glimmers in June’s
dark scented lanes; drank in the intense blue of the
thrush’s eggs, the pure white of the pigeon's, the
stippled rusty streaks of the robin’s, the fragility of
broken shells on the ground, the gape of small birds’
beaks in the nest; were awed by the sounds, at night,
of the breaking sea and the wailing wind, the waving
trees and the tu-whooing owls; listened, with acutest
ears, in autumn twilights, to church bells miles away,
now loud, now almost inaudible, and heard only the
chime, never thinking of ringers or belfry; and on a
night of fire, saw vast puffs of sparks, yellow and red,
drift across dark-blue sky with a delight we had

25

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

known also when the last golden husk had slid
back and revealed, seated high, dazzling, with
a star-pointed sceptre, the fairy at the heart of
a Transformation Scene.

That capacity for complete reception, complete
delight, complete self-forgetfulness, departed with
childhood; later youth, at school and at Cambridge,
brought its treasures of scene and society; and, for
me, at least, London does not enter into that part of
the tapestry where youth was passing through its
second transition, dipping at random into the various
worlds of books, aware for the first time of the rumour
of conflicting ideas, newly acquainted with the names
of the great ones of the world, serenely supercilious
about them, but undeniably shy when any of them
physically appeared. To others, bom and bred in
London, the place must mean things it can never
mean to me. My own first sight of it was when I was
eighteen, steaming eternally into Paddington on a
cold, damp, gloomy December day, with something
like terror closing in on me at the magnitude of the
thing and its legend—a feeling that always returns
when there comes to my nostrils the sharp coppery
reek of a great railway terminus. That terror no
man or woman bred in London can have known. As
we sped in through the ever-increasing density, until
we slowed down under the smoke-blackened cliffs
outside the great cavern of Paddington, my heart

26

A LONDON REVERIE

stood still and I trembled. I tried to laugh at myself
and could not; and dismounted with awe. The horror
wore off: the unfamiliarity remained, all the time I
was at Cambridge and for two years after. There were
occasional week-ends and three or four weeks. I
knew the environs of St. Pancras and Queen’s Club
(staying in a lodging near this last, and a boarding¬
house, full of young Indians and indeterminate elderly
ladies, in Woburn Place?—Square?—Terrace?), and
a few houses m the West of London and the suburbs.
The City I knew but as something strange, almost
mythical, full of narrow streets, traffic, classic porti¬
coes, and unexpected sooty churches, that one passed
through on the way to Liverpool Street. When, in
search of some friend, I took a hansom to Kensington
or, with very strict attention to my instructions
about trains, went out to sup near Clapham Common
or the Crystal Palace, I knew no more about the wilder¬
nesses of houses I travelled through or over than
I do now about the dismal wastes of Pittsburg.
Once or twice I passed the Abbey on buses and dis¬
liked the towers; occasionally I passed St. Paul’s
and wondered if I should ever ckmb the Dome for
the view. I did not know the names of most of the
buildings I saw: the streets, except for Piccadilly,
the Strand, and a few more, were all one. In my
first year at Cambridge I even had the idea that New
Oxford Street and Holbora were of a peculiarly

27

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

metropolitan importance. London, shorn of its
original awe, was a shapeless and featureless thing of
unknown size, a body without a soul, that meant
nothing to me. On occasional visits one might travel
to Queen’s Club for the Rugby match and spend the
evening with haphazard undergraduates drinking
new liqueurs in foreign restaurants; or go to the
theatre; gradually increasing one’s knowledge of the
stations on the Inner Circle, and learning to distinguish
between Hyde Park Comer and Marble Arch. But
London as a whole was as yet virgin of associations,
either personal or historical. I shall never forget,
but can never clearly remember, the first true inkling
I had of its size. In 1907 1 walked from Devonshire to
London, taking a holiday from employment on a
local newspaper, in the guise of a penniless tramp,
sleeping in haystacks (a rat ran across my face in
the dark), pheasant-copses (the rain dripping all
night, the pheasants chuckling), and Casual Wards.
I broke the journey at Oxford, shaved and borrowed
clothes, spent several agreeable days, punted on the
Cher, talked to a Rhodes scholar about Petronius,
played a good deal of billiards, first encountered
Father Ronald Knox in his infant glory and a red tie,
acquired the fare to Reading, and, res uming the
bedraggled mackintosh and the tieless collar, left
the disgusted porter of Balliol behind me.

One night I slept in Balliol College, the next in
28

A LONDON REVERIE

Isleworth Casual Ward: I take it, an unusual colloca¬
tion. I had walked from Maidenhead to Isleworth
on a damp Saturday afternoon in May, and reached
the workhouse when the lights were already being lit.
My pockets were turned out according to the usual
ritual; I informed the grim official in charge that I
was a “chirk/' and I waited my turn for the bath.
Whilst I was undressing a tough customer with
cunning eyes, a red nose, a black moustache, and a
bristly chin, asked me if I had surrendered my money.
“A few pence,” I said. “You done wrong,” he replied,
“you should 'a left it in the 'edge outside.” The
official, when I stepped into the bath, stood over me
with a long-handled brush with bristles like stiff
twigs. Observing that I did not need it he demurred;
and, realising that I could not be a professional, he
gave me a few words of advice about arriving at
Casual Wards so late in the evening. I slept with
difficulty on a thin blanket laid over large unresisting
diamonds of wire that left red patterns on my thighs
and back. The morning, as I had carefully arranged,
was Sunday morning. No stone-breaking on Sundays:
I was released early, after a plate of thin porridge,
with a hunk of stale bread, that I ate as I walked down
the street. And I tramped from there to Chelsea,
where my best friend was to be found.

What a walk for an unaccustomed man not versed
in the past of all those neighbourhoods: Isleworth,

29

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

the fringe of Hounslow, Brentford, Chiswick,
Hammersmith, Fulham, the King’s Road! “Wens
that Cobbett never knew”: an unmitigated ugliness,
it seemed: hideous shops, factories, gin-palaces, in
endless succession, with here and there a gas-works,
a railway station, or a Victorian Gothic church or
chapel to relieve the misery with a change of misery;
trams and buses all along the interminable miles,
and the pavements crowded with shabby townees
in their Sunday best. Size, squalor, lack of purpose,
were the dominant impressions on one new to it
all. Not one thing interested me the whole way:
the dirt was too noticeable; it was all dirt.

Were I to take that journey again to-day it would
all be different, though the tentacles of the Devouring
Town have stretched out even farther than they had
twenty years ago. Then the London suburbs were
mere names to me: I knew nothing of their past nor
of their relative positions; nor did I know what delights
may in any of them be lurking round the next comer.
All those miles, in worn boots with a greasy hand¬
kerchief still round a blistered heel, did I trudge, not
for a moment even aware that the Thames was half
the time within easy reach, and that the banks of
the Thames were strewn with the charming relics of
rural civilisation. So depressed was I with the feature¬
lessness of the new that I never noticed the presence
of the old, seeing only the great gold and black

30

A LONDON REVERIE

fascias, the projected one-storey shops, the blackened
front gardens, the groaning, creaking trams, the
congested crossroads, the wretched hordes of people,
and saying to myself, “No wonder Gissing wrote as
he did!” Yet, if I took that walk now, every quarter
of a mile would show me “objects of interest,” and
any street-name or inn-sign might start a train of
thought. The Kraken, modem London, devours
and devours, yet the hard skulls and timbers of its
prey remain intact within its capacious folds. An
inn may even be vilely rebuilt in Brewers’ Olde
Englysshe or Twentieth Century Transition, but its
name will remain; such a name as "The Packhorse
and Talbot” in Chiswick High Road, which summons
the imagination at once to a mediaeval mode of
transport, a mediaeval sporting dog, and a mediaeval
hero. As I went through Brentford I might have
thought of its antiquity, its two Kings, the Eliza¬
bethan playwrights who used to gather at the Pigeons,
the merry jests of George Peele. Whether I knew of
these things I cannot now say; but I do know that
I did not then connect them with what I saw. I
passed the gate of Syon House and knew nothing of
it; the approach to Kew Bridge and was unaware of
it, of the great domesticated landscape on the other
side, the palm house, the orangery. Sir William
Chambers’s pagoda; Kew Gardens then were to me
a name without a local habitation, and no memory

3i

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

of their lilacs perfumed the neighbourhoods around
them. Just behind the squalid respectabilities of
Gunnersbury lay intact the riverside village street
of Strand-on-the-Green, fine Augustan mansions,
tumble-down cottages, ancient pubs with little
balconies overlooking the brown tides of the Thames
and the sleeping hulls of fishing-boats which, within
living memory, had sailed from here to the Nore,
past all the traffic and history of London, on their
proper business. Rousseau had lived down one turning
in Chiswick; down another I might have come upon
the hon-guarded gate of the high-walled park where
still stands the classic mansion which Burlington
built and in which Fox died; and another, if I chance
to see it to-day, calls me to Hogarth’s house, to an
inn—closed the other day by the brewers—almost
as old as Agincourt, to old Chiswick Church and the
graveyard where Loutherbourg lies underneath the
most perfectly orotund of inscriptions, to the ferry
where old wrinkled Fishlock recalled the Crimea in
August 1914, to the little Mall dock where the red-
sailed barges lie moored in peaceful twilights, to a
great tree over the pavement, to river-gardens and
a cuckoo heard in one, to a company of old houses,
a row of poplars, a flour-covered bakery with a quay,
an old blind lady in a trim little house, full of
mahogany, china, antimacassars and carpets, children
playing on bicycles, a swan sitting in the osier bed

32

A LONDON REVERIE

of the Eyot, a dead friend, twelve years of my own
life. The poplars one year were pollarded, and for
days two crows, which had always nested in them,
flew bewildered round the ghost of its crown, in
search of what was gone for ever.

Of what was, and what was to be, on that drab
distant Sunday, I was utterly unaware, seeing only
the streets, trams and people, not knowing when I
crossed the frontiers of all these indistinguishable
boroughs, insensitive to the remains of the villages
they had been, or any painful modem efforts to
recover for them something of individuality and
give them new centres and a touch of new dignity.
There is a dream behind Hammersmith Town Hall,
and an aspiration behind the Secondary School
behind Duke’s Meadows. Utterly unaware, I was
plodding mechanically onward, asking always the
way to King’s Road, near the end of which was a
shabby square I had once visited. A few days fol¬
lowed. We went to a meeting at which there spoke,
with a fine sweeping certainty about all things, a
younger Bernard Shaw with a redder beard. We sat
on twopenny seats over the Serpentine while night
came over and the long reflections of the lamps
brightened on the water. I saw several extraordinary
little men in buildings off Fleet Street who were
unable to suggest to me even the smallest job at
the lowest salary. I took, with an attempt at hope,

33

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

a letter of introduction to H. W. Massingham from
an old friend, who had not seen him for years, but
had often bicycled with him in Battersea Park in a
past age, when that exercise, in that curious place,
was fashionable. He asked me what I was prepared
to write about. "Almost anything,” I answered,
"but especially poetry.” His lizard’s eyes blinked
behind his shining glasses. “They all say that,” he
said. They do.

The wrinkled nutcracker smile was not unkindly,
but there was no promise in it. He saw young aspir¬
ants every day, no doubt. Years later we became
acquainted and he evidently did not remember me;
nor did I ever tell him that for a day I had pinned
my last hopes on him. He was a jaundiced politician,
and had no understanding of men; but generous of
soul and attractive when you were with him. I
last met him by accident, one sunny morning in
August 1924, on the step of the Pilgrims’ Inn at
Glastonbury. We talked for five minutes and went
off in our respective cars: he to Cornwall, where,
within a week or so, he suddenly died.

The office doors of the Nation, the halfpenny dailies,
and Pearson’s Weekly —where I only just missed
thirty shillings a week as a judge of Limerick com¬
petitions—closed behind me. London would not
even be a “stony-hearted mother” to me, and I
must creep back to my province. I worked off the

34

A LONDON REVERIE

spleen by walking from London, through Winchester
to Salisbury, in just over forty-eight hours. Chelsea
at two; Guildford—with the gas-lamps shining
melancholy on laurels outside—at half-past ten.
Then, by error in the dark. Godaiming; then Famham;
Alton in the early morning, with a small hot brown
loaf from a baker’s just opened. Two nights out,
sleeping rough by snatches, heaven knows where.
I had never seen that road before, and now I know
every turn on it. A train from Salisbury and I was
back at my point d’appui.

It wasn’t entirely solitary. There were good men
on that struggling newspaper; and I had a few friends
in the town, as well as others, in Cambridge, in London,
and wandering with the wind, who sent me news of
the progress of the Union, of international comity, of
the young Crichtons of my time, of literary life in
Copenhagen, hotels in Florence, missions in India, and
football in Singapore. I played occasionally for scratch
rugger teams, and watched a good deal of football on
Saturday afternoons. I heard Madame Patti, gloriously
manipulating a cracked voice, sing “Home, Sweet
Home,” at what may have been the last of her
many farewells; admired the fiddling acrobatics of
Zacharewitsch, still (I suppose) playing somewhere,
probably in America; listened to Mischa Elman, then
an adolescent prodigy, self-conscious and foreign, in a
velvet coat, in “Air—Bach,” and the Mendelssohn

35

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Concerto, which I still love; heard for the first time
Haydn’s Clock Symphony, and (gallantly played
by the Marines) the Jupiter Symphony; saw Leonard
Boyne, plump and spruce, in Raffles, and I know not
what other plays of the period. On Saturdays and
evenings off there were communings with naval
officers in bars, or meetings with the revolutionaries
in Ruskin Hall or the open market-place. Once
Frederick Rogers, bookbinder and book-lover, fathei
and mother of Old Age Pensions, stayed with me
and once old H. M. Hyndman, social democrat
patriot, gossip, and egoist, after a great "demonstra
tion” at which he eloquently talked of Marx, chattel
slavery, wage-slavery, ballots and bullets, came bad
with me for the night and sat up talking of the politi
dans of the ’eighties and the cricketers of the ’sixtie
—for that frock-coated and bearded old rogue, fo
all his assumptions of universal importance, his casua
hints as to offices that Lord Salisbury and Mi
Gladstone would have given him, his glancin,
references to “my friend Clemenceau,” and his ver
candid views about the movement which he himsel
led, had been in his remote early days a Sussex Count
cricketer and was still annoyed that he hadn’t obtaine
his Cambridge Blue. Sometimes there were walks i
woods, on hills; sometimes there was a sail in
dinghy; there was a man who loved A Shropshii
Lad and another who knew Borrow by heart. Ye

36

A LONDON REVERIE

mostly it was work, and work at night; the machines
dr umming behind and below; the boys coming up for
the little wads of copy; the scramble soon after
midnig ht.; the respite when all had gone down and it
was now for the printers to finish the job; the wait for
the first damp and sticky copy with everything
miraculously sobered and strengthened in type, and
miraculously fitting; the supper, or very early break¬
fast, of cocoa and cheese, under the lamps; the fearless
mice who leapt on the table and sat up nibbling the
fragments of cheese. It seems in retrospect, charming
and amusing; time adds a tone to our most trivial
memories, as to our chairs, our cathedrals, and our
very skin. Yet, it was stagnation and suspense, all
this; and in London I resumed the progress of my
youth.

Two years of waiting; an opportunity of sorts; and
I began a real acquaintance with London. London
for me, as for how many thousands of others, is a
part of that most critical and crucial period of youth,
the period of awakened intellect and fulfilled emotion.
It was not the sprawling London of the suburbs, not
London the swallower, London the builders’ dormitory,
the London that I had glimpsed in casual visits to a
College Mission, or on “sprees” (the word has died
out), watching a game in the afternoon and, in the
evening, scrumming with a mob at the Empire or
daringly drinking at some cosmopolitan lounge while,

37

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

at a table apart, sat the woman of Babylon, with a
large plumed picture hat, her face impassive, her
eyes smiling. It was not the London of the rich nor
the London of the poor—though these became
gradually known: it was not, in a way, London at all:
it was the mythical country Bohemia, which is
inland, yet has a sea-coast: Shakespeare’s paradox
acquired meaning after him: only thus vaguely
could be presented so shifting a place, a State which
is more of a state. For me, when I entered it, I
lived in that shabby Chelsea square of which I spoke.
My landlady was a decayed French baroness, whose
husband, long ago, had been Ambassador to Mexico,
perhaps (for I cannot remember) to the Mexico of
Maximilian, gallant and unfortunate Hapsburg, who
ended his life (where was it I saw in youth a picture,
a woodcut, peaked postmen’s caps and baggy trousers:
in an old volume of the Illustrated London News?)
facing a firing-squad of his own subjects and soldiers.
Being French, she was an expert in omelettes; into
which she always contrived to introduce fragments of
cinder and enamel from the vehicle; but she gave me
several admirable French books, and her old brain was
as intelligent as her grey hair was disordered. Thence
did I sally in the mornings to send the most recondite
metropolitan views and information to hungry minds
in the country—first with . . . but what does that
matter? It was the evenings and the week-ends that

38

A LONDON REVERIE

mattered. Contemporaries had gathered from the
University; they had got in touch with other young
men who m some singular way had acquired intelli¬
gence, knowledge, and even wit, without ever going
to the University; and in all the circles of ardour and
enlightenment there were as many women as men.
They were not bobbed or shingled, but they seemed
so. London in those days, and at that stage of one's
life, was liberation. It was possible to talk to young
women, who knew all about music and economics,
on even the most alarming subjects, without feeling,
or at any rate betraying, the shghtest embarrassment.
We went in throngs to the gallery at Covent Garden,
where the knees of the row behind stuck into our
backs; to the arena at Queen's Hall (smoking per¬
mitted), where Sir Henry Wood perspiringly whacked
out “1812’' and “Finlandia”; to meetings where
Chestertons and Bellocs obstinately and too con¬
vincingly countered the Bee-hive Utopias to which
we had too readily surrendered. We chattered
seriously about oracles who were swindlers and fools
and who are not now even remembered as that much.
We sat about on the cushioned floors of studios and
the bravely brown-papered walls of unfurnished
lodgings (the lodgers often very poor), exchanging
mature and crystallised views about Shaw and the
Webbs, Debussy, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Charles Booth,
Trusts, Combines, Cartels, the Stage Censorship, and

39

D

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

the Czardom. Hardy, Bridges, and Housman were
there in the background waiting for us, but we never
talked of them. We argued, instead, that the Poor
Law must be reformed, that Campbell-Bannerman
and Asquith should force through Home Rule, that
Women’s Suffrage should be granted—lest worse
befall. We were, obviously, sometimes right; equally
obviously, we were often wrong. But we had an
eagerness, a directness, a capacity for enterprise and
the selection of essentials, peculiar to our age, and
generally lacking in old men, who wait for death and
merely wish, pending their demise, to keep the old
pot boiling in the old way.

Now we are ageing, those of us who are left. We
have learnt much—for the old easy solutions of the
garlicky caffe in Soho and the meetings of the con¬
verted were grotesque. But we have lost something.
Energy and faith are as essential as knowledge: we
acquire that, we generally lose the others. Looking
back on those years in which I learnt my physical
London, and acquired, unforgettably, my spiritual
London, I see pictures of dreaming youth preparing
for action. I see Frederic Keeling (for some forgotten
reason “Ben”) making statistics exciting in his
rooms in the Walworth Road and his later rooms of
Chancery Lane: bearded, flabby-lipped, wild, brown¬
eyed, much eyelashed, tumble-haired, a man gone
wrong but chivalrously wrong, voluble on blue-books,

40

A LONDON REVERIE

fierce about sex, Germanophile, destined to be shot
(as C.S.M.) by the Germans, talking, the last time he
came on leave to see me, about his privates betting
on louse-races—for, until he entered the Army, he had
never really (for all his slumming) got in touch with
the ordinary Englishman. I see again Charles Lister,
in a Strand cafe, and in the vast bleak Gatti’s in
Villiers Street, sitting amid a crowd of youth of
both sexes after some lecture: self-possessed, slow¬
eyed, wavy-haired, with the equine beauty of his
father; restlessly toying with a teaspoon, shocking his
bourgeois associates as much by his aristocratic calm
as by his revolutionary sentiments. And I see Rupert
Brooke, who had come up to Cambridge the term
after I went down, and whom I had first met on a
fleeting visit in 1907 to the place. He sits in a window-
seat above a crowd of gabbling people, who smoke and
drink beer and coffee, and talk about Keir Hardie, the
Dolomites, and Strauss. He enters a crowded room in
Lincoln’s Inn, fair-haired, sunburnt, serene, straight¬
eyed: his collar is soft-blue, his suit fits loosely but
perfectly: everybody is hushed by his appearance.
I drink with him in a window of the National Liberal
Club, and he comments on the infant sky-sign of an
enterprising tobacconist next the Playhouse: “It
runs round like mice,” he says. Then, later, when
first youth had gone, he came to say good-bye;
sorry for the death of Flecker, not thinking of his

41

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

own death, his fame, and his legend. In his brief
life he travelled much: he always returned to
London; he had many lives elsewhere, but in London
some of us can best recover him. He died, and his
death was the signal of the death of something in all
his contemporaries. There were tea-shops; and
luncheons by the Embankment Wall, with the familiar
gulls taking the leavings. There were walks to Lime-
house and the Blackwall Tunnel; there was a gradual
knowledge of the Museum, the National Gallery, the
Soane, Dulwich, Hampstead, Toynbee Hall: a mastery,
ultimately, of the middle and operative part of
London, and some clue to the suburbs. The War
came: obliteration, a gulf, age.

That same London still exists, a little changed, but
the same. It exists for others, not for us. We have
lost our illusions, and arrived, as we think, at a
sounder faith, or, the more unfortunate of us, at a
deeper and more genuine cynicism. But, though
they may assume other forms, our illusions and
delusions persist around us, among us, in our sons,
our nephews. The sons and nephews of our friends
are still inhabiting a London that is new and en¬
chanting to them, a London of hope and discovery, and
eager youthful theoiy and experiment. We, of my
generation and those generations senior to me, meet
these young. We seem to establish contact with
them; but they are foreigners to us and we to them.

42

A LONDON REVERIE

They are our own lost selves in a changed environ¬
ment—an environment so imperceptibly changed
that they cannot recognise us nor we them, though
we may greet each other sympathetically across
the abyss. What, in the intimacy of their midnight
conversations, do they really think about us and the
provisional beliefs at which we have arrived? What
are their opinions about foreign politics or home
politics? What pull does religion exercise upon them?
By what moral criteria do they judge their own and
each other’s actions? In which direction do they
intend (and what they intend will be made fact) that
artistic development shall proceed? How far, when
we are with them, do they exercise the control that
we exercised and conceal thoughts such as we con¬
cealed: writing him down a fool whom we affected,
in his presence, to admire, and worshippmg, as a
prophet, him with whom we never were brought
into contact?

We cannot know. It is possible to imagine con¬
versations, utterly honest, with boys twenty years
junior to oneself. Some, obviously, are pessimistic,
some unduly and impracticably idealistic. With
either, the impulse of the elder is always to say,
“When I was your age”; to substitute the truths of
experience for the premature assumptions of youth,
thereby helping the young to stand on the shoulders
of their fathers, skipping unnecessary stages in their

43

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

development. Vain hope! As well urge the prospective
butterfly to omit the chrysalis stage! St j&un&sse
savait! Were it possible for youth “to know,’’ the
proverb would never have existed. We think we
remember the whole attitude of our youth; but the
one thing we forget, and forget that we forget, is
that we ourselves, before we passed out of that golden
state, were subject to the desperate advice of our
seniors, and were simply unable to grasp that these
men had been young in their time and still preserved
the integrity of their hearts and minds. They had
(we supposed) been bom elderly; or the years had
made them cynical and fat; they had lost the capacity
for the faith that could so easily make such great
changes, or the sensitiveness which could respond to
the intolerable sufferings of mankind. How could
there be contact between such as they and such as
we? We were another race, another people, our eyes
and wills set upon something that these could never
see. The young are a secret society, and the old
cannot remember that they once belonged to it.

* * * * *

44

DUTY

T HEY had told him that he must not go into the
coal-cellar; for when he had been there he had
made himself very filthy. Being a little boy with a
considerable sense of duty, and a dislike of breaking
his pledged word, he did try his best to keep away
from it. But that grimy door at the end of the kitchen
passage had a strong fascination; and at last, after
an irksome smoky fog had kept him indoors for two
days, he was so bored with everything that he crept
down the stairs, hesitated, glanced around, went on
again, and finally, his heart thudding because of his
sin, opened the cellar door and went into the gloom.

Just inside the door the faint rays of gaslight from
the misty passage gleamed on ridges of smooth coal;
but round to the right the darkness was intense, a
soft hollow darkness that revealed no farther wall,
and was filled with a sea of silence.

He felt along the uneven wall, deliberately turning
his back on the door in order that he might not see
the least echo of light; then, inhaling languorously the
opiate scent of the coal, he stared into the darkness
and noiselessly swept his left hand to and fro with
his fingers grasping at the impalpable. The hushed

45

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

companionable spaces of the darkness lulled and
rocked him, so that he felt no desire to move; forgetful
of everything he gazed and gazed, breathing deeply,
until pinkish stars and waves swam over his vision,
and he felt faint.

With a kind of silent shock his sight cleared again.
Opposite him in the black wall there was a sharp
vertical line of bright yellow light. It broadened a
little and smeared the coal at his feet with gold; it
opened still wider and he saw, on a level as it seemed
with his head, the bright green head of a tree, still
in the sunlight. “Oh,” he sighed excitedly, and
stepped forward, his hands groping before him. Two
stumbles, and he was at the strange door; his hand
flung it back and he crossed the threshold to a pave¬
ment which slept white under the throbbing hot
glory of a wonderful summer sky.

He was on the terrace, smoothly-flagged, of a long
and placid stone house. There was no door behind
him, only a high leaded oriel window with mouldering
stone lace-work, the first of a line that stood along
the converging avenue of the terrace. Looking
through the panes he saw a long spacious hall to
which all the windows belonged, and on the glassy
floor of the room each window flung a broad stream
of sunlight, slightly stained here and there with red
or blue colour.

But though the house was old and beautiful it was
46

DUTY

not so beautiful as the landscape that spread beyond
the low stone balustrade of the terrace. From the
fishpond at the parapet’s foot fell away the gardens
of the house, first a series of sweeping lawns, then
tangled borders of flowers, then, still sloping down¬
wards towards an encircling valley in the middle
distance, tall trees, and trees behind them, and
gentle multitudes of tree-tops. The land fell; and
then in a long gentle slope it rose again; there came
ridge after ridge, softly green, meadows and clumps of
trees and lonely poplars, remote, remote, until the
most shadowy pencilhngs of land ended in a blue
haze on the verge of sight.

Shading his eyes, for a time he stared out over
the rolling territory, watching contentedly the mild
shapes of the woods near him, or screwing his eyes
up in a strained endeavour to see more clearly some
uncertain object far away. The sun shone warm on
his cheek, and his hand was warm on the balustrade;
contemplation of this equable scene lulled him in
complete ease and satisfaction. Being no artist and
not very capable of naming things external or internal,
he felt a reposeful elation without knowing or even
asking why; and it was natural to him not to search
for the date of the house or speculate as to the titles
of the curious and superb blooms that crowded the
flower-beds below. And so fine was the day, so
exhilarating the air, that, although he was normally

47

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

possessed of a great craving to explore empty and
■unknown rooms, he felt no impulse to look for an
entrance into the house.

At the far end of the terrace there was a shrill
cry and a flap of wings. A moulting peacock, one or
two long feathers protruding from the dun shrubbery
of his truncated tail, strutted down the balustrade,
jerking his shiny blue neck and nodding his thinned
crest. The boy, hands in pockets, nonchalantly
walked down to meet him; but he was shy of
approaches and flew up into a tree with dark green
leaves which overhung the coiner of the house.
“Oh, you needn’t if you don’t want to,” said he, and
he turned down the broad reach of steps that led
to the first lawn.

It was very pleasant to have no one near; to be
master of one’s surroundings and to walk where one
liked; to jump or lie down; to handle anything one
liked: but it was sufficient to feel that regal loneliness,
and he made no attempt to exercise its privileges to
any great extent. At the bottom of the steps he
peered for a time into the filmy green depths of the
pond where glided the huge shapes of ancestral
carp, grey before he was bom. He sat on the rim,
cooled his hands in the water, and picked at the
lichens on the brickwork. Then he sauntered over
the fresh sunlit grass down between throngs of
flowers into the margin of the wood. A few birds

48

DUTY

combated their summer drowsiness with unfrequent
notes. He looked up for them and could not find them;
but through the branches the quivering blue sky was
all burning with the sun. He turned and looked up
at the long stone house. There it sat, firm on its
stone bastion: its high tranquil windows reflecting
the sun; its even battlements clearly cut against the
blue behind them; its flanks guarded by tall seneschals
of trees. It seemed as though this place of all places
must be the true centre of the world; so serenely
from its height did it look out over the world and
silently command it.

Peace, though he scarcely knew the word, entered
the boy’s heart. A red admiral fluttered into the
wood’s edge and settled near him on a fretted spray
of briar. He watched it thoughtfully as it opened its
gorgeous dark wings with their bright red bars or
closed them into a single rich upright leaf. It flew
away, upward through the branches towards the
sky. Quietly he followed its flight; quietly he turned
away; slowly he walked up the slope, concerned for
nothing but to breathe the soft air and unhurriedly
gaze at the scene around him. He looked again at
the profusion of cups and stars and bells in the
flower-beds, and the even verdure of the lawns; he
watched for a while the slow motion of the great
fishes in the pond, and then again he climbed to the
sweet and stately dignity of the terrace windows,

49

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

and surveyed the wide magnificence of the country
that rolled away with its wooded ridges to the very
verge of sight. As he stood there behind the balustrade
drinking with childish eyes the enchanted expanse
of earth, there flooded in upon him, though he knew
not its name, one great luxurious rhythm that lifted
him away with massive and resistless swell. His head
grew dizzy; pinkish waves and stars swam before his
eyes; and out of darkness he awoke in a dismal coal-
cellar, very damp, aching in all his limbs, and afraid
of what would happen to him.

Such are the pleasures, and such, unhappily, the
rewards of sensual delights and the obliviousness of
duty.

*****

50

A GOOD LITTLE BOY

I N adolescence and early maturity a man usually
allows his boyhood to pass out of remembrance.
His mental operations are extensive and thrusting;
he is obsessed by his own intellectual development;
he seldom glances backward; he regards the child of
the past as the mere larva which has evolved into a
higher and more brilliant creature, a being with
unequalled powers and superb sensibilities; a prince
of created things. He can and may recall some of
the child's habits and journeys, some of its grievances
and deceptions, jealousies, ambitions and prides.
These by an effort of memory he is able to recover,
though they are mostly dead to him, like the occasions,
the chance concatenations of unimportant events
that caused them. But he does not trouble to remem¬
ber the child’s most intense and intimate experiences,
the adventures not directly related with other persons,
the joys that arose from fresh and unhabituated
contact with nature. There comes a time when things
change. After a man has outgrown his first
enthusiasms and illusions he learns to reverence
his own childhood. It is invested with a new and
almost sacred interest for him.

51

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

On the long line of solitary meditation or in the
drag-net of miscellaneous conversation some stray
reminiscence from early years is brought shining to
the surface; and it is not again thrown away. By
degrees such memories accumulate until there is a
coherent fabric of them, recollections of impressions
long since received by a being who formulated nothing
and deliberately recorded nothing. A man exhausts
culture; he discovers that Art is but a makeshift
by which the sophisticated painfully struggle to re¬
create sensations that well spontaneous in the souls
of the young. He comes to realise that the best and
truest aesthete is the child. Memory teaches that the
natural child, ignorant of culture which is bom of
comparison, analysis, and classification, breathes in
beauty as the plant its proper air; sound and colour
and form and the play of light fill him with wonder
and joy, and he does not attempt or dream of
definition or explanation.

* * * * *

The child, very young, was given balls and skeins
of coloured wools with which it was intended he
should make reins for human horses. He was in¬
different and clumsy about the manufacture, which
was conducted by means of pins stuck into large
corks with holes in them; but of the colours he
never tired. They were bright and varied. Vermilion

52

A GOOD LITTLE BOY

on a skein would merge into splendid orange and that
into a pure yellow and that into green; or a pale
celestial blue would pass into a blue more gorgeous,
and that into purple, which would grade—and the
marvellous surprise of the changes never palled—
into a scale of glorious browns. Here shape had
nothing to do with his pleasure; in those simple
ropes of wool the dazzlingly vivid colours were almost
disembodied, like the hues of a luminous cloudless
sunset. The child did not know what he was doing;
but he would hold the skeins in his hands, his eyes
very still, sighing from excess of delight. Colour was
his divinity, which took him out of himself; contem¬
plation of it consumed him; unconsciously he strove
to plunge into the heart of the colour as the religious
mystic into the bosom of God. Even then he knew,
though he did not put his feelings into words, some¬
thing of the grief of unattainment; for, with all his
straining of heart and eyes, he could never reach the
inmost core of those heaving waves of splendour.
His elders would remark: "Isn’t he a good little boy;
he amuses himself so nicely.”

Sometimes he was very happy by the sea. He
loved the rock-pools with their red and green
anemones, and the stones in the shingle, all of
which were beautiful and never two alike. Especially
he loved those calm days when one can look along
a level glittering sea and the sails on the horizon

53

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

are like little clouds. But in the country he was
always happy; he would steep himself in the scent
and the warm shadows of bams; great rugged tree-
trunks and smooth lawns were never lacking, and
there were always delightful particular places where
he could go by himself. •

In one place a little path took him out of sight of
the low house to a piece of waste land covered with
ragged clumps of bramble and thorn. On the farther
side was a swamp. Out of the water, where ridged
newts swam, sprang green sword-like reeds and
mottled yellow irises, strong flowers, sublimely
fashioned, which seemed to return his gaze. On the
moist hummocks of the bank grew a multitude of
rushes, narrow javelins each tufted with a brown tuft
at the side. He would pluck one and strip off its
green skin, drawing out a long soft kernel almost
weightless and as white as whitest snow. This he
would lay across his hand and admire; or draw it over
his cheek and lip for the exquisite softness of it; and
then he would break it. There was something that
moved him profoundly when at the smallest tension
it almost melted into fragments. He was experiencing
the poignancy and loveliness that ding to all that
floats and to everything that is evanescent.

In another place, where he spent a long summer,
there was an orchard of old mossy trees, sunny and
undisturbed, with long green grass underfoot. The

54

A GOOD LITTLE BOY

orchard made a gentle valley for a little brook which
curved peacefully through its entire length, here so
narrow that one could step across it, and here broaden¬
ing out into a bright shallow pool reflecting the clouds
and the sky. Hither he would come day after day,
no one knowing where he was, and he all the after¬
noon, face downwards on the bank, his hands sup¬
porting his chin, m some spot where the sun fell
through overhanging leaves to the cool flowing water.
He would observe very intently the flies delicately
wafting over the surface, and the small fish, with
heads pointing up-stream, waving gently m the
current. More often, for from this he derived most
pleasure, he watched the rivulet’s bed of light brown
sand. Shadows would fleet across it as the clouds
went overhead, and now and then, most perfect
dehght of all, a tiny rmg of light, like a hollow star.
It never occurred to him that this was the reflection
of a bubble surviving from an elfin waterfall farther
up; it was a beautiful mystery as it sailed slowly over
the peaceful sand under the clear water. In the
evening he went to bed with his skin slightly burning
and his eyes tired; and he slept dreamless.

The grown man can seldom lose himself. He
criticises; he examines; he enjoys briefly. Beauty
can pierce him suddenly; it cannot often envelop him
from dawn to twilight. Surrender to beauty must
be involuntary to be complete; purpose and self-

55 E

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

consciousness break the bond and the enchantment.
We, with our intellect, must needs separate ourselves
from things; we know ourselves standing outside
them and the separation engenders chillness. The
child alone, wise in his oblivion to facts and theories,
can reach a calm and abiding unity with the hidden
world of which the visible is the cloak. He walks
with beauty daily and has no necessity for a creed.

56

THE GOLD TREE

A LL the years I was at Cambridge I had a room
with Gothic windows, very high in the great
mock-Gothic building. When the leaves were out
there were no roofs or walls within sight, and the
room was so high that, seated at my window, I was
almost on a level with the uppermost large branches
of a vast spreading elm, which stood over against
me and dominated all the other trees in the thickly
wooded gardens. When one was by the farther wall
of the room the moving green caves and promontories
of the great tree filled the whole space of the window;
but leaning on the sill one saw it framed in sky with
copses and walks stretching away behind it.

I spent many hours watching that tree when, as
often happened, I was feeling too indolent for other
occupations. In bleak winter twilights, when its
extended branches rose in dark austerity amid the
cold and wet, or toughly struggled with a fierce
wind, I saw it a self-reliant Titan, a vegetable
Prometheus, a dumb and vigilant spirit without hope
and without fear as the tempests swelled and the
menacing darkness came round. When spring thrust
away winter, and the clustered crocuses, yellow,

57

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

purple and mauve, shone in the grass about its foot,
faint delicate veils spread over its branches, veils of
buds which presently broke forth into leaves. In
summer it was a great palace for birds. The rooks
tumbled about its pinnacles at earliest dawn, and
then it became alive with the chatter of little birds,
which made its bushy wall sway and bulge and
break as they swarmed in and out. Usually when the
edges of the western leaves shone with sunset red,
a companionless thrush sang there fitfully and poig¬
nantly; I would listen, wide-eyed and quiet, forgetting
time. Most of all, the great elm was beautiful in the
autumn, when it was clad in a glory of rich colour,
the magnificence of the fulfilment which precedes
death. But in all the autumns save the first I took
little pleasure in it, and could not look at it without
a vague aching at the heart.

Nature, that first autumn, must have struck some
happy and subtle equilibrium of sun and wind and
rain. Perhaps never since that great tree's third
progenitor was a sapling and the mortar was fresh on
the oldest college walls, had just that unheralded
miracle been achieved by just that impalpable
balance of heat and atmospheric pressure, of moisture
and light. I did not speculate about this; I had no
inclination to dissect the beautiful thing I saw. But
every morning I woke with the marvel gently waving
before my eyes, a tree of pure and stainless gold; and

58

THE GOLD TREE

every afternoon, when all around the walks and
lawns were tranced in lucid stillness, I sat on my sill
and gazed at the transfigured multitude of leaves.

At first the tree's garment was thick and profuse.
It lay, one would say, in mounded waves and beaches,
still slightly stained with remembrance of the late
summer, the dry dark greens and soiled dusty browns.
Now and then leaves fell. Each day there were
more of them scattered on the level grass around the
roots; but for two or three weeks the dense masses
of foliage on the branches appeared undiminished and
unthinned. Then, with swift though imperceptible
gradation, as October wore on, the change came.

One afternoon I saw with a sudden joyous pang
that the tree had changed into something more
beautiful than anything I had ever seen in my life.
Chinks of sky were everywhere visible between the
twigs, and the leaves had all gone a uniform gold.
It was not the heavy gold of opulent stuffs from
Italian looms; it had no tmge of brown or crimson.
It was splendid; but the splendour was pale and pure
and spiritual. Here, in an immense complex pattern,
were thousands of leaves of ethereal gold. They were
all thin and smooth and perfectly shaped. They were
all distinct; yet they seemed, though so clear and
finely edged, weightless and unsubstantial. The
tree was a vision of that perfection that dwells
always as a longing in some recess of the soul, and

59

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

that is scarcely ever realised in any material embodi¬
ment. So for seven days it remained.

Nothing marred it. Every day was mild, radiant,
exquisitely peaceful; the sky was of that clear
autumnal blue which has something of the quality of
silver, the shining blue that in the fall of the year
broods maternally over all tranquil places, the remote
yet consoling blue that is closest to the spirit of old
gardens and moss-grown statues and fountains for¬
gotten by man. Hour by hour I sat staring at the
gold against the far azure; and the only motion visible
was the gentle motion of the leaves that fell like
great gold petals. They seemed to fall quite evenly
and rhythmically; one by one, without hurry, they
floated gently down through the windless air with a
slow continuous magic that made an almost intoler¬
ably wonderful harmony with that other magic of
the motionless lovely colour. Twilight came over,
and dimly I could see them falling still; and when
night closed in and the tree was a confused web
against the starry spaces I knew that they still fell,
evenly and rhythmically, hke gold petals floating
down to death.

The gold leaves became sparser. The spaces of
sky became wider. Each leaf was outlined yet more
clearly and definitely against the silvery blue. Per¬
fection was perhaps most perfect when the leaves on
the ground far below lay in such heaps that those on

60

THE GOLD TREE

the boughs stood out each a single paten of gold with
a frame of blue between it and the next, but still a
host in number. Their fragile and ravishing beauty-
breathed such tenderness that involuntary tears came
to my eyes and my lips trembled. For this was the
most beautiful thing in the world, and as I gazed it
was passing away.

