Books reviewed, by J. C. Squire

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2008 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/booksreviewedbyjOOsqui

Books Reviewed

Works by the Same Author
POEMS

poems : first series Second Edition

A Collection of Poems written 1,905-1918

POEMS : SECOND SERIES

A Collection of Poems written 1918-1921

THE BIRDS AND OTHER POEMS SeCOtld Thousand

Poems written 1918-1919

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST Fourth Edition

THE MOON

Also in a Limited Autographed Edition on large
paper

ESSAYS

THE GOLD TREE AND OTHER STUDIES

Limited Autographed Edition

LIFE AND LETTERS

books in general : first series Third Edition
By Solomon Eagle

books in general : second series
books in general : third series

PARODIES

collected parodies Second Edition

IMAGINARY SPEECHES
STEPS TO PARNASSUS

tricks of the trade Seventh Edition

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JAMES ELROY FLECKER :
Edited, with an Introduction

SELECTIONS FROM MODERN POETS

The abot>e are all published by Hodder and Stoughton
with the exception of "Flecker* s Poems" and "Selec-
tions from Modern Poets" (Seeder), and " Steps to
Parnassus" " Imaginary Speeches," and "The Sur-
vival of the Fittest" (Allen and Untvin)

Books Reviewed

By J. C.l Squire

a

Hodder and Stoughton, Limited
London New York Toronto

First Edition printed November 1922, and this the
Second Edition, 'December 1922.

The Westminster Press

411a Harrow Road

London, W.9

?

5rlr/

o <£
_ £Q
H

"7

TO
IOLO ANEURIN WILLIAMS

a

335278

PREFATORY NOTE

THIS book contains a selection from papers
on new and old books which have been for
some time appearing weekly in the Observer, whose
editor I sincerely thank.

J. C. S.

CONTENTS

PAGE

John Clare

i

Miss Mansfield's Stories

9

A Book-Collector

l7

Editing Shakespeare

24

William James's Letters

3i

Baudelaire

39

Keats

46

Austin Dobson's Essays

55

Mr. George Moore's Tapestry

63

Andrew Marvell

70

A Dictionary

79

Queen Victoria

87

Henley

95

A Critic

103

Mr. Gosse's Criticisms

109

The Art of Writing

116

A Metabiological Pentateuch

122

Byron

129

Mr. de la Mare's Romance

I36

Croce on Shakespeare

I44

The Poets and Childhood

J52

The Classics in Translation

J59

Escapes

166

Lord Rosebery's Miscellanies

174

Minor Carolines

181

Mediaeval English Poetry

190

Mark Akenside

198

William Collins

207

Herman Melville

214

Stock Phrases

223

IX

CONTENTS

PAGE

The Laureates

230

Letters

240

Glands

246

A Supplement to Whitman

252

The Elements of Poetry

260

The Prospects of English

268

Delicate Details

276

Christopher Smart

284

JOHN CLARE

DURING the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries there was something like a dynasty
of poets whom critics specially commended to the
public on the ground that they were of humble,
particularly rustic, origin. There was Stephen Duck
the thresher, Bloomfield the farmer's boy, Jones
the Derbyshire butler. Most of these prodigies
would never have been admired except as prodi-
gies. But there was one who was positively
handicapped by the manner in which critics and
the public approached him. John Clare, " the
Northamptonshire Peasant," a selection from whose
published and unpublished works has now been
competently edited and charmingly printed, was
taken up and trumpeted because he could write
good English and scannable lines (and had, to boot,
a refined and even noble face), although he had
spent his youth as a farm-labourer. Men were
astonished to find that he could remind them of
Thomson, Crabbe, and Burns ; but they never real-
ised that he was a better poet than Samuel Rogers,
who in that day was a sort of pope. His first book
went into four editions in a year — (it was published
in 1820, when he was twenty-seven), but once the
curiosity had grown stale Clare was neglected. Lord
Radstock, who early made himself Clare's financial
godfather, continued to look after him ; local land-
lords, clergymen, and doctors living near Helpston
intermittently remembered him ; he was often asked
for poems by second-rate editors ; his first publisher

BOOKS REVIEWED

( Keats 's Taylor) retained his interest. But long
before his death in 1864, after he had spent twenty-
seven years in asylums, he was almost forgotten,
and although several editors have since his death
attempted to secure him justice, he has never been
properly restored to public notice. Misfortune pro-
bably drove him mad (if he really did go mad), and
it has dogged him in death as in life. " The spirit of
fame," he wrote, " of living a little after life like a
noise on a conspicuous place, urges my blood up-
ward into unconscious melodies." But the force of
that impulse in him, the rare purity of his poetic
spirit, was never recognised, and interest in him
was so slight that until recently nobody cared to
know that he had written an enormous mass of un-
published poetry. After this new edition (Poems.
Selected and edited by Edmund Blunden and Alan
Porter) he will not again, I think, be dismissed with
a line in the histories and a page in the anthologies.
Clare was a sensitive man, and knew love, poverty,
disappointment, and madness. Inevitably something
of these experiences came into his verse. His great
lines, beginning " I am ; yet what I am none cares
or knows," commemorate his asylum years in almost
every anthology. During those years he was haunted
by the memory of an early love, Mary Joyce, and
wrote about her often and most affectionately. How
imaginative are his lines on " First Love " :

And then my blood rushed to my face

And took my sight away.
The trees and bushes round the place

Seemed midnight at noonday.

JOHN CLARE

In " The Stranger " he wrote a very powerful re-
ligious poem, forgetting his own sufferings in the
contemplation of Christ's. And the remembrance
of things lost, one of the most constant subjects of
poetry, often moved him to poetry. Childhood was
gone :

The stream it is a common stream,

Where we on Sundays used to ramble,

The sky hangs o'er a broken dream,
The bramble's dwindled to a bramble.

At nearly forty he was moved by a benevolent land-
lord out of the village in which he had always lived,
and " The Flitting " is a very poignant expression
of his hankerings for a place every corner of which
was transfigured in retrospect. The green lanes shut
out the hot sun, the brook had a lovely little bridge,
there were old stiles to rest on :

And little footpaths sweet to see
Go seeking sweeter places still.

Clare did, to some extent, write (in the ordinary
sense of the word) autobiographically. But as a rule
he did not greatly concern himself with human
passions, nor (except when the pressure of circum-
stance was especially acute) with his own passions,
save only his dominant passion for his native land-
scape.

In the nature and persistence of his love for, and
his zeal to record, the commonest incidents of the
life of the country, he closely resembled the late

BOOKS REVIEWED

Edward Thomas, though his pictures were less often
tinged with the melancholy of his mind than were
Thomas's. His descriptive poems continually remind
one of the landscape painters of the time : some-
times of the water colourists, sometimes of Old
Crome and Constable, but most often of George
Morland, most rustic and most English of painters,
a man who loved the thing he saw anywhere on any
day, and was content to show it as it was. Lines like
those on the cowboy :

Whose sun-burnt skin and cheeks chuffed out with

fat
Are dyed as rusty as his napless hat,

might have been written as inscriptions for a Mor-
land : and whatever Clare describes his exactitude
is the same. There is not a season, not a month, not
a common bird or beast or flower or bush or tree,
not a type of building, not a type of human being in
the Midlands that he knew, which is not faithfully
sketched in his pages ; and the wealth of his sub-
sidiary detail is extraordinary. There are things which
we daily see, and, in an unformulated way, like
daily, but which we scarcely ever find mentioned in
poetry, which is rather accustomed to select its
scenes and (too often) to be content with exploiting
the acknowledged beauty of forms, lights, and colours,
seas, hills, and sunsets, consecrated by many prece-
dents. But with Clare we look over a common farm-
yard gate or walk along an ordinary field path, fully
aware of all that we see : oaks, hazels, and brambles,
weeds under foot, mud, grasshoppers, ants, snails

JOHN CLARE

on thorns, pine-needles, the remains of a gipsy camp,
barking dogs, louts watching sheep, children picking
cowslips (" and, aye, the youngest ever lags behind"),
ducks dabbling in ponds, dogs sunning themselves,
turkeys, geese, grunting hogs, and strutting cocks.
He does not tumble his details out without discrim-
ination. There is always cunning in his arrangement,
and he has a sound instinct for emotional signifi-
cance. Take these two brief examples from poems
on November and another on winter :

Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm
To little birds that flirt and start away.

Moody crows beside the road forbear
To fly, though pelted by the passing swain.

Each of these phrases suggest far more than it says,
and they are characteristic of him. But he was largely
a poet of details, and it is for his details that one
likes him. His best whole poems are too long to
quote. But here is one of the short pieces discovered
by his present editors, " The Stonepit " :

The passing traveller with wonder sees
A deep and ancient stonepit full of trees ;
So deep and very deep the place has been,
The church might stand within and not be seen.
The passing stranger oft with wonder stops
And thinks he e'en could walk upon their tops,
And often stoops to see the busy crow,
And stands above and sees the eggs below ;
And while the wild horse gives its head a toss,
The squirrel dances up and runs across.

BOOKS REVIEWED

The boy that stands and kills the black-nosed bee
Dares down as soon as magpies' nests are found,
And wonders when he climbs the highest tree
To find it reaches scarce above the ground.

And how he loved to complete his pictures may be
illustrated with two stanzas from his long poem on
the spear thistle :

The sheep when hunger presses sore
May nip the clover round its nest ;

But soon the thistle wounding sore
Relieves it from each brushing guest,

That leaves a bit of wool behind,

The yellow-hammer loves to find.

The horse will set his foot and bite

Close to the ground-lark's guarded nest

And snort to meet the prickly sight ;
He fans the feathers of her breast —

Yet thistles prick so deep that he

Turns back and leaves her dwelling free.

Such a style, as straightforward and simple as Words-
worth's at its barest, leads inevitably to occasional
weakness of expression. You get in Clare couplets
such as :

And all expected such a rosy face
Would be her ruin — as was just the case.

But if you like Clare you do not mind that any more
than if you like Wordsworth you mind the excess-
ively plain statements of fact that you sometimes
find in him.

6

JOHN CLARE

Mr. Blunden and Mr. Porter have begun their
work well. I say " begun " because they will be com-
pelled to do more. They state in their introduction
that they selected the hundred and fifty poems here
printed from two thousand which they examined,
of which two thousand three-quarters (I suppose)
have never been printed at all. Of the ninety new
poems which they print, at least forty are as good as
any of the old ones, and it is to be presumed that
there are many interesting ones amongst those which,
when making the present small collection, they had
to reject. If anything, the general level of the new
poems is higher than that of those printed in Clare's
four books. The reasons for this are not recondite.
Clare was at his best and most prolific in the latter
half of his life after he had lost close touch with pub-
lishers and editors. And it would appear that those
who published work by him preferred his least
characteristic work. The editors of Annuals between
1820 and 1840 did not want his loving and most in-
dividual transcripts of the English landscape. What
they wanted was poems proving that " the North-
amptonshire Peasant " could cherish sentiments as
refined and use abstractions as lofty as were enter-
tained and employed by the most highly educated
versifiers of the time. It is significant that almost all
the best of the Poems are of the sort quoted above,
poems which Clare could have written but which
neither Tom Moore nor Rogers could ever have
dreamed of. There are, I take it, more of these among
the two thousand ; but I believe the two thousand
are not all. I have heard that just as Mr. Blunden
and his colleague were pluming themselves at having

BOOKS REVIEWED

finished their laborious survey of the ground they
were surprised (I dare not say horrified) to learn
that a huge new hoard of Clare manuscripts, poems,
diaries, and letters, literally by the sack-full, had
been discovered in Northamptonshire. There is no
help for it : they must go on.

We must keep our sense of proportion. Wre have
enough of Clare's work to be certain that we shall
never think him a great poet. Even a " final " edition
of him must be a selection. Clare was not a Keats or
a Shelley that his feeblest fragments must be scoured
for and perpetuated ; an edition of him in ten volumes
would be a monument not to his genius but to an ad-
mirer's folly. But he was a far better poet than has
ever been realised ; he had talents peculiar to him-
self ; his best work is worth looking for indus-
triously ; and his character and career were suffi-
ciently remarkable to justify a biography far more
considerable than anything which has yet been done.
A large volume of intelligently-chosen poems and a
companion volume of life and letters would justify
themselves, and would leave him securely estab-
lished among the secondary English poets.

MISS MANSFIELD'S STORIES

BOOKS of short stories are now rare ; books
of short stories in which one can be at all
interested are exceedingly rare. It is about ten years
since Mr. Wells, collecting the stories of his lamented
youth, commented on the fact that the short story
had declined. In the nineties, when he began writing,
all the most eminent, and all the most potentially
eminent of English prose-writers were energetically
writing short stories. Some of them may have been
writing to a formula. Others, like Mr. Wells, recog-
nised no definition, but were content to set down as
" jolly " and " vivid " a record of occurrences as
they could. " It may," he said, " be horrible or
pathetic, or funny or beautiful, or profoundly illumi-
nating, having only this essential, that it should take
from fifteen to fifty minutes to read." But when Mr.
Wells wrote the preface to his collection, the serious
short story had almost disappeared, and (except for
the imported O. Henry) we have had little of any
interest since. The magazine writers have continued
to turn out stories for their public ; the refined
authors have published volumes of short pieces
difficult to write and difficult to read ; but nothing
has been published which has had more than an
ephemeral reputation, and few things which have
had even that. Stevenson and Henry James are
dead ; the authors of " The Man Who Came Back "
and " The Secret Sharer " seem to have exhausted
their veins in this kind ; and the little masterpieces
of Mr. Max Beerbohm refuse to be labelled under

BOOKS REVIEWED

any category, or to be used as illustrations of any
general tendency. When a respectable writer does
publish a volume of what look like short stories the
chances are that he calls them " studies," and that
the reader who does not regard art as the best means
of producing a headache will find them intolerably
tedious.

Miss Mansfield's collection, Bliss, boldly labelled
" stories," is, therefore, remarkable for not being
tedious. It is far from tedious. She has so penetrating
a mind and such a talent for expression that she
would be interesting whatever form she were using
and whatever subject she were writing about. It is
not that she has a markedly personal view of things,
a passionate or a philosophical attitude ; she is re-
strained, and leaves her affections and her admira-
tions too much to be guessed and deduced. It is not
that she has a rich prose style ; she checks the natural
music in herself, and contents herself with a perpetual
stream of exact statements as terse as she can make
them. Every word counts to the intelligence and the
eye, but none to the ear. But the fabric of her writing
has no weak or dull places. She beats all the writers
of dyspeptic " economical " " realistic " " studies "
on their own ground. Every story is a tissue of
accurate observations accurately expressed. Miss
Mansfield has an extraordinary visual, and, if one
may say so, olfactory, memory ; her stories may
vary in reality, but her material settings — in which
one includes everything from vegetation to the
human garment of flesh — never. Almost every page
contains minor felicities which a man with the
pencilling habit would be inclined to mark.

10

MISS MANSFIELD'S STORIES

The first few pages are crowded with them. Kezia,
left behind for a few hours in the house from which
her family have moved, " sat down on one of the
box borders. By pressing hard at first it made a nice
seat. But how dusty it was inside ! Kezia bent down
to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose." Soon
afterwards she is having tea with unkind and alien
children :

But Kezia bit a big piece out of her bread and
dripping, and then stood the piece up on her
plate. With the bite out it made a dear little sort
of gate. Pooh ! She didn't care ! A tear rolled down
her cheek, but she wasn't crying. She couldn't
have cried in front of those awful Samuel Josephs.
She sat with her head bent, and as the tear dripped
slowly down she caught it with a neat little whisk
of her tongue and ate it before any of them had
seen.

Later, she wanders over the deserted house. She
finds " a pill-box, black and shiny outside and red
in, holding a blob of cotton wool." " In the servant-
girl's room there was a stay-button stuck in a crack
of the floor, and in another crack some beads and a
needle." She went downstairs and looked at the
garden through a coloured glass door "at a blue
lawn with blue arum lilies growing at a gate, and
then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow
fence." Beryl Fairfield, after climbing the chair in
the kitchen, comes down with : " Have I got a
spider's web on my face, mother ? I've been poking
into that cupboard under the stairs and now some-
thing keeps tickling my nose." Raoul Duquette

ii

BOOKS REVIEWED

makes use of " a morsel of pink blotting-paper, in-
credibly soft, limp, and almost moist, like the tongue
of a little dead kitten." Robert Salesby, imagining
snow in London, saw the houses in front with " their
window-boxes full of great sprays of white coral."

Miss Mansfield can bring before one's eyes any
visible object, from the perspiration marks on a
maid's bodice to the summer lightning fluttering
" like a broken bird that tries to fly and sinks again
and again struggles." And the accuracy and sim-
plicity of her statement extends beyond this to what-
ever non-material state she may wish to describe.
She continually delights with images such as that
in which she sets down the silence between bachelor
friend and spinster friend over teacup and fire in
" Psychology " : " That silence could be contained
in the circle of warm, delightful fire and lamplight.
How many times hadn't they flung something into
it just for the fun of watching the ripples break on
the easy shores ? " and that in which she shows a
woman's dreams reawaking when she meets the
exasperating, but much travelled, man to whom she
had been engaged six years before : " As he spoke,
so lightly, tapping the end of his cigarette against
the ashtray, she felt the strange beast that had
slumbered so long within her bosom stir, stretch
itself, yawn, prick up its ears, and suddenly bound
to its feet, and fix its longing, hungry stare upon
those far-away places. But all she said was, smiling
gently, ' How I envy you ! ' " How satisfying the
descriptions of mind and of matter are blended
might be illustrated from any of these stories. One
may take a few sentences from the picture of Beryl

12

MISS MANSFIELD'S STORIES

Fairfield, an Anglo-Saxon — happily very Anglo-
Saxon — Madame, or Mademoiselle, Bovary :

In the dining-room, by the flicker of a wood
fire, Beryl sat on a hassock playing the guitar. She
had bathed and changed all her clothes. Now
she wore a white muslin dress with black spots
on it, and in her hair she had pinned a black silk
rose

She played and sang half to herself, for she was
watching herself playing and singing. The fire-
light gleamed on her shoes, on the ruddy belly
of the guitar, and on her white fingers. . . .

" If I were outside the window and looked in
and saw myself I really would be rather struck,"
thought she. Still more softly she played the
accompaniment — not singing now but listening.

..." The first time that I ever saw you, little
girl — oh, you had no idea that you were not alone
— you were sitting with your little feet upon a
hassock, playing the guitar. God, I can never
forget. ..." Beryl flung up her head and began
to sing again :

" Even the moon is aweary ..."

But there came a loud bang at the door. The
servant girl's crimson face popped through.

" Please, Miss Beryl, I've got to come and lay."

" Certainly, Alice," said Beryl, in a voice of
ice. She put the guitar in a corner. Alice lunged
in with a heavy black iron tray.

" Well, I have had a job with that oving," said
she, " I can't get nothing to brown."

This scene lingers in the memory. And there are

*3

BOOKS REVIEWED

others which will do that ; gardens, rooms full or
empty, firelit and glittering with candles and silver,
an oily singer at his piano, a decayed actress getting
out of bed, groups of wondering helpless children,
a Paris street, a train rattling a little frightened
governess through the night. The trouble is that,
generally speaking, one remembers little more than
pictures, large or small. One has looked at a series
of these. They have dawned on the darkness, grown
bright, and quietly faded. But very seldom has one
been moved. Very seldom has one felt the faintest
impulse to laugh, cheer, or cry. Why ? The people
are not quite real enough and not quite enough
happens to them.

It isn't that Miss Mansfield is naturally a mere
quiet note-taker, or that she belongs temperamentally
to that depressing class of people who think they
have done the finest thing in the world when they
have described several articles of furniture and ex-
hibited a phantom " he " or " she " incapably yearn-
ing, frustrate, or disillusioned. " Sun and Moon "
is a delicious, a pathetic, and beautiful story, which
might have resulted from a collaboration of Tchekov
and Hans Andersen. In " The Man Without a
Temperament " her detail is at its best, and she
uses the most inconspicuous " events " to produce
a beautiful and exalting impression. Generally, how-
ever, interested as one is, one doesn't much care
what happens, and very little does happen. In the
first long story, very remarkable as a series of
photographs, the people are, except at moments,
seen clear but out of contact with us, through a
glass. We leave them where they started. Either

H

MISS MANSFIELD'S STORIES

this was meant to be the beginning of a novel, or
else the author was under the influence of the theory
that it is cheap and vulgar to let anything happen
in a narrative. Sometimes she seems to remember
the other theory that if anything does happen it
ought to be unpleasant. The conclusions of " Bliss"
and " The Little Governess " are illustrations of
that. It is not that the episodes are in themselves
unlikely or uncommon. Girls often are assaulted,
and husbands often are unfaithful ; but these stories
(the indications given of these characters) do not
prepare one for the endings. Had Miss Mansfield
changed the last page of each, and prevented the
catastrophes, we should never have suspected that
Harry was a disloyal husband, or the old German
an old satyr. It is a pity that " Bliss " thus fails to
come completely off. The scenes are drawn with
consummate precision, the wife is less shadowy than
usual, and there are moments lyric in their intense
beauty. Everything powders when we have the feel-
ing that a realist is playing tricks with reality.

But, with all its limitations, this is a book one is
bound to respect, if, possibly, one is not certain to
re-read it. The author's powers have greatly
matured since she wrote her first book. Her outlook,
too, has modified : she is no longer at her best, and
most enthusiastic, when writing of what she hates.
We may hope that in the future she may be inclined
to write more about the things she loves. Let there
be calamity, but let us at least be moved by it ; it
is depressing to read of miseries and never turn a
hair at them because the author has refused to
abandon herself in sympathy. Let Miss Mansfield's

BOOKS REVIEWED

materials remain what they are. One does not ask
her to write of pirates or cowboys, murders, bur-
glaries, or financial ramps. Childhood and the
domestic interior are her favourite haunts, and her
imagination will always take her back to them. But
she can afford to let herself go more, to abandon a
theoretic restraint which is foreign to her, to reflect
on the truth that the literature which obtains and
keeps a hold on people does not make its principal
appeal to the recognising eye or even to the under-
standing. Nobody ever said — or if he did the com-
pany must have gaped — that he found " The Trojan
Women " or " Pickwick " " interesting." And what
happens to people who rely too exclusively on the
treatment, however masterly, of incidental detail
may be illustrated from this volume. Three times in
the course of the book " a piece of iron banged "
meets the eye, and from two several stories I make
these two extracts :

... he began to do his exercises. Deep breath-
ing, bending and squatting like a frog and shoot-
ing out his legs.

... he began to do his exercises — deep
breathing, bending forward and back, squatting
like a frog and shooting out his legs.

The better it is done the more one remembers it
and the less effect it has the second time.

16

A BOOK-COLLECTOR

THERE was a brief period when Dukes in
person used to contest at Sotheby's for early-
printed books, whilst their friends stood around
backing the respective staying-powers of their fancies
as men a little while ago backed those of Car-
pentier and Dempsey. In our time those Dukes who
have the desire presumably haven't the money.
Book-collectors of a kind are as numerous in England
as ever, but few rich men are among them, and nine-
tenths of the really expensive books that are sold go
to America. There is a class of business-man there
of whom we have only a few specimens here. They
are rich, they are successful in Wall Street or the
stock-yards, and they are prepared to pay any price
for Corots or Caxtons. Their motives are often dis-
cussed by English people. Journalists frequently
describe them as men who, since titular honours do
not exist in America and dreams of an O.B.E. can-
not, therefore, be entertained, find the possession
of a unique collection of books or pictures the best
way of gaining a spurious distinction. It is not an
adequate explanation. In 1509 an author wrote of
the book-collector :

Still am I busy bookes assemblynge,
For to have plentie it is a pleasant thynge,
In my conceyt, and to have them ay in hande,
But what they mene I do not understande.

America then had only just been lit upon, and if we

17 c

BOOKS REVIEWED

ascribe (as some do) the American rage for book-
collecting to a mere desire to have things that other
people value, there is an element of that in all collect-
ing, and men who buy what they do not understand
are found everywhere. There are collectors who
read in America as there are elsewhere, and some
have been scholars. Perhaps a more nearly average
specimen of the class is Mr. Edward Newton, who
has now written a book, The Amenities of Book
Collecting, and let in a little light upon the motives
and enjoyments of some of those Americans who
have, in a generation, put the price of a good
First Folio up to £10,000 and given a new
value to every scrap of paper written by any man
of letters, dead or alive, who was ever taken seri-
ously.

Mr. Newton is not, by modern American stan-
dards, a collector of the first rank. He is, or regards
himself as, a man of modest means, who indulges
his hobby as far as he is able. He has no First Folio
and no Gutenburg Bible. But if he were rich enough
he would, he says, buy those books at any price,
and he complacently tells us (an American opinion
on the point is worth noting) that for books of this
kind " the sky is the limit." All books have risen
enormously during his lifetime, and they will all go
on rising. But, in spite of his restricted means, he
has managed to collect many remarkable things
under the noses of the Huntingtons and Wideners.
He rambles with pleasant garrulity from author to
author, and date to date, making no attempt to give
a systematic account of his library ; but the " items"
he mentions by the way are sufficiently numerous

18

A BOOK-COLLECTOR

to give an indication of what it is like. Here are some
of them — openly bought from the best booksellers :
a first edition of Herrick, Wordsworth's copy of
" Endymion," twenty-one presentation copies of
Dickens, early works by Swinburne and Hardy, the
MS. of " Far From the Madding Crowd," a holo-
graph prayer and letters by Dr. Johnson, an un-
published work by Mrs. Thrale, presentation copies
of Stevenson, Thackeray, Joseph Conrad, Johnson,
and Byron (inscribed by Queen Victoria), Keats 's
folio Spenser, Rossetti's drawing of Tennyson read-
ing " Maud " to the Brownings, Beardsley's drawing
of Wilde, first editions of Blake, Browning's copy
of Coryat, an inscribed copy of Walton's " Lives,"
Congreve's copy of the first " Robinson Crusoe,"
a first edition of " The Vicar of Wakefield," MS.
poems by Lamb and Southey, fine copies of Surtees
and Aiken, a copy of " The Life of the Prince Con-
sort," given by Queen Victoria to Sir A. Gordon,
and a copy of " Pagan Poems," given by Mr. George
Moore to Oscar Wilde.

The list is indicative both of Mr. Newton's tastes
and of his dislikes. He is promiscuous enough within
certain limits. But he has few really old English
books, and he is thoroughly indifferent to early-
printed books, which he refers to casually as
" Aldines and Elzevirs," ignoring the fact that
physically they are, as a body, the most beautiful
books in the world. It is true that he says he buys
books that he can read : and that most early books
are (not that one would read them if they weren't)
in Greek and Latin. But I doubt if he habitually
peruses " The Life of the Prince Consort." The

J9

BOOKS REVIEWED

truth comes out in his confession : "I collect as
I can human-interest books." If he could find an
Aldine Cicero which (say) Fanny Brawne had given
to Claire Clairmont he would pay any money for it.
He reads a great deal, and his tastes are marked. He
cannot care very much for verse or there would be
more early poets in his library ; his own candid
sentence runs : " I have always liked Pope. In read-
ing him one has the sense of progress from idea to
idea, not a mere floundering about in Arcady amid
star-stuff." His favourite book is Bos well, his heroes
are Johnson and Lamb : there are none better.
But he does not restrict his collecting to the litera-
ture he likes, and he cannot plausibly pretend that
Sir Theodore Martin is among his favourite authors
or Beardsley an artist to whom admirers of Lamb
are naturally drawn. The fact is that he has a passion
for possessing little fragments of people's lives, an
interest in relics, anecdotes, glimpses of character.
Most is known and most survives (generally speak-
ing) of men near our own date, and contemporary
fashion partly dictates to Mr. Newton what he shall
collect. If Mr. Beerbohm's " Enoch Soames " were
suddenly decided to be both real and important, Mr.
Newton would be the first in the field for an auto-
graph copy or an agreement between Soames and
his publisher. He would then be able to look cheer-
fully at his shelves and feel that a fragment of this
illustrious dead man's universally familiar life re-
posed on his shelves. It is, aufond, the same passion
as that which led the reverent Mayor to frame and
glaze the butt-end of the cigar which King Edward
had thrown on the station platform, and the piece

20

A BOOK-COLLECTOR

of toast in which the Royal teeth had made a semi-
circular indentation.

Personally, I do not share that taste. I like first
editions of books in which I am interested, and I
covet Keats 's Spenser. But I no more want (what
Mr. Newton possesses) Charles Lamb's letters to
Miss Kelly, the actress, than I want a lock of Shake-
speare's hair (scarce as it seems to have been even
in his lifetime), or one of Napoleon's bedroom
slippers. Manuscript poems, yes, or prose by certain
people ; but not the MSS. of any and every author
whom other people think good. Still, I can under-
stand the taste ; and, whatever a man collects, the
zest of the chase is the main thing : the excitement
of putting up the quarry and the satisfaction of
returning home with one more pelt. There is nothing
either meritorious or discreditable about a pursuit
like Mr. Newton's. There is a sort of book-collector
who perform services, and valuable services, to
literature and history. It is largely through their
means that books have been preserved which would
otherwise have been lost, that our museums have
been fed with a stream of rare and valuable works,
that editors have been able to develop the useful
science of bibliography and to standardise texts.
Had it not been for this body of sentimentalists,
hobby-riders and hoarders, the early editions of
many of our great writers, by these secluded and
cared for, would have utterly disappeared. The
collections of plays made by several American
collectors, the complete collection of Stevensons
made (at prodigious cost) by young Mr. Widener,
who went down with the " Titanic," are done with

21

BOOKS REVIEWED

a public as well as a private object : and I have
never understood why people should resent collec-
tions being made by Americans, who share our speech
and our past, and cannot be expected to content
themselves with the works of Washington Irving
and the pictorial inscriptions of the Aztecs. But
much of the collecting of Mr. Newton and men like
him serves no object except to please him (surely a
harmless one), and to disappoint persons in this
countrv (who are few) who share his mania for scraps
of autograph and find that they cannot stand up
against his purse.

But I should add one word. There was a third,
probably not a preconceived, object with Mr.
Newton : that of writing a book about his collection
and its acquisition. The result justifies him. His
book, though one sometimes gets a little tired of the
perpetual dollars, is full of amusing gossip and odd
stories, and the chapters on authors in whom he is
especially interested (above all that on Boswell) are
full of sense and pleasantly haphazard information.
Many of his illustrations add charm to the pot-
pourri. Anybody with a touch of the collector in
him or the slightest fondness for the gossipy kind
of literary history will find him readable. But neither
he nor anybody else has yet written the classic of
book-collecting or autograph collecting. The formid-
able works of the Rev. T. F. Dibdin, so popular
once in the palmy days of English bibliophily, are
now unreadable, partly because of the shifting of
taste and partly because of the intolerably rhapsodical
verbosity of Mr. Dibdin's style. Burton's " Book-
Hunter " is very good, but very scrappy. We still

22

A BOOK-COLLECTOR

wait the thorough history of a fine collection, which
several men in England and America (Mr. Wise is
an example) could give. To write that classic a man
must have inexhaustible curiosity and a good
memory, erudition and humour : it will contain
very little literary criticism, but much human nature
and many extraordinary tales. For there is no end
to the strange adventures that books have had or the
strange places in which they have been found, and
in the history of mere bibliography, matter of types,
spacing and pagination, there are detective stories
more elaborate and ingenious than those of Poe.

23

EDITING SHAKESPEARE

THERE was a clear case for a new critical
edition of Shakespeare. Had knowledge re-
mained where it was in the eighteenth century there
would have been constant new editions, but small
need for them. It was an amusing occupation to take
Shakespeare's obscurer words and sentences one
by one and suggest other words as those which he
probably wrote, and the pastime occasionally gave
an emendation splendid in its ingenuity, such as the
famous " 'A babbled of green fields " for " A table
of green fields." It was also amusing to compare all
the early texts, and, where they differed, to choose
the punctuation or the phrasing which the critic
would have used had he been Shakespeare. But
there could be little real progress until critics were
agreed as to the respective authority of the various
texts, and even agreement on that (were no more
discovered) could not in itself carry as much farther.
In our own day, however, the development of the
bibliographical and calligraphical sciences has placed
us in the possession of apparatus without which
even the ablest of the old editors were at a great
disadvantage. Mr. Pollard has demonstrated that in
all probability the " good Quartos " were printed
from Shakespeare's MSS. at his instructions, that
he supervised his publications during his lifetime,
and that the editors of the First Folio were acting
specifically as his literary executors. Mr. Pollard
and Mr. Simpson have made it plain that the punc-
tuation, which to the mere reader often appears

24

EDITING SHAKESPEARE

absurd in its vagaries, was deliberately contrived as
a guide to the proper speaking of the words. The
scientific comparison of the various sorts of plain
errors which occur in the texts has given a clue to
the nature of Shakespeare's handwriting, and thus
to the solution of other errors which have puzzled
everybody. Over and above this Sir E. Maunde
Thompson has attempted to show (and the Cam-
bridge editors appear to think, as I diffidently do
myself, that he has proved his case), that the British
Museum possesses a manuscript play, part of which
is in Shakespeare's handwriting. Finally, critics in
our days have, or can make, use of men who have a
technical knowledge of printing and binding which
their predecessors lacked, and which may unravel
many small mysteries.

The results of all this may, of course, be exagger-
ated. Nothing very revolutionary can happen to the
great mass of Shakespeare's lines, because (fortu-
nately) they are quite well as they are. We do not find
in the new Cambridge edition a mass of revolutionary
notes, for there is no need for them. The editors, in
fact, have wisely kept both the speculative, textual,
and the purely explanatory notes down to the mini-
mum necessary to elucidate the play. But the nature
of some of their notes, which I may illustrate with
a few specimens, would make Dr. Johnson rub his
eyes :

155, decked. Generally explained as " sprinkled,"
but N. E. D. gives no support. Read eked, i.e.,
increased (v. N. E. D. and M. V. 3. 2. 23) ;
Prospero's tears added salt to salt. Shakespeare

25

BOOKS REVIEWED

probably wrote " eekt " with an oversized initial,
and the compositor took it for " dekt." v. T. i., p.
xli. and cf. e and d of " rule " and " bid," Facs. 1. 5.

100, Who having into truth, etc. Much annotated,
and clearly corrupt. Read minted for " into," and
the whole context gains. . . . The misprint may
be explained thus : Shakespeare wrote " minted"
with one or two minims short, and with the ed
like oe ; this the compositor read as " inntoe,"
or " intoe," and set up as " into " !

367, be quick thou'st best. Absence of punctu-
ation denotes rapid delivery.

91, O, defend me ! A space on the F. [Folio],
before " O," suggests that the word " God " has
been omitted because of the blasphemy laws.

The new methods, of course, still afford a good deal
of room for the play of editorial fancy and for dis-
putes between experts. But they are likely to settle
many problems hitherto not certainly soluble, and
the succeeding volumes of this edition should con-
tain many agreeable surprises.

One cannot here go into the details of the editors'
treatment of the text of " The Tempest." There is
less scope for their beneficent efforts here, as there
has been less for the misguided zeal of the old emen-
dators and text-constructors, for the simple reason
that the Folio supplies our only text of the play.
But there is no element of the fantastic in the notes,
and the accompanying essays are admirable. Mr.
Wilson writes a textual introduction, there are short
treatises on punctuation, on " The Tempest," on
the copy used for " The Tempest," and on its stage

26

EDITING SHAKESPEARE

history. There is a glossary, and, since it is the first
volume, there is " Q's " general introduction to the
series. This essay is ideal for the purpose ; it is both
interesting and amusing in itself and a perfect
assurance that the editors are equipped with the
best weapons and will use them with that taste and
common sense without which the best weapons are
liable to be dangerous. Sir Arthur, in repeating the
old story that Shakespeare " never troubled him-
self or anybody to collect, correct, and print " his
plays, is ignoring the conclusions reached in Mr. Pol-
lard's recent " Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates " ;
otherwise every word he says commands assent.

Finally, I just remember to add, the volume con-
tains a play by Shakespeare ; not the greatest, but
perhaps the most nearly perfect of them all. Flaw-
lessness is not a quality that can be generally found
in him by anyone who is not a blind worshipper ;
and it is a pity that the recognition of the faults
without which he would have been superhuman
has generally been left to his enemies, the people
who have no relish for life or do not like poetry. As
Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch says, he " had often to
do odd jobs, was often careless, and sometimes wrote
extremely ill." But in this play there is nothing that
jars, little that puzzles. It was probably written more
easily than anything he did, but he scamped nothing
of it. He tackled the problem of telling, in the space
of a few hours, a story which covered many years,
and the right way came to him in a flash at last.
" Another part of the same island," " another part
of the same island " : the delicious scenes, all
matched in scale and charm, succeed one another

27

BOOKS REVIEWED

like a string of equal pearls ; and the whole play
leaves nothing behind but a delicious fragrance on
the air. The characters are not " worked out."
Prospero, Alonso, Sebastian — they are just sufficient
for this kind of play. Ferdinand and Miranda are
the faintly- tinted, delightful lovers of a pastoral, the
prince and princess of a fairy-tale. Stephano, rich
as he is, has not the solidity of the earlier broad
comic figures. Caliban is the only one whose mind
provokes one to speculation, and even he (poor
monster) will not bear the load that Browning im-
posed on him. They are all in tone with each other
and with the wedding Masque that was surely (if
the main play was earlier) interpolated for the nup-
tials of Elizabeth of Bohemia. There is no real con-
flict, little serious meditation about things ; it is a
golden tissue for which all description is inadequate,
and which, nevertheless, is so soundly conceived
and woven that any sort of performance of it — even
so (I don't speak offensively) homely and haphazard
a production as that at the Aldwych — must please
the person who is capable of being pleased by it at
all. It may have been Shakespeare's swan-song, and
would certainly be a dramatically effective one.

But can we be sure that it was consciously so ?
Men frequently state, as though it were a known
fact, that " The Tempest " (paradoxically so-called)
is Shakespeare's placid farewell. He had gone through
a period of storm and stress. He had doubted with
Hamlet and Macbeth, raved with Lear and Othello ;
he had questioned divine justice and human fidelity,
contemplated the abysses of existence and of evil ;
and, after years of distress verging on mania, had

28

EDITING SHAKESPEARE

won peace and paid his final respects to the world
in a fantastic play in which wickedness was scarcely
serious, the triumph of good never in doubt, and all
ended happily. " Here," they conceive him as re-
marking, " is the outcome of it all. At one time I
asked many questions and received few answers. I
was tortured and I groaned ; I was bewildered and
I cried against the scheme of things. My passions
weakened ; I became reconciled ; I was content
to take the things I had ; I sailed into a calm after
the storm ; I laid my blessing upon all things ; and
I broke my wand." Particularly as to the breaking
of the wand they have found in Prospero the symbol
of Shakespeare's self : everything he wished for
was accomplished, and the need for further effort
was gone.

This may all be true : we cannot say that it is not.
But it is as well to remember that hypothesis is not
the same thing as fact. " The Tempest " was, be-
yond doubt, one of Shakespeare's last plays (for
sentimental purposes we can pretend that we know
it to be actually the last), and beyond doubt he did
retire to Stratford on a competence. But if he de-
liberately broke his wand he was the first and last
poet in the world who ever did so at his age. He
must have been preternaturally prescient if he knew
that he would die at the age of fifty- two, owing (as
is supposed) to the insanitary conditions of the neigh-
bourhood : and he must have had a mental con-
stitution unique in the world's history if, after writ-
ing a succession of masterpieces, he decided point
blank that he would never write another line. Poets
are not usually made like that ; when they are moved

29

BOOKS REVIEWED

they cannot usually help themselves. And poets do
not necessarily go through a rounded arc of experi-
ence which leaves them in middle age beyond
possibility of further change. We may, it is hardly
necessary to say, run risks in assuming too close a
connection between Shakespeare's experience and
his themes. Men are not necessarily leading miser-
able lives when they are writing tragedies, nor com-
placent lives when they are writing comedies. But
even if we do assume that connection, that " serene
that Men call age " is one thing, and the exhaustion
of emotion and ambition at fifty is another. Shake-
speare, as a matter of fact (so far as we can discover
from internal and external evidence), was always a
man outwardly equable and companionable ; " the
gentle unjealous Shakespeare," Mr. Bridges has
called him, and the conception is traditional. That
is not the sort of man who changes much, and, by
all analogy, such a prolific writer is not the sort of
writer who ever stops writing. He was probably at
any time of his life temperamentally capable of both
tragedy and comedy ; he probably was so at the end.
Need we assume that he ever actually did lay down
his pen ? It is surely conceivable that in retirement
at Stratford he at least toyed with new plays and
may have begun, or even completed, new poems.
After the funeral, Anne Hathaway — who had never
been taught that publication was very profitable
and had not heard of the autograph market — des-
troyed them as what she called "a lot of old rubbish."
Should some of them come to light and prove to be
as sombre as " Hamlet," a great deal of conjectural
biography would be destroyed.

30

WILLIAM JAMES'S LETTERS

THE author of " The Principles of Psycho-
logy," son of one of the most robust and
eccentric theologians and brother of Henry James
the novelist, led a more active and diversified life
than commonly falls to the lot of philosophers. He
began as an art student, then contemplated becom-
ing a printer, went up the Amazon on a zoological
expedition, took to medicine, was successively pro-
fessor of physiology, of psychology, and of phil-
osophy, travelled widely, met half the most eminent
men of his time, and died leaving a name familiar
to tens of thousands. The career testifies to that
essential personal element in him which he referred
to when he said that what Henry of Navarre's sol-
diers followed was his white plume. But beyond his
adventurousness, zest for life and versatility, he had
a quality equally infrequent in the schools : a relish
for and a gift for crude fun. This may have been a
last exasperating straw to those who could not bear
his doctrines ; conceive Aristotle or Kant signing a
letter to his mother, " Your bold, your beautiful,
your Blossom." But it has merits in the subject of
a biography, and this collection of letters joined by
a commentary is as readable a book as has been
published for years.

There is very little polemic or exposition of phil-
osophy in the letters printed in these selections
which Mr. Henry James, jun., has made. They are
personal, not professional, letters. James's main
interests are, naturally, often reflected in sentences or

3i

BOOKS REVIEWED

paragraphs. A well-known passage in " Varieties of
Religious Experience " concerning emergence from
profound pessimism is given here as a record of the
crisis in James's own life (aet. 27), and there is an
interesting note of that date : " My first act of free
will shall be to believe in free will." We find in 1879
a curt reference to the beginnings of the work on
which his fame was to be chiefly built : " I am writing
(very slowly) what may become a text-book of
psychology " ; and two pages after there is a char-
acteristic remark about one battalion of his life-long
foes :

My ignorant prejudice against all Hegelians,
except Hegel himself, grows wusser and wusser.
Their sacerdotal airs ! and their sterility ! Con-
templating their navels and the syllable own !

In 1882 he tells his mother that there are few gen-
uine philosophers about, " and I really believe that
in my way I have a wider view of the field than any-
one I've seen (I count out, of course, my ignorance
of ancient authors)." In 1885 he writes : " There is
no such superstition as the idolatry of the Whole "
— a sentence often echoed by him, notably in his
description of the monist's universe as a " block-
universe " and of the monist himself as " wallowing
in a sense of unbridled unity." In 1904 he tells Pro-
fessor Holhous to

take the sterilest scientific prig and cad you know,
compare him with the richest religious intellect
you know, and you would not . . . give the
former the exclusive right of way.

32

WILLIAM JAMES'S LETTERS

In the same letter is a striking example of the phrase-
ology which maddened some people :

Your distinction between "spurious" and
genuine courage reminds me a bit too much of
" true " and " false " freedom, and other sancti-
monious " come-offs."

" I have," he writes in that year, " no living sense
of commerce with a God. I envy those who have."
Casual conversational remarks of this sort are fre-
quent ; they will be of great interest to those who
read them in the light of his books. But if the letters
have any " influence " it will not be through these,
but through the example they show of a life lived
honestly and with gusto. Their main interest de-
rives from the reflection of that life, from the vivid
and warming picture of an interesting family circle
and a variegated circle of friends, and from the per-
petual shower of anecdote, serious and comic des-
cription of daily events, brief judgments on men and
affairs, which proceeded from James's lively fountain
of a mind. One can but illustrate these by a few
random specimens.

To current politics there are few references. He
wrote in 1870 that " if Alsace-Lorraine be taken,
there must be another war," and in 1871 that " the
German Liberals will have the harder battle to fight
at home for the next twenty years." He hoped, later
on, that the Boers and the Filipinos would win their
wars, and he was indignant about the condemnation
of Dreyfus. But the political things which really in-
terested him were of a less momentary kind. Every-
body knows how largely his brother Henry was

33 D

BOOKS REVIEWED

preoccupied with differences in national character
and in the qualities of various civilisations. It was a
natural preoccupation in an American familiar with
Europe, and William shared it. His examinations
were less subtle than Henry's, and his views (especi-
ally about the Germans) fluctuated a good deal. At
one moment he is bowed in admiration before the
Germans ; at another, exasperated by their solemn
verbosity, he is referring to " the human, as dis-
tinguished from the German mind." He never was
drawn to the French, and he seems to have come
with some reluctance to the conviction that the
English (whom he found the only non-American
people capable of blushing) were the people most to
his taste. Against all of them he contrasted America,
raw America, confused, uneducated, self-satisfied
America, America full of " bald-headed young
Ph.D.s, boring each other at seminaries." He felt
the tug which pulled Henry to Europe and kept him
there, but he was resolved to stand by his own coun-
try and help in shaping a future which he was certain
would be great.

