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FLOWERS OF SPEECH

FLOWERS OF SPEECH

Being Lectures in Words and Forms
in Literature

Sir John

LONDON

George Allen & Unwin Ltd
MUSEUM STREET

PREFACE

I SHOULD like to dedicate this book to^ Mr. Logan
Pearsall Smith: he, with Professor Ernest Weekley,
the brothers Fowler, the O.E.D., and the late Arch-
bishop Trench, has given me all the fun I have had
with words, their meanings and derivations; though
I have certainly owed a great deal to much duller,
and equally learned^ people.

The chapters on the sounds of words are, for what
they are worth, my own entirely.

The volume consists of two series of six lectures,
each delivered over the "Wireless" in 1930 and 1931.
One series was on Words, the other on Literary Forms.
I thank the B.B.C. for letting me deliver them; I could
not have been certain that anybody ever listened to
them had I not had periodical inquiries as to when
they were going to be published.

J. C. S.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE 7

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY 13

PART ONE
The Enjoyment of Words

I. ON WORDS IN GENERAL 17

Prose composition. Syntax. The origins of words.
Popular development of imported words. Meta-
phors. Similes. Idioms. Elementary origin of
words. Coining new words.

II. THE USE OF WORDS 31

Individual words and association. Beauty and
sound. Eighteenth-century classicism. Modern
associations. Wordsworth, Keats, and Burns.

III. THE Music OF WORDS 43

"What's in a name?" not wholly true. The
sound of names. Coleridge and Lewis Carroll.
Nonsense verse. Musical and unmusical gib-
berish. Melodious words and harsh sounds.
Browning and the parodists. Consonants and
vowels. Melody and meaning. Shakespeare's
"dying fall." Swinburne and defects of sound.

IV. THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY 55

Prose and verse. Lyrical prose. Poetry in un-
likely subjects. Read poetry aloud. Natural
accentuation. Longfellow and The Psalm of
Life. The recurrent beat. Good poetry and bad.

io THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

CHAPTER PAGE

V. THE ART OF WRITING 68

The practice of writing assists the enjoyment of
reading. The people who write poetry. Self-
expression. Talking and writing. Letters. The
art of life. Stages of attainment. Progress.

VI. THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 79

Aesthetic and physical enjoyment. Appreciation
of beauty. Disraeli and imagination versus ex-
perience. Wonder.

PART TWO

The Enjoyment of Literary Forms
I. POETRY 97

Rhyme and blank verse. The couplet. The
stanza and its varieties. Ballad metre. Free verse.
The governing canons. Tradition and experi-
ment. "In the house of Poetry there are many

mansions."

II. THE ESSAY 108

Vagueness of definition. The kinds of essay. The
looseness of English terminology. The essay
proper. The history of the English essay. The
adaptability of the essay to economic conditions.

III. THE NOVEL 116

Greek and other early novels. Medieval novels.
The dawn of the modern novel. The varieties of
the novel. The novelist's approaches. The critic's
approach.

CONTENTS ii

CHAPTER PAGE

IV. THE PLAY 125

History of the drama. The limitations of the
theatre. The main elements of construction. The
subsidiary elements of construction. The condi-
tions of theatrical success. The qualifications for
durable success. The sphere of production. Verse
and prose in the theatre.

V. BIOGRAPHY 135

Plato and Plutarch. The evolution of biography
in England. The objects of biography. The
diverse methods of biography. Contemporary
biographers and their aims. What does the reader
seek ? and what should the writer provide ?

VI. CRITICISM 145

What is a critic? The kinds of critic. The con-
fusions arising from differences of definition.
The philosophical and historical critic in relation
to the past. The critic of ideas in relation to the
present. The critic as aid to creation. The critic
as reviewer.

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM ARCHER: Play-Making. (Chapman & Hall. 73. 6d.)
GEORGE p. BAKER: Dramatic Technique. (Cape. i8s.)
E. M. FORSTER: Aspects of the Novel. (Arnold. 75. 6d.)

RONALD FULLER: Literary Craftsmanship and Apprecia-
tion. (Allen & Unwin. 8s. 6d.)

H. w. LEGGETT: The Idea in Fiction. (Allen & Unwin. 53.)

JOHN LIVINGSTON LOWES: Convention and Revolt in
Poetry. (Constable. 73. 6d.)

PERCY LUBBOCK: The Craft of Fiction. (Cape. 33. 6d.)

ANDR MAUROIS: Aspects of Biography. (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press. 75. 6d.)

SIR A. QUILLER-COUCH: Shakespeare's Workmanship.
(Cambridge University Press. 35. 6d.)

GEORGE SAINTSBURY: A History of English Criticism.
(Blackwood. I2s. 6d.)

SIR LESLIE STEPHEN: Studies of a Biographer. (Duck-
worth. 4 vols. Readers' Library. 33. 6d. Vol. I only
published so far.)

Tendencies of the Modern Novel. By Hugh Walpole,
Luigi Pirandello, D. S. Mirsky, Jakob Wassermann,
V. S. Pritchett, Hamish Miles, Erik Mesterton,
Milton Waldman. (Allen & Unwin. is. 6d.)

PART ONE

THE ENJOYMENT OF WORDS

ON WORDS IN GENERAL

I SHOULD like at the outset of this chapter to impress
one thing upon readers: that this book is not meant
for academic experts, or for persons already versed
in the art of writing or familiar with the study of
words. For I am no prosodist I never knew but
one practising poet who was I am no philologist,
and, although I must at one time have known some
grammar, I have just realized how little I know.
Whilst picking up one book after another for the
purposes of this little book I came upon a book I had at
school. It was English Prose Composition, by Marchant
and Sergeant (a book which I very strongly recom-
mend to anyone who is willing to take a little trouble
to improve his English), and I began reading it. It
opens with a brief survey of the elementary principles
of syntax, I came upon "Notes on the Predicate,"
distinctions between compound and complex sen-
tences, and such sentences as "An adverb modifying
the complement follows the copula, but if emphatic
precedes it," and realized what a world of erudition
f rom m y memory.

of Speech

i8 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

I remember, I remember

Those first aspiring years,
The mastery of analysis

I won with blood and tears;
I could not parse a sentence now,

Alas! 'tis little joy
To know Fm further off from syntax

Than when I was a boy.

Yet I doubt if amongst living authors of even the

greatest eminence there is one who remembers any

more syntax than I do. The lack of an early grounding

in grammar usually shows itself later on; but if it

has been effectively acquired it can be forgotten when

a man's habit of logical expression has been formed,

just as a scaffolding is forgotten when a building is

complete or a mould broken when the casting has

been made. I am here, not as an expert in a language

speaking to the experts whom I may politely ask,

at this stage, to switch over to Hilversum or Toulouse

but as a professional writer whose practical business

it is to use words as effectively as he can, to listeners

whose enjoyment of writing and reading may perhaps

be a little intensified by a few conversations on the

properties of words, on the objects to be aimed at,

and certain faults to be avoided in, their use, and on

certain incidental pleasures which may be obtained

from the choice and arrangement of them.

I should also add that I shall at times wander from

ON WORDS IN GENERAL 19

my syllabus. Nothing, perhaps, could illustrate this
intention more forcibly than a short digression on
the very sentence in which I announced it. "Wander
from my syllabus." Yes, the meaning is clear enough:
but what is there to be observed in the phrase? Well,
to take the last thing first, what an odd word "syllabus"
is ! It looks, if you stare at it long enough, almost
comic in an English sentence, so alien is it: and it
certainly would convey no sense of its meaning to
anyone who heard it for the first time. Look it up,
and what do you find? In the first place it shouldn't
be "syllabus" at all. There was a Greek word sittuba
which became in Latin sittyla (accusative sittybas),
which meant the piece of parchment on a book
which bore the book's title in those old ages when
everything was written by hand. The Latin word
appears in Cicero; somebody thought the two "t's"
in a manuscript were two "Ps," and in some early
printed editions the- two "Ps" consequently appeared.
Thus came into existence the alleged Latin word
syllabus, and scholars duly invented a supposed
Greek original, syllabos, to account for it. Now had
there been in Greek such a word as syllabos, it would
have had something to do with a verb meaning to
put together or collect the verb from whence we
derive our syllables, which are collections of vowels
and consonants. So, by an easy transition, we reach
our present meaning.

20 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Yet, had I not used that word, what word should
I have used? I could hardly say "table of contents,"
and "the annotated list of the titles of my chapters"
would have been much more cumbersome. Probably
I should have said "epitomej" "synopsis/* or "pros-
pectus," all thumping Greek or Latin words. And
why? In the answer lies part of the history of England
and of civilization, as well as part of the history of,
language. Our Celtic ancestors had names enough for
the things they knew, for natural features and for
the common articles of their use: from them we
derive words like pool, marl and crag, harness, pony
and cart, gown, breeches, button and cradle, bran
and whisky. Our Saxon ancestors supplied us with
most of the words we ordinarily use a child's talk
is almost wholly Saxon. But while Celts and Saxons
were still living in primitive conditions the nations
of the Mediterranean were enjoying an elaborate
civilization, and by the time the inhabitants of this
island desired words for the operations of scholar-
ship, of theology, and of science, they existed ready-
made. The more removed from primitive conditions,
a thought, or a thing, the more likely it is in English
to have a Greek or a Latin name. And an odd thing
is that our older importations from the classic lan-
guages are often modified in English to such an
extent that their origin is effectively disguised, but
that later importations, which have come in since

ON WORDS IN GENERAL 21

education became general, and the mass of the popu-
lation lost control of the development of the language,
tend to remain in or near their original forms. The
fight between the two processes, of frigid adaptation
and popular development, still goes on. Almost all
our new names for mechanical inventions and physical
discoveries (not to mention many of the names of
our patent medicines) are cold-bloodedly made up
from Greek or Latin. It is noticeable that where the
words have to be widely used the general public gets
at them in the long run. A syllabus is not a thing
that the ordinary person has to use every day, so a
syllabus it remains. An omnibus is, so it has become
a bus. The moving pictures first reached us under
the resounding Greek names of cinematograph and
kinetoscope. It didn't take long before the general
public insisted on using the word "cinema" or the
less desirable, because vaguer, "pictures," and the
Americans, who still make new native words with a
medieval freshness, followed with "movies." "Movies"
has not yet come greatly into use here, but its sister,
"talkies," has the reason being that the talking film
came to us direct from America with its name, whereas
the silent film came to us from France, where the
classical tradition of naming things is very strong.
Telephone (it means "far-sound" and the Germans
call a telephone a "far-speaker") is now generally
shortened into "phone," and will ultimately be

22 THE ENJOYMENT OF UTERATURE

written as such. "Taxi" had to come: to ask a man
to call a taximeter-cabriolet would have been too
much. All these words are in common use, and the
population has digested the products of learning into
ordinary speech. A stethoscope is not a thing in
common use; only doctors use it, and the layman
sees it seldom, and would be very glad never to see
it at all. But if everybody used stethoscopes they
would soon become "steths," and in the end the
doctors themselves would say "steth" as, for all I
know, they may already amongst themselves. Thus
far have we reached, and we could follow the trail
indefinitely, from the word "syllabus"; the excursion
may illustrate the kind of interest that awaits us if
we take to examining the meanings (which usually
involves the derivations) of the words that we and
other people employ. But in that brief sentence I
uttered, "I may wander from my syllabus," there is
another noticeable thing if we do but pause to notice
it. There is the ghost of a dead metaphor in that
"wander."

Had such a phrase never been used before, it would
seem very forcible and picturesque: the hearer would
see a picture of a man physically sauntering away
(down a by-path, perhaps, between hedges) from a
disregarded syllabus. But when it sprang so easily to
my lips (there, again, is what must have once been
a quite vigorous phrase) nothing of the sort was in

ON WORDS IN GENERAL 23

my mind: I did not realize that there was anything
metaphorical about it at all. Yet, had I not used it,
I should probably, equally spontaneously and thought-
lessly, have used some other phrase equally embodying
a picture and a comparison and equally dim to him
who runs and reads. I should have said, let us say,
that I would not "adhere" to my syllabus, or that I
would not "stick" to it : and neither I nor my readers
would have envisaged the grotesque scene which
must have been called up by the term long ago when
it was fresher. Our common speech is a very museum
of such words, and of whole metaphorical phrases,
and of similes which are so familiar to us that we do
not notice what they mean when we use them. Who
thinks of "gold" when he says "As good as gold"
an idiom that must have been very emphatic indeed
when it was first coined or, when he says "As fit
as a fiddle," wonders what kind of a fiddle it is that
can Be " thus supremely fit? The translation, "As
healthy as a violin/' would sound very odd to a
Frenchman. Mr. Pearsall Smith, in his fascinating
book, Words and Idioms^ gives long lists of such
phrases which are habitually used by us as counters
that convey a general meaning whilst their real
original meaning is lost. There are what he calls
"the doublets," in which two words are habitually
used together for the sake of emphasis, such as
"enough and to spare," "far and wide," "fear and

24 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

trembling/ 5 "hammer and tongs," "free and easy,"
"stuff and nonsense," "bag and baggage," "rack and
ruin," "by hook or by crook/' "rain or shine/' "for
love or money," "through thick and thin." There
are the standard comparisons, such as "as dead as a
doornail," "as dull as ditchwater," "as like as two
peas," "as pleased as Punch," "as stiff as a poker"
whence we proceed to our innumerable proverbs.
We are, it is often said, very rich in idiom. But the
riches are more often perceived by the foreigner, to
whom all these phrases are new and some bewildering,
than by ourselves, who scatter them about without
realizing how picturesque and apt they are. Our
enjoyment of our language, here again, can be in-
creased if we consider what we say and realize the
wealth of poetry and wit that lies buried in our
ordinary conversation. Even the most "commonplace
type with a stick and a pipe" talks idioms all the
time, simile and metaphors crowding his speech.
Two meet:

A. How goes it ?

B. Right as rain.

A. Pm in the pink, too. What's your poison ?

B. I'm off it to-day. On the wagon, etc.

There is a history behind every phrase there. 1 do
not suggest that we should never speak or write
without closely attending to every word. But a habit

ON WORDS IN GENERAL 25

of occasional attention may at once lead us to appre-
ciate our treasures of speech more, and, incidentally,
to avoid language of too stereotyped a kind. The
ordinary leading article in a newspaper, though not
so bad as it formerly was, is too often a mere string
of stock phrases which come easily to the pen and
save the fatigue of thought. "You know, etc." And
documents of an entirely mechanical, and much more
artificial, kind are freely to be found elsewhere. In
certain sections of the commercial world counters of
the most detestable kind are used to save the trouble
of accurate thought and speech. From what dim haze
of mind proceeded a letter which I received the other
day from a garage proprietor, and which began:
"Re your esteemed favour of 29th ult., same has been
received . . ." How unnecessary that Latin "re"!
How mendacious that "esteemed favour," which has
lost all meaning since it came to be applied as a
synonym for any sort of communication, for I had
been refusing to pay a bill, and I am quite sure he
didn't like it. All he meant was, "I have received
your letter. If you don't . . ."