A night came when the wind rose and the leaves
with no resistance were swept down in flying com¬
panies. Next day a few golden stragglers alone clung
to the bare boughs, the dishevelled remnants of a
great army that had gone along its road. The tree
of spiritual gold was no more; there remained a hard
great tree strong to battle with the iron winds of
winter. Beauty, supreme beauty, had died; and why
had the heart survived it? There was a vague aching
in my breast as with fixed and filmy eyes I gazed
unseeing out of the window, over the forgetful paths
and lawns, to a world man never sees, but the nature
of which he sometimes obscurely apprehends through
fragmentary symbols.

In none of the other autumns was the tree of gold
to be seen. The hues of the great elm’s vesture were
year by year luxuriant and gorgeous, but the pale
and even and stainless gold did not come again.
The excitement of expectancy was always followed
by the depression of disappointment; I grew to feel
that what I had seen once I should not see again.

61

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

But, perhaps, that when I am an old man, neai
my grave, I shall some day wander into the gar¬
dens below my old window, and find a second time
the tree of gold, still and perfect, under a consoling
autumn sky.

62

ENGLISH BIRDS

BIRDS IN POETRY

I N England the birds are all around us. As I write
I am in a room in Outer London, with miles of
suburbs still between me and the open country. I
have just stood, first at the back window, over the
small garden with its acacia, its two pear-trees, its
little grove of lilacs and flowering currants, and then
at the window in front which overlooks a road, a
waterside garden, and the osiers of Chiswick Eyot and
the Thames, with the houses of Barnes beyond.
Everywhere there are birds, perched and flying:
starlings crossing the upper air, sparrows troubling
the holly, a thrush intermittently singing behind the
upper veils of the ash-tree, chaffinches tinkling some¬
where unseen. So it is all the year. In mere point of
frequency the birds are far more commonly seen here
than anything else in animate nature, excepting
man: for us they are, to all intents and purposes,
animate nature. There are insects, many if one
looks for them, few if one does not: a pair of phasin g
white butterflies, a ladybird on a rose-leaf, a little
bronzed beetle now and then, and in their season
caterpillars of the currant and vapourer moths.
Animals, beyond the domestic, are not here at all.

65

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Twice a year, perhaps, I may hear a plop in the water
and catch sight of a ripple and the head of a water-rat
hurrying to the overhung bank of the island. But
the birds are always present, numerous and various,
even here. The twittering of the small birds is
perpetual; every morning’s dew is printed with the
claws of blackbirds and thrushes, a robin nested this
year be hin d the thick streamers of the Virginia creeper
on the back wall, tits ceaselessly hop about on the
high twigs of the fruit-trees. Year by year a pair of
crows have built in a tall poplar by the river. They
came back this year to find it pollarded, circled in
bewilderment for a morning round the space where the
vanished tree-top had been, and then resigned them¬
selves to a new home. Wild ducks swim on the smooth
water, gulls on the stormy. There are swans which
sail proudly as Spenser's. Every year a pair tries to
raise a family on the Eyot. The eggs are usually
addled by a spring tide. This year a benevolent and
bold neighbour moved their nest a foot higher when
they were off it; and now there is a family of cygnets,
learning to swim, struggling against the tide and
climbing between their mother’s wings when they
are exhausted, she moving steadily on, a solicitous but
a severe parent. On summer evenings, as we pass the
Eyot in a boat, a heron often will rise out of the reeds,
looking, if it is getting dark, like a tattered black
flag, and will flap away up-river, disappearing in

66

BIRDS IN POETRY

the twilight. Then, as the year wears on, the migrants
rest on the osiers in thousands, and especially armies
of swallows. They will fly about the sky, very high
up, like an immense swarm of gnats, and then, in
long streamers, all drop suddenly down. There they
perch, not one visible, but the whole reed-bed alive
with them; a small stone thrown in the midst will
send a great cloud of them fluttering and chirping up
into the dim air.

So it is all over England. There are countries where
most of the birds migrate, and a winter’s day may pass
without a bird being seen. There are countries where
small birds are few, because they are no sooner seen
than they are shot for food. There are others rich
in gorgeous screeching birds, but poor in the homelier
singers. In England the birds and their music are
everywhere. It is natural therefore that our literature
should be full of them, and especially our poetry.
The commonest objects must be, to use for the
moment no stronger word, "mentioned” more often
than the others. They are a noticeable part of almost
every natural background; whatever mood or action
we may be experiencing, if it be "set” out of doors,
birds will be present, birds will probably be singing,
and they will consequently be associated with our
theme, as the other common elements of nature will
be, sun and clouds, trees and grasses. By the same
token, the commonest birds, the thrushes and black-

67

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

birds, rooks, peewits, robins, and sparrows, will
“occur” in literature more frequently than rails or
hoopoes. Unless a man deliberately go in search of
these last he will seldom if ever see them; the others
are daily, as it were, thrust upon us, and no desire
for a change of imagery will alter the fact.

It will be found that the poets represented in
Mr. H. J. Massingham’s delightful and representative
anthology* have seen their birds in various aspects
and written of them in manners of an analogous
variety. There are those who, describing nature with
a calm and comprehensive affection, have noted the
characters and habits of birds as they have noted
those of beasts, the transformations of the weather,
and the passing of the seasons. Chaucer and Clare,
Thompson and Cowper and Crabbe had an eye for
their individualities and knew their way of life.
Yet mere existence in nature, the mere being of a bird,
would not in itself have led to the large literature
which has been written about birds. Were there no
other birds than the vulture and the kite, though these
might have sat on every roof, bird-literature would
not have been what it is, though vultures and kites
would necessarily be frequently spoken of. We find
in most of the tribe of birds—and the philosophers
may discuss why—beauties which appeal to our
aesthetic sense. These beauties they share with other

* Poems about Birds , by H J. Massingham.

68

BIRDS IN POETRY

living things. The appealing softness and daintiness
which Bums found in the linnet are precisely what he
found in the field-mouse: his poems to the two are
twins. The gorgeous colours of Pope’s pheasant and
Milton’s peacock are also worn by certain snakes and
baboons; the gazelle is gentle and shy, the lion
majestic, the greyhound and the dragon-fly are swift.
The physical beauties of the birds and the lovely
qualities of their movements are not peculiar to
them; but they are all around us and they possess
them, and particularly an appearance of softness and
grace, more plentifully than any other creatures. All
poets must write of the birds who write of “Nature,”
and all must be moved by the beauty of many of them,
their colours, their easy flight, their lightness and
softness, the grace and whimsicality of their ways.
Yet more than that is found in them. Above most
living things man has found them, in certain regards,
emblematic of his own state. In the first of all our
bird-poems that moving anecdote of the Northum¬
brian court which, in prose, has been the first literature
to move the hearts of many children in the way that
poetry moves hearts, the passage of a sparrow is
seen to symbolise man’s transience, his journey from
unknown to unknown. To watch birds passing, and
especially a solitary bird, is to feel a vague emotion
springing from a likeness to something in our own
lives, and the words that result will depend upon the

69

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

philosophy, permanent or not, of the man who utters
them. From Sydney Dobell, watching the swallow
flying overseas, came the cry, “Swallow, I also seek
and do not find”; in Bryant, with a firmer faith, a
similar sight led to the reflection:

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast.

Man finds in the flight of a wild bird an emblem of
his mortality; and in the caged bird he has most often
found an emblem of his imprisonment by evil cir¬
cumstance, the vanity of beating the bars, the sad
alternative of a living death, the other sad alternative
of a dull resignation, the rare resort of a brave and
joyous triumph over captivity. Their lives, their
wings, their familiar experience, under our eyes, of
our own joys and adversities, winter and summer,
plenty and penury, sun and rain, mating, parenthood
and death, give them an intimate relation with us.
To Blake they seemed almost a more innocent kind
of human spirits, by virtue of the image of the
domestic and thankful lives they lead, the swiftness
and vivacity of their joys. But to most poets and
mankind at large they are chiefly and most often
brought near to ourselves not by their physical love¬
liness, their breasts and wings, nor by their social
existence, but by a faculty and a love which they
share with us alone.

70

BIRDS IN POETRY

The most intimate link between birds and poets,
between birds and men, the chief cause of the
voluminousness of a bird and poetry anthology, is to
be found in the second of the quotations with which
Massingham graces his flyleaf: “Music ... an art
common to men and birds.” Nature is full of voices:
but whatever predilection the modernist musician
may have in favour of the nocturnal cat, it will
scarcely be disputed by anyone that the birds as
musicians are in a class apart, for number, ubiquity,
sweetness and range. With every dawn "the in¬
numerable choir of day” breaks into song. We, in
England, are so accustomed to the birds that it is
by their absence that we are best able to define a
profound silence.

The sedge is withered by the lake.

And no birds sing:

the phrase of itself produces an atmosphere to us
strange and abnormal, and in one form or another it
has been used a thousand times. Everywhere, at all
seasons, they are around us; the down is very lonely
and the marsh very desolate which harbours no bird
that sings, and in our habitual fields and lanes and
gardens the twittering is so continuous that we notice
it most when it stops, when a hush falls with excessive
heat or the approach of thunder. They are always
ready for us, whatever our mood; and whatever our

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

mood it is not unnatural that we should link it to their
music, finding it either a vicarious song expressing
our mood, or, more bitterly, an alien rejoicing in¬
different to it. The latter experience is much the
rarer; where the music of the birds is referred to in
the present collection there is seldom the note of
“How can you sing, you bonny bird?” The birds are
sympathetic; if they carry messages their messages
are like that of Milton's nightingale, “Thou with
fresh hope the lover’s heart dost fill”; they are a choir
in the cathedral of heaven expressing their joys and
(as man cannot but feel) gratitude on his behalf as
well as their own, for the perennial blessings of life,
for mere living itself, for love, for spring and the end
of winter, for morning and the retreat of night. The
mystic in exaltation will at times hear the song of
worship from all animate and all inanimate nature.
The Psalmist knew that truth; it is magnificently
recorded in the Song to Damd and Mr. Hodgson’s Song
of Honour; it is characteristically phrased in Vaughan’s
"Yet stones are deep in admiration,” and "hills and
valleys into singing break”; it is stated with charming
simplicity in the seventeenth-century Hymn of
John Hall:

Yet do the lazy snails no less

The greatness of our Lord confess.

Their ruder voices do as well.

Yes, and the speechless fishes tell.

72

BIRDS IN POETRY

Yet Hall has to remind himself of this truth. He is
rationalizing from the memory of a rare experience,
and it is from the obvious, the undeniable, the every¬
day “happy chorister of air” that he has to start;
those whose song the physical ear never allows us to
forget. It is in David ap Gwlym’s beautiful poem
that their song is compared to a Mass; and the thought
recurs through all our poetry. In the far trills of the
lark in the throbbing of the thrush's throat, we see
a spring of joy and gratitude the more pure, more
certain and spontaneous and courageous, than
anything that comes, except at rare moments, from
a race looking before and after, and consciously
“clutching the inviolable shade.” The moments
would be rarer still were the birds not there for
companionship and example; many of our most
joyous bursts of song have been directly inspired
by them.

73

BIRD-WATCHING

i

T HERE are in our present English Civilization,
tendencies that one must deplore. There are also
tendencies which are elating. It has often been
observed (foreign visitors remarked it even in the
Middle Ages) that the English are fond of the country
and like living in it; the discovery, and early exploita¬
tion, of coal and iron was not their fault. The
Industrial Revolution came suddenly and could not
at once be coped with; but its late consequences are
now being fought. The slums are being countered
with Garden Cities and County Council flats; no
sooner do the garish petrol-stations invade the
villages than a vigorous agitation against them begins;
the plague of rural advertisements is in process of
mitigation; the possessions of the National Trust
greatly increase annually, owing to the widespread
desire for the preservation of solitudes; the C.P.R.E.
has come into existence and saved the upper reaches
of the Thames just when the fate of the lower reaches
threatened to overtake them; the massacre of trees
has produced a general interest in afforestation; and

74

BIRD-WATCHING

there has been a change in the national attitude
towards our "Wild Life” just as the richness and variety
of our “Wild Life” were being threatened. The bittern
and the bustard we have lost; the fens were drained
and the bustard was too large and accessible. The
bittern, at least, has come back now that there are
bird-sanctuaries in East Anglia, and we shall not,
it appears, lose many more. Even with regard to the
common birds there is a perceptible change in the
public attitude. Village children may still "pug” nests
and stone or torture nestlings. But wanton slaughter
is diminishing; the young egg-collector is gradually
being trained to take one egg rather than the whole
clutch; birds are protected by law which used to be
slaughtered as vermin. A growing respect for bird-life
is perceptible, parallel with that feeling for our
botanical heritage which leads the B.B.C. to put
forward reiterated pleas for a discreeter plucking of
wild flowers. Simultaneously, ornithologists have
been changing character.

My own bible about birds is Morris’s book—six
volumes about the birds and three about their nests.
The records of rare birds in this admirable work
make deplorable reading. This—not an actual, but
a typical, entry—may serve as a specimen:

The Lesser Broad-Billed Chuck may perhaps
be classified amongst our British Birds, as three
specimens have been recorded in various parts of

75

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

the country. In 1839 the Rev. R. Jones shot
one at Skipton-under-the-Water, Yorks; in 1840
a second specimen (a female in fine plumage)
was shot by the Rev. W. Smith at Liskeard, in
Cornwall; and last year a male fell to the gun of
my friend Archdeacon Robinson in an oak-wood
at Bedstead, Surrey.

Records, in those early days, were almost all records
of killing. To-day there are a host of observers who
watch birds with enthusiastic affection, never kill
a bird, and would never dream of killing a rare bird.
The modem man who kills a rare bird is not regarded
as the hero of an exploit, but as the perpetrator of an
unpunishable crime. The collectors, the hoarders of
eggs, the staffers of skins are now a furtive race.
The bird-lover now is not a man who shoots a golden
oriole, but a man who saves a kestrel as Mr. Hendy*
saved one, or one who lies in sedges for hours to
photograph shy wild things feeding their gaping
young, or one (like Professor Garstang, whose whist¬
ling and chattering have recently delighted “listeners-
in”) who finds his pleasure in listening to the various
strains in the multitudinous chorus of the birds and
attempting to register them in some sort of musical
and linguistic notation.

*The Lure of Bird Watching „ by E. W. Heady.

76

BIRD-WATCHING

2

The distribution of birds is a very fascinating and
mysterious subject. Hasty observers, because of a
decline in some species in their own neighbourhood,
will often announce that the species is becoming
rare; in another district, meanwhile, the same birds
have been multiplying. The Dartford Warbler is
undoubtedly a rare bird; some observers regard it as
a very rare bird; yet I know a parish not above forty
miles from London where it nests in considerable
numbers every spring. When I was a boy in Devon¬
shire I regarded the yellow-hammer as a bird almost
as common as the sparrow; its eggs, covered with
Arabic inscriptions, were the small change of small
boys. So it was until a few years ago in this same
parish; yet now it is less common here than the black¬
cap; in fact, it is hardly ever seen; the reason conjec¬
tured by the local bird-authority being the decline
in the output of horse-manure. Who can tell what
fluctuations have occurred in the raven population
of these islands? For myself I have only seen ravens
wild on the cliffs of Cornwall; great black things
squawking out through the weaving swarms of crying
gulls, high above the beaches and the serrated foam-
edged rocks on which the shags, black and brownish-
grey, stand immobile. Tame ones I have known in

77

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Western gardens, as sly as the Jackdaw of Rheims;
and a raven has severely bitten me at the Tower of
London—the bird it was that died. So striking a bird
is the raven that it is very prominent in literature;
early-nineteenth-century romantic literature is thick
with ravens. But we cannot be sure that a great many
authors have not written about ravens who never
saw a raven; one suspects that these birds were always
few and far between. Not all birds, moreover, are
observed. We know that many hoopoes are noted
and written about every decade; we cannot be certain
as to how many have flown here, bred here, and gone
away without ever being seen by anyone who would
know a hoopoe from a shrike. Bird-watching is not
a universal pastime; and, with the best of glasses
and the extreme of patience, it is never an easy one.

3

The loveliest pictures of birds that I know are in
Hudson's Far Away and, Long Ago. There is one of
a group of flamingoes and other invaders in a still
water; and one of a flock of little yellow parakeets
settling in a blossom-laden tree. Those scenes were
witnessed in the Argentine seventy years ago; there
are an infinity of pictures to be drawn even under
our more temperate sky. There was once a kingfisher,

78

BIRD-WATCHING

•with a goldfish in his mouth, perched on a leaden
Cupid who sprayed water into an ornamental pond
. . , but that is hardly typical. Flamingoes and king¬
fishers are well enough. But there is one glory of the
sun and another of the moon. A flock of goldfinches;
a pair of nuthatches; a chequered wagtail running and
pausing on a lawn; a blue-tit clambering over a coco¬
nut; a male chaffinch in full panoply; turtle doves
flapping away from a hedge; a crested plover on a
stone; a magpie; a jay: these may be seen any morn¬
ing in any English county, and we need no cockatoos
or humming-birds. The colour of birds’ eggs and the
structure of birds’ nests (most wonderful of all the
chaffinch’s) are not only to be enjoyed by these who
rob the birds. The chemical manufacturers of the
world have been labouring for years to produce a
colour like that of the thrush’s egg: it can be enjoyed,
any spring, at the expense of a brief search in any
hedge. Many of the commonest eggs—thrush's,
sparrow’s, starling’s, hedge-sparrow’s, robin’s—are
amongst the most beautifully coloured: and what
miracles of delicacy, putting the finest porcelains to
shame, are to be found amongst the smaller eggs!

4

Three-quarters of my most vivid recollections of
79

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

birds were stored up in eaxly youth, long before I ever
thought of deliberately going out with field-glasses.
I thought I was merely looking for eggs: peering ahead
at the hedges as the dog-cart jogged along and the
small birds flitted out; parting hollies and diving into
gorse-bushes; letting myself down, projection by pro¬
jection, over cliffs; studiously examining clumps of
reeds on the edges of ponds and streams. I did not
then know, being intent on the nests, how deeply the
impressions of the birds were striking: blue pigeons,
gaudy jays, incessantly-screaming gulls, bright-eyed
thrushes sitting tenaciously on their nests, hosts of
little gaping beaks in a globe of moss, the gay sur¬
rounding songs of the unattacked. The eggs were the
prize and the collection the goal: at least I never
stripped a nest. There, perhaps, lies the secret; medio
tutissimus ibis. Unchecked, the birds would get out
of hand; over-plundered, they would be extinguished.
An awareness of this probably accounts for the fact
that half the most ardent bird-lovers in England are
also eager shots. They will shoot one kind of bird,
which is very common or owes its existence to pre¬
servation, and they will no more think of shooting
another kind than they would think of shooting their
brothers and sisters. They will kill jays and even
magpies, as poachers; but if these vermin (the term is
not mine) were to become scarce they would be as
indignant at the man who shot one as they now are

80

BIRD-WATCHING

at a man who shoots a golden eagle (in England) or
a chough. The Montagu Harrier is vermin m a sense;
he massacres little birds, without a thought of their
rarity; but he is uncommon and the law now protects
him. I confess that some of my own most intimate
experiences with birds have been obtained during
shooting expeditions. It was on one of these last year
that a friend of mine, surmounting a hedge and
suddenly snap-shooting, brought down a nightjar
thinking it was a snipe: the mistake was pardonable,
and all he said was, “The damned fool ought to have
migrated a month ago!” A day’s shooting always
brings one surprises. But there is nothing to equal
an evening’s shooting. Go to a duck-pond in wide
marshes or moors as twilight falls in November or
December. The sun sets, the moon rises; the faint
mists begin to gather. You wait for the duck in total
silence as the light on the water greys to steel and the
barred clouds hang motionless. From a distant wood
an owl hoots; invisible snipe flit mysteriously over
the heather behind one; a flock of plover flashes
momentarily past one’s vision. It darkens still; the
moon is obscured and it is almost too dark to see.
Suddenly, from the direction of the wind, there is a
faint whirring. The birds are unseen; there is a little
splash and then the ghost of a quack. On such a night
whether one shoots and kills or not, the realization
comes over one that this is not merely a world of men,

81

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

but a world of animals who also have their own times
and places and come and go mysteriously on their
own business, thinking nothing of us until, with our
unheralded explosions, we break into their world
as earthquake and lightning break into ours. And
not always calamitously; sometimes as a merciful
release. Yesterday in the lane I came across a young
rook with a damaged trailing wing. He allowed me at
last to capture him; yawned at first, then was re¬
conciled to the stroking hand. I could not bear to
wring his heck, thicker and tougher than a partridge’s:
he was on terms with me and, anthropomorphically,
I envisaged a sense of betrayal in him, poor sturdy
young creature to whom something odd, but (for all
he knew) temporary, had happened, and who had
been taken up by a kind Providence which did not,
apparently, mean to hurt him. I brought him home,
shut him up in a crate while I put the gun together;
let him out to flap across the yard, and then blew him
to bits.

82

FOUR MEN

JAMES ELROY FLECKER. I: The Poems

J AMES ELROY FLECKER was bom in London
(Lewisham) on November 5th, 1884. He was
the eldest of the four children of the late Rev.
W. H. Flecker, D.D., formerly Head Master of
Dean Close School, Cheltenham. After some years
at his father’s school he went in 1901 to Upping¬
ham, proceeding to Trinity College, Oxford, 1902.
He stayed at Oxford until 1907 and then came to
London, teaching for a short time in Mr. Simmons’
school at Hampstead. In 1908 he decided to enter
the Consular Service, and went up to Cambridge
(Caius College) for the tuition in Oriental languages
available there. He was sent to Constantinople in
June 1910, was first taken ill there in August, and in
September returned to England and went to a sana¬
torium in the Cotswolds. He returned to his post,
apparently in perfect health, in March 1911; was
transferred to Smyrna in April; and in May went on
leave to Athens, where he married Miss Helle Skia-
daressi, a Greek lady whom he had met in the preceding
year. He spent three months' holiday in Corfu, and
was sent to Beyrout, Syria, in September 1911. In
December, 1912 he took a month’s leave in England

85

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

and Paris, returning to Beyrout in January 19x3. In
March he again fell ill, and after a few weeks on the
Lebanon (Brumana) he went to Switzerland, where,
acting on his doctor’s advice, he remained for the last
eighteen months of his life. He stayed successively at
Leysin, Montreux, Montana, Locarno, and (May 1914)
Davos, where on January 3rd, 1915, he died. He is
buried in Cheltenham at the foot of the Cotswold Hills.

His published books include:

Verse: The Bridge of Fire (Elkin Matthews,

1907) , Forty-two Poems (Dent, 1911), The Golden
Journey to Samarkand (Goschen, 19x3, now
published by Martin Seeker), and The Old Ships
(Poetry Bookshop, 1915).

Prose: The Last Generation (New Age Press,

1908) , The Grecians (Dent, 1910), The Scholar’s
Italian Grammar (D. Nutt, 1911) and The King
of Alsander (Goschen, 1914, now published by
Allen and Unwin). He left also two unpublished
dramas, Hassan and Don Juan* and a number of
published and unpublished short stories, articles,
and poems.

2

That is the bare outline of Flecker’s life and work.
The present Introduction does not pretend to supply
a “personal memoir,’’ for which materials have not
been collected; and the work of estimating Flecker’s
art and “placing” him in relation to his contemporaries

‘These have since been published, as also a volume of letters.

86

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

may be left to others. But one may usefully give a
few more biographical details and a short analysis
of the poet’s artistic attitude and methods of work.

In person Flecker was tall, with blue eyes, black,
straight hair, and dark complexion. There was a
tinge of the East in his appearance, and his habitual
expression was a curious blend of the sardonic and
the gentle. Until illness incapacitated him he was
physically quite active, but his principal amusement
was conversation, of which he never tired. He felt
acutely the loss of good talk during his years abroad,
in Syria especially. He was sociable, and enjoyed
meeting and talking with crowds of people; but he
had few intimate friends at Oxford, and, after he left
England, little opportunity of making any. One of the
few, Mr. Frank Savery, now of the British Legation,
Berne, sends the following notes:

My acquaintance with him began in January
1901, when he was a lanky, precocious boy of
sixteen, and lasted, with long interruptions, until
his death. His fate took him to the Near East,
mine took me to Germany: for this reason we
never met from 1908 to 1914, though we never
ceased to correspond. Largely because our
intercourse was thus broken, I believe I am better
able to appreciate the changes which his character
underwent in the latter years of his life than those
who never lost sight of him for more than a few
months at a time.

It was at Oxford that I first came to know
87

s

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

him intimately. He was extraordinarily
undeveloped, even for an English Public School
boy, when he first went up in 1902. He already
wrote verses—with an appalling facility that
for several years made me doubt his talent. He
imitated with enthusiasm and without dis¬
crimination, and, the taste in those long-gone
days being for Oscar Wilde’s early verse and
Swinburne’s complacent swing, he turned out a
good deal of decadent stuff, that was, I am
convinced, not much better than the rubbish
written by the rest of his generation at Oxford.
What interested me in Flecker in those days was
the strange contrast between the man—or
rather the boy—and his work. Cultured Oxford
in general, I should add, was not very productive
at that time: a sonnet a month was about the
maximum output of the lights of Balliol. The
general style of literature in favour at the time
did not "lend itself to a generous outpouring.
Hence there was a certain piquancy in the
exuberant flow of passionate verse which issued
from Flecker’s ever-ready pen in spite of his
entire innocence of any experience whatever.

Furthermore, he was a wit—a great wit, I used
to think,but no humorist—and, like most wits, he
was combative. He talked best when someone
baited him. At last it got to be quite the fashion
in Oxford to ask Flecker to luncheon—and
dinner-parties—simply in order to talk. The
sport he afforded was usually excellent. . . .
Looking back on it now, I believe I was right
in thinking that in those days he had no humour
'(there is very little humour in Oxford); nor am
Iso entirely sure that his wit was bad. I had, at
any rate, a growing feeling that, in spite of his
88

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

immaturity and occasional bad taste, he was the
most important of any of ns: his immense
productiveness was, I vaguely but rightly felt,
better and more valuable than our finicky and
sterile good taste.

By 1906 he had developed greatly—largely
thanks to the companionship of an Oxford
friend whom, in spite of long absence and
occasional estrangements, he loved deeply till
the end of his life. Even his decadent poems had
improved: poor as are most of the poems in
The Bridge of Fire, they are almost all above the
level of the Oxford poetry, and there are
occasional verses which forecast some of his
mature work. Thus I still think that the title-
poem itself is a rather remarkable achievement
for a young man and not without a certain
largeness of vision. The mention of this poem
reminds me of an episode which well illustrates
the light-heartedness which at that time dis¬
tinguished the self-styled “lean and swarthy
poet of despair.” I was sitting with him and
another friend in his rooms one day—early in
1906, I thmk—when he announced that he was
going to publish a volume of poems. “What shall
I call it?” he asked. We had made many sug¬
gestions, mostly pointless, and almost all, I
have no doubt, indecent, when Flecker suddenly
exclaimed: “I'll call it The Bridge of Fire, and
I’ll write a poem with that name and put it in
the middle of the book instead of the beginning.
That’ll be original and symbolic too.” We then
debated the not unimportant question of what
The Bridge of Fire would be about. At midnight
we parted, the question still unsettled. Flecker,
however, remarked cheerfully that it did not
89

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

much matter—it was a jolly good title and he'd
easily be able to think of a poem to suit it.

Flecker always cherished a great love for
Oxford: he had loved it as an undergraduate, and
afterwards not even the magic of the Greek seas,
deeply as he felt it, ever made him forget his
first university town. But on the whole I think
that Cambridge, where he went to study Oriental
languages in preparation for his consular career,
did more for him. I only visited him once there
—in November 1908, I think—but I had the
distinct impression that he was more independent
than he had been at Oxford. He was writing the
first long version—that is to say, the third
actual draft—of the King of Alsander. Incident¬
ally he had spoilt the tale, for the time being,
by introducing a preposterous sentimental con¬
clusion, a departure to unknown lands, if I
remember rightly, with the peasant-maid, who
had not yet been deposed, as she was later on,
from her original position of heroine.

And now follow the years in which my know¬
ledge of Flecker is drawn only from a desultory
correspondence. I should like to quote from some
letters he wrote me, but, alas, they are in Munich
with all my books and papers. He wrote to me
at length whenever he had a big literary work
on hand; otherwise an occasional postcard
sufficed, for he was a man who never put either
news or gossip into his letters. I knew of his
marriage; I knew that his literary judgment,
as expressed in his letters and exemplified in his
writings, had improved suddenly and pheno¬
menally. That was all.

At last his health finally collapsed and he came
to Switzerland. It was at Locarno, m May 1914,
90

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

that I saw him again. He was very ill, coughed
continually, and did not, I think, ever go out
during the whole fortnight I spent with him. He
had matured even more than I had expected. . . .

He was very cheerful that spring at Locarno
—cheerful, not extravagantly optimistic, as is
the way of consumptives. I think he hardly
ever mentioned his illness to me, and there was
certainly at that time nothing querulous about
him. His judgment was very sound, not only
on books but also on men. He confessed that
he had not greatly liked the East—always
excepting, of course, Greece—and that his
intercourse with Mohammedans had led him to
find more good in Christianity than he had
previously suspected. I gathered that he had
liked his work as Consul, and he once said to
me that he was proud of having been a good
busmess-like official, thereby disposing, in his
case at any rate, the time-honoured conception
of the poet as an unpractical dreamer. He was
certainly no mere dreamer at any period of his
life; he appreciated beauty with extraordinary
keenness, but, like a true poet, he was never
contented with mere appreciation. He was
determined to make his vision as dear to others
as it was to himself.

I saw Flecker once more, in December 1914.
He was already visibly dying, and at times
growing weakness numbed his faculties. But he
was determined to do two things—to complete
his poem. The Burial in England, and to put
his business affairs into the hands of a competent
literary agent. The letters and memoranda on
the latter subject which he dictated to me were
admirably lucid, and I remember that, when I
9i

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

came to read them through afterwards, I found
there was hardly a word which needed changing.

One evening he went through the Burial line
by line with Mrs. Flecker and myself. He had
always relied greatly on his wife’s taste, and I
may state with absolute certainty that the only
two persons who ever really influenced him in
literary matters were the Oxford friend I have
already mentioned and the lady whose devotion
prolonged his life, and whose acute feeling for
literature helped to a great extent to confirm him
in his lofty ideals of artistic perfection.

Although he never really finished the longer
version of the Burial which he had projected,
the alterations and additions he made that
evening—"Toledo-wrought neither to break nor
bend” was one of the latter—were in the main
improvements and in no way suggested that his
end was so near. To me, of course, that poem
must always remain intolerably sad, but, as I
re-read it the other day, I asked myself whether
the casual reader would feel any trace of the
“mattrass grave” on which it was wntten.
Candidly I do not think that even the sharpest
of critics would have known, if he had not been
told, that half the lines were written within a
month of the author’s death.

His letters, as is remarked above, were generally
business-like and blunt. I have found a few to my¬
self: they are almost all about his work, with here and
there a short, exclamatory eulogy on some other
writer. He observes, in December 1913, that a journal
which had often published him had given The Golden

92

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

Journey “an insolent ten-line review with a batch of
nincompoops”; then alternately he is better and
writing copiously, or very ill and not capable of a
word. In one letter he talks of writing on Balkan
Politics and Italy in Albania; in another of trans¬
lating some wax-poetry of Paul DeroulMe’s. Another
time he is even thinking of "having a bang at the
Cambridge Local Examination . . . with a whack in it
at B. Shaw.” Then in November 1914 he says: “I have
exhausted myself writing heroic great war-poems.”
He might comprehensibly have been in low spirits,
dying there in a dismal and deserted “health resort”
among the Swiss mountains, with a continent of war-
zones cutting him off from all chance of seeing friends.
But he always wrote cheerfully, even when desper¬
ately ill. The French recovery filled him with en¬
thusiasm; he watched the Near Eastern tangle with
the peculiar interest of one who knew the peoples
involved; and in one delicate and capricious piece of
prose, published in a weekly in October, he recalled
his own experiences of warfare. He had had glimpses
of the Turco-Italian War: Italian shells over Beyrout
(“Unforgettable the thunder of the guns shaking the
golden blue of the sky and sea while not a breath
stirred the palm-trees, not a cloud moved on the
swan-like snows of Lebanon”) and a "scrap” with the
Druses, and the smoke and distant rumble of the
battle of Lemnos, “the one effort of the Turks to

93

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

secure the mastery of the iEgean.” These were his
excitmg memories:

To think that it was with cheerful anecdotes
like these that I had hoped, a white-haired
elder, to impress my grandchildren! Now there’s
not a peasant from Picardy to Tobolsk but
will cap me with tales of real and frightful
tragedy. What a race of deep-eyed and thought¬
ful men we shall have in Europe—now that all
those millions have been baptized in fire!

Then in the first week of January 1915, he died. I
cannot help remembering that I first heard the news
over the telephone, and that the voice which spoke
was Rupert Brooke’s.

3

Flecker began writing verse early, and one of his
existing note-books contains a number of poems
written whilst he was at Uppingham. The original
poems composed, at school and at Oxford, up to the
age of twenty are not very remarkable. There is
nothing unusual in some unpublished lines written
on the school chapel bell at the end of his last term,
and little in Dance’s Cradle-Song for Perseus (1902).
A typical couplet is

Waste of the waves! 0 for dawn! For a long low
level of shore!

Better be shattered and slain on the reef than
drift evermore.

94

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

Both rhythm and language are Tennysonian, and the
alliterative Tennysonianism at the end of the first
line is repeated in a Song of 1904 beginning:

Long low levels of land

And sighing surges of sea,

Mountain and moor and strand
Part my beloved from me.

A Dream-Song of 1904 is equally conventional, though
in the lines

Launch the galley, sailors bold,

Prowed with silver, sharp and cold.

Winged with silk and oared with gold,

may be seen the first ineffective attempt to capture
an image that in various forms haunted Flecker to
the end of his life. But the most numerous and, on
the whole, the best of his early poems are translations.
And this is perhaps significant, as indicating that he
began by being more interested in his art than in
himself. Translating, there was a clearly defined
problem to be attacked; difficulties of expression could
not be evaded by changing the thing to be expressed;
and there was no scope for fluent reminiscence or a
docile pursuit at the heels of the rhyme. In 1900-1,
aet. 16-17, he was translating Catullus and the Per¬
vigilium Veneris, and amongst the poets he attacked
in the next few years were Propertius, Muretus, Heine,
Bierbaum, of whose lyrics he translated several, one
of which is given in this volume. This habit of trans-

95

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

lation, so excellent as a discipline, he always continued,
amongst the poets from whom he made versions being
Meleager, Goethe, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, H.
de Regnier, Samain, Jean Moreas, and Paul Fort. In
the last year or two his translations were mostly made
from the French Parnassians. What drew him to
them was his feeling of especial kinship with them
and his belief that they might be a healthy influence
on English verse.

He explained his position in the preface to The
Golden Journey to Samarkand. The theory of the
Pamassianshad for him, he said, "a unique attraction.”
“A careful study of this theory, however old-fashioned
it may by now have become in France, would, I am
convinced, benefit English critics and poets, for both
our poetic criticism and our poetry are in chaos.”
Good poetry had been written on other theories and
on no theories at all, and “no worthless writer will
be redeemed by the excellence of the poetic theory
he may chance to hold.” But "that a sound theory
can produce sound practice and exercise a beneficent
effect on writers of genius” had been repeatedly proved
in the history of the Pamasse.

“The Parnassian School” (he continued) “was a
classical reaction against the perfervid sentimentality
and extravagance of some French Romantics. The
Romantics in France, as in England, had done their
powerful work and infinitely widened the scope and

96

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

enriched the language of poetry. It remained for the
Parnassians to raise the technique of their art to a
height which should enable them to express the
subtlest ideas in powerful and simple verse. But the
real me aning of the term Parnassian may be best
understood from considering what is definitely not
Parnassian. To be didactic like Wordsworth, to write
dull poems of unwieldy length, to bury like Tennyson
or Browning poetry of exquisite beauty in monotonous
realms of vulgar, feeble, or obscure versifying, to over¬
lay fine work with gross and irrelevant egoism like
Victor Hugo, would be abhorrent, and rightly so, to
members of this school. On the other hand, the finest
work of many great English poets, especially Milton,
Keats, Matthew Arnold, and Tennyson, is written in
the same tradition as the work of the great French
school: and one can but wish that the two latter poets
had had something of a definite theory to guide them
in self-criticism. Tennyson would never have pub¬
lished Locksley Hall and Arnold might have refrained
from spoiling his finest sonnets by astonishing caco¬
phonies.”

There were, he naturally admitted, "many splendid
forms of passionate or individual poetry” which were
not Parnassian, such as the work of Villon, Browning,
Shelley, Rossetti, and Verlaine, "too emotional, in¬
dividual, or eccentric” to have Parnassian affinities:

97

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

The French Parnassian has a tendency to use
traditional forms and even to employ classical sub¬
jects. His desire in writing poetry is to create beauty:
his inclination is toward a beauty somewhat statuesque.
He is apt to be dramatic and objective rather than intimate.
The enemies of the Parnassians have accused them
of cultivating unemotional frigidity and upholding
an austere view of perfection. The unanswerable
answers to all criticism are the works of H6r6dia,
Leconte de Lisle, Samain, Henri de Regnier, and Jean
Moreas. Compare the early works of the latter poet,
written under the influence of the Symbolists, with
his Stances if you would see what excellence of theory
can do when it has genius to work on. Read the works
of H6redia if you would understand how conscious
and perfect artistry, far from stifling inspiration,
fashions it into shapes of unimaginable beauty. . . .
At the present moment there can be no doubt that
English poetry stands in need of some such saving
doctrine to redeem it from the formlessness and the
didactic tendencies which are now in fashion. As for
English criticism, can it not be learnt from the Par¬
nassian, or any tolerable theory of poetic art, to
examine the beauty and not the ‘message’ of poetry.

“It is not” (he said) “the poet’s business to save
man’s soul but to make it worth saving.. . . However,
few poets have written with a clear theory of art for

98

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

art's sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has
been, or can be judged;—and rightly so if we remember
that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees
in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservatives
or revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion
that inspires them.”

His own volume had been written “with the single
intention of creating beauty.”

Though many of his own poems show the “tendency
to use traditional forms and even to employ classical
subjects,” Flecker did not, it must be observed,
dogmatize as to choice of subject or generalize too
widely. The Parnassians were not everything to him,
nor were those older poets who had resembled them.
It was as a corrective that he recommended the
study of this particular group to his English contem-
pories. It is arguable that most of his English con¬
temporaries—one might instance Bridges and Yeats—
are anything but chaotic, extravagant, careless, or
didactic. References to the “latest writer of manly
tales in verse” and “formlessness” might certainly be
followed up; but formlessness and moralizing are not
so universal amongst modem English writers as
Flecker, making out his case, implied. It does not
matter; there is not even any necessity to discuss the
French Parnassians. Flecker had an affinity with
them. He disliked the pedestrian and the wild; he
did not care either to pile up dramatic horrors or to

99

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

burrow in the recesses of his own psychological or
physiological structure. He liked the image, vivid,
definite in its outline: he aimed everywhere at clarity
and compactness. His most fantastic visions are solid
and highly coloured and have hard edges. His imagin¬
ation rioted in images, but he kept it severely under
restraint, lest the tropical creepers should stifle the
trees. Only occasionally, in his later poems, a reader
may find the language a little tumultuous and the
images heaped so profusely as to produce an effect
of obscurity and, sometimes, of euphuism. But these
poems, it must be remembered, are precisely those
which the poet himself did not finally revise. Some
of them he never even finished: The Burial in England,
as it appears, is the best that can be done with a con¬
fusing collection of manuscripts, thoughts and second
thoughts. He was, as he claimed, constitutionally
a classic; but the term must not be employed too
rigidly- He was, in fact, like Flaubert, both a classic
and a romantic. He combined, like Flaubert, a
romantic taste for the exotic, the gorgeous, and the
violent, with a dislike for the romantic egoism, loose¬
ness of structure, and turgidity of phrase. His ob¬
jectivity, in spite of all his colour, was often very
marked; but there was another trend in him. Though
he never wrote slack and reasonless vers Hires, the
more he developed the more he experimented with
new rhythms; and one of his latest and best lyrics

TOO

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

was the intensely personal poem Stillness. He ran
no special kind of subject too hard, and had no refined
and restricted dictionary of words. A careful reader,
of course, may discover that there are words, just as
there are images, which he was especially fond of
using. There are colours and metals, blue and red,
silver and gold, which are present everywhere in his
work; the progresses of the sun (he was always a
poet of the sunlight rather than a poet of the moon¬
light) were a continual fascination to him; the images
of Fire, of a ship, and of an old white-bearded man
recur frequently in his poems. But he is anything
but a monotonous poet, in respect either of forms,
subjects, or language. It was characteristic of him
that he should be on his guard against falling into
a customary jargon. Revising The Welsh Sea and
finding the word “golden,” which he felt he and others
had overdone, used three times (and not ineffectively)
in it, he expunged the adjective outright, puttmg
“yellow” in the first two places and “slow green” in
the third. His preface on Pamassianism was whole¬
hearted; but any one who interpreted some of his
sentences as implying a desire to restrict either the
poet’s field or his expression to a degree that might
justifiably be termed narrow would be in error. In
one respect, perhaps, his plea was a plea for widening;
he did not wish to exclude the classical subject. And
his declaration that poetry should not be written to

ioi

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

carry a message but to embody a perception of beauty
did not preclude a message in the poetry. His last
poems, including The Burial in England, may be
restrained but are scarcely impersonal, may not be
didactic but are none the less patriotic. He need not,
in fact, be pinned to every word of his preface separ¬
ately. The drift of the whole is evident. He himself,
like other people, would not have been where he was
but for the Romantic movement; but he thought that
English verse was in danger of decomposition. He
merely desired to emphasise the dangers both of
prosing and of personal paroxysms; and, above all,
to insist upon careful craftsmanship.