A preoccupation with the future, with the con-
tinued adventure of mankind and the enlargement
of the bounds of knowledge, is reflected in his com-
ments on books. James was a voracious reader, but
he does not seem to have been very fond of pure
literature, although his taste was fairly good. There
are few criticisms of novels or poems, and these are
short. He was greatly impressed by Turgeneff, was
interested by " Daniel Deronda," and found Sir
Walter Scott " a dear old boy." He preferred authors
who bestowed the graces of literature on works of

34

WILLIAM JAMES'S LETTERS

religious or philosophic interest. His criticisms on
these are full of interest. He found in Emerson " too
little understanding of the morbid side of life " ; of
Goethe he said, " There is a deal of naivete in the
old cuss." Mr. Arthur Balfour's " Foundations of
Belief " he thought worth fifty German books : "It
almost makes me a Liberal-Unionist " ; and he
described Mr. Chesterton as " a tremendously strong
writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of
paradox." An ampler portrait is that of Renan :

So the magician Renan is no more ! . . . The
queer thing was that he so slowly worked his way
to his natural mental attitude of irony and persi-
flage, on a basis of moral and religious material.
He levitated at last to his true level of superficial-
ity, emancipating himself from layer after layer
of the inhibitions into which he was born, and
finally using the old moral and religious vocabu-
lary to produce merely musical and poetical effects.
That moral and religious ideals, seriously taken,
involve certain refusals and renunciations of free-
dom, Renan seemed at last entirely to forget. On
the whole, his sweetness and mere literary
coquetry leave a displeasing impression, and the
only way to handle him is not to take him heavily
or seriously. The worst is, he was a prig in his
ideals.

The most elaborate piece of purely literary criticism
in the letters is addressed to his brother Henry. Mr.
Philip Guedalla has recently divided Henry's career
into the three periods of James I., James II, and the

35

BOOKS REVIEWED

Old Pretender. It may be presumed, from William
James's vehement abuse of his brother's " third
manner," that this dynastic arrangement would have
pleased him. But Henry was unperturbed. One of
the early references to Henry (1867) contains
the phrase " the serene Harry dealing his snubs
around." To the onslaught of forty years after the
serene Harry replied that if he found that his books
were pleasing William he should begin to grow
seriously alarmed about their merits. The relations
between these two throughout the book are delight-
ful ; the years of separation never in the least im-
paired their affectionate intimacy ; each immensely
admired the other and thought him (we may suspect)
slightly comic.

I leave it to more competent people to discuss
what has happened and will happen to James's ideas.
During his lifetime there were those who revered
him as a Copernicus of philosophy and those who
detested him as a picturesque and perverse dis-
seminator of false notions, a " journalist " even —
to use the term which (alas), in modern intellectual
controversies, is always supposed to convey the last
opprobrium. That his " popular " vogue, for what
it was worth, would pass was inevitable ; for the
large dabbling public he is no longer the latest
" stunt." In 1 910, the last year of his life, James met
for the first time the man who, as (shall we say ?) a
subject of the higher kind of dinner-table conver-
sation holds now the place which James held fifteen
years ago. " I hope," he wrote, " that Freud and
his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits,
so that we may learn what they are. They can't fail

36

WILLIAM JAMES'S LETTERS

to throw light on human nature ; but I confess that
he made on me personally the impression of a man
obsessed with fixed ideas." The impression was
correct ; and James can have found little of " the
white plume of Henry of Navarre " about that most
cumbrous and humourless of plodding mono-
maniacs. He could " make nothing " of Freud's
dream theories. Yet if he were writing now he would
certainly have to take cognisance of Freud, he would
certainly have to admit a core of truth within Freud's
cocoon of dreary fantasy, and he would, I imagine,
be forced to admit that Freud's discoveries must
lead to some modification in his own picture of
things : for instance (I walk diffidently on such
ground) by introducing a new restriction of the area
which he regarded as open to free choice by the con-
sciousness.

The one thing certain is that whatever happened
to his theories (in the way, not of what he thought
crass opposition, but of genuine supersession) he
would not mind. He would cheer the advance of
creative evolution. For he was not the ambitious
constructor of a pet, a sacred, system, but a frank,
fearless, and jolly man who loved Life and was at its
service. In the whole of these two volumes of letters
there is not a selfish, a cruel, a priggish, or a dull
sentence. His philosophy, in spite of the wide and
salutary influence of the spirit behind it (described
by his enemies as American Commercialism, Ameri-
can Uplift, etc.) upon the lay public, has never
obtained much of a hold upon the academic world.
Those systems which do seldom obtain much of a
hold (are in fact regarded as awe-inspiring gibberish)

37

335278

BOOKS REVIEWED

everywhere else ; and, anyhow, all our systems,
however elaborately logical, will die, as James's will,
and their instructive mummies will be ranged in that
mortuary catacomb which we call the history of
thought. But James, at lowest, was certainly a land-
mark in the progress of psychology ; even his least
defensible propositions had the great quality of
stimulating thought ; and whatever might happen to
his theories, both his works and these letters will
continue to be read for the simple reason that they
are delightful reading, and that their author was one
of the most fascinating and lovable characters in the
American record. There is always a place for the
philosophic writer, however pragmatical, who does
not give one a headache. And there is a great deal
surely to be said for one who, seeing all the furniture
in his room leaping at the shock of the San Francisco
earthquake, felt " no fear, only admiration for the
way a wooden house could prove its elasticity," and
glee over the vividness of the manner in which such
an " abstract idea" as " earthquake " could verify
itself into sensible reality.

38

BAUDELAIRE

MR. SYMONS'S essay on Baudelaire is
slight and rather disappointing. It has faults
not usual in his books. Even those who do not
approve his attitude towards art and life or, usually,
share his critical admirations, must admit that he
has generally been a lucid critic, careful of his English
and careful of his form ; exercising, in fact, that
fastidiousness and aiming at that perfection which
delight him in his favourite artists, whether poets,
dancers, or music-hall performers. His " Baudelaire "
is scrappy ; it lacks shape ; it is neither a " life "
nor a thorough study. It is (if I may use the offensive
words inoffensively) padded out with a chapter on
Villiers de l'lsle Adam which appears to have been
written long before the rest of the book and has no
obvious connection with what goes before and after;
and its English is remarkably rough, grammatically
and otherwise, if judged by the standard Mr. Symons
himself has set. The bibliography is useful. There
are a certain number of " facts " in the book which
will be interesting to those who are unfamiliar with
Baudelairean literature ; and the reader who likes
the flavour of a bygone fashion may derive some
entertainment from the delightful obstinacy with
which Mr. Symons maintains his desperately de-
tached attitude towards the seven sins and the seven
thousand diseases. He, whatever may happen to the
rest of the world, is not going to be thrown off his
balance by considerations of morals and hygiene.
He sings the old tune which has strayed on from

39

BOOKS REVIEWED

the days of Gautier's " Moi je fais emaux et
camees." How charming a perversion ! How beauti-
fully stated a brutality ! How harmonious a blas-
phemy! But, granted his point of view, Mr. Symons
has often been very penetrating and illuminating,
and he might, with a greater expenditure of trouble,
have written at least the most interesting thing about
Baudelaire in English. And a good book about
Baudelaire would be welcome.

For Baudelaire was one of the most fascinating
personalities of his century, and, historically, one
of the most influential. I use the word, of course, in
a restricted sense. The large public never heard of
him, and his " teaching " was never sufficiently
coherent, or " practical," or " social," to inspire
group activity. He never disseminated drug taking
as others have disseminated vegetarianism ; no
body of his disciples has ever instituted the system-
atic worship of Satan or consumption of hashish in
any Hampstead Hothouse Suburb ; and the devotees
of despair remain unorganised. But he was important
both as symptom and as agent. In him there came
to a climax that romantic pessimism which had
wept in Werther and raved in Manfred, and brought
gall to the lips of some of his French predecessors ;
and there was something in him which was in none
of the others. He was the father of the later deca-
dence, and much greater than any of his children.
Classifications apart, his literary influence has in-
disputably been immense. His disciples have come
to him one by one in the solitude of their own
chambers, but those who bear his marks are found
in all civilised countries, and have included many

40

BAUDELAIRE

of the most conspicuous men of their age. Verlaine,
Mallarme, Rimbaud, Samain, Huysmans, in France :
Swinburne, Wilde, Beardsley, in England : these
are only a few remembered casually of the swarm
whose thought and language have borne those un-
mistakable stigmata. It is possible to be affected by
his thought, and then to cast off the sinister enchant-
ment ; it is possible to read him without being
infected by his pessimism at all. But it is impossible
to read him and forget him, to hear his accents with-
out sometimes echoing them, to turn away with
indifferent eyes from his powerful and mysterious
personality. It is not the actual events of his life
that exert this sway. His career was no pageant. He
was an affectionate son, he had a long and wretched
attachment to a stupid woman of colour, he trans-
lated Poe, wrote for the newspapers, despised
women, hated Belgians and material progress, was
a slave to hashish, and died terribly : there is little
more to be said. His power resided within himself
and in the poems which came nearest to being an
expression of himself. As man and artist he was
wholly unlike anybody else.

It is commonly said that Romanticism is dis-
tinguished by the desire for " escape " : that " Over
the hills and far away " is the phrase which best
expresses the romantics of all ages and the whole
romantic movement of the last century. That passion
was present in Baudelaire in its intensest form ; but
peculiarly. He did not, as did some of our Pre-
Raphaelites, turn his back on the contemporary
world. He looked hard and long at it ; he saw it
vile and filthy, and described the foulness he saw

4i

BOOKS REVIEWED

with dreadful realism. He was not one of those who
avoid life and find happiness by lapping themselves
in dreams of things more beautiful and serene,
countries of content beyond the horizon and ages
golden through the haze of time. He hankered rather
than escaped. He was perpetually longing for some-
thing " remote from the sphere of our sorrow," but
he could never surrender himself to a vision of it ;
for his eyes were open, and he saw a horrible world
and a black universe, terribly anarchic or terribly
governed. When he was a young man he made a
voyage to the East, and the memories of it haunted
him all his life. The hot blue skies, the basking
islands, the brown girls, the ships lying under the
palm trees, the odours of spice and of brine : they
recur in his work continually as symbols of all things
unattainable. But we may be sure that when he was
in the East he got little consolation from them, and
he was sure of it himself. In one of his prose poems
(I quote Mr. Symons's own old and excellent trans-
lation) he traversed the whole world in imagination,
and it all turned to dust and ashes. " Life," he said,
" is a hospital, in which every patient is possessed
by the desire of changing his bed. ... It seems to
me that I should always be happy if I were some-
where else." But he offers his soul Holland, and
Lisbon, and the Baltic, and the Indies, and his soul
remains unresponsive. In the end : "At last my
soul bursts into speech, and wisely she cries to me,
' Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world.' "

His spirit had, he knew, the power of poisoning
all that it contemplated. He was, he said in one of
his poems, the peer of Midas ; he could turn gold

42

BAUDELAIRE

into dross and built sarcophagi in the gleaming fields
of heaven. He was endowed at birth with a passion
for " the place where you shall never be ; the lover
whom you shall never know " ; his life was spent
in the pursuit of a Beauty defined by himself as
inaccessible. Yet there the passion was. He might,
in life, vainly attempt to distract himself with every
vice. He might talk blasphemy about God and
cynicism about human love. He might expend all
the resources of his unique art on the description
of the repellent objects which fascinated him. He
might peer into every forbidden room, and defile
every altar. He might walk, in the flesh or in im-
agination, through the most sterile of deserts and
the most fetid of marshes, through all the disordered
nightmares of the drug, and all the squalid byways
of the human city, taverns, and brothels, and rain-
soaked cemeteries ; he might profess indifference
to pain and admiration for evil ; but he could never
kill his unsatisfied heart, and, above the confusion,
he could always perceive the glimmer of virtue and
love and peace beyond his reach :

Des Cieux Spirituels l'inaccessible azur,

Pour l'homme terrasse qui reve encore et soufTre,

S'ouvre et s'enfonce avec l'attirance du gouffre.

Neither physical debauchery nor philosophic
diabolism could long distract him from the un-
attainable ideal, and it is this which is one of the
chief sources of his undiminished power of com-
manding men's attention and even affection. It is
easy enough to detect pose or feebleness in the

43

BOOKS REVIEWED

ordinary decadent ; and Baudelaire's own works
have made thousands of such. We are tempted to
say to them, " Stop this nonsense," or " Take some
healthy exercise," and conceive their cases as suffi-
ciently dealt with. Baudelaire cannot be dismissed
like that. It is not possible to despise him, and we
are not able to suppose that he failed to understand
anything : he did not pose, there was no medicine
for him, and he was as familiar with the thoughts
of others as with his own. Fifty years after his death
he still speaks in the portrait printed in the common
edition of his poems. WTe see those dark liquid pene-
trating eyes looking out from under the contem-
plative forehead, the wide shut mouth, the pouting
under lip. There is pride in it that tells us we are
to expect, in conversation, no confessional flow, no
appeal for pity ; nothing but courteous, precise,
ironic sentences, acute brief analyses, observations
slightly tinged with a bitter humour. But the soul
in reserve is evident in the fixed, ardent, melancholy
look. He suffered and he was strong. When he died
of general paralysis, locked up in a body without
speech, his condition was an image of his whole life.
He was always a prisoner beyond reach of human
contact, and the lips in his portrait seem to say that
wherever he may find himself he will be the same
on earth or in interstellar space, in heaven or in hell,
a wanderer, a solitary and an alien. There was power
in him, the power of a great personality ; but his
strength was strangely manifested. There is a story
by himself with a hero whose impotence was " so
vast " that it was " epic."

His one resource — it can be explained no more

44

BAUDELAIRE

and no less in him than in any other — was his art,
and his genius as an artist was so extraordinary
that his influence would still have been great had
his character and " subject-matter " lacked their
peculiar qualities. He wrote impeccable prose ; but
his verse, for compactness, for accuracy, for music,
cannot be surpassed. He may not be ranked with
the world's greatest poets : humanity will scarcely
concede that to a man whose principal work was
labelled (not without reason) " Flowers of Evil,"
and who was successfully prosecuted for obscenity :
apart from which, volume of work and universality
of appeal are bound to count in such matters. But
there certainly never was a poet who said with more
perfection what he had to say, who had fewer weak
lines or otiose words, who was more consistently
near his own highest level of achievement. His sense
of form was like that of the great masters in marble
and bronze, and he worked like a slave in his narrow
field, watering it with his sweat " pour extorquer
quelques epis." Here, at any rate, his influence
cannot but have been salutary. If the Symbolists
trace to him the origins of their " correspondences"
and their mystical minglings of the senses, the Par-
nassians were certainly as much in his debt for the
example he set of artistic self-discipline. To read him
is to contract a disgust with looseness and diffuse-
ness. It is perhaps significant that the memorial ode
which the young Swinburne wrote on him was the
most clear, vivid, and truly classic of all Swinburne's
poems.

45

KEATS

JOHN KEATS died in 1821. He was born on
October 31, 1795, his father then working in
a livery-stable in Finsbury Pavement. His parents
died before he left school. He entered at Guy's,
became a dresser there when he was twenty, met
Hunt, Haydon, and Shelley in the same year, and
published his first volume when he was twenty-
one. " Endymion " appeared when he was twenty-
two, " Lamia " and the " Odes " when he was
twenty-four. He died at Rome of consumption at
twenty-five, and his death was noticed in " Black-
wood " as that of " a young man who had left a
decent calling for the melancholy trade of Cockney-
poetry."

Throughout the last hundred years Keats 's repu-
tation has steadily grown. There were those among
his friends who realised when he was alive that he
was a poet of extraordinary powers. That is in the
natural course of things ; for in spite of the common
delusion to the contrary, and the obvious truth that
great writers often take many years to impress the
ruck of critics and attract the general literary public,
the records show that, at a very early stage in their
careers, they may usually rely on recognition from
a few, and especially from their colleagues. Leigh
Hunt notoriously admired Keats ; Shelley, if he
did not fully understand him, died with " Lamia "
at his breast ; Lamb met him and told Crabb
Robinson that he put "St. Agnes' Eve " next to
Wordsworth. There is surely something significant

46

KEATS

in the fact that he should, at so early an age, have
drifted, however casually, into the society of these
men and others as eminent. They differed about
his early performances, but they felt instantly in
him a candidate for immortality. Outside recognition
was certainly slow. Tennyson and his circle at
Cambridge proclaimed his greatness as far as their
voices could carry, which was not very far. He had
been dead nineteen years when the first " collected "
reprint appeared, and this went into remainders.
Yet it did appear, and with the success of Lord
Houghton's edition of 1848 came the evident ful-
filment of his quiet prophecy : "I think I shall be
among the English poets after my death."

The view was not, however, as yet general that
he might possibly, had he lived, have been the
greatest English poet after Shakespeare. Tennyson
repeatedly said this, but it was not common doctrine,
Attention for many years was largely centred on the
things which he did supremely well ; the things com-
pleted and perfected, " Isabella," " St. Agnes' Eve,"
the " Odes," a few sonnets and songs, the finest pas-
sages from the longer works. His character as a poet
was, as it were, fixed by these ; he excelled in visual-
isation, in a languorous music, in richness of imagery ;
for ideas, for philosophy, for doctrine, for contem-
plation of the nature and destiny of man in general,
as for the study of men in particular, we must go
elsewhere. These were not for Keats, who preferred
Greek legends and autumn leaves, musical sighs, a
sweet melancholy, and the shining of moonlight
through a window dyed azure and gules. This view
arose, as we have said, through too exclusive a study

47

BOOKS REVIEWED

of his acknowledged masterpieces ; more recently,
the examination of his outlying works and of his
letters has produced a general tendency to speculate
on what he might have done rather than to describe
what he actually did. Not everybody has been con-
vinced by the South African professor who has dis-
covered a profound and comprehensive philosophical
system hiding like a mighty stone temple within
the tangled greenery of " Endymion " ; but there
is no need to go chasing after allegories to become
apprised of the fact that Keats had the attributes
of an original and masculine thinker. His curiosity
and his strong common sense are shown everywhere
in his correspondence, and the later " Hyperion "
is the work of a" world-poet " trying his mighty
wings. He might, it is now conceded, have written
on the Miltonic scale with the Miltonic force,
though it does not seem likely that he would have
driven home the Miltonic conclusions. He had a
natural interest both in metaphysics and in ethics,
though he was not in the habit of employing those
words ; and the combination of qualities, mental
and physical, in him was so rich and peculiar that
had he produced " serious " works on the major
themes they would have been very unlike anyone
else's. As it was, he had just developed (to use his
own phrase) the " large utterance of the early gods,"
when he died, having scarcely had the use of it. This
truth is now accepted, it may even be that it has
been overstated : and it is not only the seeds of a
great philosophic poet, a sunnier Lucretius, that
they have found in him. Critics of our own day have
also argued that only time was needed to make him

48

KEATS

one of the noblest of poetic dramatists. The con-
tention is based solely, but not altogether unreason-
ably, on the impressive fragment, " King Stephen,"
which moves convincingly and contains characters
who are strongly and surely drawn and differentiated.
All Keats 's " potentialities " are now studied ; no
writer who ever died in youth has ever had his
promise explored with more wonder or more praise.
Nevertheless, though the probable greatness of
Keats 's maturity is now realised, we are still habitu-
ally blind to the peculiar greatness of his immaturity.
We are accustomed to think of Keats, Shelley, and
even Byron as poets of the Romantic age who died
equally young. There is something to be said as to
their relative chances of development had they all
lived longer ; but leaving that aside, we commonly
forget that Keats had several years of life fewer
than Shelley, only half Shelley's length of man-
hood. Keats died at twenty- five ; at twenty- five he
had created all that body of work which we have,
and established the most widespread and fruitful
poetic influence of the century. His poems, less
numerous than Shelley's though they are, are com-
pared with his, and people who admire both are
content to differ about their respective merits. Sup-
pose, though, that Shelley had died at twenty-five ?
There would have been no " Cenci," no "Adonais, "
no " Prometheus," no " Cloud," no " Skylark,"
no " Ode to the West Wind " ; few of the best
lyrics and, of the longer poems, nothing notable
except " Alastor " and " The Revolt of Islam."
Byron, dying at twenty-five, would never have
begun " Don Juan " ; Milton, had he died at Keats's

49 e

BOOKS REVIEWED

age, would be known to us only by " Comus,"
" L'Allegro," " II Penseroso," " The Ode on Christ's
Nativity," and a few minor poems. Of all the great
English poets only Coleridge had written the larger
part of his best work before his twenty-sixth birth-
day, and Shakespeare himself, so far as our very
inadequate knowledge extends, had written literally
nothing at all, and almost certainly not a line of the
plays and poems which we know. It may be sug-
gested that the more sensuous and pictorial kind of
poet may be expected to produce art of a high order
at an earlier age than other men. Whether this be so
or not, Keats was, in fact, not one of several equal
prodigies, but a prodigy unparalleled for volume of
masterly early achievement.

We may, therefore, say that even now it is not
universally recognised how unique was his promise
and, in the circumstances, his performance. But
that he was potentially one of the greatest of all poets
is a commonplace, and our own time has also seen
the dissipation of a false conception of his character
which imputed to him weaknesses of a kind which
are not, and cannot be, found in the greatest poets,
though they may be found in many poets of the
second order. The greatest poets, however repug-
nant we may find some of them, have not been
cowardly or unmanly : but for generations men
thought of Keats as a querulous and hyper-sensitive,
indolent and luxurious, invalid. Byron's uninformed
jest about his having been " killed off by one
critique " was for long current, and Shelley's mar-
vellous but misleading elegy supplied apparent
confirmation. It is now clear that Keats was as

50

KEATS

undisturbed by the scurrilous philistinism of
" Blackwood " and the " Quarterly " as we should
expect a poet of his powers to be, except in so far
as he feared that reviewers might prevent him from
earning money — a mundane consideration, no doubt,
but even poets want their breakfasts, and cannot
always obtain them on credit. When this slander
had been finally blown away, the letters to Fanny
Brawne were published, and hundreds of critics,
including the austere and self-contained Mr. Swin-
burne, diffused the contempt they felt for a young
man who could so thoroughly abandon himself to
his passions. " Fulsome and liquorish endearments" :
thus spake the author of " Anactoria " concerning
some of Keats 's less happy lines, and of the letters
he said :

While admitting that neither his love letters,
nor the last piteous outcries of his wailing and
shrieking agony, would ever have been made
public by merciful or respectful editors, we must
also admit that, if they ought never to have been
published, it is no less certain that they ought
never to have been written ; that a manful kind
of man or even a manly sort of boy, in his love-
making or in his suffering, will not howl and snivel
after such a lamentable fashion.

" He lived long enough," was Swinburne's con-
clusion, " only to give promise of being a man."

But this misconception has been dissipated like
its predecessor. It is quite true that the sentences
which the reviewers quoted from Mr. Buxton

5*

BOOKS REVIEWED

Forman's edition to the horror of the public and
Mr. Swinburne are there : but their " piteousness "
and grossness have both been absurdly exaggerated.
They are as they stand, not half as " deplorable "
or abnormal as they were made out to be, and the
worst of them came from a man already enveloped
in a mortal illness. If there are those who can guaran-
tee what their deportment would be during that
slow and painful approach to Death which may be
in front of any of us, I can only say I envy them ;
and the torment was very great for Keats, who was
dying young, with his ambitions unfulfilled and his
love unsatisfied. If we knew nothing of him beyond
his verse, strength of character could be deduced
from the robust power and serenity of parts of his
verse ; but all the evidence we have confirms the
impression. He was, when in health, sociable,
humorous, sensible, intellectually adventurous : and
he gave known proofs of that physical courage which
may be the unmistakable manifestation of that moral
courage with which it is often falsely contrasted.

To this truth after a century his countrymen have
at last come. He had, most obviously, irritating
faults of expression. There are vulgarisms in his
early works which send shudders down the spines
of the sensitive. They are almost all of one kind :
they occur when he is writing of women and love.
Now they would not be there, it may be admitted,
had not Keats had, like most men and almost all
poets, a powerful strain of sensuality. But what is
objected to is not really his morals (which are often
in strongly sensual men unexceptionable), but his
manners : not a particular grossness in him, but

52

KEATS

his naive and uncultivated way of confessing his
proclivities. It is all a matter of words : we do not
like the "dalliance" and the "fondling," the
" breasts of cream " and " gentle squeezes," and,
above all (to quote the most uncomfortable line from
all " Endymion "), " those lips, O slippery blisses."
To some extent in the early, though not in the later
Keats, we feel a slightly over-marked preoccupa-
tion ; but it wouldn't have been noticed had he
learnt reticence. And it is easy to guess why it took
him so long to shed his vulgarisms — for that is what
they were. The Leigh Hunt circle, valuable as its
enthusiasm was to him, was not impeccable in its
taste ; and before he entered that circle Keats in
all likelihood kept precisely the company in which
refinement in certain regards would be least culti-
vated. We can imagine him during the " apothecary "
days with facetious Dick Swivellers as the most
enlightened of his acquaintance, and spending much
of his time with precocious young bucks like Mr.
Smallweed, who ordered his chop so maturely in
Chancery Lane, while casting an expert glance at
the barmaid. Before Keats died his vocabulary had
become civilised, and his intellect had made an
advantageous pact with his senses. An article on
him to-day can be ended, probably without sur-
prising anyone, with an extract from the present
Poet Laureate which indicates the measure of the
change, in Keats 's regard, which has come over
English criticism. " If," says Mr. Bridges :

I have read him rightly, he would be pleased,
could he see it, at the universal recognition of

53

BOOKS REVIEWED

his genius and the utter rout of its traducers ;
but much more moved, stirred he would be to
the depth of his great nature, to know that he was
understood, and that for the nobility of his char-
acter his name was loved and esteemed.

But what Gifford and Jeffrey would think is beyond
all conjecture.

54

AUSTIN DOBSON'S ESSAYS

MR. AUSTIN DOBSON* has throughout his
career led a double life. One of his lives has
been spent in our own age, and even, to a large ex-
tent, in the Board of Trade. The other has been
spent, very innocently, in the eighteenth century,
and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he has
as many acquaintances in the eighteenth century as
in the twentieth, and that he is as much at home
with those as with these. It is easy enough to become
familiar with the outstanding figures of the Georgian
era. We may know our Burke and our Gibbon, our
Goldsmith, our Gray, our Reynolds, and our
Sheridan. We may, through Horace Walpole and
Boswell, establish some sort of contact with Con-
way, Mason, Mme. du Deffand, and the Misses
Berry, with Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerk,
Mrs. Thrale, and General Paoli. But Mr. Dobson
has penetrated far beyond those obvious circles
which are the first to receive the casual traveller.
He does not greatly bother about the foreground
except in so far as it gives clues to the background.
He has an affection for those who were persons of
some, but not very much, importance in their own
day ; he knows his way about a variety of cultivated
middle-class homes of that bygone age : houses
where the great were but casual visitors, libraries in
which intelligent rentiers wrote treatises on syntax,
boudoirs in which young ladies composed pre-
cocious novels or wrote sprightly letters to their

* Mr. Dobson's lamented death has happened since this was
written.

55

BOOKS REVIEWED

friends, drawing-rooms in which harpsichord and
flute were played nightly and a call from the Mus-
covite Ambassador caused an immense flutter. He
is sufficiently familiar with the masterpieces of the
age ; it would not be easy to stump him on " Amelia"
or " Humphry Clinker," or " Clarissa Harlowe."
But others do justice to these, and Mr. Dobson pre-
fers to spend his time among the neglected, though
never among the stupid. He will do justice to the
intelligent doctor whom Dr. Johnson once met at
Streatham, or the Female Sage whom Walpole
casually mentioned to Sir Thomas Mann. He will
dig out their works, discover their letters, pry (if he
can) into their diaries, reconstruct their houses and
gardens, recover their loves, friendships, ambitions,
and disappointments, and. in the end, give us a
picture of them in convincing relation to their con-
temporary setting. He cannot bear to think that a
charming, a clever, or a very eccentric person should
be entirely forgotten ; that is, one who belonged to
the generation towards which he himself is tem-
peramentally drawn because of its tastes, its manners,
its common-sense, and its wit. In his series of books
on the eighteenth century he has drawn a large gallery
of such portraits, and he is now so familiar with his
ground that the mention of even the obscurest of
Georgian worthies at once brings into his mind
half-a-dozen forgotten persons with whom " the
deceased " was probably or certainly in commu-
nication. And he knows something instructive or
amusing about each one of them.

His latest volume {Later Essays, 191 7- 1920), which
appears after his eighty-first birthday, contains

56

AUSTIN DOBSON'S ESSAYS

six long essays and a few scraps of prose re-
flection and metrical epigram. One of the essays
deals with the Abbe Edgeworth, the Irish priest
who accompanied Louis XVI on the flight to
Varennes and knelt on the scaffold over his head-
less trunk. The subjects of four of the others are
William Heberden, " Hermes " Harris, " the learned
Mrs. Carter," and Thomas Edwards. It would be
difficult to say which of these is now the most widely
remembered, if such a term can be applied to any of
them. I suppose Elizabeth Carter, who was one of
the most sensible talkers of her time, was a blue-
stocking without being a prig, wrote several toler-
able poems and a few lines that deserve preservation,
and made a translation of Epictetus, which had a
vogue (for such were the proclivities of the time) like
that of " Reynard the Fox " or " Kim " in our own
time. But the best-known person does not neces-
sarily make the best subject. Harris serves Mr.
Dobson as well : a Wiltshire gentleman, an amateur
philologist, and father of that Lord Malmesbury
who brought Queen Caroline over to the Prince
Regent, to be received as if she were something
boring to the point of being nauseous. Dr. Heber-
den's career as physician and man of the world is
very typical : a sort of parallel to Arbuthnot's,
except that Heberden had no literary genius. But
Thomas Edwards, obscurer still, is responsible for
an essay full of the most delightful things. He was
a barrister of means, a friend of Richardson and
Hawkins Browne the parodist ; and his little fleet-
ing fame came with his pamphlet attacking the over-
bearing bully Bishop Warburton, the rashest, if not

57

BOOKS REVIEWED

the stupidest, of all Shakespeare's editors. Many
of Edwards's cunning hits are recorded here, with a
mass of minute information about his private life :
amongst other things we are given excerpts from his
ironical " Canons of Criticism," such as :

I. A Professed Critic has a right to declare,
that his Author wrote whatever He thinks he
ought to have written ; with as much positive-
ness, as if He had been at his elbow.

VII. He may find out obsolete words, or coin
new ones ; and put them in the place of such, as
He does not like, or does not understand.

IX. He may interpret his Author so ; as to
make him mean directly contrary to what He says.

The case for the conjectural emendation has never
been more succinctly put.

This resuscitation of ancient gossip is always
agreeable ; but it is as well to have a present re-
minder that even in the eighteenth century men
differed, and that the conventional picture of solid
brick houses, Chippendale and chamber music is
misleading. Under the crust was Gin Lane, and
Walpole's excursions around his bric-a-brac were
sometimes rudely interrupted by menacing mul-
titudes of unemployed " weavers." The most mem-
orable of these papers is of a kind less frequently
represented in Mr. Dobson's collections : it deals
with the career of a great and an effective reformer.
John Howard, " the philanthropist " (since Dickens
and Mrs. Jellyby nobody applies that noble name to
a man in a wholly serious and complimentary way),

58

AUSTIN DOBSON'S ESSAYS

was not the sort of person who wrote polemical tracts
about Shakespeare, who translated elevating maxims
from the ancients, who craned his neck to appraise
the ceilings of Angelica Kauffmann, or who assuaged
his melancholy with the strains of the German flute.
He had, it is true, in early life a taste for pictures ;
but once he had become convinced of the need for
prison reform he never again thought of anything
but prisons. The story Mr. Dobson tells is the
story of one of the most austere, saintly, " dedi-
cated," and systematically vagrant of lives. Howard
was an upholsterer's son, who inherited a com-
petence. At twenty-seven he married his elderly
landlady ; she died two years later, and, grown
restless, he wandered through Portugal and France.
Returning, he became a member of the Royal Society,
settled in Buckinghamshire and married again. He
travelled a good deal (amongst other things taking
the temperature of Vesuvius), and became suffi-
ciently prominent in his rural district as to be made
High Sheriff of his county. This was in 1773 ; he
was forty-seven ; and up to that date he had done
so little that, had he died then, nobody now living,
excepting Mr. Dobson, would have heard of him.
But his duty brought him into contact with the local
gaol, and the gaol of that time was the foulest of
foul dens :

In it, young and old, hale and sick, pure and
impure, innocent and guilty, were herded and
huddled, without distinction or occupation ; and
here, for the most trivial offences, on the vaguest
evidence, they were detained indefinitely, in order

59

BOOKS REVIEWED

to satisfy the exorbitant claims for fees made by
rapacious wardens and turnkeys. They were ex-
posed to the most wanton cruelty, systematically
starved, savagely punished, and ruthlessly ex-
posed to the horrors of infection. Not a few of
them became imbecile or insane, while others
succumbed to the terrible distemper generated
by the total neglect of sanitary precautions.

From that time to his death Howard spent most
of his time scouring the prisons and pest-houses of
Europe and endeavouring, through Parliament and
the Press in this country and interviews with the
great abroad, to secure their reformation. He spared
his body no labours ; his abstemiousness was such
that he would have been thoroughly at home at the
table of John the Baptist. The things he saw were
revolting. " His very notebook grew foul and
tainted." " At Nottingham he found that the poorer
prisoners slept in damp ' dug-outs ' forty-seven
steps down, cut in the sandy rock. ... At Ely it
had been the practice to chain the inmates to the
floor on their backs, with a spiked iron collar about
their necks, and a heavy bar over their legs. . . .
At Plymouth there were two small chambers for
felons. One of these — the ' Clink ' — was solely
lighted and ventilated by a wicket in the door, seven
inches by five, and to this contracted breathing-hole
the prisoners under sentence of transportation came
by turns for air." It sounds a ghastly condemnation
of contemporary civilisation ; but it was true of
those evils, as of many, that few people were enter-
prising enough to discover that they existed. Howard

60

AUSTIN DOBSON'S ESSAYS

shocked the public, and received the thanks of the
House of Commons. It was, as usual, some time
before anything effective was done, and after the
first horror had passed there was a tendency on the
part of the authorities to take the will to reform for
the deed. But the reform of prison hygiene and
discipline in this country (by no means perfect
yet) dates from Howard, and his activities spread
everywhere, from Ireland to the Urals. He repeatedly
toured Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany,
Switzerland, and Bohmeia ; protested against the
iniquitous " Piombi " at Venice and the treatment
of prisoners of war in Dunkirk, saw the knout
used in Moscow, and caught jail-fever in Lille.
Forty-seven thousand miles he covered, and in
1789, enfeebled and sixty-three, he set out for
his last journey through Europe to Russia. His name
was widely known and honoured ; this at least is to
the credit of the powers of his day that they threw
every prison open to him, and welcomed his sug-
gestions ; and the influence of his reputation and
personality on the objects of his solicitude was such
that he once quelled, unarmed and alone, a riot of
several hundred prisoners who had murdered their
jailers. At the close of 1789 he had reached Kherson,
in Russian Tartary, where he wished to inspect the
military hospitals, Russia and Turkey being at war.
He had sighed occasionally for a peaceful old age in
Buckinghamshire ; he died in a Russian village, and
his remains were followed to the grave " by some
two or three thousand spectators, an escort of cavalry,
and a crowd of carriages, including the sumptuous
equipage of the Prince of Moldavia, drawn by six

61

BOOKS REVIEWED

horses covered with scarlet cloth." In Stepanovka,
a white pyramid stands over his grave. In St. Paul's
Cathedral is his statue. It was the first to be placed
there, and represents him "in a classic costume,
with shock hair, broken shackles at his feet, and a
key in his right hand," and rustics are reported to
have mistaken it for an effigy of St. Peter. That
career and that statue may be taken as representing
symbolically the relation between life and art in the
eighteenth century. They loved, feared, and broke
their hearts ; but it didn't strike them to put it into
their poetry. They adventured and died like men :
and, commemorating their heroes, they reduced
the most extraordinary of careers to a marble toga
and a couple of dead metaphors. That is the worst
of too unmitigated a reign of " taste " : but it has
its charms, and nobody has ever appreciated them
more exquisitely than Mr. Austin Dobson.

62

MR. GEORGE MOORE'S TAPESTRY

SOME years ago Mr. George Moore, deter-
mined no longer to court the insults of the
library censorship, announced his intention of having
his future books privately printed and issued to
subscribers. The new era has seen the production
of several books very agreeable in physical appear-
ance and very diverse in character. " The Brook
Kerith " was followed by " A Story-Teller's Holi-
day," in which one delicious and beautiful tale was
surrounded by others which had little point beyond
their grossness, and that by " Avowals," one of the
most original and companionable of his books. A
play came next, and now we have a novel on a large
scale, in which he has retold a classic story of love.
He is nothing if not enterprising ; who would have
thought to hear him talking mediaeval history and
even sprinkling his pages with " alacks," " withals,"
and " twains " ? His scene is Paris in the early
twelfth century, when Nominalists and Realists
were dividing the world of thought, and the bold
and brilliant young philosopher Abelard was acquir-
ing an influence which alarmed the clergy. He meets
Heloise, a girl fresh from a convent, living with her
uncle, a Canon of Notre Dame. As Paolo and Fran-
cesca came together over their book, so these two
do over Virgil and Ovid, and the Chanson de Roland.
They elope. They part, after Heloise has conceived,
because she wishes him to enter the Church, where
alone a career is open to a philosopher as great as
Plato. The uncle insists on a secret marriage ; there

63

BOOKS REVIEWED

is a disingenuous renouncement of wedlock in order
that Abelard may realise his ambitions, which do
not stop short of the Papacy ; Heloise goes into a
nunnery, consoled at times by the presence of her
son, who has the remarkable name of Astrolabe :
she waits for Abelard for nine years : she then
hears how long ago her uncle had him seized and
mutilated ; they meet for the last time ; and they
separate to know no more of each other except
through letters. That is Mr. Moore's outline. How
has he filled it in ?

Meditating on Mr. Moore's book, one realises
that several sorts of great novel might have been
made out of his theme and his period, and that
hints of them all are to be found in his book. The
relics of the twelfth century are not so profuse as
those of the fifteenth ; there is a certain lack of
materials for the construction of a vivid picture of
life, at any rate, in the towns. It isn't that a few
anachronisms matter ; I, for one, had Mr. George
Moore mentioned artichokes, should not have gone
to a book of reference to see if artichokes had been
introduced into France at that date. Yet a novelist
cannot put down things that he knows to be absurd
and that the reader will know to be absurd ; while
years of ad hoc research are apt to deaden the creative
impulse and result in a catalogue. Still, a man's
imagination might be captured by that period, and
form a bright and detailed picture of its physical
aspects and spiritual movements. " Ivanhoe " and
" The Cloister and the Hearth " were worth writ-
ing. Any good picaresque novel, again, is a fine
thing to write ; a novel, whatever its period, in

64

MR. GEORGE MOORE'S TAPESTRY

which the central personage or group passes through
a variety of amusing or romantic scenes, and en-
counters a variety of strange people, each with his
peculiar habits and his store of tales ; a " Lavengro"
of the twelfth century, well done, would be worth
having. Finally, the story of Abelard and Heloise,
passionate and unfortunate lovers, with the added
interest of being very intelligent, might make one
of the most moving books in the world.

Beyond doubt a great novel is conceivable which
should have elements of all three. Mr. Moore's has.
It is a blend, and the mingling is cunningly done,
although there are places where his vagrant tendency
gets a little too much the upper hand. But it is a pale
blend. His gallant tapestry is well woven, of good
quality, but faded. He does not give a full and con-
vincing picture of the period, much as he talks of
the Crusades and the Church, Nominalism and
Realism, and studious though he is to mention
troubadours and gleemen, lepers and wolves. These
are mentioned, but as a rule they are not clearly
seen or in their force felt. No swarming scene of
action remains in one's memory after one has read
the novel : even Paris and its priests and students
is visualised only dimly and in fragments ; the
crowds make no noise, and we are not even sure
about the architecture. The wandering part of the
story, again, lacks humour, colour, and character.
Abelard and Heloise, with the servant Madelon,
make a long journey together, by forest roads to
Orleans, by boat to Nantes. Abelard makes another,
first alone, and then in company with his old master,
a ruined Count. A large part of France is traversed ;

65 f

BOOKS REVIEWED

the travellers sleep in inns and houses and woods ;
they encounter all weathers, see many birds and
beasts and flowers ; they converse with each other,
and strike many companions of the road, gleemen,
pedlars, and pardoners. Everybody, too, tells
stories faintly reminiscent of the " Fabliaux " and
the " Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles," not to mention
the " Heptameron." That the discursive method
suits Mr. Moore nobody who has read his volumes
of memoirs needs to be told. But he has not suc-
ceeded here. His publicans and pardoners have not
the life of his Edward Martyns and A. E.s ; his
suns do not burn and his rains do not drench ; his
landscapes are not differentiated ; and his em-
bedded anecdotes, though conducted with very
great skill, lack the last degree of — well, punch —
the author's interest in them apparently warming
only on the few occasions on which, in these volumes,
he permits himself to be disgusting. There are
amusing and beautiful patches, but the whole is
dullish. And with what is after all his main concern,
the amours of Abelard and Eloisa, he cannot be
held to have perfectly succeeded. There are two
principal reasons for this. One is that he has im-
perfectly drawn, if not imperfectly apprehended,
the character of Abelard, who is not merely a puzzle,
but a puzzle which does not excite us to solution.
His Abelard only interests us because Heloise is
interested in him, and seldom at that ; even when
the worst calamities befall him we do not much
mind ; here, as often in Mr. Moore's books, one
feels that the author's women characters attract
him more than his men.

66

MR. GEORGE MOORE'S TAPESTRY

But another reason of the love-story's failure to
hold us is that there is an inadequate stress laid
upon the more significant parts of it. Now and again
there are sentences of a tender beauty and analytic
passages of some subtlety, but passion, if often re-
ferred to, is never made fully evident. The crises
of emotion are not communicated to the reader ;
over everything Mr. Moore ambles smoothly on ;
the tone of the sentences does not vary, whatever
their content ; one thing comes after another and
we turn the pages with unruffled equanimity. So it
comes to pass that, reading again what should be
one of the powerfully affecting of all the true stories
in the world, one is very seldom conscious of the
faintest wing-touch of suffering, we are infinitely
less grieved and elated than we have been by the
mere fairy-tale of " Aucassin and Nicolette." It is
a half-realised tale of old unhappy far-off things ;
the age and the distance are more noticeable than
the unhappiness ; it is stretched out to thinness.
The inadequacy of Mr. Moore's treatment is all
the more annoying because his invention of incident
has not failed. Time after time he brings us to a
place where he might have written a memorable
page, and always he skims over the great moment
in a polished conversational way. One does not ask
him to " lay it on too thick " ; but restraint is one
thing, and the apparent absence of anything to re-
strain is another.

Were the book written by anyone but a man of
genius, I should not have elaborated the case against
it like that. I do not wish to convey the impression
that it sent me to sleep, or to suggest that it has not

67

BOOKS REVIEWED

great merits. Heloise frequently comes to life.
There are delightful scenes in her uncle's house at
Paris, and again in the convent to which she retires,
after losing her husband ; and intermittently we
feel her pangs : above all, during those long years
of separation, when she did not even know where
Abelard, immured above the grey sea of Brittany,
was, and talked absent-mindedly to the nuns, was
troubled about her child, and woke from restless
sleep to " sit up in bed scared, watching the grey
window pane." Some of the minor characters,
especially the fat and selfish Canon, are well done ;
there is grace and interest in certain of the dis-
quisitions on theology and metaphysics ; and above
all, there is Mr. Moore's prose style. The book may
be monotonously written, but so high a level of
monotony has never been reached. We may some-
times miss the right word, but we are never acutely
conscious of the wrong one. By long labour Mr.
Moore has arrived at a simplicity of diction and
phrase which is a true simplicity ; he has discovered
his natural method of expression and shed the ac-
quired ; every sentence comes easily and flows into
the next ; it is a stream of perfect talk. Even the
least arresting and most rambling of his pages is
unmistakably the work of an artist in prose and may
arouse envy by virtue of its easy elegance of move-
ment and purity of language.

And it would be absurd not to add a tribute to
the energy, witness of a rare devotion to his art,
which produced a book so elaborate and so ambitious
when the author has reached an age at which most
novelists are content to make dabbling efforts to

MR. GEORGE MOORE'S TAPESTRY

repeat their former successes. It is the biggest job
Mr. Moore has ever attempted to tackle, and the
very great labour of its composition must have been
preceded and accompanied by a considerable labour
of research. Failure though the book may be, one
instinctively judges it by the highest standards.
And it leaves me with the feeling that Mr. Moore's
best book may be yet to come, so active is still his
mind and so unquenched his desire to excel his feats
of craftsmanship. But if it does come I suspect that
it will not be a book with a great theme appealing
to the deeper feelings, but the book of a raconteur,
an audacious humorist, a connoisseur in art, nature,
and the emotions, a man who by this time ought to
know himself more akin to Boccaccio and Watteau
than to Shakespeare or Dickens. One cannot help
admiring the perverse pride of one who continues
in a wish to do something which he has not done
before, but Mr. Moore was not made to be a great
romantic writer. Happily he discovered long ago
that he was made for something better than a
" realistic " writer.