This chapter is a preliminary to others in which
specific and limited subjects will be considered; but
I should like, before we go further, to emphasize in
another way the richness and complexity of civilized
speech in general and English speech in particular.
Let us consider what words are. The primary use of

26 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

speech is communication, although someone did once
say that it was given to us to conceal our thoughts.
Where language began we do not know: there is a
missing link, in an evolutionary sense, between the
grunts of the animals and the first words of man, as
thfere is between the animals and the earliest man
biologically. But we can fairly certainly conjecture of
what kind the first words must have been. Even to-day
we have not lost the faculty of making words by
imitating noises: the war gave us words like "whizz-
bang" and "crump." The first men made the first
words by imitating sounds connected with natural
objects, reinforcing their laconic remarks with as
much gesture as they could think of. Now suppose
we take it that the first word ever thought of for
snake was "hiss" the remains of which are to be
found at the beginning of our own words "snake"
and "serpent." He would wish to warn somebody that
a snake was present; he would say "hiss," presumably
point, and then probably run. But centuries may have
passed before such simple name words, always multi-
plying as an increasing number of types of objects
were noticed, were supplemented by the first modi-
fications arising from the observation, say, that there
were two different kinds of prevalent snake, making
rather different noises and even these would not be
made until man had a reason (if only that of curiosity)
for remarking on the distinctions. Painful must have

ON WORDS IN GENERAL 27

been the creation of the elementary words indicating
motion and position; slow the growth of the habit
of using part of the name of one thing to represent
another having some quality in common with it; and
long the interval before it dawned on man that he
could, when in difficulty, just "give it a name" (as
the phrase goes) and get his friends to agree with
him, and ultimately infect with his invention neigh-
bours far and wide who may have been wanting a
name for just that thing, or who may not have clearly
observed the thing until it was shown them with an
associated name. There was the great leap. We can
now find a name for anything building it up, on
customary principles, out of old roots, or words
which, united, will indicate its qualities, or even
simply inventing it irrationally. Were a man to invent
to-morrow a new and perfect boot-polish and call it
"Bombex," we should all (some under protest for a
time) call it "Bombex." Were it to supersede all other
polishes, in the end the word "bombex" would
probably supersede "boot-polish" and the philolo-
gists of the remote future would have one more
pretty little problem of derivation to study.

But although we can name anything, our termin-
ology does not, in fact, greatly outrun our needs,
and in some regards lags behind them. We often
encounter words in foreign languages for which there
is no English equivalent. If we wish to convey the

28 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

sense of one of them, we use the foreign word (if we
know it) or have to fall back upon a circumlocution.
National habits of thought as well as of life are re-
flected in national languages; and differences between
the thought of one age and that of another are indi-
cated by the appearance of words for things which
elsewhere are absent. There is no word in English
for "a man who has the same ideas as oneself/'
though the Esperantists have the word samideano.
I remember Mr. Pearsall Smith once suggesting that
we kill two birds with one stone by calling such a
person a "milver," thus providing ourselves with a
useful word and the poets with a long-needed rhyme
to "silver." The innovation has not yet been made,
but suppose that, owing to some new development
of social psychology, we found ourselves under the
constant obligation of referring to those who share
our ideas the word for "a man with the same ideas
as oneself" would come soon enough even if it were
some cumbersome classic hybrid j and, if convenient,
we should evolve another word for "a woman who
has the same ideas as oneself." In the Hindustani
language, I believe, there are words for all sorts of
distant relatives whom we never think of in special
categories. There is, as it might be, a word for "the
third daughter of my uncle's oldest second cousin
on the mother's side." If that be so, it means that
certain family relationships are, or were, of more

ON WORDS IN GENERAL 29

importance in the Hindu social structure than in ours:
and words for them were necessary to facilitate not
merely speech but thought, which does not move
easily in an air of circumlocutions and rough approxi-
mations. Naming a thing is part of defining it. As
speculation grows and the extension of knowledge,
new worlds of words come into existence words at
first sharply confined to their original meanings, then
getting (as words will) extended meanings, entering
into idioms, acting as the bases of new words and
becoming part of the fabric of spoken language,
which is an unresting sea.

There are still countless new words awaiting us,
not merely for really "new" things, but for things
which have been always vaguely present in our con-
sciousness. Anybody who really thinks when he is
writing about conveying his whole meaning with the
utmost accuracy and concision is sometimes tempted
to coin a new word, or "neologism" as it is called.
The habit of coining words can be overdone, if the
words are ugly or superfluous or not precise in their
significance, but it is as well not to be so conservative
about it as some people are, for not only do pro-
fessional writers sometimes need neologisms to express
their thoughts, but the general population has always
coined spontaneously and better than any single
individual when left to itself, and it would be a pity
were education to check the inclination or kill the

30 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

talent. On the other hand, for myself I find the
American popular mania for whole dictionaries of
new words every year rather tiresome. Language is
a live thing which we can help to grow, but it is also
an inherited treasury which we ought to reverence.
Slang ceases to be amusing when we hear nothing
else* It is better not, in one's mere passion for change
and facetiousness, to be continually changing the
meanings of words, or we lose our hold on the past.
As Mr. Arthur Hopkinson says, in his beautiful little
book, Hope: "Literature in its true forms enshrines
words, fixes their meaning, and standardizes their
value. The supreme example of this, for the English-
speaking race, is found in the Authorized Version of
the Bible." It is as well not to try to cramp the passion
for creation too much, and we do not want a literary
language as well as a popular language. But if some
American theorists had their way, the end of it would
be that the American population would not be able
to read the English Bible without spending years
learning Old English in schools, and then no more
getting the full flavour out of the words than our
own children get out of French words.

II

THE USE OF WORDS

THE ATMOSPHERES AND ASSOCIATIONS
OF WORDS

IN the last chapter, which dealt with the meaning
(which, to some extent, involved the derivation) of
words, I asked readers to consider from time to time
the words they used, and reflect upon the actual
connotations of them. There is a famous character in
Moliere, M. Jourdain, who discovers that he has been
talking prose all his life without knowing it: most
English people, in their conversation, scatter idioms,
metaphors, similes, paradoxes, wild excesses of the
poetic imagination, without knowing it. By periodi-
cally pulling ourselves up and examining our own
habitual language we may increase our enjoyment of
the flavour of our English tongue, and we may learn
to avoid outraging that tongue. In this chapter we
are going a stage farther: we are considering the
flavour of individual words.

I am talking about the associations of words,
without reference to the intrinsic pleasantness or
unpleasantness of the words themselves. I sometimes
meet people I am going to deal with this question

32 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

of sound in a subsequent chapter who suggest that
association is everything, that we should think
"stomach-ache" a beautiful word if it meant "moon-
light," and "Elsinore" an ugly word if it meant "the
larger intestine/* I don't believe that. I do think that
there are such things as words pleasant to the ear
and words unpleasant to the ear: associations may
temper the harshness of an unpleasantly sounding
word or may stop our ears to the beauty of a word.
"Keats" K-E-A-T-S that is a very harsh-sounding
name. When we hear it, so strong is the force of
association, we think of nightingales and Grecian
urns and autumn, and "that large utterance of the
early gods," and Endymion and Hyperion, until, in
the end, we think that very coarse and consonantal
sound a name which might lull us to sleep. Strip it
of its associations, and it is a very unpleasant name:
a splutter and a hiss. By the same token many words,
very beautiful so far as mere sound is concerned, are
lost to us because they have unfortunate associations.
Desirous of illustrating this, I thought suddenly of
the names of diseases. There we have an extreme
instance: call a disease "Oenone" or "Guinevere,"
and the beauty of the word will be lost, because
people will only think of the thing. Yet even between
the names of diseases there is a difference made by
sound. Can you conceive an Arthurian tale with
heroes and heroines called Measles and Mumps? or

THE USE OF WORDS 33

a garden of flowers called croup, cramp, and stomach-
ache? Yet listen to this: a poem, in the Pre-Raphaelite
manner (with a slight Shakespearean cross), in which
the names of diseases are used for knights, ladies, and
flowers. If you do not realize from this poem (i) that
some words are more musical than others, and (2) that
association obstructs (as it also assists) our enjoyment
of words, this resounding passage of blank verse will
have been written in vain.

So forth then rode Sir Erysipelas

From good Lord Goitre's castle, with the steed

Loose on the rein; and as he rode he mused

On knights and ladies dead: Sir Scrofula,

Sciatica, he of Glanders, and his friend

Stout Sir Colitis out of Aquitaine,

And Impetigo, proudest of them all,

Who lived and died for blind Queen Cholera's sake;

Anthrax, who dwelt in the enchanted wood

With those princesses three, tall, pale and dumb,

And beautiful, whose names were music's self,

Anaemia, Influenza, Eczema. . . .

And then once more the incredible dream came back.

How long ago upon the fabulous shores

Of far Lumbago, all a summer's day,

He and the maid Neuralgia, they twain,

Lay in a flower-crowned mead, and garlands wove,

Of gout and yellow hydrocephaly,

Dim palsies, pyorrhoea and the sweet

Myopia, bluer than the summer sky,

Agues both white and red, pied common cold,

Flowers of Speech C

34 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

Cirrhosis, and that wan, faint flower of love
The shepherds call dyspepsia. Gone, all gone:
There came a night he cried "Neuralgia!" .
And never a voice to answer. Only rang
O'er cliff and battlement and desolate mere
"Neuralgia 1" in the echoes* mockery.

There are some words in the language which have
very little flavour and no associations or so many
associations that they cancel one another out. I used
a word in that last sentence which will serve as an
illustration: the word "the." If it were not a mere
article, it might not be a bad word jt goes smoothly,
almost swooningly: if there were a thing called "the,"
it would be possible, when mentioning it, to import
something of romance into one's intonation. But
there isn't anything called a "the," and that pleasant
combination of letters would have to be regarded as
sheer waste were it not for the fact that, with an
extra "e" and the same pronunciation, we employ it
in the most abject and gushing kind of address. Let
me fall back upon another word in that sentence: the
word "little." That, surely, should be a word divested
of accidental implications. After all, everything is
either big, little, or middle-sized. But as soon as I
look at the word I discover that it means more to
me than it obviously sets out to mean. It was a word
much employed in a pathetic sense by Shakespeare.
Richard II, that most eloquent of minor poets, when

THE USE OF WORDS 35

contemplating his latter end, refers to "a little, little
grave, an obscure grave." I cannot pretend that every
time I hear the word "little" pronounced I remember
that passage: on the other hand, I can never be certain
that I do not. Mr. de la Mare, in his beautiful poem,
Farewell, which is a poet's valediction to a world
which he has enjoyed and enriched, says:

all things we must praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.

There isn't a word, with the possible exception of
the smallest particles, which any of us uses which is
not overlaid by associations. The associations differ
as between class and class, group and group, indi-
vidual and individual. One sometimes wonders
whether any word which isn't a mere conjunction,
preposition, or interjection means the same thing to
any two people. I am not here referring to the
evident and inevitable differences: as that "love" will
not be quite similarly defined by a man and a woman,
even if they are in love with each other, or "poverty"
mean the same thing to a hard-up millionaire and a
tramp with blistered feet who is sleeping under a
haystack with the rats running over his face. I am
referring to the different atmospheres that words will
have even to two people of the same sex who have
been brought up in similar circumstances. And I am

36 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

referring to the different atmospheres that two words
which the dictionaries call synonymous will carry with
them for the same person.

Let us take an example. An assembly of trees may
be called in English by various names: let us select
"grove," "wood," and "forest." "Grove" we use
very little now. What is the reason? The reason is
that it was almost invariably used by Pope and his
successors of the eighteenth century to signify any
kind of wood or forest. They called young women
"nymphs" and young men "swains." They were not
quite as artificial as we think them. There were times
when they wrote of rural nymphs and rustic swains
straying through vernal groves when what they were
thinking of was really villagers, male and female,
walking in the woods in spring. But it was rather a
conventional, rather an artificial age, an age that
looked at the country through the drawing-room
or library window, and the unhappy word "grove"
has suffered for it. Put it into a sentence, and the
reader at once thinks (i) that you are choosing your
words, and (2) that your tastes are rather eighteenth-
century.

But leave that word out. Take "wood" and "forest,"
both of them words in general modern use, and
neither of them staled by precious literary usage. A
dictionary-maker would be hard put to it to draw a
distinction between them: he might say that a wood

THE USE OF WORDS 37

was a small forest and a forest a large wood. But
suppose one had been born in the New Forest, a large
part of which is open land covered with brambles
and bracken, and had never read any books which
interfered with or in any way modified one's notion
of a forest, one would think of a forest as a great
tract of land, partly covered with trees, partly open;
whereas a "wood" to one would be something
entirely covered with trees. I wasn't, as it happens,
born in the New Forest; but I happen to have browsed
pretty freely in the woods and forests of literature.
I take myself as an example. What does "wood"
mean to me, and what "forest"? When I hear the
word "wood" I think of an assembly of trees, not
too close together, with sunlight dappling through:
oaks and beeches, with primroses in season, and
possibly, in glimpses, the antlers of deer what
Shakespeare calls "the Forest of Arden," but I always
think of that as a wood. But "forest"! To Shake-
speare the words may have meant almost the same
thing. To medieval officers of the Crown "forest"
meant a wild land (they still officially call Dartmoor
a forest) reserved for royal hunting; but to me the
word "forest" can never mean what it did to them,
for I have read about Russia and the sledges going
through forests covered with snow, bells tinkling,
and wolves howling; and I have read Hans Andersen
and Grimm, and picture at the word endless miles of

38 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

pines and firs, with smooth, needle-strewn ground
underneath, and magician's castles, and lost princesses,
and wandering children, and kindly, solitary charcoal-
burners; and I have read of the forests of the Amazon
and the Congo dank, marshy wildernesses, full of
strange butterflies, and steam, and crawling rivers.
In me, as it happens, the fairy-tale is uppermost:
utter that word to me, and that is what I see, or, if I
don't see it, it is at the back of my mind, intertwining
with the picture that I do see. The word always gives
me a little thrill, even when they announce that song
called Down in the Forest Something Stirred. That
thrill I probably have in common with hundreds of
thousands of English people who have had the same
sort of training and background; it must be missed
(except what of it may spring from the mere hushed
and evocative sound of the word) by everybody who
has not.

Now, why all this long discursion upon two words?
Well, for this simple reason: whatever is true of
"wood" and "forest" is true of almost every sub-
stantive we use. There are bounds of narrative and
statement beyond which we cannot go. The Roman
Catullus, hopelessly in love with a repulsive and
fascinating coquette, writes, "Odi et amo" It trans-
lates straight into "I hate and love," and it is forcible
enough to make an impression in any tongue. Get
beyond this plain sort of statement, and the man of

THE USE OF WORDS 39

letters is appealing and trading upon, if you like,
associations which he shares, or hopes he shares, with
his readers, and the associations may spring either
from literature or from life. The moment the bare
statement is qualified or compared, we are being
"got at."

Take almost any celebrated passage of poetry, not
directly dramatic, which moves you you don't know
why and examine it: you will find that every word
is pregnant with associations whose power over you
the poet, either with deliberate cunning or through
sheer force of natural genius, has exploited. Take
Wordsworth's Highland Reaper. She sang

Of old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago.

What was she actually singing about? I don't know:
possibly Flodden. But observe how Wordsworth,
with his "old," his "unhappy," his "far-off," his
"long ago," touches every stop of the pathetic organ,
reminding us not only of our own lost past, lost
childhood, lost pain, lost happiness, not only of the
passage of time and the imminence of death and the
mystery of the hereafter, but of all the works of older
authors than he, in which "long ago" rang out as a
sad memorial chime: and since he newly consecrated
those words they have an even fuller force than they
had before him. The very rose and nightingale,

40 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

though the first was the most delicate and richest of
flowers, and the second a bird that sang sweetly at
night, were never what they are when a thousand
poets have associated them with all that is freshest
and tenderest in our hearts as the cheap bards well
know who get half the way by merely mentioning
them.