This careful craftsmanship had been his own aim
from the beginning. “Libellum arido modo pumice
expolitum” is a phrase in the first of the Catullus
epigrams he translated at school; and whilst the
content of his poetry showed a steadily growing
strength of passion and thought, its form was sub¬
jected to, though it never too obviously “betrayed,”
an increasingly assiduous application of pumice-stone
and file. His poems were written and re-written before
they were printed; some were completely remodelled
after their first publication; and he was continually
returning to his old poems to make alterations in
single words or lines. His changes at their most
extensive may be seen in the development of The
Bridge of Fire, in that of Narcissus, and in that of

102

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

Tenebris Interlucentum. As first published this ran:

Once a poor song-bird that had lost her way
Sang down in hell upon a blackened bough.

Till all the lazy ghosts remembered how
The forest trees stood up against the sky.

Then suddenly they knew that they had died,
Hearing this music mock their shadowed land;
And someone there stole forth a timid hand
To draw a phantom brother to his side.

In the second version, also of eight lines, each line is
shorter by two syllables:

A linnet who had lost her way
Sang on a blackened bough in Hell,

Till all the ghosts remembered well
The trees, the wind, the golden day.

At last they knew that they had died
When they heard music m that land,

And some one there stole forth a hand
To draw a brother to his side.

The details of this drastic improvement are worth
studying. The treatment of the first line is typical.
The general word “song-bird” goes, the particular
word “linnet” is substituted; and the superfluous
adjective is cut out, like several subsequent ones.
Gravis Dulcis Immutabilis was originally written as a
sonnet; the Invitation to a young but Learned Friend
was considerably lengthened after an interval of years;
and the poet’s own copies of his printed volumes are
promiscuously marked with minor alterations and

103

H

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

re-alterations. One of the most curious is that bj
which the sexes are transposed in the song printec
first as The Golden Head and then as The Queen’i
Song. The last four lines of the first stanza originally
ran:

I then might touch thy face.

Delightful Maid,

And leave a metal grace,

A graven head.

This was altered into:

I then might touch thy face.

Delightful boy,

And leave a metal grace,

A graven joy.

The reasons for the alteration are evident. The sounds
“ace” and “aid” are uncomfortably like each other;
the long, lingering “oy” makes a much better ending
of the stanza than the sound for which it was sub¬
stituted; and the false parallelism of “metal grace”
and “graven head” was remedied by eliminating the
concrete work and replacing it by another abstract
one on the same plane as “grace.” Such a sub¬
stitution of the abstract for the concrete word, sound
enough here, is very rare with him; normally the
changes were the other way round. He preferred the
exact word to the vague; he was always on his guard
against the "pot-shot” and the complaisant epithet
which will fit in anywhere. With passionate deliber-

104

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

ation he clarified and crystallized his thoughts and
intensified his pictures.

He found, as has been said, kinship in the French
Parnassians: and though he approached them rather
as a comrade than as a disciple, traces of their language,
especially perhaps that of de Regnier and H6redia,
may be found in his later verse. A reading of Heredia
is surely evident in the Gates of Damascus: in

Beyond the towns, an isle where, bound, a naked
giant bites the ground:

The shadow of a monstrous wing looms on his
back: and still no sound

and the stanzas surrounding it. An influence still
more marked is that of Sir Richard Burton. Flecker,
when still a boy, had copied out the whole of his long
Kasidah, and its rhythms and turns of phrase are
present in several of his Persian poems. It was in the
Kasidah that Flecker found Aflatun and Aristu, and
the refrain of "the tinkling of the camel bells” of
which he made such fine use in The Golden Journey.
The verse-form of the Kasidah is, of course, not
Burton’s, it is Eastern; and the use Flecker made of
it suggests that infusion of Persian and Arabic forms
into English verse might well be a fertilizing agent.
He always read a great deal of Latin verse; Latin
poetry was as much to him as Greek history, myth,
and landscape. Francis Thompson, Baudelaire, and
Swinburne were all early "influences.” He learnt

105

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

from them, but he was seldom mastered by them. He
did not imitate their rhythms or borrow their thought.
The Swinbumian Anapasts, written in a weak moment,
were an exception. In Flecker’s printed copy the
title has first, in a half-hearted effort to save the poem
whilst repudiating its second-hand music and in¬
sincere sentiments, been changed to Decadent Poem:
and then a thick pencil has been drawn right through
it. From his English contemporaries Flecker was de¬
tached. He admired some of them—W. B. Yeats,
A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, and others; and
with some he was friendly, especially Rupert Brooke,
with whom he had been at Cambridge. Of Mr. Chester¬
ton’s Flying Inn he writes to me in January 1914: “A
magnificent book—his masterpiece; and the humorous
verse splendid.” But his physical absence, first in the
Levant and then in Switzerland, in itself prevented
him from getting into any literary set, and his tem¬
perament and opinion of current tendencies was such
that, even had he lived m England, he would probably
have escaped "infection” by any school or individual.
Flecker’s vision of the world was his own; his dreams
of the East and Greece were bom with him. He knew
the streets of Stamboul and the snows of Lebanon,
and the caravans departing for Bagdad and the
gates of Damascus, and the bazaars heaped with
grapes and "coffee-tables botched with pearl and
little beaten brass-ware pots”; but his hankering long

106

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

antedated his travels. There is an unpublished poem
written when he was twenty in which voices call him
“to white iEgean isles among the foam” and the
“dreamy painted lands” of the East. In the same
year he translated Propertius I, xx. His lifelong
love of Greek names is shown by his enunciation of
them even then:

But Oreithyia’s sons have left him now:

Hylas, most foolish boy, where goest thou?

He is going to the Hamadryades,

To them devoted—I will tell you how.

There’s a dear well beneath Arganthos’ screes.
Wherein Bithynian Naiads take their ease.

By leafage overarched, where apples hide
Whilst the dew kisses them on the unknown trees.

This poem is dated 1904. It is the year of the Glion
stanzas, the sonnet on Francis Thompson, and (pro¬
bably) the fragmentary Ode on Shelley. It is the year,
that is, when Flecker began to show marks of maturity.

Whatever may be said about the Collected Poems
there are few which are not characteristic of the poet.
His rigorous conception of his art and his fidelity to
hisownvision preventedmanylapses, and he suppressed
those which he did commit. One unrepresentative
phrase there is which he seized on to give a very un¬
true description of him. In the Envoy to The Bridge
of Fire he speaks of himself as "the lean and swarthy
poet of despair.” It meant nothing; the first poem in
the same book, with its prodamation that "the most

107

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

surprising songs” must still be sung, and its challenge
to youth to turn to “the old and fervent goddess”
whose eyes are “the silent pools of Light and Truth”
is far more characteristic of him, first and last. “Lean
and swarthy poet” may stand; but not of despair.
The beauty of the world was a continual intoxication
to him; he was full, as a man, if not as a poet, of
enthusiasms, moral and material, economic, educa¬
tional, and military. Neither the real nor the spurious
disease of pessimism is present in his verse and in his
last autumn he was writing, with an energy that some¬
times physically exhausted him, poems that blazed
with courage, hope, and delight. Like his Old Battle¬
ship he went down fighting .

JAMES ELROY FLECKER. II: Hassan

W HEN Hassan, nearly eight years after its author’s
death, was published, it was generally agreed
that Flecker’s friends had not exaggerated its merits as
a stage-play. The one reservation which some of the
critics made was that the latter part of it might be
found in the theatre unbearably painful. Hassan began
as a farce, and the development of Flecker’s first idea
into the play as we have it is interesting in itself and
also as an example of the strange processes that go on
in the minds of artists and above all perhaps, in the
minds of artists who are writing for the stage.

The origin of the play—I am indebted to the poet’s
widow for this information—was as follows. On enter¬
ing the Consular Service, it will be remembered.
Flecker went first to Constantinople and then to
Beirout in Syria. From June to August 1911, he
spent three months’ leave in Corfu, where he occupied
himself chiefly in working for the Consular examin¬
ations in Turkish. He was in good health and his
spirits were light; the scenery was beautiful and life
seemed easy. Hewroteagooddeal. “In the cottage where
we lived,” writes Mrs. Flecker, “he used to spend long
hours in the garden beneath a tall orange-tree, sitting

109

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

in a deep armchair, certainly a relic of the Englis]
occupation, watching, pen m hand, a small wood
worm, a little brown hooded hermit that lived in tb
arm of the chair, come out of his den and set to piero
a new hole with his saw-beak.” The poems he wrob
there included Yasmin, Saadabad, The Hamman Name
The Golden Journey, In Phceacia, and Oak and Olive
Amongst the Turkish books he read was a smal
volume of farcical plays. One of these he translated
It related the adventures of one Hassan, a simple anc
credulous man, whose friends amused themselves bj
playing practical jokes upon him with the aid of a
Hebrew magician. The magician struck Flecker’s
fancy and he sketched a short farce in which Zachar-
iah the Jew and his philtres were the centre of interest.
The manuscript no longer exists. The manner of it
may be deduced from the opening of Hassan. Flecker
had been reading with great delight Dr. Mardrus’s
French translation of the Arabian Nights: the lines
inscribed on the title-page are an example of Mardrus’s
direct style and of the spirit in which Flecker con¬
ceived his comedy. There was a woman in the farce
named Yasmin; and soon alter he had written this
little play he wrote Yasmin: a Ghazel, the lovely song
which now appears in Hassan but which was originally
composed without any reference to a dramatic settmg.
The name had suggested the song, the song suggested
a play: for Flecker next thought of writing a three-act

no

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

comedy in which Yasmin was to be the chief feminine
character. About the same time he wrote “A Diwan
of the West,” the poem pubhshed later -under the
title “Prologue,” in which the Golden Journey to
Samarkand first appears. In July this three-act
comedy was sent to London to be typed, and the
first act of the draft is before me as I write. It is
covered with scrawls, for it became the basis of the
ultimate play; and on the title-page the words "A
Comedy in Three Acts” are scratched out and “A
Play in Five Acts” substituted, the same substitution
being made for "A Farce” on the next page. Here is
the whole of this second title-page as it originally
stood.

THE STORY OF HASSAN OF BAGDAD AND
HOW HE CAME TO MAKE THE GOLDEN
JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND.

A Farce.

“And he laughed so, he fell back upon his
bottom.”

{Arabian Nights.)

“He was seized with inextinguishable laughter.”

{English translation of the same.)

INTRODUCTION

The Caliph Haroun al Raschid.

Jafar, his Vizier.

Masrar, his Executioner.

Ishak, his Singer and Companion.

Hassan, a Confectioner.

Selim, a friend of his.

hi

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Zachariah, a Jew Magician.

Tulip, a Negro Boy.

Yasmin, a widow Woman.

Splendour, a Lady.

Sugar Cane, )

Palm-Branch, rher Maids.

Myrtle Blossom. J

Some of these characters disappeared before the
final version was reached: Rafi and Pervaneh, around
whose story the later play was to centre, are not here.
The setting for the first scene was as it stands. Much
of the original dialogue has been retained. The
play opened as at present, but the conversation was
between Hassan and Yakub, “his friend, stubbly
beard, about same age, similar costume.” Selim
came in later; the final play gives Selim all Yakub’s
remarks _as_ well as his own, one “friend” serving
instead of two friends.

Zachariah fthe Jew, in the play as we have it, never
appears on thu stage: Selim merely recounts his feats
and goes off to get a philtre from him. In the original
comedy Selim' [fetches Zachariah, “a tall bearded
individual in a flowing gown embroidered with signs
of the Zodiac and a square hat.” The Jew asks an
outrageous price for his potion; Hassan cannot pay it.

Hassan. Woe is me. For if I sold all my
possessions, my shop and my bed and my carpet
and my new sugar boiler, that boileth swiftly,
I could not amass one-fiftieth of that sum. Is
there no help, 0 Master, for the children ofthepoor?

’112

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

Selim. O Venerable Zachariah, let me plead
for my friend, for is it not written:

Do not shut the cupboard door:

Give your pieces to the poor.

Give them generously, or.

When you lose your little store
You may bitterly deplore
That you shut that cupboard door.

Zachariah. My son, the honey of your
eloquence has sweetened the acrimony of your
resolution. 0 bom under an unhappy star,
listen. For twenty pieces of gold, for twenty
pieces only I will brew thy mistress a potion
of black magic that shall bring her running to
thy bed: and there, and thereupon thou shalt
know the three delights of Paradise, which are
Approach/ Fulfilment and Renewal.

Selim (to Hass an). His mercy streams to¬
wards you like the splendour of the morning.
Give Allah the praise, my son, and me the credit
and him the dinars.

Hassan. Eywallah! Twenty dinars.

Selim (in scorn). Eywallah! Twenty dinars!
Twenty dinars from the Prince of Passion!
The price of a small cow for the love of Leila.

Hassan. Eywallah! Twenty dinars is a
monster sum for a very poor man. Complete
your generosity, 0 master of miracles, and turn
not my day to darkness for that which for you
is a little and for me a lot.

Zachariah. Twenty dinars, O parer of nut¬
megs, dost thou imagine I desire thy twenty
dinars? They would not pay me for the bottle.
But it is a law of magic that the philtre will not
work for him who makes no sacrifice.

113

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Hassan is sobered, declines to make the purchase
and expresses doubts about the efficacy of the remedy.
“Beware, Hassan,” remarks Selim, “he may change
thee into an ass and beat you round the city.”
Zachariah retires in dignity and telling Selim to
bring Hassan to his house next day, when “by the
God of Jacob I will make him fall flat on his belly in
amazement and stupefaction ... I dme with the
Caliph, Farewell.” Yasmin knocks on the door as in
the present text, and the rest of the act has been
little altered.

No more survives. During his sojourn in Syria,
Flecker often thought of turning the rather crude
comedy into something more elaborate. Apart from
everything else, the old light fantasia was no longer
to his mood. The burning sky of the East threw
everything into hard relief; the human world around
him was pitilessly real, his nerves were on edge and he
felt estranged. His health broke down; he went to
the H6tel Belvedere at Leysin; and there, in enforced
leisure, he took up Hassan again with extraordinary
energy and passion. The play as we have it, in fact,
was composed amid the horrors of Alpine health-
resorts, where hundreds of invalids are crowded
together in hideous buildings under a glare as crude
as that of the East. It expressed a mood which was
engendered by cruel realities. In Hassan Flecker
found an outlet for his thoughts; a refuge he sometimes

114

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

found in the pure and tranquil beauty of his lyrics
of this period, such as The Blue Noon and The Old
Ships. In four or five weeks of July and August
1913, the play was completely remodelled, and most
of what we now possess was written, and the "Golden
Journey” was appended as epilogue. In the earlier
play there had been a bare mention of a slave-girl
Leila who had been stolen from the King of the
Beggars for the Caliph's harem. Flecker’s imagination
fastened on this girl and this episode, no doubt
lightly invented in the beginning, and there came
into being all the story of Rafi and Pervaneh, and in
that story an image of the immense cruelty and cour¬
age and beauty of life, a tragic vision that demanded
and indeed compelled all the deepest sincerity of the
poet’s nature for its embodiment. When the play
was finished it was seen by one or two actor-managers
and ultimately reached Mr. Basil Dean, then sub¬
director to Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s. Mr.
Dean asked Flecker to shorten it for the stage. The
request found Flecker and his wife at Montana, above
the Rhone Valley. The poet had a bad relapse at
Christmas 1913, and spent nearly three months in
bed, during which time he cut down his text with
unsparing bravery. In March 1914 he went to Locarno
and in May to Davos, where the work of revision was
proceeded with and a scenario written, embodying
various changes for the stage version.

115

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Towards the end of 19x4, after the outbreak of the
war, he received from Mr. Dean a proposed stage-
version. He was reassured to find that several oi
his cuts had been reinstated and especially delighted
that the ghost-scene, which he had feared no produce:
would tolerate, was thought possible. In detail he
was only able to examine the first act; but he was
pleased at the respectful handling of his text.

The manuscript, like all Flecker’s manuscripts, is
a mass of corrections. Almost every sentence has
been amended—his alterations were invariably im¬
provements—and several long episodes have been
completely scrapped. These, however good, all went
with excellent reason; the play would be the worse
were any of them restored. The scene in Rafi’s house
has been very much reduced; both in large and in
little, Flecker’s compressions, his squeezings out of
water from sentence and page, are admirable, brisk¬
ness being gained with every change. The first scene
of the next act has also been drastically cut, good
but too ruminative conversation between Hassan
and the Caliph being sacrificed. One example may
be given of a passage as it was (though this after
many verbal alterations) and as it is. Certain sen¬
tences ran thus:

Caliph. * Surely you are of gentle birth and
do not know your true origin. For how should
a confectioner acquire the art of verse. Wherefore
should a confectioner decorate his wall with a

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

Bokhara caxpet. In gems and miniatures and
broidered silks I tested you at the Palace and
you were surely a connoisseur. But never have
I seen a man like you for poetry and carpets.
When you tread on a carpet, you drop your eyes
to earth to catch the pattern; and when you hear
a poem, you raise your eyes to the stars to hear
the tune.

Hassan. No mystery. Master, attended thy
servant’s birth. My father was a confectioner,
and his father too. If thou doubtest, look at me.
Also have I the stature, the grace, the outline
of nobility?

Caliph. But whence your poetiy—and
whence your carpets? Have you had a great
teacher?

Hassan. Master, I have not sat at the feet
of the wise nor sucked honey from the lips of
philosophers. But as for Poetry, I have learnt
to read and I have loved to hear.

In the final version for print all this was brought
down to:

Caliph. What a man you are for poetry and
carpets! When you tread on a carpet, you drop
your eyes to earth to catch the pattern; and when
you hear a poem, you raise your eyes to heaven
to hear the time. Whoever saw a confectioner
like this! When did you learn poetry, Hassan of
my heart?

Hassan. In that great school, the Market
of Bagdad. . . .

The scene in Hassan’s pavilion was longer to the
extent of an amusing episode. Hassan had his own

117

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Bokhara carpet brought to him from his house;
its modest beauty did not blend with the gorgeousness
of the Caliph’s presents, but Hassan fought down
objections with “Roll up the Isfahani. What is
harmony of colours to the presence of a friend?”
A long cut in the great Palace scene lopped a strand
from the plot. As the play stands, Sehm is never seen
again after his disgraceful triumph over Hassan on
Yasmin’s balcony; we become well acquainted with
him in the first Act and then he vanishes. Probably,
in the original comedy, he remained an important
character throughout; but only the opening scenes
of the original comedy remain. There was no natural
place for Selim in the later scenes of the play that
ultimately grew out of the comedy; but Flecker did
originally bring him in. He made him join the Beg¬
gars’ rising and, in the Caliph’s Hall, appeal to Hassan
to obtain pardon for him. The Caliph gave Hassan
the opportunity should he choose to take it; and
Hassan, arguing with himself that it was unfair to
the other doomed Beggars that one of their number
should escape their fate, especially a rascal like Selim,
refused to redeem him with the necessary word.
Later on, this weighed on his conscience and the know¬
ledge that he had sent an old friend to his doom made
him wretched. The whole of this incident Flecker
excised. He was probably aware that he had invented
it merely in order to bring Selim in again and add

118

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

another complication to the plot; he must certainly
have realised that it weakened the appeal of Hassan to
our sympathies and that he had loaded Hassan with
enough tragedy without that; he may even have been
doubtful whether the Hassan of his creation would
have acted thus either from frigid logic or from long-
cherished anger. At all events many pages of effective
writing were struck out at a blow and the play
greatly clarified and strengthened as a result. One
more convolution of the plot was struck out. There
was a passage in which the Caliph, at the last moment
before the torture and death of Rafi and Pervaneh,
told Hassan that if he really was so agonised by their
sufferings, he could reprieve them by volunteering
to take their place, thereby securing an immortality
in poetry. Flecker wisely cut this out, knowing that it
must impair the terrible grandeur of his direct
conclusion, and that the rejection by Hassan of so
intolerable an alternative would throw no new light
whatever on his character, whilst d im i ni shi n g, un¬
fairly as it were, its attractiveness.

Flecker himself (writing to Mr. Frank Savery) said:
“The part of the play that thrills me most is the
ghosts—and don’t you think the effect of the poem at
the end should be grand. I love my ghosts—I suppose
because my poetic soul loves the picturesque in the
play above everything.” That is how he saw it when
standing outside it and visualizing it as a theatrical

1x9

1

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

construction: and certainly in Hassan there are to
be found some of the loveliest and most terrible
spectacles which an English poet has ever imagined
for the stage. But if, thinking of his achievement of
beauty for the senses, of that realization in colour
and sound which he was never to see and hear, he
talked of the grandeur of such effects, he knew well
enough that into the tragic issue of his play he had
poured “exultations, agonies,” passionate love and
aspiration, torments which he was brave enough to
face even if he could not master them: that he had
registered here a struggle with the inexorable, and
such dreams of the spirit as ring in Pervaneh’s cry
after her appalling and magnificent choice: “Hark!
Hark!—down the spheres—the Trumpeter of Immor¬
tality! ‘Die lest I be shamed, lovers. Die, lest I
be shamed.' ”

120

HENRY WHEELER

I N a letter which he wrote me on January 16th,
1919, from Dublin, Henry Wheeler said:

If you get to the Bibliographical Society
General Meeting on Monday, and if there should
be any announcement thereat as to the printing
of the Wadham Catalogue, will you let me have
a line? If nothing is said, I shan’t expect to hear,
as I know how furiously busy you are.

Whether or not anything was said on this occasion
I have forgotten. At all events, the Society, which had
been for some time considering the publication of his
work, finally decided that it could not, the Catalogue
being of too "local” an interest. Within a few months
Wheeler was dead. Now, years later, means have
at last been found for the publication of the only
enduring work of a man who, had he not died in
youth, would have shown himself both brilliant and
sagacious, not only as a bibliographer. He had,
for instance, a great picaresque book in him. Not
one of his friends will doubt this; nobody else, perhaps,
could be expected to believe it.

Henry Albert Wheeler was bom at Eastleigh, Hants,
on September 20th, 1887, and went up to Wadham

121

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

College, Oxford, in 1906. At Oxford, like many men
of literary proclivities before and since, lie read more
•widely in general literature than in books useful for
examination purposes—though he worked hard
enough to take a Second Class in Greats and to pass
into the Home Civil Service at the end of his Oxford
career. I did not know him then, but knowledge of
him later, combined with conversations with himself
and his friends, make it easy enough for me to form
a picture of his undergraduate life. Never at any
time was he a man of numerous semi-friendships.
He rowed, and knew the people in his boat; beyond
that, his friendships were few but deep, and mostly
with men of an original turn of mind and unconven¬
tional habits. At Oxford, as later, he had an enormous
acquaintance amongst people of a social class lower
than his own. The University regulations were not
made to fit such a man. There was not a single
tavern in Oxford or the neighbourhood, however small
and secluded, where he had not repaired now and
again, a tall, dark, Scholar-Gypsy; later on one could
go with him to the most curious places in Oxford, in
London, and on the Thames water-side, up-river, and
find that he always knew the landlords and frequen¬
ters, male and female—hawkers, bookmakers, game-
keepers, gypsies, boat-builders, retired sea captains,
all the sort of characters in whose conversation can
be found raciness, popular wisdom, and that sort of

123

HENRY WHEELER

candour which is killed by the good manners of the
superior ranks of society. With such people Wheeler
was always instantly on good terms; he seldom did
much of the talking, having a slight stammer, being
very modest, and being also intensely curious about
the workings of the human mind, and always on the
look-out for amusing things which would entertain
himself and his friends later. He contrived to be a
kind of vagrant when at Oxford; he even managed to
be something of a vagrant in the Civil Service. One
of his consolations, when in the Customs House, was
the fact that Bums had been in the same employ and
that there were documents there signed by, or
referring to, that very untypical Civil Servant.

I first met him, I think, in the autumn of 1911 in
the smoking-room of a London club, with one of his
Oxford friends. At first sight I was more interested
than attracted. He lay back in a chair, very long,
very thin, very languid, talking unorthodoxies in
what X thought a superior manner. He had a most
extraordinary head and face. The head was long and
narrow beyond any head I ever saw, though each
feature was drawn out in such perfect proportion
that he was extremely good-looking. A high forehead;
beautifully arched eyebrows which seemed a vast
distance above the dark, brilliant, heavily lidded
eyes; pronounced cheek-bones; over-flushed hollow
cheeks; a long, thin, slightly aq uilin e nose with

123

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

sensitive nostrils; a month drooping at the comers,
and usually slightly open; and a clean-cut, deter¬
mined chm gave him an appearance of self-confidence
and even superciliousness which quite absurdly
belied him. When I left him the first time I did not
know that we should ever meet again; within a few
weeks a friendship had been founded which was
bound to last until one of us died. For a time, in
1913, he lived with us on Chiswick Mall; then he
moved to Strand-on-the-Green; then he married and
went to live over the tow-path at Putney. Wherever
he was we seldom missed seeing each other for more
than a few days. And Sunday morning a hail might
come from the river, and I would go to look out of
my window, and see, through overhanging brandies,
a skiff, sculls, and a lean figure in a zephyr who would
shout arrangements for dinner that evening, or lunch
next day, and a trip to a second-hand bookshop.
Having his company, I never dreamed of better. He
spoke slowly and carefully and hesitatingly in a quiet
tenor: with a gift for full-flavoured predsion which I
have never known excelled. Often I used to go down
to the Customs House where he was employed and
fetch him out. Our opening remarks would generally
run on these lines:

s.: Hallo! What have you been doing this
morning?

w.: D-d-dog licences in Cumberland.

124

HENRY WHEELER

Then we would have a rapid snack and a tour of the
local inns or the hawkers’ barrows in the Whitechapel
Road. Under my eyes there, he one day picked up
for a shining a large and fine copy, full of woodcuts,
of a book printed by Richard Pynson.

If such a thing were there he was bound to get it
and not I. He seemed to have an uncanny instinct
which made his hand go straight for the one rarity
on a shelf even when it was some little book with an
insignificant modem binding on it. There was a shop
in the East End that we both of us haunted for years.
It has probably been tidied up by now. Two very
philosophical, laconic, fair-minded, sedentary brothers
had inherited a cob-webbed shop with an immense
stock from a father whose tastes were more bookish
than their own. The stock had grown and grown until
it was quite unmanageable. The cellar was piled
six feet deep in books; one had to go down there with
a candle or an electric torch and force a passage
through them; even a spade would have been handy.
Upstairs was a long room stretching back from a nar¬
row frontage, with crammed shelves reaching to the
ceiling, and a sort of mound, or Long Barrow, of
books running from front to back of the shop in the
middle. Here, at any moment of the day, one brother
or the other might be found sitting at the back of the
shop on a great heap of books, bowler-hatted, mous¬
tached, rubicund, smoking his pipe, waiting for

125

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

customers to approach him with possible purchases in
their hands, and willing to accept any reasonable
offer. I often went there alone and picked up many
early-printed books and volumes of old verse, valuable
in more than one way. In the evening Wheeler
would probably come round. I would show him my
find. It was seldom indeed that he had not already
seen the book; even when it had come from the inner¬
most and lowest recesses of one of Messrs. X’s mounds
or pyramids of books, I seldom produced anything
which Henry Wheeler had not already seen. Very
often the finds were his rather than mine; for he had
seen something which he considered "off his beat"
and told me about it. Often we went there together;
and it was extraordinary to see him step quietly up
a ladder, pick some obscure little pamphlet out of a
shelf, bring it down, and purchase it for a few shillings.
I remember one occasion in particular when from
somewhere near the ceiling he detached a little black-
letter volume which proved to be a collection of
Henry the Eighth’s Statutes, which I believe is still
absent from the British Museum’s set. He died at
thirty-one; he had very little money; he was unable to
buy a tenth of the things that he would have liked to
have bought. Yet he picked up obscure works by
people like Crashaw even out of catalogues. Cata¬
logues were propped up against the cruet when he had
breakfast; more catalogues, or perhaps bibliographies,

126

HENRY WHEELER

were his staple reading in the train. In his short
career as a collector he accumulated an immense
knowledge of obscure and anonymous books; and he
was aided by the sort of memory which enabled him
to say at once whether a book should or should not
have a portrait or a half-title simply because he had
once, years before, seen it described in a catalogue.

Before writing this little tribute to his memory I
searched my house for letters from him. Most of his
letters seem to have disappeared. A few scraps are
all that I can find. I will quote one or two of these
simply to give an indication, as it were, of his tone of
voice. In 1912 he was suddenly annoyed by somebody
writing an article called The Ideal Pub. He wrote and
told me. I was then on a weekly, now dead; and he
proposed to reply. The postscript to the letter ran:

P.S. I have not been able to think of a title
unless it be A Pub-Crawler’s Complaint against
Idealists and Others, which is rather long. If you
accept the essay, call it what you like.

Here is a whole letter, written in the last year of his
life, 1919:

Your letters were gratefully received. Though
I am still in bed, I confidently hope that I am
now on the verge of being let out of it by the
end of this week, and am keenly supporting the
theory of Friday's Daily News that this is the
third of the three waves of which epidemics
consist. As I have been a case in each of them,

127

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

and twice extra, I should have a good chance
of immunity if the theory were true.

I was not surprised to hear of the big pro¬
gramme of Bibliog. Soc’s. publications; it means
books for us anyhow, though some of them
might be more interesting than a Register of
Middle Enghsh Verse. I am now for the first time
in temporary occupation of a copy of Dyce’s
edition of Skelton, which is giving me great
amusement and discloses some quite fine hymns,
as well as satires. The official laureate poems are
of course dull, and I have not tried the interludes;
but some of the rest of the verse is a real surprise.
Dyce, needless to say, has good notes. Buy a
copy if you ever see one cheap; £3 or £4 is some¬
times asked, if not more. These two last months
are unique among those of my last five years;
during them I have bought no book, tho’ I
have been more than once on the verge of getting
McKerrow’s Printers' Marks to cheer the long
hours. I should have them pretty well by heart
by the time I was in full flight again, and that
would be a solid good. But doctors’, chemists’
and nurses’ bills have, so far, turned the edge of
my resolution.

I am comfortably supplied with ordinary
literature, but if you should have Boom by
Wm. Caine, I should like a loan of it. I have
been through a good heap of his others with lots
of amusement. I have been having a strong burst
of Trollope and am now making a second com¬
plete run through Peacock—all profitable.

With love to E. and the Cygnine youth (recent
study of Milton).

Yours ever.

128

HENRY WHEELER

It is a very curious thing, but I did ultimately come
across a copy of Dyce, priced not at a few shillings,
but at one dollar, in a bookshop, in a back street in
Washington, D.C. (no less), two years after—and
brought it back to England. This letter, incidentally,
illustrates two things. One is that to the author of
the Wadham Catalogue, bibliographer though he
was, books were primarily things to be read; and the
other is the catholicity of his taste. The letter was
written from Dublm. In another letter he writes:

I am expecting to see Magee, alias Eglinton,
shortly, almost my sole acquaintance among the
literati here, and thro' him I can have a free
run in the National Library without formality
of application for books. He is an agreeable
man.

He was in Dublin. He came back to England and
spent his last months in the country in Hampshire.
His wife nursed him devotedly. His letters were
serenely cheerful to the end. One of his last visitors
said: “I feel when I come out of Henry’s room as if
I had been conversing with some saint.” Then on
August 4th, 1919, "he woke from quiet sleep and was
gone in a few moments. He spent yesterday afternoon
lying outside his hut in the fresh air, watching the
birds.” That was the last news I had of one of the
most gentle and charitable souls I have ever known, a
wit devoid of cynicism, an intellectual who was loved

129

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

by some very ordinary people, a scholar free from
pedantry.

His Wadham Catalogue was mostly compiled in
the previous year. He was repeatedly rejected from
the army during the war, and in 1918 he ultimately
had to go on indefinite leave of absence (though I
don’t think he ever quite knew how ill he was) and
settled for some months in Oxford. The work as it
stands is not finally revised, but we thought it better
to leave it as it left his hands, and to apologize for
any slips which he might have corrected. There are
some entries in it which were in no Wadham catalogue
before he came: books bound up with other books,
and, in one instance, a rare fragment of fifteenth-
century English printing found in the binding of some
quite uninteresting work. He told me about all his
discoveries; characteristically, he does not disclose
them in his catalogue. Reader, take them for granted.

130

THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

J OHN FREEMAN was bom at Dalston on January
29th, 1880, and died at 29, Weighton Road,
Anerley, on September 23rd, 1929, aged forty-
nine. For the last sixteen years of Ms life he had
known that death might come at any time, owing
to the weakness of his heart. Before the war a doctor
told him he might live only a few months: the diagnosis
was confirmed by several Army doctors from 1914
onwards. Some of Ms friends knew tMs: others
probably guessed it. The only time I remember his
saying anything to me about it was shortly after the
outbreak of war. The inevitable topic turned up in
our conversation, and he said he had just tried to
enlist (I think—he was tall—as a private in the
Grenadier Guards!) and that the doctors had rejected
him at once. “Is your sight so bad as that?” I asked.
"No,” he replied, with a shy smile, in wMch neither
self-pity nor anxiety was apparent, “my heart.”

Few “facts” about his exterior life need be stated.
He went to work in London as a boy. He married,
in 1902, Miss Gertrude Farren, and they had two
daughters. His fnendsMps were not numerous, but
they were very firm; he knew, and was admired by,

131

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

most of his contemporaries who were poets, his earliest
associates among writers being, I believe, Edward
Thomas, Mr. de la Mare, and Mr. Roger Ingpen.
His first volume was Twenty Poems, published in
1909 and long ago out of print. Then followed Fifty
Poems, Stone Trees, Presage of Victory, Memories of
Childhood, Poems New and Old, Music, The Grove,
Prince Absalom, Solomon and Balkis, Collected Poems
(1928); and four prose volumes— The Moderns,
A Portrait of George Moore, English Portraits, and
the Herman Melville in the English Men of Letters
Senes. For the volume of Collected Poems the whole
body of his verse was severely winnowed: but the
selection was well made, and may be commended
without reserve. He who finds spiritual and intel¬
lectual beauty, passion, and power of language in
that volume will of his own motion proceed to the
other books, which include two long narrative poems.
He who does not need concern himself with Freeman
no more.

Freeman, except privately from his brethren in the
craft, had very little recognition in his lifetime. He
was awarded the Hawthomden Prize in 1920, and his
later books, as they appeared, were respectfully
reviewed in such papers as take any notice at all of
poets who are neither cheap, nor violent, nor eccentric,
nor very aged. How secluded had been his working
life was illustrated by the newspaper obituaries when

132

THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

he died. It seemed to be commonly, if very dimly,
known that he was a person of importance, and
laudable attempts were made to do him something
that would look like justice. But there was nothing
about him in the works of reference, his books were
evidently not at hand for serviceable quotation, and
in more than one great journal he was confused with
another man of the same name who had written
novels. That nothing appeared about the career
which maintained him was not merely comprehensible
but eminently pardonable, for so quiet and reticent
was Freeman that people who knew him for years had
only the vaguest notion as to his profession.

Yet one of the most outstanding and notable facts
about him is that he had a remarkable business
career, which was unknown to the Press and seldom
mentioned to his friends. At the age of thirteen he
entered the service of the Liverpool Victoria Friendly
Society: when he died he had risen to the very top of
this great organization, and was Secretary, Director,
and (in the words of a colleague) “the Chief Executive
Officer directing very successfully and efficiently the
operations of a staff of over 7,000 engaged in the
business of Industrial and National Health Insurance
with many millions of contracts and funds of
£20,000,000.” There are other such men, able,
energetic, reliable, with great gifts for organization
and negotiation. But they are seldom contemplative

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

poets—even though in this instance fancy does suggest
that the qualities which served Freeman well in
business are evident also in his writing. And, stranger
still was his capacity for shutting his mind completely,
when away from his calculations, committees, and
conferences, against business affairs. Half his friends
never knew exactly what he did: they thought of him
as a literary man who earned his living by some vague
job at a desk in the City. He himself—who might,
indeed, had he had a chance in early years, have
been by choice a professional writer—deprecated
inquiry into the matter, and spoke of the daily work
he so faithfully performed as a necessary drudgery.
He would preside at committees, confer with officials,
do all the routine work of a busy man of affairs.
Then, tall, angular, spectacled, clean-shaven, large¬
eyed, full-lipped, dressed more like a clerkly poet than
a director, he would take the train home to his suburb
by the Crystal Palace, read an old or a new book, and
lapse easily into the composition of quiet poetry,
joyful, resigned, or full of

Over and over and over and over again

The same hungry thoughts and the hopeless
same regrets.

No regret did he ever in talk inflict upon his friends.
His troubles were his own; only other people's troubles
were worth discussion. And other people’s books. I
never knew him obtrude anything he had himself

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THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

written: but be was constantly begging his friends to
examine meritorious works by the unknown young or
the neglected middle-aged, which he thought might
usefully be made known to the public. He helped,
gratuitously, eagerly, and privately, to make reputa¬
tions for men nothing like as good as himself. If
a few were willing to read his verse, and there were
an editor or two willing to let him contribute poems
and occasional criticism, he was as content as a man
could be who had a poet’s capacity for mental suffering
and a weak heart which, for sixteen years before
his death, was at any time liable to break down and
kill him.

Freeman died at Anerley. His wish was that his
body should lie in a country churchyard; and on the
afternoon of Friday, September 29th, in still sunshine,
he was buried at Thursley, in the south-western
comer of Surrey. The church is in part Saxon;
secluded, and on a hill which looks northward across
the commons to the Hog’s Back. It is in the heart of
Cobbett’s country, and the farms, lanes, and woods
round it are familiar to the reader of the Rural Rides.
Years ago, in an essay on Cobbett, Freeman referred
to a passage in which the lusty old pilgrim described
one of his rides to “this beautiful village of Thursley”
and said, “A prettier ride I never had in the course of
my life. It was not the less interesting from the
circumstance of its giving me all the way a full view

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

of Crooksbury Hill.” Within view of Crooksbury, with
its crest of pines, the earth for an age will cover
Freeman’s discarded shell. But little did he care
about that corporal dust; none but a pagan could.
When a man asks to be buried in such a place as this,
the impulse which prompts him does not proceed
from a care for outworn flesh and bone which never
were awake and never could enjoy such a blessedness
as sleep. It derives from a deep desire to mingle his
memory, in others’ minds, with things that he loved
and that may speak for his faith and affections better
than he ever could speak for them himself. Standing
by the grave of a poet who chooses such a burial as
this it is though one heard the dead speaking: ‘‘Look
about you and there is a poem of which I wrote only
dim fragments, a poem made of wide sky, of cloud-
shadows over wood and moorland and far lines of
trees, of farms, cornfields and cattle, of ancient cot¬
tages and a steeple over trees, of great old elms and
mossy stone walls, grass, fresh daisies and wittered
cut flowers. Bird-song is here and the hum of bees
in the silence of sunny afternoons, and a bell as the
evening brightness fades, and the sound of country
worship and the light of country lamps, and darkness
falling over the mounds and the lichened memorials
of men who knew older wars and older sciences, yet
were blood of our bloqd. Here, where I lie, think of
all these, of the recurrence of seasons and the love-

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THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

liness of the earth, and the transience of men—a
multitude of visible and invisible things which gave
my senses delight, shed on my heart a pure joy, or
moved me to a solitary and untroubled contemplation,
a world of symbols of acceptance and the day’s
content, of the assuagement of sorrow and the end of
strife.” Much of John Freeman’s verse is a mirror of
such things: but much is the record of suffering and
dark struggle with enemies within and without, from
which such things are a refuge. It was no simple
pastoral poet who wrote of Poetry and the inscrutable
universe:

If there were worse ills than Death to dream of.
Worse pangs than hunger’s and the numbed
sense,

If even the long foul solitude of the grave
Ended not other griefs of other men,

And other fears; even then

Poetry needs must breathe through lips of man
Desperate defiance and immortal courage.