69

ANDREW MARVELL

THE city of Hull is to celebrate the tercen-
tenary of the birth of Andrew Marvell, who
represented Hull in Parliament from 1659 till his
death in 1678. Marvell was a son of the Rev.
Andrew Marvell, rector of Winestead, who became
master of the Hull Grammar School in 1624. Tne
younger Andrew was taught by his father, went to
Cambridge in 1633 as a Sizar of Trinity, and in 1638
was admitted a Scholar. In 1641, or thereabouts,
he went off for a four years' tour on the Continent.
He seems during the early portion of the Civil War
to have mixed in Royalist circles ; but the temper
which inspired his famous eulogy of Charles I on
the scaffold, embedded in a congratulatory ode to
Cromwell, saved him from discomfort without in-
volving him in dishonour. From 1650 till 1652 he
was tutor to Fairfax's daughter Mary at the General's
country seat, and in the latter year he was recom-
mended by Milton (who had gone blind) as assistant
Latin (Foreign) Secretary. He obtained the position
in 1657. Next year we hear of his being given six
yards of mourning on Cromwell's death ; in 1659
he was elected member for Hull ; on the Restora-
tion in 1660 he not merely did not suffer because
of his support of the Protector, but was largely in-
strumental, by vigorous lobbying, in saving Milton
from Tyburn or the gaol. In 1663 he went with
Lord Carlisle on a mission to Scandinavia and
Russia ; he published several political and religious
tracts ; and he died in 1678.

70

ANDREW MARVELL

Certain of his verses had come out as pamphlets.
The more polemic of them had to wait. But he left
a widow of whom the one thing we know is that she
at once set herself after his death to collect all his
non-satirical poems. They came out in 1681, in a
folio with a portrait. Verses of another kind were at
last printed and attributed to him in the " State
Poems " in William's reign, and in 1726 Thomas
Cooke published a two-volume collection. But it
is not to Cooke that Grosart and Aitken, MarvelPs
latest editors, have looked for authority. The basic
edition of Marvell was that produced in 1776 by a
collateral descendant, Captain Thompson. This
useful and enthusiastic mariner had a manuscript
book containing several fine unpublished poems,
and he printed, besides the poems, Marvell 's corre-
spondence with the Hull Corporation, and also his
prose writings. We have in the history of Marvell 's
works a story in which his city may rightly pride
itself. For both Thompson, Marvell's first important
editor, and Aitken, his last, were Hull men. But the
Mayor and Corporation of 1670 would be surprised
could they hear that their cheerful little red-faced
member is chiefly remembered as a delicate lyrist.
Most of Marvell's best poems were, it is supposed,
written before the Restoration — many of them
while he was tutor to Fairfax's daughter. Almost all
are in octosyllabic couplets, a kind of verse in which,
at his best, he is excelled by no English poet.
" Where the remote Bermudas ride " is a poem
perfect in form and unique in kind : as a rule he
was best when in a garden or a meadow, or
writing light pastoral dialogues or tender epitaphs.

7i

BOOKS REVIEWED

Everybody knows the garden poem containing the

lines :

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade,

lines which precede two of the loveliest and most
dexterously simple stanzas in all literature. But the
gardens are all over his book. The whole of the long
poem " Upon Appleton House " is full of the scent
of flowers, and the fertility of his light fancy was
inexhaustible. Take this description of a soldier's
garden as a model of extreme artificiality which is
not allowed to smother reality :

See how the flowers, as at parade,

Under their colours stand displayed ;

Each regiment in order grows,

That of the tulip, pink, and rose.

But when the vigilant patrol

Of stars walks round about the pole,

Their leaves that to the stalks are curled

Seem to their staves the ensigns furled.

Then in some flower's beloved hut,

Each bee, as sentinel, is shut,

And sleeps so, too, but, if once stirred,

She runs you through, nor asks the word.

His rhythms are as smooth as possible, and he will
go for many lines without inversions, in a sort of
inspired conversational way. And his nature was
not conventional nature. He saw things for himself.
Lines like —

And through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye,

72

ANDREW MARVELL

which are rare in our Caroline poetry, are common
in Marvell. The marks of his period are to be found
in occasional conceits and tropes. Having been
communing with birds and plants, he has grown so
close to them that he says :

Give me but wings as they ; and I
Straight floating on the air shall fly ;
Or turn me but, and you shall see
I was but an inverted tree.

Describing a hospital mansion that has no archi-
tectural grandeur, he ventures :

A stately frontispiece of poor
Adorns without the open door ;
Nor less the rooms within commends
Daily new furniture of friends.

This was of the time, but more frequently Marvell
reminds us of a later time. " The Picture of Little
T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers " has often been
compared to the similar composition of Prior. In
many descriptive passages we are reminded of Gay
at his best. For example :

Oh, what a pleasure 'tis to hedge
My temples here with heavy sedge ;
Abandoning my lazy side,
Stretched as a bank into the tide ;
Or to suspend my sliding foot
On the osier's undermined root,
And in its branches tough to hang
While at my line the fishes twang.

73

BOOKS REVIEWED

There is very little passion in his poetry, but
much affection : no majesty, but much grace.
Innocence and Quiet were his Muses ; looking
both at fields and at people he reaped " the harvest
of a quiet eye." His is pastoral poetry before it
hardens into conventionalism. His nymphs are still
real people, his fishes are not yet finny tribes, nor
his woods groves. When he commends a maiden
there is a sufficient tinge of genuineness in the com-
mendation. And he does it as exquisitely as it can
be done. There is she who —

Counts her beauty to converse
In all the languages as hers ;
Nor yet in those herself employs,
But for the wisdom, not the noise ;
Nor yet that wisdom would affect,
But as 'tis Heaven's dialect.

And she of whom he wrote :

Her soul was on Heaven so bent,
No minute but it came and went ;
That, ready her last debt to pay,
She summed her life up every day ;
Modest as morn, as mid-day bright,
Gentle as evening, cool as night :
'Tis true ; but all too weakly said ;
'Twas more significant, she's dead.

And the sweetest of all is the nymph, not directly
described, who laments her little pale fawn shot by
passing troopers :

74

ANDREW MARVELL

Thou ne'er didst alive
Them any harm, alas ! nor could
Thy death yet do them any good.
I'm sure I never wished them ill ;
Nor do I for all this, nor will.

That is a characteristic passage from the member
for Hull. But he had another aspect : as a satirist
he vied with Oldham, if not with Dryden.

If Marvell, in his serious poems, is a bridge be-
tween the mid-seventeenth century and the age of
Gay and Prior, his satirical poems are also transi-
tional. They are almost all in couplets. The earliest,
choked and rambling and stumbling, are clearly
under the influence of Donne ; the latest, such as
" Nostradamus' Prophecy," anticipate the smooth
closed epigrammatic verses of the Augustans. Some
interest in the details of political history is needed
for a man to read Marvell's Satires all through.
Most of them — privately circulated in MS. during
his lifetime and not " released for publication "
until the Glorious Revolution — were satires upon
the corruption and debauchery of Charles II, his
brother and their satellites at Court and in Par-
liament. The purity of the writer's motives is never
in doubt. The reader never feels, as he must when
perusing the works of many such men, that the
author would rather flagellate anybody than nobody.
He was concerned for the State and, as a monarchist,
he let the King down as lightly as he could. He
seldom went farther, when in the King's person,
than where, in the dialogue between Charles I's
horse at Whitehall and Charles IPs at Woolchurch,
he makes the latter say :

75

BOOKS REVIEWED

De Witt and Cromwell had each a brave soul ;
I freely declare it, I am for old Noll ;
Though his government did a tyrant resemble,
He made England great and his enemies tremble.

But the purity of his motives and the soundness of
his judgment regarding individuals do not make his
satires uniformly readable, and it was only inter-
mittently that he achieved in them the triumphs of
art which will keep even purely topical satire alive.
He who cares to read them, however, will con-
tinually be rewarded by sharp little witticisms and
gleams of warm and gentle humour. In the earliest
of all we find the youth who is deserted by his hired
poet :

Who should commend his mistress now ? Or who
Praise him ? Both difficult indeed to do
With truth.

" The Character of Holland " is a beautiful example
of deliberately farcical hyperbole. " Holland, that
scarce deserves the name of land " gives the key-
note. It is formed by the off-scouring of the coasts
of Briton, which the Dutch have laboriously heaped
together, " Building their watery Babel far more
high To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky ! "

Glad then, as miners that have found the ore,
They, with mad labour fished the land to shore,
And dived as desperately for each piece
Of earth, as if it had been of ambergris,

76

ANDREW MARVELL

Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear away,
Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll,
Transfusing into them their dunghill soul.

Of his later works, the most considerable take the
then popular form of " Instructions to a Painter " :
telling the artist what to paint, the poet described
everything in society and politics to which he
objected. All of these works were anonymous ; but
some of Marvell's controversial prose was acknow-
ledged. His greatest success was with his " Re-
hearsal Transposed," in which he attacked Samuel
Parker, who had claimed for princes the power to
determine their subjects' religion. Marvell's con-
troversial wit was so good that when Roger l'Estrange,
the licenser, wanted to suppress it, the King him-
self (who would forgive anything provided it were
wittily done) told l'Estrange that he must not in-
terfere with it.

Mar veil, the politician, was an incorruptible man
in a corrupt age. He cared for his country ; his
opinions were not coloured by ambition or personal
prejudice. He took his Parliamentary duties so
seriously that he wrote to his constituents daily,
they recognising his solicitude with a regular salary
and frequent presents of barrels of beer. Yet it may
be doubted whether he had much influence on the
course of events, and I cannot think that those who
have commended his abandonment of poetry for
the public service have come anywhere near proving
that he did wisely. They are thinking rather of a
hypothetical than of the real case. Mar veil did not

77

BOOKS REVIEWED

hold high office, and he seldom spoke in the House :
few, probably, took the slightest notice of his ad-
mirable example of incompatibility ; and if, through
his entrance into politics, we lost a few lyric poems
equal to his best, we have, I imagine, lost more than
his contemporaries gained.

Mar veil seems to have been, one may conclude
by saying, as sensible a critic as he was a politician.
He recognised immediately the " might " and
" majesty " of " Paradise Lost," and the nature of
Butler's subject did not prevent him from paying
several handsome tributes to " Hudibras." In every
capacity Marvell had not merely the desire, but the
ability, to be both honest and fair.

78

A DICTIONARY

LEARNING and the desire and capacity for
research do not always go with a zest for life.
Many of our standard works are far drier than they
have any reason to be. Take Webster's " Diction-
ary," for instance. It is beyond all doubt the best
dictionary of its size and scope in existence ; if one
cannot have the great Oxford compilation, Webster
is the next best thing. But Noah Webster and his
successors, for all their magnificent devotion to
their task, have not got much colour into their work.
It was not always so. Cotgrave's definitions were
full of salt, and Dr. Johnson deliberately made his
work at once as accurate and as entertaining as he
could. Modern lexicographers have feared the re-
proach of superficiality and have excluded person-
ality from their work. It is a very great pleasure
therefore to get An Etymological Dictionary of Modern
English from Mr. Ernest Weekley.

One knows from experience that Mr. Weekley
would contrive to avoid unnecessary dullness even
if he were compiling a railway guide ; but that he
would also get the trains right. This dictionary is
not meant to be a substitute for Webster and his
kind, but a complement to them. Mr. Weekley 's
aim is to cover our " literary and colloquial vocabu-
lary, so far as the former is not purely archaic and
the latter not purely technical or local " ; he ex-
cludes most modern scientific terms, and endeavours
to include current slang words, many of which have
been overlooked by his predecessors, and all foreign

79

BOOKS REVIEWED

words which are likely to occur in reading and
educated conversation. He has picked and chosen
his ground, and frankly admits it. But another thing
he admits without shame is that he has done his best
to make his learning palatable.

Mr. Weekley, to some extent in his definitions
and to a large extent in his illustrations, has re-
turned to the Johnson tradition, his affection for
which is displayed in his reproduction of Johnson's
best things. " It has always seemed to the compiler,"
he says, " that a dictionary without quotations is
too unrelieved in its austerity. Those included here
range chronologically from the Venerable Bede to
Mr. Horatio Bottomley." The result is something
which is not merely a dictionary, but an anthology ;
a book, even, which one might without brutality
leave lying about in one's visitors' bedrooms. He
does not, any more than Johnson did, take pains to
secure the presence of at least one facetious remark
on every page, but when the spirit moves him he
puts down a definition which lays bare some small
portion of his intellectual history. This is what he
says, for instance, about " unquestionably " :

In philology usu. in refer, to some hazy recol-
lection of an amateur theory propounded in the
" correspondence column."

He supports this with two quotations from news-
papers. One goes : " ' Odds ' is unquestionably a
corruption of ' orts,' " which appeared in the Daily
Chronicle, and the other is a similarly bold sentence
from the Observer. Like Johnson, he does not

80

A DICTIONARY

disdain to put in clear references to his own experi-
ences. One illustration, he feels, will do as well as
another ; so why not choose illustrations which will
give the reader a little amusement when he strays
upon them ? Hence we get, under " Nietzscheism,"
some extremely uncomplimentary remarks made
by a monthly paper on Professor Weekley himself ;
and under " monger " we find :

Common since 16 cent, in nonce-formations
implying " one who carries on a contemptible
or discreditable ' trade ' or ' traffic ' in what is
denoted by the first element of the compound."
(N.E.D.).

Professor Weekley is well known to our readers

as the most entertaining of living word-mongers.

— {Daily News, November 8, 19 16.)

" Values " is illustrated by only two quotations,
which together make a poignant short story. These
are they :

We apologise to Mr. Wells for using the word
" values " since he dislikes it. — (Times Lit. Supp.,
June 5, 1919.)

The hooligan sees none of the values of the
stranger. — (H. G. Wells, Observer, January 18,
1920.)

and under " conscience " stands the following
quotation :

A conscientious objector, who gave an address
at Knutsford, was fined £4 at Warrington for de-
frauding the railway company. — (Daily Chronicle,
April 24, 1 91 8.)

BOOKS REVIEWED

Throughout he has studied, even when not (so
to speak) parading an arriere-pensee, as he does here,
to make his quotations lively. He has illustrated
" verisimilitude " with the best of all possible
quotations : Pooh-Bah's " Corroborative detail
intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald
and unconvincing narrative." Under " vengeance "
we find an extract from the Observer : " A distin-
guished neutral calls it peace with a vengeance."
" Mixed metaphor " is exemplified with a remark-
able quotation from the Fortnightly for July, 191 9 :

In 1 914 our old, regular army crossed swords
with a great numerical superiority of the cream
of the German host at concert pitch and un-
damaged by war.

This is much better than resuscitating once more
Sir Boyle Roche's rat, which was floating in the air
and should be nipped in the bud. Of all these strik-
ing illustrations, one of the most surprising comes
on the very first page. It illustrates the colloquial
use of " A.i," and runs :

A proper A.i copper-bottom lie.

Would you believe that that comes out of The Times
of 191 7 ? In its solemn context it comes with almost
as much unexpectedness as the quotation which
stands alone in its glory beneath the long disserta-
tion on the word " German " :

He called me a German and other filthy names.
(Defendant in Middlesex Police Court, 1915.)

82

A DICTIONARY

Much knowledge may be acquired by anyone
who studies Professor Weekley's less topical quota-
tions. Looking up " Panjandrum," I learn (I at
least did not know it before) that the celebrated
rigmarole about " What ! No Soap ? " was written
by Foote. Underneath it is Panopticon, a word which
was coined by Bentham " as name for ideal circular
prison in which captives could be always watched."
Whether the great Utilitarian thought that this in-
vention would promote the greatest happiness of the
greatest, or any, number is not recorded ; but Pro-
fessor Weekley's phrase leads one to reflect on the
beautiful elasticity of the word " ideal." I strolled
from this, by a natural progress, to " Utilitarian."
This word apparently has been traced back not to
any philosophic work, but to Gait's " Annals of the
Parish." Under " fountain-pen " we find surpris-
ingly early references, as for instance one in an
advertisement printed in the Morning Chronicle of
June ii, 1788 : "Portable fountain pens to carry
ink and write well, made and sold by E. T. Williams,
No. 13, Strand." " Portmanteau word " was in-
vented by Lewis Carroll : examples given include
" Eurasian," " Bakerloo," " electrocute," " squar-
son," and " gerrymander " : the thing was older
than the name for it. Two other oddities I must
quote. Professor Weekley has been so lucky as to
find in a work of Queen Anne's own time a passage
which shows that the sentence by which Queen
Anne chiefly lives was older than she. Swift, in his
" Polite Conversation," has this dialogue :

" What news, Mr. Neverout ? Why, Madam,
Queen Elizabeth's dead."

83

BOOKS REVIEWED

And under the word, new to myself, " mugger " I
find this chaste entry :

Mugger. Broad-nosed Indian crocodile. Hind.

" magar." Curiously confused in quotation below

with " nuzzer," ceremonial present.

Sir Salar Jung was presented to the Queen
and offered his mugger as a token of allegiance,
which her Majesty touched and restored.

Even Queen Victoria might have been for a moment
at a loss if it really had been a broad-nosed crocodile.
Most of the latest slang is to be found in Pro-
fessor Weekley's book. Many words which became
popular during the war were older than the war.
" Cushy " probably came from the East, and " is
said to be Hind, from Pers. khush, pleasure."
" Wangle," one of the words for the use of which
occasion is most frequently found nowadays, is
stated to have been recorded as printers' slang in
1888 ; and it has been found in a book by Mr. Edgar
Wallace, published two years before the war. " Fed
up," as most people will remember, first became
popular at the time of the South African War, but
Mr. Weekley produces an example older than that
from G. W. Steevens's book, " With Kitchener to
Khartoum." Of another interesting and popular
phrase he observes : " Mod. ' to get it in the neck '
appears to allude to ' where the chicken got the axe.'
A further playful variation is ' where Maggie wore
the beads.' " " Scrap " is far older than most people
would think. A sentence of 1679-80 runs : " They
are in great fear Sir Robt. Payton should bring them

84 "

A DICTIONARY

into ye scrappe." On many other colloquial terms
light is shed. " Thorough-paced," which is now
never used save in a derogatory connection, was
once a quite straightforward word, and men spoke
of " a thorough-paced Christian." " Rhino," as
one of the hundred synonyms for money, is traced
to the seventeenth century, and is " apparently con-
nected by some obscure joke with ' rhinoceros,' as
'rhinocerical,' wealthy, also occurs." "Loafer" is
referred to as a newly-invented Yankee word in
Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast" (1840), and
" bally " is traced back to 1885, where its origins
are matter of speculation. The verb " to bitch,"
used as an equivalent of to bungle or make a mess
of it, is described as "thinned form of 'botch.'"
Under " blimy " one searches in vain for the re-
sults of research, the Professor being content with :
" For Gawblimy, God blind me ; cf. swop me
bob." Of modern terms of derision, " cad " is said
to have an Oxford origin, and " bounder " and
" rotter " to have started on their careers from
Cambridge. In my time their equivalent at the latter
University was usually " tout," now perhaps fallen
into disuse, and absent (in this sense) from Pro-
fessor Weekley's Dictionary.

I do not affect to have read this book right
through, though its charms have beguiled me into
reading twenty times more of it than the minimum
amount which would have made me capable of
writing a thoroughly deceptive review. But I have
noticed several omissions which can scarcely have
been deliberate. No man making a particular effort
to embody the whole of contemporary slang should

85

BOOKS REVIEWED

have overlooked the verb " to jaw " with its school-
boy derivative, now respectably established, " pi-
jaw." Professor Weekley gives " wind up," but
misses " cold feet," and his sporting vocabulary
does not include the common cricketing term
" rabbit." Had he carried his researches into the
more adventurous spheres of finance he might have
heard the term " put the hooks into," and also
" cough up," neither of which he records. How-
ever, most of the terms by which I have tested him
are here, and he seems to have made very few errors
which can be detected by a non-philologist. But he
has, I think, gone badly off the rails (there is another
metaphorical usage which he has missed) in dealing
with the word " profiteer." He thinks it a war-word
and ascribes to it the definite date 191 5. But it was
current in the Labour movement for years before
the war, and I fancy that a search of the files of the
New Age might lead him to its origin.

86

QUEEN VICTORIA

WHAT, could she read his book, would
Queen Victoria say of Mr. Lytton Strachey ?
She would certainly think him a monster. She might
say that, like the pioneers of " Women's Rights,"
he deserved " a whipping " ; she might be tempted
to use phrases such as she used about the Russians ;
" It makes the Queen's blood boil ! Oh, if the Queen
were a man, she would like to go and give those
Russians, whose word one cannot believe, a beat-
ing." But her judgments of strangers were frequently
hasty ; she was tempted to be deceived by surface
appearances : the slightest sign of a divagation from
her own opinion was liable to draw from her a
passionate demand for hostilities. And if she, or
anyone else, were deceived by appearances into
thinking Mr. Strachey's book anything but a tribute,
a great mistake would be made.

It was observed when Mr. Strachey wrote his
last book that he was, although a rather sceptical
and studiously ironical writer, a man anxious to be
just and capable of warm sympathy with certain
kinds of character. He has little use for the ordi-
nary humdrum man. He regards the appellation
" Christian gentleman " as almost equivalent to a
term of reproach ; when he encounters the com-
mon, cautious, dutiful person he shoots one con-
temptuous bullet at him and leaves him for dead.
But he can admire : he admired, within limits,
General Gordon, Cardinal Newman, and Florence
Nightingale. He likes, understands, and respects

87

BOOKS REVIEWED

adventurousness, recklessness, passionate sincerity
in any form, even discontent, because it does not
go with smugness ; and by the same token he is
attracted by, and in effect extols, Queen Victoria.
" It was," he says, " her sincerity which gave her
at once her impressiveness, her charm, and her
absurdity."

In 300 pages he gives a picture of her whole life ;
as girl (so guarded that she was never left alone in a
room with a single person), as young monarch
(coming like " the spring " after her debauched
uncles), as happily married woman, as cloistered
and laborious widow, and as the aged Empress who
was almost a legendary figure whilst she was still
alive, and enjoyed an Indian summer of mellow
glory. Throughout he is never — he never would be
— tempted to sentimentalise. He attributes to her
nothing that she does not possess. He never dis-
guises the fact that her speech was usually emotional
gush, that she had little intellect, that her inter-
ferences in public affairs were uninformed, and might
have been disastrous. He is, in opinion, as opposed
to Queen Victoria as he could be ; she had probably
not a notion about this world or the next, the throne,
the hearth, or the altar, which he shares. But she
was honest and she was fiery ; she knew what she
wanted and fought for what she wanted ; she slaved
at what she conceived to be her duty, and she had
a great capacity for suffering ; she loved life and
hated dying ; and her biographer cannot but be
drawn to her. She was a powerful, a puzzling, and
(whatever her pride and egoism) an attractive and
affectionate woman. She is displayed as such here,

QUEEN VICTORIA

but she would probably fly off at a tangent before
discovering it. She had an acute nostril for lese-
majesti.

But here she is. Most of the materials are the old
ones. Mr. Strachey has availed himself of a certain
amount of private information, and he has seen the
unpublished parts of Greville — which, by the way,
might just as well be published at this date. But
these new sources are comparatively unimportant.
Everything depends on the perceptions and the art
of the biographer. With all the old materials Mr.
Strachey has given us a new picture of the Queen,
and a new and (since he discovered a strain of dis-
satisfaction and melancholy in him) sympathetic
portrait of Prince Albert.

The volume is an important addition to historical
literature. The age appears as a background to the
two central figures ; it is a century seen through a
diminishing glass. And how clearly and amusingly
seen ! Nobody who read " Eminent Victorians "
will need to be told that Mr. Strachey's book is
delightful reading. He has learnt his art, not from
the historians and biographers, but from the artists.
We are conscious, though not disagreeably con-
scious, throughout that he is taking his job seriously
from an aesthetic, as well as from a historical, point
of view ; that he is, in a general way, solicitous
about proportion and in detail careful to select the
significant episode and the significant characteristic
and to order his words in the most telling way. There
is no such short biography in English ; thinking of
its analogues, one finds oneself inevitably comparing
it not with records of fact, but with fictions. He is

89

BOOKS REVIEWED

really one of the post- Flaubert novelists. His work
is as uniform, as coherent, as economical as the best
short stories of Maupassant and Tchekov. Such
closeness and evenness of texture, such clarity and
terseness of phrase, can be found nowhere in bio-
graphy. The book recalls rather such novels as
Couperus's " Old People and Things that Pass " —
though I am far from suggesting that Queen Victoria
and her Consort bore any resemblance to the central
characters of that very alarming study. And Mr.
Strachey, writing a short and sparsely-documented
book, in which years are often skimmed in a sen-
tence, produces an effect of completeness which is
seldom produced by the two-volume monuments
of the last generation. Reflecting on the old Queen's
death at Osborne he says :

Perhaps her fading mind called up once more
the shadows of the past to float before it, and re-
traced, for the last time, the vanished visions of
that long history — passing back and back, through
the cloud of years, to older and ever older memo-
ries—to the spring woods at Osborne, so full
of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield— to Lord
Palmerston's queer clothes and high demeanour,
and Albert's face under the green lamp, and
Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his
blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming
in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at
Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm-trees,
and the Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees
in the dawn, and the old King's turkey-cock
ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold's soft voice at

90

QUEEN VICTORIA

Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her
mother's feathers sweeping down towards her,
and a great old repeater- watch of her father's in
its tortoiseshell case, and a yellow rug, and some
friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the
trees and the grass at Kensington.

It is a long catalogue of the typical incidents of a
long life. The point is that when they are thus drifted
in series before us, we are already familiar with
them all. In three hundred pages a whole century
has been indicated ; and, turning back to a scene
which one assumes must have occupied a chapter,
one finds it suggested in a brief parenthesis.

Mr. Strachey's craft and assiduity have displayed
before us the long and crowded life of his heroine,
a succession of social changes, the crumbling of one
era after another, and a swarm of minor characters.
In retrospect one finds that his gift of selection has
imprinted very many minor portraits on the memory.
There are the seven sons of George III : the Regent
with his stomach released from his stays, and the
Duke of Kent with his precision and his debts, and
King William, " A bursting, bubbling old gentle-
man, with quarter-deck gestures, round rolling eyes,
and a head like a pineapple," who went redder than
usual when the King of the Belgians insisted on
drinking water at his table. There is dear, absent-
minded, wise, flippant old Lord Melbourne, " the
autumn rose " of the eighteenth century, of whom
Greville said that he was " a man with a capacity for
loving without having anything in the world to
love." There is the old Duke, with his shrewd eyes,

91

BOOKS REVIEWED

his nose, and his wry smile, always called in at an
emergency and summing up any position in a laconic
sentence. There is Lord Palmerston, without prin-
ciple, but holding that one really couldn't think of
the Neapolitan prisons without getting angry ;
volatile and wilful : turning up at Osborne just after
the Consort's death " in the pink of health, brisk,
with his whiskers freshly dyed, and dressed in a
brown overcoat, light grey trousers, green gloves,
and blue studs." There is Gladstone, just glimpsed
but truly seen ; and Napoleon III, whose gipsyish-
ness fascinated the Queen ; and Disraeli, actor in
his own play, who laid the flattery on with a trowel,
and received favours never bestowed on another
subject. A few of these minor characters are less
clear than others : the Duchess of Kent, Lehzen,
and the conscientious Stockmar, who advised that
the Prince of Wales should be " brought up in the
creed of the Church of England " without being
led to believe in " the supernatural doctrines of
Christianity." But these are figures which should
properly be less dim than those others : they are the
mysterious outskirts. Generally speaking, the im-
pression made is the impression of a consummately
written short novel : each figure displayed in pro-
portion to its importance in the story, each incident
elaborated according to the degree and weight of
its relevance to the main theme.

And Mr. Strachey's writing is almost consistently
excellent. He wastes no words. He has, as has been
remarked, his outlook ; and his irony is often crystal-
lised in a sentence, even in a sentence unspoken.
" And fortunately, if the world would not understand ,

92

QUEEN VICTORIA

there were faithful friends who did. There
was Lord Granville, and there was ' kind Mr.
Theodore Martin'"; a chapter of criticism is im-
plicit in the phrase. Describing the aptness of the
design of the Albert Memorial, which was modelled
on a form of shrine, he says, with brutal reticence,
that the architect's " idea was particularly appro-
priate, since it chanced that a similar conception,
though in the reverse order of magnitude, had
occurred to the Prince himself, who had designed
and executed several silver cruet-stands upon the
same model." The section on the Crimean War
begins with the uncannily adequate statement : " The
Crimean War brought new experiences, and most
of them were pleasant ones." Mr. Strachey never
sets up pointers to his jokes : he merely describes
a thing in very simple, but the right, words to get
his effects. We flow smoothly on from some merely
explanatory passage into sentences, equally matter-
of-fact on the surface, like these :

Upon the interior decorations Albert and
Victoria lavished all their care. The walls and the
floors were of pitch-pine, and covered with
specially manufactured tartans. The Balmoral
tartan, in red and grey, designed by the Prince,
and the Victorian tartan, with a white stripe,
designed by the Queen, were to be seen in every
room : there were tartan curtains, and tartan
chair-covers, and even tartan linoleums. Occasion-
ally the Royal Stuart tartan appeared, for Her
Majesty always maintained that she was an ardent
Jacobite. Water-colour sketches by Victoria hung

93

BOOKS REVIEWED

upon the walls, together with innumerable stags'
antlers, and the head of a boar which had been
shot by Albert in Germany. In an alcove in the
hall stood a life-sized statue of Albert in High-
land dress.

The quotations are as economically, as aptly, and
as gravely introduced ; for instance, this, which
stands without comment : " We were always in the
habit of conversing with the Highlanders — with
whom one comes so much in contact in the High-
lands." Similarly, what it is misleading to call the
purple passages grow out of the context : they are
adequate, sometimes noble, but never obtruded.
Everything is interwoven, and in tone nothing stands
out. Mr. Strachey has really digested everything
he has taken in.

Victoria and Albert and their age are here recorded
as one man sees them. The picture cannot be final
or complete ; but it does present, and very clearly,
one aspect of the truth. Mr. Strachey has naturally
selected his facts in accordance with his tempera-
ment ; but he has not cheated, as a man making a
comic picture must be strongly tempted to do. And
whatever reservations and qualifications he may
have omitted, however others may differ from him
in the assessment of what people now call " relative
values," it is indisputable that so far as he goes he
is accurate, and that his portrait of his central figure
must, in its essentials, stand.

94

HENLEY

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY, whose col-
lected works now appear, was born at
Gloucester in 1849, and educated there. He was a
man of large frame, but illness attacked him, and in
1873 he went to Edinburgh to seek the aid of Lister.
For two years he was in hospital there, during which
period he first met Stevenson, and conceived his
" In Hospital " poems. Discharged as a permanent
cripple and invalid, he edited London (1877-8),
The Magazine of Art (1882-6), the Scots {National)
Observer (1883-93), an^ tne New Review (1893-8).
He published many volumes of verse and criticism,
and died in 1903 after celebrating the South African
War, and causing considerable disturbance by a too
drastic criticism of his dead friend Stevenson.

Henley, were he alive to-day, would be only
seventy-two, but his reputation has already sustained
strange vicissitudes. During his life-time he was
known chiefly as a brilliant editor who had also the
gift of forcible polemic writing and a peculiar power
of attracting the affection and service of talented
men. He certainly was a great editor. He thought,
perhaps, too exclusively of what he was publishing
and too little of the steps which might be taken to
induce people to read it ; the consequence being
that his contributors were the kernel of his public
and all his papers were short-lived. But he knew a
man of force when he met him, and most of the
writers of his time, from Stevenson to Kipling, and
from Kipling to Yeats, either established or enhanced

95

BOOKS REVIEWED

their reputations in the pages which he edited.
But an editor's reputation is a brief one. He may
perform great services to literature in general and
to particular authors, but no sooner has his last
number appeared than his authors sail off on their
own adventures, and his enterprise becomes a
memory fading daily. No sooner had Henley died
than the National Observer became a legend, to
which ageing journalists referred with sentimental
regret. The young noted the regret and were prepared
to take the merit of the performance for granted ;
they did not propose to go to the British Museum
files in order to discover whether or not Henley
was a great editor. That fame dwindled ; Henley
became a " poet of the 'nineties," represented
chiefly in anthologies by an apostrophe to England
and " Out of the Night that covers me." Middle-
aged gentlemen might still be met who were young
men with Henley and talked of him as one who
fascinated and permanently influenced them. But
what had he left ? Certain verses. He was one of the
lesser poets of the later Victorian age ; an energetic
writer of verse who very occasionally rose to an
almost accidental perfection. Yet it now seems
probable that the poet in Henley will ultimately
seem not the most important thing about him. If
his name lives it will probably live as a critic ; and
it may be that even yet some biographer may be
tempted to investigate and immortalise him as a man.
A powerful and passionate personality, an en-
thusiasm for life and for literature, honesty, industry
and faith are not in themselves sufficient to con-
stitute a great, or even a good, poet. Henley had all

96

HENLEY

those attributes. We do not need the assertions of
his friends to convince us that he cared about letters,
took a devouring interest in men, individual and in
the mass, bore pain with gay courage, loved, hated,
and jested with vigour and gusto. All that can be
seen in his writings ; as also that tendency to shout
and to bully which so impressed his disciples, and
disseminated so widely the impression of his per-
sonality. All these things may be seen in his works,
but they are seen less purely in his poetry than else-
where, and he lacked certain qualities which are
essential in verse if it is to make a deep or a lasting
appeal. Let it be admitted that now and then he
" pulled it off." But, generally speaking, he was,
when writing poetry, neither natural enough nor
careful enough. The horse-sense that marked much
of his criticism deserted him. He dispelled all un-
certainties in himself by loud vociferation. He lacked
the confidence to employ simple language ; he
attempted to carry the fort by storm and a plenitude
of great bombastic adjectives ; he could not state
precisely what he felt in language just adequate. It
was all very well, when he was sitting on his sofa,
beard bristling, hands swinging, eyes flashing, to
hammer away at his audience with his dogmas and
his denunciations. But a worked-up excitement is
no good in poetry; nor is the thin and padded
language of rapid dictation. Much of Henley's poetry
is precisely like dictated poetry. In a manner he
meant what he said. But he could not reflect and
labour until he had got accuracy. He must cover
the ground quickly. He must bang his notions into
the listener's head.

97 H

BOOKS REVIEWED

The result often was great expanses of cacophonous
magniloquence that tire the ear and dazzle the eye.
Is he describing ? We get :

Out of the poisonous East,

Over a continent of blight,

Like a maleficent Influence released

From the most squalid cellarage of hell,

The Wind-Fiend, the abominable —

The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and

light-
Comes slouching, sullen and obscure,
Hard on the skirts of the embittered night ;
And in a cloud unclean
Of excremental humours, roused to strife
By the operation of some ruinous change,
Wherever his evil mandate rear and range,
Into a dire intensity of life,
A craftsman at his bench, he settles down
To the grim job of throttling London town.

Or is he exhorting, preaching his gospel of action ?
Then we get (the starting-point being Lord North-
cliffe's, then Mr. Alfred Harmsworth's, motor-car):

Thus the Mercedes
Comes, O she comes,
This astonishing device,
This amazing Mercedes,
With Speed-
Speed in the Fear of the Lord.
So in the eye of the Lord,
Under the Feet of the Lord,

98

HENLEY

Out of the measureless

Goodness and grace

In the Hand of the Lord.

Speed !

Speed on the Knees.

Speed in the Laugh,

Speed by the Gift,

Speed in the Trust of the Lord —

Speed.

It was meant. He believed. But not all the recapitu-
lations carry it home, nor all the copious capital
letters. His instrument was a coarse one, and his
hands, though strong, not delicate. He had too little
care about exactitude, either of meaning or of ex-
pression ; and too little ear. If his more ambitious
and robustious experiments in unrhymed verse
show this, so also do most of his attempts at quieter
song. The rhetorician becomes the jingler. The
excited apostle of vague but tremendous forces, the
booming chanter of " solemn ancientries " and
" plangent comforters " and a thousand other rather
too cumbersome things becomes a thin Heine, sing-
ing of dreams and roses with just too little com-
pression and just too little music. We may explain
away much in him and his verse on the ground of
his lifelong pain. He, by temperament and physique
a man of action, compelled to inaction by his mala-
dies, naturally tended to glorify the Paradise from
which he had been shut out, to celebrate the grim
glories of war and adventure, speed and the sword,
to express himself through batterings and swirlings
of speech since his limbs would not do their work.

99

BOOKS REVIEWED

But he was not an artist in verse even when these
tendencies were not operating. Except in a few
places, merit is to be found in his poetry only when
he is describing, with the vividness of good journal-
ism, something he has seen, and, above all, when
he is painting a portrait. The nurses, the doctors,
the patients, in his Edinburgh hospital and the
strange gallery of his London types : these remain
in one's memory when the rest of his metrical writ-
ing has faded away. He had the eye of a Daumier
or of a Phil May for the character in a face or a gar-
ment ; and he need not mention Rembrandt to
assure us that the lighting of his hospital scenes was
done by one who appreciated painting. His des-
criptions, moreover, are not merely external ; his
characters are grasped inwardly, and his celebrated
sonnet summary of Stevenson is only one out of
several as good.

Yet most of these things are little more than
rhymed — or, indeed, unrhymed ! — prose. Little
sensuous appeal is made to the ear ; the best word
is not usually hunted for if the second best will
roughly convey the idea ; that " spherical " form
which is a quality of good poems is usually missing ;
what we get is a series of energetic, interesting, and
frequently picturesque statements. Henley's verse
is commonly no more than the journalism of an
unusual man ; he is at his best when he knows he
is writing journalism. Some of the critical work
now reprinted is careful and exhaustive ; the essay
on Burns is deservedly famous. But much of it was
casual, brief, hurried work ; and it is surprisingly
good. Henley's prose was not always devoid of

ioo

HENLEY

affectations. He still would sometimes throw in an
unnecessarily resounding or archaic word ; he liked
parading his carefully-acquired knowledge of thieves'
slang ; he favoured unnecessary archaisms, such as
the use of " 'tis " for "it is." And the things he
says are still sometimes coloured too much by his
propagandist zeal : he bellows his revivalist doctrine
and looks menacingly round, prepared to thump
you on the head if you do not agree. But in a general
way he is far more natural in prose, and far more
subtle. His taste was good, his outlook was sane,
his intellect (when he would allow it) operated subtly,
he could discriminate even with his heroes, and his
heroes were invariably men. His reading was very
wide ; and his power, here, of compression was so
great that he could say many valuable and pene-
trating things, even in an article of a thousand words,
on one of the world's great masters. In the more
miscellaneous of these volumes there are very short
papers on Dickens and Rabelais, Gay, Congreve,
Fielding and Tolstoi, Richardson, Hood, Herrick
and Hugo ; and every one of them, though a mere
note, adds to one's information and assists one's
insight. And there is a beauty on Dumas. For there
Henley found an author who dreamed such men as
he would like to have been. His challenge to " what-
ever gods there be " may have been a little bom-
bastic, not to say tautologous ; it may have savoured
a little of the whistle on a dark night to keep one's
spirits up and one's eyes from wandering into the
shadows. But he was a joyful and a gallant man. In
a generation which toyed with despair and disease
he would have none of either ; and his instinct for

IOI

BOOKS REVIEWED

character and for art was such that he made very
few mistakes in judgment. The second and the fourth
volumes of this edition are a most valuable contri-
bution to literary history ; and they are amongst
the most readable " books about books " that our
age has produced.

The new edition is agreeable in appearance. The
first volume includes several poems not previously
reprinted from the papers in which they originally
appeared. The plays which Henley wrote in collabo-
ration with Stevenson are here ; they are vigorous,
brisk, and vivid : the sort of plays that Mr. John
Buchan might, but unfortunately does not, write.
And it was a good idea to include with Henley's
works the anthology he made, " Lyra Heroica." He
is expressing himself here in the selection of poems
by other men, and his spirit is better manifested in
their poems than in his own. There is scarcely a
thing in the book which is not at once gallant,
chivalrous, and humane. There are aspects of life
not represented in it and human needs which it
does not satisfy. But so far as it goes it reflects as
much credit on his character as it does on his taste
and as much credit on his taste as it does on his
scholarship. Every boy ought to be given it, and no
man would be the worse for having it ; especially in
a period like this, when the need for preserving one's
ideals, one's cheerfulness, and one's determination
to make the most of life under the shadow of death
is more imperative than ever. I may add, just to
provide a pleasing anti-climax, that a biographical
introduction and a few notes would have been
welcome in this edition.

102

A CRITIC

JULES LEMAITRE, who died during the war,
was amongst the first French writers of his
time. But though he wrote stories, and stories of
great charm, he was in the first instance a critic,
not a professional novelist. The result is that during
his lifetime he was in England almost completely
unknown. Anatole France had been read here for a
generation before a single book by the contemporary
who was, in mind and manner, nearest to him had
been translated. Mr. Evans has now, however,
followed up his translation of Serenus with an ad-
mirable version of some of the essays in the eight
volumes of Lemaitre's " Les Contemporains."

Mr. Evans has made his selection wisely. He has
chosen essays on subjects not too strange to the
larger cultivated public. Anatole France, Bourget,
Maupassant, Zola, Renan, Loti, Taine, George
Sand, Bernhardt, de Sevigne, Joubert, Virgil, Thomas
a Kempis : there is not one of these on whom a
number of essays by Englishmen could not be
found ; even Joubert has had his meed.

These papers, some of them very short, are as
illuminating and delightful as any literary essays
ever written. Lemaitre was not primarily a pro-
pagandist of good but neglected literature, he was
not (like Leigh Hunt) a standard-bearer of the
promising young, and he was not (like Matthew
Arnold) very concerned with moral causes. He took
his subjects where he found them, often from among
the acknowledged great. Anything that aroused his

103

BOOKS REVIEWED

curiosity did ; how did he react to " Boule-de-Suif,"
the " Manage de Loti," or " Germinal " ; what
things in them attracted, amused, moved, or re-
pelled him ? That was what concerned him ; that
and the elegant transmission of his impressions. He
was avowedly preoccupied with description rather
than with judgment ; but the personality which
entered into his descriptions was a very peculiar
one, whimsical and tender, very acute of percep-
tion, masking a good deal of hankering under an
ironic exterior. He was eminently, in his scepticism,
a creature of his time ; but he was far more un-
comfortable with it. Even when celebrating the
powers and reflecting the doubts of his contempo-
raries he often betrayed an implicit dislike of them.
Almost every reference to " this age " (i.e., the last
age) : to its " stoic pessimism," its " ironical resig-
nation," its " strange mania for making out the
world very ugly and very brutal," reflects a regret
which he did not care to elaborate. He salutes Zola
as " an epic poet," but he did not end with the phrase
" a pessimist epic of human animalism " without
letting the reader see that he was more uncomfort-
able about it than Zola was. This clash of elements
in him made him unique among the critics of his
time ; he was of the company of Anatole France,
but his secret soul was with Joan of Arc. His writing
is always delicious ; natural, yet very precise, full
of odd turns, quiet, vivid, and admirably decked
with quotations. In retrospect it may be seen that
he was almost always right. . . .

" Oh, no," says Lemaitre, " don't say I am right,
don't indeed ! " In his introduction, Mr. Evans

104

A CRITIC

gives an account of Lemaitre's and Anatole France's
controversy with Brunetiere as to the nature and
objects of criticism. " To Brunetiere 's almost
pathetic assertions that criticism to be of any value
must be ' objective ' ; that the difference between
a good work of art and a bad one could only be deter-
mined by reason and comparison, and that the critic
must go by fixed standards, Anatole France replied
by denying the possibility of ' objective ' criticism,
smiling at reason, and flouting the fixity of any such
critical standards." Lemaitre said that his own
method was simply to define and explain the im-
pressions that he received from works of art :

When the impressionist critic has thus ex-
pounded his doctrine of universal relativity and
has explained that, as he is imprisoned in his own
personality, there is no standard to which he may
refer his own opinions or those of others, he may
be asked to state what then is the value of criti-
cism. To this M. Lemaitre replies that to become
acquainted with the sensations aroused in another
personality by reading a book that pleases is to
prolong and intensify our own sensations.

" I assure you," said Lemaitre, "it is possible for
me, as for other people, to judge on principles and
not on impressions. Only if I did so I should not be
sincere. I should say things of which I should not
be sure, whilst I am sure of my impressions." But
is there nothing more that a critic can do unless he
care to erect a body of artificial laws to which liter-
ature must conform, and insists that the unities

I05

BOOKS REVIEWED

must be preserved, " correctness " maintained,
morality respected, immorality eschewed, and so
forth ? Has he no alternative ? Must he choose be-
tween a renunciation of judgment and the claim to
possess an infallible yard-measure of principle ?

Few men live thoroughly up to their theories,
and behind Jules Lemaitre's essays one can fre-
quently trace the conviction that he is giving some-
thing more than a personal impression worth no
more than any other personal impression. But the
sceptical theory simply amounts to this : what is
one man's meat is another man's poison, and
everything in the world may be both meat and
poison. " I think X is good, you think it is bad ; we
cancel out." The position is certainly difficult to
attack. But it does rather call to mind the flushed
Freshman who has made his first stumble over the
frontier of philosophy and takes up every casual
assertion of knowledge with " How do you know
you know anything ? " We may grant that we are
in the dark about absolutes, and it is difficult to
dispute about tastes. We may realise how standards
change and how intelligent men differ. But a critic
may, if he choose, still endeavour to make, without
dishonesty, pronouncements which are something
more than the records of personal impressions and
judgments which are more than confessions of taste.
Let us rule out the question of absolute validity ;
the fact remains that mankind has been agreed in
designating as the best literature that which has
retained, humanly speaking, a permanent hold upon
readers. It may quite easily be admitted that works
with many great qualities may die young ; perhaps

106

A CRITIC

they serve an immediate purpose, strongly move a
large body of contemporaries, but are crowded with
ossifying topical references. It may be admitted,
again, that to millions of people Mrs. Henry Wood
was a greater writer than Mr. Meredith. Put in all
the reservations. The fact remains that in the world
in which critics live and for which they chiefly write
the prime interest of a work of art lies in its chances
of " lasting." Yes ; it may be taking the credit and
letting the cash go. Also, as Anatole France is so
often at pains to remark, the world will some day
grow cold, and Homer and Mr. Garvice will lie in
the same bed.