That was a simple passage. Take an equally well-
known but far more artificially composed one, Keats's

Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

I think it possible that this passage has been over-
rated: it contains so many exquisitely "poetical"
words, quintessentially romantic. But there is no
doubt that quite apart from the merits of sound,
and we are considering SOund in a later chapter the
poet exploits association in these lines to the utter-
most. There are all kinds of subtle touches that make
their effect. The "foam," with its visual image of the
sea's edge, suggests all that lies behind the wave that
makes the foam; the plural "seas" has something of
the illimitable about it, which the singular "a perilous
sea" would not have had. But examine the other
words. "Magic" is obvious in its other-worldliness,
and "faery" is but a repetition of it, bringing a sug-
gestion, none the less there because we do not realize
it, of all the dreamlands to which changelings and

THE USE OF WORDS 41

vagrant poets were snatched away in the old ballads
the spelling reinforcing this. "Casements" is fairy-
tale and antique again. "Windows" would have con-
veyed the dull surface meaning, but that word, in
Keats's day as in ours, would have carried with it a
suggestion of Georgian brick and sashes; "casements,"
though not an entirely dead word, suggested small
panes, bygone ages, ivy leaves, maidens leaning out.
"Forlorn," to a brutal realist, would appear to add
little to the passage: literally, I suppose, it would
suggest that there used to be fairies in the place, but
that they had now deserted it. Keats was not thinking
of literalness or of fairies present or absent: he was
trying to reinforce by an epithet an impression of
strangeness and remoteness; and he hit on a word
which was the very essence, after a long history in
literature, of unaccountable loneliness, and which had
been rhymed a thousand times to the "horn" which,
coming from some mysterious quarter, rang through
the solitudes, and faded.

No two people have quite the same associations.
All people have some associations in common: the
svorks that are most universally appreciated and about
svhich there is least dispute among people of taste are
those which deal with these. The moment adjectives
:ome in, differences of taste become evident. These
are not only accountable for, as is generally assumed,
i>y differences in ear and moral sensibility, but by

42 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

actual differences in what is called "reference." An
Assyrian might have written, and have languished
and luxuriated as he wrote:

Sweet as the face of Asshur-Bani-Pal.

To us, who know nothing of Asshur-Bani-PaPs face,
it is a statement and no more, though we may take
the gentleman's judgment for granted. Let Burns say,
"My love is like the red, red rose," and we know
what he means, and what he means is not literal.

I suggest that readers might amuse and instruct
themselves by taking some of their favourite passages
in literature and saying to themselves: "Why (over
and above any straight emotional or moral appeal)
Joes this passage appeal to me so much? What
underlies the words? How far am I being moved by
incidental associations, and how far did the author
set out to move me thus?" Along this path is to be
found a secondary means of enjoying literature, and,
I may add, new wonderment at the skill of the great
writers, who do not delete and delete, and substitute
and substitute, without good reason, and whose good
reason is very often the desirability of taking the
reader in flank by associations, as well as in front by
assertions.

Ill
THE MUSIC OF WORDS

IN the last chapter there was a short romantic poem
in which' knights, ladies, flowers, and faery lands all
bore the names of diseases. It was meant to illustrate
how our views of the sound of words are modified
by their associations: intrinsically ugly words have
their ugliness concealed the name "Keats/* for
example, conjures up the images of moons and
nightingales and cool evening woods and intrin-
sically beautiful words have such unbeautiful asso-
ciations that we never realize how beautiful they are
If those medical terms, embodied in the setting I gave
them, sound musical when spoken or read aloud, the
collateral point is effectively made that some words
are more pleasing to our ears than others, quite apart
from their meaning. This is, or ought to be, a
commonplace: but one does occasionally meet tire-
some people who try to maintain that everything
depends upon associations. They usually quote,
"What's in a name? A rose by any name would
smell as sweet." Even that remark of Shakespeare's
may not be wholly true as it stands: our very enjoy-
ment of the scents of plants may to some extent be
magnified or diminished by the music, or lack of it,

44 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

in their names; verbena, in that regard, may have an
advantage over annual stock or tobacco-plant. But
Shakespeare never said that a rose by any other name
would sound as agreeable: no one ever had a more
sensitive ear than he, and he might never have men-
tioned the flower, smell it ever so sweetly, had it
been called Trublosch or Swixswix. There is a good
deal in the mere sound of names. We recognize this,
of course, when we are talking of languages: we say
that Italian is the tenderest of languages and that
German is the harshest: we sometimes console our-
selves with the reflection that English, with its mixture
of strong Teutonic words and flowing Latin ones,
can command a greater range of music than any other
tongue. When people quote what they believe to be
"perfect" single lines, the lines will usually be found
to be lines embodying sublime thought or feeling in
words which flow effortlessly from the tongue, like

Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

and

In sua voluntade e nostra pace.

Even the sublimest thought would not be quoted as
an example of a perfect line (at any rate in this country)
if it were expressed in such words as

Schloggel brisks kikpok peff gogwolduk skump.

THE MUSIC OF WORDS 45

Those, I hasten to add, are not words from any
known language or, at any rate, from any language
known to me. No human voice, I think, could make
them affecting or melodious. The poet Coleridge
you will find some examples in the Oxford edition
of his works used to write down nonsense verses
in order to record melodies; Lewis Carroll, in several
of his poems, moves us because of the very music
of his syllables, by sentences which mean little more
than Coleridge's. No effort of mine could make that
very dental spluttering that I have just recited musical.
I will try. In the reign of Charles II a French traveller
came to England, and noticed, as one of the oddest
things about it, that the English had a curious way
of reciting their poetry in a melancholy, dreamy
croon. I will try it on that line. It ran, you will (or
will not) remember:

Schloggel brisks kikpok peff gogwolduk skump.

Listen: I will do my best in the other-worldly way:
Schloggel brisks kikpok peff gogwolduk skump.

Do what I may, I cannot avoid clickings which are
unpleasing to the ear, and contortions of the mouth
resulting from difficult gradations from one con-
sonant to another which produce the effect of painful
effort and not of ease. It's absurd, of course: it sounds
like a drunkenness test. And that, of course, suggests

46 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

the thought: what is difficult to say is not pleasant
to hear.

Now I am far from suggesting that the harsh-
sounding words and conjunctions of words have not
their uses. If you want to convey the notion of a
smash, you could not have a better word than
"smash"; if you wish to convey the notion of a
smack and a bang, you could not make better words
than "smack" and "bang." The English language as
I remarked in my first chapter is full of these
onomatopoeic, imitation words, and the harsh and
startling word fits the harsh and startling thing. Our
language is very imitative, and our poets have made
good use of it. Consider the effect that sound plays
in the conveyance of the meanings of "a crack of
thunder," "a peal of thunder," "a roll of thunder,"
"a rumble of thunder," and "a distant muttering of
thunder" all common phrases, and all attempting to
indicate, by sound as well as by the definitions and
associations of the words, the qualities of the first
impacts of the noise as well as of the later, prolonged,
awful, majestic reverberations. Naturally, if the sound
is rough or unpleasant, the word should be the
closer words fit things the better; as I remarked
before, it is a pity that exquisite, languishing words
should be wasted upon disgusting ailments. The
Italians, with their language full of liquid words
which end in vowels, find it difficult to represent a

THE MUSIC OF WORDS 47

rough noise. Tennyson endeavoured to convey the
clattering tumult of a battle of men in armour with
the refrain, "Clang battle-axe and clash brand." You
.have only to change that into the sham Italian "Clanga
battle-axa and clasha brando," and you will see what
I mean. The difficulty for the Germans though
Heine, among others, triumphantly overcame it is
to produce a soft effect in a language full of rough
gutturals and dentals and emphatic sibilants. Writing
is a mode of speech: we hear what we see in print!
at any rate we lose a great deal if we don't hear it.

But when we talk of the music of words we usually
think of pleasant sounds, not of representations, how-
ever accurate, of unpleasant sounds in nature. Music
in this sense resides in single words; in the placing
of words together; and in the general arrangement
and flow of a number of words in sentence, para-
graph, or stanza. "Endymion," "tenderly," "moon,"
"lonely," "eternity" like the "myopia" to which I
referred before are essentially melodious words.
I suppose that analysis, in the last resort, would
discover that our preference for these is very deep-
rooted. Birds usually make two kinds of noises: they
have their "songs" and their "alarm-cries," and the
latter are very much more sharply consonantal than
the former. Words like "purr" and "coo" indicate
pleasure and comfort in human beings as well as

48 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

in cat and dove: "shriek" and "scream" are quite
different matters. All pleasant and beautiful things are
best represented by words in which the consonants are
not too acute and the vowels are soothingly drawn
out. Whatever may be at the bottom of it, the fact
remains that we do prefer certain words to others for
sound, and that is a thing that every writer has to
bear in mind.

And the moment words are juxtaposed the thing
becomes more evident still. Unless there is a positive
reason for not giving us pleasant, flowing sound, a
man should aim at giving it; or he produces a less
powerful effect than he might. Lines in poetry,
though they may technically "scan," may be so
overcrowded with consonants that fight one another,
or vowels that involve a continual, ungraduated
changing on the mouth that they cannot be spoken
musically, and produce an effect of congestion and
strain. Browning is full of such lines. Take the often-
quoted couplet from the poem which ends "What
porridge had John Keats?":

Nokes hints blue, straight he turtle eats,
Stokes prints blue, claret crowns his cup.

The lips, tongue, and teeth have heavy work getting
it out; and when it comes out it sounds like a mixture
of hissing and chattering. It would be well enough
were it done intentionally, but it is not. Browning,

THE MUSIC OF WORDS 49

after his first youth, was so preoccupied with his
meaning that he forgot all about music. Nobody
would suggest that the plain, matter-of-fact observa-
tions in these two lines demand or justify any par-
ticular loveliness of lilt : but there is no reason why
harsh, cacophonous lines should be thrown at us
wantonly. When Browning was more in vogue than
he is now the best of him must return it was his
habit of clotting consonants together and awkward
transitions of vowels that the parodists chiefly fastened
upon, and what parodists fasten upon are usually
weaknesses.

Melody may be secured by a careful vigilance over
the contacts of words and by a careful (though with
most good writers the melody comes naturally, if
at all) watch over sequences of consonants and
vowels. R. L. Stevenson, who thought more about
this matter than most men, once stated that the
sequence of "p," "f," and "v" was very effective; as
it might be in "passed to a farther vale." Here there
is a gradation from the softly explosive "p," through
"f," which is half-way, to "v," which is the softest
and least consonantal consonant that there is. Why
should that sequence please us? For one thing,
because it costs us little effort to proceed from the
pronunciation of one of these letters to that of the
next: the lip movements are very similar. For another,
the sequence grows softer as it goes on. You may

Flowers of Speech D

50 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

remember in Shakespeare how, after music has been
played, an enchanted hearer says, "It has a dying
fall." A dying fall pleases us as much in words as in
wordless tunes, and it will often be found that it is
in the presence of "a dying fall" that resides the
power of a passage of poetry or prose to move us
the melody of the sigh.

In the music of words we can find parallels to all
the music of the composers, from the simple folk-
song to the elaborate symphonic construction. Simple,
sweet melody flowed from the lips of the old ballad-
writers and more consciously on occasion from
Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's more elaborate fine
passages, as in the great passages of the English
Bible, and the seventeenth-century prose masters, and
Ruskin, and Pater, we find an elaborate building-up
with a view to musical effect. Take the hackneyed
passage from the Tempest:

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

THE MUSIC OF WORDS 51

Or take this passage from the late Lord Balfour:

We survey the past, and see that its history is of
blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild
revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations.
We sound the future, and learn that after a period,
long compared with the individual life, but short
indeed compared with the divisions of time open to
our investigation, the energies of our system will
decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the
earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the
race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude.
Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts
will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this
obscure corner has for a brief space broken the
contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.
Matter will know itself no longer. * 'Imperishable
monuments" and "immortal deeds," death itself, and
love stronger than death, will be as though they had
never been. Nor will anything that is be better or
be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion,
and suffering of man have striven through coundess
generations to effect.

Or take, in its harder and coarser way, almost any of
the more eloquent paragraphs of Macaulay. You will
find, if you read them naturally, letting yourself go
where the meaning and the cunning arrangement of
alliterations and repetitions stresses, of short or pro-
longed sentences, closely joined or widely separated
pauses, take you, that the passages are as clearly
marked for interpretation by the vocal instrument as

52 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

any page of music you simply cannot help the
crescendos and rallentandos and lentos and staccatos
the passages rise and roar and dwindle into peace,
the voice swells and sinks again, and the impression
which the writer wished to make by what, bluntly,
he said, has been reinforced by the way in which he
said it. That most of the finest passages, musically,
in English echo the cadences of the Authorized
Version, and have a bearing on mortality, is another
matter: there may be a touch of the mystery of our
birth and death about all the art that moves us.

The least of us can take some trouble about the
sound of our sentences, and can gain in the power of
persuasion by the reinforcement of meaning by sound
which conveys a part of meaning. "Hist 1" which has
unhappily died out, was far more effective than
"I say, what was that?" But there is one point more
which I must make before I end a chapter which can
do no more than touch the fringe of a vast subject.
Some cynic once observed: "Take care of the sounds
and the sense will take care of itself." That was going
too far. For a completely satisfactory effect, the
garment of melody must fit closely to the body of
meaning; and in all the masterpieces it does. But a
writer who gets too preoccupied with sound for its
own sake tends to end with no effect but the effect
of sound: some of Shelley and most of Swinburne
suffers from this drawback. It is a mistake to produce

THE MUSIC OF WORDS 53

a melody so overpowering, so unrelated to the
fluctuating meaning of the words within that the
reader or listener forgets the meaning in the sheer
sensuous enjoyment of the music. It is a commonplace
that much of Swinburne's inferior work suffers from
this defect; but even some of his best work is ham-
pered by it. Take, out of that famous and wonderful
chorus from Atalanta, the stanza:

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round her knees, and cling ?

O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring !

For the stars and the winds are unto her

As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;

For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,

And the south-west wind and the west wind sing.

I have, I suppose, read that a hundred times, but I
dare not swear that I have ever noticed the details of
the statements made: I am carried away by the
intoxication of the chant; the poet raves and croons,
his eyes sparkle, his hair flows in the wind, and I
hear only the noise he makes, and never notice the
things, very likely interesting, which he is saying.
This defect, of an actual overplus of melody, is
uncommon in modern prose-writers, but even in
prose it is evident in the great sermonizers of the
Jacobean and Caroline ages: whatever they say "hath
a dying fall," and one tends to listen swooningly to

54 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

them, without being aware whether they are describing
the flowers of spring or warning us against our
latter end.

I would suggest to readers that they should turn
to passages which have moved them, and examine
how far, in some, the weight of the meaning has been
reinforced by music, it may be, cunning and calcu-
lated, and how far, in others, the magic of verbal
melody may have screened from them the actual
literal meaning of the author.

THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY

PERHAPS instead of "The Peculiar Properties of
Poetry," I ought to have said "The Peculiar Proper-
ties of Verse." For the other phrase at once provokes
the question: What is Poetry? and to that question
there have been a thousand answers, none of them
comprehensive enough to win general assent. The
word is sometimes used in a narrower sense of litera-
ture written in metrical form; or, in a still narrower
sense, of good literature written in metrical form. But
it is also used, very often by the same people who
sometimes assume the other connotation, of any form
of writing or even speech, in which a heightened state
of emotion is expressed in language which communi-
cates it. I have known men of whom people commonly
said that they were "born poets," although they had
never written a line of verse, or even of prose, which
was intended to be literature. And the exclamation:
"That is sheer poetry 1" is a common one on our lips,
when we encounter in conversation, in the speeches
of politicians, in the addresses, sometimes, of counsel,
and in almost all the great prose works of the world,
passages which exalt us by their combination of
affecting sound and lofty or tender sentiment Think

5 6 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

of any definition of poetry that you have ever heard,
and you will find it inadequate. Wordsworth said it
was "emotion recollected in tranquillity" a valuable
contribution to criticism, but a remark that has no
bearing on the differences between verse and prose.
Lord Byron, who wrote at white-heat, said that it
was the flow of lava, to which, were it suppressed,
the alternative would be an earthquake: there is not
much question of tranquillity there, and once more
the question of verse, of regularity of rhythm, and of
beat, does not come in.

Where so many have failed, I am not going to
rush in. But perhaps one image and one observation
may help. Nobody denies even in this questioning
age nobody has yet been found to deny that there
is a difference between day and night. But who can
say precisely when day ends and night begins, when
night ends and day begins? There is, at dawn and
dusk, a period of transition, of perfectly continuous
modification, during which there is no precise moment
at which we can say that here it is definitely night
and here it is definitely day. In the same way poetry,
in the broadest sense, and prose fade into each other.
Nobody disputes that Bradshaw's time-table is prose,
or that Milton is poetry: but there are all sorts of
gradations between. After generations of discussion
and people always grow hottest in discussions
which are certain to have no conclusion we may

THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY 57

most comfortably reconcile ourselves to the opinion
that an exact definition is impossible.

The observation I would couple with this image
is that where prose becomes emotional it does tend
towards the condition of verse. It tempts the reader
to chant it: there is a propensity in it towards
repetition of stress and cadence and equal length of
phrase: towards pattern, in short. Any crowd, primi-
tive or civilized, in a state of excitement tends to work
off its feelings in regular, rhythmical noises -beats
of tom-tom, clappings of hands, stampings of feet.

'-*" * **.,.. ^ >ii ^1^^*J** H *'' 3 * a * a *>*-t. miuuMto^; % ^ MAB .,, 4 M >2 h u.^MdMMFMM*

And I think that in all prose, conventionally so-called,
which rises to a high pitch of emotion or imagina-
tion, we find if we take careful note that we are
approaching verse. The whole range of prose, from
the most pedestrian to the most lyrical, can be found
in the Bible. I won't take for an example one of the
great and famous passages from Job or Ecclesiastes,
works of which parts, in our Authorized Version,
may be described as, and could be printed as, what
is called "free verse": I will take, rather, a less well-
known passage from the small and neglected Epistle
of St. Jude, which is tucked away just behind Reve-
lation:

Woe unto them !

For they have gone in the way of Cain

And run greedily after the error of Balaam for reward,

And perished in the gainsaying of Core,

58 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

These are spots in your feasts of charity when they

feast with you,
Feeding without fear:
Clouds they are without water
Carried about of winds;
Trees whose fruit withereth,
Without fruit, twice dead,
Plucked up by the roots,
Raging waves of the sea
Foaming out their own shame;
Wandering stars
To whom is reserved
The blackness of darkness for ever.

Again and again here we find repetitions repetitions
of word, of alliteration, of assonance, of stress, of
phrase length: the passage does not make a regular
pattern, but it makes a pattern with regular elements
in it. Such a progression towards that systematic
symmetrically shaped regularity which we call verse
may be observed in the more exalted utterance, not
merely of great writers, but of the veriest tub-thumper
in the park when excitement or vision is strong upon
him, though his vocabulary be ill-chosen and his
grammar weak.

They say that verse originated with the dance:
what is that but another way of saying that humanity,
when strongly moved, desires regularly rhythmic
expression. Verse is dancing in words. Not all verse
is poetry: once the formula of the pattern had been

THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY 59

found, anything could be put in it: there is even
verse which is not poetry, but is nevertheless pleasant,
because of its wit, its concision, the deftness of its
workmanship. Dr. Johnson, ridiculing the simplicity
of the old ballads, improvised the stanza:

I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,

And there I met another man
With his hat in his hand.

The man who would call that poetry would be a bold
man: it is verse; but had verse never just come into
existence in response to the demands of the emotions
it would not have existed. And even that bald parody
gains something because it is regular metrical form,
with rhymes which are but one form of repetition,
or recurrence, among many. I could repeat the subject-
matter in indisputable prose, thus:

I put my hat on my head, went out into the
Strand, and there was another man who was carrying
his hat in his hand.

I will repeat it in the Johnsonian form, with the
sonority that verse almost automatically calls forth:

I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,

And there I met another man
With his hat in his hand.

6o THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

A practising poet would have some criticisms to make
of the execution of this. There are too many initial
"h's" in that last line for easy recitation, and the
stress upon the first "his" is awkward. Yet the fact
that the regular form permits of, and even insists on,
musical chanting results in a certain stirring effect,
quite apart from all the associations that such a
quatrain may have for a well-read person, or an old
countryman who remembers his father singing the
last of the folk-ballads when he was a child. Sir
Philip Sidney said that he could never hear the old
ballad of Chevy Chase without feeling his heart
stirred as it were by a trumpet: there are faint echoes
of that trumpet still in that nonsense of Johnson's.

Prose: poetry: verse. Now there is nothing like
a concrete example. I take the first passage that meets
my eye in my search for raw material, namely the
opening of the first leading article in yesterday's Times.
The second leading article would have suited my
purpose better, for it was about the General Election
in Norway, and there was an obvious opening for
the play of associations, fjords and fells, trolls in the
mountains, clear Arctic airs, and wastes of snow. But
it is better to stick to the programme, and I take the
first. The "leader" begins:

The inter-party Committee which is examining
the problems of Unemployment Insurance is holding
a further and probably a decisive meeting to-day.

THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY 61

Since it adjourned three weeks ago, responsible
statesmen in all parties have publicly acknowledged
the necessity of drastic reforms in a system which
all have recognized to be no longer in any sense an
insurance system.

Nobody could call that anything but prose, and pretty
prosiac prose at that. Now I could convert it into
verse without great difficulty. As for instance (the
sentiments, this being a political address, must not be
taken as mine) :

To-day once more the old Committee meets,
Examining the problems of insurance,

Two million men are still upon the streets,

The tax-payer is taxed beyond endurance.

We're tired of Mr. Snowden's "Pay, pay, pay,"

Let's hope they'll come to some result to-day.

This body last adjourned three weeks ago,

Since when the leaders on all sides have said

Drastic reforms must come at once, and so
We take it that the present system's dead.

Ours is an age of many a crying scandal,

But none, we think, to this can hold a candle.

That is undoubted verse. I think the mere conversion
into verse, though I made not the slightest attempt
at contriving cunning subtleties of melody to get at
the reader's feelings, or even at wit, gives the matter
a certain "kick." But it is not poetry. No: the man
who should be writing poetry about this subject would

6z THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

approach it in a very different way, and his expression,
though it would inevitably be rhythmical, would
resemble mine not in the least.

I shan't attempt to write poetry, even prose poetry,
about a Committee on Unemployment Insurance.
But it is a vulgar error to suppose that poetry could
not be inspired by it. There is poetry in any object,
provided that the observer has eyes to see and happens
to be in the right frame of mind when he is looking
at it, A man contemplating those two sentences might
suddenly think of all the grim realities behind our
abstract words like "Committee" and "Unemploy-
ment" and "Insurance": seeing the individual man or
woman, workless and burdened with a family, or
workless and lonely in streets, far away from London,
which have never been heard of by anybody who
sits on that Committee; and might be struck with
awe at the thought that what are regulations and
clauses and amendments in Whitehall are agony or
relief, hope or despair, life or death to people else-
where, who may hardly know where Westminster is,
but who have been born, and have painfully learnt
in childhood what sort of rough world they have been
thrown into, and made up their minds to struggle
their best, and given hostages to fortune, and been
desolated by the prospect of defeat, underserved, and
brought, each in the solitude of his own soul, face to
face with that problem of evil, of wanton pain and

THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY 63

suffering, which is the torture of the philosophers.
Or a poet might envisage the Committee as men,
fallible men (great names, but no man is ever as great
as a name can be), meditating the weight of their
responsibility, baffled in private, putting a brave face
on it in public, pathetically endeavouring to cope
with issues too great, perhaps, for any human brain
to master. Or he might again, were he more occupied
with the mysteries of all existence than with the
sufferings of one of those generations of men who
are but as the millions of leaves of a season on the
tree of Eternal Life, see that Committee, sitting so
seriously in its room, worrying over its figures and
its distinctions between so-called "deserving cases"
and so-called "work-dodgers," as small and pathetic
figures against the background of the Universe,
tormenting themselves over things which tormented
the Egyptians in their day and the Romans in theirs;
and the Egyptians are gone, and the Romans are gone.
Or he might, were he more detached, at a glimpse
of the committee-room, find an inspiration in a shaft
of sunlight striking a water-bottle, and the mellow
hue of old portraits on the walls, and the hush of an
empty, waiting room, which has grown wise after
seeing so many Committees come and go, but remains
silent. Nothing, nothing, nothing in life is immune
against the poet. There is always a tendency in the
minor poets to become petrified, to find beauty only

64 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

where it has been found before, to look at the infinite
only through accredited windows : and, indeed, owing
to the long chain of old associations, it is much easier
to get a sentimental response out of people by men-
tioning a ship than by mentioning an aeroplane. Why
am I emphasizing this in a chapter on the Enjoyment
of Words? Why, because in a large measure and I
have already dealt with some other aspects of the
matter the enjoyment of words is the enjoyment of
things.

A tome would not suffice for all that even
I could write about poetry and verse: all I can
hope to do in these chapters is to throw out a
few disconnected observations that may possibly
prove suggestive. I shall now make one which has
no obvious relation at all with those which have
gone before: I have not been at the pains to establish
an apparent transition from one paragraph to another.
But it is, I think, an observation which is of impor-
tance to those who are seeking to increase the amount
of enjoyment they get out of their reading, but who
may have found particular difficulties with verse. It
is this: When you are in any difficulty, read the thing
aloud, and read it with the accentuation that you
would naturally employ. All the best verse flows
naturally, if spoken in what has been called "speech-
rhythm": anything that does not is not good verse.
The greatest modern master of rhythm was the late

THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY 65

Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. Often and often
people have come to me and told me that they have
stumbled over his verses, because they could not
make them scan. My reply has invariably been: "My
dear idiot, you forget all about scansion; poets never
think of it, and never have to think of it. You just
read the stuff aloud, and you'll find how perfect the
pattern is. 5 ' I won't take a good example to illustrate
my point! I will take a bad one. And a popular one.

According to Dr. Johnson, whom I have already
quoted, Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister of
England, said that at his dinner-table he always
talked obscenity, "for in that all could join" which
was very considerate of him. All, I think, can join in
Longfellow's Psalm of Life. It owes its immense
popularity to the fact that it contains a large number
of important and salutary truths truths that are so
truthful that they tend to be considered platitudes,
and consequently it is not the mode to repeat them,
and consequently they may be lost sight of. Not for
one moment would I dispute a single thing that is
said in that so celebrated poem about our responsi-
bility to a higher power, our duty of resisting pessi-
mism, our obligation to remember that better men
than we have found the fight worth fighting; and
Longfellow put it all in very simple language that
anybody can understand. But he did miss something.
I must have said over and over again that words, if

Flowers of Speech E

66 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

we are to enjoy them fully, must be both accurate
and pleasant-sounding. But in verse something more
is demanded: the sentences, as we should naturally
speak them, must not fight with the pattern of the
verse, or we get the feeling that there is something
unnaturally artificial about it all. The first verse oi
that excellent and execrable poem of Longfellow's
runs thus:

Tell me not in mournful numbers

Life is but an empty dream,
For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

It is all very encouraging, no doubt. But how hav<
we read it? Why, with the maddening, unintelligent
vocal see-sawing of a parcel of village school childrer
chanting "Twice one is two" on a summer afternoor
when the larks are singing beyond. Were the word*
not cramped into that stiff metrical framework, neve
would we pronounce them thus. Consider the seconc
line. It might reasonably be pronounced in severa
ways, as, for example,

Life ... is but an empty dream,

and with a pause after the "life"; or the stress ma)
come heavily upon "dream" or even upon "empty/
But say it in whichever reasonable way you like
another metre appears. And precisely the same thing
appears in the last line, which can only be made tc

THE PECULIAR PROPERTIES OF POETRY 67

fit the metrical scheme if a quite unjustifiable weight
is put upon the word "are" a weight that no human
being would put upon it in conversation.

Read your poets and pretenders to poetry in the
light of that. The recurrent beat makes an impression
on its own account, but let it coincide with the
natural stress of speech and the effect is far stronger.
Good poets know that, and take immense trouble to
fit everything in. Bad poets throw out a mechanical
tune and some agreeable sentiments, and hope for
the best.

THE ART OF WRITING

THE Art of Writing well, these chapters are not
meant for professional writers, and the last thing I
wish to do is to increase the numbers of professional
writers. Goodness knows there are quite enough of
them at present: and the few who are very good need
no instruction from me or anybody else. Not more
than one in twenty of the books which are published
survives, even among a few readers, twelve months
after it is published; and he would do an ill service
to literature, or to the economic situation of a hard-
pressed country, who should urge people who had
never thought of doing so before to write books.
Those who have it in them to write good books will
do it without encouragement: what I am thinking of
is rather reading than writing.