Needs must hope bicker in his burning eye,

And Death and hunger, madness and despite.
Sink sullenly from sight.

A casual peruser of Freeman’s poems might think
that he was chiefly occupied in writing about trees:
the more familiar one grows with his work the more
sure one becomes that his lasting hold will depend
(apart from his achievements as a grave and cunning
craftsman) on those parts of his poetry which axe

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

concerned with the eternal abstractions and their
visible workings, in which he shows his knowledge
of the human heart and his rare candour in revealing
it. Not that he was of the eager self-disdosers. The
core of his poetry is sometimes hung round with veils,
which can only be lifted by those who already know,
through community of experience, what is behind
them.

Freeman was never, and probably never will be,
a widely read poet. He did not shine in popular nar¬
rative: he was serious, and did not yield his whole
secret at first glance; he gave few concessions to our
frailty in the form of luxurious images, strong visual
descriptions, obviously infectious music, or fine
detachable platitudes. The result of his gravity and
surface reticence, as well as the nature of his subjects,
was reinforced by the retirement of his private life
and his abstinence from public appearances as from
miscellaneous writing in the newspapers. He will be
read by more people now than when he was alive;
alive his chief readers were his brother-poets. He
was apparently content that that should be so. Yet
there must be many who would find a perpetual spring
of inspiration, solace, and delight in him did they but
make the intellectual effort to get thoroughly in touch
with him which the best of his work demands.

The collection of Last Poems includes only one or
two which had ever appeared in print before. John

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THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

Freeman, considering how full of business his life
was, was a prolific poet: but he was also a careful one,
and his desk when he died contained a large number
of manuscripts, dating from all periods of his writing
life, which were unfinished, or for which he still
meditated a final polishing, or of which he had post¬
poned publication because of their very intimacy of
revelation. Not all of these manuscripts were easily
decipherable, and some were crammed into the
strangest little bits of paper: but the utmost pains
have been taken to secure faithful transcripts. Where
it appears to the reader that there are roughnesses
and imperfections in the Last Poems let him hesitate
to think the author’s ear suddenly defective, for the
author had not, in many instances, done with them.
I conceive, for example, that there was much to be
added to the “Willow Pool,” the existing verses of
which promise a work not only psychologically com¬
plicated but more powerfully dramatic than Freeman’s
narratives sometimes were. At the same time let him
believe that Freeman’s literary “trustees” have printed
nothing which they do not think worth printing.

Uneven they naturally are, but I think that there
are to be found there beautiful examples of all his
main types. It was only to be expected that, in so
far as he was known to an audience beyond the circle
of his professional and habitual admirers, it was
through his directer “nature poems” and, in the

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Wordsworthian phrase, his “Poems of the Domestic
Affections,” especially the Memories of Childhood;
it was the Patmore of The Angel in the House, who
reached the general public, not the Patmore of the
Odes. In his last collection there are several charac¬
teristic lyrics of simpler kind: the Mozartian Air has
the sweet rippling motion of such an air of Mozart’s,
and is as clear, and the presences of Freeman’s old
companions, the trees, slender and flexible or massive
and steadfast, are everywhere. But, I think, a more
than usually large proportion of these “new” poems
are burdened with thought, profounder, more intricate,
more illuminated by insight, more turbid with per¬
plexity than those others. For Freeman, though
commonly regarded as a “nature poet” in so far as
he was commonly regarded at all, was always—and
the longer he lived, increasingly so—a poet who
brooded over all life and his own heart, a man tor¬
mented by evil and resolved to face it a speculative
thinker who contemplated all history and its meaning,
an honest analyst who examined without flinching
the world of human relations, and, at whatever
expense of suffering and shame, the tangled conflict
of principle and instinct, of selfishness and unselfish¬
ness, of commonsense and obstinate hankering,
within himself. He had come, in his last years, to
middle age, that period of life in which a man
has lost his illusions, and must either take refuge in

140

THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

cynicism or some other admission of defeat, or, as
bravely and clear-sightedly as he may, newly confront
an outer and an inner existence from which the veils
of youthful dreaming have been tom, a human world
which cannot be as rapidly or as fundamentally
changed as youth imagined, a world of inexplicable
evil, interminable struggle, and irreconcilable needs
and "rights,” a world in which "we mortal millions
live alone,” and even between lovers there is warfare.
With that warfare Freeman was acquainted, the
wrestling not merely of individual with individual, but
of sex with sex, the man and the woman (each in
bewilderment trying, with blind inability, to com¬
prehend, or incredulous refusal to admit, the enduring
differences between their bodies and minds), to wrest
the other, for love’s sake as well as self’s and, patheti¬
cally, for reason’s, to his or her modes and habits of
intellect and sense. He never wore his heart upon his
sleeve, but those who are fit to find the key may find
it, and when they do they will discover that, except
only the late Robert Bridges, he was love’s truest
scholar amongst all modem poets. Were all his love
poetry assembled Swinburne's words might far more
aptly be applied to it than to Gautier’s scented
novel: “This is the golden book of spirit and sense.”
The deepest abysses of Love’s hell he had plumbed,
and, for such a man, the blackest of all, where abides
the agony of self-reproach:

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Harsh words too cruelly sped, yet thoughts
unspoken,

Long angry silences, yet too soon broken,

O, deep and dark despairs, fondness perverse.
Self-aimed, self-wounding, wounding you the worse
Who loved and love; deeper dividing pride
Burning and burning Love undeified.

Degraded Love. . . . O thou unmerciful mind
That being in me must needs be so unkind.
Unmatched for inhumanity. . . .

But his pilgrimage of spirit and sense was not incom¬
plete. Every doubt, craving, jealousy, sullenness,
resentment known to lovers was familiar to him, all
the unachieved communions of the brain and all the
frustrated desires of the insatiable flesh: and every
experience was to him, it may be, peculiarly intense,
because of the imminent shadow of death which
overhung him, lending a deeper gloom to discontent
and a sharper edge to joy. Yet he knew the ultimate
peace and happiness of love, the haven after storm,
that last quickening of perception, that harmony
through the oblivion of self, which come to the stead¬
fast lover when maturity has grown accustomed to
truth, and the humble heart, in which alone there is
no sex, cries in astonishment, "If this be love, I
never loved till now.” Such bliss can never be more
than intermittent:

Yet ever and anon the trumpets sound
From the hid battlements of eternity
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again .
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THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

We are chained to our mortal parts, and till death
comes there is no release from them. But he must be
counted a happy man who has once known that
consummation and whose heart has once been
flooded by that light.

Freeman thought persistently and felt acutely: he
was one of those rare people who thought with detach¬
ment when in the midst of strong emotion, conscious
at one and the same moment of a cool head and a hot
heart. In Armistice Day, in this last volume, we
cannot but be convinced that we are listening to the
thoughts that came to the poet in the very midst of
the brief Silence:

Birds stayed not in their singing.

The heart is beatmg,

The blood its steady coursing.

The child in the dark womb
Stirred; dust settled in the tomb.

Old wounds were still smarting,

Echoes were hollow-sounding.

New desires still upspringing.

No silent Armistice might stay
Life and Death wrangling in the old way.

Earth’s pulse still was beating.

The bright stars circling;

Only our tongues were hushing.

While Tune ticked silent on, men drew
A deeper breath than passion knew.

There is the same fusion of thought and feeling in
Outpost Duty. That poem was mspired by a casual

143

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

sentence in Mr. Blunden’s Undertones of War: it is
significant that any casual sentence seen anywhere,
so that it had some implication linking it to the general
riddle of existence, or the general endeavour to make
terms with life, or the general human welter of carnal
and spiritual aspiration and experience, might prompt
Free m an to utterance. One of his most ambitious
long poems was inspired by a curt paragraph in a
newspaper about two forgotten children having died
of starvation in a flat in Westminster. In this very
volume are to be found lines drawn from him by the
lynching of negroes in Mississippi. This poet, sup¬
posedly so predominantly pastoral, was in fact far more
varied in mood and far wider in range than most of his
contemporaries. The zealous for comparisons may
find a kinship with Donne in Hemispheres, and an
affinity with Hardy in the macabre The New House.
Letter and Answer, in these last pages, is the beginning
of a poem Browningesque in its conception; and the
long and evidently unfinished There Came a Time,
tremendously ambitious in its attempt to envisage
the changes which would be wrought in human
society and the human outlook by the abrogation
of the main condition of fife, testifies to a philosophic
intelligence which habitually roved over the whole of
that great crucible of history, and never wearied of
dissecting our nature into its elements and pondering
the circumstances which determine their balance.

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THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

Freeman’s interest in life was scientific, as well as
passionate, aesthetic, and religious: he was a whole
man.

It can hardly be disputed that as a critic Freeman,
though not very productive, was one of the soundest
of his generation. Not being a professional man of
letters, he had the advantage of always choosing
subjects about which he really wanted to say some¬
thing—which something very often took the form of
generous and understanding praise of contemporaries.
An indication of the quality of his criticism as well
as that of his prose may be conveyed by a passage
from English Portraits and Essays (1924):

It is easier to speak candidly of the dead than
of the living; it is easier to praise the dead, it is
easier to be just to the dead than to the living.
The art of criticism, which may appear to some
a purely intellectual exercise, is p rim arily a
moral exercise, for it is not to be practised
except with equal honesty and sensitiveness,
equal kindness and confidence; but the natural
difficulty of applying critical principles to a
dead artist is slight in comparison with that
which arises when the subject is a contemporary.
Those principles themselves are so variable and
variously cherished, and the aestheticism which
every artist and every critic broods darkly
upon is so purely personal, that the task of
finding a common ground and using a common
language is perplexing as well as exciting.

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Criticism is not a science, else young men might
learn it; nor an attitude, else old men might grow
perfect in it; rather is it an adventure calling for
a touch of gallantry, a touch of forbearance, a
gentle use of logic, a free recourse to imagination,
and no more than the faintest hint of dogmatism.
If something of this delicate adjustment may
be spared when the subject is in the past, cer¬
tainly nothing must be forgotten in following a
living creative mind in its mental travails. The
subject is no longer an island to be painfully
surveyed, but a ship to be followed, a light to be
pursued through the changing currents of the
mind.

This is the opening of an essay on Walter de la
Mare: the others include discriminating eulogies of
Cobbett and G. K. Chesterton, Maurice Hewlett,
Edmund Gosse, and Coventry Patmore, and the tone
of them is precisely what that passage might lead one
to expect. Freeman did not (as it is the duty of a
reviewer of new books to do) star-sprinkle his essays
with quotations selected because of their mere merit,
and give an easy delight to the reader of the criticism:
he was exploring, defining, expounding, and chose
such extracts as best illustrated his arguments. Nor
did he rely at all on incidental felicities of his own, or
the tricks of the improviser—those brilliant half-
truths, epigrams, superficial parallels and contrasts,
verbally striking restatements of the accepted obvious,
or those paste sirpiles and metaphors which share the
colour and glittefi, but not the substance, of harder

146

THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

and rarer gems. He approached men and books
seriously, and unself-consciously and uninfluenced
by what had been written before; searching for the
beauties of inspiration, the subtleties of art, the
shades of character, the qualities of thought and
doctrine, the peculiarities of perception, of taste,
and of language, to which his heart, mind, and ear
made Trim acutely sensitive. He approached his
subjects with the measure of his own faculties, and
stated the results soberly, subtly, and with only a
secondary consideration for effectiveness in his own
manner. His writing owed its charms to the clarity
and delicacy of his thought, which of its own nature
shaped his sentences to a fine concision, or to a grave
flow of harmonious long sentences, and which from
inner necessity bloomed into an imagery which was
always organic in his prose.

The value of the “personal adventure” method in
criticism naturally varies with the person employing
it. There have been men of independent judgment
who have fearlessly looked into matters for themselves
and discovered that Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens
were no good at all. Freeman’s character and mind
were such that his enjoyments were at once catholic
and canonical. The independence of his own examina¬
tion never led him to exalt men whom the community
of criticism has agreed to be unimportant, or to
attempt to pull the recognized great from their

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

thrones. It merely led him to the discovery of un¬
familiar aspects, the dusting of neglected comers, the
qualifications in detail of mechanically repeated
judgments, the revelation of shades of motive and
predilection, of beauties and flaws in expression, which
had been awaiting the scrutiny of his honest and care¬
ful eye. Of his peculiar kinships as a poet he was aware:
but he could be sound, sympathetic, and illuminating
on writers who were as different from him as is possible
within the wide limits of genuineness and intelligence.
He never carolled like the robin, but he loved the
robin’s song; he never wrote in the rapid rhythms of
high excitement, but his heart-beat in response to
the shouts and gallopings of others: and the guffaws
of the great buffoons drew from him, as he stood
detached, a smile that spoke of a finer relish than
many men’s hilarity. "Where his appreciation was
slightly defective was where he found himself unable
to tolerate the neighbourhood of baseness, vulgarity,
shallowness, or even clever histrionics: he could not
quite easily enjoy, for what they were worth, the
adroitness and surface charm of brilliant charlatans
and elegant poseurs, and he had his doubts about
red-nosed comedians. Those reservations may help
to define his bent. As for his way of expressing
himself it was firm, yet unaggressive, confident, yet
modest, persuasive without cajolery, passages of hard
reasoning being mingled with rovings of a musing

148

THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

poet’s fancy: his humour was not paraded, and he
was able to express contempt in a quiet word or
phrase and turn to pleasanter things.

In his books the essence of the man will be found,
and by the percipient and painstaking, a good deal of
autobiography. But the picture of him as he walked
and talked will be incomplete until and unless his
letters are collected. These were extremely numerous:
many were long, and the best he had to give, whether
of mind or of heart, was poured into them: he was not
of those niggards who keep all their best things for
the printed page, and even the shortest of his notes,
which were a happy blend of spontaneity and care,
had the artist’s touch. Small gleams of humour and
elegance would be slipped into postscripts after the
merest one-line acknowledgment of a proof or invita¬
tion to dinner. I have been perusing scores of these,
and may pardonably quote a few illustrations. During
the General Strike he writes briefly, looking on the
bright side: there was no room in the shrunken sheets
for Attempts to Explain the Fiscal Problems of Pata¬
gonia or The Declining Birthrate in Salt Lake City.
He adds that there would be something to be said for a
permanent but discriminating strike of the printers,
proceeding to give his list of the proscribed. "We
eat at seven, in our native Woad, undecked” is a
characteristic PS. to one kind of note; and to another:
"I’m still bewildered at being asked to make an

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REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

article longer: broader, lighter, looser, obscener, I
can understand. But longer!” Again and again he
writes soliciting aid for some deserving writer or
draughtsman, his own efforts being referred to in
such terms as: “I’m busybodying a bit for G., so as to
help his thing a little more effectively than by the
verses I’ve given him for it,” or "I’m doing ... a
stupid article with stupid emphasis, ‘I like this, and
that, and the other—look!’ And that's the best thing
a critic (no critic, I) can say, after all: anything else
he’ll only say for the egotism of ideas, hatred, envy.
Envy perhaps has crept into my notes, but may not be
detected.” Often, in letters, he lapsed into sustained
passages of criticism. Here are one or two out of
many:

(1917. In the course of a discussion about a poem,
by another man, rather loose in structure.) I was
glad to read . . . twice aloud, and so reading it
didn’t miss so acutely the form which I did miss on
reading it to myself. There seems nearly always
something of evasion or indolence in irregular verse,
unless the passion behind the poem is felt in it,
making its own strong, native rhythm: and only very
seldom is anything won which would compensate for
the loss of'.form. I don’t know if one can argue from
the fact that the lines which are most delightful are
usually those most definitely “lines”; for it can be
retorted that they seem delightful only because they

150

THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

are definite. But I do think that emotion seeks for
and hungers after and wholly needs form, and needs
it not only for resistance, as a swimmer needs water,
but for its very means of life. So far as the free
versers are dispensing with form, they are funda¬
mentally, metaphysically, and even demonstrably
wrong—and nothing could be wronger. I suppose in
the abstract the ideal would be for every poem a new
and different form, the expression of every lyric
utterly completing and enfolding—simply embodying
—the individual impulse; but since the mind hardens
and grows firm, and character comes more and more
surely into the work—half blessedly and half not—
the form tends to repetition, embodying over and
over again the same passion in nearly the same shape.
And this, not always because inspiration has failed
but because it hasn’t, the passion becoming a ruling
passion, the idea pure. Idea, seeking satisfaction in
repetition merely because it is incapable of satis¬
faction.

Was this all nonsense? I haven’t the ghost of an
“idea” about poetry, and no "theory” of verse. "One’s
mind’s made so ”—and the difference between mat urity
and immaturity, between man and man, is only that
some know at last, more than half unconsciously,
how their mind’s made, and let it move where it will.
Which is the elementary forgotten wisdom of the
world.

L

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

(1926. Describing one of bis rare visits to the
theatre.)

It’s very seldom I go to the theatre—ordinarily
I hate it, my puritanic blood made critical by
an expiring spurt of conscience—and so I’m
inclined to be cold in my mind yet soft in my
heart: impressed by the very things that seem
ignominious, easily swayed, and angry at being
swayed. The last play I saw was Pirandello’s
Henry IV., which overwhelmed me, and when
I saw this I couldn’t help recalling Pirandello,
for something of the same painful urgency
streamed over the stage and struck me sharply.
It seemed mainly a painful play, even cruel;
not simply in its acute emotional scenes, but
in its general sense of men at war with time,
snared by circumstances. It’s common to be
snared and teased by the senses, gross or fine;
it’s not so common to be aware of the pressure
of time like an iceberg, annulling all emotion
and affection. What in fact it brought home
was the coarse intolerable fact of death, alias
time, alias fate—or what not. It was the isolation
of man in time and space, the fact that his
simplest and sincerest voice can’t carry (except
in the miraculous tones of poetry) across centuries
or even decades of years.

And sometimes he would glide surprisingly from
passionate earnestness to genial flippancy. One letter,
mostly about that "psychological” poetry which so
greatly exercised his thoughts, ends: "It’s the kind of
poetry that remains to be written. All that living
pool of dark deep water remains unnoticed, and it’s

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THE LAST OF JOHN FREEMAN

the essential poetry which isn’t of our time, or past
time, but of all time, and no time. . . . We’ve
intestinal poisoning in the family. What have you?”

He once quoted Patmore’s proud valediction:

I have written little, but it is all my best; I
have never spoken when I had nothing to say,
nor spared time or labour to make my words
true. I have respected posterity; and, should
there be a posterity which cares for letters, I
dare to hope that it will respect me.

The last portion of this, Freeman himself could never
have written. The first may stand for himself. As
for his “stature” as a poet it is not a matter that any
man who knew him could trouble to think of when
trying to accustom himself to the departure of such
utter integrity, such gentleness and kindness, such
modesty, such reverence, and such steadfastness.

0, why in all a world of sweet.

Bird-song and dew and light and heat.

Comes this malignity of Death to still
Blood and spirit with sudden chill,

Breathing in youth’s ears, like poison,

His whisper hoarse.

Here, for the last time, we find him putting the
peipetual question, which again stalks through our
own hearts because of his loss. But he did not
habitually linger on that note: he won, through hard
and courageous struggle, consolations and assuage¬
ments, and an acceptance of life under all the hanging

153

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

swords which are as foreign to the complacent opti¬
mists as they are to the sick prophets of despair, the
fruit of a strength and sweetness which will fortify
men yet unborn.

154

JULIUS WEST

J ULIUS WEST was bom in St. Petersburg on
March 21st (9th O.S.), 1891. In May, when he was
two months old, he went to London, where from that
time onwards, his father, Mr. Semon Rappoport, was
correspondent for various Russian papers. At twelve
years of age. West entered the Haberdashers’ (Aske’s)
School at Hampstead. He left school in 1906, and
became a temporary clerk in the Board of Trade,
assisting in the preparation of the report on the cost
of living in Germany, issued in 1908. On leaving the
Board of Trade, he became a junior clerk in the office
of the Fabian Society, then in a basement in Clement’s
Inn. (It was there that in 1908 or 1909 I first saw
him.) To get to the Secretary's room one had to pass
through the half-daylight of a general office stacked
with papers and pamphlets, and on some occasion
I received the impression of a new figure beyond the
counter, that of a tall, white-faced, stooping youth
with spectacles and wavy dark hair, studious-looking,
rather birdlike. The impression is still so vivid that
I know now I was in a manner aware that he was
unusual long before I was conscious of any curiosity
about him. I had known him thus casually by sight

155

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

for some time, without knowing his name: I had
known his name and his repute as a precocious boy
for some time without linking the name to the person.
He was said to read everything and to know a lot of
economics; a great many people were getting interested
in him; he was called West and was a Russian, a
collocation which puzzled me until I learned that he
was a Jew from Russia who had adopted an English
name. Although still under twenty, he was already,
I think, lecturing to small Labour groups when I
got to know him more intimately. He knew his
orthodox economics inside out, and was in process
of acquiring a peculiar knowledge of the involved
history of the Socialist movement and its congeners
during the last hundred years.

He was, in fact, already rather extraordinary.
His education had been broken off early, and he
always regretted it; but I have known few men who
have suffered less from the absence of an academic
training. Given his origins, his early struggle, his
intellectual and political environment, the ease with
which he secured some sort of hearing for his first
small speeches to congenial audiences, one might
have expected a very different product. It would not
have been surprising, had he, with all his intellect
become a narrow fanatic with a revolutionary
shibboleth; it would not have been strange if, avoiding
this because of his common sense, he had been drawn

156

JULIUS WEST

into the statistical machine and given himself entirely
to collecting and digesting the materials for social
reform. He took a delight in economic theory and he
had a passion for industrial history: the road was
straight before him. But the pleasure and the passion
were not exclusive. Although it is possible that
his greatest natural talents were economic and his¬
torical, and (as I think) likely that had he lived his
chief work would have been along lines of which the
History of Chartism is indicative, he was in no hurry to
specialize. He had a catholic mind. Behind man he
could see the universe, and, unlike many Radicals of
his generation, behind the problems and the
attempted or suggested solutions of his time, he could
see the wide and long historical background, the
whole experience of man with the lessons, moral,
psychological and political, which are to be drawn
from it, and are not to be ignored. You may find in
his early writings (though not in his History of
Chartism ) all sorts of crudities, flippancies and loose
assertions; he was young and impulsive, he had been
under the successive influences of Mr. Shaw and
Mr. Chesterton, and lacked their years and their
command of language; he had a full mind and a
fluent pen which, when it got warm, sometimes ran
away. But at bottom he was unusually sane; and
his sanity came in part from the intellectual temper
that I have sketched, but partly from a sweet, sensitive

*57

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

and sympathetic nature which made injustice as
intolerable to him as it was unreasonable. He did not
always (being young and having had until the last
year or two little experience of the general world of
men) realize how people would take his words; but I
never knew a man who more quickly or more girlishly
blushed when he thought he had said or written
something wounding or not quite sensible.

Julius West’s life was conspicuously a life of the
mind. But if the reader understands by an intellectual
a man to whom books and verbal disputations are
alone sufficient, reservations must be made. It is
true that he was a glutton for books: he collected a
considerable library where Horace Walpole, Marx,
Stevenson, Conrad, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb
and Marlowe stood together. His father writes:
"He was a great reader, and his literary taste even
as a schoolboy was remarkable. He scorned to read
books written specially for children, but used to
enjoy the reading of classical writers even at the age
of seven or eight years, and his knowledge of all
Shakespeare’s dramas was astonishingly complete.”
But he was restless and roving rather than sedentary.
He was capable of running great physical risks and
enduring hardships beyond his strength; he travelled
as much as he could, and had the authorities admitted
him into the Army, he would, unless his body had
given out, have made a good soldier. He did not

158

JULIUS WEST

mistake books for life; but one had the feeling that
life to him was primarily a great book. His nature
was emotional enough: he fell in love; he was deeply
attached to a few intimate friends; and there was an
emotional element in his politics and his reactions to
all the strange spectacles he saw in his last years of
life. But ordinarily what one thought of was his
curiosity rather than his emotions; his senses not at
all. If at one moment one had peeped into his affec¬
tionate nature the next one was always carried off into
some “objective” discussion. His curiosity about
things, his love of debate, gave him a refuge during
trouble and an habitual resort in ordinary times. He
seemed incapable of any idle thing. Most of us, with
varying frequency, will make physical exertions with¬
out obtaining or desiring reward beyond the effort
and the fatigue; or we will lie lapped in the gratifica¬
tion of our senses, happy, without added occupation,
to drink wine or sit in silence with a friend and tobacco,
or encumber a beach and feel the hot sun on our faces
or loll in a green shade without even a green thought.
Or we will travel and see men and countries, or take
part in events for the mere exhilaration of doing
it. But whatever his physical activity, Julius West
would always have been the curious spectator,
observing and learning, recording and deducing,
with history in the making round him; and, whatever
his physical inactivity, his brain would never have

159

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

been asleep, or bis senses dormant. If one walked
with him, there were few silences; a punt on the river
with him would have meant (unless he were reading)
eager, peering eyes and speculations either about the
surrounding objects, and what people had said about
them, or else about Burke, Bakunin or some such
thing. For all his energy, I never knew his ambition,
or was clearly convinced that he had any other
ambition than to see and learn all he could, and
produce his results.

He attempted all sorts of literary work; parodies,
short stories, criticism. It was to be expected that
the criticism would be chiefly concerned with doctrine,
and that the other work would be defective and full
of ideas. Partly, I suppose, all this writing was the
by-product of an intellectual organ which could not
stop working but demanded a change of work; partly
his very curiosity operated; he saw what other men
had written, and he wanted to find out what it would
be like to write this, that and the other thing. But
he had neither the sensuousness nor the selfishness
(if that hard word may be used of that detachment
and that preoccupation) of the artist, nor the reverence
for form that demands and justifies an intense appli¬
cation to general detail which is not, to the hasty
eye, very significant. As a rule he was exclusively
preoccupied with the general purport of what he
wanted to say. But it was not unnatural that a

160

JULIUS WEST

young man with his heart, his imaginative intelligence
and his wide reading, should have begun his career as
an author with a book of poems. (The book published
by Mr. David Nutt in 1913 was called Atlantis and
other Poems.) It was ignored by the reviewers and
the public; he would not have denied that it deserved
to be; but it was very interesting to any one interested
in him. A great part of it (remember, most of the
verses had been written by a boy under twenty-one)
was very weak; short poems about mermaids, sunken
galleons, maidens, dreams, ghosts and witches,
written in rhythms which are lame, but displaying in
the ineffective variety of their form the restless
ingenuity, the hunger for experiment of this young
author; and here and there lit up by a precocious
thought or phrase. A man with a greater share of the
poetic craft was likely to do better with a larger
subject and a looser structure, and much the best
poem in West’s book is Atlantis, a narrative in about
five hundred lines of blank verse, with a few songs
embedded in it. The blank verse is as good as most;
few men of West's age could write better; and he
could without contortion move in it, and make it say
whatever he wanted it to say. He represents the
Lost Continent as dwindled to a small island and
inhabited by people conscious of their impending
doom, weighed down with the memory of what their
country’s forests and fields and birds were like before

161

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

the last wave. The subject offered an obvious chance
as a visible spectacle, and the poet (feeling this)
made an attempt to paint the features of the city,
describing its houses and temples and festivals. The
attempt was unsuccessful; it was when he reached
more congenial ground that West showed his origin¬
ality and his power. With one of the most alluringly
“picturesque” and melodramatic subjects in the world
under consideration, he put all the obvious things
behind him and spent his time considering what
effects such a situation as that of the doomed remnant
of Atlanteans would have had upon the minds of
men. Passionate love became almost extinct:

and ’twas thought ’twas well
No helpless childish hands were there to pull
Their elders’ heartstrings, making death seem
hard

And parting very bitter, and the end
A bitter draft of pain, poured by a hand
Unpitying, a draft of which the old
Were doomed to drink more than a double share.

The poets

Did all but cease th’ eternal themes to sing
And in their place sang songs about the End.

The philosophers ran to strange doctrines about the
perfectibility of the survivors from the next deluge
or starkly expounded the End, or were

Buffoons who sought to turn the End a thing
For jest;

162

J ULIUS WEST

and across the city sometimes flashed a band of
fanatics proclaiming this shadowed life to be an
illusion from which those who had courage and faith
could escape. Voices spoke, sad or resentful, of men
cheated out of their due years; one fierce

For us an aimless life, an aimless Death. . . .

That I should have the power for once to live.

To be a creature strong with power to kill.

To stay, but for a little while, the strength
That hems us in? That I might taste the joy
Of conflict with an equal force to mine,

Conflict of life and death, not purposeless.

Not vain, as we now feebly struggle on. . . .

That I could have the gift of knowing hate.

Black hate that animates before it kills. . . .

O, to do aught with force, not rest supine.

In this boyish poem we can see West’s mind trying to
realize Atlantis as a whole community, where charac¬
ters vary and doctrines clash; as a vessel holding, at
a certain position in time and space, the human
spirit.

Whether he would have written more poetry I do
not know. I doubt it; at all events he had little time
and many distractions, and he looked like growing
confirmed in other pursuits. In 19x3 he went into
the office of the New Statesman, for which, intermit¬
tently, he wrote reviews (usually of books about
Eastern Europe) and miscellaneous articles until he
died. He remained in the office for a few months;
then left, and became a free lance writing for various

163

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

papers, lecturing, and starting work on the present
book and others. I think his second publication was
a tract, notable for its sagacity and its wit, on John
Stuart Mill. He was busy with several books when the
war broke out, which in the end was to kill him at
twenty-seven.

I forget if it was in August, 1914, that he first tried
to join the Army. A layman might have supposed
that both his eyes and his lungs were too weak, but
a doctor told him that he was good for active service.
Whenever it was that he volunteered—his first
attempt was early, and there were others after his
short visit to Russia and Warsaw in 19x4-15—he
made a discovery. He had not realized—if he had
ever known it the conception had dropped out of his
mental foreground—that he was not a British subject.
But they told him so, and said that his status must
be settled before he could have a commission. He
had arguments: his parents were Russian subjects
and he himself was bom in Russia; but his parents
were merely visiting Russia when he was bom, and
he submitted that at that time he was really domiciled
in England. The argument, it seemed, had no legal
validity; and, denied citizenship in the only home
he knew or wanted, he at once went, very set and
intent, to a friendly solicitor's office in Lincoln’s
Inn Fields where I had the odd experience of assisting,
as I believed, to naturalize a man I had never thought

164

JULIUS WEST

of as a foreigner. This, he thought, would settle it;
he would soon be in the Army. But no. The hierarchy
at this point thought of something new. He was a
Russian, an Ally of military age; we would not
naturalize him here. It would have been difficult to
conceive a more grotesque suggestion, if one knew the
man. He had left Russia when a baby in long clothes;
he spoke Russian (at that time) with difficulty; he
looked at Russia and her institutions from an English
point of view; he was married (he had been confirmed
in the Church of England), to the daughter of an
English clergyman; all his friends were English
and most of them in uniform: and it was suggested
that if he really desired to serve the Allied cause he
should divest himself of all his ties and go off to
mess in the snows of Courland or Galicia with bearded
strangers from the Urals and the Ukraine. The
suggestion was repulsive to him, quite apart from the
fact that it might mean years of unbroken exile. He
was, however, allowed to join an ambulance corps in
London.

Before long he was off to Petrograd on a flying
tour as a correspondent; thence to Moscow and War¬
saw, within sound of which the German guns were
booming: Russian Warsaw with enemy aeroplanes
overhead and expensive Tsarist officers revelling in
the best hotels. He saw the Grand Duke Nicholas
on November 17, 1914, in the greatest Cathedral of

165

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Petrograd at a gorgeous service of commemoration of
the miraculous preservation of the Tsar Alexander II:
how long was that ago! He returned, and for a year
and more was in England, editing Everyman and
writing books at a great pace. Then his wife died.
Another opportunity of going to Russia offered, and a
man always restless took it as a means of escape from
himself. He was in Petrograd in the early months of
the Bolshevik regime. He lived (a few letters came
through) in a state of high excitement, seeing every¬
thing he could, visiting the Institute and the Bol¬
shevik law courts, attending meetings at which Lenin
and Trotsky spoke, dogged everywhere, for he was
suspected, daily expecting to be shot from behind.
Being a democrat and a believer in ordered progress
he was veiy angry with the Bolsheviks; having a
zest for queer manifestations of life he found an
immense variety of interest and amusement in their
conduct. When he returned he was full of stories of
rascality. Lenin, on the point of character, was in
many ways an exception; but he was tricked wholesale
by German Jew agents disguised as Bolsheviks. One
of them, high in the Bolshevik Foreign Office, had
even judiciously edited the Secret Treaties, the publica¬
tion of which so edified the Bolshevik public and so
surprised the world. Daily great stacks of documents
were served out to the Bolshevik press, a dole for this
paper, a dole for that; but the busy German spy had

166

JULIUS WEST

taken the last precaution to ensure that the documents
which involved the Allies should come out, and that
those which most seriously compromised Germany
should not. West became pretty familiar with many
of the revolutionary figures, and enjoyed working in
such an extraordinary scene. But he recognized that
his excitement was hectic and bad for him; he suffered
to some extent from the famine conditions of Petro-
grad; the cold was terrible, and that, and the mdoor
st uffin ess which it led to, affected his chest. He had to
get away. In February, 1918, he left with a party of
English governesses and elderly invalids. He was not
an old man nor a governess; he was in effect an
English journalist of fighting age who might be carry¬
ing valuable information; but he was fortified with
some lie or other, and with the rest of the pathetic
caravan he went over the ice and through the German
lines. The enemy were at that time in occupation of
the Aland Islands, and West told a romantic story of
the night he and his companions spent in a village
there guarded by the German soldiers: a night filled
with snow, a silence broken by guttural voices talking
of home and the fortunes of the war in Flanders.

He got through to Stockholm and from there home,
where, unexpected and unannounced, he floated in
on me, keen and volatile as ever, but looking ill. He
ought then to have taken a long rest; but he was asked
to go off to Switzerland—then a hotbed of enemy and

i6 7 m

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

pacifist intrigue—and he thought that with his
experience and knowledge of languages (he now knew
Russian, French, German, Dutch and Ro uman ian) it
was his duty to go. But it killed him. He came back,
hollow-eyed and coughing, and went first to an hotel
in Surrey, and then to a sanatorium in the Mendips.
His friends did not know how ill he was; he wrote
cheerfully about books and politics, asked for more
books, was glad he had found an invalid officer or two
with cultivated tastes. But he just saw the war out.
A complication of influenza and pneumonia developed,
and he died.

During the war he had published several books.
Two —Soldiers of the Tsar and The Fountain —were
issued by the Iris Publishing Company, the pro¬
prietor of which, now dead, deserves a book to him¬
self. The first was a collection of sketches written
mostly in Russia in 1914; the second a tumultuous
race of satires and parodies probably modelled on
Caliban’s Guide to Letters. The aged Reginald at the
end observes:

And, oh, my children, be not afraid of your
own imaginations. Once in the distant ages
before our universe was bom, when Time was an
unmarked desert, and God was lonely. He let the
fountain of His fancies play, and life began. Be
you, too, creators, for there is none, even among
my own grandchildren, who has not in him a
vestige of that impulse which made the earth.

168

JULIUS WEST

The book was written on this principle; perhaps the
fountain played too fast; but its many-coloured spray
shows how various was the manipulator's knowledge
and how active his mind. The other books were
G. K. Chesterton: a Critical Study (Seeker), an abridged
translation of the de Goncourt Journal, published by
Nelson, and translations of three plays by Tchekoff
and one by Andrieff. The translation from the
Goncourts, produced at a great place, is really good:
lively, vivid, idiomatic. The monograph, though
independent and containing plenty of reservations,
was an exposition of the theory that Mr. Chesterton
“is a great and courageous thinker.” West, though not
blind to his subject’s genius as artist and humorist,
characteristically concentrated on his opinions about
religion and politics; his own were revealed en
passant. "The dialogues on religion contained in
The Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more
than enough to place it among the few books on
religion which could safely be placed in the hands of
an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence.”
Magic and Orthodoxy together “are a great work,
striking at the roots of disbelief.” During the war
“those of us who had not the fortune to escape the
Press by service abroad, especially those of us who
derived our living from it, came to loathe its mis¬
representation of the English people. . . . Then we
came to realize, as never before, the value of such men

169

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

as Chesterton.” It was an impulsive book, but there
was a great deal of very acute analysis in it. The one
book, however, which has a reasonable chance of
long survival is his History of Chartism.

Now it really is rather remarkable that this book
should have come from the same man, the same very
young man, as the works mentioned above. We still
produce, and it is a good thing we do, men who take
an interest in everything and talk, whether shallowly
or with the instinct of genius, or both, about literature,
science and politics, relating them all. But if a man
does this, one can never expect him to be also a
specialist (except, rarely, in some literary subject)
who is capable of research and loves documents. An
essay on Chartism we might expect; an exposition of
its real or supposed principles; an idealization of the
movement. But we do not expect a man with the
habits of the literaiy-pohtical journalist to grub for
years amongst pamphlets and manuscripts in the
British Museum, and produce a chapter of history
containing and relating a “mass of new facts.” But
that is what West did, and he did it concurrently with
his other miscellaneous work; editing, reviewing,
translating, speaking, and the rapid composition of
topical books. The Chartists were specially interesting
as being in some sort pioneers of the modem Labour
movement in which West had grown up; but he might
have been drawn to any other subject had he found

170

JULIUS WEST

another that had been so neglected by English
historians. It did not take him long to discover that
some current opinions would have to be revised; that
the physical menace of the Chartist movement had
often been exaggerated, and its historical importance
generally ignored. But, whatever might have been
his conclusions, he loved finding t hing s out; almost
anything would do. He had a prodigious memory that
would enable him to correct at a moment’s notice a
mis-statement as to the percentage of one-roomed
tenements in Huddersfield, or the name of the
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Mr.
Gladstone’s first Government. He could read any¬
thing with interest and he forgot nothing that he
read. At the British Museum he went through all
the available Chartist literature like a caterpillar.
Then one day, with great excitement and amusement,
he came to tell me that he had discovered, at the
Hendon annexe, scores of manuscript volumes put
together by Francis Place which had never been
examined by any previous English writer. Every
sort of Chartist trifle had been “pasted up’’ by the
industrious tailor; the obscurer the newspaper from
which Place’s cuttings came, the greater West’s
pleasure. He liked them for their own sakes; but he
retained his sense of proportion, and I do not thinlr
that those more competent to judge than I, who read
his book, will think that West swamped his general

171

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

outline with his own lesser discoveries. And he had
none of the jealous greed of the baser kind of research
worker. He would have given his results to any one.
When he was nearly through his book, there was
announced a book on somewhat similar lines by
another young student, the late Mr. Hovell. West
showed no fear that his own work might be rendered
worthless, but (I think) volunteered to assist in
preparing it for the press.

172

A MISCELLANY OF BOOKS

PATER AND MARIUS

W ALTER PATER was bom in 1839 and died in
1894. He was educated at the King’s School,
Canterbury, and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he
spent most of his life as a don. He was a quiet,
precise, conventionally-dressed man with a moustache,
not prone to violent controversy, the idol of a small
sect of undergraduates, immensely respected by a
few friends. This is not a biography or a general
criticism: those who wish for an account and an
examination of him may be referred to the late
Arthur Christopher Benson’s admirable monograph
in the English Men of Letters Series. He wrote a
number of books, mostly collections of "studies”:
Marius the Epicurean , written between 1881 and
1884, is much the most substantial and important of
them.

In the casual allusions of current criticism Pater
is often the victim of injustice. He is commonly
referred to as the father of the “Art for Art’s Sake”
movement of the 'eighties and ’nineties, and the one
passage quoted from him is a rather overcharged
description of a picture which seemed to him to
mirror the iridescence of decay. The common con-

175

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

ception of him is that of an a-moral scholar who
announced that art existed in order to intensify the
moment for the moment’s sake and who, faced with
the conflicts, agonies, and exaltations of the world of
men, dandiacally replied, like ThSophile Gautier,
"moi je fais 6maux et cam 4 es.” The discovery of a
really "inevitable ’’epithet gave him, it is supposed,
a satisfaction which he could never have derived
from any other achievement: he was a connoisseur
writing for connoisseurs.