The source of our preoccupation here is as dark
as everything else about us. But, under that mys-
terious and menacing cope we must have our
toys, and we may amuse ourselves with admiring
" immortal " literature as well as in any other way,
and it is possible, without presumption and without
dreaming of reaching infallible " principles," to
escape to some extent the completely anarchistic
and personal attitude of Jules Lemaitre. A critic
may, not too sternly, not with any hope of arriving
at certainty, but with good hope of discovering
some elements of truth and evolving " tests " of at
least provisional value, regard literature from an
historical and scientific point of view. Every reviewer
who says " I do not think this book will last " is
unconsciously referring to an opinion formed as a
result of his study, however fragmentary that may
have been, of the works of the past which actually
have " lasted." Man's nature may change : the
amoeba was and the superman may be : and we feel

107

BOOKS REVIEWED

little kinship with either. But if our historical epoch
be isolated we may assemble literary facts and make
deductions from them, just as any other kind of
scientist does with facts of another kind. We may
find that in a particular category of " lasting " works
of art one or two nameable elements have always
been present ; their absence in something profess-
ing to be a candidate for their company gives one
ground for a judgment, if not for a judgment for
which we can (or need) claim infallibility. There is,
for instance, something more than a personal im-
pression that " Dada poetry " (an extreme example)
will not " live." Casually we all make this sort of
judgment, with more or less of undeliberate in-
vestigation behind it. It might be made far more
systematically ; works admitted to retain an active
life after a hundred, or five hundred, years, may be
set apart, sorted, analysed ; and most interesting
and valuable results may flow from such a study,
powerful weapons given to critics who do feel a
little more need for dogmatising than was felt by
M. Lemaitre. . . .

All the same, I think we can, after all, leave it to
the Germans to do the job thoroughly.

108

MR. GOSSE'S CRITICISMS

MR. GOSSE'S Books on the Table is com-
posed of weekly reviews contributed to a
Sunday newspaper. It is as delightful and illumin-
ating as any in the long series of its predecessors.
Let us consider what this means.

When I had finished the book I sat down to reflect
upon the limitations under which Mr. Gosse must
work ; to imagine what it must be like to write a
weekly column and a half about literature, with
especial reference to new books. I think I have some
dim apprehension of the difficulties of doing the
work well at all, and especially of doing it in such a
manner that one's articles shall be not merely read-
able after breakfast, when the newspaper reader has
exhausted the political, the sporting and (possibly)
the financial pages, but that they shall still have some
savour, some appearance of value, when they are
reprinted in book form. In the first place there must
be (as I conjecture) the difficulty of a subject. Some-
times the subject is ready-made, as when a book of
the quality of Mr. Gosse's own comes out, or some
work like Mr. Lytton Strachey's, which the critic
could not escape even if he would. But often enough
a week must go by which sees the production of no
book of surpassing, or even tolerable merit, and no
book concerning any " literary figure " whose per-
sonality and powers provoke enthusiasm and
curiosity. Beyond this difficulty there are the diffi-
culties of Time and Space. On some prearranged
day of the week, I suppose, a man in Mr. Gosse's

109

BOOKS REVIEWED

position is expected to deliver his " copy." " Rarely,
rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight " is a com-
plaint which has been echoed by all literary artists,
but it would be precious little use saying it to an
editor or a printer, especially over the telephone.
The calendar must be obeyed, and I daresay that
there are times when the day of delivery seems to
recur with a malignant rapidity. And when the im-
pulse does come it is at least conceivable that the
prearranged amount of space may often seem very
like a strait- waistcoat. Take the instance of a con-
temporary not yet sufficiently known to the public ;
there must often be in the critic's mind an uncer-
tainty as to whether to suppress necessary quotations
from his author or comment by himself which he
cannot but feel to be almost equally indispensable.
All these suppositions, as I say, arose in mind when
I contemplated Mr. Gosse's book. And I cannot
but marvel that papers which, when I read them
first, seemed to me excellent, and often very topical,
journalistic columns should read now as though
they had been composed at leisure and with a single
eye to publication in a permanent form. Mr. Gosse
has not split the difference between reviewing and
criticism, journalism and literature ; he has abol-
ished it.

It would be an impertinence at this time to call
attention to the range of Mr. Gosse's erudition. In
this volume he is equally at his ease with Ausonius
and Mrs. Asquith, Guevara, Goethe, Mr. de la
Mare, and Miss Daisy Ashford, and the index of
persons and books to whom and which he makes
reference fills ten closely-printed pages. Nevertheless

no

MR. GOSSE'S CRITICISMS

he has no trace of that maddening habit — too
common amongst people who know anything at
all — of dragging in scraps of learning merely for
the sake of showing that he possesses them. Learn-
ing is for use and for ornament, not for parrot-like
repetition on parade, and the profoundest of literary
critics have worn their knowledge most lightly. And
when I say knowledge I do not mean that — although
in some departments he is a specialist — Mr. Gosse
knows more than any man living about Shakespeare's
commas or the manuscripts of Dante. He is a scholar;
but he is not primarily a scholar : he is a critic to
whom the researches of scholars are useful material
towards the formation of judgments on life and art ;
he is a bibliographer and collector who does not take
his pursuits with undue seriousness. He has spent a
good deal of his life with an open book before him,
but he has never lost sight of the relation between
books and life.

This volume is naturally for the most part critical.
Possibly the most signal of Mr. Gosse 's gifts is his
power of analysing the persons and describing the
events that he has seen, but the portraits and the
reminiscences in this volume are only incidental.
Half his contents would be well described by his
old title of " Gossip in a Library," half derives
from a consideration of poems, essays, and " Lives "
produced in our own time. Not novels. Mr. Gosse
obstinately refuses to yield to the common delusion
that the novel is necessarily the most important
product of contemporary art, merely because the
circulating libraries are chiefly stocked with it. He
will deal with such novels as are really worth his

in

BOOKS REVIEWED

attention ; the mere " novel of the week " he looks
at with a blank stare. Literature in his hands never
loses its dignity ; but it must be confessed that
litterateurs sometimes lose theirs. For he belongs to
a race of critics commoner in France than here. He
never abandons himself to an author. He does not
look down on the tribes of men ; he stands a little
apart and examines them with shrewd and level
eyes. And even the greatest, thus considered by a
man who is not, however exquisite his aesthetic
appreciations, blinded by his ecstasies, are liable
to display certain asinine attributes. It is Mr. Gosse's
distinction that he can see and, for our delectation,
transcribe these without the slightest forgetfulness
of his main business, or the least risk of lampooning.
The whole time he knows perfectly what he is
doing. The coolness of Mr. Gosse's judgment is
reflected in the quality of his prose. It is quiet, even,
very compact, full of brief felicities of phrase, and
it has an agreeable tinge of acidity. He says in his
paper on Lady Ritchie that " the dish of banana
fritters is delicious, but too sweet ; a dash of lemon
would vastly improve it." His own banana fritters
never lack the dash, but they are never drowned
with the flavouring. No one could convey condem-
nation or ridicule in fewer or more temperate words ;
he can knock a man down with a debonair touch.
" It is," he says of one book, " felicitous in expres-
sion, and chivalrous in sentiment, but it does not
make any strong impact on the attention." Here, as
in the confection of certain cordials, the sugar has
been merely rubbed against the outside skin of the
lemon. How agreeably he says that " Villon was a

112

MR. GOSSE'S CRITICISMS

very great poet ; he was also a rogue and a robber,
who committed murder too often for the occurrence
to be an accident," and that " In 1861 Clough read
' Mari Magno ' to Tennyson, and cried like a child
over it. We are not told whether Tennyson wept,"
and that " People who argue that Shakespeare can-
not have existed because we know so little about his
life, will be pained to observe that we know still less
about Massinger's." Of M. Claudel, he remarks
that " His new piece is entitled ' Le Pere Humilie,'
but if I am asked why, it is I who am humiliated,
for I have not the least idea," and of a venerable
but archaistic English writer that " Mr. Doughty
is very fond of ' derne ' ; his pilgrims are all sud-
denly dasht on a derne cliff. It sounds like a mild
American expletive." Every essay he writes is
sprinkled with comments like these, which produce
in the reader a silent grin of enjoyment. He scorns
phrase-making, but there is no living writer whose
phrases are more adequate or more flavoured with
personality. And this extends to his imagery. What-
ever the tenour of his argument, he is liable to drop
into an easy and compact metaphor, grotesque or
charming, with the right imaginative touch. He
speaks of two forgotten novels as " those faded
romances whose very names now sound dim and
faint, like the tunes of a hurdy-gurdy heard in the
evening three streets off." Of the romantic gener-
ation of critics he says that " Those who marched
with flags to fling themselves at the feet of Webster
merely touched their sombreros lightly as they
hurried past the figure of Massinger," and he sums
up the whole saintly failure of Clough when he

113 I

BOOKS REVIEWED

remarks that " he sat counting the pulse of his own
conscience until he heard no other sound." And how
better could he have conveyed the strange thrills
which the biblipohile would feel in the presence of
certain rare pamphlets than by this brief comparison :
" Anyone casually lighting upon any of these will
be like a sportsman who penetrates the brushwood
of New Zealand and stalks a living moa."

These essays are delightful for their information,
for their criticisms, for the biographical and auto-
biographical peeps into the past which Mr. Gosse
so often allows himself, and, as I have said, for the
charm and pungency of their detail. But their merits
of style go beyond their separate sentences. They
generally have form, a considered outline, effective
beginnings and effective endings. And at intervals
Mr. Gosse rises into sustained eloquence. Eloquence
is not his metier. It pertains chiefly to the enthusiast,
the man who surrenders himself, and however Mr.
Beerbohm may see fit to delineate Mr. Gosse he
will never draw him, I think, with whirling arms,
shouting himself red in the face. The style is the
man, and Mr. Gosse's style is normally crisp. But
his sentences join ; he has his swifter moments even
if he does elevate restraint into a high place among
the literary and other virtues. I do not see how I
could better illustrate what he can do at times with
the paragraph than by quoting his last words, quick
in movement though packed with the results of re-
flection, on Donne :

The world, therefore, is to be excused if, while
clasping Donne to its heart as a poet, it has been

114

MR. GOSSE'S CRITICISMS

content to take him for granted as a prose-writer.
He wrote most detestable prose in an age which
had not yet strained the language of common life
through the jelly-bag. All the torrent which poured
from his lips as he stood, a monument of awful
death in life, in his pulpit in the old Gothic
Cathedral of St. Paul's was turbid with the refuse
of scholastic Latin, and stained with the experi-
ments of an English still unrefined. After all, when
people like Taine speak of the great English
divines as a sort of ichthyosaurians wallowing in
the slime of their own obscure diction, we may
recall that the mundane and playful writers of
that age, like Dekker and Rowlands, are not more
limpid nor much easier to read than the theo-
logians. The fact is that, with a few bright ex-
ceptions, prose did not exist in any real lucidity
and grace until the middle of the century, and
English style had no Calvin to clarify its cloudiness
till Jeremy Taylor rose in all his splendour. Donne
is perhaps worse than the rest in certain qualities
and relations, but he is better than almost all at
certain moments of inspiration and glory.

It is already some time since Mr. Gosse celebrated
his seventieth birthday. This book is a proof not
merely of an uncanny and almost unexampled power
in him of preserving his youth, and, often, bettering
the achievements of his mature manhood, but also
of his rare and whole-hearted devotion to and pride
in the art of letters.

"5

THE ART OF WRITING

PROFESSOR BROWN teaches Rhetoric and
Composition in Carleton College. His title-
page informs us that he is the author of " How the
French Boy Learns to Write." But the present book,
The Writer's Art, is almost entirely the work of other
authors : Hazlitt, Emerson, Stevenson, Thoreau,
Diderot, Maupassant, Poe, and other artists who
have discussed composition. The collection is
primarily meant for " college use," and it is sympto-
matic of certain recent developments in the American
academic world.

Instruction in the practice of composition is now
commonly given in many American Universities,
and there are signs of its approach here. I have heard
of an American lady who took her Ph.D. in Short
Story Writing. Manuals on that art abound in
America. The kinds of short stories are classified,
modes of progression are analysed, and lists which
purport to be exhaustive of permissible " ingre-
dients " are set down. I have not yet seen, though I
am prepared to believe in their existence, handbooks
on the composition of poetry, but an extensive
literature is available for aspiring dramatists, and
works of a general character which, like the present
anthology, are intended to assist the writer, in what-
ever kind, to know himself and perfect his ex-
pression, are numerous. In this country students
of English are being more and more encouraged to
" show up " original compositions, and teachers
like Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch are propounding

116

THE ART OF WRITING

from lecture platforms those elementary principles
of good writing which are commonly agreed upon
by good writers conscious of the nature of their own
activities.

I do not know that " Q " or his colleagues have
ever supposed or suggested that their maxims would
lead to an increase in the production of good litera-
ture. Their practice is defensible without resort to
that contention. Nobody can deny that even econ-
omists, philosophers, civil servants, and business
men would be better for the acquisition of a sound
English style. Sir Arthur, following in the steps of
Hazlitt, Stevenson, and the rest, demands accuracy,
lucidity, the concrete word rather than the abstract,
the suppression of superfluous epithets, the elimi-
nation of cliches. No contributor to a Blue Book
but would be better for the adoption of these
counsels. Whether the inculcation of them to the
undergraduate population at large will lead to a
general raising of the level of written English, re-
mains to be discovered. It is at least conceivable
that nobody really comprehends this kind of teach-
ing except those who have no need of it. I doubt
this ; I am even prepared to believe that the prac-
tice of formal composition in English may assist
men to read intelligently, just as the practice of
Latin verse — hallowed by long tradition — is ad-
mitted to have increased men's enjoyment of their
classics. But when it comes to the view that " literary
artists," as they are called, may be increased in
number by University courses we are on other
ground. Professor Brown disclaims the notion that
the whole secret of literature can be analysed, set

117

BOOKS REVIEWED

down, and transferred. But he is remarkably opti-
mistic all the same. " If," he says, " we are to have
groups of young writers who shall contribute any-
thing to American letters, they must receive, in
addition to basic instruction, a variety of quickening
suggestion, in order that they may always be open-
minded and imbued with an undying intellectual
curiosity." That strange sentence is succeeded by
another even stranger. It deserves the prominence
of an "indent":

Very few colleges or universities encourage
teachers to improve their teaching by becoming
creative writers.

There it is, baldly. The teachers are to become
" creative writers " — the taught — the young writers
whose technical training, he says, is so inferior to
that of the young engineers — are to receive, en
masse, basic instruction and quickening suggestion.
They are there in crowds : student-men of letters
with men like Professor Brown pouring into them
all the best precepts of the best writers, examining
for them the best French, English, and ancient
models, pruning and clipping the first productions
of their craft. Teachers and students are equally
eager that the next generation of American writers
should be a credit to their country. But when all
this labour has been given time to produce results,
when the latest race of students have gone out into
the world, may a new movement be expected ?
When the pie is opened will the birds really begin
to sing ?

118

THE ART OF WRITING

Do not expect it. Men and writers may be taught
much. To take a small and obvious example, an
American student might be persuaded not to use
" some " as an adverb, and if he were persuaded
he would have been benefited. Every man has faults
of expression, habitual woolly and slipshod phrases,
words which he uses in wrong senses ; much may
be done in the way of purging. But the future of our
literature does not repose on the efforts of professors
to eliminate what our ancestors called incorrect-
ness. An intelligent man may, as the result of in-
struction, become a competent tradesman in written
commodities of a humble kind, though even in the
lowest spheres of composition a large part must be
played by incommunicable faculty. The writer of a
really successful soap advertisement must have a
touch of genius of a kind : imagination, psycholo-
gical insight, sympathy (however tinged with cyni-
cism) with the thoughts and emotions of multitudes
of people unseen. Yet if even in the lower walks all
is not done when certain minor faults have been
eliminated, and a shop-finish produced, how is it
when we are in the world where men write for im-
mortality ? The most constant and awful thoughts
and the deepest passions of men, the hopes they
have when they are in love and their fears when
they contemplate death, are the themes. A variety
of characters are displayed, panoramically and in
their separate reactions : or a man sets down his
own heart. The truth must be seen and told, and in
such actions that emotion is conveyed from writer
to reader. The fundamental elements in literature
are often enough insisted upon in the extracts given

119

BOOKS REVIEWED

by Professor Brown. Not merely have the great
laid emphasis upon them, but Professor Brown has
found them stated in a leading article from the New
York Sun, which I may quote because of its un-
expectedness :

You don't find feelings in written words unless
there were feelings in the man who used them.
With all their apparent independence they seem
to be little vessels that hold in some puzzling
fashion exactly what he put into them. You can
put tears into them as though they were so many
little buckets ; and you can hang smiles along
them, like Monday's clothes on the line, or you
can starch them with facts and stand them up
like a picket-fence ; but you won't get the tears
out unless you first put them in. Art won't put
them there. It is like the faculty of getting the
quality of interest into pictures. If the quality
exists in the artist's mind, he is likely to find means
to get it into his pictures, but if it isn't in the man
no technical skill will supply it.

A man may do much for another man. But, in
the literary as in other worlds, it is of little real use
to tell him cold-bloodedly that honesty is the best
policy. A conviction that the truth ought to be told,
and the expression of it striven for, is scarcely a
matter to be conveyed by pedagogics ; and a
thousand lectures about the artistic necessity of
sincerity and humanity will not unseal the fountains
of the heart. Artistic genius, though often found in
immoral surroundings, has a moral quality. If a man

120

THE ART OF WRITING

incapable of writing literature can at all be made
into a man capable of it the change will be the result
of a kind of conversion. And strong moral influence
is neither more nor less likely to be exercised by a
teacher of literature than by a teacher of any other
subject — including theology. When the American
revival comes I doubt if the schools will have much
to do with it.

After this digression, if it be a digression, I will
return for a moment to Professor Brown's book. It
is an admirable book of its kind. He has gone far
afield for his extracts ; he includes, amongst other
things, Edward Coplestone's delicious adverse
review of Milton, and he has made his explanatory
notes as short as possible. It should be useful, and
it is extremely readable : an anthology of good
prose which, since it was made in order to serve a
special purpose, contains none of those familiar
purple passages without which no ordinary collec-
tion of prose masterpieces dare show its face in
public.

121

A METABIOLOGICAL PENTATEUCH

IT would have been a pity not to use it at the top
of the page. I remember learning, when still
young enough to think long words amusing, a poem
about the adventures of "an antediluvian man of
sesquipedalian height " who met an ichthyosaurus.
Mr. Shaw's sub-title recalls that ; but he may be
allowed his little jokes. He is far too shrewd a jour-
nalist to employ these terms for his main titles. No
sub-editor on an evening paper ever had a better
gift for pungent and arresting headlines. " Back
to Methuselah " is one of the happiest conceptions
he has had ; it catches one at once, and has the
added advantage of meaning something. This, how-
ever, is what the reader does not understand im-
mediately : there is, as usual, a preface interposed
between the title-page and the play.

It is a long preface and not in every respect one
of Mr. Shaw's best. The History of Evolutionary
Thought is surveyed, with glances at the theatre,
painting, politics, and theology. Mr. Shaw races
along with fewer good witticisms than usual and
fewer really provocative remarks. The sensation of
speed is enjoyable at first. But after a while one
tends to drowse ; one ceases to notice the swift
succession of passing objects, and is conscious only
of the rhythmic rattle of the train. The upshot of it
is that Creative Evolution is " the genuinely scientific
religion for which all wise men are now anxiously
looking." Our old friend, the Life Force, comes in
(he always reminds me, by the way, of Gibbon's

122

A METABIOLOGICAL PENTATEUCH

sneer about " the science, or rather the language of
metaphysics ") as the motive power. The play that
follows has a major and a minor theme. The major
is Creative Evolution at work — mind conquering
matter. The minor is a new instrument for acceler-
ating the process. Men do not live long enough to
learn anything. They are children — none more so
than Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George. Lamarck
teaches that if a species wants anything badly it will
get it. Men should want to live to the age of
Methuselah, instead of dying in their intellectual
infancy. If they did the evolutionary movement
would proceed much more quickly and win far more
commendation than it does from Mr. Shaw.

Certain stages of it are presented in Mr. Shaw's
five Acts. He begins with an allegorical picture of
Adam and Eve in the garden, and the suggestions
of the snake, whence came Death and all our Woe.
We next come to the present day, when the theory
of volitional survival is formulated to a pair of stupid
and incredulous politicians, a curate and a hoyden
with bobbed hair. Next, in 2170, we find a man
actually surviving for three hundred years (persons
of normal age, in spite of mechanical advance, re-
maining as foolish and greedy as ever), and finally
we come to a.d. 31920. That is not Utopia ; Mr.
Shaw's only Perfect State is the Eternity of the
Spirit. But people are now born from eggs, in a
condition corresponding to our condition at seven-
teen ; they outgrow mundane passions and affec-
tions in four years ; and the more elderly are safely
and consciously forwarding a further movement
away from our present plight. Lilith, the dea ex

123

BOOKS REVIEWED

machina, at the close proclaims the aim : " I shall
see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the
whirlpool become all life and no matter."

The drama itself occupies 267 pages. At the close
of the preface Mr. Shaw says : "I am doing the
best I can at my age. My powers are waning ; but
so much the better for those who found me unbear-
ably brilliant when I was in my prime." The ad-
mission is so handsome and so unusual that it seems
almost a pity that it was unnecessary. Mr. Shaw's
powers do not seem to be waning at all. The only
typically senile vice that he has is the vice of garrulity,
and that in him, to use the jargon which so delights
him, was rather an inherited predisposition than an
acquired habit. His juniors would be perfectly pre-
pared to believe that, like the people in his last act,
he was born from an egg and began discoursing
when no more than his head was through the shell.
But that his powers are waning there is no evidence
at all in this book. Those who creep back to him in
the belief that he has become completely mild and
tame will be disagreeably surprised. His life differs
from his play in this, that it is not merely the ghost of
the Old Adam that is appearing in the last act. Mr.
Shaw is as clever, as vigorous, as cunning, as high-
spirited, as flippant, as curious as ever he was. There
are conspicuous faults in this book. The preface,
for all its merits, is rather inconsecutive, and gives
one the feeling that although Mr. Shaw habitually
thinks, he seldom stops to think. His characters are
mostly sticks ; his appeal is almost continuously to
the intellect ; the text is overloaded with topical
references ; a few passages are in bad taste and many

124

A METABIOLOGICAL PENTATEUCH

pages are tiresome. Most of the middle of the play
might have been taken for granted ; we did not
want that endless silly talk between Mr. Lloyd
George, Mr. Asquith, and the rest, to help us form
a conception of the present limitations of humanity;
some scene much shorter could have furnished the
necessary symbol. But there is no reason to trace
any of these things to senile decay.

Mr. Shaw's qualities and faculties are precisely
what they were ; the faculty of being very boring
was always amongst them, and he may cheer him-
self with the reflection that there is no fault here,
large or small, which cannot be paralleled repeatedly
from his earlier plays. I at least feel that in places
Mr. Shaw is here surpassing his previous best, and
notably in the first and last scenes. The whole play
may be no more actable than the second part of
" Faust " or yesterday's Times, but the first act and
part of the last would be as effective in the theatre
as anything that Mr. Shaw has ever done. The
craftsmanship of the Eden scene deserves the much-
abused epithet, " astonishing " ; every sentence is
revelatory, and moves the action forward ; and the
whole is a genuine re-creation of the legend. The
illusion is perfectly imposed, and the temptation to
cheap cleverness, which previous wits who have
dealt with that story have not resisted, is avoided.
Mr. Shaw's sympathy with the Serpent is scarcely
veiled, but he does not obscure his intellectual con-
ceptions with irrelevant jests as he has so often done,
nor does he allow those conceptions, in their turn,
to smother the dramatic progress of his story. In
the last act he comes nearer to poetry than he has

J25

BOOKS REVIEWED

ever come, and in the last pages nearer to awe. An
operation would have to be performed on him be-
fore he could actually write poetry or communicate
awe ; but the operation would cut something out,
not put something in. There are elements in his
composition which inhibit him from an even
momentary abandonment to love or pity or aesthetic
enjoyment, and he is incapable of fear. He is always
" all there " ; he possesses his subject and cannot
be possessed by it ; his sense of humour is never in
complete abeyance ; the strain of argument is
always present ; he is too interested in things in
general to give his natural sympathy for individuals
much play — being, like Nature, careful of the race,
but careless of the single specimen ; he despises
the senses and, in so far as Art appeals to the senses,
he despises Art. When he uses the mechanism of
Strephon and Amaryllis, temple and bosky glade
and pastoral dance, in the last act, our constant
tendency to lapse into enjoyment of the idyllic
element is checked by the pervasive sense of Mr.
Shaw's irony ; we know he thinks that all nonsense.
Even at the close where, as I have said, he does
actually come near awe, he does not quite achieve
it : for in the imagined presence of the very spirit
of Nature, to whom he has dedicated himself, Mr.
Shaw's self-possession and detachment remain : it
is as it were a theoretical awe struggling to carry
conviction. Nevertheless, that scene, from the pro-
cession of primaeval ghosts to the last eloquent har-
angue of the symbolic Lilith, is conceived finely,
and constructed with extraordinary skill. It leaves
one with a sense of having had a glimpse of grandeur.

126

A METABIOLOGICAL PENTATEUCH

A cold and pagan grandeur ; but there is Mr.
Shaw's philosophy. He is unlike Mr. Wells in many
respects, but he is like him in this, that so long as
he can regard himself as a humble instrument of
Evolution he is perfectly happy. His horizon is
wider than Mr. Wells's, and the operation of his
revered process more extensive. Mr. Wells, except
for an occasional dash into metaphysics just to show
that he knows they are there, usually keeps his eyes
firmly glued on the earth, which was once a whirl-
ing ball of fire. Time is good enough for him, and if
the upward climb from the amoeba is going to end
in a material calamity, collision or cooling, he pre-
fers not to worry about it. He advocates our co-
operation with the biological movement as a man
advocates any other measure of practical reform.
Mr. Shaw is not satisfied with that. He has always
been interested in the physical details of current
evolutionary science. He will talk about Darwin,
Lamarck, and Weismann until all's blue, and in the
present preface he very nearly does. But his Adam
and Eve is only a metaphysical parable. He is not
content to begin with the amoeba, or to end with a
race of very highly educated engineers who play
billiards on board their smoothly-running trains or
discover how to fly to the other planets. Vegetarian,
teetotaler, anti-zesthete, he does not really long to
increase material comforts or delights ; he wants
to abolish them and the means of enjoying them.

His final blissful dream is of man shedding one
organ after another, the foot, the hand, the head,
until he becomes pure spirit : Creative Evolution.
I hold no brief for Mr. Asquith or Mr. Lloyd

127

BOOKS REVIEWED

George, but I doubt whether they would be justified
in taking it from Mr. Shaw that the democracy has
given them a mandate for this. No doubt they look
grotesque little objects when Mr. Shaw exhibits
them in front of a background of seons. But it is a
tough test. Even the majestic author of this preface
might appear slightly ridiculous were he conceived
as delivering his soul under the shadow of some-
thing no larger or more ancient than the Pyramids
and the Parthenon. Nevertheless Mr. Shaw has
attempted to formulate his view of things and his
ideal ; and the attempt must command respect.
Even he, with all his desire, has not bridged the
passage from Time to Eternity in his exposition :
but the difficulty of relating two things, neither of
which one can comprehend, is no new one. Mr.
Shaw announces that he has done his best to provide
mankind with the Bible of a new religion : a demand
for which has just been made by Mr. Wells. It may
be taken for certain that mankind at large, if it ever
hears of them, will find his dogmas about life eternal
as vague as it will find his dogmas on life temporal
unappetising. Put it in another manner. Are you
yourself quite happy with the notion of the Universe
as an enormous theatre where one long Shaw play
is being acted ? I don't think Bibles are made this
way.

128

BYRON

yf ST ARTE was first published in 1905. Its
«^- *■ author, Lord Lovelace, was Byron's grand-
son. Its theme was the guilt of Byron and his half-
sister, Mrs. Leigh. The first edition was very small.
Lord Lovelace desired " above all things to avoid
the possibility of making money out of the story "
of his ancestors, and most of the copies were given
away to his friends. Occasionally some of them have
come into the salerooms and fetched as much as
twenty pounds each. The contents of the book were
universally known, but not generally accessible.
This situation was clearly unsatisfactory, the last
thing Lord Lovelace wanted being to cater for
speculators in the chronique scandaleuse. Beyond
this there was the fact that some people held he had
not fully proved his case, and the family possessed
documents, unpublished by him, which supple-
mented his evidence. His widow, therefore, has
now produced a comparatively cheap and enlarged
edition through the ordinary publishing channels.

What made Lord Lovelace attempt so repellent
a task ? He would have been in ordinary circum-
stances the last man to do so ; a studious and fas-
tidious man who disliked publicity of any kind, and
whose loathing of gossip, prying journalism, and
what seemed to him the thousand squalid vulgarities
of modern civilisation, bordered on eccentricity.
Had the charge never been made against Byron he
would have been the last to break silence. But it
had been made, it had been incompetently made

129 K

BOOKS REVIEWED

(by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who had, he thought,
betrayed Lady Byron's confidence), it had been
bitterly answered by Byron's friends, who had
accused Lady Byron of coldly and cruelly ruining
his life, and he felt that justice demanded that Lady
Byron's memory should be cleared. He could do
nothing for his grandfather's reputation, but he
might at least secure that justice should be
done to the innocent woman whose life his grand-
father had wrecked. With great reluctance, there-
fore, he sorted his family papers — memoranda by
Lady Byron and her friends, letters from Lady
Byron, Lord Byron, and Mrs. Leigh, and others,
unpublished material of every description — and
made out his case, supporting his arguments with
quotations from the poems.

His evidence will not be analysed here, and it may
be left to those who like such things to pad their
columns with the most ardent sentences, the darkest
hints and the most suspicious parentheses in the
letters which passed between Byron and his half-
sister. The case made out is undoubtedly very
strong, and probably at this date could not be
answered ; but, whatever may be the temptation
to take the matter as settled, it must in fairness be
admitted that the last degree of proof is lacking,
the few direct sentences of testimony or confession
which would outweigh all the rest put together.
Lady Byron's tenderness and goodness are certainly
demonstrated ; it is also clear that she believed her
husband guilty of the enormity ; and it always has
been clear that the Byron with whom she spent her
year of married life was a man who gave her plenty

130

BYRON

of reasons for leaving him, without recourse to that
now under discussion. He paraded his infidelities,
and his temper was so bad that close observers be-
lieved him to be deranged ; wounded pride and his
great gift for self-pity accounted for the pathetic,
half-genuine, later protestations that she had heart-
lessly deserted him ; he had taken small pains to
make her happy when she was present. Even if we
assume every one of Lord Lovelace's contentions
to be true, they make little difference in one's con-
ception of Byron's character. This may seem an
extreme thing to say. But he had one of the most
puzzling characters on record, and in his rages of
pride, rebellion, and desire he was capable of any-
thing.

His hand was against every man and every in-
stitution. He had deliberately willed not to govern
his almost ungovernable passions. There were things
he would have shrunk from doing. He disliked
lying (there seems to have been a fear that he would
even tell the truth about his relations with Mrs.
Leigh, and certainly nothing but solicitude for her
would have restrained him), he would never have
been cruel for cruelty's sake, and he was incapable
of an underhand plot against any man's life or repu-
tation. It was not only " the pageant of his bleeding
heart " that he was willing to trail across Europe :
Europe could know everything about him. No doubt
this scorn of concealment was not mainly merito-
rious ; telling the truth was one way of securing the
" glory " for which he hungered, and the more
shocking the truth, the greater the glory. A more
lunatic pride than his has never been known, and it

J31

BOOKS REVIEWED

was from that that his rebelliousness mainly sprang.
Shelley was the rebel of love, Byron the rebel of
hate and contempt. Shelley believed in a Utopia,
Byron had no such illusions. He felt himself superior
to the rest of mankind ; like Napoleon, he conceived
that morality was not made for him ; he was Satan
in revolt. The Biblical comparison is not inapt. He
was soaked in Biblical phraseology and might have
used it himself ; but beyond that there was a strain
of belief in him. A common egoist and roue does
not habitually employ terms like " sin," " guilt,"
and " crime," which constantly haunted Byron's
mind and verses.

Byron was a paradox even more than other men
are. He had a conscience which never modified his
conduct, a refinement which could not mitigate his
coarseness, a kindness which was obscured at the
smallest firing of his pride or his desire, and, oddest
of all, a sense of humour which never assisted him
to observe proportion. " Heaven knows why,"
wrote the exile from Geneva, " but I seem destined
to set people by the ears." If this were serious it
would be staggering ; if it be facetious it is most
difficult to reconcile conduct which was frequently
not that merely of a reckless and cheerful libertine,
but that of a savage, tigerish, mad. All the indict-
ments of him ever written fade from memory as
one reads the sunny cynicism of his letters and
" Don Juan," as they do when one comes across his
gentler lyrics or remembers the many stories of his
generosity and good companionship. He was capable,
sometimes, even of humility ; he said that if people
only knew Shelley's writings they would realise

132

BYRON

how second-rate were his own. According as people
like his poetry or not, or according as temperament
or caprice lead them to fasten upon one or another
aspect of his career and character, so they are " pro "
or " con." Nobody has yet succeeded (and few have
seriously attempted it) in reconciling all his aspects.
Any full description must always look like a tessel-
lated pavement, with alternate squares of black and
white.

A thousand new books will fail to solve the riddle,
and a thousand new crimes would not entirely
destroy the affection that many people must feel for
him. Those who were disgusted by his anger and
his sneers were fascinated again by his smile ; those
who knew that he exploited his charm could not
deny his charm ; and it is in death as it was in life.
As for his poetry, concerning which it is time that
somebody said something, it may seldom be the
best kind of poetry, but much of it is living litera-
ture. Except in some of the narratives, where un-
convincing stories were rhetorically told in language
that seldom passed eloquence, he always worked
on the true materials of poetry. His sufferings,
however self-induced, were real, and he had a
genuine, if not a real passion for Nature ; he watched
the general spectacle of the human world with
immense gusto, and he was moved to awe by the
fundamental problems of existence. As a writer of
satirical verse it may be maintained (though he him-
self would have regarded this as blasphemy against
Pope) that he is unequalled, if combined quality
and quantity be considered, in our language. The
satirist in him — the same thing happened in Pope —

133

BOOKS REVIEWED

tended, as time went on, to overmaster the rest. The
faults of his serious poetry are partly faults of exag-
geration, natural to a glutton for personal fame who
was desirous of impressing the grandeur of his
moods upon mankind, and partly faults of expres-
sion. He had, although an immense gift for com-
pact, neat, and antithetical lines, a defective ear. His
dislike of the looser measures which had superseded
the couplet went with an incapacity to use them
with very much finesse. And he did not care about
fine shades of phrasing ; the first vigorous words
which came to his pen would do. So immense a
production, considering his various occupations,
could scarcely have been managed otherwise. The
consequence has been a reaction which has accused
him of writing fustian, false rhetoric, and jingling
prose. But even at his worst it is difficult to stop
reading him, for the quickened pulse is behind what
he writes, and, with whatever lack of care, he did
frequently in his heat express genuine sentiments
with consummate naturalness. Passages simple,
sincere, moving, reflecting the elementary impulses
of the human breast, may be found throughout his
works, from the early affecting poems addressed to
his Harrow friends to the last lines he wrote at
Missolonghi :

Seek out — less often sought than found —
A soldier's grave, for thee the best ;

Then look around, and choose thy ground
And take thy rest.

Whatever he had done he had not been happy.
The lightning he had defied had struck him. His

J34

BYRON

desire for peace was genuine, and at the end he was
familiar with the most pitiful and awful mood a man
can have — the mood in which he does not care
whether he lives or dies. At the end he died in a good
cause, and whatever may be disclosed about him
his statues will stand about the towns of Greece.
What drove him there ? Not an abstract passion for
liberty, but a romantic attachment to historic Greece
and his European, his almost John Bullish, instincts,
which roused him to resist the Orient which so
fascinated him. He had written about Marathon ;
he never lived to hear of Mustapha Kemal. Uncon-
sciously he was a prominent figure in a struggle
which has gone on for thousands of years, the
struggle between East and West over the body and
soul of the Levant. He lived a scoffer and died a
Crusader, and there are some graves over which it
becomes us to show a little charity, though we
mustn't, more than we can help, lie.

I have got away from " Astarte." It is a work of
great labour, conceived and executed conscientiously.
But it is rather a document put in as evidence than
a book which can be recommended to those who
wish to be edified or amused.

135

MR. DE LA MARE'S ROMANCE

FIVE years ago it might still have been de-
sirable, when nominally reviewing a book of
prose by Mr. de la Mare, to occupy oneself entirely
with proclaiming the merits of his verse. This is
not necessary to-day. He stole very slowly and un-
obtrusively into public notice, producing little,
never adapting himself to an assumed public taste,
oblivious to every kind of advertisement, content
to express what was true to him and resolved to
employ every resource of his art on every line of his
work. But there is now no lover of poetry willing
to dispute his place among the immortals ; the
certainty of his progress has equalled its tranquillity ;
he is admitted to be as true a poet and as consum-
mate an artist as any man who ever wrote English
lyrics. His prose, of which there are several long
examples, is not so widely known or appreciated as
" Motley " and " Peacock Pie." Those who think
that a poet is wasting his time if he takes serious
pains with anything but poetry will think this fitting.
But after reading " Memoirs of a Midget " it is
impossible to be wholehearted in one's regret that
he should have devoted years of labour to so full
and beautiful a work.

A sketch of the plot of this romance will give a
very poor notion of its nature. Miss M., the Midget,
is exceedingly small, smaller than the common
dwarf, almost elfin in size. She passes in succession
through home life, life in a small town, life in
fashionable London, then has a brief turn in a circus,

136

MR. DE LA MARE'S ROMANCE

and retires into country peace. Well, we can con-
ceive novels about dwarfs : Dickens might have
written one, and very comic and pathetic it would
have been. But Mr. de la Mare's book is profoundly
unlike a novel by Dickens or anybody else. There is
a story. There are episodes, such as that of proud,
heartless, beautiful Fanny and the curate, which
might have been conceived by another. But the
library subscriber who should carry the book off
under the impression that she was taking an ordinary
narrative fiction home would have a shock. For,
good as are many of the characters and the events
that happen to them, they are seen through a lens
of whimsicality. And the main quality of the book
is not that it enlists our sympathies for particular
men and women, or gives us a realistic presentation
of scenes from the human comedy as we know it,
but that it introduces us into Mr. de la Mare's world,
and brings us into contact with his feelings about
the life which detached Miss M. saw us leading
with such pathetic courage and blindness. It is a
poet's book. I can think of no prose book by an
English poet which is a more substantial achieve-
ment, but of many in which poets have escaped to
a greater extent from the manner and matter of their
poetry. Mr. de la Mare is one and indivisible. The
world of his poetry, that strange assembly of pictures
and sentiments drawn in from the daily world, from
childhood's memories, and from art, contains
elements familiar separately but nowhere else found
in such combination. He can write of familiar
decorative things, a deserted garden, or a statue in
a fountain, as though nobody had ever seen them

137

BOOKS REVIEWED

before : he makes everything he touches his, and
he touches nothing to which he does not sincerely
respond. The world of his poetry is a quiet world
of moonlight in still places, of evening waters, of
gardens, woods, and wild roses, of quiet parlours
sleeping in sunlight, of midnight silences broken by
small sounds. Yet it is a world never made for
decoration ; it is haunted by the most secret whispers
of the heart, and in every corner of it we encounter
a gentle, bewildered, suffering human spirit. In a
lyric the quintessence of a chapter can be given,
and made memorable by music. The music, largely,
has gone from Mr. de la Mare's prose ; but in this
romance it is his old world we see again and in
immensely greater detail.

The book is a close tissue of lovely images and
perfect phrases. Every page is crowded, so crowded
that it can be read only slowly if the mind's eye will
see everything that is presented to it and the heart
receive every quiet message. But in all this elabora-
tion and complication of picture and language,
thought, and fancy, there is never anything false or
faked, not a word that is dishonest, or that strikes
one as having been put in for effect. The major
elements in our landscape are shown with sur-
passing freshness : the Midget helps here, for she
was secluded until grown up, and the author, look-
ing through her unaccustomed eyes, has realised
many common things — the stars over a wood, the
sensation of being alone in the fields at night, the
sea, trains, tea-parties, streets — as though they had
all just broken on him for the first time. There are
countless little landscapes, and the stars, with their

138

MR. DE LA MARE'S ROMANCE

noble names, Sirius and Aquila and Aldebaran,
come in as a recurring motive, pure, keen, and re-
mote in the night. In every chapter there are, as
there were sure to be, vivid interiors : furniture
shining, old women fussing, kettles boiling, cats
purring, candles reflected in mirrors, moonlight
ghostly through curtains, and stairs creaking in the
darkness. But the most remarkable thing is the mul-
titude of small things seen and described with loving
precision. In one of the finest of his poems Mr. de
la Mare has mused on the endless wonders of
creation, Leviathan and the honey fly, the smooth-
plumed bird :

The seed of the grass,
The speck of stone
Which the way-faring ant
Stirs — and hastes on !

The illusion of size has never blinded him ; the
small things are much the more numerous and the
more neglected ; he has watched them and thought
on the life within them. His leviathans are few com-
pared with his mice and snails and spiders, in a
teeming world where every stone hides a community
and every blossom has its secret and peculiar hiero-
glyphics. Miss M. in her latter retirement spent her
time, we are told, " embroidering her brilliant tiny
flowers and beetles and butterflies with her tiny
needle." Small things had been more clear to her
than to us, and many of her principal experiences
had come to her through them. Cruelty, death, and
decay broke upon her with the manifest destinies

139

BOOKS REVIEWED

of mole and wren ; and her first night of fear reached
its culmination with a swarm of cockroaches,
" shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures . . .
scurrying away into hiding, infants seemingly to
their mothers, whisper, whisper." But it is Mr. de
la Mare's autobiography as well as hers that we are
reading when we get such confessions as this :

Over such small things as a nut, a shell, a drop
of rain-water in a buttercup, a pond of frost (for
there were cold winters at Lyndsey in those days),
I would pore and pore, imbibing the lesson
that the eye alone, if used in patience, will tell its
owner far more about an object than it can merely
see.

So, when he paints the sky in all its transform-
ations, woods and houses in all their moods, the
larger outlines always contain minute details clearly
seen. There are thousands of phrases which might
be quoted : " Raying lights circled across the ceiling,
as carriage and cart glided by on the esplanade " ;
" a dwindling meteor silvered across space " ; " the
forsaken sweet of the morning "... fruits of an
eye that never fails to notice and a memory that
always records. But both Mr. de la Mare's observa-
tion and the qualities of his prose may perhaps more
easily be illustrated from one of the few sustained
passages allowed himself by an author who writes
beautifully because he writes exactly and affection-
ately, but never aims at the grandiose set piece or
pads a paragraph to make it the length of the most
approved fine paragraphs. This comes from the
account of Miss M.'s childhood when she is under

140

MR. DE LA MARE'S ROMANCE

the roof of her father and mother and beginning to
learn her universe :

My eyes dazzled in colours. The smallest of
the marvels of flowers and flies and beetles and
pebbles, and the radiance that washed over them,
would fill me with a mute, pent-up rapture almost
unendurable. Butterflies would settle quietly on
the hot stones beside me, as if to match their
raiment against mine. If I proffered my hand,
with quivering wings and horns they would uncoil
their delicate tongues and quaff from it drops of
dew or water. A solemn grasshopper would occa-
sionally straddle across my palm, and with patience
I made quite an old friend of a harvest mouse.
They weigh only two to the halfpenny. This
sharp-nosed furry morsel would creep swiftly
along to share my crumbs and snuggle itseif to
sleep in my lap. By-and-by, I suppose, it took to
itself a wife ; I saw it no more. Bees would rest
there, the panniers of their thighs laden with
pollen ; and now and then a wasp, his jaws full
of wood or meat. When sun-beetles or ants drew
near they would seem to pause at my whisper, as
if hearkening, as if in their remote silence ponder-
ing and sharing the world with me. All childish
fancy, no doubt ; for I proved far less successful
with the humans.

But now that I have pulled it from the mould, I feel
that it somewhat wilts and fades. It is a delicate book,
not easily to be handled by coarse fingers, not even
as I have said, easily to be described. There is a

141

BOOKS REVIEWED

wiser and sweeter son of Poe in it, and a gentler
brother of the Brontes, and a cousin of Hans
Andersen : even those traffic in the elusive, and
most of what is here can be indicated by no name
except that of de la Mare, a sufficient label for those
who know him, and nothing in the world for those
who do not. He quotes — he probably doesn't know
how often he has quoted— the old verses of " Tom
o' Bedlam," whose mistress was the moon :

With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander ;

With a burning spear,

And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.

With a knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to tourney ;

Ten leagues beyond

The wide world's end ;
Methinks it is no journey.