But the practice of writing, "not necessarily for
publication" (as the phrase goes), is a great assistance
towards the enjoyment of reading. If we have tried
to do a thing ourselves and failed, we can with all
the more relish appreciate the work of those who have
tried and succeeded. When our ancestors founded the
traditional system of classical education in England,
and ordained that every miserable little boy should

THE ART OF WRITING 69

attempt to write Greek and Latin verses (as, in many
of the schools of England, they attempt to this day),
it was not with the notion of producing a crop of
poets who could write Latin and Greek verses which
could compete with the best works of the ancients:
there were not more than one or two in a century
who did that. The notion was that between the few
geniuses and the mass of complete stupids there was
a large number of boys who through failing, or half
succeeding, to discover their thoughts and feelings
and express them in terse and muscial language, con-
forming to certain rules which were not arbitrary but
the fruit of experience, would all the better under-
stand the achievement of those who had performed
the miracles of which they themselves were incapable.
And by the same token, the practice of writing
English, with a very large number of people, must
sharpen the edge of the enjoyment of reading. If there
is anybody reading this now who has ever tried to
write poetry in secret but no, that is a very silly
start. I once made a bet with a man that I would
ask the next fifty people I met, tete-a-tete, whether
they had ever attempted to write serious verse, and
that every one of them, under pressure and the seal
of confidence, would (as the old journalists used to
say) "admit the soft impeachment/' I lost, but I only
lost by one man, who was a civil engineer. Every
kind of unlikely person, sometimes after trying semi-

70 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

mendacious evasions, confessed that there had been
a moment when poetic success was dreamed of. If
they had never attempted it at any other time, they
had at least yielded to the temptation of pouring out
their intimate feelings when they were young and in
love yes, Cabinet Ministers and M.P/S of all three
parties, and even Professors of Economics. Most of
them added to their confession some such phrase as
"I don't know what made me do it," or "Of course
it was all the most dreadful rot, and I can't imagine
why I am telling you." Well, what was true of the
first fifty people I catechized in 1919 must be true of
thousands and thousands of others: almost everybody
attempts to compose something in writing at some
time, just as almost everybody at some time or
another has attempted to draw a picture, if only a
portrait. And what I say to them is this: Don't be
ashamed because you are not Shakespeare, and don't
be disturbed because you may never write anything
fit for publication. If you have time and inclination
for it, let words be your hobby. Play about with them
in verse or in prose: you may not think of anything
worth saying, and if you do you may say it very
badly; but the more you experiment, once you have
realized the conditions of the job, the better will be
your critical sense, and the more pleasure you will
get out of the works of the masters. Much that the
masters put into their works is missed by most of

THE ART OF WRITING 71

their readers because they are not looking out for
certain things, or perhaps do not even know that
they exist. This is so even with very popular authors.
A good example is Mr. P. G. Wodehouse who is
the contemporary successor of Mr. W. W. Jacobs
a popular jester who is also a careful and skilful artist.
Anybody can enjoy his ingenious and complicated
plots, his rough, hearty satire, his charmingly imbecile
young men, his terrific fathers and aunts from whom
the young men have expectations, his resourceful
heroines, his simpletons triumphant and his biters bit:
but it is only a minority which gets an additional
savour out of the flow of his sentences and the
frequent exquisite choice of his words. Ohe may
illustrate the same truth from another angle. The
most popular poets in every generation are almost
always those who tell stories and in their lifetimes,
at least, before the schoolmasters begin using them as
texts the poems in which they tell their stories are
much more popular than the poems, equally good or
better, in which they do not tell stories. What this
means is that although (as I said before) anything is
given a little extra "kick" by being expressed in
vigorous repetitive rhythm, what is said matters much
more to most people than the way in which it is said.
For lack of the development of the critical faculty,
most readers would as soon read the narrations of
Tennyson and Byron, provided the same events

72 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

happened and the same sentiments were expressed, in
bad doggerel as in superb verse. I cannot be the only
person who has heard Tennyson's glorious Revenge
and Out with the Lifeboat recited by the same man
to the same village audience on the same evening
with equal success.

It is somewhere said that nobody expresses himself
so well, so forcibly, and so economically as the non-
professional with a story; and one does sometimes
come across a narrative by a sailor, say, or an engineer
which compels one's admiration by the closeness with
which words fit things, and by the absence of trivial
literary decorations. But the statement that the un-
professional write best is only a half-truth not
perhaps as much as that. One does occasionally meet
one of these men of action, full of character, blunt,
direct, shrewd, who talks well and writes as he talks.
But most people write much worse than they talk.
The world is full of people whose conversation, taken
down by a typist hidden behind a screen, would read
excellently racy prose, no cant, no stale expressions
but who, as soon as they get pen in hand, write
in a manner commonplace, or worse than common-
place. They aren't used to the medium; they are
frightened or awestruck when they see a sheet of
white paper in front of them; they at once, being
unfamiliar with the technique of writing, cease to be
themselves, and start writing stilted and second-hand

THE ART OF WRITING 73

sentences that never could pass their lips. No journalist
ever writes such appalling journalese as the private
citizen who, once in a while, sits down, heavy with
his consciousness of the solemnity of the occasion
and the dignity of print, to write a letter to a local
paper. The vast majority of such letters would be
infinitely more persuasive, as well as infinitely more
amusing, were their authors to write them as nearly
as possible as they would speak them to a familiar
friend. Think of the sort of thing we see. A gentle-
man, signing himself "Citizen," "Plain Man," or
"Pro Bono Publico," writes to the Gazette or the
Sentinel about Mr. Baldwin or the public drains, and
he begins: "Sir, the nature of public feeling on this
momentous subject now having been made clear in
no uncertain voice," clotting the thing up with bad
grammar, woolly comparisons, and phrases which
have lost all their force because of incessant mechanical
use. In conversation what the man would say is I
naturally eliminate everything that convention rightly
prohibits in print would be something like this (I am
dealing now with the local drains, not with imperial
politics): "Look here, Mr. Smith knows as well as
I do that this disgusting nuisance simply cannot go
on." But people won't write as they talk. They feel,
when they sit down to write, that they must live up
to the majesty of authorship; and their notion of how
to secure that is to drag out of memory's wardrobe

74 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

every moth-eaten royal robe, every blunt halberd,
every scrap of tinsel and gilt cardboard that they can
lay their hands on: the result being that millions of
people, all of them individuals with their own little
differences of character, opinion, and speech, all write
exactly alike.

I suggest that practice may prevent that, and that
practice can be obtained by everybody. No one need
write letters to the newspapers. But there isn't one
of us who isn't occasionally obliged to write letters
to friends or relations. You, my reader (if I may
arbitrarily take an example), are going to-morrow to
write a letter to your brother, your mother, or your
wife. Well, you think that there is nothing to say:
that is one mistake, for there is always something to
say. If one's object really is to give pleasure to the
person at the other end, it can always be given,
provided care is taken with one's expression, by
describing as vividly and amusingly as possible any-
thing that one may have seen or done during the
day. No day in anyone's life is ever exactly like
another: if we will only stop and think, and not be
lazy about it, there is always something which will
move the person at the other end: and, after all, the
chief difference between a private letter and a pub-
lished essay or article is that one is addressed to an
audience of one or two and the other to an audience
more numerous. But beyond the "matter," there is

THE ART OF WRITING 75

the manner. Even in letters, even in the letters of the
least skilful of us, a difference may be made to the
people at the other end, and our own faculties will
be sharpened, if we look before we leap, and think
before we write. Half the population of England ends
its letters with "Hoping that this will find you well
as it leaves me." Well, it is a very laudable sentiment,
and the first time that the phrase was used it must
have seemed rather near and rather touching. But
when you have had it at the end of a hundred letters
it means no more than "Yours truly" or a full-stop.
We cannot all, as I have said, be professional authors;
and, as I also said, I am thankful for that. But we are
all obliged, since we all leamt to read and write, to
be amateur authors; and there isn't a human being
who ever writes a letter who hasn't it in his power
to give more pleasure at "the other end," and carry
more conviction, and even promote his own interests,
by considering his thoughts a little before trying to
put them into words, and his words a little before
finally inscribing them.

What to avoid. Read Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's
book, The Art of Writing, read particularly the
chapter on "Jargon," and you will discover some of
the things which should be avoided. You will discover,
for instance, that it is really rather silly to say, "This
is especially so in the case of Lord Hugh Cecil," who,
happily, is not yet in a case at all. But all the things

76 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

that are to be avoided are implicit in a catalogue of
the things that are to be sought. The first thing to
be sought is Accuracy.

I am writing it may be a poem, a novel, an essay,
or a mere letter. Call it a letter. I have seen something.
Certain aspects of that something struck me with
particular force, and inspired in me (if I allowed
myself to think) particular thoughts. I must, if I am
going to write anything worth writing, first of all
discover what I did see, what I did feel, what I did
think. Not what others felt and thought before me;
not what I suppose that I ought to have seen, felt,
and thought. No, what I actually saw, felt, and thought
myself. It may be that, when the results of the scrutiny
appear, I shall be found to have seen, felt, and thought
what thousands before me have seen, felt, and thought,
though even if that be so there will inevitably be a
slight difference; for no two human beings are pre-
cisely alike, as no two leaves on the countless trees
of the countless generations of trees have ever been
exactly alike. But the only path to salvation as a writer,
whether as a public writer or a private writer, is the
path of accuracy. Disentangle your own response to
what you have observed from all the responses you
know about or conjecture. Make sure of what you do
yourself see, feel, and think. Then select from your
impressions those which are best calculated to convey
the picture you wish to convey and produce the effect

THE ART OF WRITING 77

you wish to produce, remembering always that the
concrete image has always more force than the abstract
generalization; then, if God has not given you the
divine gift of speaking automatically in musical
phrase, consider the noise that your words make.

The Art of Life consists in getting all we can out
of every experience that we have. Training, as well
as natural talent, is required before we can do that.
The same thing applies to the Art of Writing. I may
say for myself taking myself purely as a specimen,
and not as somebody more interesting than anybody
else that it was only by very gradual stages that I
learned what was involved in writing, and attained,
in some measure, the ability to say what I really
thought in a way that was really my own. When I
was very young I wrote poems in the manners of
Edgar Allan Poe and Mr. Kipling: I was intoxicated
by their tunes, so I took over their opinions and
outlooks, kept in two compartments, for they didn't
mix very well. When I was a little older I fell under
the influence of the French decadents, particularly
Baudelaire: that poet wrote so well about despair and
corruption that for a time after first encountering him
I, too, could write about nothing except mouldering
corpses, which didn't interest me in the least, and a
despair which, thank God, I never knew then and
have never known since, however present daily the
thought of death may be to me. I am, I must assert

7 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

again, taking myself as a specimen. Gradually I dis-
covered that none of these artists, great though may
be the debt that I must always, artistically, owe to
them, thought in the least like me, and that I had
been taking at second-hand opinions that did not fit
me in the least. I discarded them. I began to try to
express in my own language, though echoes of their
melodies may always be present in what I write, what
I really saw, felt, and thought forgive this reitera-
tion myself. Life is short and Art long: the curtain
may come down before I have discovered myself
entirely, and learnt to speak in a language entirely
concordant with my own nature. But the path of
progress is clear enough: and it is one that may be
followed, in his own sphere, by everybody, poet or
prose-writer, professional or layman. "Don't lie" is
the first maxim I would like to ram in, and "Tell the
truth with a music that will assist it" is the second.
Realize these two things, and those of you who never
dream of writing for publication will get greatly
increased pleasure out of the works of the great
writers: for they will know what the great writers
were trying to do.

VI

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS

I HAVE in the previous chapters, I will not say covered,
but at any rate glanced at, various aspects of the
enjoyment of words considered historically, psycho-
logically, phonetically, in regard to their associations
and in regard to their relation to musical metrical
schemes. But to one truth I have devoted very little
attention, and that is that you will not get much
enjoyment out of words unless you have developed
and retained the capacity for enjoying the things
behind them. And that is not so easy. Most adults'
capacity for enjoyment is very restricted.

When I refer to "enjoyment/* I am not referring
to enjoyment through the grosser senses. I have
frequently, in public places, heard ladies put enormous
relish into requests for "a nice glass of port," and I
have heard an audience cheer with sympathetic fervour
a music-hall song of which the refrain was "I do like
an egg with my tea." But the enjoyment of food and
drink, though well enough if not carried to an animal
excess, is frequently the only enjoyment which people
experience in any intense degree. Suppose you are
sitting in a restaurant and your companion said,
"There's a man behind you who seems to be enjoying

8o THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

his food/* you don't have to turn round to see what
he is like. You will know that sitting there, bent in
awful concentration over a porterhouse steak, will be
a portly man with protruding eyes, flushed cheeks,
distended veins, multiple chins and necks, who has
long ago ceased to enjoy anything except his food.
Invite him to consider the exquisite colour of the spot
of ruby light shining through his uplifted glass of
wine, and he won't know what you are talking about.
Quote to him, "My love is like a red, red rose," and
he will surlily reflect that he doesn't see how a woman
could be like a rose, considering that a woman has
eyes, ears, a nose and a mouth, and a rose has not.
Mention the moon to him, and he will think only of
a round white thing, alleged to move round the
earth, which is sometimes in the sky at night, though
he hasn't noticed it lately; he knows it is always
mentioned in silly, sentimental songs, and may dimly
remember that long ago, when he was still capable
of making love, it used to have an absurdly disturbing
effect upon him. Invite him to consider the fact that
all the hundreds of diners present will be dead within
fifty years, and he will be angry, as though one had
been guilty of indecent exposure of the soul. For him
a million million dawns have broken in vain, and all
the generations of the flowers and the stars beckon
to him fruitlessly; all the graces and all the tragic
beauty of dead civilizations are as nothing to him;

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 81

he is unaware of the emotional appeal that lies in the
strength of the oak, the fragility of the butterfly, the
noise of rain on leaves, the stealth of creeping mist,
the passing freshness of youth, the dignity of age;
and he walks unseeing daily before the ultimate
majesties of Good and Evil, of Life and Death. The
sense of wonder has gone: and yet, as a child, he
probably had it.

Now there is a good deal of nonsense talked about
children. Wordsworth's Ode and its "trailing clouds
of glory" is often gushingly misapplied; as also its
original, that poem of Vaughan's which begins:

Happy those early days when I
Shined in my angel infancy.

Children are not angels in every regard; in some ways
they are little savages, badly in need of moral (as
well as hygienic) education. But the phrase "childish
delight" is significant; and it is significant that savages
are frequently described as being like children. They
share the virtues as well as the vices of children: the
pleasure that a savage takes in coloured glass beads
(for which he is often laughed at by the people who
give them to him in exchange for the rubber and ivory
out of which we make our own not necessarily more
beautiful toys) is a pleasure that we all of us knew
when we were children, and that most of us lose, or
severely limit, as we grow up. The contrast is often

Flowers of Speech F

8* THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

painful between dull, unimaginative parents, incapable
of delight, and their children, who can be ravished
by colour and rhythm, to whom each new object that
they see is a miracle of shape and contrivance, and
who easily and habitually employ the power of visual
imagination. R. L. Stevenson said that he was puzzled
to know what became of all the horrible medical
students and where all the nice doctors came from.
In the same manner, one might well be puzzled as
to what becomes of all the sprightly children, and
where all the heavy grown-ups come from. That is
to say, one would be puzzled, did one not know that
to some extent the process of degradation has taken
place in oneself, and that one is always in danger of
losing one's sense of wonder completely.

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
About the growing boy.

Surely, whatever compensations we may have had,
it has been the experience of almost every one of us
that, as we have grown older, our impressions have
grown less sharp and our habit of exposing ourselves
to them has disappeared. That the whole freshness of
a child's awareness should be retained when things
have grown familiar cannot, perhaps, be expected.
Moreover, we can find all sorts of excuses for the
way in which we allow the scales to grow over our
eyes, and even over our hearts. Here we may refer

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 83

to another hackneyed passage in Wordsworth, the
sonnet which begins with:

The world is too much with us, late or soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers,
Little we see in nature that is ours,
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.