There is an element of truth in this: he had a
fastidiously delicate side, he was impatient of the
slipshod, eclectic in his admirations: his themes
were commonly found in fields unfrequented by the
many: he favoured characters disdainful of the herd
and a prose scrupulous in dignity, richly and a little
heavily clad, far removed from all the hasty jargons of
every day: he was an aesthetic anchorite paying
solitary and ceremonious devotions to the principle
of Beauty. Yet to say all that is not to state the whole
truth, and it is particularly to ignore Marius the
Epicurean, the solid and long-meditated apologia of his
prime. “Art for Art’s Sake” was never supposed by
Pater to be a sufficient aim and satisfaction: the
intensification of enjoyment which Art gave him was
important to him but a less abiding preoccupation
than other things. If Oscar Wilde was his aesthetic
disciple, Ruskin was his father in aesthetics: he

176

PATER AND MARIUS

occupied a middle position, not indeed mixing his
art and his ethics, but simultaneously concerned
with both. Perhaps the most crucial fact of all to
remember about him is that in youth he intended to
become a clergyman, and that just before his death
he is believed to have been again thinking of taking
holy orders. “The Rev. Walter Pater” may sound
strangely indeed to those who conceive of him as a
sort of Oxford Omar or as the rather bewildered,
hollow-eyed, and strenuously appreciative husband
of La Gioconda. Yet, had he lived a few years longer,
he might have compelled us to accustom our ears to
it: and it would not have consorted ill with the gravity,
the spiritual earnestness, the charity, the sensitive¬
ness, the complete honesty and the Christian exordium
of Marius the Epicurean. How people can continue
to deduce this shibboleth of “Art for Art's Sake” from
a book like this is a puzzle. A mere connoisseur in
cosmogonies and ethical systems, whose passion for
form and record could best be satisfied by depicting
them, is, I suppose, a conceivable creature. Let no
one think that the author of Marius was such a one.
No doctrine is examined in this book which has not
a perennial appeal to some minds in some moods; the
weighing of the successive attitudes is not the weighing
of an appraising jeweller with his little scales, but that
of an anxious seeker for truth peering into the depths
of every well that he passes. He may not come to

177

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

definite conclusions about religion and duty, but
he is far from being indifferent to them; a brooding
sad-eyed man who turned often enough from his murex
and his roses, his Latin phrases and his miniatures on
vellum, his ambrosial goddesses and amaranthine
youths, to sorrow over the vast barbarity of history,
to gaze in silent inquiry at the starry midnight sky,
to listen to the response of his own heart to heroism,
to candid innocence and to self-abnegating love.
Walter Pater's was a profoundly religious nature. His
aestheticism was governed by ideals of temperance
and good taste, and it was conditioned and limited by
his humanity and spiritual awareness. He was never
within a thousand miles of that hell of the really pure
aesthete who ends by admiring the beautifully curved
and tinted facial contortions of a victim who is being
flayed alive. Marius ends with somebody else saying
“Abi, anima Christiana,” not with himself saying
“Qualis artifex pereo.” The book is as truly a religi¬
ous novel, for all its disquisitions on other themes, as
any of its didactic or doubt-haunted contemporaries.

The book is in narrative form, and it has retained
its hold over several successive generations: but few
writers of fiction can ever have been so notably devoid
as was Pater of some of the principal talents and
characteristics of the typical novelist. His powers are,
in some regards, deficient; his methods are, in some
regards, amateurish. He is at every point technically

178

PATER AND MARIUS

unorthodox, and he succeeds in overcoming by his
earnestness and his golden speech difficulties raised
by his own indifference to the most commonplace
canons of the narrative art, and his own incompetence
to do things generally deemed indispensable to success¬
ful tales of whatever species.

In the first place the central character, who fills
most of the stage most of the time, is not conceived
"in the round,” hardly even in the flat. Marius at
best (subject to a reservation made later) is an en¬
chanting shadow to whom are attributed all the most
agreeable moral qualities and all the most likely moral
speculations. At moments he comes alive, at moments
of intense affection or sacrifice: in a general way we
are merely told that he is alive. Normally, a novelist
will endeavour to exhibit a character by showing him
expressing himself in action and speech. Pater does
neither. Marius’s wanderings are not very strongly
“motivated”; he drifts from place to place stirred by
a faint curiosity, and most of his experiences come to
him by chance. He never attempts to exercise his
will upon life, neither grief nor love ever makes him do
anything but think, and in the end he assents with a
faint sweet smile to a martyrdom not of his own
seeking. We are not shown his physical movements
except in so far as they assist to provoke trains of
interesting thought in him or in his creator. He may
at times believe in a doctrine of enjoyment, but he is

179

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

seldom seen enjoying specific things under the prompt¬
ings of his passions, his desires, or his doctrines. Nor
do we know the accents of his voice any better than
we know the personal hue of his actions. There can
seldom have been a novel in which there was so little
dialogue: what dialogue there is which leaves any
impression behind it is philosophic conversation, not
true dialogue. Not in words are the loves of Marius
and his friends expressed or his griefs and longings
at moments of peculiar poignancy. Virtually every
opportunity for dramatic speech is neglected: we are
told by the author what Marius is thinking, never by
Marius himself: Marius is a transmitter.

As for the other characters, it is significant that
those for whose existence and characteristics there is
historical warrant are more vividly and distinctly
drawn than those whom Pater felt obliged to invent.
Comelius-Galahad and Flavian-Catullus (the Pervigi¬
lium must have had an author, and it was a pleasant
notion to produce one) are types, catalogues of
qualities, not individuals. There is considerably more
individualization about the portraits of the others:
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Lucian (an Anatole
France in his softer moments), the laughing and con¬
ceited Faun-Platonist, Apuleius, and even old Fronto,
the Emperor’s tutor. Flavian is more elaborately
described than anyone in the book: the numbering of
qualities is very exhaustive: the type clearly recogniz¬
ing

PATER AND MARIUS

able: yet one hot impatient word, one betrayal of
sudden shame or love in speech, would have made him
live more clearly than a page of the facts that we are
given.

The construction, too, of the book is very strange.
There is no well-proportioned development towards
a crisis in the action—which, with this theme and
method, is the same as the crisis in the thought. When
the end comes, it comes accidentally and unexpectedly:
we are even defeated of our natural hopes of seeing
Marius come more closely to grips with Christianity;
it is certainly some deus, aut diabolus, ex machina who
precipitates this premature breach in the train of
thought. Important characters are introduced and
then dropped for no reason, sometimes having had
very little effect upon the plot, such as it is; when they
have gone Marius usually forgets them and so does
Pater. Frequently the action is interrupted by long
digressions: the author even intervenes in his own
person, gently brushing aside his characters and their
“scenery,” whilst he imparts interesting information
about an imperial triumph or a philosophic tenet.
Pater, in fact, would obviously not have made a
good playwright.

Yet it is of little avail to judge a book on a priori
technical grounds if the book evidently succeeds in
arousing, and over a long period, the enthusiastic
interest of the audience for whom it is intended. If

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kEFLECXIONS AND MEMORIES

Marius be not a good story, then it is a good something
else. There are, it is clear at once, some elements in
it which violate all the canons of narrative and are
largely responsible for the book’s fascination. Pater
may interrupt his story as much as he hkes: we never
complain, the interruption being so good: we are
even content to forget Marius for many pages while
we are reading the lovely fable of Cupid and Psyche,
bodily transferred from the Golden Ass of Apuleius.
This is preceded by a critical essay on Apuleius’s
strange mixture of beauty, humour, fantasy, coarse¬
ness and morbidity. Pater does remember to mention
Marius once in the course of this, and to attribute one
of his own impressions to the young man: but the
illusion of Manus’s existence and attention is hardly
sustained by a sentence like “all through the book,
there is an unmistakably real feeling for asses, with
bold touches like Swift’s,” or the statement that a
certain scene “is worthy of Theophile Gautier.” The
book is considerably enriched by its references to
Lucian and the Pervigilium and its sketch of old
Fronto: but these are ajl done for their own sakes
and not because they affect Marius or the action. We
must regard the book as a miscellany with a thread:
a religious "revue” with an ancient Roman setting:
a mixture of fiction, autobiography, aesthetic criticism,
history, ethics, and metaphysics. Every rift is cer¬
tainly loaded with ore: whatever Pater is doing he

182

PATER AND MARIUS

does it well, whether the summarizing of abstract
thought, the evocation of pictures, of landscapes and
maimers, or the delineation of portraits. And in
beauty of style the book is the crown of all Pater’s
achievements.

The writing is not quite as elaborate, bejewelled
and be-comma'd as that of some of Pater’s other
books. No anthologist will find in Marius passages
quite as sensuously resonant as the celebrated oration
on Monna Lisa, or descriptions quite as exquisitely
vivid as that page on the tree's falling petals in The
Child in the House. We must look elsewhere for Pater
at his most glittering, and also for Pater at his most
parenthetical and periphrastic. The writing here is
more condensed, and has a gravity and clarity which
are proper to the comparing of Stoicism and true
Epicureanism, a noble gravity and lucidity which
permit, reticently and at a low pitch, of every subtle
modulation of feeling which Pater could wish to convey,
the pity, love, grief, mirth, excitement, indignation,
and anger of a scholar and a gentleman. Who could
mistake for anyone else’s such a musing and leisurely
opening as this—one, by the way, which qualifies the
remark made above about the absence of Pater's
most parenthetical and sub-claused manner from this
book?

Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half-
real, something cloistral or monastic, as we should

i 8 3

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

say, united to this exquisite order, made the
whole place seem to Manus, as it were, sacellum,
the peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who,
still m real widowhood, provided the deceased
Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life
which we can give to the dead, in our intensely
realized memory of them—the “subjective im¬
mortality,” to use a modem phrase, for which
many a Roman epitaph cries out plaintively
to widow or sister or daughter, still in the land
of the living. Certainly, if any such considerations
regarding them do reach the shadowy people,
he enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm
place still left, in thought at least, beside the
living, the desire for which is actually, in various
forms, so great a motive with most of us. And
Manus the younger, even thus early, came to
think of women's tears, of women’s hands to lay
one to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood,
as a sort of natural want. The soft lines of the
white hands and face, set among the many
folds of the veil and stole of the Roman widow,
busy upon her needlework, or with music some¬
times, defined themselves for him as the typical
expression of maternity.

Take again the unostentatious music, elegance and
exactitude of his description of Verus, that “brother”
of Aurelius, who wore a “soft curling beard powdered
with gold,” and who “might well have reminded
people of the delicate Greek god of flowers and wine”:

The younger, certainly, possessed in full
measure that charm of a constitutional freshness
of aspect which may defy for a long time extrava-

184

PATER AND MARIUS

gant or erring habits of life; a physiognomy,
healthy-looking, cleanly, and firm, which seemed
unassociable with any form of self-torment, and
made one think of the muzzle of some young
hound or roe, such as human beings invariably
like to stroke—a physiognomy, in effect, with
all the goodliness of animalism of the finer sort,
though still wholly animal. The charm was that
of the blond head, the unshrinking gaze, the
warm tints: neither more nor less than one may
see every English summer, in youth, manly
enough, and with the stuff which makes brave
soldiers, in spite of the natural kinship it seems
to have with playthings and gay flowers. But
innate in Lucius Verus there was that more than
womanly fondness for fond things, which had
made the atmosphere of the old city of Antioch
heavy with centuries of voluptuousness, a
poison to him: he had come to love his delicacies
best out of season, and would have gilded the
very flowers.

There is a drawback to this prose. The texture is
sometimes so uniform, the cadences so satisfying and
so continuously woven, that we are prone to be
crooned into a languorous inattention by it, and must
needs return on our tracks to notice the rare refine¬
ments of idea and observation, the laborious ease of
polished phrase. This is evident in the introduction
to the Stoic Emperor’s speech to the Senate:

There was a certain melancholy grandeur m
the very simplicity or triteness of the theme: as
it were the very quintessence of all the old Roman

185

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

epitaphs, of all that was monumental in that
city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and
people. As if in the very fervour of disillusion,
he seemed to be composing— axnrep emypa<pas
Xpovwv icai. o\(cv eOuwv — the sepulchral titles of
ages and whole peoples; nay! the very epitaph
of the living Rome itself. The grandeur of the
ruins of Rome,—heroism in ruins: it was under
the influence of an imaginative anticipation of
this, that he appeared to be speaking. And
though the impression of the actual greatness of
Rome on that day was but enhanced by the
strain of contempt, falling with an accent of
pathetic conviction from the emperor himself,
and gaining from his pontifical pretensions the
authority of a religious intimation, yet the curious
interest of the discourse lay in this, that Marius,
for one, as he listened, seemed to foresee a grass-
grown Forum, the broken ways of the Capitol,
and the Palatine hill itself in humble occupation.
That impression connected itself with what he
had already noted of an actual change even then
coming over Italian scenery. Throughout, he
could trace something of a humour into which
Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the tendency
to cry Abase yourselves! There was here the
almost inhuman impassibility of one who had
thought too closely on the paradoxical aspect of
the love of posthumous fame. With the ascetic
pride which lurks under all Platonism, resultant
from its opposition of the seen to the unseen, as
falsehood to truth—the imperial Stoic, like his
true descendant, the hermit of the middle age,
was ready, in no friendly humour, to mock,
there in its narrow bed, the corpse which had
made so much of itself in life.

186

PATER AND MARIUS

One more passage, also with reference to death, may
be quoted as carrying his voice, speaking with a less
uniform delivery:

That a Numa, and his age of gold, would
return, has been the hope or dream of some, in
every period. Yet if he did come back, or any
equivalent of his presence, he could but weaken,
and by no means smite through, that root of
evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human
sense, in things, which one must carefully dis¬
tinguish from all preventible accidents. Death,
and the little perpetual daily dyings, which
have something of its sting, he must necessarily
leave untouched. And, methinks, that were all
the rest of man's life framed entirely to his
liking, he would straightway begin to sadden
himself, over the fate—say, of the flowers! For
there is, there has come to be since Numa lived
perhaps, a capacity for sorrow in his heart,
which grows with all the growth, alike of the
individual and of the race, in intellectual delicacy
and power, and which will find its aliment.

“It hath a dying fall”: that very last word, “aliment,”
is perfect in weight and movement: try to substitute
any of its so-called synonyms for it and Pater’s sensi¬
tive taste and cunning will be evident. He could
unroll masterly convolutions hke Henry James; his
sustained elegiac passages have something of the
mournful surge of seventeenth-century prose; a para¬
graph like that just quoted is all his own, and reminds
us of nobody except his successors. The mere noise

187

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

of him read, with only a half-attention to his meaning,
is like the sound of fountains in secluded gardens, or
of trees faintly rustling on a summer afternoon, or of
a fire burning quietly in curtained night, or of bees,
or of sleepy birds, or of a melancholy wind.

The book consists chiefly of accounts of spiritual
experiences and intellectual speculations, each arising
from some contact of Marius’s with the daily world
or some impact made upon him by the thoughts of
others. His trains of thought fall into two obvious
categories. There are those which seem to ring very
personal to Pater himself, and there are those which,
though Pater has set them down here, and may well
have often entertained them philosophically, seem
more “objective" in their reference and more matter
of fact in their statements. Take, for instance, a
passage like this (one which the modem psycho¬
logists would devour with much alacrity), and who
can doubt that Pater is here imputing to Marius very
acute sensations of his own produced by a scene
literally recorded?

Though his liking for animals was so strong,
yet one fierce day in early summer, as he walked
along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes
breeding, and ever afterwards avoided that
place and its ugly associations, for there was
something in the incident which made food
distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days
afterwards. The memory of it, however, had

188

PATER AND MARIUS

almost passed away when, at the comer of a
street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman
exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the
reptile writhed, the former painful impression
revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of
the real world, and again for many days took
all sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered
at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret
of that repugnance, having no particular dread
of a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who
had put his hand into the mouth of an old garden-
god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind
of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he
could hardly have killed or injured the animals,
which seemed already to suffer by the very
circumstance of their life, being what they were.
It was something like a fear of the supernatural,
or perhaps rather a moral feeling, for the face of
a great serpent, with no grace of fur or feather
so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort
of humanity of aspect in its spotted and clouded
nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and
sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the
sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into one
metallic spring of pure enmity against him.

Who can doubt that the individual Walter Pater here
speaks through the lips of Marius? “It had always
been his policy, through all his pursuit of experience,
to take flight in time from any too disturbing passion,
from any sort of affection likely to quicken his pulses
beyond the point at which the quiet work of life was
practicable”: there, again, the Pater whom we know
is murmuring confidences through a mask; and as

189

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

much may be said of some of those early passages in
which the young Marius contemplates the past, dis¬
covers the present, and dreams of his own future, the
very colour of the nineteenth century being in some
degree to the second. There were passages, too, of
religious speculation which would never have binned
so intensely had they not reflected the profound
troubles and hazardous voyages of Pater’s own soul:

And were the cheerful, sociable, restorative
beliefs, of which he had there read so much, that
bold adhesion, for instance, to the hypothesis
of an eternal friend to man, just hidden behind
the veil of a mechanical and material order, but
only just behind it, ready perhaps even now to
break through—were they, after all, really a
matter of choice, dependent on some deliberate
act of volition on his part? Were they doctrines
one might take for granted, generously take for
granted, and led on by them, at first as but well-
defined objects of hope, come at last into the
region of a corresponding certitude of the intel¬
lect? . . . Experience certainly taught that,
as regarding the sensible world he could attend
or not, almost at will, to this or that colour, this
or that train of sounds, in the whole tumultuous
concourse of colour and sound, so it was also, for
the well-trained intelligence, in regard to that
hum of voices which besiege the inward no less
than the outward ear. Might it be not otherwise
with those various and competing hypotheses,
the permissible hypotheses, which, in that open
field for hypothesis—one’s own actual ignorance
of the origin and tendency of our being—present

190

PATER AND MARIUS

themselves so importunately, some of them with
so emphatic a reiteration, through all the mental
changes of successive ages? Might the will itself
be an organ of knowledge, of vision?

As we read this little chapter from “the grammar of
assent” we feel very much more certain that Pater
himself had been tempted to try this peculiar path¬
way to peace than that it would even have been per¬
ceived by his quiet young Roman vagrant. Elsewhere
we have admirable expositions of the manner in which
Marius examined and discarded one view after another,
and plausible accounts of the influence exercised by
men and events on the colour of his thought; while
occasionally, as in the brilliant and lucid pages on
Cyrenaicism and Cynicism, the narrative is discarded,
the charming puppet Marius is forgotten, and Pater
the scholar and teacher produces an essay which
might have come out of a volume of Studies in Classical
Philosophy. For in spite of all those other qualities
which we have noticed, it is in its chaplet of spiritual
and intellectual experiences that the chief interest of
the book lies. Doubtless there are conjectural cos¬
mogonies which are not discussed or even glanced at
here: I think that Marius is never allowed even to
suppose a diabolic government of the universe. But
most of the changes in the spiritual sky are here re¬
corded: reflective men will find great areas of their
experiences compressed within these pages, and will

191

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

also find much that has been vaguely entertained
and formulated by themselves given that “hard gem-
like” quality which was Pater’s aim in language as in
thought. The Epicurean outlook is one of those which
is summarized.

“A hogg of Epicurus’ stye”: that was Burton’s
pleasant version of an ancient phrase. It is certainly
inapplicable to Epicurus or his serious disciples. No
one, probably, has ever set up a school in order, on
principle, to teach drunkenness and lasciviousness:
the pagan sensualism of the brilliant Flavian is not
Epicureanism and has no connection with what was
essentially a doctrine of temperate and discriminating
enjoyment, arrived at after a steady and serious
examination of the known facts about life, death, and
human nature. In Marius’s brief diary there is a
passage in which this frugal and intellectual quality
is emphasized.

Often have I maintained that, in this generous
southern country at least, Epicureanism is the
special philosophy of the poor. How little I
myself really need, when people leave me alone,
with the intellectual powers at work serenely.
The drops of f allin g water, a few wild flowers
with their priceless fragrance, a few tufts even of
half-dead leaves, changing colour in the quiet of
a room that has but light and shadow in it;
these, for a susceptible mind, might well do duty
for all the glory of Augustus.

So thought the Augustus of that time: the passage

192

PATER AND MARIUS

must surely recall that page in the Meditations on
which the Stoic Emperor speaks of the loveliness of
the ripe and gaping fruit. The gulf is not so very wide
here between the Epicurean and the Stoic: there is a
temperamental difference, one being milder and less
reluctant to accept the perishable beauty than the
other, who can never look at a body without thinking
of a corpse. What is not quite evident is why Pater
chose to call his hero Marius the Epicurean rather
than Marius the —Anything Else. If Pater means to
suggest that the Marius he draws had the sort of
nature which, historically, was attached to that very
fine "stye” we may, if we like, take his word for it,
though this most fastidious of connoisseurs, even when
most enchanted by the delights of sense, never had a
kiss and seldom, if ever, a flagon. If the title is meant
to convey (as to the uninstructed novice it may
convey) that Marius was a man with a set philosophy
which gave him a way of life and a test for experience
it is very misleading. Marius, if his career be looked
at as a whole, can only be called an Epicurean philo¬
sopher in so far as he was always an epicure in philo¬
sophies, and in so far as Christianity can be regarded
as the crown and consummation of Epicureanism.
Marius is far from being a member of a school: unless
the animce naturaliter Christiana can be regarded as
a kind of school guided in certain directions not by
their reasons but by their intuitions. Pater knew far

193

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

better what be was going to do with Marius than
Marius ever knew what he was going to do with
himself.

For Marius, though he progressed, was an Aeolian
harp to both sensations and ideas, which came to him
in the order which best suited Pater’s design, and
which always struck music from his soul and from his
creator’s tongue. The book, as we have seen, is less
a narrative than a series of little essays on Marius's
thoughts about life and religion, with Pater’s thoughts
often added as a commentary to the m : external
events being, mostly, reduced to the minimum re¬
quired to set each train of reflection, ardour or
revulsion, in motion. Mood after mood, speculation
after speculation, is imputed to him, sometimes as a
result of Pater’s own intense experience, sometimes
because the mood or the speculation (given Marius’s
gentle and honest heart) seemed inevitable in the
circumstances of his age, and therefore had to be
laboriously bodied forth. His first religious impressions
are associated with ritual and the past:

What had been in the main a matter of family
pride with his father, was sustained by a native
instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A
sense of conscious powers external to ourselves,
pleased or displeased by the right or wrong
conduct of every circumstance of daily life—that
conscience, of which the old Roman religion was
a formal, habitual recognition, was become in

194

PATER AND MARIUS

him a powerful current of feeling and observance.
The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the
power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so
highly in a northern peasantry, had its counter¬
part in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed
the spot, “touched of heaven,” where the
lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in
the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering
garlands about it, marked the place.

That dramatically incongruous mention of Words¬
worth is symbolical of one of Pater’s weaknesses as a
story-teller. A man eager to capture the reader with
his story of persons and events might have mentioned
anybody prior to Marius—Hesiod, Theocritus, Ennius,
Virgil, or whoever might supply the parallel and adorn
the tale. He would have known that the mention of
Wordsworth would destroy illusion by reminding us
of the presence of a nineteenth-century Pater who
had read a nineteenth-century Wordsworth and in¬
vented a second-century Marius. But this was not
primarily intended to be a novel: the remarkable
thing is that, concentrated as he was on the argument
and on his depiction of various phases in religious
experience. Pater should have held our attention with
his “fable” as he does. Marius, as a youth, developed
from acceptance to question, and, in his quiet manner,
took every supposed way of life in his hand and
scrutinized it. He saw, in succession, some of the
most famous of living talkers and thinkers: he was
not blind to the spell of beauty in action; he rejoiced

195

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

in the glitter of the temporal, which is contemptuous
or oblivious of the eternal: he studied the old books
and the established liturgies, lest some secret might
be lurking there which might be the key to his rest.
The quest was not entirely barren for him. He
evidently had, as Pater so nobly had, strong “in¬
tellectual interests”: in other words, he could evidently
find relish in putting his qualifying parentheses
between commas, and in exhibiting the contrasted
merits and defects of an inadequate system, even
when it was clear that he was merely dallying with a
hedgerow rose, or bramble, instead of following the
“gleam” to which he had dedicated himself. Yet
that “gleam” is never lost sight of. The fascination
of these strange happy Christians was already closing
on him, all unawares; and the end was now near when
he wrote in his diary of all the sorrow in the world,
and how the sorrow would be all the worse were this
death-beleaguered world of men and women more
nearly perfect: “I would that there were one even as I
behind this vain show of things.” And again,

A protest comes, out of the very depths of
man’s radically hopeless condition in the world,
with the energy of one of those suffering yet
prevailing deities, of which old poetry tells.
Dared one hope that there is a heart, even as ours,
in that divine “Assistant” of one’s thoughts—a
heart even as mine, behind this vain show of
things!

196

PATER AND MARIUS

With exquisite art, with perfect spiritual tact, Pater
places that chapter of self-communing in which Marius
almost touches the prophetic and apostolic, as an
earlier pagan has been deemed to touch it in Tu
Marcellus eris, immediately before another chapter
in which Marius is thrown violently in contact with
that new religion which was proclaiming, with in¬
effably cheerful countenance, the existence and omni¬
presence of the “Assistant” for whom he yearned.
Everything is done to heighten the contrast. We
have been conducted through a long sequence of
arguments as to the goods of life and the end of it:
argument has ceased now, there is none of it. There
is hardly even mention made of a revelation (for that
might provoke argument): we are merely shown the
concrete results of that revelation: a great light of
joy shining in the eyes of humble people worshipping
in secluded villas or dark catacombs, and an air of
chivalry and kindness never dreamed of before, least
of all by Aurelius, one of the chief of pagan saints.
For years Marius, though earnest and plain-living
himself, had been wandering in easy places listening
to famous philosophers discoursing from couches or
leaning over marble balconies whilst the slaves brought
them what they wanted. Now, in this underground
world to which his friend Cornelius (a kind of Roman
Sir Galahad) has brought him, he finds himself with
people too happy to debate, anxious only to proclaim

197

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

their great news of glad tidings, willing to proclaim it
to the death, weeping and praising God whilst their
fellows, men and women, are subjected to the most
barbarous martyrdoms, and their own turn may be
to-morrow.

“It had always been his policy,” Pater says, “through
all his pursuit of experience, to take flight in time
from any too disturbing passion, from any sort of
affection likely to quicken his pulses beyond the point
at which the quiet work of life was practicable.”
What the “quiet work” was we are not told: Pater
was probably lapsing into thoughts of lectures at
Brasenose. It is conceivable that a “disturbing
passion” might have overtaken Marius (as he has
been shown to us and as we have learned to feel
affection for him) after he had read that terrible and
magnificent letter from the persecuted churches in
France: but Pater dodges the issue, ends the chapter
with the letter, and begins the new one with Marius
after an interval, still pursuing his normal quest. He
never does, so far as we are privy to his conversations
and his thoughts, become informed as to the history
and doctrines of these Christians. He seems, having
met people who live well instead of merely talking
about it, to be satisfied to judge the tree by its fruits:
and in the end, knowing that he has found nothing
better on earth, he is content to die an inadvertent
martyr to the Faith of which he knows so little:

198

PATER AND MARIUS

The people round Ms bed were praying fer¬
vently —AW AW Anima Christiana! In the
moments of Ms extreme helplessness their
mystic bread had been placed, had descended
like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips.
Gentle fingers had applied to hands and feet, to
all those old passage-ways of the senses, through
wMch the world had come and gone for him, now
so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. It
was the same people, who, in the grey, austere
evening of that day, took up Ms remains, and
buried them secretly, with their accustomed
prayers; but with joy also, holding his death,
according to their generous view in this matter,
to have been of the nature of a martyrdom; and
martyrdom, as the church had always said, a
kind of sacrament with plenary grace.

For many reasons it must be admitted that Pater
chose Ms period well, since this wasto be his denouement.
The period was one congenial to speculation. It was at
the end of "the Peace of the Antonines”—an autumnal
peace, and this was the last of it, with the worm in
the ripe fruit, Faustina in the Palace, Commodus
to succeed the rigid Emperor, and the barbarians
again beginning to boil over the frontiers—but a
peace nevertheless. At an earlier date Marius would
not have been likely to have come into personal touch
with Christians; at a later he would have had less
leisure for Ms ample peregrinations through the world,
and he would not have found that morning freshness
in the Church. It was necessary, too, that the pagan

199

o

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

world should he "looking its best" in order that the
contrast ipfhich it was Pater’s business to make should
be fairySmd final. The Roman world was never more
peaceful, nor Roman society ever more humane, than
un#er the Antonines: Gibbon has even maintained
mat no recorded epoch has ever seen mankind so
happy. Nor could a pagan Roman more fully equipped
t han Marius with the Christian virtues have been
discovered or devised. Yet even Marius perceived,
in his friend Cornelius, and in the little band of Christ¬
ians whom he met, a love and radiance which had
never before Christianity been known or even imag¬
ined. He is first curious because of Cornelius, the
handsome officer-convert: wanting to discover - "the
hidden source from which the beauty and strength of
a nature, so persistently fresh, in the midst of a some¬
what jaded world, might be derived.” Antonine Rome
knew public and private charity, charity organization
even:

But what pagan charity was doing tardily, and
as if with the painful calculation of old age, the
church was doing, almost without thinking about
it, with all the liberal enterprise of youth, because
it was her very being thus to do. “You fail to
realize your own good intentions,” she seems to
say, to pagan virtue, pagan kindness. She
identified herself with those intentions and
advanced them with an unparalleled freedom and
largeness. The gentle Seneca would have reverent
burial provided even for the dead body of a

200

PATER AND MARIUS

criminal. Yet when a' certain woman collected
for interment the insulted remains of Nero, the
pagan world surmised that she must be a
Christian: only a Christian would have been
likely to conceive so chivalrous a devotion
towards mere wretchedness.

This is said with exquisite clarity and truth: a finer
passage still is that in which Pater describes “divine
service” as Marius attended it: the mixture of ranks,
all made level by faith, hope, and charity, the grave
joy of the young men, the newly-found content on
the wrinkled faces of the old, the pervading air of
nobility as though "cleansing and kindling flame”
had been at work, the general appearance of the people
as of “the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new world,
from the very face of which discontent had passed
away.” Marius had hated the cruelties and oppres¬
sions of his civilization, but had not dreamed of a power
that should abolish them by begetting, or, rather,
bringing to light, a general hatred of them. Many were
kind to children, some were kind to slaves, and all
should be: but here was a religion in which there was
no bond and free and which regarded the meanest of
negroes as heir to a heavenly throne. Curtius, than
whom Rome had known no nobler legendary figure,
had leapt into the gulf for his City; but Christ had
died for strangers, bom and unborn, in the utter¬
most parts of the earth, for Man, not for a people, a
breed, or a society. The greatest of the Greeks would

201

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

scarcely have died, or encouraged a brother to die,
for a Persian slave, and they certainly would not
have conceived any of their gods as ordering them to
do so. No philosopher who had the least belief in, or
attachment to, the ancient cosmogonies could possibly
frame, in connection with these, a system of catholic
morals. Prometheus (whose fate was scarcely en¬
couraging) was an example of self-sacrifice and love
of mankind; certain gods might take a fancy to be
patrons of sailors or smiths; one was even a co-
operator with the doctors in the merciful art of healing.
Mostly these old gods were themselves Epicureans
in the most popular sense of the word, haphazard
in their kindnesses and their cruelties, arbitrary and
in their terrene attachments, jealous, touchy, quick
to take offence: cruel and lascivious, or cruel and
cold—the best of them only redeemed by the attri¬
butes of physical beauty and grace—sulky gods,
spoiled athletes, squabblers and intriguers, sultans
and bullies, wantons and disdainful virgins. Morality
could find no sanctions in pagan theology, unless the
theology were of that exalted type which refined the
gods away. The gods asked for piety towards them¬
selves, but they did so much as issue one command¬
ment for "domestic” use. But here, in the Old Cove¬
nant and the New of the Christian religion, was a
comprehensive code and a spirit for the interpre¬
tation and the expansion of the code. Here was a

202

PATER AND MARIUS

God who had not merely made man in his own image
but become man, and for the sake of man suffered the
worst of human pangs. What use were they, the old
philosophies of resignation or discreet enjoyment, of
cynicism or hedonism, to a lifelong slave or to parents
leaning over the body of a dead child? Here was a
radiant gospel bringing to both the consolation of a
beatific hope, a pitiful deity who would bring his
servants to "a world that rights the injustice of this,”
the “help of the helpless,” who should wipe away all
tears from their eyes. All-Fathers there had been,
north, south, and east, many a one; bearded dignitaries
who, when they thought fit, could wield the sword of
justice. Capricious deities there had been, capable
of a fond partiality for mortal favourites and expect¬
ing obsequiousness in return. Never before had there
been a God of Love; and a God of such Love, a man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief, who had been
despised like the lowest of mankind and tortured like
the most miserable, the patient shepherd of lost and
night-beleaguered lambs, the fight shining in darkness,
the voice of utter peace and charity and promise, in
death-chamber, in storm-beset ship, in blood-soaked
arena. On the horizon of a Marius the knowledge of
such a religion must have dawned like the first of
all the rainbows in the world; they were something
new to human experience, these old men and young
girls, children of Cana and Calvary, who sang joy-

203

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

fully when going to their deaths, and blessed their
tormentors. Christianity, coming in first shock to a
Marius, must have seemed a revelation, even though
he were vague as to its founder’s claims or positively
doubtful about his godhead.

Pater’s endeavours to recover the conflict of opinions
as it might have been waged in a very delicate pagan
mind, and to present pictures of the fine flowers of the
two competing ways of kfe, are very conscientious
and laborious: and call for an effort on the part of the
reader. The book, as a collection of lucidly and
winningly enunciated philosophical hypotheses, is a
great tour de force. Yet, curiously (if one reader’s
experience be typical), it is not its speculative side
that gives it its most lasting hold or remains longest
in the memory. The provisional conjectures and
beliefs of Marius, like our own, make their temporary
impressions, leave their unseen traces, and are gone:
what remains with us, after some lapse of time, are
certain pictures, an atmosphere, the sense of a
character. Pater in this book added to that land¬
scape of antiquity which every educated man carries
about in his head. Soberly grouping things according
to concepts and with a proper respect for the veri¬
fication of alleged facts, those who have never tasted
honey-dew or the milk of Paradise—or any of us with
an effort—can clearly distinguish between things
Roman and things Greek, think of the two sets of

204

PATER AND MARIUS

gods as distinct though kindred, remember, whenever
a name is mentioned, whether it comes in the category
of historic, semi-historic, or mythical, to preserve a
division between the reliable records of chroniclers
and the fanciful glosses of literary men. But to most
of us the past appears rather in images than in
concepts, and we habitually forget (hardly desiring
to remember) the difference between invention and
legend, legend and scientific fact. The Trojan war,
it appears, really took place; it is interesting to know
that: but even when we supposed that its occurrence
was as fanciful as its cause, in practice we forgot this
and thought of Ajax and Ulysses as being persons as
"real” as Pericles and Aristophanes. Not only that,
but we found the mind turning quite habitually, and
as though moving on the same plane, from some
historic figure such as Leonidas to such people as
Troilus and Cressida. Troilus, at best, was a nobody
as for Cressida, she is, really, nothing but a misprint;
—some mediaeval having read “Criseide” for the name
of Achilles’ captive Briseis—whence Chaucer’s tale
and Shakespeare’s. And these names serve to remind
us that the past remains plastic, that it still pro¬
liferates and grows; and that art does as much for it
as archaeology. Since Keats there is a Lamia who was
no more than a name in Philostratus, and "grey¬
haired Saturn” is more vivid than any ancient made
him; since Swinburne, Atalanta means more than

205

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

before; Landor, Racine, and a thousand of others have
made their contributions, small or large, to the de¬
velopment of the ancient fabric. Art will even tyran¬
nize over the fact: it is no use telling us that Cleopatra
was a plump, good-tempered and rather virtuous
little matron when Shakespeare has for ever convinced
us that she was not: whatever might come to light,
Brutus must remain Shakespeare’s Brutus and
Antony Shakespeare’s Antony—two inhabitants of
a land called "Greece and Rome,” which included
vast and varied panoramas and multitudes of persons,
the Trojan Horse and the Roman tortoise, the
elephants of Pyrrhus and Hannibal, the Nemean
hon, and the Calydonian boar, the bivouac fires in
the moonlight where the sea lay calm between the
Troad and Tenedos, the death-like stillness of the
camp where Brutus’s boy played to him on the eve
of doom, the cry of the ten thousand when they
saw the Aegean, the wail over Varus and the legions
lost in the German forests, the beehives and white
oxen of Mantua, the trampling horses of the sun,
Polydeuces, Dionysius and Nero, the Sybil of Cumae
and the oracle of Delphi, a thousand kings, a hundred
emperors, a host of Philosophers, poets, soldiers,
citizens, slaves, fights, triumphs, games, banquets,
colloquies in gardens, and lonely voyages, piety,
patriotism, courage, love, cruelty, oppression, forti¬
tude, degeneration, the Aphrodite of Cnidos, the

206

PATER AND MARIUS

Olympian Zeus, the Venus de Medici, Simonides,
Meleager, Catullus, Lesbia, the Widow of Ephesus, and
the Spartan Boy. Tumbling out come these, pell-
mell, each suggesting the next, with myriads more
behind them. There is some sort of order and shape in
the vast display: we are always aware that Adonis
dies in the first act and that Marcus Aurelius lives
somewhere in the fifth: but we do not make a practice
of remembering that Adonis’s wanton never existed
and Aurelius’s did, each being a real personality to us.

These two peninsulas and their attendant islands
lie for us in a pool of light, and almost timeless. There
was a vast world around them, immemorial China,
Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and the less literate nations
of mankind. Such, here, is our education, and so
dose are our links with these civilizations that, after
all these years, and after all this archaeology, we still
feel ourselves to be “inside” a continuous Graeco-
Roman camp. All who were not Greeks or Romans,
from Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, to that
priest who told Herodotus of the secrets of Egypt,
from Brennus the victorious Gaul to Vercingetorix
the beaten, are to us besiegers beyond the walls—
foreigners, interlopers, barbarians.

This aggregation of states, empires, utopias and
fairylands which we call “the ancient world” is, as we
have said, constantly in process of expansion, and
Pater added something to it. Not so much in the

207

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

way of visible scenes as. might have been expected
from the author of The Chili in the House: the pic¬
tures in this book are, mostly, rather evoked than
painted, and the evocation of the physical is not the
author’s first concern. Sienkiewicz has no rival in
Pater, though there are a few memorable cool glimpses
of city and country. Some of his portraits with back¬
grounds, however, do add something to our permanent
treasure of classical experience. The charming picture
of Marcus Aurelius himself, fabricated entirely from
a bust, the Meditations and the correspondence with
Fronto, leaves us with a fuller and more vivid Marcus
than we had before. The glimpses of Lucian and
Apuleius supplement our previous knowledge with
information that seems completely veridical. Lucian
was the easier to deduce and is the more simply
described: the man (Anatole France in his gentler
moods) is so evident in his works. Apuleius, the
jocular and rather showy Platonist, half serious, half
not, coarse and fantastic, with a touch of George
• Meredith and a touch of Pantaloon, is, as we can
deduce him from his works, but a list of attributes,
and Pater, however summarily, did breathe life into
these and add Apuleius to the ancient characters
which are alive for us. But his greatest achievement
was his imposition upon his readers of the character,
adventures and fate of his central figure, Marius.

Marius the Epicurean, the quiet young man from
208

PATER AND MARIUS

“White-Nights,” the friend of the handsome CatuUan
sensualist Flavian and the soldier and Christian
gentleman Cornelius, is not dearly drawn from the
outside: we guess at his features, and we are not
allowed to hear his words: he never “does anything”
or “takes steps” which result in crystallizing his
personality for us: yet in retrospect, because of the
movements of his mind and heart, his disinterested¬
ness, charity and love of beauty, he lives for us.
Whilst we are reading the book he is but a gentle
ghost to us: he gains solidity with time and distance:
we create him, as it were, for ourselves from hints
and materials given us by Pater. So, in the end, to
some who have read this strange book Marius is as
real as Marcus: the Emperor’s reign is the reign which
saw Marius the Epicurean pondering life and death,
his grave hours softly illumined by the Christian
dawn. Before Pater there was not on record a pagan
Roman so tender and sensitive as Marius; possibly
there never was one in Rome; but there is one now.
If not “the noblest Roman of them all” in the old
Stoic and heroic sense, he is certainly the sweetest
Roman of them all. Against that faintly drawn and
coloured background of Antonine Italy and Antonine
Rome (also a creation, very careful, of Pater's) he
lives for us, a redeeming feature of the Roman civiliza¬
tion, a type (who knows?) of many more, a person
who arouses pity and affection, an explanation, so

209

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

fax as he goes, of the manner in which Christianity,
with its well-spring for the thirsty, spread at last
even among the educated at Rome. It is not until
several generations later, in St. Augustine’s Con¬
fessions, that we encounter a convert more intelligent,
forcible, and vivid, who reveals in his own heart and
brain the image of the bitter and momentous religious
struggles which were raging in the world outside
him. St. Augustine would hardly have been a friend
of Pater’s.