It is no more easy to catalogue Mr. de la Mare than
it is to analyse that. He has rich gifts of fancy, and
even of demure wit : many others have had as much.
He tells fairy-tales, but how far he is from being a
luxurious or sentimental dreamer ! He plays with
toys, but conscious of impending calamity ; he takes
in impressions through every sense, but how little
is he a slave of the senses ! The most dominant thing
about him is a thing, never paraded but always pre-
sent : his sense of the mystery, beyond all the super-
ficial beauty and dreadfulness, of existence :

142

MR. DE LA MARE'S ROMANCE

When Music sounds all that I was I am
Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came.

Everything, from the stars to the minutest plants,
he sees against that background of eternity. If he
dogmatised about it he would be more easy to talk
about ; but the one thing he scarcely ever expresses
is an opinion. In the recesses of his mind he has his
prepossessions ; though he continually asks questions
he never has the colour of a sceptic, but all his
opinions are unformulated. One can say no more
than that he feels the unseen behind the seen, and
is awed and vaguely comforted in its presence.

Miss M., too, bravely battled under that arch,
and was happy. Her story adds immensely to one's
knowledge of and admiration for her creator. I can-
not, however, deceive myself into thinking that it
will be understood, or even read, by a large public.
A few people will read it ; but those who read it at
all will read it many times. It is a book for poets and
their kindred, and unlike any other book that ever
was written. The symbol may be queer. But are we
not all Midgets, making terms with a foreign world,
and tiny under the heavens ?

H3

CROCE ON SHAKESPEARE

BENEDETTO CROCE, the most stimulating
of contemporary philosophers, has a uni-
versality of interest rare amongst modern thinkers.
He proceeds with ease from pure metaphysics, ethics,
and aesthetics to the consideration of the concrete
results of history and the concrete achievements of
art ; and the range of his knowledge is so great that
he can meet the experts with equal knowledge in
any field which he cares to enter. The nearest parallel
we have had to him in England is Coleridge : I do
not suggest that his ideas resemble Coleridge's, but
Coleridge will serve as an indication of the width
of his outlook, his equal gaze over the eternal and
the temporal, the humanity of his philosophic writ-
ings, and the philosophic quality of his critical work.
Until this book on Shakespeare appeared — trans-
lated, rather carelessly, I am sorry to say, by his
regular English interpreter, Mr. Ainslie — none of
the great Italian's literary criticisms had seen the
light in English. The volume is a collection of essays
on three great figures — Ariosto, Corneille, and
Shakespeare. If I say nothing about the papers on
Ariosto and Corneille it is not only that I do not feel
qualified to discuss writers with whom I have a very
slight acquaintance, but that Croce himself would
not pretend that those poets were on the same plane
as Shakespeare or that his essays on them were of
equal importance with his criticisms of Shakespeare.
His criticisms of Shakespeare, I say. But a large
part of his Shakespearean treatises is devoted to

144

CROCE ON SHAKESPEARE

criticisms of Shakespeare's critics. Signor Croce is
that unusual thing, a philosopher who loves poetry
for its own sake, and a critic who realises that art is
something other than a vehicle for deliberate teach-
ing. He is also a man of strong common sense and
with a marked proclivity for stating facts as he sees
them. The result is that the thousand and one bio-
graphers of and commentators on Shakespeare come
off very badly at his hands. He writes much valuable
and beautiful criticism ; his sense of poetic values
is very acute ; his descriptions of such characters
as Hotspur, Falstaff, and Cordelia could scarcely be
bettered for eloquence and fairness. But he is largely
controversial ; and his arguments are chiefly directed
against those who will insist on mixing up Shake-
speare's plays with Shakespeare's supposed life and
opinions.

Signor Croce is penetrating and satisfying as an
interpreter of Shakespeare's characters and as a
delineator of his art. But in spite of all his protests
he naturally goes farther than this. He attempts to
discover the chief intellectual interests and spiritual
predilections of Shakespeare the poet, and he also
is led to implications about Shakespeare the man.
He marches under no political or religious banner ;
he is not the poet of particular practical ideals, non
est de hoc tnundo, because he always goes beyond, to
the universal man, to the conscious problem. Signor
Croce, having said this, feels obliged to gloss over
the motives behind the historical plays. He is right
in thumping the commentators who have attempted
to deduce some modern brand of Liberalism or
Toryism from the historical plays. But he is, I think,

T45 L

BOOKS REVIEWED

understating the fact when he says that all that the
historical plays prove is that Shakespeare had a
keen interest in " practical action," and that " this
interest, finding its most suitable material in political
and warlike conflicts, was naturally attracted to
history, and to that especial form of it which was
nearest to the soul and to the culture of the poet of
his people and of his time, English and Roman his-
tory. This material had already been brought to the
theatre by other writers and was in this way intro-
duced to the attention and used by the new poet."
It might certainly be put more bluntly. There is no
justification, in this instance, for divorcing the im-
aginations of the poet from the affections of the
man ; and if there is one thing clear about Shake-
speare it is that he felt a peculiar affection for his
own country and that (since he was far too intelligent
not to have put the question to himself) he was
prepared to defend his patriotism on practical
grounds. There comes a point later at which Signor
Croce uses language which cannot but apply to
Shakespeare the man and arouse curiosity about
Shakespeare the citizen. He refuses to contemplate
the possibility of knowing Shakespeare's intentions
regarding Shylock, " because Shylock lives and
speaks, himself explaining what he means, without
the aid of commentaries, even such as the author
might possibly have supplied " — as though char-
acters dropped from off Shakespeare as apples fall
from an undeliberate and unreflecting tree. But he
is firm enough about certain other of the plays. He
says of " King Lear " : " An infinite hatred for
deceitful wickedness has inspired this work " ; but

146

CROCE ON SHAKESPEARE

also the inspiration of love, love of goodness mani-
fested in Cordelia, " a true and complete goodness,
not simply softness, mildness and indulgence :

Why ? Why does not goodness triumph in the
material world ? And why, thus conquered, does
she increase in beauty, evoke ever more discon-
solate desire, until she is finally adored as some-
thing sacred ? The tragedy of King Lear is pene-
trated throughout with this unexpressed yet
anguished interrogation, so full of the sense of the
misery of life.

The statement is unexceptionable. One cannot
question either the description of the central point
of Othello as being " the work of Iago, of that demi-
devil, of whom one might ask in vain why he had
thus noosed the bodies and souls of those men, who
had never nourished any suspicion of him ? " It is
true : he was contemplating " that most mysterious
form of evil . . . perversity, which is an end and a
joy to itself." It is equally true that

It would be vain to seek among the songs of
Shakespeare for the song of reconciliation of
quarrels, composed of inner peace, of tranquillity
achieved, but the song of justice echoes every-
where in his works.

But if it be true that Shakespeare the dramatist
meditated much on evil and good, that he had a
passion for justice, a hatred of cruelty and unkind-
ness and malice, a love of goodness and charity, is

H7

BOOKS REVIEWED

it possible to argue that this gives us no clue to the
nature of Shakespeare the man ?

We none of us, alas, live up to the best of our
dreams. We may be models of good will towards
mankind when sitting in our studies, removed from
the world of conflicts and ambitions and temper-
amental incompatibilities, but we are all apt to
stumble when we come down into the road. Never-
theless (and Croce would be the first to admit that
Shakespeare was not a superman) it is not in nature
for the personality of a good artist to be other than
the personality which governs his deeds in the prac-
tical world. Shakespeare of Stratford (or, if you like,
Lord Rutland, Lord Derby, Lord Oxford, or what-
ever other peer you fancy) may not always have been
just, pure and kind ; but it is inconceivable that he
cannot have constantly wished to be, or that his mind
can have been otherwise than continually exercised
with the problems of his own conduct. Signor Croce
may be sympathised with in his reaction against the
pedants who manufacture colossal supposititious lives
of Shakespeare, with about ten small facts in them,
and those other crass pedants who will be tracing
in every incident of his plays the exact reflection of
some event in his own life or some episode in the
history which was being made around him. But he
himself, however reluctantly, does form a picture
of Shakespeare's character, of the character of a man
who had to face, fight or make terms with the
things which we all of us have to encounter. And
why, since the character is a great, noble, and fas-
cinating one, should we be precluded from taking
an interest in it ?

148

CROCE ON SHAKESPEARE

We are allowed to take an interest in the worldly
fortunes of Henry V, who never existed, in the
spiritual struggles of Macbeth and Hamlet, who
never existed, in the happy and unhappy loves of
Desdemona, Rosalind, and Romeo, who never ex-
isted ; why should it be mean and gross in us to
feel a curiosity about the emotions and experiences
of Shakespeare, who did exist and who, the father of
them all, united the capacities and the sensibilities
of all of them ? I do not go so far as the late Arthur
Bullen, who (and he was one of those rare scholars
whose love of poetry and taste in it could not be
disputed) stated, when still young, that any serious
student would be willing to give an arm and a leg
in exchange for a single new fact about Shakespeare.
If that be the qualification for serious studentship,
I must frankly confess that until I am old and bed-
ridden I shall be a non-starter ; and so, I fancy,
would Shakespeare have been. But I do admit to
a vast curiosity about the course and the results of
Shakespeare's contact with the daily world, and not
all Signor Croce's lofty rebukes will make me
ashamed of it.

Consequently I am able (I take myself as the
representative of a common type) to view with
toleration and affection the gentlemen who spend
years grubbing in the Record Office and in the
obscurer corners of Elizabethan literature for new
" facts " about the man who wrote the plays and
the sonnets. No "fact" would change my concep-
tion of his character or modify belief in the general
integrity of his life, the gentle considerateness
with which he treated people, the efforts after justice

H9

BOOKS REVIEWED

that he made in his dealings, and the purity and
generosity of his loves. A fact apparently irreconcil-
able with this conception I should treat as a fact
imperfectly known ; a fact in conformity would
give me great pleasure ; a fact which was " a simple
primrose " I should be glad of as such. And though
nothing would persuade me to spend my short life
doing this sort of research I cannot but be grateful
to those who, finding nothing better to do, consent
to be our helots and hodmen, zealously embracing
a voluntary servitude. Even the merely useful have
their place in the scheme of things. We may fully
accept Signor Croce's reservations about most of
the modern Shakespearean scholars and most of
the older ones except " Herder, Goethe, Schlegel,
Coleridge, and Manzoni." But if the work of literary
history had been left entirely to philosophers and
to men with a perfect understanding of the pro-
cesses of poetic creation and a perfect discrimination
amongst its results, very little literary history would
have been written.

This reservation made, one may certainly com-
mend the book to everybody who takes an interest
in Shakespeare or in the poetic art. Or, one may
add, in the intellectual and moral health of our own
time. For Croce, although he has his shibboleths
like all philosophers, even if he couch them in less
obscure language than most, is at once a man in
love with life and a bracing moralist. He summarises
the last age in one sentence, roughly, if only roughly,
just. How, he asks, could Shakespeare be rightly
appreciated in an age when " the consciousness of
the distinction between liberty and passion, good

*5°

CROCE ON SHAKESPEARE

and evil, nobility and vileness, fineness and sensual-
ity, between the lofty and the base in man, became
obscured ; everything was conceived as differing
in quantity, but identical in substance, and was
placed in a deterministic relation with the external
world."

^

THE POETS AND CHILDHOOD

THIS book (A Book of English Verse on In-
fancy and Childhood, chosen by L. S. Wood),
compiled with great pains and furnished with ex-
cellent notes, contains a selection of English poems
dealing with childhood. The period of childhood is
defined as extending over the first twelve years of
life. The selection has been well made. Little, save
a few carols, could be found in our early literature,
and not much of any kind before the middle of the
seventeenth century. The Elizabethans produced a
few charming lullabies, and Shakespeare, as always,
was searched not in vain. But five-sixths of the poems
in the book are later in date than the year 1700.

Certain aspects of childhood have never dis-
appeared from poetry. The baby in his mother's
arms, a sight which it falls to most men's lot to con-
template with an emotion as deep as any, is an
obviously universal theme. And the ancients, like
ourselves, felt upon a child's death a sorrow of
especial poignancy, and saw in it an emblem of
many of the elementary facts of our lives, posing
most powerfully the riddle of existence, and evoking
most pathetically all the associations of transience
and grief. Hope unfulfilled, growth cut short, beauty
blasted, innocence cruelly ill-treated ; all these
must lie in the death of a child, which has besides
the common attributes of all deaths — the pain, the
bewilderment, and the separation. Many of the
most exquisite poems in this collection (which
strangely does not contain the best of all, the Poet
Laureate's "Ona Dead Child ") have that subject.

152

THE POETS AND CHILDHOOD

One of the best is a poem which the compiler
strangely attributes to the seventeenth century,
but which cannot conceivably have been written in
the seventeenth century. It begins :

He did but float a little way

Adown the stream of time ;
With dreamy eyes watching the ripples play,

Or listening to their chime.
His slender sail
Scarce felt the gale ;
He did but float a little way,

And, putting to the shore,
While yet it was early day,
Went calmly on his way,

To dwell with us no more.

Yet if this be not of the seventeenth century, there
are the lovely little elegies by Carew, Herrick, Ben
Jonson, and Sir John Beaumont. What is not con-
spicuous in these poets or in anyone before Vaughan,
is an avowed resort to early memories for subjects,
and the mood in which modern poetry about child-
ren has mainly been written.

The change is well known, and, in any event,
obvious. A tinge of the modern comes into Shake-
speare's passage :

We were
Two lads that thought there was no more behind,
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal . . . what we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence ; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream 'd
That any did.

153

BOOKS REVIEWED

This might well be Wordsworth, but it is unusual
even for Shakespeare, in Shakespeare's age. A man's
own childhood and childhood in general were sub-
jects ignored.

What has produced the change of outlook, or at
least of literary practice, is not easy to say. I have
heard it urged that there is a connection between
the modern hankering after childhood and the
modern decay of religious belief ; that we must
have an earthly Paradise behind us because we are
uncertain of a Heavenly Paradise ahead of us ; but
it is in the religious poets that the new interest and
the new note may first be observed, and in them
for the last two hundred years the tendency to dwell
upon childhood, and with reverence, has almost
always been present. It is common to almost all
modern imaginative writers, and especially to poets.
Since Vaughan and Traherne, Blake and Words-
worth, we must have learned to receive as a prin-
cipal subject for poetry childhood considered par-
ticularly as a miraculous thing we have lost, and as
a condition in a way spiritually superior. The com-
piler of this anthology seems to have been somewhat
governed by this conception, and one feels that her
choice has been rather restricted by a felt obligation
to preserve the tone of awe.

Mr. Belloc's lines urging a child not to tear a book
come not only as a relief, but as a reminder. We
grown-up persons are only doing justice to our-
selves in realising that not all children are im-
peccable in their conduct all the time. Vice is not
purely the product of age, not do defects of char-
acter never come to light before the twelfth year.

J54

THE POETS AND CHILDHOOD

Let us recall our own childhood. Looked at from
the outside — there is nothing more affecting than
an early photograph of oneself — it may arouse feel-
ings of envy and compassion. We see ourselves,
under the spell of literature and in the light of the
most vivid and dearest of our recollections, wander-
ing in a timeless garden engaged in the most harm-
less of occupations, creatures of fairyland who barely
consented to eat and drink and were as yet ignorant
of the gross commerce of the world. We have a vision
of childhood in the abstract, and that colours our
pictures of ourselves. The child is fresh from
Nature's mysterious mint, nearer, as it seems to
our minds (which are enslaved by Time), to the
unknown which precedes birth. Dependent on
others, he has no need to engage in the coarse
struggles by which we earn our bread, he has lost
no illusions and become aware of no inescapable
bad habits ; many temptations have never yet come
his way ; and some of the more dangerous passions
have not yet developed in him. It is no wonder that
we use childhood in general as the image of a lost
Eden, and that each individual of us has a tendency
to place his own Golden Age in the past. We have
lost things we shall never find again, and found
things which we shall never be able to lose. All our
virtues we impute to our childhood and all our vices
to our maturer days ; we scarcely remember — or,
if we do, we regard them as things for which nobody
was responsible — the misdemeanours of our early
youth ; and every word and deed which we really
regret stands as a tarnish upon our manhood. But
we ought not to deceive ourselves. If our early

*55

BOOKS REVIEWED

memories are honestly searched we shall find in
them elements which hardly consort with the notion
of juvenile perfection. We were ignorant of many
things, and ignorance was mainly bliss. But the
emotional and intellectual weaknesses with which
we are now painfully familiar were there as far back
as we go, to the frontiers of babyhood, a region
from which we all emigrate with every recollection
of it blotted out. " Tis little joy," said Hood, " To
know I'm farther off from heaven than when I was
a boy." But on the lower shelves of memory's cata-
combs rest Falsehoods and Fears and selfish Re-
sentments, and Unhealthy Curiosities and Idle
Evasions, in form and feature much like their later
descendants. To begin to think is to begin to plot
and to deceive, to begin to feel is to begin to hate as
well as to love ; dishonesty comes with the first
games and shirking with the first duties. Children
do not commonly get drunk or wage war or establish
fraudulent bucket-shops. But you do not need to
be twelve years old to lose control of yourself or to
persecute or to cheat. This, that, and the other fault
— like the innocuous snobbery in the " Young
Visiters " — may be a merely superficial attribute
shed upon one by one's surroundings. But the
demands and the devices of the insistent ego are
there from the start. Knowledge may offer them
useful instruments, education and experience may
curb their violence. Children no less than men are
in their manner " fit for stratagems and spoils,"
and degeneracy as the years pass is not the inevitable
and invariable process. The " Darling of a pigmy
size " in this anthology seldom does anything more

156

THE POETS AND CHILDHOOD

forcible than halloo to get an echo ; if we cannot
recall our own youth we may at least observe the
children around us to see that the shades of the
prison-house close around at a very early date. We
all know people who have considerably improved
since they were children ; who are less cruel, less
wilful, more honest, more amiable, and so forth.

Yet it is not simply a false sentimentality that
has made those who have written of their childhood
and of the childhood of others present an idealised
picture. The poets have not been merely deceived
by the fresh bloom of a cheek into deducing a char-
acter more angelic than exists ; and they are not
only influenced by envy of a state, in which one is
protected against a harsh world, in which every
want is supplied and every sorrow soothed. We have
lost something ; it is not so much innocence of mind
or heart as freshness of imagination. Nothing is ever
so beautiful as the things which were beautiful when
we were small. We had newly come upon the world.
Every object interested us and left a deep impression
upon our minds. Every day new objects now grown
common to us dawned upon our consciousness ;
the edge of our enjoyment of the visible had not
been dulled by usage, and there was no whispering
crowd of solicitudes to interrupt the bright con-
tinuity of our day dreams. The bluest skies and the
most silvery stars we know were seen by us not this
year, but many years ago ; brooks and shrubs and
insects, we saw them all magnified and in isolation ;
every sense was its language. That keenness of
observation, that freedom of imaginative adventure,
as well as that leisure, a grown meditative man must

iS7

BOOKS REVIEWED

envy, and no man more than a poet. The com-
plementary truth is that most poets deliberately
draw very largely upon their memories of childhood
for the material of their verse. Earth, at any rate,
lies about us in our infancy ; in our later years it is
only very seldom that we really look to see if it is
still there. The brain is preoccupied, and horn has
come over the eyes. Eagerness has gone out of us,
and when we look at a child the thought, clearly or
dimly, is present in our minds : " You do not know
what you have or what is in store for you. But I
was once what you are now and you will be what I
am now." The matter of morality is not, I think,
necessarily involved.

158

THE CLASSICS IN TRANSLATION

HERE are six more volumes of the Loeb
Library, which now contains well over a
hundred. The library, one of the greatest publish-
ing schemes on record, was made possible by the
enthusiasm, energy, and riches of Mr. J. Loeb, and
its success must have rewarded him. In time the
whole of the surviving works of Greek and Latin
literature which are of the least interest to us will
be available to us here, with the text on one page
and a translation (usually good and sometimes
brilliant) on the opposite page. The variety of the
works published and the status of the translators
may be gathered by a glance at the list. The
contents of the new batch range from the best
existing version of Herodotus to a translation of
Quintilian's treatise on oratory, and a version with
a vast commentary on Apollodorus's collection of
Greek myths by Sir James Frazer — a work which
might be regarded as a supplement to the " Golden
Bough " series.

The Classics can never regain their old supremacy
in our education and, consequently, will never again
be so familiar an element in social intercourse as
they were. We even find it hard to realise how great
their influence once was. When the Grammar Schools
were founded, " grammar " meant Latin grammar ;
and the circumstances of the time justified the in-
sistence laid upon the ancient tongues. The Renais-
sance Modernists could not wish to throw Latin
and Greek over as relics of Medievalism, for Greek

iS9

BOOKS REVIEWED

was largely their own discovery, and through the
medium of the old manuscripts and the old monu-
ments worlds of new beauty and new knowledge
had broken upon them, with an appeal to the im-
agination which we can hardly conceive. Exaggera-
tion naturally followed ; a schoolboy learned nothing
of English, nothing of history, nothing of con-
temporary languages, and it was difficult to pursue
in later life the study of any science without an in-
timate acquaintance with Latin. In the nineteenth
century we suddenly awoke to the fact that we were
still living under the hardened crust of what had
once been a living movement. We began shoulder-
ing through it, and we have now largely broken it up.
It is impossible that the Classics should recover
their former place in education, and, indeed, certain
that they will lose more ground than they yet have
— ground which will, let us hope, be partly occupied
by other human studies, and not entirely given over
to laboratory " experiments." But there is some-
thing more than a just and natural reaction against
them to be observed. We' may see all around us a
kind of passionate animus against them, a desire to
oust them completely, even to obliterate them from
the consciousness of the race. In some quarters you
cannot mention Latin without inviting the answer
" dead language," or Greek without being deemed
one of those supposedly blind and besotted obscur-
antists, the supporters of compulsory Greek. I know
some otherwise enlightened men whom I suspect of
a secret desire to introduce Total Prohibition of
the teaching of Latin or Greek, with a heavy punish-
ment for illicit distillers and secret consumers. The

160

THE CLASSICS IN TRANSLATION

prejudice extends to the Greeks and Romans them-
selves : many people felt in Mr. Wells's " Outline
of History " an inclination to " larn " the Greeks
and Romans to be classics, to visit on them all the
sins of all the Dons. In the heat of our enthusiasm
for a Business Administration Mr. Asquith's defects
were ascribed to the fact that he took the Craven,
and the merits of Sir Barnaby Rudge, the eminent
entrepreneur, to the fact that he didn't. In some
quarters a knowledge of the Classics is regarded as
a handicap, almost as a disgrace, something that
emasculates or petrifies a man ; and deliberately
anti-democratic at that.

For this absurdity there are several reasons. In
the first place all reactions go too far : those who
find consolation in metaphors may comfort them-
selves with the reflection that the pendulum which
sagely stopped in the middle would not work the
clock. In the second place there is a certain amount
of envy. The tendency to think (or to pretend, for
one's own comfort) that what one doesn't know
isn't worth knowing is not confined to a few especially
vain persons. It is, in varying degrees, one of the
commonest foibles of the human race ; and those
who do not know the Classics are much more vocal
now than they were fifty years ago. Moreover, the
last strongholds of overdone classical teaching have
been the institutions of the rich ; Latin and Greek
have acquired a strong class flavour which tends to
exaggerate the jealousy felt against them. In the
third place their defenders, as a body, have fre-
quently "asked for it." While one don is busily
translating Plato or Sophocles, ten others are telling

161 M

BOOKS REVIEWED

people that they cannot get the slightest inkling of
Plato and Sophocles unless they read them in the
original. The classical schoolmaster, looking dis-
dainfully down from his antique keep (which once
was as new as South Kensington), has often dis-
played a maddening contempt for every form of
study not his own, and a deplorable lack of curiosity
about the spiritual and physical world into which
he has been born. Nothing else but Greek and Latin
could exercise the intellectual faculties of youth.
Men who apparently lacked the least tinge of wis-
dom talked of the classics as the only sources of
wisdom, and men patently devoid of aesthetic sensi-
bility argued, or rather stated, that no modern
literature could hope to compete with the ancient —
however long, apparently, it might continue to grow.
Naturally a great many spirited people, listening
to this sort of talk, feel a strong desire to cram their
Hesiods down their throats. I have said " feel," I
ought to have said " felt." For during recent years
the classical don and the classical schoolmaster
have become very subdued. Many of them have
the air of unwanted orphans in a cold world, or
decrepit wasps who are afraid of being smoked out
of their nests. Youth is dashing away to engineering ;
parents are making themselves felt ; they have no
influence over the new race of politicians and pub-
licists. The best of them are seriously concerned lest
the value they know to lie in a classical education
should be lost to the State, and those who most love
the ancient literatures fear that in process of time
Latin and Greek might really become dead languages.
Let us hope not, though we are still not in a

162

THE CLASSICS IN TRANSLATION

position to guess what proportion, even of the most
studious boys, would choose Greek and Latin for
subjects of study were heavy premiums not put
upon those subjects. In another generation there
will certainly be fewer people who can quote Horace
than now, even in the House of Lords, the only
place where it is still done (about once in six months)
without producing a smile or a scoff. The proportion
of scholarships given to the classics will certainly
diminish, and they will probably have vanished as
compulsory subjects from the most conservative of
our schools. Yet I cannot but think that as soon as
their privileges have been removed they will call
with a new fascination to many young men ; that
persons, even, who have had no proper groundwork
at school, will, at the period of intellectual awaken-
ing, take to the Classics with something of the zest
and energy with which young men now take to other
fresh studies. From the general point of view — ■
once the admission has been made that the Classics
can be replaced as necessary elements in the training
of a fully educated man — there will be no need of a
very large body of competent classical scholars.
The bulk of the textual work on the existing Classics
has been done ; no great percentage of European
classical scholars is directly engaged in digesting
and elucidating the fruits, manuscript and other, of
current archaeological research ; and even produc-
tive digging will come to an end in time.

So far as our civilisation is concerned the essential
thing is that access to the thought and records of
the Greeks and Latins should be easy. And com-
mon sense insists that this access may be open

163

BOOKS REVIEWED

through translations — which, by the way, must, as
a rule, be renewed from age to age. Classical poetry
in translation — save in rare fragments done by great
poets and not by great scholars — naturally loses as
much as English poetry would lose if translated into
Latin. Prose style may often be incommunicable in
translation. Yet what proportion even of reputable
scholars have read the Classics primarily as an
aesthetic experience ? And how tiny a fraction of
those who have, in any age, gone through the classical
mill have gone through life with their Homers or
their Virgils in their coat pockets ! It was not Homer's
" Iliad," but Pope's, that sold twenty thousand
copies in the time of Queen Anne, who is dead.
Even here it cannot be granted that all is lost if
there be no first-hand reading : Shakespeare prob-
ably and Keats certainly are evidence to the con-
trary. But in a more general way it may be argued
most forcibly that one who should know the corpus
of the Classics, poetical, historical, philosophical,
through translations might have a far profounder
appreciation of the mind, morals, and arts of Athens
and Rome than many of the finest scholars on record.
I once heard a classical don maintain with heat that
you could not discuss the ancient literatures if you
knew them only in translations ("no word was ever
an exact rendering of another word," etc.), and a
moment after proceed to dogmatise about Tolstoi
and Turgenev for all he was worth. Yet he did not
know a word of Russian. Who, except Mrs. Garnett,
Mr. Baring, Mr. Harold Williams, and a few others,
does ?

If (which Heaven prevent) all the classical texts

THE CLASSICS IN TRANSLATION

were to disappear, and only the English pages of
the Loeb library were to survive, we should go on
discussing the qualities and achievements of the
ancients, and (excepting that those who really know
would not in each generation exercise their authority
to keep up a reverence for the supreme expression
of certain of the poets) we should not be greatly
handicapped in making our estimates, in drawing
suggestions from ancient thought, or warnings from
ancient experience. Even to-day our classics may
read Aristotle in the original, but our political
scientists usually do not. If it be true that Plutarch
was partly responsible for the French revolution,
he would have been (probably was) just as efficacious
in translation as in the original. So if we cannot
restore the widespread study of the originals we
may at least try to promote a knowledge of trans-
lations more general than ever before. They are
even, as a rule (it may be worth suggesting), good
reading. There are dull classical as there are dull
modern books ; but it is a remarkably low pro-
portion of those which have survived. I open the
second volume of Mr. A. D. Godley's exquisite
version of Herodotus at random, and this is what I
see : " The Budini are native to the soil ; they are
nomads, and the only people in these parts that eat
fir-cones." I think I shall go on from there.

165

ESCAPES

EVEN a convict escaped from Dartmoor com-
mands almost universal sympathy. Provided,
in his efforts to get to safety, he merely steals
clothes and food and does not commit murderous
assaults, the secret good wishes of the most respect-
able people are with him. He may be a professional
blackguard, brutal, unscrupulous, and evil of coun-
tenance, but it doesn't matter. He has shown
courage and cleverness ; he has pitted himself
against society, this time in an enterprise which is
in itself innocent ; he is a small thing hunted by a
big thing ; and we all hope he will get away — pro-
vided always, be it understood, that there is no
likelihood of his appearing through our own
window at dead of night. The qualities of gameness
and adventurousness, the Thermopylae element in
the unequal contest, appeal to human nature so
strongly that for a generation the unspeakable villain
Charles (affectionately Charlie, like Mr. Chaplin)
Peace was almost a popular hero, whilst reprobation
was reserved for the woman who was supposed to
have " done him in." Nobody, whatever public
approval may be expressed, really likes the person
who gives information about an escaped criminal.
Here, as so often, the conscientious man has to
deplore a conflict between his civic sense and his
natural instincts.

Every escape is interesting, and every escaped
prisoner arouses our sympathy. The best of the
stories of escape from Germany will be as thrilling

1 66

ESCAPES

as ever twenty years hence, when most of the his-
tories of operations and other impersonal war books
have become documents for students or less than
that. The advantage is not peculiar to books about
escapes. All biographical books, all stories of the
personal adventures of a man or a small group have
a power of holding the attention which is often lack-
ing in works conventionally of great " importance."
For one man who will read a naval history a hundred
will read the life of Nelson. If Napoleon's battles
are widely studied by unprofessional readers it is
largely because they were fought by Napoleon. The
fate of Europe hung on Marlborough's battles also,
but it has always been impossible to persuade people
to take an interest in them, because they neither
know anything nor want to know anything about
Marlborough. History is history to very few ; to
most it is drama. If we are to examine great events
we prefer to do it through the eyes of one man, and
it is conceivable that posterity will know no more
about the East African campaign than it can learn
from Major Brett- Young's " Marching on Tanga,"
which happens to be a very personal book written
in beautiful prose.

Of the good war-books of this kind perhaps the
majority have been narratives of escape, and there
will probably be more of them within the next few
years. Those published during the war were written
under a serious handicap. Nothing could be in-
cluded which might assist the enemy, and no in-
formation about methods of escape which might
impair the chances of anybody else escaping. There
were nevertheless several which, if slight, were

167

BOOKS REVIEWED

extremely exciting ; amongst them Capt. Gilliland's
" My German Prisons," Captain Caunter's modest
and vivid " Thirteen Days," and, above all, the late
Pat O'Brien's characteristically named " Outwitting
the Hun." This author was a young American in
the British Air Force ; he was reported recently to
have been killed in an accident in a Western State.
He wrote his book slangily and with the gusto of
one who, if he had no true tall stories to tell, would
have invented false ones for the fun of telling them.
Nothing that happened to him was of an ordinary
kind. He began by nose-diving from a height of
several thousand feet and crashing without break-
ing a bone. He leapt off a train almost as soon as he
got into Germany. After living on roots for days he
swam the Meuse in so exhausted a condition that
he had to get rid of his wrist watch in order to re-
lieve himself of its weight. He lived in a large Belgian
town for weeks with Germans all around ; he got
into Holland by burrowing under the great German
wire-fence ; and he rounded off his exploits by
dedicating his book to the useful Pole Star, which
had probably never received such an honour before.
The book is one which may still be commended
as a true story as full of dramatic moments as
" Greenmantle " ; but the best and most elaborate
escape stories have taken longer to write and ap-
peared later. " The Road to Endor " is now,
deservedly, in its seventh edition, and it is highly
probable that Captain Evans's book, The Escaping
Club, will have an equal success.

Captain Evans is the Hampshire and England
cricketer. During the Somme battle an intractable

1 68

ESCAPES

aeroplane engine let him down in the German lines,
and he spent most of the rest of the war-period
escaping from captivity. He had been in Germany
(the Harz district) for two months when he got well
away for the first time, went by train to Dusseldorf
with a Belgian confederate, spent a day there, and
was ultimately caught twenty yards from the Dutch
frontier. The result of this was removal to the dark,
icy, insanitary, crowded Fort 9 at Ingolstadt, where
were collected a large number of the toughest char-
acters from the Allied armies. Most of them were
there as punishment for escaping from other camps.
They answered gross ill-treatment with perpetual
insubordination, and they spent most of their time
inventing and attempting every sort of ingenious
scheme for getting out of an almost impossible
place. In this camp there were :

Men who could make keys which would unlock
any door ; men who could temper and jag the
edge of an old table-knife so that it would cut
iron bars ; expert photographers (very useful for
copying maps) ; engineering experts who would
be called in to give advice on any tunnel which
was being dug ; men who spoke German per-
fectly ; men who shammed insanity perfectly,
and many, like myself, who were ready to risk a
bit to get out, but had no parlour-tricks. One had
escaped from his prison-camp dressed as a Ger-
man officer ; another had escaped in a dirty
clothes basket, and another had been wheeled
out of the camp hidden in a muck-tub ; another
sportsman had painted his face green to look like

169

BOOKS REVIEWED

a water-lily, and had swum the moat in daylight
under the sentry's nose. . . . Forgery, bribery,
impersonation, with an utter disregard of risks
of being shot, all found their advocates in Fort 9.

Thenceforth, in the book, attempts to escape are
almost continuous. Captain Evans's own first effort
(with two companions) was a dash over the frozen
moat, followed by " a fair amount of shooting " ;
a lorry-load of munition workers put an end to this.
Six weeks later, with snow on the ground, he and
another cut their way at night through a wired
window and got away with white overclothes on,
shots again following. Bad luck once more ruined
their chances, and they were brought back to " a
very hostile reception from a mob of angry sentries,"
the Feldwebel " cursing them roundly for bringing
us in alive rather than dead." Several other schemes
were fruitless, but at last the chance came. There
were riots. A party of prisoners was dispatched by
train for another camp. At a favourable moment
the sentries were distracted and obstructed, Captain
Evans and Lieutenant Buckley sprawled out of the
window, and there began a two-hundred miles
journey to the Swiss frontier. It took eighteen nights,
and the description of it fills fifty very fine pages.
Captain Evans returned home ; went to Palestine ;
was captured by murderous Arabs and nearly killed ;
made a dash for the coast alone and foodless, and
failed ; was taken to Constantinople ; and got out
of Turkey just before the Armistice. It is impossible
to do justice to his book in a summary or in quota-
tions. It is crowded with detail, and written in a very

170

ESCAPES

direct style, without ever a word put in for effect or
a sentence noticeably careless. The spirit of it is
equally admirable. Captain Evans has a respect for
truth and his general coolness and restraint give
peculiar force to his one set denunciation, which is
aimed at the whole race of Turks.

Captain Evans says somewhere that he would
like to know whether German prisoners here found
smuggling as easy as he did. It is permissible to feel
curiosity also about the escapes of Germans from
prison-camps in England. Whether any of them
actually got back to Germany I do not know, and I
do not think we were ever told. It is not likely that
many could have done so. It is one thing, prodi-
giously dangerous and difficult though the feat
always was, to crawl, or make a midnight dash,
between sentries on a land frontier ; it is another
to get across the high seas. There were, I seem to
remember, Germans captured in a small stolen boat,
and there was one (who certainly deserved to get
away) who smuggled himself on board ship, or near
it, disguised as a consignment of fish or a piano, in
a large wooden crate pierced with air-holes. But if
none got out of the country, many escaped from
their prisons, and some were at large for weeks and
were recaptured after long wanderings.

Presumably some of these will have published
their experiences in Germany. But as far as I know,
only one such book has as yet been translated, and
that was rather a thin book in which there was a
short account of Donington Hall and a short, if
interesting, sketch of a walk from Donington Hall to
Nottingham, where the local police force interrupted

171

BOOKS REVIEWED

the tour. Cannot some publisher get us one or
two others ? It is not that one is particularly eager
to hear about the domestic life of the Germans in
British prison-camps, which was, to put it mildly,
less eventful than that of the unfortunate English-
men who fell into the hands of Germany ; though
even here one would be interested to learn how
English commandants and guards appeared through
those strange German spectacles. But the methods
of escape adopted in our own midst excite one's
curiosity, and above all it would be entertaining to
see how our own familiar countryside and towns and
people looked to the escaping foreigner.

For the prisoner who is escaping through a strange
land observes the scenes through which he passes
with painful closeness and from a peculiar angle.
The Germany that Captain Evans and his com-
rades saw was not the Germany which the Germans
saw. The moment a man was slinking on his way to
the frontier the whole landscape changed. The most
ordinary scenes became invested with a romantic
quality. Lanes, fields, woods, cottages, rivers,
bridges, signal-boxes, which were commonplace to
accustomed eyes, took on a mystery, became grim
and menacing, were dreaded for the perils they
might conceal or blessed for their harmlessness.
Every object seen was seen for the first time and in
an unusual aspect ; every yokel and every dairy-
maid working in the fields or walking home or
chatting under a street-lamp was a possible enemy ;
every enforced conversation was an adventure, and
every eye was watched for the glint of suspicion. It
would be an amusing thing to have a few pictures

172

ESCAPES

of our own homely roads, our own streets and
railway stations, and our own routine selves,
done from the point of view of men who were
travelling across England much as though it were
an Africa, full of lurking deaths, with the courage
of solitary wanderers fighting their way out of a
region of enchantments. Did a man, four years ago,
with his heart standing still, ask the clerk at Bir-
mingham booking office, in consciously bad English,
for a ticket to Paddington ? Did a man, cold and
ragged, lie under leaves in a copse of Richmond
Park as Captain Evans lay, evening after evening,
on the hills of Bavaria ? Did one sit on the Embank-
ment watching the gulls, pretending to read a paper,
frightened of every policeman, and wondering
where to go next ? Did a party of them boil their
Bovril in the woods above Oxford ? Did stray
fugitives swim the Trent and the Thames, blunder
on the Washington Inn without knowing its name,
and see it as a sinister thing, inspect Salisbury
Cathedral, look hungrily over the moonlit Channel
from the Downs, bluff their way through com-
panies amongst whom we ourselves may have been,
take the wrong road at Guildford, and fall into a
trap at Stoke Poges ? There must be many Ger-
mans who have tales of desperate adventure in an
England which is to us so comfortable and unsus-
pecting— ending usually, no doubt, in conversations
with farmers and policemen which, and whom, they
will have found very odd.

173

LORD ROSEBERY'S MISCELLANIES

IN a prefatory note to this collection Mr. John
Buchan takes the responsibility for it ; he im-
portuned Lord Rosebery to " release " his mis-
cellaneous shorter works for publication. These in-
clude one or two long historical essays ; a few review
articles and prefaces ; and a large number of dis-
quisitions on a variety of subjects delivered from
Scottish Rectorial chairs or before statues which
Lord Rosebery was unveiling. How dull, were the
author anybody but Lord Rosebery, it would all
sound ! But, the author being he, it was a collection
well worth making.

The little monograph on Lord Randolph Churchill
is already well known ; it is extraordinarily good,
and makes one wish that Lord Rosebery would
supplement it with other portraits of his contempo-
raries. The study of Peel is also familiar ; it is just
and illuminating, and it contains a passage on the
modern Prime Minister and the modern Cabinet
more frank and acute than anything that has been
said on the subject by any other living politician.
Of the other historical papers the chief are the
group which deal with Scotland. I hesitate even to
touch on these arcana ; when I began reading them,
so full as they are of enthusiasms and rituals and
allusions strange to me, I felt almost like a shy in-
truder who has strayed into some service in a mosque.
But they are excellent reading, and contain passages
which must be an inspiration to any Scotsman who
reads them. The most conspicuous of the literary

174

LORD ROSEBERY'S MISCELLANIES

essays are those on Burke and Dr. Johnson. That
on Johnson was a centenary address given at Lich-
field ; the main elements in the Doctor's character
and in Boswell's success have never been better or
more succinctly described. Lord Rosebery is devoted
to these two authors above all ; but his taste, though
he says little of poetry (except Burns 's), and nothing
of any modern author except Stevenson, is obviously
catholic. He is hearty in his admirations and pleas-
antly candid about his dislikes. He says, refresh-
ingly, that he finds Chesterfield's letters dreary ;
he describes " The Master of Ballantrae " as an
" utterly repulsive " story of " the conflict of a
scoundrel against a maniac narrated by a coward " ;
he betrays an intimate knowledge of Swift, Scott,
and Miss Austen ; and he writes a charming ap-
preciation of Thackeray in which the qualities and
defects of " Vanity Fair " are balanced with con-
summate art.

Everywhere the expression is normally easy ; the
periods when they come glide naturally out of the
elegantly conversational. The words, as everybody
knows, are admirably chosen, and the incidental
jokes, often very quietly ironical, are a constant
temptation to the pencil. Wordsworth " was not
prone to external admiration " ; Landor would
have been hard put to it to write an Imaginary Con-
versation between a Tory Democrat and Lord
Eldon ; the old aim in Scotland was to get " two
eyes for an eye and two teeth for a tooth " ; the
Scotch monarch was a sort of " living Great Seal."
Contemplating the developments of a mechanical
age, he pictures " His Royal Highness the Prince

175

BOOKS REVIEWED

of Wales leading home the victorious locomotive
in the national race on Epsom Downs " ; he has a
delicious set passage on the modern rage for memo-
rials and testimonials ; and he frequently dwells
on the drawbacks of speechifying. " Speeches," he
says, in one place :

even the best, are as evanescent as fireworks or
thistle-down ; they are explored for untimely
quotation during the speaker's life, and when
that useful purpose ceases with his death, they
cease to be opened at all ; they are even less read
than old sermons, which possess an elect public
of their own.

These volumes contain much wit, much sense,
much sound, and much eloquent English, much
interesting literary and historical criticism, many
valuable studies in portraiture. Those attributes
alone would give them a high rank amongst the pro-
ductions of literary politicians. Except for one or
two short speeches, which have no merit but a per-
functory polish, every essay and address that Lord
Rosebery has compiled has displayed both wide
reading and prolonged reflection. He, the most
expert of ceremonial orators, has never been con-
tent that his oratory should be merely ceremonial.
A man is no more on his oath in a ceremonial address
than in a lapidary inscription, but Lord Rosebery
has never been content to fob his audiences off with
pleasant platitudes or easy first thoughts. A man
with his gifts could quite easily have done it and
with applause ; his mere grace of style in writing,
his mere voice and gesture in speaking, were always

176

LORD ROSEBERY'S MISCELLANIES

sufficient to carry him through without trouble if
he cared to be so carried through. But he always
took his commissions of this kind more seriously
than he thought it necessary to admit. The jesting
or diffident exordium was always succeeded by the
evidence of close reading and a serious desire to say
something worth saying. There is hardly a paper or
a speech in the collection which is not worth having
for the information which it contains and the judg-
ments based upon that information. Yet for all this
the main interest of these volumes does not derive
from the facts or the criticisms which they incor-
porate, from their varied erudition or from the
admirable construction of their sentences. It is not
Lord Rosebery's talent but his strain of genius
which chiefly fascinates.

The quality of his imagination frequently comes
out in isolated phrases or images, resembling those
of his hero Burke, and of the lesser (but often Burke-
like in this regard) Walter Bagehot. This is the sort
of sentence I mean : — " The crises of nations, like
the crises of Nature, have their thunderbolts, and
Cromwell was one of these " ; and " I have seen
life and death and glory chasing each other like
shadows on a summer sea " ; and (to men leaving
their university) " There will always be a voice
from these old walls which will speak as a second
conscience " ; and (when he is speaking of the swift
changes in the streets and houses of London) " When
in a long walk one comes on some untouched nook
it is with the same surprise that one finds a patch of
snow under a hedgerow in a thaw." But his imagin-
ation does not operate only in these localised flashes.

177 N

BOOKS REVIEWED

His imaginative, one may as well say poetic, frame
of mind comes out also in his power, and his con-
stant inclination to exercise the power, of establish-
ing a sudden sympathetic contact with his audience
and compelling them to join with him in some
strange adventure of the mind. He is talking on
Burns, and he must unexpectedly, with a few words,
make his audience think of the births taking place
in the world at that instant and the possibility of
another Newton or another Caesar being amongst
them. He is addressing the Johnsonian faithful at
Lichfield, and he startles them with the imagined
presence of Johnson lumbering into that congre-
gation and asking what the nonsense is all about.
He is talking at St. Andrews on the five hundredth
anniversary of the University, and he conjures up
the first Rector, endows him with an immortality
in the flesh, and through those conjectured eyes sees
the whole procession of events in the world during
half a millennium. He is addressing the burgesses
of Bristol on the subject of their former member
Burke, and he quotes to them Burke's words :
" What shadows we are and what shadows we pur-
sue," with the comment that they " sum up the life
of every politician, and perhaps of every man." It
was always his habit to view the events of agenera-
tion (as a historian must) in the light of the events
of centuries and (as an imaginative artist will) the
events of centuries in the light of eternity. The pro-
cesses of time have always haunted him, and the
mysteries of human existence and human pain and
doubt. It was characteristic of him that in one of
the earliest of serious addresses, delivered to the

178

LORD ROSEBERY'S MISCELLANIES

students of Aberdeen in 1880, he should have re-
minded the students, little younger than himself,
of the Dance of Death :

Day by day the horizon of human possibility,
which now lies so unbounded before you, must
contract ; the time must come when, under the
stroke of illness or the decay of nature, hope and
health, the pride and power of life and intellect,
which now seem so inseparable from your triumph-
ant youth, will have passed away.