(I may remark in parenthesis, once more recom-
mending a close attention whilst reading, that "late
or soon" is a very clumsy inversion of a quite un-
necessary "sooner or later," and that "a sordid boon"
is another piece of padding put in to provide a rhyme
for the moon, with which Wordsworth could not
bear to dispense.) The truth of statement is unex-
ceptional; and the situation, to some extent, cannot
be avoided. It is pardonable not to notice the sunset
if you are thinking of your debts, and he would be
a monster of detachment who could admire the buff-
coloured paper or elegant typography of a demand
for unpaid income tax. But the world is with none
of us the whole time: we simply let ourselves get out
of the habit of really looking at things, and really
allowing ourselves to feel them, letting the pageant
of life and nature pass before unseeing eyes, refusing
emotion because we are too indolent or too drugged
in body or in mind. It is easy enough to lapse, but
not so easy to get back. I suppose that some of my
elder readers may remember the tremendous vogue

84 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

of Professor Henry Drummond's book, Natural Law
in the Spiritual World, which was an attempt to con-
struct a biology of the spirit parallel to the biology
of the body, with which the Darwinians had startled
his generation. I dare say much of it is out-dated now,
but there was one truth, perhaps a commonplace,
which was very effectively driven home, and that was
that there is not one of our faculties, moral, intel-
lectual, aesthetic, which will not atrophy if we neglect
to exercise it. Mr. Chesterton once remarked, speaking
of mankind's affairs in general, that unless you keep
on whitening a whitewashed wall it will go black.
You will go "black" unless you retain the resolution
not to let yourself get crusted over by custom, not
to repeat judgments at second-hand, not, if you still
think and feel at all the beauty, richness, and mystery
of life, t6 subsist entirely upon impressions that you
received when you were more observant and more
discriminating, and allowed your sensibilities to be
reached as you do not allow them to be reached now
though you may be unaware that years have passed
since you knew the shock of beauty or of strangeness.
This last unawareness overcomes far more people
than know it. It is a matter of common observation
that many writers, even great writers, draw entirely
on theif childhood for the material of their books,
continually devising new variations on the same old
themes. It is well enough even to live in the past

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 85

with a perfect acuteness of enjoyment, even if you
have, after certain years, withdrawn into a tower with
your secrets, content to experience no more. But it
is better still to remain capable of experience: to be
perpetually renewing the enjoyment of immediate
contact with the world around, and perpetually
enlarging the pastures on which memory may
feed.

I have just used a word, "experience," which is very
much in vogue just now, and which is used with
alarming vagueness. Judging from the way some
prople talk, one might think that "experience" meant
breaking the Ten Commandments, or serving three
months as a dustman or a stoker when you had no
intention of remaining one. No; these things may be
done, and the doer remain precisely the same after-
wards as he did before, except that he may have lost
an illusion or two which he need never have con-
tracted. There are tiresome persons who imagine that
you cannot describe a murder convincingly without
committing one. It was of these persons that Disraeli
was thinking when he said, in his twenties, that if
one had Imagination one did not need Experience.
When he was seventy, he was asked if he still was of
that opinion, and he said that he was, only more so.
Experience, as I am using the term, is a matter of
quality of perception and of response, not of mere
brute rushing through a variety of physical scenes.

86 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

And anything we go through may be experienced
with almost any number of degrees of intensity and
fullness.

The poets, so long as they remain poets, have this
faculty in its fullest development: the great poets
retain the child's capacity for wonder and untarnished
vision, and couple it with the man's powers of analysis
and of intellectual imagination. Some, including some
who are of no great general eminence, but conspicuous
in this one regard, are "poets all the time," so to
speak, never losing the wonder in their eyes or in
their words, and being charmingly, if rather patheti-
cally, unable ever to exhibit common sense. But all,
until or unless they cease to be poets as some have
ceased are in frequent exercise of the faculty of
wonder or, one might better say, are able frequently
to make the surrender to wonder. There is a poem
of Mr. de la Mare's called The Scribe. The poet
imagines himself sitting by a tarn, a little lake in the
hills. Well, had his imagination conformed to many
people's reality, he might have conceived himself
saying, "Well, it's nice and quiet here, well out of
the wind. What about that lobster?" proceeding then,
though in a manner soothed by the warmth and
allayed by the peace of the landscape, to talk about
golf handicaps and look at nothing around. But what
does he write? This:

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 87

THE SCRIBE

What lovely things

Thy hand hath made:
The smooth-plumed bird

In its emerald shade,
The seed of the grass,

The speck of stone
Which the wayfaring ant

Stirs and hastes on !

Though I should sit

By some tarn in thy hills,
Using its ink

As the spirit wills
To write of Earth's wonders,

Its live, willed things,
Flit would the ages

On soundless wings
Ere unto Z

My pen drew nigh;
Leviathan told,

And the honey-fly:
And still would remain

My wit to try
My worn reeds broken,

The dark tarn dry,
All words forgotten

Thou, Lord, and I.

There you have the man who will never allow the
cares of life to overwhelm him or the advance of age
to ossify him. The nearer he gets to the grave, the

88 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

more acutely he is aware of the certainty of death,
the more he will be anxious to miss nothing of delight
in the universe around him; and we can all of us,
however heavy the burden of trouble or practical
business that lies upon us, however we may at
moments sink under it into indifference and callous-
ness, find enough moments of retreat to enjoy every-
thing the words and the things behind the words
even as he.

And there is a world of enjoyment, in this sense,
around us wherever we are. A man of imagination
can voyage through all the worlds. Coleridge, in the
Ancient Mariner, envisaged, in all their dramatic
solitude and vastness and simplicity of colour, the
wastes of the Antarctic seas. Read that poem, and
then conceive what kind of letter a person who had
lost his youthful freshness would have written about
it all, e.g.: "Dear Mother and Father, It is very cold
here, and there is a lot of ice about. Yesterday we
saw a bird they call an albatross, and a member of
the crew shot it. We had a good wind for some time,
but now it has been calm for some time. The sun is
redder here than it is in Peebles. We saw a funny
sort of ship the other day, I don't know what it was.
We are running short of water: this was very careless
of the agents." You may go where you like, and miss
everything; you may stay at home and, failing the
pleasure of travel, imagine much (with a little basis

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 89

of information) about the ends of the earth. But
romance, for all the spell that strange names and
colours and plants and climates have over us, is not
to be found only in far places. Beauty is at our doors
and every day. Tennyson illustrated this in his
poem about the "Flower in the crannied wall/'
which contained all the secrets of all life. But I will
take a more present illustration. I will take the wireless.

Ten years ago this invention was in its infancy.
Everybody said, "Isn't it wonderful what these
scientists do? What will they be doing next?" Now
everybody takes it for granted, and the chief interest
that many have is to criticize the programmes
adversely. Now I am not taking the wireless as an
example because it is a new development of science
or more remarkable than anything else; for that
matter, the reception of vision by the brain through
the eye that responds to waves in the ether, like any
wireless set, is equally awe-inspiring. I am taking the
wireless as an example simply because it is, at this
moment, very present both to you and to me.

Imagine I am broadcasting. You are there, ten, or
a hundred, or a thousand miles away. I am here, with
a water-bottle and a chaste little square microphone
in front of me, in a sort of artistic padded cell; I read
these words, and they go forth, and you hear them,
and they go forth beyond you, possibly sending
^reverberations into farthest space and farthest time,

90 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

imperceptibly echoing for ever into ah outer limbo
where are eternally preserved all the sights and sounds
of the remotest ages. But the voice is less important
than the person: forget the machine, remember the
communication: remember that what you hear over
the wireless are not disembodied voices mechanically
making sounds, but instruments our voices are
instruments though made of flesh played by spirits
who are here for a season and then will be gone,
calling to other spirits across the deep, surrounded
by all the other deeps. In other words, don't get used
to things: if one thinks things have gone stale, it is
oneself that has gone stale.

"Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait . . ." "If
youth but knew, if age but could. . . ." It is bound to
be always true, this sad dichotomy of practical affairs:
youth cannot believe the world to be what it is, and
age, when it has realized truth, has no longer the
energy to act on it. But in our present connection,
with an effort, as we grow older, we can combine
the advantages of both states: youth cannot anticipate
the wisdom of age (though, if it will, it can take
some of it on trust), but age can, if the spirit is
sufficiently vigorous and faith sufficiently alive, keep
burning the enthusiasm of youth without its delusions.
I adjure you, difficult though it may be, and many
though may be the temptations to sloth, to keep your
eyes clear, though that may involve effort, and to

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 91

keep your heart open, though that may involve
suffering.

I will say another thing about the enjoyment of
words this time not directly from the aesthetic or
emotional but from the intellectual point of view
though, in the last resort, the pleasures of the intellect
are emotional and aesthetic also. It is this. Don't let
words become shibboleths to you. Life will be much
more interesting to you, and you will be much more
interesting to other people, if you do not.

When Mr. Baldwin first became Prime Minister,
one of his first actions was to go down to the Cam-
bridge Union and inform all the aspiring under-
graduate orators that "Rhetoric is the harlot of the
arts." This is true; though in a world where spell-
binding is bound to be done the answer is (in the
old phrase) that "it is better not to let the devil have
all the best tunes." Speech is, in large measure, used
for persuasion; the arts, not merely of rhetoric, can
be used to enforce persuasion; genuine passion earns
its influence if simulated passion does not.

Spell-bind others, if you like, by the force of your
eloquence and the passion of your conviction; yield,
if you will, to the same thing in others; but don't
allow words to get an hypnotic influence over you
when you have never really examined the things
behind them.

I will take instances (I am not going to be con-

92 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

troversial) from the vocabulary of politics. I know
people who foam at the mouth if one breathes a word
in favour of "aristocracy" as a method of govern-
ment; I know others who are equally indignant if a
favourable allusion is made to "democracy." To one
side "aristocracy" means the greedy tyranny of an
unqualified few; to the other "democracy" means the
drab dictatorship of an ignorant many. To him who
detaches himself, and considers the literal meaning of
words and the course of human history, these terms
merely connote alternative systems of governing a
country, each of which may be better than the other
in a particular place and time (morality not being
involved at all), and each of which, in any particular
circumstances, must be judged by its capacity for
making everybody happy as far as possible. "Liberty,"
"Free Trade," "Protection," all these words, with
many people, are used as armour against thought:
come down on whichever side you will, but do
consider, when using these abstract terms, what they
really mean, not only to you, but to others, and what
they have meant in the past. The believer in aristocracy
is no good if he has never considered the dreams of
the great democrats, and the obscure hankerings of
the speechless mass; the believer in democracy has
not begun to think if he supposes that the mere word
carries its own conclusive arguments with it.

Expose yourself to the essences of things, and

THE THINGS BEHIND WORDS 93

think, when you have leisure to think, of the meaning
of words, especially those words which you habitually
use as though they were arguments. So will all life
be enriched and illuminated for you. If only I could
feel that these chapters had done anybody else as
much good as they have done me, I should be a very
happy man indeed. But for that matter I am.

PART TWO

THE ENJOYMENT
OF LITERARY FORMS

POETRY

THESE chapters, of necessity, can contain little more
than a few facts and suggestions which may be useful
to the ordinary reader of books. I shall avoid the
technical terms of the prosodists, their anapaests,
amphibrachs, and hendecasyllabics. A knowledge of
prosody is no more necessary to the reader who
wants to enjoy poetry than a knowledge of physiology
is necessary to the spectator at a football match. I
would lay long odds that not a quarter of the poets
I have known could have explained what an amphi-
brach was.

As much applies to forms. There are people who
love to talk of "rondeaus" and "villanelles" and
"ballades" the last a form still copiously practised.
These forms are amusing to poets: though none so
much as what Wordsworth called "the sonnet's
narrow plot of ground." It is fun to take a set form
and see what one can do with it: all the more so in
that all men work better within rules. But let not the
diffident be too worried about these things, or even
about the difference between blank verse and rhyme.
Milton, in his preface to Paradise Lost (though he
had done lovely things in rhyme), attacked rhyme.

Flowers of Speech G

98 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

But rhyme is only one more kind of repetition; and
it is the repetitiveness of the rhythm that distinguishes
verse from prose. Enjoy yourselves with poetry: do
not be distracted by arguments as to the superiority
of this, that, or the other method of expression.
Emotion engenders regular rhythm : to regular rhythm
we can all respond. Some poets employ it to convey
conceptions which few (for lack of education or
intelligence or imagination) can take in, and others
employ it (in Keats's phrase) to express what all men
feel but cannot say. Take what you can from it: do
not suppose that what you cannot understand is
nonsense; and believe that the poets are the flowers
on humanity's tree. "They learn in suffering what
they teach in song"; they welcome Pain in order to
sing; if you are deaf to them, consider it your fault
not theirs. The poets are those who are habitually on
the highest plane to which the ordinary individual
reaches.

Do not be side-tracked by critical disputes. There
is always a good deal of talk among critics about
movements and schools in poetry, and a certain
number of poets, not usually good ones, announce
that they intend to demonstrate new theories and
create new forms. Those who really do create new
forms usually say very little about them, and new
theories as to the nature and function of poetry are
hardly likely to be valid at this time of day. The best

POETRY 99

known "school" in the history of English literature
is the so-called "Lake School of Poets/' and Words-
worth, Coleridge, and Southey had very little in
common except that they happened to be friends in
youth, and were agreed that the poetry (like other
things) of the day needed humanizing, and that the
diction of eighteenth-century poetry had become too
stilted and too removed from ordinary speech. This
was quite true; but nobody could have supposed that
Kubla Khan was written by Wordsworth; and the
better poetry of both sprang from the same sources
and dealt with the same subjects as all the best poetry
in the world. In our own day you sometimes see
allusions to a "Georgian School." They never called
themselves that; they were merely a certain number
of younger poets, selections from whom are gathered
together in a series of volumes by Mr. Edward Marsh,
an anthologist of genius. But they had very little in
common (except what they had in common with the
general tendencies of their day), and many of them
thought each other no good at all. For some years
after the war the place teemed with groups of young
people who labelled themselves with all sorts of
"isms," on the Paris model the French delighting
in schools and movements, being a nation devoted
to ideas, a prose nation rather than a poetical nation.
Some of them were very extreme indeed, though
none so extreme as the French Dadaists, who printed

ioo THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

things upside-down, and sometimes composed poems
which consisted of rows of exclamation and question
marks of varying length. Stunts come and go: the
man who thinks that a new technique makes a new
poetry is confusing the means with the end. Sir Philip
Sidney said the essential word on the subject when
he said, "Look in thy heart and write."

The greatest poetry arises out of a state of emotional
and imaginative excitement. Wordsworth defined
poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity/* It is
often quoted, but it is only true of some poetry. The
great lyrists, such as Catullus, Heine, and Burns,
probably poured out their songs when they were at
white heat of emotion. We know that Tennyson's
"Break, break, break," one of the most affecting and
inevitable lyrics in English, welled straight out of him
when he was walking alone within sound of the sea
and thinking of a friend who was dead. Consider it,
and consider how simple are the elements of it:

Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O sea,
And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy

That he shouts with his sister at play !

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay !

POETRY 101

And the stately ships go on,

To the haven under the hill,
But Oh for the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still.

Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O sea,

And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

In point of fact, Tennyson's heart uttered those
thoughts much better through not uttering them.
A diplomatist once said that language was given to
conceal our thoughts: it is certain that it can never
entirely reveal them. But we do an immense amount
by suggestion and by intonation. Anybody who is
not too petrified to forget what it is to be in love
will remember how much can be conveyed by such
simple ejaculations as "Darling!" "Oh!" "Yes," and
"No, no," and what different meanings according to
the way in which they are spoken. The poet who
has mastery over his metre compels his reader (pro-
vided the reader surrenders sufficiently, forgetting
mechanical beats, as to read the lines in the natural
intonation of speech) to speak his lines with an
emphasis and an inflection which convey things un-
spoken, compelling a rush of excitement or a sigh,
with all its implications.
I do not think that examination of a good poem by

102 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

people who have not been moved by it is likely to
do much good; but there is intellectual fun in exam-
ining a poem which actually has moved one. Let us
go through this most spontaneous and simple of all
lyrics. "It is art to conceal art," the old saying goes;
but if you have a genuine poet writing impulsively,
he gets with ease precisely the same results as the
most consummate artist will get in cold blood. If
Virgil, who wrote twelve lines a day and no more,
had considered that first line, he would probably
have come to the conclusion that the best way of
indicating the recurrent wash of the waves on the
shore was by that triple reiteration "Break, break,
break." You will notice that at the beginning and
the end of the word there are strong syllables; they
mark the divisions, the pauses between the waves,
and the determined quality of their arrival: "wash,
wash, wash," or "roll, roll, roll," or "fade, fade,
fade," would have produced quite different effects.
The "break, break" is like the ticking of a clock
the sea's clock; and, feeling it rather than thinking
of it, the mere sound reminds us of the inexorable
passage of time which takes all hands away from us
and stills all voices. In the next line the long "o" in
"cold" concentrates attention on the longevity of the
ocean as opposed to the short duration of man; and
the long "a," for that is what it really is, in "grey"
reinforces the impression. There is a failing at die

POETRY 103

end of the word "utter" which indicates human
incapacity to cope with the immensities of the
universe; there is a duration and stress on "arise"
which reflects the struggle of the human spirit to
cope with them.

Tennyson might, had he not been in an excited
condition and imaginatively awaked, have passed a
hundred times the fisherman's boy playing with his
sisters. In that awakened condition, the imagination,
not the laborious reason, at once selected from among
the hundred sights and sounds around him that one
image of the innocent children at play, unaware of
time and death, so violent a contrast to his friend
who had died. In the next stanza the contrast is
pointed. The traffic of the world continues: the loved
one has gone. And then, almost automatically, he
returns to his main theme, and we are reminded
again of the eternities and of man's unanswered
questions that are addressed to them.

That is an example of a purely spontaneous poem,
drawn out from a man in a state of emotion, who
could not but speak music when in that state. Shake-
speare says:

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.

And when the poet or the lover is at the point of
lunacy (provided he has a vocabulary) there is no

io 4 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

question of art concealing art: the soul governs the
tongue, and the tongue speaks music. Few men
remain long in, or enter often, that divinely inspired
state in which the god seizes them by the hair and
the tongues of Pentecost descend. Most poetry, even
most great poetry, though the bones of it may have
originally been stirred to life by the breath of the
visionary Muse, is in large part deliberate: art has to
work out an approximation to what inspiration would
have dictated had it been in action. Consider, in
contrast to the poem I have just quoted, Tennyson's
"Blow, bugle, blow." Or consider such a lyric as
Robert Bridges's (from his marvellous Shorter Poems),
April 1885:

Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh;
The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of

May:
All day in the sweet box tree the bee for pleasure

hummeth:
The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower

At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's

drouth:

On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower
In bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling
south.

That would be a pleasant thing, for it represents
pleasant things, to anyone even who had not an ear;

POETRY 105

much pleasanter to one with an ear. But if this last,
having succumbed to the music, had also intellectual
curiosity, he would find that the poet, without
parading what he was doing, had employed assonance,
alliteration, and internal rhyme to almost an un-
paralleled extent. "Wanton" and "long'* have the
same vowel sound; "delay" and "gay" in the first
line anticipate the "May" of the second; there is
hardly a vowel, hardly an initial consonant which is
echoed in an effective place. The poet began by loving
an April day; but his poem does not gush out: it is
an exquisite contrivance in which all the concealed
artifices lie hidden to be discovered by the explorer.

It remains emotional, and full of the sense of
mystery. A good deal of the most interesting work
written by English poets is neither emotional nor
mysterious. There are those who strive after a
definition of the differences between poetry and
verse: so do not I, recognizing that almost every-
body who has written poetry has lapsed into verse
(which, if well written, may make the most common-
place statements more amusing and epigrammatic),
and that there is scarcely a writer of verse who has
not occasionally, perhaps because of the mere in-
vigorating quality of the tom-tom beat of verse,
soared into poetry. It is better not to bother too
much about the differences between the two. Leave
that to the experts who can write neither poetry nor

106 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

verse. The thing is to enjoy these quintessential
comments on human life, and, if you cannot enjoy
all of them, to enjoy those of them which suit you.
"In the house of poetry are many mansions," said
Leigh Hunt, who had been a friend of Byron, Shelley,
and Keats, all of them as different as men could be,
but different kinds of men heightened to a common
degree of expression. Keats dreamed of physical and
sensuous beauty; Shelley dreamed of the perfectibility
of man and of imaginary worlds where people more
perfect than men roamed free from all men's limita-
tions; Byron was a man of this world, acutely con-
scious of those limitations and of his own, who was
sceptical about all the dreams of his time (though,
like all poets, he, too, hankered after Paradise), and
spent a great deal of his time writing verses which
were epigrams in which observation of life was
qualified by a sense of how much worse it was than
it might be, and by a wit which took delight in the
compressed description of its drawbacks. Those were
all poets of one "romantic" generation: there were
centuries of poets behind them, all, according to their
ages, different from them.

Take what you can from any poet. Probably only
the poets, who are very few in each generation and
a kind of secret society at that, can take everything
from each other that is offered: there are indeed (it is
a conventional expression) "poets* poets," the full

POETRY 107

enjoyment of whom is granted to be the privilege of
other poets, and some of whom seem quite dull to
even very intelligent persons who are not sensitive
to the last fine shades of terminology or of rhythm.
There are, on the other hand, persons with a gift for
deft versification who remain on the humdrum plane
all their lives, but can give an aesthetic delight because
of their talent with the instrument. Those are few
who can enjoy everything from Chaucer to Spenser,
from Spenser to Pope, from Pope to Calverley; he
who cannot should take from poetry what he can,
and be willing to admit that his inability to enjoy
what he cannot is his misfortune and not somebody
else's fault.

II
THE ESSAY

THE word "essay" is an intimidating one to the vast
majority of the British population. It carries with it
memories of efforts at school to compose one or two
laborious pages on "How I Spent my Holidays/' or
"Which would you rather be, a Sailor or a Soldier?"
It has, by the same token, painful associations for me.
The first piece of really careful prose I ever remember
writing was composed for a school essay on "Egypt."
I thought of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, of Philae
and the Valley of the Kings, of the Pharaohs going
back into the mists of remote antiquity; I thought of
the ancient Nile, rising in the mysterious Mountains
of the Moon and flowing past all those monuments
now, when they are crumbling, as of old when they
were bright and new; and I laid myself out to write
Ruskinian paragraphs full of colour and cadence, in
which the words "illimitable" and "eternal" occurred
much more frequently than I should allow them to
occur now. "Well," thought I to myself complacently,
"I can't imagine that anybody else has done anything
like that." Did I get a prize? No; I wasn't even
commended. All that happened was that I was taken
aside by a master, who knitted his brows and bit his

THE ESSAY 109

lips, and asked from what author I had copied out
the passage on which I had dwelt most lovingly the
passage fullest of the venerable river, the immemorial
sands, and the brooding spirit of antiquity. When I
denied that I had copied it from anybody, I was
invited to consider the old maxim that "lying only
makes the offence worse," and I ended by narrowly
escaping a beating for having the germs of a poet
in me. This by the way; but I was trying to write
one type of essay when another type was wanted.
I was expected to write: "Egypt is a very old country.
There was once a ruler there, a very wicked man
called Pharaoh, who was drowned in the Red Sea
for persecuting the Jews. The chief sights of
Egypt are the Pyramids, which are not all the
same size, and the Sphinx, which is a very large
Sphinx."

Well, we are not talking about school essays. Nor
are we talking about scientific, religious, political,
and economic essays. Malthus wrote an Essay on
Population; probably at this moment somebody is
writing an Essay on the most advantageous use of
Phosphate Manures in Metalliferous Areas. The word
"essay," in English, covers a multitude if not of sins
at least of painstaking dullnesses. But when one talks
of "The English Essay," one does not think of these
or even of critical essays, however excellent, like
Matthew Arnold's or Walter Bagehot's, but of a

i io THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

particular kind of wandering, personal thing which
has flourished in England as nowhere else.

It didn't begin in England. Its ^father was indis-
putably Montaigne, the quiet French seigneur who
lived in his castle tower in Gascony and allowed his
mind to wander where it would over life and history
and books, without caring whether or for how long
he digressed, and exposing (even, one might say, for
the public delectation, exploiting) his own character
in order that others should see their own reflections
in it. That, I think, indicates one of the things that
draws people to the English essayists when they are
most typically English essayists. They have all
rambled into the descriptive and the informative: we
owe to Hazlitt a marvellous description of a prize-
fight and first-hand impressions of the Lake Poets;
we owe to Lamb inestimable portraits of the old
actors and the old Benchers. But even in those essays
they contrive to be very personal, and their most
quintessential essays and Lamb is the most quintes-
sential of all essayists are purely personal. When we
are reading a novel, the last thing we want to be
reminded of is the existence and peculiarities of the
author: the author must be forgotten in the story.
But when we are reading an essay, the more person-
ality we get the better, whether it be that part of
personality which consists of the qualities common to
all men (and we are all comforted by being told that

THE ESSAY in

the great, whether writers or otherwise, share our
weaknesses, hankerings, tastes, affections, fears, and
prejudices) or whether it be that part which is pecu-
liarly individual. The typical English essayist is an
attractive and charming person who gives us con-
versation (his statements not being made on oath)
such as we might have at an ideal dinner-table, only
polished and refined as verbal conversation never
can be.

Now the first of the great English essayists was
Francis Bacon. He would certainly never have written
had it not been for Montaigne, but this great lawyer
and scientific man who was going to become Lord
Chancellor never acquired Montaigne's gift of personal
confession. For all his vast curiosity and sense of
history, he could never quite give himself away. Take
two instances. First, the beginning of his celebrated
essay, Of Gardens:

God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed,
it is the purest of human pleasures; it is the greatest
refreshment to the spirits of man; without which
buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks: and
a man shall ever see, that, when ages grow to civility
and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than
to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater
perfection. I do hold it in the royal order of a garden,
there ought to be gardens for all the months of the
year, in which, severally, things of beauty may then
be in season*

uz THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

And later that most famous sentence from the Essay
on Death: "Men fear Death as children fear to go
into the dark/' You may deduce from it, if you will,
the fact that Bacon, in this regard, shared the dread
of his fellows; but he doesn't say so, he remains
detached, unwilling to confide except by implication.
His essays are marvels of concision, wonderful reposi-
tories of worldly wisdom and observation, full of
sudden magics of vocabulary and sound. But they do
not establish an intimacy between writer and reader;
and the typical English essay is the much more con-
fidential work of a much more modest man.

The first English essayist in the modern sense was
Abraham Cowley, whose essays (though in print at
the Oxford University Press) are at the present time
as neglected as his ingenious and, occasionally, lovely
poems. "Who now reads Cowley? 5 ' asked Pope,
more than two hundred years ago. The question
might still be asked, but all the time he had had a
few affectionate lovers. Listen to this, written in the
middle of the seventeenth century the beginning of
an essay which at once shows Cowley's consciousness
of whence his essays derived and forecasts the whole
tone of the English essay from his day onward. It
comes from his essay, On Greatness.

Since we cannot attain to greatness, says the Sieur
de Montaigne, let us have our revenge by railing at
it: this he spoke but in jest. I believe he desired it

THE ESSAY 113

no more than I do, and had less reason, for he
enjoyed so plentiful and honourable a fortune in a
most excellent country, as allowed him all the real
conveniences of it, separated and purged from the
incommodities. If I were but in his condition, I should
think it hard measure, without being convinced of
any crime, to be sequestered from it, and made one
of the principal officers of state. But the reader may
think that what I now say is of small authority,
because I never was, nor ever shall be, put to the
trial; I can therefore only make my protestation.

If ever I more riches did desire
Than cleanliness and quiet do require;
If e'er ambition did my fancy cheat,
With any wish so mean as to be great,
Continue, Heaven, still from me to remove
The humble blessings of that life I love.

I know very many men will despise, and some pity
me, for this humour, as a poor-spirited fellow; but
I am content, and, like Horace, thank God for being
so. ... I confess I love littleness almost in all things.
A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a
little company, and a very little feast; and if I were
ever to fall in love again (which is a great passion,
and therefore I hope I have done with it), it would
be, I think, with prettiness rather than with majestical
beauty.

Honesty and whimsicality and confidential button-
holing: there are all the things here that make people

Flowers of Speech H

ii4 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

love Charles Lamb. The pedigree is straight from that
to Hazlitt's On Going a Journey:

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty,
to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey
chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all incon-
veniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to
get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-
space to muse on indifferent matters . . . thatl absent
myself from the town for a while, without feeling
at a loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of
a friend in a post-chaise or in a Tilbury, to exchange
good things with, and vary the same stale topics
over again, for once let me have a truce with imper-
tinence. Give me the clear blue sky over my head,
and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road
before me, and a three hours' march to dinner and
then to thinking!

I may be doing a few people a service if I recommend
a perusal of the essays of Abraham Cowley.

Since him, what a procession! There are obscurer
men whom I might mention. I should like to send
readers back to the neglected essays of Alexander
Smith, whose The Lark Ascending (you may know
his poem Barbara in the Oxford Book) is one of the
most beautiful and thoughtful essays in English. But
Addison, Steele, Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt it would
require hours to celebrate adequately their contribu-
tions to our enjoyment. And in our own day Mr.
Beerbohm, Mr. Lynd, Mr. Knox, Mr. Belloc, Mr.

THE ESSAY 115

Lucas, Mr. Chesterton have continued the old tradi-
tion. We may regret that they mostly write so briefly:
that cannot be helped; a contributor to periodicals
has to write to the length required. All these authors
would doubtless pour themselves out much more
fully and ingeniously were they invited to write at
Charles Lamb's length, and we may regret that (with
the exception of Mr. Beerbohm) they do not. But it
is agreeable to see spirit triumphing over matter, and
posterity will take pleasure in the spectacle of men of
letters of our own day continuing to compress their
effusions within the limits of a newspaper column and
still keep their freshness, their humour, their sense of
beauty, and their capacity for exposing themselves as
specimens of mankind. The reader of, for example,
Mr. Belloc's Hills and the Sea forgets, after he has
read it, that the essays are so much shorter than the
essays of old; he merely remembers that he has shared
one man's delight in life, laughed with one man, loved
the beauty of the earth and sea with one man, dwelt
in awe with one man, and enjoyed much prose, still
noble, although written for a quite contemporary and
very likely commercial press.

Ill
THE NOVEL

WHAT is a novel ? I suppose the answer of the ordinary
readers of novels would be, if he (or should I not
say she ?) were asked, would be that a novel is a story
long enough to fill a good-sized book. I think that,
for our present purpose, we had better accept that
rough definition. The sophistical analyst might sug-
gest that there was no intrinsic difference between a
story in prose and a story in verse. Certainly, if you
think of the subject-matter and the way in which it
is treated, the Odyssey of Homer is a picaresque, or
rambling, novel in verse very much akin to Robinson
Crusoe, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has a great
affinity to Mr. Priestley's The Good Companions a
very great affinity indeed. Chaucer's people, the Wife
of Bath, the Pardoner, the Knight, the Clerk of
Oxenforde, and the others are brought together from
all the quarters of the country to embark on a common
enterprise, and we are told all the stories of their
various pasts, and, incidentally, as the relevant back-
grounds are successively introduced, presented with a
picture of England in Edward Ill's day such as we
could never construct from legal, constitutional, or
economic documents. While we are reading the

THE NOVEL 117

Canterbury Tales we are enchanted by the music of
the verse: weeks afterwards, we have forgotten that,
and remember the characters, and their humours, and
the colour of the time. I may remark, in parenthesis
merely, that those poets are usually most immediately
popular who, like Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and
Mr. Masefield, tell stories in verse, adding the magic
of metre to narratives of the kind which, in prose,
most appeal to their time. However, we cannot discuss
poetry here.