210

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS
TO OTHER PEOPLE'S WORKS

D R. JOHNSON is often charged with constitu¬
tional indolence. The impression that he was
inactive is due to two things. One is the fact that
Boswell knew him only in his old age, after his life-
work (except in a social way) was done; the other is
that he perpetually reproached himself for not work¬
ing. In point of fact, during his early and middle
periods he was prodigiously industrious, acquiring
and dispersing that approximation to universal
knowledge which was in his time possible; and his
contributions to other persons’ works were amongst
the by-products of a powerful energy and an illimitable
generosity.

These contributions may be easily sub-divided
into two classes: dedications and prefaces which were
mere additions to the books which others wrote, and
material alterations made by Johnson to the texts of
such books. His motives were also varied. Sometimes
he merely "did it to oblige,” sometimes he was
affectionately helping a dear friend, and sometimes he
was impelled by what, in a combative mood, he once
declared to be the only incentive to writing, namely.

211

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

the desire for gain. This last he bluntly admitted
when accounting for the Preface which, in 1756, he
wrote for Rolfs Dictionary of Trade and Commerce.
He was' asked what he knew of Rolt, and he said:

Sir, I never saw the man, and I never read the
book. The booksellers wanted a Preface to a
dictionary of Trade and Commerce. I knew very
well what such a Dictionary should be, and I
wrote a Preface accordingly.

This suggests that Johnson would have been a per¬
fect advertisement-writer. The ideal advertisement-
writer does just that: forms an opinion as to precisely
what a soap or a tobacco should be and writes his
advertisement accordingly.

A picture of Johnson assisting people in the uncom¬
mercial way is given by Boswell on a much later page
of the Life:

This letter crossed me on the road to London,
where I arrived on Monday, March 15th, and
next morning at a late hour found Dr. Johnson
sitting over his tea attended by Mrs. Desmoulins,
Mr. Levett, and a clergyman who had come to
submit some poetical pieces to his revision. It is
wonderful what a number and variety of writers,
some of them even unknown to him, prevailed on
his good nature to look over their works, and
suggest corrections and improvements.

My arrival interrupted for a little while the
important business of this representative of
Bayes; upon its being resumed, I found that the

2x2

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

subject under immediate consideration was a
translation, yet in manuscript, of the Carmen
Seculare of Horace, which had this year been set
to music, and performed as a public entertain¬
ment in London, for the jomt benefit of Monsieur
Philidor and Signor Baretti. When Johnson had
done reading, the author asked him bluntly,
“If upon the whole, it was a good translation?’’
Johnson, whose regard for truth was uncommonly
strict, seemed to be puzzled for a moment what
answer to make, as he certainly could not honestly
commend the performance; with exquisite address
he evaded the question thus: “Sir, I do not say
that it may not be made a very good translation.”
Here nothing whatever in favour of the per¬
formance was affirmed, and yet the writer was
not shocked. A printed Ode to the Warlike Genius
of Britain came next m review; the bard was a
lank, bony figure, with short black hair; he was
writhing himself in agitation while Johnson
read, and showing his teeth in a grin of earnest¬
ness, exclaimed in broken sentences, and in a
keen, sharp tone, “Is that Poetry, Sir? Is it
Pindar?” Johnson: "Why, sir, there is here a
great deal of what is called poetry.” Then,
turning to me, the poet cried, “My muse has not
been long upon the town, and (pointing to the
ode) it trembles under the hand of the great
critic.” Johnson, in a tone of displeasure, asked
him “Why do you praise Anson?” I did not
trouble him by asking the reason for this ques¬
tion. He proceeded, “Here is an error, Sir; you
have made Genius feminine.” “Palpable, Sir,
(cried the enthusiast) I know it. But (m a lower
tone) it was to pay a compliment to the Duchess
of Devonshire, with which her Grace was pleased.
2x3

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

She is walking across Coxheath, in a -mili tary
uniform, and I suppose her to be the Genius of
Britain.” Johnson: “Sir, you are giving a reason
for it; but that will not make it nght. You may
have a reason why two and two should make five;
but they will still make but four.”

The Dedications that Johnson wrote for other
people are numerous. It should be borne in mind that
in his own work he was more than sparing of Dedica¬
tions. Apart from the Dedication to Chesterfield
which missed the post, there is, I believe, only one
Dedication in his works, and the signature of that is
imputed to the bookseller. But where other people
were concerned he was fully aware of the advantages
of the patron and prepared to dedicate freely. “I
think,” he said, "that I have dedicated to all the
Royal Family round.” The Royal Family was the
Royal Family of Hanover, and it may be presumed
that Johnson thought a man was no more on his
oath in a dedication than he was in a lapidary inscrip¬
tion. A specimen of what he could do for the House
of Hanover is the Dedication which he wrote, in
1763, for Hoole’s Tasso. It is addressed to the Queen
and runs:

Madam,

To approach the high and illustrious has been
in all ages the privilege of Poets; and though
translators cannot justly claim the same honour,
yet they naturally follow their authors as atten¬
dants; and I hope that in return for having

214

Johnson’s contributions to other people’s works

enabled Tasso to diffuse bis fame through the
British dominions, I may be introduced by him
to the presence of YOUR MAJESTY. TASSO has
a peculiar claim to YOUR MAJESTY’S favour
as follower and panegyrist of the house of Este,
which has one common ancestor with the house
of Hanover; and in reviewing his life it is not
easy to forbear a wish that he had lived in a
happier time, when he might among the des¬
cendants of that illustrious family have found a
more hberal and potent patronage. I cannot
but observe, MADAM, how unequally reward
is proportioned to merit, when I reflect that the
happiness which was withheld from TASSO is
reserved for me; and that the poem which once
hardly procured to its author the countenance
of the Princess of Ferrara, has attracted to its
translator the favourable notice of a BRITISH
QUEEN. Had this been the fate of TASSO, he
would have been able to have celebrated the
condescension of YOUR MAJESTY in nobler
language, but could not have felt it with
more ardent gratitude, than, MADAM, YOUR
MAJESTY’S most faithful and devoted servant.

He had already written in 1762 for the Reverend
Dr. Kennedy, Rector of Bradley, in Derbyshire, in
what Boswell calls "a strain of very courtly elegance,”
a dedication to the King of that gentleman's work,
entitled A Complete System, of Astronomical Chronology,
unfolding the Scriptures. Boswell says, feeling it
necessary to say so, “he had certainly looked at this
work before it was printed.” In 1766 he wrote what
Boswell terms “the noble dedication, to the King” of

2x5 P

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Gwynn’s London and Westminster Improved. This
Mr. Gwynn was an architect, and five years before
Johnson had "lent his friendly assistance” to correct
a pamphlet written by him and entitled Thoughts
on the Coronation of George III. This is the Dedication
to King George in Gwynn’s London and Westminster
Improved:

To the
King
Sir,

The patronage of works which have a tendency
towards advancing the happiness of mankind,
naturally belongs to great Princes; and publick
good, in which publick elegance is comprised,
has ever been the object of your Majesty’s
regard.

In the following pages your Majesty, I flatter
myself, will find that I have endeavoured at
extensive and general usefulness. Knowing,
therefore, your Majesty’s early attention to the
polite arts, and more particular affection for the
study of architecture, I was encouraged to hope
that the work which I now presume to lay before
your Majesty, might be thought not unworthy
your Royal Favour; and that the protection
which your Majesty always affords to those who
mean well, may be extended to
Sir,

Your Majesty’s
most dutiful subject,
and most obedient
and most humble servant
John Gwynn.

216

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

Next year he produced one more dedication to the
King, namely, that prefixed in the ingenious Mr.
Adams’s Treatises on the Globes. Long after, in 1778,
still another Dedication to King George came from his
pen: that which appears in the first edition of Sir
Joshua Reynolds’s celebrated Discourses:

TO THE KING

The regular progress of cultivated life is
from necessaries to accommodations, from
accommodations to ornaments. By your illus¬
trious predecessors were established Marts for
manufacturers and Colleges for Science: but for
the arts of elegance, those arts by which manu¬
facturers are embellished, and science is refined, to
found an Academy was reserved for Your Majesty.

Had such patronage been without effect, there
had been reason to believe that Nature had, by
some insurmountable impediment, obstructed
our proficiency; but the annual improvement of
the Exhibitions which Your Majesty has been
pleased to encourage, shows that only encourage¬
ment had been wanting.

To give advice to those who are contending for
royal liberality has been for some years the duty
of my station in the Academy; and these Dis¬
courses hope for your Majesty’s acceptance, as
well-intended endeavours to incite that emulation
which your notice has kindled, and direct those
studies which your bounty has rewarded.

May it please Your Majesty,

Your Majesty’s
Most dutiful Servant,

And most faithful Subject,
Joshua Reynolds.

31 7

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Space does not permit the quotation of all the dedica¬
tions he wrote; I may quote some and enumerate the
rest. In 1756, Boswell says, “This year Mr. William
Payne, brother of the respectable bookseller of that
name, published an Introduction to the Game of
Draughts to which Dr. Johnson contributed a dedica¬
tion to the Earl of Rochford, and a Preface both of
which are admirably adapted to the treatise to which
they are prefixed.”

To the Right Honourable
William Henry
Earl of Rochford, etc., etc.

My Lord,

When I take the liberty of addressing to
Your Lordship A Treatise on the Game of
DRAUGHTS, I easily foresee that I shall be
in danger of suffering Ridicule on one hand,
while I am gaining Honour on the other, and
that many who may envy me the Distinction of
approaching you, will deride the present I
presume to offer.

Had I considered this little Volume as having
no Purpose beyond that of teaching a Game, I
should indeed have left it to take its Fate without
a Patron. Triflers may find or make any Thing
a Trifle; but since it is the great Characteristic
of a wise Man to see Events in their Causes, to
obviate consequences, and ascertain Contin¬
gencies, Your Lordship will think nothing a
tnfle by which the Mind is inured to Caution,
Foresight and Circumspection. The same Skill,
and often the same Degree of Skill, is exerted in
great and little Things, and Your Lordship may
218

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

sometimes exercise, at a harmless Game, those
Abilities, which have been so happily employed
in the Service of your Country. I am.

My Lord,

Your Lordship’s
Most obliged.

Most obedient
and Most Humble Servant
William Payne.

In 1758 he wrote the Preface or Dedication to John
Angell's Stenography, or Shorthand Improved.

To the Most Noble
Charles
Duke of

Richmond, Lenox, Aubigny, etc.

May it please Your Grace,

The improvement of Arts and Sciences has
always been esteemed laudable; and in pro¬
portion to their Utility and Advantage to
Mankind, they have generally gained the Pat¬
ronage of Persons the most distinguished for
Birth, Learning and Reputation in the World.
This is an art undoubtedly of Public Utility,
and which has been cultivated by Persons of
distinguished Abilities, as will appear from its
History. But as most of their Systems have
been defective, clogged with a multiplicity of
Rules, and perplexed by arbitrary, intricate,
and impracticable Schemes, I have endeavoured
to rectify their Defects, to adapt it to all Capaci¬
ties, and render it of general, lasting, and
extensive Benefit. . . .

etc.

John Angell.

219

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

In 1760 he wrote for Signor Baretti the dedication of
his Italian and, English Dictionary, to the Marquis of
Alven, then Envoy-Extraordinary from Spain at
the Court of St. James’s. In 1762 he wrote the
Dedication of Mrs. Lenox’s The Female Quixote —one
of a number of Quixotes popular m the century. He
had previously in 1753 favoured this lady with a
Dedication to the Earl of Ossoiy of her Shakespeare
Illustrated, and in 1759:

From that liberality which never failed, when
called upon to assist other labourers in literature,
found time to translate for Mrs. Lenox’s English
version of Brumoy "A Dissertation on the
Greek Comedy” and the "General Conclusion
of the Book.”

His French, be it remembered, was extremely good,
as also his Italian, although when encountering
foreigners, he greatly preferred to talk Latin. Here
we find continuous help given to one person, a lady,
indeed, for whose success he had been solicitous from
the beginning. One of the finest passages in Hawkins’s
life concerns her:

Mrs. Lenox, a lady now well known to the
literary world, had written a novel entitled The
Life of Harriet Stuart (supposed to be her own
history), which m the spring of 1751 was ready
for publication. One evening at the (Ivy Lane)
Club, Johnson proposed to us celebrating the
birth of Mrs. Lenox’s first literary child, as he
called her book, by a whole night spent in
220

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

festivity. . . . The place appointed was the
Devil Tavern, and there, about the hour of
eight, Mrs. Lenox and her husband, and a lady
of her acquaintance, as also the club and friends
to the number of near twenty assembled. The
supper was elegant, and Johnson had directed
that a magnificent hot apple-pie should make
part of it, and this he would have stuck with
bay-leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lenox was
an authoress, and had written verses; and further
he had prepared for her a crown of laurel with
which—but not till he had invoked the Muses
with some ceremonies of his own invention—
he encircled her brows. The night passed, as
must be imagined, in pleasant conversation and
harmless mirth, intermingled at different periods
with the refreshments of coffee and tea. About
five, Johnson’s face shone with meridian splen¬
dour, though his drink had been only lemonade;
but the far greater part of the company had
deserted the colours of Bacchus and were with
difficulty rallied to partake of a second refresh¬
ment of coffee, .which was scarcely ended when
the day began to dawn. This phenomenon
began to put us in mind of our reckoning; but
the waiters were all so overcome with sleep that
it was two hours before a bill could be had, and
it was not till near eight that the creaking of the
street door gave the signal for our departure.

In 1763 he wrote the Dedication to Bennett’s edition
of Lord Shaftesbury’s works; Davies, the bookseller,
indeed, says that Johnson was actually the editor.
In 1765 he wrote “part of’’ the Dedication to Percy’s
Rdiques. The Dedication runs thus:

22X

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

To Elizabeth, Late Duchess and Countess of
Northumberland, in her own right Baroness
Percy, etc., etc., etc., who, being noble heiress,
to many great families of our ancient Nobility,
employed the princely fortune, and sustained the
illustrious honours, which she derived from them,
through her whole life, with the greatest dignity,
generosity and spirit, and who for her many
public and private virtues, will ever be remem¬
bered, as one of the first characters of her time,
THIS LITTLE WORK was originally dedicated,
and as it sometimes afforded her amusement, and
was highly distinguished by her indulgent
approbation, it is now, with the utmost regard,
respect and gratitude, consecrated, to her
beloved and honoured memory.

This Elizabeth was the heiress of the ancient Percys;
she married Sir Hugh Smithson, a city man who
changed his name and is the ancestor of the modem
Percys. The Dedication was accounted for by the
Bishop’s belief, not yet authenticated by genealogists,
that he was a relation. What Johnson wrote I do not
know: probably not This Little Work.

Finally:

Early in this year (1777) came out, in two volumes
quarto, the posthumous works of the learned
Dr. Zachary Pearce, Bishop of Rochester,
being “A Commentary with Notes, on the Four
Evangelists and the Acts of the Apostles,” with
other theological pieces. Johnson had now an
opportunity of making a grateful return to that
excellent prelate, who, we have seen, was the
only person who gave him any assistance in the

222

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

compilation of his Dictionary. The Bishop had
left some account of his life and character, written
by himself. To this Johnson made some valuable
additions, and also furnished to the Editor, the
Reverend Mr. Derby a Dedication which I shall
here insert, both because it will appear at this
time with peculiar propriety; and because it will
tend to propagate and increase that "fervour
of Loyalty” which in me, who boast of the name
of TORY, is not only a principle, but a passion.

To the King
Sir,

I presume to lay before your Majesty the last
labours of a learned Bishop, who died in the toils
and duties of his calling. He is now beyond the
reach of all earthly honours and rewards; and
only the hope of inciting others to imitate hi m
makes it now fit to be remembered, that he
enjoyed in his life the favour of your Majesty.

The tumultary life of Princes seldom permits
them to survey the wide extent of national
interest without losing sight of private merit;
to exhibit qualities which may be imitated by
the highest and the hunblest of mankind; and
to be at once amiable and great.

Such characters, if now and then they appear
in history, are contemplated with admiration.
May it be the ambition of all your subjects to
make haste with their tribute of reverence; and
as posterity may learn from your Majesty how
Kings should five, may they learn likewise from
your people how they should be honoured. I
am, may it please your Majesty, with the most
profound respect, your Majesty’s most dutiful
and devoted subject and servant.

223

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

From Dedications we may slide, by a natural grada
tion, to Prefaces. The first Preface I can trace i.
that written in 1748 for Dodsley:

Mr. Dodsley this year brought out hi,
Praeceptor, one of the most valuable books fo
the improvement of young minds that ha
appeared in any language, and to this meritoriou.
work Johnson furnished “The Preface” con
taming a general sketch of the book, with a shor
and perspicuous recommendation of each article
as also “The Vision of Theodore the Hermit
found in his Cell,” a most beautiful allegory 0
human life, under the figure of ascending th<
mountain of existence.

Here, with a miscellany, we are treading on th<
frontiers of periodical literature, which we had bette
not cross. In 1758, ten years later, he wrote th<
Preface to John Payne’s New Tables of Interest:

Among the writers of fiction, whose busines:
is to furnish that entertainment which Fane]
perpetually demands, it is a standing plea, tha
the beauties of nature are now exhausted, tha
imitation has exerted all its power, and tha
nothing more can be done for the service 0
their mistress, than to exhibit a perpetua
transposition of known objects, and draw nev
pictures, not by introducing new images, bu
by giving new fights and shades, a new arrange
ment and colouring to the old. This plea ha;
been cheerfully admitted; and Fancy, led by th<
hand of a skilful guide, treads over again th<
flowery path she has often trod before, as mud

224

JOHNSON'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

enamoured with every new diversification of the
gamp prospect, as with the first appearance
of it.

In the regions of Science, however, there is not
the same indulgence: the Understanding and the
Judgment travel there in the pursuit of Truth,
whom they always expect to find m one simple
form, free from the disguise of dress and orna¬
ment; and as they travel with laborious step and
a fixed eye, they are content to stop when the
shades of night darken the prospect and patiently
wait the radiance of a new morning, to lead them
forward in the path they have chosen, which,
however thorny or however steep, is severely
preferred to the most pleasing excursions that
bring them no nearer to the object of their
search. The plea, therefore, that nature is
exhausted, and that nothing is left to gratify
the mind but different combinations of the same
ideas, when urged as a reason for multiplying
unnecessary labours among the sons of Science,
is not so readily admitted: the Understanding
when in possession of Truth, is satisfied with the
simple acquisition; and not, like Fancy, inclined
to wander after new pleasures in the diversifica¬
tion of objects already known, which, perhaps
may lead to Error. . . .

The power of Arithmetical numbers has been
tried to a vast extent, and variously applied to
the improvement both of business and science.
In particular, so many calculations have been
made with respect to the value and use of money,
that some serve only for speculation and amuse¬
ment; and there is great opportunity for selecting
a few that are peculiarly adapted to common
business . . . and to answer the purposes of
225

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

that business, in some degree more perfectly
than has hitherto been done, the following Tables
are published. . . .

Among the Brokers of Stocks are men of
great honour and probity, who are candid and
open in all their transactions, and incapable of
mean and selfish purposes; and it is to be lamented
that a market of such importance as the present
state of this nation has made theirs, should be
brought into any discredit by the intrusion of
bad men, who, instead of serving their country,
and procuring an honest subsistence in the
army or the fleet, endeavour to maintain
luxurious tables and splendid equipages by
sporting with the public credit.

It is not long since the evil of stock-jobbing
was risen to such an enormous height, as to
threaten great injury to every actual pro¬
prietor. . . . But this evil, after many unsuc¬
cessful attempts of the Legislature to conquer
it, was, like many another, at length subdued
by its own violence, and the reputable Stock¬
brokers seem now to have it in their power
effectually to prevent its return . . . by opposing
every effort made for its recovery by the desperate
sons of fortune, who, not having the coinage of
highwaymen, take ’Change-alley rather than
the road, etc. . . .

On one occasion he was deceived by the author,
and wrote a Preface to a fraudulent compilation:

The Reverend Dr. Douglas having with
uncommon acuteness clearly detected a gross
forgery and imposition upon the public by
William Lauder, a Scotch schoolmaster, who had,
with equal impudence and ingenuity, represented
226

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

Milton as a plagiary from certain modem Latin
poets, Johnson who had so far been imposed
upon as to furnish a Preface and Postscript to his
work, now dictated a letter for Lauder, addressed
to Eh. Douglas, acknowledging his fraud in terms
of suitable contrition.

This extraordinary attempt of Lauder was no
sudden effort. He had brooded over it for many
years; and to this hour it is uncertain what his
principal motive was, unless it were a vain
notion of his superiority, in being able, by what¬
ever means, to deceive mankind. To effect this,
he produced certain passages from Grotius,
Masenius, and others, which had a faint resem¬
blance to some parts of the Paradise Lost. In
these he interpolated some fragments of Hog’s
Latin translation of that poem, alleging that the
mass thus fabricated was the archetype from
which Milton copied. These fabrications he
published from time to time in the Gentleman’s
Magazine; and, exulting in his fancied success,
he in 1750 ventured them into a pamphlet, entitled
An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the
Modems in his "Paradise Lost.”

To this pamphlet Johnson wrote a Preface, in
full persuasion on Lauder’s honesty, and a
Postscript recommending, in the most persuasive
terms, a subscription for the relief of a grand¬
daughter of Milton, of whom he thus speaks:

It is yet in the power of a great people to
reward the poet whose name they boast,
and from the alliance of whose genius they
claim some kind of superiority to every
other nation of the earth; that poet, whose
works may possibly be read when every
other monument of British greatness shah
227

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

be obliterated; to reward him, not with
pictures or medals, which if he sees he sees
with contempt, but with tokens of gratitude,
which he, perhaps, may even now consider as
notunworthy the regard of an immortal spirit.

Later, in 1773, Dr. Johnson was able to do an old
friend a good turn. “In that year,” says Boswell,
“he did not, so far as is known, furnish any production
of his fertile pen to any of his numerous friends or
dependents, except the preface of his old amanuensis,
MacBean’s Dictionary of Ancient Geography.” And
in 1775 he was responsible for one sentence in the
introduction to Mickle's once famous translation of
the Lusiads; also

In the summer he wrote a prologue which was
spoken before A Word to the Wise, a comedy by
Mr. Hugh Kelly, which had been brought upon
the stage in 1770; but he being a writer for the
Ministry in one of the newspapers, it fell a
sacrifice to popular fury, and in the playhouse
phrase, was damned. By the generosity of Mr.
Hams, the proprietor of Covent Garden Theatre,
it was now exhibited for one night, for the
benefit of the author’s widow and children.

We come now to more integral contributions, work
by Johnson which was actually embedded in the
writings of other people, and passed as theirs. Here
Johnson was of assistance to a variety of persons and
in a variety of degree, his help ranging from mere
deletions to the fabrication of an entire work. I
suppose that the most celebrated of his virtuous

228

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

forgeries on the wholesale scale are the publications
which were imputed to the gifted, unfortunate, and
rather oily Dr. William Dodd, the curled darling who
published the Beauties of Shakespeare (translated into
many languages), fascinated London with his pulpit
eloquence, and went to the scaffold for forgery.
Johnson’s heart was moved by this man’s collapse
and the disproportionate severity of his doom. He did
his best to save him from the gallows, and helped him
at the last with a senes of pamphlets which were
intended to support his cause, notably The Occasional
Papers and The Convict’s Address to his Unhappy
Brethren —a sermon preached in Newgate, 1777.
The extent of Dodd’s contribution to this, the most
highly affecting of his productions, is made dear by
a sentence of Boswell’s in which he says that Johnson
marked for him “such passages as were added by
Dodd.” Another case in which he was virtually the
entire author of another man’s book is that of
Zachariah Williams’s treatise, published in 1755, and
entitled An Account of an Attempt to ascertain the
longitude at Sea, by an exact account of the Magnetical
Needle.

Whatever charge may be brought home to Dr.
Johnson,—and we who love him will, I am sure, have
to be hard pressed before we admit any charge what¬
ever against him—it will hardly be that of a lack of
versatility. The scientific aptitude which he always

229

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

showed had been earlier illustrated in 1743 when Dr.
Janies published his Medicinal Dictionary in three
volumes folio. Johnson is alleged to have written
some of the articles. “He certainly,” says Boswell,
“wrote the Dedication to Dr. Mead, which is conceived
with great address, to conciliate the patronage of that
eminent man.” In a much later passage referring to
this effort Boswell says: “I have in vain endeavoured
to find out what parts Johnson wrote for Dr. James,”
adding, with some naivety, “perhaps medical men
may.” In 1767, we are told, he wrote the first two
paragraphs of The Design of Chinese Buildings,
Furniture, Dresses, Machines, Utensils, etc., by Sir
William Chambers, most noted, perhaps, as the
perpetrator of the Pagoda in Kew Gardens. The first
two sentences—apparently he was regarded as an
umpire or starter—of T. Davies’s Memoirs of Garrick,
were also his:

All excellence has a right to be recorded. I
shall therefore think it superfluous to apologize
for writing the life of a man, who, by an uncom¬
mon assemblage of private virtues, adorned the
highest eminence in a public profession.

Here, as far as I know (but there are probably swarms
of other instances in which Johnson helped these
lame dogs over their worst stiles), we come to an end
of his known complements to other men’s prose.
There remain the recorded examples of the assistance
he gave to writers of verse.

230

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’SWORKS

More than thirty years ago I was staying, m Devon¬
shire, with a great-aunt who, were she living now,
would be more than a hundred years old. Observing
my propensity for mixed reading, she told me that
she had a number of quite old books in a boxroom and
that, if I liked, I could have them. I naturally said
I liked; I went to the attic; and I took home with me
about a hundred books. There was a complete set
of the Diamond Classics in a little glass-fronted two-
shelved case shaped like a Greek temple—now long
fallen in pieces. There was Solomon Gessner’s Death
of Abel, Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs,
Klopstock’s Messiah, Baxter’s The Saint’s Everlasting
Rest, Drelincourt on Death (perhaps the biggest best¬
seller of the eighteenth century) and various little
volumes of verse. But much the most splendid volume
to the eye was a tall, wide-margined, red-morocco-
bound copy of a work called Boulter’s Monument by
the Rev. Dr. Madden. It was a poem commemorative
of the virtues and achievements of Boulter, Arch¬
bishop of Armagh, who died in 1742. A dull work,
I thought, but it followed me in my wanderings; and
some years lat«r I discovered, on perusing Boswell,
that Dr. Johnson was a participant in it. Here is
what Boswell reports as having been said to him by
Dr. Thomas Campbell:

Sitting with Dr. Johnson one morning alone,
he asked me if I had known Dr. Madden. . . .
He begged of me that when I returned to Ireland,

231 Q

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

I would endeavour to procure for him a poem of
Dr. Madden’s called Boulter's Monument. The
reason (said he) why I wish for it, is this: when
Dr. Madden came to London, he submitted that
work to my castigation, and I remember I
blotted a great many hnes, and might have
blotted many more. However the doctor was
very thankful, and very generous, for he gave me
ten guineas, which was to me at that time a
great sum.

The work—although the supply was probably in
excess of the demand—was rare at that time. It is
rare now: except for the one I possessed, I have never
seen or heard of a copy.

A similar work of revision, with the insertion of
some hnes, (for he illuminated it here and there with
a ray of his own genius) seems to have been done by
Johnson for the poems, published in collected form,
of Mary Masters, a lady of whom Powell merely
ambiguously tells us that she “lived ^th ^ r - Carr/
but whose reputation, I believe, subjef^ *° correction,
to have been unblemished. What Jo'h 113011 s correc¬
tions were is likely to remain as con'j ec ^ ura ^ as the
song of the Sirens. I cannot suppose he ' was responsible
for the Dedication, at least. It is ac c ^ resse< ^ to the
Earl of Burlington, and Mrs. Mast ers un hes the
normal humility of Grub Street wi^ a humility
peculiar, at that time, to her sex. L' )r< ^ Burlington
shines in the heavens, she is a mere S^h. Yet,”
she proceeds,

232

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

. . . when a British peer has deign’d to shed
His gen’rous favours on my worthless head
Silent shall I receive the welcome Boon?

the boon, apparently, being encouragement:

He spoke; he prais’d, I hearken’d with delight
And found a strong Propensity to write.

Mrs. Masters was not a bad poet, in spite of this.
She had a feeling for nature, which struggled for
expression in very stiff couplets. Neither in the best
descriptive passages, nor elsewhere, can I detect the
hand of Johnson. Some of her neatest lines are lines
of self-depreciation. There is a poem headed To One
Who Questioned her being the Author of Some Verses
—a title used by Anne Killigrew two generations
before; for men found it difficult, in those days, to
believe that a woman could write good poetry; and
what they would have said if asked to believe in a
woman doctor swimming the Channel. I don’t know.
The neatest part of it is this:

Search but these strains you think so much excel.
Scan ev’ry verse, and try the numbers well:
You’ll plainly see, in almost ev'ry line
Distinguishing defects to prove them mine.

The last line, I suppose, Dr. Johnson may conceivably
have corrected, though he could hardly have initiated
it; but he cannot be suspected of even that degree
of collaboration in the lines in which this most modest
poetess depreciates her own personal appearance:

233

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

My songs th’ attentive nymphs with pleasure,
hear.

Because in me no rival charms they fear.

My shape erroneous and my stature low
Can to the eye no dang’rous beauty show.

Boswell says elsewhere:

He furnished the preface, and several of the
pieces, which compose a volume of Miscellanies
by Mrs. Anna Williams, the blind lady who had
an asylum in his house. Of these, there are his
Epitaph on Philips; Translation of a Latin
Epitaph on Sir Thomas Hammer; Friendship,
an Ode; and The Ant, a paraphrase from the
Proverbs, of which I have a copy in his own
hand-writing; and, from internal evidence, I
ascribe to him, To Miss—on her giving the author
a gold and silk network purse of her own weaving;
and The Happy Life. Most of the pieces of this
volume have evidently received; additions from
his superior pen, particularly ' Verses to Mr.
Richardson on his Sir Charles Grandison; The
Excursion; Reflections on a Grave digging in
Westminster Abbey. There is in this collection a
poem. On the death of Stephen Grey, the Elec¬
trician; which on reading it appeared to me to be
undoubtedly Johnson’s. I asked, Mrs. Williams
whether it was not his. “Sir,” said she with some
warmth, “I wrote that poem before I had the
honour of Dr. Johnson's acquaintance.” I,
however, was so much impressed} with my first
notion, that I mentioned it to Johnson, repeating
at the same time what Mrs. Williams said. His
answer was, “It is true, sir, that she wrote it
before she was acquainted with me; but she has

234

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

not told you that I wrote it all over again, except
two lines.” The Fountains, a beautiful little
fairy tale in prose, written with exquisite sim¬
plicity, is one of Johnson’s productions; and I
cannot withhold from Mrs. Thrale the praise of
being the author of that admirable poem, The
Three Warnings.

We come next to two instances in which Johnson
collaborated importantly in two very fine poems,
gilding refined gold and painting the lily. I refer,
of course, to his emendations of Goldsmith’s The
Traveller and The Deserted Village. Mr. R. B. Adam
of Buffalo possesses copies of these works annotated
by Boswell himself. In the 5th edition of The Traveller
(1770?) Boswell writes:

In Spring 1793, Dr. Johnson at my desire,
marked with a pencil the lines in this admirable
poem, which he furnished: viz. 1. 18 on p. 23
and from the 3rd line on the last page to the
end except the last couplet but one. These (he
said) are all of which I can be sure.

In the first edition (1770) of the Deserted Village
Boswell wrote:

The four last lines were marked at my desire
by Dr. Johnson, Spring 1783, as all he wrote of
this admirable Poem.

These notes square with the accounts in the Life.
These are as follows:

235

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

He said of Goldsmith’s Traveller, which had
been published in my absence, “There has not
been so fine a poem since Pope’s time.”

And here it is proper to settle, with authentic
precision, what has long floated in public report,
as to Johnson’s bemg himself the author of a
considerable part of that poem. Much, no doubt,
both of the sentiments and expression, were
derived from conversation with him; and it was
certainly submitted to his friendly revision;
but m the year 1783, he, at my request, marked
with a pencil the lines which he had furnished,
which are only line 420th,

To stop too fearful, and too faint to go; (a bad
line) and the concluding ten lines, except for the
last couplet but one, which I distinguished by
the italic character:

How small of all that human hearts endure.
That part which kings or laws can cause or
cure.

Still to ourselves in every place consigned.
Our own felicity we make or find;

With secret course, which no loud storms
annoy,

Glides the smooth current of domestic joy:
The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel,

Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s led of steel,
To men remote from pow^r, but rarely
known, J

Leave reason, faith and conscience all our
own.

He added, “These are all of which I can be
sure.” They bear a small proportion to the whole,
which consists of four hundred and thirty-eight
verses. :

236

JOHNSON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE’S WORKS

Dr. Johnson at the same time favoured me
by marking the lines which he furnished to
Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, which are only the
last four:

That trade’s proud empires haste to swift
decay

As ocean sweeps the laboured mole away:

While self-dependent power can time defy,

As rocks resist the billows and the sky.

But his last service to English poetry was performed
long after Goldsmith’s death and when he was near
his own. There were persons still living when most of
us were bom who remembered the last, and not the
least eminent, of the poets whom Johnson assisted.
He was an old man of 74, with his triumphs long
behind him when there came to him for advice a
young clergyman who was to carry Johnson’s couplets,
his own tradition of strong sense and honest observa¬
tion, right on through the new Romantic generation.
It was George Crabbe who brought to him The Village.
“Its sentiments,” says Boswell, “as to the false notions
of rustic happiness and rustic virtue” (for Crabbe
was a country parson in very bad times) "were quite
congenial with his own; and he had taken the trouble
not only to suggest slight corrections and variations,
but to furnish some lines, when he thought he could
give the writer’s meaning better than in the words of
the manuscript.” Boswell gives an instance. Crabbe
had written:

237

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,
Tityrus, pride of Mantuan swains, might sing:
But charmed by him, or smitten with his views.
Shall modem poets court the Mantuan muse?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray.
Where Fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?

This, leaving but one line, Johnson altered to

On Mincio’s banks, in Caesar’s bounteous reign,

If Tityrus found the golden age again,

Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,
Mechanick echoes of the Mantuan song?

From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray.
When Virgil, not when Fancy, leads the way?

There is the old resonant ring there, the old clarity of
reasoning, the old “guts”; and it is pleasant to think
that, touching hands with Crabbe as he had once
touched hands with Pope, the old man, who, in
retrospect, bestraddles our eighteenth century like
a colossus, linked the age of Anne, now so remote, with
that of Victoria, still so near us.

238

ELIZABETHAN SONG

W HEN I began to bring together what I thought
the best of the Elizabethan songs, I was at
once faced with the question "What is a song?” I
soon decided that my life at least would be too short
for the framing of a satisfactory definition. We
think we know a song when we see one, but there
must be, and are, borderland cases. An extreme
instance is Campion’s poem beginning:

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived, a new admired guest.

The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round.
White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest. . . .

When we first read that it certainly does not appear
to us to be a song. Yet Rossiter set it to music with
the author’s assent, and published it as a song. As
an Elizabethan song we must therefore regard it.
I regarded as available for my choice all Elizabethan
poems which were published with music, as well as all
poems, described by their authors as songs, and all
other poems akin to these.

Under the last analysis the main subjects of all
poetry are seen to be few, commonplace and enduring;

239

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

for the main elements in our lives and surroundings,
which make the most frequent and the deepest appeal
to our emotions, do not change. But it will be found
that the subjects of Elizabethan songs are restricted
in a more special sense; that many of the songs have
been deliberately written as variations on agreed
themes; and that the subsidiary objects mentioned
tend, as one reads on, to become familiar. The camp
one scarcely ever enters; there is an occasional visit
to the tavern; there are broadly comic songs, a lusty
smith’s song. But most frequently we are either with
shepherds and shepherdesses in a pastoral landscape
or with a lutanist and his lady in a Tudor hall or
garden. The poet either sings directly to his lute, or
through the Arcadian convention in terms of Corydon
and Phillis, the earlier Strephon and Chloe. Either
way subjects and sentiments tend to run in grooves.
The lover, courtly or rustic, sings his lady’s praise;
her beauties and virtues, dwelt on one by one, are
incomparable; Venus is jealous of her, and Cupid
disarmed by her. Or he laments hejr cruelty; or he
asks, entreats, implores her to relent’ or he comforts
himself for the loss of her; or it is the Shepherdess who
is forlorn or the shepherd unkind. To the lute.
Love, strange malady, delightful 'pain, accursed
infliction, is dissected, adored or denounced; to the
lute and pipe the passage of you'h and pleasure
is sung, more often as an incitement to the gathering

240

ELIZABETHAN SONG

of rosebuds in their brief season than as a consolation
to despair. And above all these poets are singers of
spring, spring in the world and m the heart. Pure
joy is rare in poetry, but it is here in a hundred lively
songs of spring birds and spring flowers, spring morn¬
ings, spring love and spring nuptials. Dominant over
all the griefs, real or assumed, the reproaches and
scorns, the mementoes of death and the maledictions
on Love, is this air of gaiety, this morning freshness,
whether genuine of the Enghsh country or imputed to
an imaginary Utopia where the flocks feed in the sun
and Tityrus pipes to Amaryllis in the shade, the
rejoicmg spirit that breaks out in those lines which
Herrick alone of later men could have written, where
the girl calls of the sun:

In at our window peeping;

Lo, how he blusheth to espy
Us idle wenches sleeping.

As a rule certain qualities of observation, thought
and feeling are, at their most intense, absent from
these songs. That they should not be markedly
descriptive or meditative is not a peculiarity; that is
inherent in the nature of song. The manner of song
is to be simple in its statements and comparisons,
to express the peaks rather than the foundations, the
results rather than the processes of thought and
emotion. Analysis is not its business and it does not
keep its eye too attentively on the object. Bums

241

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

could paint genre in detail; but, singing, his manner is
the right maimer of:

O my love is like the red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June. . . .

No poet has described the sea and the shore with more
discriminating accuracy, more fullness of detail, than
Tennyson; but in song he can go no farther with
epithet than:

Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O sea. . . .

and the “happy autumn fields” of the other song
would have been described with far greater elaboration
had they occurred, as background or as simile, in the
Idylls of the King. The Elizabethan songs are full of
nature, but it is nature simplified and generalized.
That, and a similar brevity of reflection, is natural;
though some men, such as Shakespeare: 1 , can go farther,
whilst still singing, than others. But the whole range
of emotion, granted suitable expression, is open to
song: we find that the Elizabethan gongs do not as
a rule express great depth and ardour of feeling. This
might prove true also of any great gathering of song;
it may be that always and everywhere ,it springs most
often from light-heartedness. It is certainly so with
the Elizabethans. There are many feongs of grief,
and they are exquisitely done; but the grief does not
usually give us a pang; we are just tomched as we are

242

ELIZABETHAN SONG

meant to be, and as the singer was; the tinge of artifice
is general. When a deeper depth than normal is
sounded, and a Catullan sincerity comes in, we are at
once struck by it: the man, we know at once, really
feels and means what he says; he is not delightfully
pretending; he writes from a stir of genuine emotion.
That unmistakable note of earnestness sounds,
though soberly, in Daniel’s

When your eyes have done their part,

Thought must length it in the heart.

There is reality in the song from Dowland:

Dear, if you change, I’ll never choose again. . . .
Fair, if you fail, I’ll judge all beauty vain.

And in the anonymous One did I love:

Let him not vaunt that gains my loss.

For when that he and time hath proved her.
She may bring him to Weeping-Cross;

I say no more, because I loved her.

And poignantly in Campion’s ending:

'Tis now flowery May;

But even in cold December,

When all these leaves are blown away.

This place shall I remember.

i *.