We can confidently deduce that such reflections
were never far from him ; that they crossed his
mind at Cabinet meetings, on platforms when
thousands were cheering some joke or political
announcement, in rooms where diplomatic chaffer-
ings were proceeding over tables. This is what it
means to be of an imaginative and reflective habit ;
it is sometimes a handicap and sometimes a great
help.

Lord Rosebery says there were a hundred Glad-
stones. There may have been ; but they all got on
very happily together ; the complexity in Glad-
stone's heart and brain was not so great as that in
his own. Behind this book, and his other books,
and all his career, one is aware of a strange congeries
of inhabitants in that one form, the ambitious and
versatile man of affairs living with the meditative
student of mortality, the elegant and cultivated
Georgian senator with the melancholy artist of the
Romantic period. He has never paraded his more
intimate solicitudes ; on the contrary, he has desired

179

BOOKS REVIEWED

to preserve an exterior urbanity, to be objective in
his attitude, reticent in his expression. But his tem-
perament was always far too strongly coloured for
any pride or any code of manners to be able entirely
to counteract it ; it is plain that he always has been
conscious of his every word and act, and, deliber-
ately or not, his essays let us into the dominant
preoccupations, temporal and eternal, of his mind.
What these are may be left to the reader to discover ;
but it is clear that he has always been exercised by
the problem as to whether a born man of letters is
ever wise in allowing himself to be swallowed up
by politics.

1 80

MINOR CAROLINES

THE third volume of Mr. Saintsbury's re-
prints of lesser Caroline poets was announced
before the war. The war held it up. It has now
appeared.

There is a slight distinction between it and its
predecessors. In the first two volumes the poets
were distinctly minor minors. The best of them all
was probably Katherine Philips (Orinda). The
others were mainly curiosities ; at best poets who
once or twice " came off." There was Benlowes, the
eccentric who ruined himself by benefactions to
needy poets, and whose " Theophila " was put
through the press with such unremitting assiduity
and such fluctuating intentions that scarcely any
two copies contain the same number of plates. There
was Chamberlayne, whose " Pharonnida " is an
immense narrative dunghill, in which the otherwise
unoccupied may search for, and sometimes find,
pearls. There was Chalkhill, who wrote a charming
song ; Patrick Carey, whom Sir Walter Scott
temporarily revived ; Philip Ayres, who wrote
sonnets when sonnets were not in fashion ; Kynaston
and Hall, who rose to great heights at isolated
moments ; Hannay, who is dull ; Godolphin, who
was a plaster imitation of a good poet ; and others.
But the new volume contains poets of greater stature
than these. The first three are Cleveland, Stanley,
and King.

Cleveland we may perhaps pass as not much
above the level of the others. His works were very

181

BOOKS REVIEWED

popular after the Restoration, because he had
lampooned the Puritans with notable offensiveness.
There are splendid bits of invective in him as there
are in his later congener, Charles Churchill ; but
he was less of a poet than Churchill, and his fame
may be greater than he deserves. Stanley and King
are far more important people. Thomas Stanley,
author of a once-celebrated " History of Philosophy,"
opulent friend and patron of half the most gifted
men of his age, was as a poet a link between Donne
and his followers and the song- writers of the Restora-
tion. " Expectation," which begins :

Chide, chide no more away
The fleeting daughters of the day,
Nor with impatient thoughts outrun
The lazy sun.

is of the age of Herbert, but the accents of another
generation are anticipated in " The Relapse " (pub-
lished 1 651), which opens :

O ! turn away those cruel eyes,

The stars of my undoing !
Or death in such a bright disguise

May tempt a second wooing.

In both moods and in both measures he sometimes
got near perfection, and no general anthology of
English verse can pretend to be representative which
does not contain several of his poems. As much
may be said of Bishop King, of Chichester, who
lived from 1592 to 1669. His " Exequy on his Wife "

182

MINOR CAROLINES

has often been reprinted, and can never be re-
printed too often. There is no more affecting fare-
well in all English poetry than its closing lines :

Sleep on, my Love, in thy cold bed

Never to be disquieted !

My last good night ! Thou wilt not wake

Till I thy fate shall overtake :

Till age, or grief, or sickness must

Marry my body to that dust

It so much loves ; and fill the room

Thy heart keeps empty in thy tomb.

Stay for me there : I will not fail

To meet thee in that hollow vale. . . .

" The Departure," " Brave Flowers," and " Tell
Me No More " are in the same category. He is
certainly a minor poet in the light of the major poets ;
but compared to Chamberlayne or Ayres he is
gigantic. These and two others, Whiting and Flat-
man, are included in the new volume. The texts
have been carefully revised with the assistance of
Mr. Percy Simpson and Mr. Thom-Drury, and
the notes are as full and as racy as Mr. Saintsbury
alone could make them. It is a pleasure to see him
thumping Roundheads again in the old way. Every
page of text is welcome ; but there is one poet for
whom we may acknowledge an especial debt to
Mr. Saintsbury.

Of Cleveland there is a modern edition made by
one of those industrious American gentlemen who
write theses for the doctorate or engage themselves,
at the behest of their universities, on works of post-
graduate research. King was in the main edited by

183

BOOKS REVIEWED

Archdeacon Hannah eighty years ago, and Stanley's
lyrics and some of his translations are accessible
(though they were not when Mr. Saintsbury first
planned his edition) in the edition prepared by the
late Louise Imogen Guiney and published in 1907
by the late J. R. Tutin, of Hull, one of the orna-
ments of the English bookselling trade. All these
poets are in a manner accessible, though Mr. Saints-
bury's editions will certainly supersede all previous
ones. Whiting and Flatman are in different case.
Neither has ever been edited in modern times, and
there is, I believe, no issue of either 's poems later
than the seventeenth century. That Whiting has
not been edited I do not, after reading his works,
feel surprised at. He is a lumbering narrator, with
a grovelling mind and a style full of pedantry and
made metaphors. He was a " character " and is
amusing to meet once ; but it is likely that the
English language will die out of the world before
another Mr. Saintsbury arises to give him a second
resurrection. But in editing Flatman (and, in-
cidentally, unearthing several of his poems from
manuscript) Mr. Saintsbury has added one more to
the long series of substantial services that he has
done to English poetry.

Thomas Flatman was (probably) a Norfolk man,
of Winchester and New College, who was born in
1635 and died in 1688. He is the most neglected of
the genuine poets of the Restoration period. Several
of them still want thorough editing : Dorset, Cotton,
Buckingham, Sedley, and the almost great Rochester
are known to most readers of poetry only through
selections in anthologies. But Flatman only just

184

MINOR CAROLINES

peeps into the anthologies, and even there he seems
to escape notice. Except in the catalogues of Messrs.
Sotheby and Hodgson — his editions are all rare and
fetch large prices — I doubt if his name ordinarily
appears in print once a year. Probably it is the said
name that has done for his reputation ; a poet might
almost as well be called John Proser, Henry Dullard,
or Christopher Numskull. But he was at times a
goodish poet, and one may say of him, as one can
of several of his contemporaries, that had he been
born in another generation he would have been a
better one. He was not a consummate song-writer,
but some of his songs are graceful ; and he had a
particular faculty of getting touches of simplicity,
of humour, and of imagination into the most pomp-
ous-looking of pindarics. It was not for nothing
that one of his friends was Dr. Walter Pope, the
wag who wrote that charming domestic poem, " The
Old Man's Wish " ; and on the other hand Mr.
Saintsbury is fully justified in saying that he is dis-
tinguished from his contemporaries by having in-
herited from the previous generation a constant,
though not a morbid, preoccupation with Death.
" No more ! Alas ! that bitter word, No more ! "
the opening, both in sentiment and in expression,
is foreign to his time. And Wordsworth himself
can scarcely have written with a more simple direct-
ness than Flatman did in his " song " on the same
subject :

Oh, the sad day,

When friends shall shake their heads and say
Of miserable me,

185

BOOKS REVIEWED

Hark ! how he groans, look how he pants for breath,
See how he struggles with the pangs of Death !
When they shall say of these poor eyes,
How hollow and how dim they be !
Mark how his breast does swell and rise
Against his potent Enemy !

When some old friend shall step to my bedside,
Touch my chill face, and thence shall gently slide,

And when his next companions say,
How does he do ! What hopes ? shall turn away,

Answering only with a lift-up hand,
Who can his fate withstand ?

Flatman could not long remain at this level of
solemnity, though the solemnity was genuine. He
had to finish the poem with :

Then shall a gasp or two do more

Than e'er my rhetoric could before,

Persuade the peevish world to trouble me no more !

That whimsical note often recurs. Perhaps the
most characteristic poem of all is that in which he
very brazenly preaches his doctrine of " Anything
for a quiet life." He calls it, slightly libelling himself
in the title, " The Unconcerned," and it was written
at a time of great mundane convulsions :

Now that the world is all in a maze,
Drums and trumpets rending heav'ns,

Wounds a-bleeding, mortals dying,

Widows and orphans piteously crying ;

186

MINOR CAROLINES

Armies marching, towns in a blaze,

Kingdoms and States at sixes and sevens ;
What should an honest fellow do,
Whose courage, and fortunes run equally low ?
Let him live, say I, till his glass be run,
As easily as he may ;
Let the wine, and the sand of his glass flow to-
gether,
For life's but a winter's day.

Alas ! from sun to sun,
The time's very short, very dirty the weather,
And we silently creep away.
Let him nothing do, he could wish undone ;
And keep himself safe from the noise of gun.

It may not be the most laudable kind of outlook,
but it is a common one, and it has seldom been so
felicitously expressed. It is reflected again in " The
Whim," which is too long to quote bodily, but of
which I may give the first stanza :

Why so serious, why so grave ?

Man of business, why so muddy ?
Thyself from Chance thou can'st not save,

With all thy care and study.
Look merrily then, and take thy repose ;
For 'tis to no purpose to look so forlorn,
Since the World was as bad before thou wert born,

And when it will mend who knows ?

And a thousand years hence 'tis all one,
If thou lay'st on a dunghill, or sat'st on a throne.

" Sit the comedy out, and that done, When the
play's at an end let the curtain fall down." All things

187

BOOKS REVIEWED

will be swept away by Time. " Hereafter no more
thought on than my rhyme, Or faery kingdoms in
Utopia." " When the puling fit of Life is gone, The
worst that cruel man can do is done." He was, when
writing most convincingly, something of a pessimist ;
but it didn't seem greatly to upset him. He was a
quiet and sensible man. In another age he might
have been a religious poet, in that age he avoided
the fashionable extremes of cynicism and reckless-
ness. Cotton, Walton, and Pope were among his
friends. Rochester jeered at him, and his reply was an
eloquent and touching tribute when Rochester died.
Mr. Saintsbury has now concluded his collection.
He had intended to reprint several very small writers,
including Heath and Flecknoe, each of whom wrote
lines of some beauty. These had to be omitted ;
very likely nobody may wish to print them now.
The work must have been one of immense labour,
and it is difficult to realise that it is only a drop in
the vast ocean of Mr. Saintsbury's production.
Even now, though he is over eighty, and has vowed
that his delicious " Notes on a Cellar Book " shall
be his last compilation, one would not be surprised
were he suddenly to undertake some new and
elephantine postscript. There are certainly plenty
of things left which he might profitably have done,
and which it is to be hoped some later scholar with
one half his enthusiasm and energy may arise to
carry through. The collectors and the editors be-
tween them have now fairly thoroughly sorted out
and made accessible all the Elizabethans who are
worth anything and all the Carolines, but our know-
ledge of the Restoration, Augustan, and Georgian

188

MINOR CAROLINES

ages is still very imperfect. The greater poets have
been edited, and it may freely be admitted that the
minors of those ages are not on the same plane as
their predecessors. But there is far more worth in
the poetry which came between Milton and Words-
worth than is commonly allowed. The miscellanies
and song books have not been explored ; even so
powerful a writer as Rochester has not been edited ;
and there are many charming poems to be routed
out and assigned to their places in their authors'
works. Granted the difference ; but why should a
hundred people know Wither 's songs to one who
knows Walsh's " The Despairing Lover," and why
should Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose," be familiar to
thousands who have never heard of Broome's
scarcely less beautiful apostrophe ? Jago and Cuth-
bert Shaw were much truer poets than Whiting or
Godolphin, whom Mr. Saintsbury has considered
worthy of an edition, and we can go higher than
them. Who has edited John Dyer ? It is into these
fields that the next generation of scholars will move
on. They will not find them as rich as the pastures
in which Lamb and Dyce, Grosart and Bullen,
ranged ; but they will not find them barren. Un-
fortunately few of them as yet seem to have realised
the direction in which they will have to move if
they are to be of any service. Young students of the
late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, who
will carry on the work of Mr. Gosse, the late Austin
Dobson, and the omnipresent Mr. Saintsbury, and
produce editions where those men produced his-
tories, are yet to be discovered.

189

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH POETRY

IT used to be, and to a deplorable extent still is,
the fashion to say and to suppose that Chaucer
(with the possible exception of Beowulf) was the
only thing that mattered in English poetry before
the Renaissance. Chaucer was a freak born out of
time, and owing his quality largely to direct contact
with French and Italian influences. There was Piers
Plowman, a document. There were Hoccleve, Lyd-
gate, and Gower, dull monks who passed their
time making immense moral poems because they
had nothing else to do. In John Skelton were to be
found the rugged beginnings of English poetry as
it has developed in the last four hundred years.

Modern research has gradually undermined this
theory, and in recent years more and more of the
results of exploration have been made accessible to
the ordinary intelligent reader who does not care a
dump for the differences between the dialects of
Wessex and Mercia, and is content to let others
decide for him the interesting points arising from a
comparison of Text A with Text B and Text C.
" Pearl " and " Gawayne and the Green Knight "
are now fairly widely known ; Dunbar and Henry-
son have been rescued from neglect ; Richard Rolle
is recognised as an important figure in the history of
mysticism ; the Miracle Plays are receiving an in-
creased amount of attention ; and, above all, the
best of the mediaeval lyrics have been introduced
to a large public through the medium of collections
such as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's. It would be a

190

MEDIAEVAL ENGLISH POETRY

strong-minded anthologist who could now begin a
representative book of English verse with anything
later than " Sumer is a-cumin in."

Mr. Sisam's book, Fourteenth Century Verse and
Prose, should continue the process of readjustment.
He gives extracts from the work of a single century,
the century of Edward II, Edward III, and Richard
II. It was not perhaps the most interesting of the
centuries if we consider it, as he does, with Chaucer
left out. The first freshness of the spring song had
died. The South (source of most of our poetry) was
largely silent ; the note of the North was grim ; the
misfortunes arising from war, famine, and plague
bred a school of stern moralists ; the new modes
of rhyme fought it out against a revival of the old
alliterative blank verse. But as Mr. Sisam says, a
man who reads medieval literature without taking
an interest in mediaeval life is greatly handicapped ;
and in the works he quotes, works almost all of artistic
merit, we get much light on the life of the time —
the social changes, the popular outlook, the mind
of the Church, the risings and the winds of doctrine,
trade, art, and the family. Gower, Wiclif, Mande-
ville, Barbour, Michael of Northgate, Langland :
these are amongst the authors on whom he draws.
His selections are excellently made, introduced and
annotated. He ends with pieces from the York and
Towneley plays, a few political pieces (including
some of Minot's political songs), and nine miscel-
laneous lyrics. " Now Springs the Spray " is one
of the loveliest and least known of these ; there is
also a song jesting at the noise and puffing in a black-
smith's shop which is in the true line of our national

191

BOOKS REVIEWED

humour. A more extensive view of our fourteenth
century and other early lyric poetry may be obtained
from the other book under review.

How great was the lyrical wealth of the Middle
Ages is illustrated by the volume of Early English
Lyrics compiled by Messrs. Chambers and Sidg-
wick. This book first appeared in 1907 ; the pub-
lication of a second impression now suggests that
it has had a slow but steady sale. Its contents cover
the ground from the thirteenth century to Skelton
and Henry the Eighth, the advent of the sonnet
with Wyatt and Surrey being regarded as the symp-
tom of a new poetical age. We know, as Mr. Sisam
says, that we can have only fragmentary remains of
the lyric poetry, and especially of the secular lyric
poetry, of those centuries. What we have we have
only from manuscripts. Almost the only repositories
of the manuscripts were monasteries. The monas-
teries naturally had a prejudice in favour of sober
and instructive compositions. In addition to this
the shorter poems, and the homelier of the longer
ones, were the stock-in-trade of travelling minstrels
and story-tellers, who would not have been over-
anxious to disseminate their treasures in writing.
Yet the contents of this volume can be compared
without too disastrous a result with any volume of
equal size of Elizabethan lyrics. The carols and re-
ligious poems, particularly those in praise of the
Virgin, are the most numerous. They include such
exquisite things as " Of a rose, a lovely rose," and
" I sing of a maiden That is makeles," and " This
flower is faire and fresche of hewe," which was
never printed until it appeared in this book. They

192

MEDIAEVAL ENGLISH POETRY

include also " Quia Amore Langueo," the author
of which, were his name known, would have a great
reputation on that alone :

In a valey of this restles minde

I soughte in mounteine and in mede,
Trustinge a trewe love for to finde.

Upon a hill than I took hede ;

A voice I herde, and neer I yede,
In huge dolour complaininge tho,

" See, dere soule, how my sides blede,
Quia amore langueo."

Yet the religious poems are not, save in number,
more notable than the others. The " Nut- Brown
Maid " is one of the masterpieces of the language.
" Alison " is another. They are richly comic lyrics
like that spoken by a man concerning his wife, which
has for refrain : "I dare not seyn when she seith
' Pes,' " which, being interpreted, means " Peace."
Religion and the mystic life of mediaeval England
join hands in the delicious poem which begins :

The shepard upon a hill he satt ;
He had on him his tabard and his hat,
His tarbox, his pipe, and his flagat ;
His name was called Joly Joly Wat,

For he was a gud herdes boy.
Ut hoy !

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

and the roots of half our nursery rhymes can be
seen in :

193 o

BOOKS REVIEWED

I have a gentil cok

Croweth me day ;
He doth me risen erly

My matines for to say.

I have a gentil cok ;

Comen he is of grete ;
His comb is of red correl,

His tail is of get.

Everywhere, by the way, new rhythms and new
stanzas are to be found, the art has spontaneity but
the spontaneity has art. Scarcely a lyric measure
that we love to use but can be traced to these old
poems. There was plenty of intelligence and plenty
of ear and precisely the English feeling we know
behind such a stanza as :

Alone walking,

In thought pleyning,

And sore sighing,

All desolate,
The remembring
Of my living,
My deth wishing,

Both erly and late. . . .

And there are still scores of others to mention, in-
cluding the glorious spring song (1325), which
begins :

Lenten ys come with love to toune

With blosmen and with briddes roune. . . .

194

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH POETRY

In time, presumably, we shall get the literature
of the Middle Ages better in perspective. We can-
not hope, unfortunately, to recover the names of
the men who wrote the lyric masterpieces, and no
great proportion of the lost poems is now likely to
be recovered. But the historians will stop talking of
Chaucer as a solitary lighthouse in a dark sea, and
tiresomely recounting the names of Lydgate and
Hoccleve as those of two dullards who happen to
be remembered because there is nothing better to
remember. But it is not easy to impress the merits
of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries
upon the ordinary reader, and the reason is that he
will not take enough trouble — and after all why
should he ? — about the language. " Love is Life,"
by Richard Rolle of Hampole, is a beautiful, simple
and moving poem. But what is the reader who is
not a scholar, or very persistent, to make of a stanza
like this :

Luf es a lyght byrthen ; lufe gladdes yong and aide ;
Lufe es withowten pyne, as lofers hase me talde ;
Lufe es a gastly wyne, that makes men bygge and

balde ;
Of lufe sale he na thyng tyne that hit in hert will

halde.

The spelling will puzzle the reader ; he will probably
think that " gastly " means " ghastly " and that
" balde " means " bald," a reading which at once
gives the poem a facetious air. When you add to
this that some of the words are written, not as I
have written them, but are sprinkled with strange

195

BOOKS REVIEWED

signs meaning " th," or " gh," or " g," or " y," or
" z," and that it is not always certain which of these
transliterations is intended, we have something
which seems almost as formidable to the lay eye as
would be the inscriptions of the Egyptians or the
constitution of Jugo-Slavia. Robert Mannynge of
Brunne, who flourished between 1300 and 1350, is
quoted by Mr. Sisam as explaining that he writes
simple language, without literary affectations or
elaborate versification, in order that everybody may
understand him. This is how he puts it :

Haf I alle in myn Inglis layd
In symple speeche as I conthe,
That is lightest in manes mouthe.
I mad noght for no disours,
Ne for no seggers, no har pours,
But for the luf of symple men
That strange Inglis can not keen ;
For many it ere that strange Inglis
In ryme wate never wate it is,
And bot thai wist what it mente,
Alis me thought it were all schente.

It is hard luck on a man who was so determined to
be comprehensible to all that time should have
done to his verses what he deliberately abstained
from doing to them himself. But there it is : to the
ordinary reader of English literature gibberish with-
out swarms of footnotes.

The nearest thing we can get to a remedy is
modernisation. Few modernised versions of the old
poems are likely to be as good as the originals ;

196

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH POETRY

something in sense and in sound is almost sure to
be lost. Literal reprints can never be, and should
never be, superseded ; we must have the texts and
we must train the scholars. But a whole bookfull
of poems in Middle English is to most lovers of
literature a sealed bookfull. Let us regard the opera-
tion as translation (always considered permissible),
and translation of which nine-tenths of the work is
happily done in advance. Messrs. Sidgwick and
Chambers set a good example by modernising the
spelling of the later poems in their volume. There
is no reason why some other scholar, of equal taste
and practical facility, should not present us with a
large volume, containing a representative selection
of mediaeval poetry, with words we understand,
ingeniously substituted for words we do not under-
stand, and the doubtful points of metre made clear.

197

MARK AKENSIDE

CENTENARY articles are rather a bore to
write when everybody is writing them. On
the present occasion, however, I cannot feel certain
that anybody else will remember the centenary.
However, here is notice to the town of Newcastle-
on-Tyne and all whom it may concern. Mark Aken-
side, the poet, was born on November the ninth, 172 1 ;
and, although not as good as his friends thought
him, he deserves the passing tribute of a paragraph.

He was born at Newcastle, the son of a butcher.
When he was seven years old he received a wound
from the paternal cleaver, as a result of which he
was — like Byron and Scott it has been observed —
lame for life. In 1739 he went to Edinburgh as a
student of theology. He came to pray and remained
to anatomise ; and in 1741 left Edinburgh as a
surgeon, having printed a small volume of poems
in the previous year. In London he made friends
with a Mr. Dyson, a rich man, afterwards privy
councillor and lord of the treasury. Dyson took a
house for him and made him a handsome allowance
for the rest of his life— the sort of thing that never
happens to poets now. From 1746 onwards he wrote
very little poetry, though he revised a good deal ;
he made steady progress in his profession, wrote
several medical treatises, delivered a remarkable
Harveian oration, and became principal physician
to Christ's Hospital. He died in 1770, aged forty-
eight, and his poems were collected after his death
by Dyson and issued in 1772 in a handsome form.

198

MARK AKENSIDE

Akenside's poems, like those of most of his best
contemporaries, are not very voluminous. They
fill three hundred smallish pages in the Aldine
edition of his works, which is the best edition and
contains an excellent memoir by Dyce. There are
the two versions of " The Pleasures of the Imagina-
tion " ; there are thirty-three Odes, nine Inscrip-
tions, " The Epistle to Curio," and fewer than a
dozen other poems. In his own day he had a very
great reputation. When he first appeared in London
the manuscript of " The Pleasures " was shown
by Dodsley to the dying Pope, who urged its pub-
lication on the grounds that its author (then only
twenty-two, we should remember) was " no every-
day writer."

The public agreed, and for the rest of his life,
and, indeed, until the end of the century, Akenside
was ranked with the important English poets. A
few very detached and wary people realised that
he was not quite deserving of that. Gray said of the
long poem that it was " above the middling," and
that some of the descriptive parts were very good,
but that it was often obscure, unintelligible, and
loaded with philosophical jargon ; as for the critics,
he remarked that poems might just as well be judged
by " the ladies that keep the bars " in the coffee
houses as by them. Horace Walpole refers to him
contemptuously as " another of these tame geniuses,
a Mr. Akenside, who writes odes," and Dr. Johnson
mingled his praise with censure in a very character-
istic way. Akenside had possessed " an unnecessary
and outrageous zeal for what he called and thought
liberty ... an impetuous eagerness to subvert

199

BOOKS REVIEWED

and confound, with very little care what shall be
established." Akenside was also one of what Johnson
called " the brethren of the blank song " ; he
employed blank verse which Johnson disliked as
betraying " luxuriant and active minds into such
self-indulgence that they pile image upon image,
ornament upon ornament, and are not easily per-
suaded to close the sense at all." When Johnson
condemns him he does it with a relish which he
could not help feeling when thumping a Radical.
When Akenside is lyrical he talks of him " laying
his ill-fated hand upon his harp." " Of his Odes,"
he says in his " Life," " nothing favourable can be
said " ; and in conversation his comment on the
publication of a Collected Akenside was : " One
bad ode may be suffered, but a number of them
together makes one sick." Nevertheless, he thought
ultimately that Akenside was a better poet than
Gray, and for all his criticism (acute as always) of
detail, he said that Akenside 's longest poem showed
"great felicity of genius," and that he had written
blank verse better than most people.

The generality went farther ; the " Ode to the
Naiads " was perhaps the most highly esteemed
short poem of its age, and it was not an obscure or
absurd contemporary who depicted Akenside in
heaven with Plato and Virgil weaving chaplets for
him and Lucretius and Pindar retiring modestly
behind. Up to 1820, and later, no collection of the
poets was complete without him, but the Romantic
movement completely obscured him. He had none
of those attributes which were once more looked
for in poetry : strong passion, novel music, direct

200

MARK AKENSIDE

or vivid language, mysticism, sensuousness. The
intellectual element in him was the strongest ; his
verse, whatever might be said for or against it, was
felt to be the very type of that stiffness, that poly-
syllabic orotundity, that artificiality of image, against
which the new poets revolted. He was more and
more relegated to the histories. Even Mr. Saints-
bury finds nothing good in him except the satirical
11 Epistle to Curio," and to most modern readers he
is merely a name, and supposed to be a dull dog,
no more and no less unreadable than Armstrong or
the dozens of couplet-writers and ode-mongers who
flourished at the same time. He is, it is thought,
merely a cold confectioner, a moral platitudinarian,
whose work may safely be neglected.

He will never stand again where he did. But if he
be read for what he can give and not for what he
cannot give, less contempt may be felt for those who
once hailed him as a great genius. The man who
wrote " The Pleasures of the Imagination " may
have been a prig, and rather chilly ; but he was no
fool, and there was beyond question a poet in him.
The synopses to the books are certainly enough to
make most modern readers take to their heels. His
object, he says, is, " by exhibiting the most engaging
prospects of nature, to enlarge and harmonise the
imagination, and by that means insensibly dispose
the minds of men to a similar taste and habit of
thinking in religion, morals, and civil life " ; and
his verses are introduced with summarising sentences
such as " The separation of the works of Imagina-
tion from Philosophy, the cause of their abuse among
the moderns. Prospect of their reunion under the

201

BOOKS REVIEWED

influence of public Liberty." He was a severe young
man, and a young man with a system. Moreover,
he could be guilty of the worst eighteenth-century
excesses in pomposity and sham decoration. The
stock epithets are everywhere, and the abstractions :
his didacticism is grave and his imagery rather stiff
even in his best passages. It is amusing to find lines
of his which can be paralleled from the Romantics.
Where Shelley writes :

Liquid Peneus was flowing
And all dark Tempe lay

Akenside puts it :

Where, gliding through his daughter's honored

shades,
The smooth Peneus from his glassy flood
Reflects purpureal Tempe 's pleasant scene.

The adjectives are confusing, and Shelley is un-
mistakably better. Where Keats writes :

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, that is all. . . .

Akenside 's version is :

For Truth and Good are one,
And Beauty dwells in them and they in her,
With like participation.

This we recognise as too complicated and prosy in
expression. The fact remains that Akenside 's im-
agination was struck by the scenes, and that Aken-
side's intellect entertained the ideas. Grant him the

202

MARK AKENSIDE

rather monumental style, and many eloquent, beau-
tiful, and interesting things will be found in this
work of a precocious youth. Sometimes he even
stumbles on a simple and direct line, as in the end
of the passage where he says he is exploring the in-
tellectual abyss to gather a laurel culled :

Where never poet gained a wreath before,

and passages dignified and moving, in spite of an
occasional redundancy, are plentiful. Here are
several :

Say, why was man so eminently raised
Amid the vast Creation ? why ordained
Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame ?
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth,
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,
As on a boundless theatre, to run
The great career of justice ; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds ;
To shake each partial purpose from his breast ;
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering. . . .

Now amazed she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode,
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travelled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrives in sight of mortal things.

203

BOOKS REVIEWED

On my strain,
Perhaps even now, some cold, fastidious judge
Casts a disdainful eye ; and calls my toil,
And casts the love and beauty which I sing,
The dream of folly. Thou, grave censor ! say,
Is beauty then a dream, because the glooms
Of dulness hang too heavy on thy sense
To let her shine upon thee ? So the man
Whose eye ne'er opened on the light of heaven,
Might smile with scorn while raptured vision tells
Of the gay-coloured radiance flushing bright
O'er all creation.

If this last passage is not early Keats, in feeling and
expression, I should like to know what it is. The
last thing I am going to do is to claim Akenside as
one more precursor of the Romantic Revival ; but
he at least had something in common with the
romantic poets. The peroration of " The Pleasures,"
in which God is seen behind " the winds and rolling
waves, the sun's unwearied course, the elements and
seasons " is reminiscent of Wordsworth in expression
if the philosophy is Wordsworth's with a difference.
Gray said that Akenside 's great work was pub-
lished nine years too soon. This meant that Akenside
would develop. He did not, and the springs of poetry
almost dried up in him. There is charm and sense
in several of the Odes, such as the " Hymn to Cheer-
fulness," beginning :

How thick the shades of evening close !
How pale the sky with weight of snows !
Haste, light the tapers, urge the fire,
And bid the joyless day retire.

204

MARK AKENSIDE

'* Amoret " is deliciously neat, and so is " The
Complaint," and the " Ode to the Evening Star "
is one of the sweetest lyrics of the century. Its open-
ing :

To night retired, the queen of heaven
With young Endymion stays. . . .

is perfect, and the poem very nearly lives up to it.
The description of the nightingale at the wood's
edge would bear comparison with any other that
exists. Here is one stanza :

Hark, how through many a melting note

She now prolongs her lays :
How sweetly down the void they float !
The breeze their magic path attends ;
The stars shine out ; the forest bends ;

The wakeful heifers gaze.

There are happy touches in even the worst of the
shorter poems, and " The Epistle to Curio," an
onslaught against Pulteney, whom he regarded as a
renegade, has a formal finish and a fierce sincerity
which are lacking from the livelier satires of Charles
Churchill. Akenside was not a great poet, but the
revival of interest in Dyer should be extended to
him also.

Akenside 's character is not very favourably de-
picted by his biographers. Only from one or two of
his poems can it be deduced that he was ever in
love ; he became, whatever he was when young, a
stiff and formal bachelor, vain, dogmatic, inclined
to lose his temper if he were opposed, an obstinate

205

BOOKS REVIEWED

theologian and a peppery radical. Smollett lam-
pooned him in "Peregrine Pickle," and the most
startling stories were told about his brutality to the
poor patients at Christ's Hospital :

If the poor affrighted patients did not return
a direct answer to his queries, he would often dis-
charge them from the hospital. He evinced a par-
ticular disgust to females, and generally treated
them with harshness. It was stated that this
moroseness was occasioned by disappointment
in love.

Thus the world saw him, and his character was
thought to be suited to his appearance — the pale
face, the rigid figure, the precise, elegant clothes,
the long sword and hobbling gait. But the sensibility
and fancy which are visible in his poems coloured
his conversation when among his intimates ; his
eloquence, when he got going, was very impressive ;
and his scholarship has been excelled by few English
poets.

206

WILLIAM COLLINS

THE bi-centenary of the birth of William
Collins occurred last week ; he was born on
Christmas Day, 1721. In various quarters timely
tributes were paid to his memory. I should have
written about Collins had I written at all last week.
I feel some doubt as to the chances of my being
here when his next centenary arrives, and I take
the liberty of coming in a week after the fair.

The elements of Collins 's biography are few and
well known. He was born on December 25, 1721,
at Chichester, where his father, a hatter, was twice
Mayor. In 1733 he went to Winchester, where he
was a friend of Joseph Warton, and wrote a good
deal of verse. In 1740 he went to Queen's College,
Oxford, and in 1741 was elected a Demy at Mag-
dalen. Next year, while still under twenty-one, he
published his " Persian Eclogues," which he had
begun at school. He failed to obtain a fellowship,
left Oxford because of his debts, came into a legacy,
and squandered it in excesses in London. He con-
templated entering the Church and the Army ; his
uncle, Colonel Martin, said he was " too indolent
even for the army." At twenty-five he published
his " Odes," which brought him the friendship of
Thomson ; at twenty-seven his uncle, the Colonel,
left him a small competency and he retired to
Chichester. His " Ode on the Popular Super-
stitions of the Highlands " dates from 1750. Nothing
later survives. Collins lived nine years more, but
they were years of melancholy and intermittent
207

BOOKS REVIEWED

madness. He died at thirty-seven and a half, having
passed clean out of the sight of literary London,
which nowhere recorded his death.

Less than two thousand verses by Collins survive.
The number would be slightly larger did we possess
everything he is known to have written. He pub-
lished at Winchester two poetical pamphlets of
which no copies are believed to exist, and at the end
of his productive career an " Ode on the Greek
Theatre," which may have ranked with his finest
works. But it would be a small volume at best ;
fertility was not a characteristic of the poets of the
eighteenth century, especially the best poets, who
may be supposed to have been cramped by the " cor-
rect " spirit of the time. Collins's poems are few,
and his good poems are very few indeed. Any student
of literary history must be struck by the iteration
with which critics quote the same few pieces by
him over and over again. They quote, and they
must quote, the first stanza of the perfect " Dirge
in Cymbeline " :

To fair Fidele's grassy tomb

Soft maids and village hinds shall bring
Each opening sweet, of earliest bloom

And rifle all the breathing Spring.

They quote again the stanza, anticipatory of Gray's
" Elegy," in the unrhymed " Ode to Evening " :

Now Air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd Bat,
With short shrill Shriek flits by on leathern Wing.
Or where the Beetle winds
His small but sullen Horn.

208

WILLIAM COLLINS

They quote, too, some part of " How Sleep the
Brave who Sink to Rest " :

By fairy hands their knell is rung ;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung ;
There honour comes, a pilgrim grey,
To deck the turf that wraps their clay ;
And freedom shall awhile repair,
To dwell, a weeping hermit there.

They commend the " Ode to Pity," they admire
the " Ode to the Passions," and they find in the
" Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the High-
lands of Scotland " the germs of a great deal of later
poetry. Beyond these they find little to praise ; they
seldom even bother to hunt for excellent lines in
the " Eclogues."

The volume of Collins's good work, then, is very
small. Its quality, however, has, by general con-
sent, given him a high place among the secondary
English poets. And the peculiar merits ascribed to
him are his occasional technical perfection, his
beautiful touches of Nature, and his position as " a
forerunner of the romantic movement." When
reading dissertations on this last matter, and specu-
lations as to what Collins would have done had he
been born in another age, I sometimes wonder
whether we may not perhaps be in danger of losing
our sense of proportion about him. He was certainly
a fine craftsman ; he had a fastidious ear and was
an indefatigable corrector of epithets ; he some-
times struck off a phrase or a stanza of classic per-
fection. But there is little sign in his external form

209 P

BOOKS REVIEWED

of a revolt against the conventions of his contem-
poraries, little ground for holding that he was, like
Blake, or like Christopher Smart, demonstrably
born out of due time ; and the more we examine
the poetic undergrowth of the age the less import-
ance shall we attach to the natural images of which
so much has been made. To the Leigh Hunt circle
the whole eighteenth century was bare of natural
images ; the regularity of the eighteenth-century
forms and the conventionality of the eighteenth-
century language acted as a crust which prevented
these enthusiasts in revolt from seeing anything at
all alive behind it. Later critics tended to adopt the
same view, partly because of sheer ignorance of
eighteenth-century work. In our own time the eight-
eenth century is being gradually re-examined, and
particularly with a view to discovering natural
images. The result is that traces of direct contact with
nature are continually being found in unexpected
or obscure quarters. Dyer's " Grongar Hill " has
been rediscovered ; there has been a turn of the
tide in favour of Thomson ; the search is made not
entirely without success even in Young and Aken-
side ; and we may expect to find in the near future
that extracts from Scott, Shaw, Cunningham, and
others will be added to the growing list of examples
proving that there were always souls who revolted
against the prevalent habit of concealing strong
emotion, and the prevalent refusal to look straight
at natural beauty and describe what one saw and
felt in simple language.

Collins 's historical eminence has partly been due
to overmuch levelling of the surrounding country.

210

WILLIAM COLLINS

The Georgian age was certainly not as great poeti-
cally as the ages before and after it ; but, with all
its artificiality and prosiness, it was not quite so
barren as it used to be thought, and Gray and
Collins were not such sports — though they were
undoubtedly the finest artists of their times — as
they used to be thought. Suppose Collins had
written this :

Swiftly from the mountain's brow,
Shadows, nurs'd by night, retire :

And the peeping sun-beam, now,
Paints with gold the village spire.

Philomel forsakes the thorn,

Plaintive where she prates at night ;

And the Lark, to meet the morn,
Soars beyond the shepherd's sight.

From the low-roof 'd cottage ridge,
See the shatt'ring swallow spring ;

Darting through the one-arch'd bridge,
Quick she dips her dappled wing.

If Collins had written that — even though it be not
quite so neat as his neatest — it would be a stock
illustration of his position as a " precursor " of
Wordsworth and the rest of them. It is from John
Cunningham's " Day," and a hundred other mid-
eighteenth-century poems, examples of close obser-
vation and fresh feeling, could be found.

As a matter of fact that seems to me fresher than
anything in Collins ; I will go farther and say that

211

BOOKS REVIEWED

Collins does not seem to me a signal example of a
man born out of due time. On the contrary he seems
to me to have been on fairly good terms with the
eighteenth-century conventions. His learning, his
personifications, his smoothness do not appear as
things occasional or things against which he was
rebelling. His finest passages, unlike those in " The
Song to David," do not read like passages written
in another century ; they are rather the perfect
flower of eighteenth-century formalism ; he was a
genuine poet, but a poet of the grave, discreet and
scholarly kind, whose transports would always have
been moderate and who would always have inclined
to the less buoyant measures. It is a lovely passage
in the " Ode to Evening " about the " hamlets
brown and dim-discovered spires " ; it shows him
a true poet, but not necessarily an untimely romantic;
and he proceeds at once, without apparent dis-
comfort, to

While sallow autumn fills thy lap with leaves,
Or winter, yelling thro' the troublous air,
Affrights thy shrinking train,
And rudely rends thy robes.

And nobody compelled him to furnish his poems
with historical and linguistic notes. He was, as a
writer, slightly touched with frigidity, and it was
not a frigidity imposed from outside. There is cer-
tainly no contradiction to this in the description of
him given by his first editor, Langhorne. I will
quote this in full, as it seems to me rather to con-
firm what I have been saying :

212

WILLIAM COLLINS

Mr. Collins was, in stature, somewhat above
the middle size ; of a brown complexion, keen,
expressive eyes, and a fixed, sedate aspect, which
from intense thinking, had contracted an habitual
frown. His proficiency in letters was greater than
could have been expected from his years. He was
skilled in the learned languages, and acquainted
with the Italian, French and Spanish. It is ob-
servable that none of his poems bear the marks
of an amorous disposition, and that he is one of
those few poets, who have sailed to Delphi, with-
out touching at Cythera. The allusions of this
kind that appear in his " Oriental Eclogues "
were indispensable in that species of poetry ;
and it is very remarkable that in his " Passions,"
an ode for music, love is omitted, though it should
have made a principal figure there.

Thomson, Warton and Langhorne were Collins 's
poetical friends. They were all of the eighteenth
century. Warton was distinctly more " romantic "
in proclivity than Collins ; unfortunately he was
not so good.

213

HERMAN MELVILLE

THE reputation of Herman Melville has had
curious vicissitudes. Seventy years ago, for
a brief period, he was widely known on both sides
of the Atlantic. After " Moby Dick " he lapsed
into a semi-obscurity which lasted for the remain-
ing forty years of his life. New editions of his prin-
cipal works came out at rare intervals ; now and
again some writer peculiarly interested in the sea
— Stevenson, Clark Russell, and, later, Mr. Mase-
field — celebrated his genius ; periodic attempts
were made by critics who had come across him to
induce a wide public to read him. But his death in
1 891 was almost unnoticed, and for nearly thirty
years after that he continued to be what he had
been — to the few a great classic, to the many barely
a name. And when I say the many I mean not the
greater many, but the many who are in the habit of
reading good books. Some strange inhibition seems
to have operated. You could tell an intelligent man
about Melville ; he might remark that somebody
else had told him about Melville ; and he would
then go away and leave Melville unread. Possibly
Melville's titles— " Typee," " Omoo," "Moby
Dick " — may have had something to do with it. At
any rate, there it was. In 191 9 Melville's centenary
was celebrated ; that is to say, it occurred. The last
two years have seen articles, and good articles, about
him in most of the leading critical journals ; the
Oxford Press has reissued " Moby Dick " precisely
as the author wrote it ; and now an American

214

HERMAN MELVILLE

enthusiast, with the help of family papers, has com-
piled a biography. Can we hope that these latest
attempts to incorporate Melville in the list of authors
with whom every reading person must have some
familiarity will be more successful ? Possibly what
seems like a curse may still be in operation ; but
here at least is one more effort.

Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819,
of good Colonial stock. His maternal grandfather
was a Dutch Revolutionary General ; on his father's
side he sprang from the Scotch Melvilles. At eighteen
he took a trip to Liverpool and back as cabin boy
on a merchantman ; the experience was a cruel
one. After a brief engagement as a schoolmaster
he went to sea again, and lived for three years the
life which was the substance of all his finest works.
He began with a whaling cruise under a brutal
captain. He deserted in the Marquesas, lived for
several months with charming cannibals in a valley
like Eden, escaped (after killing a one-eyed chieftain
with a boat-hook) ; went another cruise and was
involved in a mutiny at Tahiti ; spent some time
in the French prison there ; and wound up with
two long cruises in a United States frigate. The
details of his adventures, both at sea and in the
islands, were in the highest degree remarkable. Evil
fortune persecuted him ; his character and his
courage invariably rescued him, in the most melo-
dramatic way, at the moment of extremity. Two
incidents from his homeward voyage may be quoted.
Through no fault of his own, he omitted to perform
some duty on the frigate ; he was already lashed
to the grating for a flogging when, with unparalleled

215

BOOKS REVIEWED

but successful impertinence, a corporal of marines
(who had never heard of " Pinafore ") spoke up for
him to the captain and got him released. He was
almost within sight of home when he went aloft to
reeve the stun '-sail halyards. His jacket was pitched
over his head, and he fell a hundred feet into the
sea. " So protracted did my fall seem, that I can
even now recall the wondering how much longer it
would be ere all was over, and I struck." He thought
himself dead. " But of a sudden some fashionless
form brushed my side — some inert, coiled fish of
the sea ; the thrill of being alive again tingled in
my nerves, and the strong shunning of death
shocked me through." He was picked up, and in ten
minutes was sent aloft again to complete the un-
completed task. The whole episode is marvellously
described in " White Jacket," the book which
secured the abolition of flogging in the U.S. Navy.
The end of this voyage, the story of which con-
cludes whilst land is still out of sight (" I love an
indefinite infinite background, a vast, heaving, roll-
ing, mysterious rear "), marks the end of Melville's
active life. He was twenty-five. He married and
brought up a family, he made two trips to Europe
(writing full and amusing diaries, which are re-
printed by Mr. Weaver), he had a short stimulating
friendship with Hawthorne. By the time he was
forty he had written all the most important of his
books. For the rest of his life he was externally a
customs officer, of whom the world became in-
creasingly oblivious, and his inner life was that of
an imaginative philosopher, whose writings were
scattered with obscure splendours and speculations

216

HERMAN MELVILLE

of terrifying sombreness. A few people knew him
as a bronzed and bearded recluse who had had a
rather disreputably violent past and now read Kant
and Plato. They might think what they chose. He
felt himself to be growing perpetually, but he ceased
to be very much interested in what others thought
of him. " I have come to regard this matter of fame
as the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon
more and more, and every time see deeper and
deeper and unspeakable meanings in him."

What could be more pessimistic, more disillu-
sioned ? It certainly would be impossible to describe
Melville as anything but a pessimist. He habitually
faced the harshest facts in the universe ; they hurt
him, and he had no explanation for them. Looking
for an image of his attitude when in contemplation
one thinks inevitably of the gentle and meditative
mate Starbuck, looking over the side of the " Pequod"
as she floats over the silken sunlit Pacific, and think-
ing of the world of horror under that lovely surface,
the perpetual massacre, the vile writhing shapes,
the ruthless rows of teeth. The whole book — and
" Moby Dick " is quintessential Melville as well as
the crown of his artistic achievement — has been
resolved into an allegory of despair. The mad captain,
Ahab, sleeplessly chasing the great White Whale,
who had mutilated him, is that innermost ego to
the nature and insistence of which Melville so often
recurs. The mates, quiet Starbuck, and jovial Stubb,
and commonplace Flask, are the recurrent moods
with which he must keep company. The chase is
the chase of life, the thing hunted an invulnerable
brutality and an inevitable defeat. Again and again

217

BOOKS REVIEWED

the theme is directly and openly returned to ; the
eternal problem of evil is posed in all its manifesta-
tions ; sentences and pages are written which
momentarily open black abysses of despair or pre-
sent to the mind with irresistible force pictures of
nightmare horror. No writer could more powerfully
convey such pictures to the imagination ; none
has exceeded Melville in the gift of using a single
word or phrase which stabs the heart and leaves it
throbbing with dread. Whenever Moby Dick is
seen he seems " the gliding great demon of the seas
of life." Ahab, momentarily softening to the poor
black boy, Pip, speaks to him of " omniscient gods
oblivious of suffering man ; and man, though idiotic,
and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet
things of love and gratitude." Consider, says the
author, the eternal wars of the sea :

Consider all this ; and then turn to this green,
gentle, and most docile earth ; consider them
both, the sea and the land ; and do you not find
a strange analogy to something in yourself ? For
as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant
land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular
Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed
by all the horrors of the half-known life. God
keep thee ! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
never return.

Melville himself pushed off ; at least in the sense
that he became lost in speculation. Perhaps it was
inevitable, as Miss Meynell suggests in her excellent
little introduction to the new edition, that this should

3J8

HERMAN MELVILLE

happen to the author of " Moby Dick." There are
depths so great that if the diver reaches them he
sinks to return no more. But in " Moby Dick "
itself, the struggles of the intellect with the enigma
are not yet out of the control of the artist ; more-
over, one is liable to give a false impression in saying
that the book is pessimistic. It has nothing in common
with the grey miseries of the enfeebled. Its darkest
passages are passionate in the writing and produce
an exhilaration in the reader ; both the glory as
well as the awfulness of life are celebrated at white
heat ; and the moods of the book are as varied as
the " Pequod's " crew. The jovial Stubb and the
matter-of-fact Flask get their turns with Starbuck
and the captain. Every variety of marine experience,
all the beauty and terror of the South Seas, a world
of human character and lively external incident, are
here. At one moment we are watching a bloody fight
on deck, at another listening to a story in a cafe at
Lima, at another boiling down whale-blubber in
the fire-lit night ; there are enough battles and
storms and encounters to make a dozen books for
boys. Not only does one feel that there was a Conrad
and a Stevenson in Melville, but frequently one is
forcibly reminded, in chapters at a time, of Dickens
and Defoe. How could a book open more briskly
and humorously and excitingly ? In what novel can
one find a record of fact so elaborate, a collection of
odd learning so amusing and peculiar, as in that
large section of the book which describes the whole
history, structure, and fate of the whale, and epito-
mises the manners and customs of whalers ?

Melville's laugh is as loud as his brooding is deep,

219

BOOKS REVIEWED

and no recorder of the surface of life ever had a
keener eye for every kind of detail or a more retentive
memory. And the whole wealth of his passion and
knowledge, humour and suffering is poured out in
language which is at its best unsurpassed, and in a
curious mixed form — plain narrative is broken up
by essays, treatises, dramatic dialogues — which
superbly justifies itself.

He lapsed sometimes into excesses of rhetoric ;
his love for Sir Thomas Browne sometimes be-
trayed him ; but he equalled Browne's sentences
and De Quincey's apostrophes when he was think-
ing of neither, and none of his numerous South Sea
successors has approached him in the power of
natural description. " I will add," he says, when
discussing ropes, " that Manilla is much more hand-
some and becoming to the boat than Hemp. Hemp
is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian ; but Manilla
is a golden-haired Circassian to behold." " For,"
he says in parentheses, " there is an aesthetics in all
things." That there was to him, that he was a born
poet, is evident everywhere — except sometimes in
his poetry. Imagery pours out of him, and every-
thing he mentions is touched with light. I should
like to reprint the whole marvellous chapter on
" The Whiteness of the Whale " ; I can only quote
a few poor sentences to illustrate his qualities :

The subterranean miner that works in us all,
how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the
ever-shifting, muffled sound of his pick ?

Few are the foreheads, which, like Shakespeare's
or Melanchthon's, rise so high, and descend so

220

HERMAN MELVILLE

low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal,
tideless mountain lakes ; and all above them, in
the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the
antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the
Highland hunters track the snowprints of the deer.

To any meditative Magian rover, this serene
Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea
of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the
world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being but
its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the
new-built Calif ornian towns, but yesterday planted
by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded
but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older
than Abraham ; while all between float milky-
ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, un-
known archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans.
Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the
world's whole bulk about ; makes all coasts one
bay to it ; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.
Lifted by these eternal swells, you needs must
own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.

But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain,
as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed
place beside the mizzen rigging, with one nostril
he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from
the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild
lovers must be walking), and with the other con-
sciously inhaled the salt breath of the new-found
sea ; that sea in which the hated White Whale
must even then be swimming. Launched at length
upon these almost final waters, and gliding to-
wards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old

221

BOOKS REVIEWED

man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met
like the lips of a vice ; the Delta of his forehead's
veins swelled like overladen brooks ; in his very
sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted
hull, " Stern all ! the White Whale spouts thick
blood ! "

There have been more profuse great writers than
Melville, and, as some may think, wiser men ; but
I do not believe that there exists a greater work of
prose fiction in English than " Moby Dick."

222

STOCK PHRASES

MR. A. M. H YAM SON is known to amateurs
of lexicography as the compiler of an ex-
tremely useful small " Dictionary of Universal
Biography." His latest work, A Dictionary of English
Phrases, should be equally useful. Much of the in-
formation he gives will be found in existing dic-
tionaries of quotations and of " Phrase and Fable,"
but he has worked on a rather eclectic plan of his
own with a view to providing a complement to the
ordinary verbal dictionary. He himself says that he
has included, besides " phrases proper," " phrase-
ological and historical allusions," " catchwords "
(political and other), " stereotyped modes of speech,"
" metaphorical cliches," " corrupted words," " nick-
names and sobriquets," " derivations from per-
sonal names," " quotations that have become part
of the language," " war words," etc. It is a curious
company ; but I think that experience will prove
that Mr. Hyamson's method justifies itself.

A large part of any such work must be devoted
to telling the instructed reader what he knows
already. You cannot compile dictionaries with a
single eye on those who least need them. Many of
us may not need to be told the meaning and origin
of Gordian Knot, Rump Parliament, Grad grind,
Procrustean Bed, or the Seven Ages of Man. A very
large number of the purchasers of this book will
probably never have need to refer to

Goth, A : a barbarian ; one heedless of the
claims of the arts and sciences. After the people

223

BOOKS REVIEWED

that overran and devastated the Roman Empire
in the third and fifth centuries.

Yet he would be a very learned man who should
find any page on which there was no information
which was novel to him ; and I myself, not having
an entire issue of this journal at my disposal, can
only give a few specimens to indicate the sort of
material which Mr. Hyamson supplies.

Oddly, the very first phrase which caught my eye
when I opened the book was one which comes from
a source that I had not dreamed of suspecting. " Not
worth a twopenny damn " is the phrase ; it looks
too simple to invite curiosity ; but according to
our present authority it derives from the fact that
there was " an Indian coin, a dam, which much
depreciated in value." Opposite it I noticed " uncle"
as used of a pawnbroker. It comes, apparently, from
the Latin uncus, a hook on which pledges used to
be hung. There is no mistaking the meaning of
" The Great Unwashed," which appears just below
" Uncle," but a very small fraction of those who
employ this offensive designation will know that it
was first used by Edmund Burke. " Go to Bath "
is said to be in allusion to the popularity of Bath as
a place for the treatment of lunatics ; but " Go to
Jericho " is disputed. Some will derive it from the
fact that Henry VIII used a country place called
Jericho as a retreat ; others from King David's
order to certain people to go to Jericho until their
beards were grown. King David : "as drunk as
David's sow." Looking that up I find it amidst
" drunk as a cobbler," " drunk as a fiddler,"

224

STOCK PHRASES

" drunk as a lord," " drunk as a pope," " drunk as
the devil," and " drunk as a tinker at Banbury." It
is alleged that there was a man David Lloyd, of
Hereford, whose wife was found drunk in a pig-
stye when he took a party to see a sow he owned.
It isn't very convincing, but nothing better offers.
11 To let the cat out of the bag " is attributed to a
custom of selling cats in bags, falsely representing
the same to be sucking-pigs.

The " Ashes " (cricketing) have been satisfactorily
run down to the Sporting Times of 1882. Of " chaff,"
meaning banter, three explanations are offered, one
of which is that there was

a custom in the North Midlands of emptying a
sack of chaff at the door of a man who ill-treats
his wife, to indicate that thrashing is done there.

" Chestnut " (an old joke) is variously attributed ;
I am surprised to find it so modern that it can
plausibly be traced to a story of a chestnut farm too
frequently told by E. A. Abbey, the painter, who
died as recently as 191 1. "To face the music " has
no fewer than four suggested derivations :

From (1) the actor, who in facing the music
faces his public, his critics ; (2) the difficulty in
training army horses to remain quiet in the com-
pany of a regimental band ; (3) the drumming
out of men dismissed by the U.S. army ; (4) the
muster of militia-men who are drawn up in ranks
facing the band.

You take your choice ; but with such uncertainty
one feels that the genuine original context may have

225 0

BOOKS REVIEWED

been none of these. The mention of the actor facing
his public sends me in search of another phrase. It
is here, but only in the form of " To get the big
bird " ; Mr. Hyamson should note " to get the
bird " as the commoner variant. Amongst terms
which are less commonly used than they might be,
I notice " Albino Poets," which was used by Wendell
Holmes of the sicklier kind of bards.

It is inconceivable that such a collection should
be complete, or that a collection in one volume
should not frequently disappoint the reader. Granted
that it contains any considerable amount of in-
formation which is new to one and not easily acces-
sible elsewhere, one ought to be grateful for it. I
certainly, to use a phrase which, as I now learn,
derives from Heywood's " Proverbes " (1546), will
not look the gift-horse in the mouth. Mr. Hyamson
himself, in fact, disarms criticism in his very modest
preface. He does not profess to be able exactly to
define the scope of his book ; he seems to have been
guided as much by intuition as by reason. He says
that critics who point out deficiencies will seldom
lack justification, and he asks for suggestions for
additional entries. For myself, I think that it would
be worth his while to pay rather more attention to
slang, and especially to well-established American
slang, which is in continual process of naturalisation
here. He has plenty of mid- Victorian words and
phrases which came from America : " carpet-
bagger," " bunkum," " bark up the wrong tree,"
and hundreds of others. But if he went freely about
London with his ears pricked up (Virgil's " Aeneid
I." and Chapman's " All Foole's Day "), he would

226

STOCK PHRASES

certainly encounter many more recent immigrants.
We may never adopt the admirable word " copper-
throat," for we are already so well-stocked with
terms descriptive of drinking propensities. Possibly
" rubber-neck," also, dear to all students of O.
Henry, who reduced it to " rube," may fail to get a
home here. But " beat it " is coming, " beat the
band " is already popular, and " to go on the water-
wagon " (briefly, on the wagon) may be heard almost
anywhere. Mr. Hyamson would find it easy to make
room for many additions if he could bring himself
— though the process must be distressing to any
dictionary-maker — to leave out some of the phrases
he has now thought fit to include. Some of the
solemner nicknames might go. It is quite right that
we should be told that " The British Solomon "
was James I ; the phrase has long been widely
current, and is often used without explanation in
the context. But it is hardly worth while to record
the fact that a forgotten painter was at one time
known as " the English Salvator Rosa." There are
other words — " uppertendom " is an instance —
which are merely awkward attempts at coinage
which have definitely failed. And the words made
from proper names might be diminished. I see
" Beardsleyism " here, defined as :

A pictorial illustration in black-and-white in
the style of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley.

The word has doubtless been used, but it is unlikely
to be used if or when Beardsley has been forgotten.
Anybody can make that sort of word at any moment ;

227

BOOKS REVIEWED

it defines itself. We are quite likely to see Lloyd-
Georgism, Carsonism, Byronism, Conradism, Wil-
sonism, and many other such in the papers to-
morrow morning.

These are small suggestions. I turn from the
book with a certain melancholy. Why ? Because of
the number of fine phrases it contains which we
use daily and the fineness of which we never realise.
It is a cemetery of dead metaphors ; these were
lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they
are put into dictionaries. Surely the reflection is a
little saddening. A man may make an image which
is of local application or a little above the heads of
mankind, and it will retain its freshness in per-
petuity. Let him do the best thing of all — make an
image which is widely applicable and plain to the
common understanding — and his beautiful creation
will be killed by too much handling. What an agree-
able shock of surprise must have been felt by those
who were first told by an imaginative man that they
were looking for a needle in a bundle of hay ! With
us familiarity has bred blindness ; we drop the phrase
out without seeing any needle or any hay. " To
build on the sand," " to beat the air," " to sponge,"
" to split hairs," " to feather one's nest " — there
are a thousand of them in this book. They have
become so worn by usage that we might almost as
well be without them ; they are said to " enrich
the language," but the only person who really gets
full enjoyment out of this opulence is a foreigner
who learns English. Every great writer contributes
to the stock ; his very best phrases are withdrawn
from him and turned into half-obliterated currency.

228

STOCK PHRASES

And for us there comes ready to our tongue a stock
description of every situation and a stock com-
parison for every quality. " Straight — as a die,"
" Old— as the hills," " Soft— as a peach," " Rain-
ing— like cats and dogs," " Dark — as pitch " ; half
the epithets we have bring their little withered tails
behind them with scarcely a wag left in them. " A
Dictionary of English Phrases " is an immense
mausoleum full of the mummies of Samsons, and
Helens, and Cleopatras.

229

THE LAUREATES

MR. E. K. BROADUS'S scholarly and amus-
ing book, The Poets Laureate in England,
contains a study of the origins of the laureateship, a
history of its development as a regular institution,
sketches of the lives of the Laureates, and accounts
of their work, whether commanded or spontaneous,
as political poets, in the broad sense of the word.

Before scientific history began, respectable authors
thought nothing of making the confident assertion
that the University of Cambridge was founded by
Cantaber of Spain, 4,321 years after the Creation,
or by King Arthur ; that the University of Oxford
owed its origin to King Alfred ; and that the prime
founder of the British Kingdom was a refugee from
Troy. To a generation unfamiliar with documents,
impatient of exact research, and fond (as all healthy
people are) of the picturesque, there was nothing
unnatural in the neat pedigrees of the Laureateship
produced by the antiquaries of the seventeenth
century. In Dryden's patent, " Sir Geoffrey Chaucer,
Knight," " Sir John Gower, Knight," and " Benja-
min Jonson, Esquire," were all specifically mentioned
as having fully and amply enjoyed " the rights,
privileges, benefits, and advantages thereunto be-
longing" in the time of " our Royall Progenitors."
Where supposed experts were so dogmatic, it was
not strange that laymen should take the antique
lineage of the Laureateship on trust. These poets
and others had received pensions and liquor from
the Crown, and some of them were called poets

230

THE LAUREATES

laureate. But the pensions — notably Chaucer's —
had not always any obvious connection with their
poetry ; the title was a mere degree given by the
Universities ; and there was no question of a regular
Post in the Household to which these men were
appointed. Their positions varied. Spenser received
money from Elizabeth, but his contact with her was
of the slenderest. Ben Jonson was pensioned over a
long period of years by two monarchs and supplied
many Court Masques in return for the favour. It
was not until the nomination of Dryden that the
Laureateship was recognised as a definite salaried
office which ought to be filled. Nevertheless, I feel
that Professor Broadus is a little rigid in his insist-
ence on the fact. Most of our institutions have
shadowy beginnings, and the development of the
Laureateship may be regarded as analogous to that
of the Peerage, Parliament, and the Power of the
Purse. And at least I think we ought to shift the birth
of the regular office back to Davenant ; Davenant
may not have had a patent, but the fact that when
he died Dryden was in terms mentioned as his suc-
cessor shows that he was already considered to be
holding an office, even if his status was only posthu-
mously recognised on paper.

After the date of Dryden 's appointment, Pro-
fessor Broadus distinguishes three clearly marked
epochs. Until the Georges came, the Laureates,
though any political writing they might do was
appreciated, were not expected to compose par-
ticular poems on particular dates. Dryden may have
been moved to write four great poems by virtue of
his official position, but he was not asked for New

231

BOOKS REVIEWED

Year Odes, and Tate, though prolific in these com-
positions, committed them voluntarily. It was with
the appointment of Nicholas Rowe, in 171 5, that
the stated duties began. Until George Ill's time,
the Laureate was compelled to furnish annually a
New Year's Ode and a Birthday Ode, to be sung be-
fore the King by royal musicians in the Chapel
Royal. Pope maliciously referred to Cibber's Odes
as being

made by the poet Laureate for the time being, to
be sung at Court on every New Year's Day, the
words of which are happily drowned by the in-
struments.

Whitehead, himself Laureate, wrote a very frank
"' Pathetic Apology for all Laureates," in which he
said :

His Muse, obliged by sack and pension
Without a subject or invention,
Must certain words in order set
As innocent as a Gazette ....
Content with Boyce's harmony,
Who throws on many a worthless lay
His music and his powers away.

He, a patient and a sensible man, sometimes managed
to combine a humane and eloquent passage in an
official poem, but more often produced verses which
deserved his own candid description ; the only men
who were probably comfortable with the job were
the obscure Eusden and the worthless Pye. A typical

232

THE LAUREATES

passage is Colley Cibber's panegyric on the off-
spring of George II :

Around the royal table spread,
See how the beauteous branches shine !

Sprung from the fertile genial bed
Of glorious George and Caroline.

The task was usually unpalatable ; one offer made
in the middle of the century was coupled with an
assurance that Odes would not be insisted upon.
But the offer was declined, and the obligation con-
tinued until George IV released Southey, who had
insisted when he was " inducted into all the rights,
privileges and benefits which Henry James Pye,
Esq., did enjoy," that he wished that " upon great
public events I might either write or be silent as
the spirit moved," and had only under protest sup-
plied (not for publication) Odes for a few birthdays
of the old mad blind George III.

Then began the third period. Since then the
Laureate has been free " to write or be silent." Mr.
Broadus rightly says that Tennyson was a national
spokesman as no previous Laureate has been, and
he calls attention to the fact, too often ignored, that
during the late war the present Laureate produced
a series of poems " of memorable quality and sub-
stantial length." " It is not," he says, " the ephemeral
impulses of the war which find expression in Mr.
Bridges' pages, but rather the greater emotions —
the emotions which will still emerge as the per-
spective lengthens, and will sum up all the rest."
" Throughout the war, and since the war was won,

233

BOOKS REVIEWED

Mr. Bridges has performed a service to which this
history affords no parallel."

Is the Laureateship worth having ? Professor
Broadus's book gives emphatic support to the view
that " command " poems are, as a rule, likely to be
bad. Even the ablest and most patriotic of genuine
poets will probably produce a frigid and hollow-
sounding composition if he be ordered to celebrate
a nation, a hero, or a cause on a particular date. But
this is not, as it has so often been supposed to be,
sufficient ground for a condemnation of the Laureate-
ship as an institution. Those who make it so are
cherishing a misconception of the historical facts.
It was always supposed that an official Laureate
would occasionally derive inspiration from national
history and political events ; and there is sense in
the assumption that a man publicly called to the
position of national poet will find his thoughts turn-
ing more often than they might, in other circum-
stances, turn to those themes, and might more often
be moved to genuine poetical utterance concerning
them. The disciplined Poet Laureate, the bard
working to a schedule, is another matter ; and he
has never existed in this country except during the
one Hanoverian century. He appeared and dis-
appeared with the powdered wig, and it is incon-
ceivable that he should come again. A Laureateship
without set duties is not, as is so generally assumed,
an obsolete survival ; it is precisely the Laureate-
ship which was originally established. One common
error is evident here ; another lies in the equally
frequent statement that appointments to the
Laureateship have nearly always been bad.

234

THE LAUREATES

They have not. Excepting in the eighteenth
century they have usually been very good. We may,
with Professor Broadus, rule out Chaucer, Skelton,
and Jonson as not being in the true Laureate sequence:
but the rest are a very creditable list. When Dryden
was appointed there was one greater poet living,
but even the most tolerant of restored Stuarts could
scarcely have been expected to select John Milton,
whose head, in 1660, had narrowly escaped being
stuck upon Temple Bar to rot with those of the
regicides. In 1688 there was nothing better avail-
able than Shad well, who received the appointment,
and whose work, after all, still in a manner lives.
Nahum Tate, who followed shortly after, was
certainly not a very eminent man, though he con-
tributed one classic to the language, the carol,
" While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night."
But, in the political circumstances, nothing better
could have been done. The Georgian era undeniably
saw a slump both in poetry and in Laureates. Yet it
is worth remarking that even in the worst age of
official taste the Laureateship was offered to the
greatest poet of that age. Gray refused. That he
should wear the mantle just relinquished by Cibber
was a little too much to ask ; and he was a recluse.
His own account of his refusal was characteristic :

Though I very well know the bland, emollient,
saponaceous qualities both of sack and silver, yet
if any great man would say to me, " I make
you rat-catcher to His Majesty, with a salary of
.£300 a year and two butts of the best Malaga ;
and though it has been usual to catch a mouse or

235

BOOKS REVIEWED

two, for form's sake, in public once a year, yet to
you, sir, we shall not stand upon these things," I
cannot say I should jump at it ; nay, if they would
drop the very name of the office and call me Sine-
cure to the King's Majesty, I should still feel a
little awkward, and think everybody I saw smelt
a rat about me ; but I do not pretend to blame
anyone else that has not the same sensations ; for
my part I would rather be sergeant-trumpeter or
pinmaker to the palace. Nevertheless, I interest
myself a little in the history of it, and rather wish
somebody may accept it that will retrieve the
credit of the thing, if it be retrievable, or ever had
any credit.

Whitehead, who received the reversion, was hardly
great enough to " retrieve the credit of the thing,"
but there was no one much better in a time when
graceful small poets were common and great poets
not to be found. Warton, his successor, was also a
good — and an unexpected — choice, considering the
material available. When Pye died, in 1813, Sir
Walter Scott was offered the Laureateship and
declined it ; Southey, not a mean figure, however
poorly he may compare in our eyes with two poets
then writing, accepted it, and began the restoration
of credit. In the last eighty years there have been
four Laureates, of whom one was a statesman's
practical joke, and the other three were Words-
worth, Tennyson, and Robert Bridges. No doubt
many good nineteenth-century poets did not hold
the Laureateship. You cannot kill a Laureate a
year in order to prove your ability to choose his

236

THE LAUREATES

successor ; if Tennyson was Poet Laureate, Browning
and Matthew Arnold could never be Poets Laureate,
since the office is held for life. This point is often
overlooked ; the truth is that as a rule the appoint-
ments have been made very well.

So why not go on making them ? It would be
pointless to exaggerate the advantages of the thing.
Let us say no more than that any contact between
the State and good literature is to be welcomed,
and that the Laureateship has led to the enrich-
ment of our literature by a few good poems. Yet we
need not even go so far as that to justify a con-
tinuance of the office. If no more could be said for
it than that it will generally, or even occasionally,
give an advertisement to a meritorious poet, and
that it is an ancient and innocuous part of our national
system, it would be worth preserving. So many old
things compel their own abolition by becoming
positive obstructions, abuses, and nuisances, that
we should feel especially tender about the old things
that do no harm.

Let the Laureateship remain ; and let the butt of
sack be restored. The student of Professor Broadus's
book will find that from the earliest days all our
Court poets and Poets Laureate were paid partly
in wine. He will also find, and he ought not to be
surprised to find, that when the grant of a butt of
wine was commuted for a small additional grant
of money, the change was made at the request of
the egregious Pye, at once the most avaricious, the
most abstemious, and the most illiterate of all those
who have worn the British laurel. In so doing he
cheated all his successors. For a thrifty government

237

BOOKS REVIEWED

conveniently forgot to pay them the .£26 in lieu of
wine, pretending that the sum was included in the
£100 which had always been paid, and which con-
tinued to be paid. As Southey wrote pathetically to
Walter Scott :

The butt of sack is now wickedly commuted
to £26 ; which said sum, unlike the canary, is
subject to income-tax, land-tax, and heaven knows
what beside. The whole net income is little more
or less than £90.

Scott replied :

Is there no getting rid of that iniquitous modus,
and requiring the butt in kind ? I would have
you think of it ; I know no man so well entitled
to Xeres sack as yourself, though many bards
would make a better figure at drinking it. I should
think that in due time a memorial might get some
relief in this part of the appointment — it should
be at least £100 wet and £100 dry. When you
have carried your point of discarding the ode, and
my point of getting the sack, you will be exactly
in the position of Davy in the farce, who stipulates
for more wages, less work, and the key of the
ale-cellar.

Mr. Bridges at present receives £72 from the Lord
Chamberlain's department and £27 from the Lord
Steward's " in lieu of a butt of sack." In other words,
Pye's greed simply resulted in a reduction of salary.
Mr. Bridges is not primarily a bacchanalian poet,
238

THE LAUREATES

but I cannot think that he would object if some
member of Parliament, with a soul above trickery,
the Statute of Limitations, and the Gaming Act,
should begin agitating for the undoing of an ancient
wrong, and the restoration of a still more ancient
perquisite.

239

LETTERS

TWO years ago Mr. George Saintsbury
announced that his " Notes From a Cellar
Book " would be his last book. The universal com-
ment was that a man who was still capable of pro-
ducing a little masterpiece like that had no right to
stop. He has not stopped. Nature was not to be
driven out for good, even with a corkscrew. Mr.
Saintsbury has returned to normal. His latest enter-
prise, A Letter Book, might be described as consist-
ing of notes on the National Cellar of Letters. He
has the advantage here of being able to illustrate his
disquisition on growths with samples which the
reader may taste for himself ; exquisite as it was, his
last work would have been still more so had a similar
provision been possible for those who studied it.

There is a suggestion in the preface that Mr.
Saintsbury regards his volume as a cairn or mauso-
leum celebrating a dead art. He is not alone in
thinking the English Letter a fit subject for an epitaph.
We cannot, of course, be quite sure that our age
will not produce great letter- writers. We never know
what is going on behind the scenes in any regard ;
history is bound to produce surprises — as, for in-
stance, Disraeli's letters to Queen Victoria. But we
do know for a certainty that the composition of good
letters is demonstrably less general than it was in
the eighteenth century. In that century all one's
friends would have been writing long and polished
epistles ; in this century they certainly do not.
Communications have improved. A man must go

240

LETTERS

as far as China before we feel he is really cut off from
us, and not likely to drop in at any moment ; and
even there he will be getting from cables and news-
papers far more information about wars, politics,
books, pictures, the weather, the movements of the
great, and all the other topics of Horace Walpole
than we could ever compress into informative letters.
It is disheartening to tell a man things he must know
already ; we are not equal to merely re-writing the
newspapers in our own whimsical, picturesque,
idiosyncratic styles.

We are always rushing about ; so are our corres-
pondents ; our letters approximate to telegrams
containing merely essential demands, instructions,
private news, and a casual sentence of cheer merely
inserted to give them a faint touch of humanity. The
Gray or the Cowper, living in some rustic vicarage
or other such secluded retreat, may still be com-
municating, in leisurely style, with a few old friends
about household affairs, eccentric literature, the
migrations of swallows and the manners of ducks.
If he is, so much the better for posterity ; but he
will lack the background of lesser lights. In the great
age almost every educated person wrote good letters;
the existing stores are not yet fully explored. In our
age we know from our own experience that this is
not so. And I fancy that our posterity will be especi-
ally poorer by virtue of the lack of substantial letters
from eminent writers, whose lives and private
opinions arouse so natural a curiosity. Gray, Cowper,
Lamb, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Browning — their
letters, crowded with interest, fill many volumes.
But I have never heard that any of our great

241 R

BOOKS REVIEWED

contemporaries has shown the slightest inclination to
such discursiveness ; the best literary letters that
I have seen have been tapped out on typewriters :
letters can be done so much more quickly on type-
writers. Let us console ourselves with the reflection
that there are already far more fine English letters
in existence than most of us have managed to read ;
a man, before seriously complaining, should go
through the sixteen volumes of Horace Walpole.
Our letters are one of the glories of our literature,
and any book which calls attention to them should
be welcome.

Two good sorts of anthologies of letters may be
conceived. Mr. Lucas, in his delightful collections,
drew his materials from anywhere and everywhere.
He was in search of the most amusing and charming
things he could find ; he roped in every sort of
author ; his books exist for their own sakes. Mr.
Saintsbury's collection is of the other kind. With
the exception of a few engaging things such as that
by Ballard (of the " British Ladies ") his specimens
are entirely drawn from the letters of great letter-
writers and great authors — they include, by the way,
an unpublished example of Stevenson. They are
chosen avowedly to illustrate his historical sketch
of the progress of the art : the chief figures must all
be here, and no great amount of space can be allowed
to any of them : we have but one letter from Lamb,
but one from Cowper, but one from Walpole, but
two from Gray. They are freshly chosen, and a book
which contained nothing but these and the two noble
love-letters of Dorothy Osborne would be worth
reading. Scarcely anything in the book could be

242

LETTERS

superseded by anything better unless it be Ruskin's
letter to the Daily Telegraph, chosen, I fear, with a
touch of malice, which is full of nobility and wisdom,
but is oh ! how far from being intimate ! But the
volume is rather a chapter of history than an anth-
ology. And, in fact, Mr. Saintsbury's own writing
fills a half of it. His introduction is a hundred pages
long : a masterly summary of the ways and means
of correspondents from the earliest ages. In the
course of it Mr. Saintsbury not merely sketches and
explains the general changes which have taken place
from age to age, but does full justice to all the great
letter- writers in our language, amongst whom it is
pleasant to notice that he puts Lady Mary Montagu,
who, in our day, has received little lip-service, and
scarcely any real attention. And the whole essay is,
one need scarcely say, amusing and provocative in
the extreme. So are the notes. Mr. Saintsbury's
first extract comes from the letters of Synesius, who
was Bishop of Ptolemais in the early fifth century.
It begins :

I have already got three hundred spears and as
many cutlasses, though I had, even before, only
half a score two-edged swords : and these long flat
blades are not forged with us. But I think the
cutlasses can be struck more vigorously into the
enemies' bodies, and so we shall use them. And
at need we shall have bludgeons — for the wild
olive trees are good with us.

Of the bludgeon referred to Mr. Saintsbury says in
a footnote that ' it was probably like the lathi which

243

BOOKS REVIEWED

the mild Hindoo takes with him to political meet-
ings." It is a characteristic start for Mr. Saintsbury,
who himself has never attended the most academic
of confabulations without his bludgeon. It was
distressing a few years ago to see him formally
abdicating this formidable weapon, as Prospero his
wand ; and now all the more delightful to see him
in the arena again clubbing right and left. His notes
to the letters are full of his old gay pugnacity, with
clean downright words for all the authors, critics,
politicians, puritans, social institutions, and historical
developments which he considers inimical to truth,
good taste and the joy of life.

There never was a better writer of footnotes ;
every sentence Mr. Saintsbury writes has his char-
acter stamped upon it, and his memory, which is as
prodigious as his erudition, enables him to juxta-
pose the most surprising variety of illustrations.
Independent judgments, odd facts, and comic stories
appear on every page. Discussing whether or not
Dorothy Osborne was born in the Castle in Guernsey,
he says that " the present writer (who has danced,
and played whist, within its walls) hopes she
was." It isn't exactly evidence, but it is pleasant
to know it. Encountering a denunciation, very
justifiable, of lecturing by Charles Lamb, he puts
as footnote :

Lamb would have enjoyed a recent newspaper
paragraph, which, stating that an inquest had
been held on someone who, after lecturing some-
where, was taken ill and expired, concluded thus :
" Verdict : Death from natural causes."

244

LETTERS

He remarks of Ruskin that " If anybody ever could
1 write beautifully about a broomstick ' he could :
though perhaps it is a pity he so often did." A
mention of a pike in Kingsley's racy letter to Tom
Hughes gives him occasion for a dissertation on the
pike's physiognomy : " And in fact the pike is not
a cheerful-looking fish. Even two whom the present
writer once saw tugging at the two ends of one dead
trout in a shallow, did it sulkily." Introducing his
selection from Charles Lamb, he recalls to mind
" Mr. Matthew Arnold's very agreeable confession,
when he was asked to select his poems, that he
wanted to select them all." Mr. Saintsbury is, in
fact, always and everywhere racy : as much of a
piece as Charles Lamb himself : and if you can
enjoy him at all, you can enjoy the whole of him.
Had he written that unfortunately-abandoned " His-
tory of Wine," which he contemplated for so many
years, it would have been as lively as his " History
of the French Novel " ; in a Grammar or a Study
of Fluctuations in Prices he would be as lively, as
original, as anecdotal, as he is anywhere. Give him
any excuse, and he will start pouring out quotations,
allusions, challenges, dogmatic judgments, recol-
lections, and jokes from his vast horn of plenty. The
present volume is one more instalment of him ; and
no assurances of his will prevent one from expecting
more.

245

GLANDS

THE book before me is entitled The Glands
Regulating Personality, and its author is Dr.
Louis Berman, of Columbia University. This is not
the kind of book which I normally review, or have
any scientific competence to discuss. But I took it
up casually, and a phrase in it struck me. Dr. Berman
remarks :

To bring to mind an immediate complete image
of the hyperthyroid face, one should think of
Shelley.

This agreeable association of ideas led me on ; and
finding the phrase, " A man's chief gift to his child-
ren is his internal secretion composition," I knew I
must go through with it. Here, beyond doubt, was
one more of these men with an explanation, satisfac-
tory to himself, of everything that exists. So through
thyroid and pituitary, pineal, adrenal and thymus
I pursued my way, marvelling at one of the most
remarkable medleys of erudition, illogicality, lack
of taste, disinterested passion, complacency and
bad English that I have seen since I read Freud's
most humourless masterpiece, namely, his book on
Wit.

Dr. Berman takes the glands one by one and out-
lines their spheres of influence. He compares them
to the Directors of a Large Corporation : he might
almost call them our Glandlords. From one to
another he passes in an almost lyrical strain. For
example : "In such enthusiasm for the thyroid as

246

GLANDS

a determinant of evolution, its pillar of cloud by
day and column of fire by night, one should not
forget the other glands of internal secretion." En
route he throws out numerous definitions. " Mas-
culinity," he says, "may be described as a stable,
constant state in the organism of lime salts, and the
feminine as an unstable variable state of lime salts."
" The mother expresses," he observes, " the deep
craving of protoplasm for immortality." And, in a
phrase reminiscent of Sir William Harcourt's, " We
are all Socialists now," he says that we now recognise
that " we are all, more or less, partial hermaphro-
dites." Almost everything has been run down except
the fluid of love, which, beyond doubt, exists in the
interstitial cells. Having done with the separate
glands, he passes to consider their influence on per-
sonality. He uses Mr. Strachey's account of Florence
Nightingale for a ruthless analysis of the glands
that made her what she was ; Caesar, Napoleon,
and Nietzsche are other of his specimens. He re-
grets that they did not live later, so that science
could have rectified them. For the answer to " What
is Man ? " has been found. It is — I don't think it a
very complete answer — " Man is regulated by his
glands of Internal Secretion."

" The chemistry of the soul ! " It is, says Dr.
Berman, a great phrase. He looks forward — and,
reading his book, one is tempted at times to share
in this Larger Hope — to a time when statesmen
will make it their business to raise the general level
of intelligence by a " judicious use of endocrine
extracts." " Internal glandular analysis may become
legally compulsory for those about to mate before

247

BOOKS REVIEWED

the end of the present century." And then he be-
comes rhapsodic :

The exact formula is yet far beyond our reach.
But we have started upon the long journey and
we shall get there. Then will Man truly become
the experimental animal of the future, experi-
menting not only with the external conditions of
his life, but with the constituents of his very
nature and soul. The chemical conditions of his
being, including the internal secretions, are the
steps of the ladder by which he will climb to those
dizzy heights where he will stretch out his hands
and find himself a God.

It is a strange idea of God. I suppose it doesn't
much matter. The man who wants to Get Omniscient
Quick is no new type. Pedantry, self-satisfaction,
fantastic exaggeration are as old as the race. One
would not even say, " Physician, inject thyself,"
to Dr. Berman ; such men as he add to the colour
of life ; they rode other hobby-horses in the days of
" Tristram Shandy," but their character, or glandular
composition, remains unchanged. It is, however, a
pity that they should now be commonest in the
world of what used to be called exact science ; for
the excesses of the Freudians and their analogues
have led many intelligent people into a very scep-
tical frame of mind about every scientific discovery
and speculation whatsoever, particularly when these
have a bearing upon the constitution of man. Twenty
years ago William James, meeting Freud, described
him in a letter as a monomaniac. The frontiers^of

248

GLANDS

psychology and physiology are infested by hosts of
these ill-balanced persons who get hold of a little
truth and turn it into an idol. Dr. Berman himself
has an excellent image for the Freudians : he says
they look at a small section of life through a teles-
cope and think it is the universe. The metaphor
applies precisely to himself ; it is well enough, in a
poet's sense, to see the universe in a grain of sand,
but it is grotesque to see it in the glands. At best all
he could do would be merely to identify a machine,
and one amongst many.

He and his fellows may, however, win disciples
amongst the large number of persons who are now
able to dabble in this kind of easy science. And the
one really serious result may be the infection of
literature with it. I note such a passage as :

Christina may be adrenal cortex centred and
so masculinoid : courageous, sporty, mannish in
her tastes, aggressive towards her companions.
Dorothea may have a balanced thyroid and pituit-
ary, and so lead the class as good-looking, studious,
bright, serene, and mature. Florence, who has
rather more thyroid than her pituitary can
balance, will be bright but flighty, gay but moody,
energetic, but not as persevering.

It may prove very tempting to our novelists. All
over the fiction of Europe and America the Freud-
ian complexes are raging furiously together ; when
the novelists have tired of these they may get on to
the glands ; we shall have the Tragedy of a Pineal
and the conflict between two highly-developed

249

BOOKS REVIEWED

Adrenals. In one thing alone there is a gleam of hope.
There is less satisfaction for the morbid curiosity
in the glandular compilations than in the works of
Freud and his school ; less sensational material.
Nobody will take up with the glands out of a desire
to be audacious and shocking ; they are dull affairs.
I revert to the phrase with which I opened. I
cannot leave it there. One of my more highly-
developed glands is secreting hard. Here is the
result. A Ballade of the Glandular Hypothesis :

What Hormones had that proud Egyptian Queen ?

And great Napoleon, who had cause to rue
Deficiency of the central endocrine

Which finally dried up at Waterloo ?
Poor Shelley's optimism was undue,

He never should have dreamed at such a pace ;
He said " The world's great age begins anew " ;

But Shelley had a hyper-thyroid face.

II

There is a strange secretion flows between

The interstitial cells ; I grant it's true
It hasn't yet been actually seen,

Not even by the pioneering few ;
Still it will soon be bottled, and on view,

The stuff that made an end of Ilium's race,
And launched a thousand ships into the blue :

But Shelley had a hyper-thyroid face.

250

GLANDS
III

The toad secretes too much adrenalin,

And drunkards are a thymo-centric crew,
Glandular hyper-functioning has been

Noted in Florence Nightingale ; and you
Remember Mr. Julian Huxley drew

Very strange transformations which took place
In certain axolotls in the Zoo :

But Shelley had a hyper-thyroid face.

Envoi.

Prince, let us end our rhymes, they will not do :
Our gonads may be large and full of grace,

And comely our pituitaries, too —
But Shelley had a hyper-thyroid face.

*5T

A SUPPLEMENT TO WHITMAN

PEOPLE used to say that Whitman was
recognised everywhere except in his own
country ; that he had been accepted as a peer by
the English poets and as an influence by the French
poets before the generality of Americans were will-
ing to see him as anything more than a grubby old
man who had lived near Philadelphia. There was
some truth in the charge, and it is still evident,
whenever an academic history comes out, that in
the eyes of many Americans Whitman's defects
still obscure his achievement. But once an American
becomes a disciple he becomes a very enthusiastic
disciple indeed. To Horace Traubel, Whitman was
very much what Buddha might have been. So, also,
to Professor Emery Holloway, who must have
devoted years to the excavation of Whitman's for-
gotten contributions to newspapers, and whose tone,
in his introduction, seems to suggest the conviction
that any small fact about Whitman is of prime im-
portance. There is certainly a good deal of inform-
ation of all sorts in this introduction. We are told
that much of the poet's early life " was to be spent
in boarding-houses and hotels, a fact which doubt-
less had its influence in shaping his rather detached
attitude towards the family as an institution " ;
that his early Puritanism led him to " excoriate "
the users of even tea, coffee, and tobacco ; and that
when he first meditated a long book he proposed to
omit all reference to sex, on the ground that he knew
nothing whatever about it. Later on, quantum

252

A SUPPLEMENT TO WHITMAN

mutatus ! But informative as the introduction is, I
don't think that anybody could call it critical. And,
indeed, if Professor Holloway were a critical ad-
mirer of Whitman, or, indeed, a critical lover of
any literature whatsoever, he certainly would not
have thought it worth while to resurrect the contents
of these volumes, writings which Whitman himself
had deliberately refrained from reprinting, and some
of which are so feeble that it is difficult to remember
that the author of them was a man of genius.

It would be complimentary to say even that the
contents of these two volumes are worth having.
Those who are interested in anything that Whitman
did may like to see them once ; those who are merely
interested in good literature will regard them as so
much wasted paper. The poetry is remarkably little
in proportion to the prose ; only thirty-one pages
out of many hundreds, with the addition of a few
pages of scraps from notebooks. Such as it is, it
shows that Whitman, before casting off the " bond-
age " of rhyme, attempted with very small success
to write poetry both in manner and in matter re-
sembling the conventional verses of his time. Take
the " Spanish Lady," which begins :

On a low couch reclining

When slowly waned the day,
Wrapt in gentle slumber,

A Spanish maiden lay.

O beauteous was the lady ;

And the splendour of the place
Matched well her form so graceful,

And her sweet, angelic face.

253

BOOKS REVIEWED

But what doth she so lonely,
Who ought in courts to reign ?

For the form that there lies sleeping
Owns the proudest name in Spain.

'Tis the lovely Lady Inez,

De Castro's daughter fair,
Who in the castle chamber

Slumbers so sweetly there.

This, in point both of metrical distinction and con-
tent, is about on a par with

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand.

Whitman wrote it at the age of twenty-one. But he
was twenty-seven when he produced the " Ode to
be sung at Fort Greene," beginning :

O God of Columbia ! O Shield of the Free !

More grateful to you than the fanes of old story,

Must the blood-bedewed soil, the red battleground,

be

Where our forefathers championed America's

glory !

Then how priceless the worth of the sanctified earth

We are standing on now. Lo ! the slopes of its girth

Where the martyrs were buried : Nor prayers,

tears, or stones,
Marked their crumbled-in coffins, their white
holy bones.

At twenty-nine he was producing blank verse a long
way after Wordsworth's. At thirty he was feeling

254

A SUPPLEMENT TO WHITMAN

his way with free verse ; but this collection contains
only two or three scraps of verse from the later
period, none of them worth having except as " docu-
ments."

Prose fills up the greater part of these volumes ;
but Whitman's " uncollected " prose is not much
more interesting than his " uncollected verse." The
first prose piece quoted is dated 1838. It is taken
from the " Long Island Democrat," and is described
as " the earliest extant prose from Whitman's pen."
I think I had better quote it in full in order to illus-
trate what happens when enthusiasts get hold of a
modern writer. It is headed "Effects of Lightning"
— as it might be " Strange Happening on an Omni-
bus " or " Woman Faints at Princess Mary's
Wedding " — and this is how it goes :

At Northport, on Sunday, 28th ultimo, an
unfortunate and somewhat singular accident
occurred from the lightning. Mr. Abraham Miller,
of that place, had been in the fields engaged in
some farm work, and was returning home, as a
storm commenced in the afternoon, carrying in
his hands a pitchfork. A friend of his, who was
with him, advised him not to carry it, as he con-
sidered it dangerous. Mr. Miller, however, did not
put down the fork, but continued walking with
it ; he had gone some distance home, and had
just put up the bars of a fence he passed through,
when a violent clap of thunder occurred, followed
by a sharp flash. The acquaintance of Mr. Miller
was slightly stunned by the shock, and, turning
round to look at his companion, he saw him lying

255

BOOKS REVIEWED

on his face motionless. He went to him and found
him dead, the lightning, having been attracted
by the steel tines of the fork, had torn his hand
slightly and killed him on the instant.