Sidney, who kid, “Look in thy heart and write,”
always has an Uncommon air of reality in his songs as
in his sonnets, i His catalogue of his lady’s beauties,
similar in progress, is far more fervent and convincing

243

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

than those of Lodge and all the others who so prettily
register the golden hairs, the damask cheeks and the
ivory breasts. His serenade, which always reminds me
of Brahms's, has a concreteness and sincerity unsought
by many poets whose shepherds sang charmingly
under their shepherdesses’ windows:

That you heard was but a mouse.

Dumb sleep holdeth all the house:

Yet asleep methinks they say,

Young folks, take time, while you may.

Take me to thee and thee to me.

No, no, no, no, my dear, let be.

The reader’s heart stands still and flutters again; the
very "no, no, no,” almost a poetical counter or clich6
of the time, takes a new accent here, less like Rosa¬
lind’s and more like Juliet’s. Most of the singers are
at a remove from life, especially when they are not
avowedly gay. The lover may say he is heart-broken
but he says it neatly and with a carefully melodious
sigh; the vanity of the world may be denounced, but
not in the tones of Wordsworth, much less in those of
Timon; the passage of life is lamented/but dust rather
than corruption is the chosen image! for its decay;
the might of the leveller Death is proclaimed, but he
is not invested with his horrors. Life was what it is:
the manner of the song-writers had lb close contact
with it. In song the fierce and turbulent genius of
Faustus’s creator, who died m a tavern brawl, gave
us Come live with me and be my love, and the squalors

244

ELIZABETHAN SONG

and miseries of Robert Greene, which we know from
his prose, find no reflection in the perfect Arcadianism
of Fair Samela, whiter than the flocks by Arethusa’s
fount.

The Elizabethans rejoiced in bird-song, and took
a pretty pleasure in filling their verses with syllables,
tirra-lirra, jug-jug, pee-wit, suggesting the diversity
of notes, the tunes of lark and thrush, nightingale
and boding owl. Their own songs were as various;
the nineteenth century itself, with all its conscious
and proclaimed experimentalism, was not more pro¬
lific of metrical and rhythmical invention. English
poetry had from the earliest ages been marked by a
great range of music. Wever’s lovely

In a harbour grene aslepe whereas I lay

The byrdes sang sweet in the middes of the

day. . . .

has a reminiscence of the early mediaeval metre, of
Langland’s

In the summer season when sweet was the

sun. ...

and the lyrical range of middle English religious verse
is only just beginning to be realized. Our native
genius lay that way. Under the influence of Ben
Jonson and Donne—themselves, on occasion, cunning
manipulators of trochaic and wavering rhythms and
bold devisers of new forms—a tendency to resort

245

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

more exclusively to iambics set in, though everywhere,
in imagery, shape of stanza, adventurousness of
thought and expression, liberty ran into licence.
The reaction in favour of lucidity, sense and correct¬
ness was accompanied by a further constriction of
prosodic practice. Not only were the iambics pre¬
valent in the days of Anne and the Georges, but
verse forms, in general, were reduced to a very few.
The couplet of pentameters or tetrameters (one
must use the terms for convenience), the elegiac
quatrain, the quatrain or octette in "common
measure” sufficed for almost every poet. The lingering
Ehzabethanisms in Dryden’s songs are like the last
rays of a sunset. When, in Anne’s day, we come
across such tripping tunes as that of Walsh’s

Distracted with care

For Phillis the fair

or Lord Peterborough’s

I said to my heart between sleeping and waking

we have (though we may appreciate the Augustans
for what they were) the sensations of seeing a trout
in a goldfish pond, and later, Blake's Songs of Inno¬
cence were, as much in sound as in sense, a throw¬
back as weE as a throw-forward from that age of
regularity and sophistication. The "Romantic Move¬
ment,” whatever its defects and excesses, did at least
release our natural passion for free songs, which had

246

ELIZABETHAN SONG

been confined in a strait-waistcoat. The passion and
the gift have never been more freely exhibited than
by the song-writers of Elizabeth’s time, which vir¬
tually means every poet of her time, including those
whose first aim was narrative or dramatic. I cannot
but quote a few examples from this multitudinous
choir. There is Alexander Montgomerie’s

Hey! now the day dawis;

The jolly cock crawis;

Now shrouded the shawis
Thro’ Nature anon

an anticipation of Wordsworth’s stanzas where the
cattle feed forty as one. Nicholas Breton, sweet and
tender and lovable in all his works, gives us a new
melody in every song. Nothing in English is more
dehdous than the joyous, breathless rush of his
Astrophel’s Song, so strangely neglected by antholo¬
gists:

Fair in a mom (0 fairest mom!)

Was never mom so fair.

There shone a sun, tho’ not the sun
That shineth in the air.

For the earth and from the earth,

(Was never such a creature!)

Did come this face (was never face
That carried such a feature).

Upon a hill (O blessed hill.

Was never hill so blessed!)

There stood a man (was never man
For woman so distressed).

247 E

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

The sedate Spenser himself broke into something
similar in Perigot and Cuddy’s Roundelay:

It fell upon a holy-eve,

(Heigho, holy-day!)

When holy fathers wont to shrive
(Now ginneth this roundelay).

Sitting upon a hill so high,

(Heigho, the high hill!)

The while my flock did feed thereby.

And while the shepherd’s self did spell. . . .

Sir Philip Sidney is as various as any. His music is
very personal to himself; there is something hushed
and mysterious in it, and an elaborate art; it has a
quality in common with Walter de la Mare’s. The
atmosphere of all the serenades and starlit balconies
is summed up at once by his:

Who is it that this dark night
Underneath my window plaineth?

He experimented as became a poetical theorist. One
of his poems is in Alexandrines; another. Doubt you
to whom, is written in the Omar Khayyam stanza with
an extra syllable to the three rhyming lines which
gives them a “dying fall.” A whole school of modems
is anticipated and excelled in Greene’s Venus to Adonis:

Sweet Adon, darest not glance thine eye,
N’oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

Upon thy Venus that must die
Je vous en pne, pity me.

N’oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel,
N’oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

248

ELIZABETHAN SONG

The sound here is the very voice of enticing supplica¬
tion. “Jolly” is the only word for the tune of Wootton’s

Jolly Shepherd, shepherd on a hill,

On a hill so merrily
On a hill so cherrily. . . .

and jollity and every other mood is reflected in the
tripping and tramping, laughing and sighing measures
of the hosts of songs in the music books. How could
song begin more sweetly than with:

Corydon, arise my Corydon!

Titan shineth clear.

Who is that calleth Corydon?

Who is it I hear?

That is the speaking voice.

A shepherd in the shade his plaining made
Of love and lovers wrong.

Unto the fairest lass that trod on grass
And thus began his song.

Here, I think, we may detect the influence of the
sister-art. Poet and musician in that age reacted on
one another; where words are set to music we some¬
times feel that the poet’s melody suggested the
musician’s, and sometimes that the musician sug¬
gested developments of rhythm to the poet. In
Campion, who was both poet and composer, this is
especially noticeable. He was of those whose interest
in technical discovery, like Sidney's, is evident;
not one of the spontaneous and care-free singers; he

249

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

carefully considered every sound for its speed and
weight and neighbourhood. Sometimes I think music
and words were bom together in him; sometimes I
believe (though one can scarcely demonstrate this) he
conceived a tune for instrument and singing voice and
fitted words to it with strange and charming results to
his poetry.

I cannot conclude without a word on the songs of
Shakespeare. His magnitude, his marvellous power
and ease, show here as elsewhere. Our greatest
tragedian was our greatest comedian, our greatest
dramatist was our greatest song-writer. Variety of
music is at its height in him; the new form comes
inevitably to fit the new theme. The cadences of his
laments, the caressing notes of his invitations, the
lilt of his merry-makings, are equally beautiful, and
his mark is on the slightest trifle that he carelessly
"warbled” in any stock contemporary fashion:

It was a lover and his lass,

With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,

That o’er the green cornfield did pass,

In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding ding.

Sweet lovers love the spring.

He does the utmost that can be done with the song.
Elaborate epithet is not possible, but he can throw
off “Plumpy Bacchus with bright eyne.” Sense, in
a song, must not so attest the attention as to impede
the movement, but Shakespeare approaches auda-
' 250

ELIZABETHAN SONG

ciously, without crossing, the frontier beyond which
description would kill singing quality, in the last
stanza of When Daisies pied:

When all around the wind doth blow.

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw.

And birds sit brooding in the snow.

And Marian’s nose looks red and raw.

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl.

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

To-whit;

To-who, a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

The themes of his songs are often the themes that a
hundred others treated: happy and unhappy lovers,
the transience of youth, the peace of death, the vanity
of the world, spring and the lark at dawn. But he
surpassed them all without effort in songs inevitable,
final. A hundred others in substance, but none in
perfect achievement, came near:

Take, 0 take those lips away

That so sweetly were forsworn
And those eyes the break of day. . . .

or:

Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings
And Phoebus ’gins arise. . . .

and the classic summary of all the requiems is:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

251

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Reading these we cease to inquire, and we cannot
discover, how far a genuine personal passion is to he
detected in them. Art carries them beyond the per¬
sonal; the most perfect speech is at the instant
service of universal experience; the emotions of all
humanity are voiced; the songs even quintessential
of their subjects, take various colourings from the
eye that reads them:

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

He is saying, with a vast yet ineluctable difference,
what all his contemporaries had said; yet the words
serve the purposes of many moods; at times they are
as light as thistledown, at times plangent with
sorrow. Equally “commonplace” in theme:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind.

Thou are not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude. . . .

may seem, according to our mood, the expression of
a transient sigh from a disillusionment about to be
dismissed, or the fruit of a lasting bitterness. His
songs, like his speeches, have the proverbial quality;
all the songs of seclusion are contained in the phrase:

Here shall he see
No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

His witches’ songs excel the other witches’ songs, his
fairy songs (one of which foreshadows much of the

252

ELIZABETHAN SONG

Faithful Shepherdess and Comus) excel the other fairy
songs. And there are songs in which he reminds us
of no one but himself, in which there is a magic,
bom like Iris of sun and rain, which conveys far
more than is said. How much of life smiles and sighs
in:

When that I was a little tiny boy.

With hey ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy.

For the rain it raineth every day!

It is meaningless but how pregnant; how vague yet
crowded the sentence with which he dismisses us at
the end, “But that’s all one, our play is done,”
leaving us still pondering at his wisdom and sensitive¬
ness, his tears and his laughter, his speech and his
silences!

sit * * * *

253

JANE AUSTEN

T HE critic who attempts to write an. essay on
Jane Austen does not, at least, find his work
complicated by the intrusion of biography. Miss
Austen was a contemporary of the great English
romantics, whose lives were mostly as adventurous
as their works, and whose lives and works acted and
reacted upon each other. An introduction to the
works of Lord Byron will inevitably be largely devoted
to his ancestry and school friendships, his beauty and
his lameness, his travels, his loves, his calamitous
marriage, his politics and his dramatic death, his
egoism, generosity, wit and personal habits. Coleridge
cannot be discussed without mention of his literary
friendships, his experiences in the cavalry and the
Unitarian ministry, his lectures and his opium; while
those who take Shelley as their subject frequently find
space to say no more about his poems than that, at
certain dates, he wrote them. Even criticisms of the
more sober and central Walter Scott have a tendency
to be devoured by descriptions of the fame of the
anonymous novels, the struggle to preserve their
anonymity, and the later, and more heroic, struggle
against a vast burden of debt. All that we need know,

254

JANE AUSTEN

and almost all that we can know, of Jane Austen
lies within the covers of her few novels. “L.E.L.”
was the feminine counterpart of the Byrons: M i V
Austen was the heiress of Fanny Burney, of Richard¬
son and of Crabbe, whom she jokingly pretended she
was going to marry. She was the quiet sunset of the
great day of eighteenth-century prose, and had no
more kinship with the really volcanic spirits who
scattered fire and ashes over her historical epoch than
she had with the pseudo-volcanoes who preceded
them, the Lewises and Radcliffes whose false par¬
oxysms and artificial nightmares she burlesqued in
Northanger Abbey. She had no acquaintance with
the famous; and nothing ever happened to her except
birth, death, and the normal series of incidents which
might be expected to happen to a placid spinster lady
of the upper middle class who spent almost all her
days in the country.

Jane Austen was bom on December 16th, 1775, at
Steventon Rectory, Hampshire, the youngest of the
seven children of the Rev. George Austen. In 1801
the family moved to Bath; in 1805 Mr. Austen died
there. The sons by this time had left home, two of
them (who became admirals) being in the Navy.
Miss Austen, her sister Cassandra, and her mother
moved to Southampton, and then to Chawton, Hants.
Jane died on July 18th, 18x7, at Winchester, in
ier forty-second year. She paid several visits to

255

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

London, and enjoyed the theatres; she was once
shown over the Library at Carlton House by the
Prince Regent’s Librarian, the Royal Adonis himself
sharing with Scott, Archbishop Whateley and Sydney
Smith (none of whom she knew) the honour of being
among her early admirers. At rare intervals the sailor
brothers appeared; there were decorous gaieties at
Bath; for the rest, the normal occupations of the
country—sewing and housekeeping, calls, tea-parties,
dinner parties, and sometimes a dance which might
even be glorified by the presence of officers from a
neighbouring regiment. None of the great worlds
did she penetrate. It is said that as a girl she was in
love with a man who died young; but even that
seems hardly certain, though she knew love well
enough and exhibited a reverence towards it which
gives a touch of tenderness and gravity to even her
lightest books.

The spinster daughter of a country clergyman,
leading the life of ten thousand suchl The conception
has often produced exclamations of astonishment that
such polished writing, such wit, such wisdom should
proceed from so commonplace a source; that so signal
a genius should have been satisfied with the humdrum
occupations and rustic company which apparently
gave Miss Austen all she asked of life; that she should
even have written these sophisticated masterpieces in
a common drawing-room with the family walking

256 '

JANE AUSTEN

in and out and amusing themselves by listening for
the little laughs which Sister Jane or Aunt Jane gave
when she had hit on a happy stroke; that she should
have wished for no other audience for her latest
manuscript compositions than her entirely ordinary
relatives. The surprise is based on a misconception;
it denotes a very wrong idea about the cultural map
of England, a presumption that both education and
intelligence are all concentrated in certain narrow
metropolitan circles, some aristocratic and some (to
use a term now becoming extinct) Bohemian. It is
very erroneous to suppose that, amongst women, wide
reading, wit and shrewdness about life and character
ire confined to veteran countesses who know all the
;lder statesmen and litterateurs, and confident blue¬
stockings (if the colour be conceivable in artificial silk
md with such an expanse showing) who are on familiar
:erms with all their male competitors. Half the most
aercipient readers in England have little connection
vith London and have never met an author: many of
hem are women, and many of those are spinsters,
fane Austen, in one sense, was out of contact with her
ige: she was unaffected by the great revolutionary
surrents of thought and enthusiasm which swept
hrough almost all the geniuses of her time. In
mother sense she is in contact with all the ages: far
rom being a sport of nature she was really an abiding
ype. We may be sure that something not unlike her

257

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

was known to the Paston family when the Wars of
the Roses were being waged: we find a strong affinity
with her in Dorothy Osborne. The species has
probably multiplied greatly with tune, conditions for
its development having been made more favourable:
it is certainly common today. In Jane Austen the
powers of observation, of criticism, of expression, of
the type were present in a unique degree: it is in degree
not in kind that she differs from a multitude of others
who may today be encountered wherever there is a
group of lesser gentlefolk, and who observe their
dense surroundings with the same old causticity and
amusement where pretentious stupidity is to be seen
and the same old tolerance for pure, kindly and simple
natures. Jane Austen today would live much the
same life as she led a century and more ago. A little
more diversity would be introduced into her existence.
She would have something to do with Girl Guides and
Women’s Institutes, and her vigilant eye would
glean from committee meetings and entertainments
material with which she would very much amuse,
and slightly shock, the family at home. She might
occasionally be persuaded, less frequently as time
went on, to play a game of mild tennis: now and then
she would be seen shopping in Alton or in Petersfield
or in Alresford, or (on special days) in Winchester in
her Austin—I am tempted to say Austen-Seven.
The range of visiting would be slightly extended.

258

JANE AUSTEN

Mrs. Bennet was proud that her family dined with
"six-and-twenty families”: a small car enlarges the
range. Her characters would certainly, in our time,
be more diversified. There would be specimens of the
new and vulgar rich for her; she would be unable
completely to ignore the poor; visitors from London
and the world outside would be more frequent and
their communications more easy to understand and
appreciate in view of the growth of the periodical
press, not to mention the wireless.

Yet there is no reason to suppose that, bom now,
and in similar circumstances, she would lead a life
very much different from that which she did live, even
if an occasional excursion to Switzerland replaced the
trips to Bath. For here her kindred are all around us:
a min ority but not really scarce. You could not dine
out in any country neighbourhood for a fortnight
without meeting one of them. They have ordinary
good looks and are quiet, but a light in the eye and an
occasional twitch of the mouth gives them away.
They are daughters of squires or parsons, or wives of
service-men, whose husbands may not quite read the
books they read but have something attractive or
original about them, a turn of humour, or a knack of
water-colour, or an interest in the Napoleonic cam¬
paigns, or the habits of birds. If they are spinsters or
widows, their surroundings reflect their tastes. They
tend to live in or near the cathedral cities or the older

259

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

kind of country towns; preferably in the sort of house
that seemed most pleasant and convenient to Jane
Austen herself: a brick house of the eighteenth
century with a neat garden, adorned (so far as means
allow) with prints and old silver, mahogany and
china—and books. For by such people are books
largely bought; and when they are bought they are
read, and not merely glanced at or laid, in “mint
condition,” on an occasional table for a month or two
pending supersession by something newer which has
replaced them in the gabble of luncheon tables. The
English Lady is something different from the English
Grand Dame or the English cultured fashionable,
though the types frequently coincide. Jane Austen
was the English Lady at her apex; a perfect specimen
who spoke for her whole intelligent class—and with
not too much mercy for the rest. She had unusual
qualities. The type is usually diffident, not quite
confident enough about its own strength, inclined to
be abashed in the presence of fame, however meretri¬
cious, and authority, however undeserved; prone to
think that its unerring judgment in matters of moral
and aesthetic taste is really uncertain, amateurish
and subject to professional correction. Jane Austen,
rather less humble and sensitive, rather more deter¬
mined, rather less catholic in her interests, rather
less subject to the spell of male authority than most
of her kind, was nevertheless one of a tribe and its

260

JANE AUSTEN

spokesman. Had she never written, a recurrent and
very valuable English type would not have been
adequately represented in English literature. Emma
and Elizabeth had to be drawn by their congener.

She was, as such women often are, very precocious.
Fragments have been published in recent years which
show her to have been pretematurally observant,
discriminating, witty and ingenious when still in the
schoolroom—though her spelling was subject to the
ordinary processes of orthographical growth. The
first and most popular of her major works. Pride and
Prejudice (originally called First Impressions) was
written in 1796, when she was twenty-one; though it
was not until 18x3 that, in a revised form, it was
published. The first actually to be published was
Sense and Sensibility , which appeared, with the
description "By a Lady,” in 1811, having been written
fourteen years previously. At twenty-two Miss
Austen made a beginning with Northanger Abbey;
Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, her maturest
works, were written in 1812-13, 1814-15, and 1815-16
respectively. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey ap¬
peared posthumously in 18x8; the unfinished Lady
Susan and The Watsons were in manuscript for another
sixty years and more; the engaging fragment Sanditon
appeared for the first time a few years ago. Most of
Miss Austen’s works, in fact, experienced great delay
between writing and printing. Pride and Prejudice

261

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

was rejected by the publisher Cadell sixteen years
before it was ultimately published. Northanger Abbey,
in its first form, was actually sold in 1803, then stowed
away in a drawer, and reclaimed after another
thirteen years, still in manuscript. People often
speculate about what Miss Austen would have done
had she lived to seventy-one instead of forty-one, so
steadily did her outlook widen and her mastery over
character develop. They might equally well wonder
as to what difference would have been made had
those early, almost unbelievably early, works been
published when they were first submitted to the trade.
She had no prodigious lust for fame and allowed eight
or nine years to pass without a serious effort at
composition until the appearance and success ol
Sense and Sensibility encouraged her to make a start
with Mansfield Park. This density on the part of the
publishers (combined perhaps with lack of enterprise
on her own and her father’s part) may well have
robbed us of half a dozen masterpieces.

However, we should be grateful for what we have:
there is as much pleasure in reading a f amiliar Austen
novel over again as there would be in reading a new
one: so far as she goes she is perfection. One of the
reasons is that she wrote of what she knew, and only oi
what she knew. She might have done as thousands
of women (and men) of her own time and ours have
done: invented something more exciting than the

262

JANE AUSTEN

world she knew. But she had little in common either
with the great or with the little Romantics: she did
not dream or yearn: she was equally immune against
the imaginary charms of crusaders, of corsairs and of
sheikhs. Without going as far afield as that, she might,
in her rural retreat, have imagined scenes of social
gaiety or political conflict: but her world was enough
for her and so was truth. And in so limiting herself
she really ranged the farther: her types exist not only
in her own place and time but in every place and time.
There have been Mr. Bennets in world politics (Lord
Melbourne in his later years was not far from it, to
mention no more recent example) and all her heroes
and all her fools are world-wide in their distribution.
Probably she was aware of this, and had no illusions
about spheres nominally beyond her ken. “Ccelum,
non animam, mutant” is as valid socially as geo¬
graphically: Miss Austen preferred to study her types
in surroundings familiar to her, where she could be as
certain with her incidental details of background as
she was with her psychological analysis. She also was
acutely aware of her own temperamental bias in
favour of humorous interpretation. She was not
usually in the way of either sending or receiving
remarkable letters: but she did receive one such and
suitably responded. The Prince Regent’s Librarian
became chaplain and secretary to Prince Leopold
of Cobourg, and in 1816 wrote to suggest that she

263 s

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

should write an “historical romance, illustrative of the
history of the august House of Cobourg,” and dedicate
it to the Prince. She replied:

You are very, very land in your hints as to
the sort of composition which might recommend
me at present, and I am fully sensible that an
historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-
Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of
profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic
life in country villages as I deal in. But I could
no more write a romance than an epic poem. I
could not sit seriously down to write a serious
romance under any other motive than to save
my life; and if it were indispensable for me to
keep it up, and never relax into laughing at my¬
self or at other people, I am sure I should be
hung before I had finished the first chapter. No,
I must keep my own style and go on in my own
way, and though I may never succeed again in
that, I am convinced that I should totally fail
in any other.

Even from her pictures of “Domestic life in country
villages” there were noticeable omissions. Frequent
comment has been made on her absence of allusions
to the poor, and even to servants. She must have had
close relations with servants all her life, and it is not
conceivable that she can have avoided an intimate
contact with the poor at Steventon and Chawton,
The observation has also been made that, writing ah
through the period from the Nile to Waterloo, wher
the world rang with the dash of arms, and every kinc

264

JANE AUSTEN

of political disturbance occurred at borne, her glance
goes no farther than the parish and the neighbouring
parishes. The obvious answer is that she was per¬
fectly aware of what she was omitting and omitted
it deliberately (or, if the term be preferred, instinc¬
tively) because the sort of books that she wished to
write would have been destroyed had she allowed her
gaze to stray downward to the poor or outward to
the conflicts. Imagine, for a moment, that Emma had
been allowed to begin district visiting and to listen to
the stories of hardship that must have come from the
poor peasantry in that era of man-traps, transporta¬
tion, high prices, and low feeding. What would have
resulted? Something, clearly (though it would have
been more sensible and less extravagant), like Godwin’s
Caleb Williams; and Jane Austen had no desire to
write such a book, and was conscious of no quali¬
fications for the task. She was a realist who wanted to
write sentimental comedies: realism, carried beyond
certain frontiers would have frustrated the comedy:
tier characters had to have money, or at worst to be
poor relations, in order that they might freely exhibit
their idiosyncrasies: how could the squalors of the
^allows or the frozen marshes at Austerlitz be admitted
nto consideration? She rules out some things she
<new directly and everything that she did not know
iirectly. Nothing is more symptomatic than her
placing of her characters. It is often observed that

265

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

she omits to notice the village publicans, black¬
smiths, bakers and husbandmen; it is less frequently
observed that she takes no notice of dukes or even of
the humbler sorts of peers. I may be mistaken, but
I think there is no peer at all in the canonical novels.
The peers, still bedecked with stars and garters in life
and hatchments in death, were beyond her ken:
so she left them out. At the top of her social pyramid
was a baronet or an untitled large landowner: a Sir
Thomas, a Darcy, a Bingley, a Knightley, a Sir
Walter. Basking in the direct, or the reflected,
rays of these luminaries were the other types she so
intimately knew and found adequate for the convey¬
ance of her picture of general human nature. There
were the lesser country gentry, the people with a cosy
competence, a decent house, and five or twenty acres
of land—the people so charmingly condescended to
in the novels of Miss Emily Eden, a spiritual sister
and disciple of Jane Austen's but of a higher social
rank. There were the clergy—young, educated and
earnest; or old, benevolent and stupid; or vulgar and
toadyish. There were the vagrant young soldiers and
sailors drawn from the homes of all these, drifting
into the picture and drifting away; the fascinating
young scapegraces with good connections; in the far
background a successful London alderman who had
a dubious connection with commerce. These, and their
wives, and their numerous daughters, were the people

266

JANE AUSTEN

with whom Miss Austen drank tea and gossiped:
without digging too deep into their real sorrows (and
they had fewer than most people), she could exhibit
their characters with very slender plots and through
very ordinary incidents, and she need never for an
instant tread on ground which was not quite familiar
and secure beneath her feet. Nobody ever blames
Congreve for his omissions: he is so patently artificial.
Why should this other and much more lovable comic
writer be rebuked simply because she found it artis¬
tically convenient to tell some of the truth she knew,
and not all the truth?

Her range of subject was her own business: at any
rate nobody can complain about her treatment of it.
It is to her credit that, in the cruder sense, she is
utterly undramatic. Her tone precluded passion,
including religious passion: her ironic record of every¬
day fact would have blended badly with “sensational”
and thrilling happenings, whether convincingly
imagined or cold-bloodedly manufactured. The daily
life of leisured comfortable people, and particularly
its humorous side, was her concern: the squire’s
son does not often murder the retired admiral’s
daughter, nor do any save very exceptional baronets
steal pearls: while even those shocking events, sudden
deaths and accidents, discoveries of unfaithfulness,
which are apt to shatter the peace of even the most
sheltered community, would have spoilt her texture

267

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

by unveiling depths of feeling which she did not desire
to sound and which could not be treated either ironi¬
cally or with mild sympathy. Even her elopements
occur “off stage.” Dramatic power, nevertheless,
she had and in a very high degree: it was merely that
she could secure dramatic development and dramatic
effects with the tiniest surprises. In Persuasion
Louisa falls off the Cobb (an old stone pier) at Lyme
Regis. It is the most violent event in the novels,
and stands out so boldly that it has become famous
and a tablet has actually been erected on the historic
spot. Had Persuasion been full of crimes and fights,
who would have remembered Louisa’s fall? Yet, with
one tedious interval, it is a book dramatic in the
truest sense: the attention of the reader is held, he
awaits each new entrance with delight, he always
wants to know what is going to happen next. And
something always does happen. Jane Austen, though
her descriptive touches are masterly, never wastes
time on superfluous descriptions, she shows us charac¬
ter in action instead of telling us about character, she
wastes no time over what she calls "solemn specious
nonsense, about something unconnected with the
story.” She is perfectly aware of the nature of her
task and the technique of narrative. She holds us
from the start with her bright and tidy introductions,
introduces us at once to a circle of people talking in
a manner that amuses us, makes all her characters

268

JANE AUSTEN

play their parts in her plots, and is unerring in her
“curtains.” The surprise and suspense that another
writer will get with a sudden pistol-shot or terrible
discovered secret she can secure by the cunning
manipulation of a lovers’ tiff or by the arrival of a
strange young man with a party of callers on a sunny
afternoon. She needs not the thunder of the chariots
of doom: the grinding of carriage wheels on a drive is
enough for her, and she can communicate excitement
about the preparations for private theatricals or a
garrison dance.

How could anyone begin an Austen novel without
going on?

About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of
Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds,
had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertam
of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton,
and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's
lady, with all the comforts and consequences of
a handsome house and a large income. All Hunt¬
ingdon exclaimed at the greatness of the match,
and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her
to be at least three thousand pounds short of any
equitable claim to it. She had two sisters to be
benefited by her elevation, and such of their
acquaintance as thought Miss Ward and Miss
Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria, did
not scruple to predict their marrying with almost
equal advantage. But there certainly are not so
many men of large fortune in the world, as there
are pretty women to deserve them. Miss Ward,

269

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

at the end of half a dozen years, found herself
obliged to be attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris, a
friend of her brother-in-law, with scarcely any
private fortune, and Miss Frances fared yet worse.

"Obliged to be attached.” Solemn persons have been
known to criticize Miss Austen for too complacently
accepting the standards of her time and society about
rank and money. It is a misfortune to have no ear for
irony. This very book ends with Sir Thomas gladly
consenting to his son's marriage with poor little
Fanny, being (this is a strong expression for our author)
“sick of ambition and mercenary connections.” Jane
was no reformer: she took society as she found it and
laughed at it; that does not necessarily imply that she
shared its opinions—and it may be added, that its
alleged opinions were probably not so widespread as
is supposed, decent people being as common then as
they are now. She liked her heroines to marry money;
so do all writers of non-tragic fiction; it is what we all
wish for our friends, that they should find the Fairy
Prince. But she never lost her sense of proportion
about money: her critics on this point are absurd.

Who was she to change society? On the whole she
liked it, and in so far as she did not she found it
comic. There was pleasure in observing the foibles
of types and of individuals: in a general way she
recorded faithfully and without undue malice. The
one bone of contention is Mr. Collins. It is certain that
no man ever created began a proposal with:

270

JANE AUSTEN

My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think
it a right thing for every clergyman in easy cir¬
cumstances (like myself) to set the example of
matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am
convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness;
and, thirdly, which perhaps I ought to have
mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice
and recommendation of the very noble lady whom
I have the honour of calling patroness.

Nobody ever talked like that. At the same time it
must be allowed that a Collins’s private motives would
be "as described,” and that the smoothness of the
speech should be allowed—dialogue in all good authors
being subdued to the style of the authors and not
precisely copied from words as spoken by ordinary
people. “Mr. Collins was not a sensible man” is a
comment that almost cancels out the exaggeration
by understatement. His speeches may be a little
overdone (though the reader could not wish them
otherwise, and he is not so overdone as the adorable
Chadband in Dickens), but the others in Pride and
Prejudice are not. Dialogue like this between Mr.
and Mrs. Bennet could be put straight on the stage
without a word of alteration—Mrs. Bennet is lament¬
ing over the fact that the egregious Collins has become
the fiancS of Miss Lucas instead of getting engaged
to one of her own daughters:

“Indeed, Mr. Bennet,” said she, “it is very
hard to think that Charlotte Lucas should ever
be mistress of this house, that I should be forced

271

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

to make way for her, and live to see her take my
place in it!”

“My dear, do not give way to such gloomy
thoughts. Let us hope for better things. Let us
flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor.”

This was not very consoling to Mrs. Bennet;
and therefore, instead of making any answer, she
went on as before.

“I cannot bear to think that they should have
all this estate. If it were not for the entail, I
should not mind it.”

"What should you not mind?”

“I should not mind anything at all.”

"Let us be thankful that you are preserved
from a state of such insensibility.”

Bennet here speaks for Miss Austen: he is not, though
a comfortable man, not quite so serious about property
as the rest of them; and he can only cope with a fool,
even though the fool be his wife, by means of quiet
leg-pulling remarks which amuse himself and are
unperceived by the other side.

Those are two of the best characters in all the novels.
It is not true to say that they are drawn in the round:
a great deal is left out. But at least what is not
exhibited may be deduced: we may, from what we
are shown, construct for ourselves pictures of Mr.
Bennet reading in his library and talking to his few
sympathetic friends; and even pictures of a younger
Bennet who fell in love with the pretty fool who
afterwards turned into the Mrs. Bennet whom we
know. There was no space for more, and the pro-

272

JANE ADSTEN

foundest agonies and exultations of the hundreds not
our novelist’s concern. She painted for us the soul
of individuals, quiet and voluble, in such a manner
that we can imagine for ourselves all those parts of
their lives which she did not show us. And she drew
at least two characters at full length, those of Eliza¬
beth and Emma. Elizabeth, most lovable and
intelligent of all heroines, was her own best self;
Emma was her own worst self, but the worst is not
very bad. Each has had her generations of lovers
and will have. For these novels must last as long as
the language, being true to abiding human nature,
most delicate in their drawing of the fleeting surface
of a society, dexterously constructed, and phrased
in an English which must be the envy of all who wish
to write our tongue at once lucidly, concisely and
musically. Her art was so excellent that her greatest
admirers from Scott and Macaulay to Mr. Kipling
have always been artists themselves; though the
"Janeites” include also many of those modem Janes
to whom we have already alluded, and who make so
little noise in the world. Nobody who likes Jane
Austen can be wholly bad or wholly stupid.

6

273

WOMEN’S VERSE

I AM not prepared with any philosophic justifica¬
tion for this essay. Poetry is poetry, whoever writes
it. But it is a fact, at least so far as my observation
goes, that people do feel curiosity about women’s
contributions to the arts, and that this curiosity is
co mm on to all kinds of persons, from those who
exaggerate the differences between the sexes to those
who seem to think they can eradicate them. I myself
felt this curiosity when I conceived a selection: and
it would be stupid not to admit it.

It was not the first collection of the sort that had
been made, but so far as I am aware it had only one
predecessor which can be taken seriously and that is
over a hundred years old. The principal collections
which have come to my notice may be briefly recorded
in chronological order.

(x) Poems by Eminent Ladies, published in two
volumes in 1755 and said to have been edited by
Colman and Bonnel Thornton. The preface opens:
"These volumes are perhaps the most solid compliment
that can possibly be paid the Fair Sex. They are a
standing proof that great abilities are not confined to
he men, and that genius often glows with equal

274

women’s verse

warmth, and perhaps with more delicacy, in the
breast of a female.” The intention was generous, but
the “standing proof” does not stand on these volumes.
No research had been done for them, and the eighteen
ladies represented in them were mainly bad poetas-
tresses of the time. A reprint, with additions, appeared
in 1780.

(2) Specimens of British Poetesses, Selected and
Chronologically Arranged by the Rev. Alexander Dyce
(1827), was the earliest product of the right happy
and copious industry of that learned man. It is the
only book in the list with any pretensions to scholar¬
ship, and any man who follows in Dyce’s footsteps
must be struck both by the range of his research and
the judicious manner in which he chose his extracts
from the books he found. His work is not beyond
criticism. There were poetesses, earlier than himself,
whom he missed, of whom Lady Naime is an out¬
standing example. He was rather too eager to get
in somethi n g by any Female versifier whom he dis¬
covered, and distinctly over-generous to his own
contemporaries. Moreover he gave feminine author¬
ship the benefit of the doubt when the doubt in its
favour was very slender. His evidence for the attribu¬
tion of "Defiled is myname full sore” to Anne Boleyn
was remarkably slight. There is not much more for
the ascription of the celebrated sporting treatises to
Juliana Berners. Neither of these reputed poetesses

275

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

appears in my selection, for the simple reason that I
do not believe in them. Even on his own ground
Dyce might have been surpassed by somebody stand¬
ing on Dyce’s shoulders. But had his work been
perfect, a hundred years, which have seen the prime of
the three greatest of English poetesses, have passed
since he published it. I may at this point acknowledge
my debt to him, although the poems I have taken from
him are very few.

(3) The Female Poets of Great Britain, chronologically
arranged, with copious selections and critical remarks by
Frederic Rowton, 1848. To this volume, large as it
is, no such debt will be acknowledged. Mr. Rowton,
on his title-page, claims the authorship of other works
entitled The Debater and Capital Punishment Reviewed;
if literary piracy were treated as maritime piracy is,
one could understand his interest in the death penalty.
He was a thief, a hypocrite, a most oily and prolix
driveller: a bad specimen of what a modem polemist
has called "the louse on the locks of literature.”
This heat against a man long dead may seem excessive;
but after all one could not say so much if he were
still alive, and his brazenness has probably never
been noticed before. Listen to his Preface. “Of our
male Poets there are (to say the least of it) histories
enough. Johnson, Campbell, Aikin, Anderson,
Southey, and others, have done due honour to the
genius of the rougher sex; and have left us—so far as

276

women’s verse

they have gone—nothing to he desired. But where
are the memorials of the Female mind? . . . One or
two small works (among which Mr. Dyce’s- Specimens
of British Poetesses is the only one of merit and
research) have been devoted to this subject, it is
true; but even the worthiest of these productions is
at best but incomplete. It cannot surely be pretended
that this neglect of our Female Poets is attributable
to any lack of genius in the sex. In these enlightened
days it may certainly be taken for granted that women
have souls ... we should be deeply ashamed of
ourselves for so long withholding from them that
prominent place in the world's esteem which is so
undoubtedly their due.” What a Chadband! We
have here the very accents of that speech about the
beasts of the field, and the human boy.—"Are you a
bird of the air? No!” “That prominent place in the
world’s esteem!” One might imagine he was talking
about some obscure and unnoticed tribe of the brute
creation: badgers, perhaps, or Dartford warblers.
He was for the first time calling the attention of the
human race to the existence of women, which could
only be demonstrated, apparently, by putting their
works into anthologies. But the most notable thing
is that like all his kind he was not only a humbug but
a sly robber. That patronizing parenthesis about
Dyce, without a word of acknowledgment, is the
one reference in his preface to a man on whose labours

2 17

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

he battened. Half his book—it might be very well if
he admitted it, for Dyce was competent—came bodily
out of Dyce. That was the only part of it worth
printing. Dyce did all his research for him; the rest of
his huge book was filled with the maundering pretti¬
nesses of early nineteenth-century writers. His
notes on the old poetesses are Dyce’s rewritten, often
not even that; that he was conscious of his dishonest
intent is proved by the way in which here and there,
without any sensible reason, he changes with obtuse
cunning the order of the transcribed extracts. He
had not even the sense to see that at one place he
copied from Dyce a highly ridiculous misprint!

If his earlier notes are certainly pilfered, his later
are as certainly his own. Pages of gush are devoted to
the numerous geniuses of his time. Of Mrs. Margaret
Hodson he says that "Her narratives flow as gracefully
and smoothly as Scott’s: she closely resembles that
great writer, indeed, in many respects, although as
regards dramatic skill she is certainly superior. . . .
One cannot but feel surprised that a lady of our
peaceful age should be so thoroughly imbued with
the martial spirit of our warlike ancestors. The fact
proves not merely the strength of the human imagi¬
nation, but also that the imagination is not sexual.” Of
Mary Howitt he says that "As a versifier, as a moralist,
and as a philosopher, she may safely challenge
comparison with any writer of her own sex and with

278

women's verse

most of the writers of the other sex. . . . Mrs.
Howitt is indeed a writer of whom England may be,
and will be, eternally proud.” “There is in Miss Cook,”
he says, “that fine eloquence which grows as it
advances.” But I may be deemed to have celebrated
sufficiently the character of this man and I come to
the next.

(4) Women’s Voices by Mrs. William Sharp, 1887.
This is an equally bad compilation in its way, happily
a different way. Mrs. Sharp says, “There has not, so
far as I am aware, been any anthology formed with
definite aim to represent each of our women-poets
by one or more essentially characteristic poems.”
She may have been unacquainted with Dyce: at all
events she left out half of his most interesting things.
Her book, terribly dedicated “To all women,” looks
likeafeminist manifesto: itisevenmore than Rowton's
crowded with the ephemeral productions of contem¬
poraries. They were only, many of them, of the
'eighties; but they have faded now.

$ $ $ $ #

Possibly there are ephemerides in my volume also.
But I have done my best to keep them out. My
criteria may be briefly explained. From the modems
I have taken only poems which appear to me meri¬
torious; but in the earlier portion of the work there
will be found some poems put in merely as curiosities

279 x

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

or because they are the best representatives of their
time that can be found. I have left out a great many
of Dyce’s poetesses. I could not bring myself to print
Diana Primrose, in spite of her lovely name, or
the monstrously ingenious Mary Fage, of the seven¬
teenth century though she was. But I may say quite
franldy that if I had come across, say, a poem of
Chaucer’s day indisputably by a woman it would have
gone in even though it were the weakest doggerel.
But I know no thing as early as that. Professor
Gollancz, I beheve, thought Pearl was by a woman;
perhaps it was, but we don’t know. I have omitted,
as I said, verse imputed to Juliana Berners and Anne
Boleyn. By the same token I have left out Hardy-
Knute, which may or may not have been by Lady
Wardlaw. I do not think it a great loss, for it is long
and does not live up to its opening. There’s nae luck
would have gone in had I really felt sure that Jean
Adams was a likelier author than Mickle. I should
have been glad to have included the beautiful lines
attributed to James I’s noble and unfortunate
daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, if I had seen satis¬
factory evidence for the attribution. Mrs. Tighe’s long
Psyche, a poem of respectable accomplishment, I
searched for quotable extracts, finding none; her poem
about a lily I rejected after hesitation. I found my¬
self reluctantly disinclined to include anything by
Margaret Fuller or George Eliot. Beyond these and

280

women’s verse

a few modems I do not believe that I had much
hesitation.