We may be exceedingly sorry for Mr. Abraham
Miller without thinking that the tale of his demise
was worth printing ; a single line to the effect that
Whitman was " at this time engaged in journalism"
would have sufficed as a substitute. The later papers
are better than this. There are fragments of fiction ;
there are essays ; there are obituaries ; there are
political tracts ; there are fragments of literary
criticism. Some of these last have a certain interest.
The young Whitman boldly defended Dickens
against those who accused the novelist of painting
horrible pictures of low life. The poor, he said, were
shown examples of worth by poverty deprest, and
the rich were made to taste " distresses of want "
which were beyond their immediate experience.
He said, stupidly, of Dr. Johnson that " he was a
sour, malicious, egotistical man " and " a sycophant
of power and rank " ; that his heart could only be
indicated by " the sign minus," and that " his soul
was a bad one." William Cullen Bryant he described
as " one of the best poets in the world " ; he liked
Carlyle ; he said that

Keats — peace to his ashes — was one of the
pleasantest modern poets, and, had not the grim
monster, Death, so early claimed him, would
doubtless have become one of the most distin-
guished.

256

A SUPPLEMENT TO WHITMAN

He called Lamb " the pleasant Elia," he argued
that less than justice was done to Longfellow, " an
honour and a glory as he is to the American name,"
and an equal of Wordsworth ; he described Melville
as " readable," and he was extremely enthusiastic
about authors as varied as Ruskin, James Thomson,
and Martin Tupper, whom he described as " one
of the rare men of the time." A large portion of the
second volume is occupied by a novel, written in
the interests of Temperance, alias total abstinence.
It is headed :

FRANKLIN EVANS,

or
THE INEBRIATE.
A Tale of the Times.

By WALTER WHITMAN.

and it was announced in the " New World " as being
by " one of the best Novelists of this country " ; which
was very misleading. The papers on the antiquities
of Brooklyn, which conclude this collection, are, on
the whole, much the most interesting — as they are
almost the latest — of the pieces now brought to-
gether.

Whitman was never very successful in prose,
though some of his table-talk is stimulating and
amusing. We had better get back to " Leaves of
Grass," his real legacy. That collection is at once an
achievement, a revelation, and a warning. It con-
tains some of the noblest poetry of modern times ;
it. also contains some of the flattest. Whitman was
born a poet, but there were strains in his character

257 s

BOOKS REVIEWED

which prevented him from making the most of his
natural endowment. He had a multiplicity of objects ;
he wished to Americanise America and to reform
society in accordance with a programme of his own.
He was extremely anxious to exhibit himself as the
most free and independent citizen alive. He was
anxious, especially after he found that traditional
forms very much cramped his style, to liberate
verse from the " shackles " of rhyme and regular
rhythm with which an effete, aristocratic, and mili-
tarist Europe had invested it. The result was a great
deal of " verse " which was no more than free prose,
and pamphleteering or merely informative prose at
that. There are included amongst his works very
many poems, or parts of poems, like this :

I am the train.

Panting, rolling, roaring through tunnels,

Rattling along causeways, shrieking through flying

towns,
I go from East to West, through Virginia, Kentucky,

Missouri, Kansas, Arizona, to California.
I link East to West of this great Continent,
The pale clerk of the cities
And the bronzed red-shirted broncho-buster of the

ranches.

Whitman did not write that : I have just done it
myself. But Whitman might quite well have written
it when uninspired : it ought not to be printed as
anything but prose, and even as prose it is not good.
He is often matter-of-fact, and, when not matter-
of-fact, often rhetorical. And the important thing

258

A SUPPLEMENT TO WHITMAN

to note about him is that when he is at his best there
is never any doubt that it is free verse he is writing
and not free prose. Sometimes, as in " O Captain,
my Captain," he is even impelled to make rhymes,
though not very good ones ; always, as he rises to
poetry, he tends to write like other poets, in rhythms
more repetitive than those of prose. The anthologists
drawing on him always draw on the same small
group of poems : " When Lilacs First in the Door-
yard Bloomed," " The Dirge for Two Veterans,"
and so on. In those poems, his best, he was
least peculiar, more near to his brothers. He
remained, usually, " free " ; he abstained from
rhyme, and his lines, typographically, were of vary-
ing lengths. So were Ossian's, Southey's, Blake's
sometimes, Matthew Arnold's sometimes ; there
was nothing novel in it. Being a genuine poet he did
find his imagination stirred by certain things which
had not"" previously been " mentioned " by poets ;
but his deliberate cultivation of originality led to
nothing at all.

259

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY

DURING the last ten years the appearance
of a large and voluble school of writers who
openly proclaim themselves to be in revolt against
" conventional poetry " has led to a great deal of
discussion in America as to the nature and develop-
ment of the art. I suspect that the discussion is
dying down ; I think that the extremer manifesta-
tions of " revolt " are waning, and that where the
apostles of revolt are poseurs or fools they are being
found out. But if a justification is to be found for all
the bad " free verse " that has been written in
America, and all the nonsense that has been talked
about it, it is to be found in this book. Had the
nonsense not been written, and had it not been taken
seriously, Professor Lowes would not have found it
desirable to re-examine the foundations of poetry.
And had Professor Lowes not written Convention
and Revolt in Poetry we should have forgone the best
book about poetry which has been written in our
generation. Those who have a wide acquaintance
with books about literature written by American
professors may rub their eyes at this statement. But
it is true.

I know no book where so much of the ground is
covered, no book in which so many true and valu-
able things about poetry, both " original " and
" quoted," are contained. Professor Lowes goes
considerably farther than his title might suggest.
He found, immediately he approached the subject,
that he could not argue the question for the benefit

260

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY

of puzzled contemporaries without going back
to the very roots of the subject. He had to decide
what he meant by poetry (concluding, inevitably,
that he meant what all interested persons have
always meant), and he then had to examine, scientifi-
cally and historically, the common marks of poetry
in point of content, of form, and of diction. He notes
the universality, in poetry, of poetical rhythm, and
hints (he might have gone farther) at its basis.
He explains the " inevitability of imagery " on the
ground of the inadequacy of words — he might here
have noted the common association between un-
usual emotion and the use of imagery. He explains
how it is that, men being what they are, certain
" subjects " invariably recur in poetry. He shows
how the changing circumstances of each age modify
the treatment of those subjects and the language
and imagery employed. And he gives illustrations
of the recurrent phenomena of a hardening of con-
vention and an excess of reaction against convention;
each of which leads to lying, musical deficiency,
and a diminution of poetic influence. So wide is his
range, and so fertile is he in suggestion, that it is
utterly impossible here to give even a synopsis of
his conclusions.

Professor Lowes concludes that " when dead
conventions squeak and gibber in the streets there
are just three ways of reckoning with them " :

Poets may set the conventions going with the
detachment of a phonograph, and even absent
themselves, to all intents and purposes, entirely.
Or they may exercise creative energy, as we have

261

BOOKS REVIEWED

seen, upon dead forms and empty shells, and
bring about a metamorphosis. Or, finally, they
may rise up in revolt, repudiate the old coinage
altogether, and more or less definitely set them-
selves to minting new.

It doesn't much matter what happens, he says ;
the wheel always returns. That is pessimistic. If
reaction goes too far ; if it goes so far as to lead
people away from poetry altogether ; if they alto-
gether refuse to notice what they feel (for example)
about love or death, and if they resist the rhythm
when it comes, a generation's powers may be wasted.
But Professor Lowes does not really leave us in
doubt as to his position. He knows that "the history
of English poetry is an illuminating record of
periodical farewells to folly," and if the folly could
be avoided and the second, and only fruitful one, of
his courses be always pursued, he would be com-
pletely happy.

Only in one small particular do I find Professor
Lowes 's book defective. His principles are sound,
but, in view of the fact that his disquisition was
provoked by the widespread existence of " revolt "
in his own country, he might have taken more pains
to apply them to the contemporary. Except for one
poem of Rupert Brooke's, and one not very admir-
able piece of free verse, he quotes nothing from
modern English poets : in so far as he gives modern
instances, his examples are drawn from American
writers, and mostly from those who may ambigu-
ously be called the Revolting School. His quotations
are all pertinent, but he seems to suggest by
262

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY

implication that the sillier forms of revolt have been
as conspicuous in England as in America. It is not so ;
in so far as we have witnessed an outbreak here it
has been an imported, but not an important, thing ;
taken part in by persons whose affiliations are with
America and Paris, and provoking very little serious
discussion. If one age in our poetry has succeeded
another the transition this time has been made with
unusual ease. Our poets have incorporated new
experiences, new words and new rhythms in the last
twenty years ; they exhibit a surprising variety ;
but the best of them, those with the greatest power
of communicating thought and emotion and with
the most evident gifts of craftsmanship, are as
traditional as they are modern. The difference be-
tween the circumstances of the two countries may
be illustrated by the fact that in America Mr. Robert
Frost is regarded as a rebellious innovator, whereas
here we regard him as thoroughly traditional. Con-
vention, in the last generation, was, it appears, much
harder in America than it was here, artificiality and
prettiness and pedantry much more general ; the
consequence being that a sincere and straightforward
poet whose lines are not all drawn with a footrule is
regarded as a portent, and that writers with less
brain and heart than Mr. Frost are thrown into a
state of excessive reaction against everything that
has been done before. Professor Lowes should not
suppose that anything analogous to what has been
happening in America has been happening here ;
we have had, as it were, a Mormon Mission, but
nobody has taken any notice of it. Moreover, I think
that if he compels himself to face facts, he will come

263

BOOKS REVIEWED

to the conclusion that he himself does not really
think very much of some of the " free verse " which
he quotes. He is fairly cautious about it. He does
seem to suggest that he doesn't see very much in it,
but that it has been passed on to him as the repre-
sentative work of its day, and that consequently he
supposes it must be good. He goes so far in one place
as to quote passages from the prose of Mr. Conrad,
Walter Pater, and Mr. Hewlett, and set them against
various so-called poems by young apostles of revolt.
Here, arranged in the familiar typographical way,
is a fragment from one of Mr. Conrad's novels :

The bright domes
Of the parasols
Swayed lightly outwards
Like full-blown blossoms
On the rim of a vase. . . .

The wheels turned solemnly ;

One after another the sunshades drooped,

Folding their colours

Like gorgeous flowers shutting their petals

At the end of the day.

And here is his extract from Mr. Hewlett :

As he had seen her,

So he painted. . . .

A grey, translucent sea

Laps silently

Upon a little creek

And, in the hush of a still dawn,

The myrtles and sedges on the water's brim

Are quiet. . . .

264

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY

She would vanish, we know,

Into the daffodils

Or a bank of violets.

And you might tell her presence there,

Or in the rustle of the myrtles,

Or coo of doves

Mating in the pines ;

You might feel her genius

In the scent of the earth

Or the kiss of the West wind ;

But you could only see her

In mid- April,

And you should look for her

Over the sea.

Professor Lowes contrasts these with certain
modern pieces of free verse. He does suggest that
he cannot tell the difference between one and the
other ; he is aware that there is a borderland be-
tween prose and verse, which both may be haunting ;
it does not occur to him that in almost every in-
stance his example from so-called prose is not merely
more regularly rhythmical than his examples from
so-called verse, but that it is usually, in point of
intelligence and feeling, actually far better. Here,
from one who is distinctly one of the most acute,
economical, and painstaking members of the Re-
volt, is an image :

Sand cuts your petal,
Furrows it with hard edge,
Like flint
On a bright stone.

265

BOOKS REVIEWED

I am not quite sure what it means ; it might convey
something to a Japanese. It moves me through none
of my senses ; I do not know why it should be called
verse, even free verse ; and my only answer is,
" Well, what about it ? " I should not dream of
suggesting that unrhymed verse written in irregular
lines is necessarily inferior to rhymed verse in regular
rhymes ; Arnold, Henley, and many before them,
had written it. As I have already pointed out, it is
noticeable that Whitman is most nearly traditional
in point of rhythm when he is at his best, just as it is
noticeable that Donne is least Donnishly crabbed
and obscure when he is at his best : the finest
achievements of the unorthodox are orthodox.

There is, Professor Lowes admits, some apparent
physical connection between a high state of emotion
and regularity of movement, and whenever prose-
writers become exalted in feeling, they tend to be
more regular in their rhythms. Grant that (and it is
a matter beyond our control, however unreasonable
we may presume to think it) and the utmost free-
dom is permissible if a man can make use of it.
Most poets do, in point of fact, find it pleasant and
salutary to add other forms of repetitiveness to the
one that appears essential ; but if a man care to
abandon rhyme, and even line, let him, especially
if he finds that they cramp him. It may be signifi-
cant that the positive achievements of the pro-
pagandist school of free-verse writers are almost
negligible ; but a man should use whatever form
suits him best. What is wrong with most of the free-
verse writers is not that they write free- verse, but
that they lack the qualities which make good poets

266

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY

in whatever form they may write. The worst of them
are principally governed by a desire to attract
attention or a desire to be different from other people,
or a mere radical reaction against the established
thing — which, for such are the conditions of life, is
often the inevitable and necessary thing. The best
of them are in some instances honest and intelligent,
but devoid of passion and of ear, unacquainted with
the emotions that have always produced what men
have agreed to call poetry, or else so deluded by
doctrine that they have failed to make a connection
between the emotions they experience and the art
they practise. It is not even enough to " keep the
eye on the object " if there is nothing behind the
eye.

267

THE PROSPECTS OF ENGLISH

"f | ^HERE is," says Professor Matthews, at
X the opening of his Essays on English, "no
topic about which men dispute more frequently,
more bitterly, or more ignorantly, than about the
right and the wrong use of words. . . . To misuse
words, to make grammatical blunders, is an evidence
of illiteracy ; and to accuse a man of illiteracy is to
disparage the social standing of his father and his
mother." He manages to avoid acerbity himself,
and I hope that I shall keep my own black passions
in control while writing this review.

It is a slight book, a series of papers, which not
only avoid pedantry, but do not aim at any display
of scholarship. The book is readable and uniformly
sensible — a book intended for the non-specialist,
which presents him with no difficulties. It is not a
treatise, but a volume of good and useful journalism.
Professor Matthews was apparently incited by find-
ing that many of his colleagues in the American
Academy were alarmed at the prospects of our
tongue. They thought that degeneration had already
begun, degeneration like that which marked the
later history of Greek. This, they maintained, is
our Hellenistic era. Professor Matthews, instinct-
ively revolting against so dreary a view, set about an
examination of the situation, and has now formulated
his own opinion.

I assume that all, or almost all, of the readers of
these lines will desire two things : that the English
of England and America should retain both its vigour

268

THE PROSPECTS OF ENGLISH

and its homogeneity, and that, if possible, its use
should spread amongst the peoples of the world.
Professor Brander Matthews, who speaks English
himself, has inherited our modes of thought and
feeling, and consequently desires the perpetuation
and extension of Anglo-American civilisation, treats
both these aspects of his subject. With regard to the
latter, there is not much said and there is little to
say. Political events in the end will probably deter-
mine the status of our language in the world. If we
and the Americans retain the power we have we
may look forward to a steady increase in the number
of people to whom our tongue is a birthright, and we
may reasonably hope that it (with French as its
nearest competitor) will become the lingua franca
of the world, with consequent results in the laws,
manners, and morals of the world — for, honestly,
the Germans are not the only people who have
desired to disseminate their Kultur, though they
made the ghastly mistake of thinking it possible to
spread it by mere boasting and force of arms. Pro-
fessor Matthews dismisses Volapuk (which is dead
anyhow) and Esperanto ; has a kind word for Ido,
and a kinder for Latin ; and concludes that French
will ultimately share with English the privilege of
being, amongst educated men, universal. Beyond
that he does not go ; and, after all, prophecy here
has gone far enough, As to the future of English
(domestically), he is optimistic. I think that had he
known more of current English he would have been
more optimistic still.

The English language is in the charge of two great
aggregations of states : the British Empire and the

269

BOOKS REVIEWED

American Union. It runs, or it may conceivably not
run, two risks. On the one hand it may be muddied
by too great an influx of new terms, flooding in from
every quarter of the English-speaking globe ; on
the other hand it may be the victim of fissiparous
tendencies such as produced the divergence be-
tween Spanish and Portuguese. The first danger,
Professor Matthews believes, is found on examination
not to be serious. We are not taking words faster
than our fathers did ; many are called but few are
chosen ; colloquialisms change, but standard English
remains, and it develops slowly. Its risks are rather
of the other kind. There has been observable too
rigid a reluctance to admit desirable terms from the
popular speech, a slightly exaggerated inclination
to Latinity. And, as Mr. Bridges has vigorously
argued, our difficulty with regard to foreign im-
portations is that we do not naturalise them as freely
as our ancestors did ; we still write " ennui " and
" nuance," and write them in italics. The words we
get from the populace, at home and abroad, seldom
stay unless they are really good and valuable. There
is apparently little fear that English, as we speak it
here, will merely run to seed so long as we do not.
But is the unity of the English language threatened ?
Is there any tendency on the part of English speech
and American speech to diverge ?

The answer, I believe, is so obvious that it would
not be worth making were it not that there are people
in both countries who casually assume such a pro-
cess to be inevitable. There are local differences,
both of pronunciation and of vocabulary. But the
popular speech of Illinois is no farther apart from

270

THE PROSPECTS OF ENGLISH

that of Devonshire than that of Devonshire is from
that of Whitechapel, and an educated American
talks more like an educated Englishman than does
an educated Scot who has remained at home. This
is the fact ; since it is so after generations during
which communications between the two continents
were not so easy and frequent as they are now, and
popular education was less widespread and uniform,
there is ground for Professor Matthews 's argument
that, if anything, the future tendency of the two
divisions of one speech will be to come closer. In
these days even slang, provided it be really vivid
slang, crosses the Atlantic very rapidly, and an
American neologism which really meets a demand
for a new word spreads to England instead of re-
maining a local, differentiating Americanism. " The
self-governing dominions of the British Common-
wealth," says Professor Matthews, " and the semi-
independent states of the American Union are all
of them proving-ground for verbal seedlings which
may in time be transplanted and acclimated (we
should say acclimatised) in standard English." Our
acquisitions from America are varied. Amongst the
earliest were Indian words such as " wigwam " and
" totem." Many of the later ones have been double
words, mostly metaphorical. Amongst them are
" scare - head," " wind - jammer," " side - track,"
"side-step," "pussy-foot," "high-brow," "joy-
ride," " spell -binder," "sky-scraper," "strap-
hanger " (there never was a word we more acutely
needed than that one), " rough-rider," " sky-pilot,"
"fool-proof," "gun-shy," "sky-light." "Boss"
and " boom " are older than most of these. The

271

BOOKS REVIEWED

first came out of New York, and the second from the
lumber-camps of Michigan. There was a time when
they were regarded here as Americanisms ; their
origin is hardly realised now by most of those who
habitually use them. Simultaneously new English
coinages make their way into the United States.
" Cad " and " fad " were at first only localisms ;
they were Briticisms struggling for existence, and
getting slowly into sporadic use in England, until
at last they achieved a peaceful penetration into the
United States. " Rough " has gone to America,
" tough " may finally settle here. Some words and
locutions do not seem to thrive overseas, but, if
purely ephemeral slang be ruled out, they are not
very numerous.

They are even less numerous than Professor
Matthews thinks. He might have made his case
stronger, but, like many Americans who write on
the language, he is imperfectly acquainted with
British practice ; he ought to have asked an English-
man to check his illustrations of divergence. He is
perfectly correct in saying that the American " back
of " has never won favour here, and that it probably
never will ; he notes a " British localism " that
may not spread in " directly," for " as soon as."
But several words which he thinks we do not use
we, as a fact, use daily. He is right — it is the first
thing the Englishman is breathlessly told when he
lands on the Island of Manhattan — in saying that
what is a " tuxedo " in America is known only as a
" dinner-jacket " in England. It is also true that a
" drummer " is in England a " commercial traveller."
But his authorities have misled him when they gave

272

THE PROSPECTS OF ENGLISH

him to suppose that the word " bedspread " is
unknown in England. He gives " cowboy " and
" cuspidor " as words which have no British equi-
valent ; we use the former to describe an object we
do not ourselves produce, and our equivalent for
the latter is the robust word, " spittoon." " Fall,"
for " autumn," though a good old English word, is
no longer used in England ; but it is astonishing
that Professor Matthews should believe that no-
body in England uses the word " rooster," for
"cock," or "wilt," for "wither." The word
" rooster," he says, " has completely faded from
memory in England." " There would," he proceeds,

be advantage in explaining to the American visitor
that, if he goes to an English hotel for a dinner at
a fixed price, he will be at liberty to call for a
second helping of anything which may please his
palate if the bill-of-fare declares that " a follow
of any dish will be served without extra charge."

But on what bill-of-fare is the word " follow " to
be found, used as an equivalent for a second help-
ing ? You may find the word in Dickens ; it may
still be currently employed by the " plump head-
waiter at the Cock " ; but where else can it be en-
countered ? Professor Matthews may be assured
that the conventional English term — unless you
happen to prefer " another go," " another whack,"
or, more quietly, " some more " — is precisely the
same as the American. His conclusion stands : " We
cannot help seeing that the divergencies between
British English and American English are relatively

273 T

BOOKS REVIEWED

very few if only we keep in mind the immense vocabu-
lary of our ever-expanding language."

Many other aspects of language development are
touched on by Professor Matthews. He has a good
deal to say about the coinage of new words. One is
astonished when one reflects how rapidly it is pro-
ceeding. The new words swarm ; words of all kinds ;
" dope," " enthuse," " peeved," " addict," " secre-
tariat," " personnel," " opt," " national " (the
noun) — they are everywhere, and we may devoutly
hope that not all of them will surivive, for not all of
them are needed. Professor Matthews calls attention
to the influence of headline-writers — who must
have short words — on the language. He remarks on
the degeneration of words : somebody once said
that no modern writer would dare to say that " Adam
led his blooming Eve out of her blasted Paradise."
He has some interesting pages about words which
have come back into currency after having been
long regarded as archaic, these including such
familiar vocables as "anthem," "deluge," "prob-
lem," " illusion," " sphere," " phantom," " plum-
age," and " shapely." He deprecates the use of
words in writing which we find it impossible
to use in speech, giving " irrefragable " as an
example ; elsewhere I notice himself using that
signal specimen " inexpugnable." And he argues
very strongly in favour of the complete naturalisa-
tion, phonetically and typographically, of foreign
words which we have decided that we cannot do
without. There is an unanswerable case in favour of
this. It is grotesque to go on writing role and miUe
as we do ; our ancestors would have standardised

274

THE PROSPECTS OF ENGLISH

" shover " and " garridge " by now. An elaboration
of that argument may be found in one of the
early tracts of the Society of Pure English. The
latest tract issued by this deserving Society deals
with something less vital, but very interesting. It
registers some of the French borrowings from
English, demonstrating that our exports are sub-
stantial as well as our imports. Until the late seven-
teenth century the French took virtually nothing
from us ; but since the Huguenots began trans-
lating English books into French the process of
absorption has never flagged. The English vocabu-
laries of war, millinery and cookery are almost
wholly derived from France ; but the French have
drawn quite as freely on us for their vocabularies
of sport and politics.

275

DELICATE DETAILS

EVERY day, and in every way, we are learn-
ing more and more about Swinburne's life
at Putney. Man after man who had luncheon at
" The Pines " has described the meal ; many new
facts came to light in the recent " Life of Watts-
Dunton " ; and now Mrs. Watts- Dunton comes
along with a mass of new information which she
was in a peculiar position to obtain. She had, says
the publisher of the Home Life of Swinburne,
" exceptional opportunities for studying the great
poet in the various phases of his everyday life. No
one living had the close association with him which
she enjoyed as the wife of Swinburne's dearest and
closest friend, and no one else could have drawn
this faithful picture, full of delicate details, of the
last years of his life." From early girlhood Mrs.
Watts-Dunton had been accustomed to revere Swin-
burne. She had at school a Canadian governess who
would " declaim at odd moments, in a voice throb-
bing with a sense of their beauty, that soul-stirring
lyric which begins : ' When the hounds of spring
are on winter's traces.' " The governess often had
" Laus Veneris " with her when the girls were play-
ing tennis, and " when it was time to return to the
house she would cause me to walk beside her, and
then I would hear about ' Anactoria ' and the other
glorious pieces to be found within the covers of her
cherished volume." Judge, then, the young girl's
excitement when she was first asked to dinner, found
Watts " waiting to receive me in his charming
276

DELICATE DETAILS

dining-room which, contrary to a published account,
is not connected by folding doors with the adjoining
room," and was taken out into the garden and asked
" to partake of the biggest, fattest gooseberries I had
ever seen." Judge, again, her delight when she met
Swinburne, and,

looking hard at me out of those wonderful eyes,
he ejaculated two or three times the word " Tiens ! "

And imagine with what a keen observation, when
she went to " The Pines " as a wife, she noted every-
thing which was likely to interest future students
of the poet's works.

It is impossible to do more than give an idea of
the wealth of the material which she now makes
available. Here, as she says, is something " apropos
de bottes." " A brilliant essayist wrote in a leading
review " that Swinburne had small hands and feet.
He had not :

I had ample opportunity for knowing a good
deal about the footwear of the Housemates. The
same boot-maker made for both of them. There
was but little difference in size, Swinburne's feet
being a trifle larger than Walter's. The poet took
what, in the trade, is called " an eight and a half,"
so that to write of his " tiny feet " is absurd.
Swinburne had his boots made of calf leather,
while Walter preferred a soft kid. Often when I
was out walking with Walter I would notice that
he had on a pair of calf boots. I would say, " You've
got Swinburne's boots on again. Oh, dear ! Why
will you not look ? "

277

BOOKS REVIEWED

Swinburne did not wear his hair long ; " the little
he possessed was often cut by the barber." He had
a horror of drawing small cheques. " Lord Burn-
ham may be interested to learn that Swinburne's
morning paper was the Daily Telegraph" He was
fond of Christmas and often bought presents for
his friends :

He always seemed quite pleased with every-
thing he had bought, yet he appeared uncertain
as to what the recipient would think of the little
gifts. He would inquire anxiously, " Do you
think he " (or " she," as the case might be) " will
like it ? " On being reassured on this head, he
would give a little satisfied sigh, as if the question
were quite momentous, and murmur with relief,
" Oh, I'm so glad you think so too ! "

It is untrue that he was always moving his arms and
legs about. " He made," says Mrs. Watts-Dunton,
" no convulsive movement in the intimacy of our
domestic circle," and it can only be presumed that
" the strangers who took note of his spasmodic
movements . . . were themselves the cause of the
' symptom ' they deplored." Swinburne swore when
annoyed, and " I fear it may come as a shock to the
aesthetic devotees of Swinburne to learn that the
hideous word, ' bloke,' was not foreign to his vocabu-
lary. Coming from him it sounded dreadful."

" Here in this room," says Mrs. Watts-Dunton,
recollections drive on me in waves ; my memory
is suddenly like a stream in spate. And the diffi-
culty with me is what to select as memorable and
what to reject as trivial."

278

DELICATE DETAILS

Her gift of selection proves to be almost infallible,
and she leaves our knowledge of Swinburne's char-
acter, habits, and tastes considerably extended.
There are, however, some things which remain to
be cleared up ; there are a few bewildering problems
which still call for solution if we are to have that
complete biographical insight which is necessary
to a full understanding of "Atalanta" and "Tris-
tram of Lyonesse." The size of Swinburne's feet
is now ascertained once and for all, and it will be
impossible for any future critic, however revolu-
tionary, to reopen the question of the kind of soap
which he used in his bath. Much is established ;
but much remains to be established. " The Art of
biography," a poet has written,

Is different from geography ;
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.

Nevertheless, it is impossible not to see a resem-
blance between the progress of the two arts : not
to think, when such works as Mrs. Watts-Dunton's
are published, of the piecemeal amplification of
knowledge through the local surveys of successive
explorers : not to visualise the life of a great dead
man as a continent which is gradually surveyed. In
the map of Swinburne there are still several blank
spaces which remain to be filled up. His biographers
have thus far been completely silent about certain
aspects of his diet. We know from Mrs. Watts-
Dunton the development of his tastes in drinks,
the sort of tumbler he fancied, the pleasure he took

279

BOOKS REVIEWED

in partridge-pie, and his attitude towards shell-
fish. This last is illustrated in a passage so full and
final that I feel compelled to quote it :

Here, as illustrating a self-control with which
he is seldom credited, I record his avoidance of
those dishes which he knew from experience
were not good for him. For instance, he avoided
shell-fish, although he liked it. Lobster or crab
was never served. I remember once buying some
aspic jelly which I made into moulds with very
pink shrimps showing through the gelatinous
transparency. He was immensely pleased with
the appearance of the dainty. "How very pretty
those little things look — almost too pretty to
eat ! " was his comment. " But I think I must
this time because you prepared it."

It is a heartening episode ; our mediaeval ancestors
would have made of it a Morality Play in which the
issue should lie between four characters, Courtesy
and Dyspepsia on the one side and Churlishness
and Good Digestion on the other, the conflict be-
tween Appetite and Medical Advice being the theme
for a subsidiary plot. Lobster was banished from
Swinburne's life, shrimps admitted only occasion-
ally, and with a gallant gesture ; but what of early
morning tea ? It is a fairly full account of Swin-
burne's normal day that Mrs. Watts-Dunton gives
us, but, following for once the usual custom of
biographers in omitting the things which interest
us most, she is silent regarding the very beginning
of his mornings. Did he or did he not take tea in
bed ? If he did was it his habit to take it (a) alone,

280

DELICATE DETAILS

(b) with bread and butter, or (c) with biscuits ? With
regard to clothes, again, there are important points
to be cleared up. He invariably, we now know, wore
soft collars and shirts, and liked them clean ; he
refused to be measured for his clothes ; and his
boots were of calf and of an eight-and-a-half size.

But there is a question still outstanding. Some
people might hesitate to ask it, even in an age when
we have grown accustomed to the most brutal frank-
ness about the most intimate and sacred details of
private life. But I find it impossible not to express
my curiosity about it : Did Swinburne wear sock
suspenders ? So very much hangs upon them. We
have already certain data which would give future
critics a basis for speculation, even were no further
information forthcoming from authoritative sources.
But the data conflict, and if no more are supplied the
Problem is likely to be as endlessly fruitful of con-
troversy as is that of the identity of Shakespeare's
" Mr. W. H." On the one hand Swinburne's passion
for neatness, and especially sartorial neatness, is
clear. But on the other hand we have his equally
evident inability to understand or employ the com-
plex mechanical devices of this inventive age. He
was amazed at the marvels of photography. The
thought of teaching him to use a typewriter was no
sooner entertained than abandoned. He was de-
lighted with a present of an eighteen-penny napkin-
ring, for "I doubt if Swinburne had ever heard of
celluloid." Further :

His intelligence was so confined to pretty and
imaginative literature that even the mechanism

281

BOOKS REVIEWED

of a soda-water syphon was beyond him. When
for the first time I manipulated one in his presence,
he gazed at me, evincing considerable apprehen-
sion for my safety. I succeeded in releasing a gentle
stream into my glass. When I stopped, he said with
an accent of admiration and surprise, " How cleverly
you did that ; I couldn't have done it." I could dis-
claim the compliment, but I could not truthfully
contradict the second part of his comment.

On the whole, in the light of this, I incline to
think that Swinburne's socks must have been left to
struggle with the force of gravity unassisted by
mechanical aids ; but if Mrs. Watts-Dunton can
clear the matter up in a supplement to this book,
all lovers of literature will be grateful. And another
point is : did none of his modernistic friends intro-
duce him to the mystery of bath salts ? " Next to
love of his friends came Swinburne's love of the sea.
And next to his love of the sea ranked his love of
babies." His friends and babies he could see at
Putney ; but Putney has no more sea-coast than
Bohemia. Salt and ozone being essential, Swinburne
was happy in discovering a brand of soap called
Samphire Soap :

This precious tablet smelt of the sea, or was
supposed to smell of the sea. A. C. S. believed
implicitly that it was highly charged with the
active principle of ozone. He sensed the wave in
its odour, and the suds in his bath were refresh-
ing to him as the foam of the ocean. Needless to
say, " Samphire " soap was a thing of which we
never permitted ourselves to " run short."

282

DELICATE DETAILS

11 I still," adds Mrs. Watts- Dunton, " keep a cake
of it as a souvenir of the happiest time of my life."
The time is probably not far off when it will be
generally felt that so precious a relic as a cake of
Swinburne's Soap ought not to remain indefinitely
in private hands. But there a larger question is
opened up. Is it not time that steps should be taken
to ensure the future of " The Pines " ? Ought not
a Swinburne Memorial Committee to be estab-
lished with a view of acquiring it, if and when it
comes into the market, as a permanent home for
the soap, and other relics ? These are difficult times,
and people have little money to spare ; but surely
we have here an exceptional case.

I cannot conclude this all too summary review of
a fascinating volume without a wish that other great
poets had been so fortunate in their biographers as
Swinburne has been in Mrs. Watts-Dunton. How
little we know of the Home Life of Shelley ; how
greatly a Mrs. Joseph Severin might have supple-
mented our knowledge of Keats ! Years after Keats 's
death Browning passionately asked " What porridge
had John Keats ? " He got no answer ; his legiti-
mate curiosity was unsatisfied. Keats almost cer-
tainly ate porridge ; there must have been people
who knew what kind of porridge. But they cared
nothing for the needs of posterity ; they selfishly
kept their knowledge to themselves. All we can do
is to be thankful that we have now a full-length
portrait of at least one of the great poets : pending
anything further, we shall have to take him as a type
of them all.

283

CHRISTOPHER SMART

CHRISTOPHER SMART, author of the
Song to David, was born at Shipbourne,
Kent, on April 4, 1722. His family was North
Country ; his father was steward in Kent to William,
Lord Vane, younger son of Lord Barnard of Raby
Castle, Durham. The poet was sent to school at
Durham. His holidays were frequently spent at
Raby Castle. His talents were noticed, and the con-
nection resulted in his getting an allowance first
from the Duchess of Cleveland, and then from
Henry Vane, Earl of Darlington. In 1739 he was
sent to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he
was contemporary with Gray. Gray was sober and
fastidious, Smart something of a rioter and drunk-
ard ; they did not become intimate, though Gray,
when Smart was in distress, took pains to do him
kindnesses. The turbulent undergraduate became
in 1745 a dissipated Fellow. Perhaps it was merely
that he chafed against surroundings where (in his
words)

discipline and dulness dwell
And genius ne'er was seen to roam.

No sooner was he a Fellow than he scandalised the
precise by making the undergraduates perform a
comedy of his own composition, " A Trip to Cam-
bridge," in the College Hall. In 1747 Gray writes :

His debts daily increase. ... In the mean-
time he is amusing himself with a comedy of his

284

CHRISTOPHER SMART

own writing, which he makes all the boys of his
acquaintance act. . . . Our friend, Lawman, the
mad attorney, is his copyist, and truly the author
himself is as mad as he. His piece, he says, is in-
imitable— true sterling wit and humour, by God,
and he can't hear the prologue without being
ready to die with laughter. He acts five parts him-
self, and is sorry he can't do all the rest. He has
also advertised a collection of odes, and for his
vanity and faculty of lying, they are come to their
full maturity. All this, you see, must come to a
jail or Bedlam, and that without help, almost
without pity.

The jail was narrowly escaped almost at once ;
Smart was arrested for a tailor's debt, and his
colleagues (who, like Gray, could not, it seems,
help taking an interest in him) saved him by a sub-
scription. In 1750 he won the Seatonian Prize for a
poem (the Prize still exists and is substantial) on the
Attributes of the Supreme Being. In 1751 Gray's
prediction came literally true. Gray is supposed to
be referring to Smart in a letter to Walpole, who
wanted an amanuensis : " We have a Man here
that writes a good Hand ; but he has two little Fail-
ings, that hinder my recommending him to you. He
is lousy, and he is mad : he sets out this week for
Bedlam ; but if you insist upon it, I don't doubt he
will pay his Respects to you." At all events to Bedlam
Smart went, with religious mania. He was let out
and at once — showing therein a prudence rare in
the lives of most authors and unique in his own
— married the daughter of a publisher. This,

285

BOOKS REVIEWED

ordinarily, would have been enough to lose him his
Fellowship ; but Pembroke, lenient to him once
more, told him he could keep it if he would go on
writing Seatonian Poems. This he did, winning the
prize in 1751, 1752, 1753, and 1755 ; but by that
time he had gone to London and begun to write
for the booksellers. He used the striking pseudonym
of " Mary Midnight," and he edited a periodical
(of which I should like to see a set) called " The
Midwife, or the Old Woman's Magazine." For ten
years he led a miserable life, deep in drink and debt.
His family left him, and, developing mania again,
he was sent back to the madhouse, where he spent
two years. Johnson, who had always liked him, went
to see him there. He thought that Smart was per-
haps best off there, as he dug in the garden, whereas,
before his confinement, all the exercise he got was a
walk to the alehouse, " but he was carried back
again." Nevertheless, Johnson did not think him
mad enough to be in an asylum. " His infirmities
were not noxious to society. He insisted upon people
praying with him, and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart
as with anyone else." During that confinement he
wrote the poem by which his name lives, a sudden
burst into grandeur, the " Song to David," noblest
perhaps of all English religious poems. They say he
wrote it with a key on his door panels, pens and ink
being denied him ; the story is without proof. There
it is. Smart came out ; resumed his former occu-
pations ; met the Burneys and borrowed money
from them ; struck Fanny as having " great wild-
ness in his manners, looks, and voice," and in 1770
died in the King's Bench Prison.

286

CHRISTOPHER SMART

Smart's poems, except for one, have not I think
been edited for over a century. There is no doubt
at all that " The Song to David " was immeasurably
the best of them, and that it had a quality found in
nothing else of its age. So out of its surroundings
was it that even those of Smart's contemporaries
who admired his other work thought nothing of it.
Dr. Johnson is not a case in point. He wrote a ludic-
rous parody of the " Song to David," catching the
form and missing — but perhaps he wanted to miss —
its blazing content ; but he thought nothing of
Smart even when Smart was sane. It was when asked
his view of the respective merits of Smart and Derrick
that he made his celebrated remark (which might
so often be justly applied to other controversies
concerning authors), " Sir, there is no settling the
point of precedency between a louse and a flea."
But in 1 79 1 Smart was edited in two volumes by
an admirer, and from that edition the " Song to
David " was omitted as the unfortunate lapse of a
lunatic. It afforded, remarked the editor, " melan-
choly proofs of the recent estrangement of his mind."
Just afterwards Anderson, compiling his " British
Poets," came across six stanzas. He could not find a
whole copy of the poem, and printed these six, re-
marking that " the slight defects and singularities
of this neglected performance are amply compen-
sated by a grandeur, a majesty of thought, and a
happiness of expression." Chalmers reprinted the
six stanzas and spoke of their " majestic animation";
and in 1819 the whole poem was reprinted by an
anonymous admirer. Fifty years passed before it
really came into its own ; but then its great qualities

287

/'

BOOKS REVIEWED

were fully realised. Rossetti wrote of it as " the only
great accomplished poem of the last century. The
unaccomplished ones are Chatterton's — of course,
I mean earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without
reckoning so exceptional a genius as Burns. A master-
piece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and
reverberant sound." Browning made Smart one of
the recipients of his " Parleyings with Certain People
of Importance in their Day." He described him-
self, exploring Smart's works (and, by implication,
the eighteenth century), as one who goes through
room after room in a great house where there is no
lack of the signs of decent taste and adequate cul-
ture, where

All showed the Golden Mean without a hint
Of brave extravagance that breaks the rule,

and who suddenly lifts a hanging and steps into a
magnificently beautiful chapel, full of a profusion
of audacious beauties. So with Smart :

The man was sound
And sane at starting : all at once the ground
Gave way beneath his step, a certain smoke
Curled up and caught him, or perhaps down broke
A fireball wrapping flesh and spirit both
In conflagration.

Critics usually exaggerate ; it is a pity to under-rate
Gray's " Elegy " because it is not in the same kind
as the " Song to David " and the writings of Blake ;
even common sense and common tenderness have
achieved their milder glories. Still Smart's poem

288

CHRISTOPHER SMART

does sweep one away as nothing else does that was
written in its age, an age which employed the word
" enthusiast " as a synonym for " maniac." Smart,
in his cell, burning with a fierce fire of inspiration,
rhapsodised like " the lunatic, the lover, and the
poet " all in one. He saw the whole universe blazing
with light and pulsing with adoration, and the very
incoherence and inconsequence of his vivid apos-
trophes witness the intensity of his visionary frenzy.
From a quiet beginning, contemplating the qualities
of the ideal man, he rises, with quicker pulse, to a
survey of the riches of God's earth, birds, beasts,
and fishes, trees, flowers, and gems, until he breaks
into the superbest hymn of praise in our language :

For Adoration, in the skies,
The Lord's philosopher espies

The Dog, the Ram, and Rose ;
The planet's ring, Orion's sword ;
Nor is his greatness less ador'd

In the vile worm that glows.

So he goes through a splendid catalogue. Then,
with the repetitiveness of religious excitement, he
utters stanza after stanza springing from certain
epithets :

Sweet is the dew that falls betimes
And drops upon the leafy limes ;

Sweet Hermon's fragrant air :
Sweet is the lily's silver bell,
And sweet the wakeful tapers smell

That watch for early prayer. . . .

289 u

BOOKS REVIEWED

Sweeter in all the strains of love,
The language of thy turtle-dove,

Pair'd to thy swelling chord ;
Sweeter with ev'ry grace endued,
The glory of thy gratitude,

Respir'd unto the Lord.

Strong is the horse upon his speed ;
Strong in pursuit the rapid glede,

Which makes at once his game ;
Strong the tall ostrich on the ground ;
Strong through the turbulent profound

Shoots Xiphias to his aim.

Strong is the lion — like a coal
His eyeball — like a bastion's mole

His chest against the foes :
Strong the gier eagle on his sail,
Strong against tide th' enormous whale

Emerges, as he goes.

But stronger still in earth and air,
And in the sea, the man of prayer,

And far beneath the tide,
And in the seat to faith assigned,
Where ask is have, where seek is find,

Where knock is open wide. . . .

Shouting in exultation, he proceeds through stanza
after stanza on this model until, with the " glorious"
stanzas he reaches the most splendid peroration in
English, concluding with the culminating act of
salvation now at last

290

CHRISTOPHER SMART

Determin'd, Dar'd, and Done.

What emphasis in the very sound of it ! Smart
never did compose anything like that before or after;
had this been his usual level he would have been
one of the greatest of the world's poets. Yet critics
have been rather unjust to his other work. Mr. Birrell
is typical when he describes Smart as being " until
he lost his reason a very indifferent versifier." Mr.
Streatfield goes farther and remarks that " his poems
— all save one — were the spiritless effusions of a
literary hack." Some of them were ; but not all,
unless the opinion be held that there can be no
degrees of merit in anything so uniformly con-
temptible as eighteenth-century verse. Let it be
admitted that most of Smart's poetry was written
under constraint of an atmosphere which did not
favour the more ardent kind of poetry, and that he
might have done much more had he been born in
another century. But even his more conventional
verses are not devoid of poetic feeling or craftsman-
ship. His poem " On an Eagle Confined in a College
Court " is worth a place in any anthology, energetic,
eloquent, and precise. In the Odes, which Gray
anticipated with so much disquiet, there are stilted
things and passages which have been spoiled for us
by the change in idiom — for instance, the salute to
a bride as " egregious nymph ! " Modern taste, too,
might reject such works as the " Ode on the Sudden
Death of a Clergyman." But nothing could be more
delicate, in the manner of the time, than the " Ode
to Idleness," which begins :

291

BOOKS REVIEWED

Goddess of ease, leave Lethe's brink,
Obsequious to the Muse and me ;

For once endure the pain to think,
Oh ! sweet insensibility !

Sister of peace and indolence,

Bring, Muse ! bring numbers soft and slow,
Elaborately void of sense,

And sweetly thoughtless let them flow. . . .

The last two verses run :

For thee, O Idleness, the woes

Of life we patiently endure,
Thou art the source whence labour flows,

We shun thee but to make thee sure.

For who'd sustain war's toil and waste,
Or who th' hoarse thund'ring of the sea,

But to be idle at the last,

And find a pleasing end in thee ?

There is not only truth but humour in these pointed
lines. Humour may be found elsewhere — in Smart's
satirical work, in some of his charming ballads, in
the " Apology to a Lady for his being a Little Man."
It is sometimes found misplaced. He had the effron-
tery to write an Epilogue to " Othello," to be spoken
by Desdemona, which opens with :

True woman to the last — my peroration
I come to speak in spight of suffocation ;
To show the present and the age to come,
We may be choak'd, but never can be dumb.

292

CHRISTOPHER SMART

His " Georgic," " The Hop-Garden," a eulogy of
the best product of his native Kent, is an amusing
burlesque in the Miltonic style. His invocation will
give a notion of how close he gets to his model. He
implores the help of John Philips, who had pre-
viously copied Milton :

If thou, O Philips, fav'ring dost not hear
Me, inexpert of verse ; with gentle hand
Uprear the unpinion'd muse, high on the top
Of that immeasurable mount, that far
Exceeds thine own Plynlimmon, where thou tun'st
With Phoebus' self thy lyre. Give me to turn
Th' unwieldy subject with thy graceful ease,
Extol its baseness with thy art ; but chief
Illumine, and invigorate with thy fire.

Elsewhere in the poem a close and sympathetic
observation of nature is shown ; as it is also in " A
Morning Piece," " A Noon Piece," and " A Night
Piece." These three poems do not resemble the
" Song to David," but they are very charming.
Smart mad was a great poet ; even sane he must
have been a remarkably good companion in those
taverns.

293

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below

^J *tt

JUU 1957
DEC 2 61957

HFCEIVED

jam 2 1959

(0CT 2 5 ™

m L-9
-12/38(3386)

PR99

S77bo Squire
Books
reviewed.

•*•*-*■

7T

PR99
S77bo

^osasaBI

UBR^f^ufftt

wlWWttWW

■"-295346 i

^ 000