* * * * *

There will be found in my selection some authors
and some poems which have appeared in no previous
anthology of any kind, so far as I know; one or two
authors never known, and many who have been for¬
gotten since Dyce dug them up. In all but a very few
instances I have procured and searched the original
volumes even when I have ultimately selected poems
which previous anthologists have chosen before me.
They do not always, be it understood, choose the
worst and leave the best for other people. But good
work is not the only thing to which interest attaches,
and while looking for poetesses I have come across
many odd things. I may be permitted, while the
night is still young, so to speak, to make a few stray
remarks about some of them.

There never was a time, whatever Mr. Rowton may
have supposed, when the Female Sex entirely escaped
notice, or even "esteem.” But there was a time when
it took no active share in literature. Today we
scarcely bother about the distinction between men
and women writers. With thousands of women writ¬
ing, with women’s verses in every magazine and women
reporters in every newspaper office, when literary
women congregate in clubs, and robust women novel¬
ists haggle with editors and discuss royalties with

281

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

their male rivals, we take composition for granted as a
fe minin e occupation. Even though we may not expect it
we should be only mildly surprised if a female excelling
all her grandmothers were to appear, and a second of
the sort would cause no surprise at all. But it has all
occurred very rapidly; it is less than a hundred years
since Southey wrote to Charlotte Bronte: “Literature
cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought
not to be.” Before the days of Fanny Burney and
Jane Austen the woman writer was a lonely figure,
however different may have been the ways in which
various generations regarded her. One looks back
through the centuries and sees these poetesses
scattered about in ones and twos, fine ladies, quiet
countrywomen with taste and education, blue stock¬
ings, pet prodigies brought up in literary circles,
stupid women vain of their accomplishments, timid
women apologizing for their temerity; almost all of
them inevitably and pathetically self-conscious about
the opinion of the watching males around them. Never¬
theless the degree of that self-consciousness seems to
have varied. There was very little poetry—though
we do not know about many beautiful Elizabethan
poems—by women in the sixteenth and early seven¬
teenth centuries. One of them speaks to us direct on
the subject: Mary Oxlie of Morpet, who wrote a
dedicatory poem to her fellow-countryman Drummond
of Hawthomden:

282

women's verse

Perfection in a woman’s work is rare;

From an untroubled mind should verses flow;

My discontents make mine too muddy show;

And hoarse encumbrances of household care.

Where these remain the Muses ne’er repair.

But it did not, I think, occur to many early poetesses
to apologize for writing or appeal for masculine mercy.
Those who did write, of course, were plainly aristo¬
crats, and whatever the standards of the rest of the
population there has always been a good deal of
democracy within the aristocracy, and an element of
high culture amongst aristocratic women. Even in
the eighteenth century, one of Horace Walpole’s lady
friends might not have apologized for writing verses
as humbler contemporaries of his felt impelled to do.
But after the Commonwealth we do commonly find
apologies or protestations in text or preface.

The authorized folio of Katherine Philips (Orinda)
is very enlightening. I have some doubts as to the
literary modesty of Orinda: one sees behind her poems
a bouncing gushing creature of the kind not usually
content to hide their lights under bushels. But she
protests enough. The standard edition was published
posthumously; there had been in her lifetime a pirated
book full of errors which she vehemently repudiated:

"The injury done me by that Publisher and
Printer,” she wrote, “exceeds all the troubles
that I remember I ever had ... it is impossible
for malice itself to have printed those Rimes (you

283

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

tell me gotten abroad so impudently) with so
much abuse to the things, as the very publica¬
tion of them at all, though they had been never
so correct, had been to me.” She was “that
unfortunate person that cannot so much as think
in private, that must have my imaginations rifled
and exposed to play the Mountebanks, and dance
upon the ropes to entertain all the rabble; to
undergo all the raillery of the Wits, and all the
severity of the Wise, and to be the sport of some
that can, and some that cannot read a Verse . . .
it hath cost me a sharp fit of sickness since I
heard it ... a thousand pounds to have bought
my permission for their being printed should not
have obtained it.”

“Sometimes,” she says, “I think that employment so
far above my reach and unfit for my sex, that I am
going to resolve against it for ever,” but “the truth
is, I have an incorrigible inclination to that folly of
riming, and, intending the effects of that humour,
only for my own amusement in my own life.” Her
editor, however, was proud to publish them: “Some
of them would be no disgrace to the name of any Man
that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency
in this kind, and there are none that may not pass
with favour, when it is remembered that they fell
hastily from the pen but of a Woman. We might well
have called her the English Sappho.” She would, he
says, have been persuaded to publish a correct im¬
pression of herself:

284

women's verse

But the small Pox, that malicious disease (as
knowing how little she would have been con¬
cern'd for her handsomeness, when at the best)
was not satisfied to be as injurious a Printer of
her face, as the other had been of her poems, but
treated her with a more fatal cruelty than the
Stationer had them; for though he to her most
sensible affliction surreptitiously possessed him¬
self of a false Copy, and sent those children of
her Fancy into the World, so martyred, that they
were more unlike themselves than she could have
been made had she escaped; that murtherous
Tyrant, with greater barbarity seized unexpetedly
upon her, the fine Original, and to the much
greater affliction of the world, violently tore her
out of it, and hurried her untimely to her grave,
upon the 22nd of June 1664, she being then but
31 (34) years of age. But he could not bury her
in oblivion, for this monument which she erected
for herself, will for ever make her to be honoured
as the honour of her Sex, the emulation of ours,
and the admiration of both.

Comment on the beauties of this last paragraph is beyond
me. The commendatory poems prefaced to Orinda’s
works echo these lofty strains. Lord Orrery wrote:

And as Our Sex resigns to Yours the due.

So all of your bright Sex must yield to you.

Lord Roscommon pictured h i m s elf surrounded by
lions on some Lybian plain:

The Magick of Orinda's name,

Not only can their fierceness tame.

But, if that mighty word I once rehearse.

They seem submissively to roar in Verse.

285

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

A pseudonymous lady, more vehement than her sub¬
ject, argued that environment (she didn't know the
word) made all the difference between the sexes:

Trained up to Arms, we Amazons have been,
And Spartan Virgins strong as Spartan Men:
Breed Women but as Men, and they are these;
Whilst Sybarit Men are Women by their eyes.

Nature to Females freely doth impart
That, which the Males usurp, a stout, bold heart;
Thus hunters female Beasts fear to assail
And female Hawks more mettal’d than the male.

This feminine anticipation of Mr. Kipling is followed
by the assertion that since souls were equal it was ob¬
viously not the “he” or “she” that wrote poetry.

It is a fine collection of tributes. A poem, with
noble passages, by the neglected Flatman comes into
it, and there are two interesting Odes by Cowley. One
begins:

We allow’d you beauty, and we did submit
To all the tyrannies of it.

Ah cruel Sex! will you depose us too in Wit?

The other, full of the oddest tropes, states that:

The World did never but two Women know
Who, one by fraud, the other by wit did rise
To the two tops of Spiritual dignities;

One Female Pope of old, one Female Poet now.

The panegyric was impressive; but it was all some-

286

women’s verse

what patronizing, addressed as though to a flying pig.
There is an air of strain about Orinda’s nearest con¬
temporary rival. The gifted Anne Killigrew, who, dying
young, was the subject of a great ode by Dryden, had
to write a long poem protesting against the “saying
that her verses were made by another”:

Like iEsop’s painted jay, I seem’d to all.

Adorn’d in plumes, I not my own could call.

She produced Orinda as evidence that women could
be good poets, and she said quaintly of Alexander the
Great:

Nor will it from his Conquests derogate,

A Female Pen his Acts did celebrate.

There is nothing diffident about the attitude of Aphra
Behn, the tough, the audacious, fearless young widow
who forced her way to dramatic success under the
Restoration, and who was the first of our professional
women writers. She has been rather unfairly treated
by historians. It is true that her plays are as gross,
in subject and speech, as any of her time: possibly
her coarseness was the defect of the quality which
enabled her to fight her lone hand in the Grub Street
of the day. But there is a hearty straightforwardness
about her which is lacking in some of the men of the
Restoration, she had a gift for broad, strong character¬
ization, she was honest, rough, kind, affectionate, not
at all cynical and she wrote Enghsh of an Elizabethan

287

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

lustiness. She did not apologize, she counter-attacked.
She was not allowed to forget her sex but she soundly
thumped those who reminded her that her plays and
poems were "writ by a woman.” Here is a passage
from the Epistle to the Reader which introduces The
Dutch Lover:

Indeed that day ’twas acted first, there comes
me into the Pit, a long lither, phlegmatick, white,
ill-favour’d wretched Fop, an officer in Masquerade,
newly transported with a Scarf and Feather out
of France, a sorry Animal that has nought else
to shield it from the uttermost contempt of all
Mankind, but that respect which we afford to
Rats and Toads, which though we do not well
allow to live, yet when considered as parts of
God’s creation, we make honourable mention of
them. A thing. Reader—but no more of such
a Smelt: This thing, I tell ye, opening that which
serves it for a mouth, out issued such a noise as
this to those that sate about it, that they were to
expect a usefull Play, God damn him, for it was
a woman’s. ... I would not for a world be
taken arguing with such a propertie as this; but
if I thought there were a man of such tolerable
parts, who could upon mature deliberation dis¬
tinguish well his right hand from his left, and
justly state the difference between the number
of sixteen and two, yet had this prejudice upon
him; I would take a little pains to make him
know how much he errs. For waving the exam¬
ination why women having equal education with
men, were not as capable of knowledge, of what¬
soever sort as well as they: I’ll only say as I have

288

women’s verse

to such and before, that Plays have no great
room for that which is men’s great advantage
over women, that is Learning; we all know that
the immortal Shakespeare’s Plays (who was not
guilty of much more of this than often falls to
women’s share) have better pleased the World
than Johnson’s works, though by the way ’tis said
the Benjamin was no such Rabbi neither, for I
am informed that his Learning was but Gram¬
mar high (sufficient mdeed to rob poor Sallust of
his best orations); and it hath been observ’d that
they are apt to admire him most confoundedly
who have just such a scantling of it as he had. . ..
Then for their musty rules of Unity, and God
knows what besides, if they meant anything, they
are enough intelligible and as practicable by a
woman.

This was in 1673. Forty years afterwards we get a
sidelight from the preface to Mary Monk’s poems,
written after her death by her father Lord Moles-
worth. The preface takes the form of a dedication
(fifty pages) to Carolina, Princess of Wales, who is
greeted with this ambiguous salutation: “The true
value, you have for Liberty, is so remarkable, that
one wou’d wonder where your Royal Highness (who
has been bred up in a part of Europe, but slenderly
furnish’d with just notions of that great Blessing)
cou’d have acquired it.” Lord Molesworth repeats
with approval charges recently made against women—
this was two hundred years ago and on the verge of
the eighteenth century!

289

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

That was the Natural Sweetness and Modesty
which so well became their Sex, and so much
recommended them to the Love and Esteem of
the Men is (by many) exchanged for a Careless
Indecent, Masculine Air (imitating) the Rakeish,
Milder sort of Gentlemen in the Excess in Love
of Gaming, Snuff-taking, Habit, and a Modish
Neglect of their husbands, Children and Families.

As for his daughter’s verses, of the tone of which he
is proud, he says affectingly:

We found most of them in her Scrittore after
her death, written with her own Hand, little
expecting, and as little desiring, the Publick shou’d
have any Opportunity of either Applauding or
Condemning them.

It might be possible to find some women writers of
the age to whom Lord Molesworth’s strictures might
be held, in part, to apply: Mrs. Centlivre, De la Riviere
Manly, and Lady Mary Montagu. But it gives us a
shock to hear them applied to the generality of early
Georgian women, and they certainly would not apply
to the poetesses (with whom we are specially con¬
cerned) of the rest of the century. Most of them were
extremely severe and models of propriety, proud to
display what learning they really had, but studious
to exhibit a decorous modesty about publication.

The first edition (1696) of the poems of Philomela
(Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe) was published pseudony-
mously: her “Name had been prefixed, had not her
own modesty absolutely forbidden it.” The preface

290

was written (from Harding’s Rents) by Elizabeth

Johnson, who stoutly defended her sex:

«

We are not unwilling to allow Mankind the
Brutal Advantage of Strength, they are Superior
to ours in Force, they have Custom on their side,
and have Ruled, and are like to do so; and may
freely do it without Disturbance or Envy; at
least they should have none from us, if they
could keep quiet among themselves. But when
they would monopolize Sense too, when neither
that, nor Learning, nor so much as Wit must be
allow’d us, but all over-ruled by the Tyranny of
the Prouder Sex; nay when some of them will
not let us say our Souls are our own, but would
persuade us we are no more Reasonable Creatures
than themselves, or their Fellow-Animals; we
then must ask their Pardons if we are not yet so
Compleatly Passive as to bear all without so much
as a Murmur: We complain, and think with
Reason, that our Fundamental Constitutions are
Destroyed; that here is a plain and open Design
to render us mere Slaves, perfect Turkish Wives
without Properties or Sense or Souls; and are
, forced to Protest against it, and Appeal to all
the World, whether these are not notorious
Violations on the Liberties of Freeborn English¬
women? This makes the meekest Worm amongst
us all, ready to turn again when we are thus
trampled on; But alas! What can we do to Right
ourselves? Stingless and Harmless as we are, we
can only Kiss the Foot that hurts us. However,
sometimes it pleases Heaven to raise up some
Brighter Genius than ordinary to Succour a Dis¬
tressed People; an Epaminondas in Thebes; a

291

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Timolean for Corinth; (for you must know we
read Plutarch, now he is translated) and a Nassau
for all the World: Nor is our Defenceless Sex
forgotten! we have not only Bonducas and Zen¬
obius; but Saphos and Daciers; Schurmans, Orinda
and Behns, who have humbled the most haughty
of our Antagonists, and made them do Homage
to our Wit as well as to our Beauty.

Forty years passed before her poems were reprinted
by Curll with a note from the author desiring him
“to own, that it’s his Partiality to my Writings,
not to my Vanity, which has occasioned the Re¬
publishing of them.” Curll himself wrote the preface,
telling the story of Mrs. Rowe’s life and marriage in
the strain of “Long had this Lady been the Wish and
Hope of many desiring Swains.” He addressed him¬
self to Pope; said that Prior had raised Philomela;
and quoted Dr. Watts as saying that “the Honour of
Poetry is retrieved by such Writers, from the Scandal
which has been cast upon it, by the Abuse of Verse
to loose and profane Purposes.” Philomela’s diffident
reserve was the common thing. Mary Jones, one of
the best known, a friend of Dr. Johnson and author
of verses respectably polished and pointed, prefaced
her fat volume with the apologetic statement that
her poems were “the product of pure nature only,
and most of them wrote at a very early age.” She had
for long shrunk from publication out of respect for
“them (her friends), the world and myself” and only

292

resorted to it at last (under the patronage of the
Dutch Stadtholder) in order to raise money for an
aged and indigent relative. She must have raised a
good deal: her subscription list (Christopher Smart
and Horace Walpole appear in it) is a huge one.
Her opening lines are unpromising:

How much of paper’s spoil’d, what floods of ink!
And yet how few, how very few can think.

But the rest of the poem is amusing and explains her
pretty well. Her reluctance to set out a dedication

With lies enough to make a lord asham’d!

was not shared by her contemporary Mary Masters,
whose verses (alleged to have been corrected by Dr.
Johnson) were dedicated to the Earl of Burlington.
She prostrates herself in the most approved Grub
Street mode. He is exalted; she lowly and untuneful:

Yet when a British Peer has deigned to shed
His gen’rous favours on my worthless Head;
Silent shall I receive the welcome Boon?

Boon indeed:

He spoke; he prais’d. I hearken’d with delight
And found a strong Propensity to write.

The humility of the women authors and the implied
condescension of the men were at their acutest during
the eighteenth century. Poetesses, however, were far
more numerous than before. There were (though

293

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Scotswomen wrote some immortal songs) no very
notable ones; and the spread of authorship did not
greatly affect women of the upper classes. Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, was an exception; but her
salutation to the Alps will certainly not be reprinted
by me. The cultivated relatives of dons and clergy¬
men, widows driven to a subscription for a living,
elderlyspinsters, aspiring housekeepers and governesses
composed and published volumes of respectable coup¬
lets. Now and then a considerable financial success
was made. Mrs. Barber, the pushing widow of a
Dublin tradesman, published in 1733 a handsome,
even luxurious quarto, which is still veiy common.
The most noticeable thing in the book is the prefatory
poem by Constantia Grierson: ‘‘To Mrs. Mary Barber,
under the name of Sapphira, occasioned by the en¬
couragement she met with in England to publish her
poems by subscription.”

Provincial ladies began to have volumes locally
printed, and talent by poverty depressed was studiously
unearthed. Mary Leapor, who had a strain of genius,
was a domestic servant. Stephen Duck, the inspired
Thresher, had his analogue, though not his equal, in
Mrs. Yearsley, the Bristol Charwoman. This woman
ought to be remembered for the most astounding
apostrophe on record. She addressed a poem to the
Bristol Channel in which she broke forth with
Hail! useful Channel. . . .

294

women’s verse

The phrase, unique as it is, was significant of the age.
It might be used as a text for that prevailing (though,
of course, not universal) complacency of the middle
Georgians, who often seemed to regard the Universe
as a laudably well-meaning branch of the lower orders,
and were quite capable of “Hail, gamesome Thunder”
and “Hail, pleasing Lightning.” For prosiness and
bathos Mrs. Yearsley was surpassed by another lady.
This was Miss Jane Cave, whose Poems on various
Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac and religious were printed
at Winchester in 1783, with a remarkable frontispiece
showing the author quill in hand and wearing a sort
of beribboned tea-cosy on top of a towering coiffure.
Her volume is dedicated to the Subscribers: “Ye
gen’rous patrons of a female muse.” And with some
reason. There were nearly two thousand of them,
grouped by localities, “Oxford,” “Southampton,”
“Bath,” etc. She, or the family which employed her
in some unnamed capacity, must have systematically
scoured the South of England for victims. Her
character was evidently forcible, if unattractive; but
her powers did not justify her evident self-complacency.
She was especially fond of writing obituary poems on
deceased clergymen. Here are characteristic extracts
from two of these:

Hark! how the Heav’nly Choir began to sing,

A song of praise, when Watkins entered in.

295

U

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Let ev’ry heart lift up a fervent pray’r.

That old Elijah’s mantle may he there,

That God from age to age may carry on
The amazing work which Hams hath begun.

In her dedication she disclaims any pretension to be
a “Seward, Steele, or Moore.” The list is a sign of the
times. Well-known poetesses now existed m large
numbers, and as the century drew to a close their fame
and the claims to eminence of the best of them
steadily increased. There was Helen Maria Williams,
whose Ode on the Peace, competently written but now
unreadable, was highly praised by Dr. Johnson, and
one of whose sonnets was committed to heart by
Wordsworth. There was Elizabeth Carter, translator
of Epictetus, and a blue-stocking whose learning really
commanded respect. There was Charlotte Smith, the
sonneteer, in whose writing we can still find the vigour
and grace that made her celebrated in her own day.
Anne Seward was equally well known. She did not
deserve it. Occasionally there is a famt trace of
reality m her work, as in the Sonnet on a December
morning, 1782:

I love to rise ere gleams the tardy light,

Winter’s pale dawn;—and as warm fires illume
And cheerful tapers shine around the room,

Thro’ misty windows bend my morning sight,
Where, round the dusky lawn, the mansion white,
With shutters clos’d, peers faintly thro’ the gloom.
That slow recedes;

296

women’s verse

But most of it is very bad; and I did not consider
it necessary to attempt to revive her merely be¬
cause she was once taken seriously. Mrs. Opie, wife
of the painter and author of The Blind. Boy, was
another celebrity. Her Lines Respectfully Inscribed
to the Society for the Relief of Persons Imprisoned for
Small Debts are so characteristic of the time that I
wish I had space for them.

There were others even better known. Something
of the old strangeness still clung to the woman who
wrote. Anne Sewaid was the Swan of Lichfield and
Susanna Blamire the Muse of Cumberland. But the
age that produced poets and dramatists of the status
and popularity of Mrs. Barbauld, Hannah More, and
Joanna Baillie—the last a poetess of really consider¬
able talent—was becoming reconciled. For a time
the Mrs. Radcliffes might prefer to sign their works
whilst the Jane Austens remained anonymous; but
with the end of the epoch the old air of peculiarity
faded, and with the century of the Romantic Rivival
came an innumerable host of women writers of some
distinction, and three poetesses with claims to rank
with all but the greatest men. After Mrs. Browning,
Christina Rossetti, and Emily Bronte we hear no
more, and could hear no more, of a “Female Muse.”

* * * * *

That these three were greater poets than any
297 D*

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

Englishwomen before them goes, I imagine, without
saying. Almost all their best predecessors were women
who live by one or two poems. Amongst those poems
scarcely one is a genuine classic beyond the extra¬
ordinary group of great songs written in the eighteenth
century by Scotswomen, who seemed to have led more
independent lives than the Englishwomen of their
time, and certainly sang more boldly, confidently,
and musically: the Werena my Heart’s Licht of Lady
Grisel Baillie, Mrs. Cockbum’s The Flowers O’ the
Forest, and Jane Elliot’s, the stirring lilts of Isobel
Pagan, the Ayrshire Publican, Lady Anne Barnard's
Auld Robin Gray, and The Land of the Leal of Lady
Naime.

Until the age of Joanna Baillie, the Matchless
Orinda had the greatest repute of them all, but there
is more substantial achievements in the work of Lady
Winchilsea. The Countess had no fame in her life¬
time, she did not (as Orinda did) correspond with the
literary men or exchange tributes with the poets of
her time. But it was not for nothing that Words¬
worth "discovered” and valued her. She kept her
eye on Nature at a time when the world in general had
a conventional parti pris about Nature, and an im¬
pressive power comes with her speech. This slight
“difference” in her is not peculiar to her.

It may be left to others to discuss the particular
aggregate value and characteristics of our women

298

poets, to debate the question as to whether the “mas¬
culine imagination” of Emily BrontS was a freak, to
look for especially “feminine” characteristics in the
contents of an anthology of women’s verse. They are
difficult and subtle questions. But I will call attention
to one point, and one only: and that is rather to the
credit of the poetesses. That they have, and must
have, conformed to succeeding fashions in writing is
obvious—the poetic style of an age is a fruit of its
general civilization and way of thinking. But there
is, I think, evidence that when the convention favours
highly regularized speech and restricted choice of
imagery, and when the convention favours a repression
of personality, women seem to be less prone than men
to complete conformity. Women from 1680 to 1750
may have written obediently in couplets or quatrains,
but in those of them who have any merit, personal
experience and personal passion are always peeping
through, and the smooth surface of the stock diction
is always being broken by an unexpected word, be¬
traying obstinately individual taste and observation.
Lady Winchilsea’s cropping horse in the night has
often been quoted. But we are equally surprised to
encounter the hot passion, the straightforward con¬
fessions of suffering, the open autobiography that are
exposed in the poems, however technically imperfect,
of Ephelia and Lady Wharton. Mary Mollineux's
verses (5th edition, 1761) were read, no doubt, by her

299

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

fellow-Quakers, for generations after her death, but
have never, so far as I know, been noticed by any
critic.

Mary Mollineux, the Quaker, died (under fifty) in
1695. She had suffered in prison, and her religious
poems are the work of a woman who, although very
learned, was primarily concerned with the feelings
she was registering. Totally indifferent to the manner
of the time, she was strongly under the influence of
Donne. Mary Leapor and Mary Masters again illus¬
trate the refusal of even the lesser women to remain
on the highest levels of masculine stiffness. The
detectives who are always chasing, farther and farther
back, into the Augustan Age for “heralds of Natural¬
ism,” scraps of really fresh and enthusiastic desciip-
tion of Nature, could find things in both these poet¬
esses. Mary Leapor (a domestic servant who died of
measles at twenty-four after teaching herself to write
some very polished verse) looked at Nature directly
and keenly. A mere list of things she mentions (d. 1746)
astonishes the reader accustomed, in the minor poets,
to nothing more than groves, enamelled meads,
bursting grapes, roses and lilies. If you turn Mary
Leapor’s pages you will find kingcups, goldfinches,
linnets, thyme, shining cottage tables, primroses,
damsons, poppies. . . . And how, in this passage of
Mary Masters, a knowledge of and love for the country
struggles with the hoops and corsets of the mode:

300

WOMEN’S VERSE

Here the green Wheat disposed in even Rows,

(A pleasing view) on genial Ridges grows.

Its clustered heads on lofty spires ascend.

And frequent with delightful wavings bend.
There younger Barley shoots a tender Blade,
And spreads a level plain with verdant shade.

The wreathing Pea extends its bloomy Pride,
And flow’ry Borders smile on either side.

She says, in terms, that whenever she looks at the
country it produces an excitement in her which makes
her write verse: unfortunately her intelligence was too
weak, and only a few lines (not about Nature) were
found pomted enough for a representative selection.
But she had that touch of informality, and I think
that even in the obscurest and worst women poets of
the time will almost always be found—what in the
men’s work is only sometimes to be found—expres¬
sions of personal joy and grief, the healthy instinct to
write about the things that the writer most intensely
feels.

# * * * *

There are a few problems to be cleared up on which
I should be glad of light. The identity of Fanny
Greville, whose Indifference is one of the most poignant
lyrics of the eighteenth century, has always baffled
historians. Who was Mrs. Taylor who appeared in
Dryden’s MisceUany and also in Mrs. Behn’s Miscellany
of 1683? Who was Ephelia, first given her due in a

301

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

charming essay by Mr. Gosse? There were two editions
of her poems. The first of 1679 is complete, the edition
of 1682 being padded out with poems, mostly good,
by Rochester and others, including even Come, Lasses
and Lads. A question of even more interest to me
personally is, who was Ann Collins? and one of more
interest still, where are Ann Collins’s poems? Her Song
I found in Dyce (I recommend the reader to refer to
it, remembering its date) and the other poem I got
out of a forgotten but good anthology of religious
verse compiled by James Montgomery. Dyce refers
to her Divine Songs and Meditations (1653). Lowndes’s
Bibliographer’s Manual states that the copy of the
first edition sold at the Sykes and Heber Sales a
century ago was said to be unique; but he records
also an edition of 1658.1 can find no further informa¬
tion, and neither edition is in the British Museum.
I should be glad of light on this and also on the other
compositions of Mary Oxlie, the friend of Drummond
of Hawthomden.

302

THE DIARY OF A NOBODY

T HE Diary of a Nobody originally appeared as a
serial in Punch ; and it was written by the two
brothers Grossmith, of whom one was best known to
the public as an actor and the other as an enter¬
tainer. No one ever thought of comparing them with
Flaubert or Gissing, whom they very likely had not
read, and the day of Tchekov had not yet arrived.
Yet it is arguable that in point of mere realism of
fiction they came as near to the truth as any of their
more celebrated and more sombre contemporaries. It
is true that their temperament gave their work a comic
bias, as the temperament of most of the "realists”
gave theirs a gloomy bias. But if any man really
wants what the critics used to call "a slice of life”
here it is.

Naturally, there are qualifications. Mr. Pooter is
slightly exaggerated, as are some of his companions
and an argumentative person with no sense of humour
might well contest the above assertion by saying that
Mr. Pooter would not even in a diary have so faith¬
fully recorded his extremist simplicities and his worst
humiliations. But, whatever discounts may have to
be made, the fact remains, as it seems to me, that a

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large area of English social life is painted in this book
more faithfully and fully than anywhere else. Mr.
Pooter does not beat his wife; nor do most Mr. Pooters.
Mr. Cummings does not attempt to seduce her; nor
would most of the Messrs. Cummings. Fifteen months
pass without a murder or a divorce; there is no assault
worse than the unpleasing trick played by Gowing
when he made the whole party sit on the floor, no
robbery worse than the abstraction of certain leaves
from Mr. Pooter's diary, no debauch more repre¬
hensible and disastrous than Mr. Pooter’s excessive
libations of champagne at the Lord Mayor’s Ball. But
fifteen normal months in a normal household would
be equally free from extremes of human aberration
and the worst malignities of Fate. It was the normal
that our authors were depicting; they showed it in a
comic light simply because they found it comic, there¬
by coming nearer the hearts and minds of the Pooters
themselves than do those other realists of the "Dull
Monotony” school who employ similar materials to
exhibit a scene of utter tedium faithfully communi¬
cated to the reader.

The date is, shall we say, 1891; the site is Holloway,
a typical suburb of the impecuniously respectable
kind; the manners, customs and experiences shown are
those of the poorer middle classes in a London suburb
of the late Victorian age. There are no set descriptions:
everything is done, as it naturally would be in a

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diary, by an accumulation of little touches. We are .
given a picture of English social life, in a certain class,
in a certain kind of place, and at a certain date. About
the date the authors, doubtless, were not particular:
they set down what were the facts when they wrote,
and the mere lapse of time has given some of their
details an historical value. The particular tone of the
references to bicycling would in itself fix the date
almost to a year: Cummings’s paper on the superiority
of the bicycle to the horse (but Lupin, who would now
have a fast two-seater, preferred his smart little trap)
and his lofty familiarity with the Bicycling News
have the peculiar flavour of the 'nineties. There is
something of the rose’s beauty and transience about
them now. Mrs. Cummings’s songs, of which the most
successful were No, Sir and the Garden of Sleep
are also infallible indexes: a hundred years hence
readers of the Diary will learn a good deal by looking
up these two songs in the British Museum, unless by
then that hospitable receptacle has burst its sides.
“I bought a pair of stag’s heads made of plaster-of-
Paris and coloured brown”: there is at once a record
and a criticism; for amongst other things the Gros-
smiths were admirably sound on aesthetics, lampooning
bad architecture, bad music, and bad furniture with
equal certainty. Those whose memories go back be¬
yond 1914 will find an almost painful chasm about the
reference to that quaint law—truly Victorian in its

305

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

compromise and the lies it led to—about bona-fide
travellers who could get drink out-of-hours on Sunday
by the simple expedient of saying that they had come
three miles. The Pooters’ house and the decorations
—fans, painted stools, etc.—of that and other houses
date most emphatically. The house “The Laurels”
is drawn with ruthless power by Weedon: the square
box covered with borrowed “features” out of scale
with so modest a place; the stucco balustrade in front,
the heavy steps to the porticoed front door, the
weighty facings of the windows, the vast cornice with
its unmeaning parapet atop, the puny shrubs in the
front garden, the half-basement, the side door to the
kitchen entrance, and behind all the telegraph-wires
and train smoke of an industrialism which had in¬
vaded the country at haphazards. These things, alas!
we have still with us, and in myriads: houses do not
pass so rapidly as clothes, slang and people; but where-
ever we see such a house we know the period of it, it
was built in the Pooters’ lifetime. As diary and
illustrations proceed we can almost define, though it
is never mentioned, the precise smell of cooking that
ascended from the Pooters’ kitdien. The pictures of
Pooter in the bath with the antiquated geyser, and
of Pooter painting the washstand in the servant’s
bedroom, would alone tell us everything about his
social status and habits. Weedon Grossmith had the
gift, which is shared by Mr. George Morrow, of draw-

306

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ing the commonest objects, jugs, railings, lamp-posts,
gas-brackets, in such a way as to make them at once
life-like, significant and funny. His pictures rein¬
force a story which was in no need of reinforcement:
and a whole way of life is re-created for us. What we
are told suggests infinitely more: a whole world of
people, before the age of motor-cars and jazz, living
in the drabber London suburbs, the grand people in
the larger villas, the Pooters and the Cummingses in
their plastered boxes, the tradesmen, the servants,
the charwomen, the errand-boys. It is a mistakp that
no deigyman is introduced, but there is a wonderful
tact about the intrusions of the larger and livelier
world outside. The visits of Mr. Perkupp, the kind
and prosperous master, of Mr. Franching, of Mrs.
James, a suburban quick to take up the latest fashion¬
able fad; the glimpses of the glories of the Mansion
House and the Volunteer Ball; the large air of the
cultivated and statesmanlike Mr. Hardfur Huttle:
these excitements come in just their right proportions.
And though we may smile, looking backward and
downward, at the things which the Pooters take
seriously, we know in our hearts that we share
their passions, and that we also have our toys and
their dreams, in essentials like theirs:

Carrie’s mother returned the Lord Mayor’s in¬
vitation, which was sent to her to look at, with
apologies for having upset a glass of port over it.
I was too angry to say anything.

307

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

The Lord Mayor may not be what he was in the
'nineties; and even in the 'nineties there were quarters
where his lustre did not shine so brightly as it did in
Brickfield terrace; but our laugh at the Pooters’ little
triumphs, vanities and ambitions is in some measure
a laugh at our own. "He (the curate) wants me to
takeround the plate which I thinkagreat compliment.”
The incident selected is selected with an exact eye to
the effect, the delimitation of Mr. Pooter’s sphere;
but there again is a fact for the student of manners
in ages to come, which is also a revelation of something
to which neither time, place nor class makes any
difference. “It only shows how small the world is,”
on the other hand, is something, perhaps, which
could only have become a standard remark in the
middle class: the upper class being too consciously
small, and the working class too large.

There are many enormous solemn books of great
reputation in which the characters are no more surely
drawn than they are here. Pooter’s is the one full-
length portrait: we know enough of him to deduce
from it what he would say and do in any given situation;
and it is a particular triumph of the authors that,
although they make him so superbly silly, they leave
us with an admiration of his "sterling worth.” The
presentiments of the others range, in point of scale,
downwards until we come to the laconic Mr. Padge,
who never says anything but "That’s right,” in a tone

308

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which makes us, as Mr. Belloc says, remember it all
one’s life. When has “economy of means” gone farther
in the suggestion of character? "A vulgar-looking
man,” remarks the sober Mr. Pooter, “who appeared
to be all moustache.” He seized the most comfortable
chair, blew out great clouds from his reeking pipe, and
blandly contemplated the proceedings throughout
the evening. The misadventure happened to Gowing:

I was so annoyed at the conduct of Padge, I
said: “I suppose you would have laughed if he
had poked Mr. Gowing’s eye out?” to which Padge
replied: “That’s right,” and laughed more than
ever.

Next night:

Imagine my utter disgust when the man Padge
actually came again, and not even accompanied
by Gowing. I was exasperated and said: “Mr.
Padge, this is a surprise.” Dear Carrie, fearing
unpleasantness said, "Oh! I suppose Mr. Padge
has only come to see the other Irving make-up.”
Mr. Padge cried, “That’s right,” and took the
best chair again, from which he never moved the
whole evening.

He rounds it off by saying “That’s right” when Mr.
Pooter is told by Burwin-Fosselton, the gifted imitator
to talk about what he understands. Weedon Gros-
smith's drawings of him, wedged into the best chair,
with his shaggy moustache, his flat bald head, his
perpetual pipe, his podgy hand, his vacuous, expectant

309

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

face, perfectly develop the indications given. We
know Padge; we can quite imagine him saying "That’s
right” when the malevolent Gowing said it would be
quite the thing for him to present himself for an
evening with the Pooters, who were total strangers
to him; we are tempted to reconstruct his whole life,
expede Herculem and the ichthyosaurus from a bone;
we feel sure that he has retired from business and is a
widower with a married daughter, who doesn’t in the
least know how much father is worth.

His introduction was a characteristic action of
Gowing’s, a selfish man, fond of Pooter, fond also of
pulling Pooter’s leg. The game of Mogul was Gowing’s
extremest action; but he appeared to great advantage
after the Pooters had attained the dizzy heights of
the Mansion House Ball, when:

He entered the room, without knocking, with
two hats on his head and holding the garden-rake
in his hand, with Carrie’s fur-tippet (which he had
taken off the downstairs hall peg) round his neck,
and announced himself in a loud coarse voice:
"His Royal Highness the Lord Mayor!” He
marched twice round the room like a buffoon, and
finding we took no notice, said: "Hulloh! What's
up? Lovers’ quarrel, eh?”

That passage could not have been written without a
very clear imaginative realization of all the characters
concerned. In the creation of minor characters the
authors’ invention is inexhaustible: they are always

3x0

THE DIARY OF A NOBODY

ready with a new one who is at once typical and yet
strongly particularized. Lupin is a thousand “cards,”
yet he is Lupin. Mr. Cummings is a host of sedate
bicycling—and rabbit-breeding, bowls-playing, gar¬
dening, stamp-collecting—pioneers, yet he is Mr.
Cummings with his own individual neutral tint.

And if the individuals are truthfully drawn, truths
are also conveyed which transcend the experiences
and idiosyncrasies of individuals. Teddy Finsworth
—who actually speaks almost as little as Mr. Padge—
betrays a universal tendency when he meets Pooter
again: "He insisted on my having a glass of wine (a
thing I never do), and told me he lived at Middlesboro’,
where he was Deputy Town Clerk, a position which
was as high as the Town Clerk of London—in fact
higher.” The conversation about Pooter’s dreams is
almost horribly real. It concludes:

Carrie, who had hitherto been quiet, said: “He
tells me his stupid dreams every morning nearly.”
I replied: “Very well, dear, I promise you I will
never tell you or anybody else another dream of
mine, the longest day I live.” Lupin replied, "Hear!
Hear!” and helped himself to another glass of
beer.

Everyman and Everywoman are engaged here. Take,
again, the conversation with the table-rapping Mrs.
James:

Mrs. James said she thought I was very
unkind, and if people were all as prejudiced as I

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

was, there would never have been the electric
telegraph or the telephone.

I said that was quite a different thing.

Mrs. James said sharply: “In what way, pray—
in what way?”

I said, “In many ways.”

Mrs. James said, “Well, mention one way.”

I replied quickly: “Pardon me, Mrs. James, I
decline to discuss the matter. I am not interested
in it.”

There is no burlesque in this; it happens, literally,
a thousand times a day. The workings of Pooter’s
mind often have the same general applicability.
After he has ruined Gowing’s stick by enamelling it
(an action particularly Pooterian) his entry is the
entry any candid husband might make:

Purchased a new stick mounted with silver,
which cost seven-and-sixpence (shall tell Carrie
five shillings), and sent it round with a nice note
to Gowing.

It is akin to the entry of a few days later:

Franching called at office and asked me to dine
at his club, "The Constitutional.” Fearing dis¬
agreeables at home after the tiff this morning,
I sent a telegram to Carrie, telling her I was out
to dine and she was not to sit up. Bought a little
silver bangle for Carrie.

In passing it may be remarked that the selection of a
club for Franching, who is so beautifully suggested
both in text and illustration, shows that exquisite

312

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sense of fitness, and that fastidious care for detail,
which are characteristic of these authors, whose
scrupulosity is equalled by few professional writers.

I begin to feel that I am m danger of loading a light
book with a ponderous commentary; but if I have
imputed to the authors qualities and aims to which
they gave no thought, I have imputed nothing to
them which they did not possess or achieve. The
lasting and growing popularity of the book a genera¬
tion after its appearance and years after the deaths of
the authors, is due, I am convinced, in part to its
value as a record of fact as well as to the humour of
its characterization and invented incident. Commonly
the two birds are killed with one stone. Take a typical
entry of the sort of way in which the Pooter circle—
such habits are not extinct, and can be paralleled
in any class—would spend its evenings:

At supper young Mutlar did several amusing
things. He took up a knife, and with the flat
part of it played a tune on his cheek in a wonder¬
ful manner. He also gave an imitation of an old
man with no teeth, smoking a big cigar. The way
he kept dropping his cigar sent Carrie into fits.

That is nothing but a bare record of facts, in their
order. They are funny because the human race is
funny; we may find them additionally funny-if in
our time and circle the tricks are slightly different.
Yet they are history. Some such record from ancient
Greece would be cherished as an "illuminating docu-

313

REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

ment”; and while we are laughing at the Pooters and
their Mends we are also fascinated by the verisimili¬
tude, the stark, unannotated realism of the events of
the dialogue. The Grossmiths held the mirror up to
nature, and there was a comic face in the glass. The
exaggerated burlesques of their era are dead; their
own transcript from life appears destined to a peren¬
nial popularity amongst the discriminating.

3*4