Another person who might quarrel with our defini-
tion is the learned historian. He might point out that
the word "novel" derived from a foreign word which
was used of a short story. The Renaissance Italians
wrote short stories which they called novelli from
one such collection Shakespeare drew freely for his
plots. He got, for instance, the plot of Othello from
a so-called Italian "novel." It handicapped him. In
the original, Othello is a rather unattractive character
who conspires with lago to kill his wife by letting
the canopy of her bed collapse upon her, apparently
by accident, and is then blackmailed by lago. This,
I may say, handicapped Shakespeare. There is a story
in one of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's books of a
sailor at Portsmouth who went to see Othello acted,
and, at a critical moment, shouted out, "You great
black fool, can't you see!" What happened was that
Shakespeare took over the old plot, that when he

ii8 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

began writing, Othello, in his shaping imagination,
became a very intelligent and sympathetic and un-
selfish man, and that the man (who would have been
much more liable, in the circumstances, to have killed
himself rather than the woman he loved) had to be
made to fit the old plot. But I am wandering again.
However, the point has been made that what we are
talking about is the novel as we would now define
it, and not earlier literary productions to which the
name has been applied. The novel, to us, is a work
in prose, and a work which is of such a length that
we cannot call it a short story.

It is common form to say that Robinson Crusoe was
the first novel. This is not true. The late Greeks had
their novels: the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus is
certainly a novel. The Greek novels are novels of
episode and event rather than of character; the
heroines may be seized ever so often by pirates, but
no seizure ever brings out any new point in their
characters. Novels, nevertheless, they remain, if only
early precursors of the Treasure Island school. The
Golden Ass of Apuleius is a novel: the hero is turned
into a donkey and goes through the most surprising
experiences, in respectable households and amongst
brigands, and we are given a very vivid and amusing
panorama of ancient life while the tale is being told.
The Satyricon of Petronius supposed to have been
the Beau Brummel of Nero's day is a novel It is, in

THE NOVEL 119

parts, a very squalid novel; but it is almost Dickensian
in its mixture of comedy and tragedy, in its miscel-
laneous portraiture, in the vividness of its shifting
scene, in which we can recover the life of the time as
it was led by all types of persons, including the newly
rich and the inhabitants of the underworld, male and
female. The Elizabethan romances I recommend
The Unfortunate Traveller of Nashe, but hardly dare
recommend the verbose Euphues of Lyly are novels
of a kind; the French romances of the seventeenth
century, though intolerably long and tedious and
insufferably highly pitched, are novels; and what is
Don Quixote but a novel? Don Quixote was a novel
a century earlier than Robinson Crusoe which was
written partly in order to expose the false sentiment
of a whole school of earlier novels, romances of
chivalry which the author thought were too remote
from ordinary life. As he went on Cervantes fell in
love with his hero and the chivalric ideal; long before
we reach the end we feel that a lunatic who tilts at
windmills is a more attractive person than a wholly
sensible man who never tilts at anything; and, while
following the fortunes of Don Quixote, we have
obtained such a picture of the Spain of his day as we
never could have got from the historians.

The novel did not begin with Robinson Crusoe. But
it is true that the multiplication of novels dates from
Robinson Crusoe's time. It was in the eighteenth

no THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

century that women, in England, began to read on a
large scale; and the more women have read the more
the novel has become dominant. With the appearance
of the novel of the moment, women authors who
had only occasionally dipped into poetry and scholar-
ship began to get more numerous. Aphra Behn and
Mrs. Manly were among the first professional novelists,
and love, of one kind or another, was their normal
theme. Had literature remained male, we should have
had our few great novelists perhaps, and our shocker-
writers, but not the innumerable tribe who are chiefly
preoccupied with the relations between men and
women. But most men like facts: history, biography,
numismatics, travel; and the modern novel is chiefly
a supply to a demand from women, who either want
to learn about life in an easy way or wish to escape
from life in a romantic way. I repeat again: we cannot
regret it. The development of the novel has given us
Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, Scott, Dickens,
Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith, and Hardy, each of
which last was also a poet. It is fascinating to watch
the evolution of the form. Experiments in method
are continually made. Nobody knows where the
novel may go next. But it is important to remember
that a story is a story, and not necessarily a story
having any real relation to life at all.

Two pieces of advice I may give to intelligent
readers of contemporary fiction. The first is: that if

THE NOVEL 121

you really want to read the best, do not rush at new
books. If you want to read six new novels a week,
well and good: you are the mainstay of the publishing
trade. You will easily find, in the reviewing columns
of the newspapers, six new novels a week which are
hailed as masterpieces: read them, and forget them.
But if you only want to read the good (though,
occasionally, you may find that some critic upon
whom you rely really convinces you that a new book
really is a masterpiece), wait a little. The "book of
the season" is very seldom the book of the next
season. It is talked of for a month or two, and then
it is forgotten. But if somebody intelligent tells you
to read a novel a year after it has been published,
there is probably something in it. Remember that the
reputations of most of the great novelists have been
made slowly Hardy and Conrad are recent examples
of this. The people who get the immediate success
are the people who appeal to the fleeting taste of the
day, and who deliberately appeal to it. They do not
love anything; they do not sit down and endeavour
to present a vision of life as they honestly see it;
they do not care about the permanent elements in
human life. They think about the moment as much
as any milliner with her hats: the vogue passes and
"the place of them knoweth them no more." A study
of the files of any literary newspaper for the last
hundred years would be a melancholy study: we

122 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

should continually be encountering "great" novelists
now completely forgotten. It is difficult, perhaps, to
realize that oblivion will be the fate of most of the
so-called "great" novelists of our own day, but it
will be. There is Mr. A, who has relied mainly on
shocking the suburbs and the provinces by painting
alarming pictures of the life alleged to be led by the
fast, smart set in metropolitan London. There is
Mr. B, who is, intrinsically, a journalist, and who
makes his appeal by painting pictures, essentially
trivial, so realistic that everybody gives a shout of
recognition when he sees them. There is Mr. C, who
represents in himself the typical religious or political
mood of the time, and writes novels in which the
characters have precisely the doubts and ideas which
are momentarily most common amongst those people
who have doubts at all or ideas at all. But yesterday's
doubts and ideas are not to-day's doubts and ideas.
Your true novelist or dramatist takes all these things
in his stride, is not greatly influenced by contem-
porary movements, and concentrates on the perma-
nent elements in human nature. Your Chaucer, your
Shakespeare, and your Cervantes are far more modern
than your out-of-date novelist of 1896 who was
championing some cause now so finally won or so
hopelessly lost as to be no longer interesting. Think
of Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did. It made a
vast sensation in its day, shocking all the Victorian

THE NOVEL 123

notions of propriety. But where is it now? Gone, one
might gloomily say, with the propriety. And still
Hamlet wonders about Life, Death, and the Eternal,
and still Lear raves upon his heath, and still Macbeth
is egged on by his woman to do a deed of which his
conscience will never approve.

That is one thing: the novel of the year is very
seldom the novel of next year. Another thing is this:
do not think, in a general way, that you will learn
anything about how to conduct your life from novels.
A few of the greatest novelists most of them poets
at heart have put into their novels all they knew of
life, in a conscientious way; from these, possibly,
something may be learnt, and certainly in good fiction
we can get the general panorama of life as we can
get it nowhere else. But most novels (however
realistic in superficial aspect) are (so far as their
central themes are concerned) written by born
romantics who are not writing about anything they
have known and seen, but about life as they wish it
would be, or hope it is, or fear that it might be.
How many governesses in the novels of the late Mr.
Charles Garvice married dukes and earls disguised as
clerks or tramps? But how many have done it in
real life? This gift of making vivid pictures is a
dangerous one: "this must have happened," we think
as we read; but it never did. By the same token, the
most violent and hectic novels are usually written by

I2 4 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

the tamest people. "Out of the strong cometh forth
sweetness" is the Biblical text. Beware of novelists
who offer you scathing exposures, the "burning core
of life," audacity, defiance, flaying, and so forth:
they are usually working off the inferiority complex.
Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, both of whom
I knew, were strong men and courteous gentlemen:
in their writings utterly truthful and restrained, in
person quite undemonstrative. There is a tendency,
in this age of print and of conflicting philosophies,
to think that ferocity on paper implies strength of
character. It doesn't.

IV
THE PLAY

NOT long ago an eminent living dramatist informed
a newspaper reporter that, although very successful in
the theatre, he had the greatest contempt for it. The
person who drew my attention to the statement was
rather shocked by it; but I wasn't. The author in
question had obviously been maddened by two
things: the limitations of the theatre, and the ease
with which, quite cold-bloodedly, he could secure
effects in the theatre. He had the same sort of revul-
sion against the theatre as a popular orator might have
against big political meetings, a skilful demagogue
who knows that he has only to get on a platform
and say certain things, meant or not meant, and
the whole audience will cheer, laugh, or weep.
The theatre and the drama, in other words, are
peculiar.

The most obvious peculiarity about the drama is
the tiny portion of it which survives its own day. In
other departments of literature there is a constant
accumulation: there are so many good books in the
world, still living, still read, still written about, that
seventy years is not long enough to read them in.
If you are interested in poetry or fiction, you are

n6 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

always hearing of alleged masterpieces in Finnish,
Polish, and Lithuanian which you will never probably
have time to read. But if you are interested in the
drama, it is quite another matter. It takes no time at
all to read all the classics, and when you have read
them you may, if you are a curious antiquary, read
thousands of other plays which were alive in their
day and stone dead now; but if you only wish to
read plays which still have life in them, and still
appear good, you are very short of pasture.

How few there are ! The dramas of the great Greeks,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes,
still retain their eminence and their readers, and are
still occasionally acted. Their numbers may before
long be added to if, as Signor Mussolini hopes (he
told me so himself, so you may take this as gospel),
the new Italian excavations at Herculaneum result in
the discovery of lost classical manuscripts. Nearly
two thousand five hundred years have passed since
those plays were written. What others since them are
still, I won't say acted, but even read for pleasure
as distinguished from erudition? Virtually nothing
(unless one makes an exception in favour of Everyman)
until you come to the Elizabethans, and then only
the plays of Shakespeare and a very few outstanding
works by Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and Beaumont
and Fletcher. You have since them a few Spanish
plays, Racine, Corneille, Moltere, and Beaumarchais

THE PLAY 127

in France, and in England a few comedies by Con-
greve and his contemporaries, by Goldsmith and
Sheridan, and by Wilde. You have Ibsen's plays, and
those of other moderns who may last. For hundreds
of years thousands of playwrights have been turning
out plays, many of them enormously successful in
their own day, which have now no life in them, and
which nobody will ever attempt to revive again,
except (in a few instances) scholarly societies, at the
universities and elsewhere, who revive demoded plays
out of mere curiosity.

Why is this? It is partly because a man who is
writing a play to last must have several qualities not
commonly found together. The first requisite of a
play is that it shall hold the audience all the time;
and this applies as much to Charley s Aunt as to
Hamlet. A political speaker or lecturer is done for
once his audience has begun coughing; a playwright
is done for if for but five minutes his audience begins
to think, "How boring and unreal all this is." With
a novel or an epic weak patches and faulty construc-
tion do not matter so much. The subject-matter and
the language are the dominant things; and we will
plough through or skim all sorts of improbable, dull,
or distended chapters because we know we are going,
from time to time, to encounter beautiful or profound
things. In the plays that survive the centuries there
is beauty and profundity; but no amount of intellect

128 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

or poetic feeling is of avail if the play is badly made.
A playwright has but three hours, and from twelve
to eighteen thousand words the number of words
in a long short story to do his work in. In that
space and in that time he must develop his characters
and tell his story. He must amuse, interest, or thrill
all the time, and all the time (particularly at the end
of each act) he must make people keen to know what
is going to happen next. If, at the end of an act, they
either feel quite certain what is going to happen next,
or do not care what is going to happen next, they will
probably walk out of the theatre, or, at any rate, only
stay there because they have paid for their seats. If
this requirement is not met, nothing else is of any
avail. Since the Elizabethans almost all the great poets
have written plays, or tried to; and not one of them
has held the stage, except Dryden (who condescended
to the stage) for a time. Coleridge tried, Wordsworth
tried, Tennyson and Browning tried: they had im-
measurably more brains and passions than most of
the successful playwrights of their respective days,
but they failed as playwrights because they did not
pay sufficient attention to the carpentry side of play-
writing. Tennyson's Becket was the best of his plays;
Henry Irving's acting made it run for a hundred
nights or so, but it will never really hold the stage.
It was roughly contemporaneous with Charleys Aunt
not to mention Gilbert and Sullivan. Charley 3 Aunt

THE PLAY 129

is revived annually in London, and runs continually
in the provinces. Nobody was ever ravished by the
beauty of any scene in Charley's Aunt. Nobody ever
learnt anything about life from Charley's Aunt.
Nobody ever came away from Charley's Aunt think-
ing, "I have just heard original thought and powerful
sentiment expressed in impressive language/' Nobody
has ever come away from Charley's Aunt thinking
(though there are some pretty good phrases in it),
"How witty are the epigrams in this play!" And
nobody ever came away from the play thinking he
had learned something about human nature which
he might have done from one of the outrageously
unsuccessful plays of the late Henry James. Yet the
characters are sufficiently indicated to be amusing, the
satire (though not profound) is adequate, the wit
(though not equal to Congreve's) is not so feeble as
to "put one off," and all the time there is situation
after situation, surprise after surprise, with a little
sentimental plot mingled with all the robust humour
and shooting one with the second barrel. That play,
I frankly admit, I can see again and again. For the
strange thing about suspense and surprise in the
theatre is that one still gets them, if the play is
properly made, even when one has seen the play
before and knows precisely what is going to happen.
All the brains in the world and all the heart in the
world and all the honeyed speech in the world are

Flowers of Speech I

i 3 o THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

of no avail in the theatre, unless technique (which
the disappointed call tricks) is good. The author
must know precisely how to arrest an audience's
attention at the start and how to hold it thence-
forward. He must gradually work up to an inevitable
climax. However enthusiastic he may be about his
theme, he cannot just preach from it. The characters
must say what they, roughly, might say; and they
must not make speeches so long that the audience
suddenly begins to lose its illusion of reality, because
nobody (except for a rare philosophical Scotchman)
ever makes such long speeches in life. The working
out of the plot necessitates the perpetual removal of
characters from, and then introduction to, the stage.
The amateur playwright gets them on and off by
awkward and obvious devices: somebody calling
about a dog or a cigarette case left behind. The
moment the audience sees through the device and
begins to think that the person would not have come
on or gone off naturally, but is being dragged about
for the author's convenience, the illusion of reality
(which we get even in a good, preposterous farce)
has gone, and we no longer surrender to the play,
we are merely looking at something made up by the
author. Readers may be commended to the plays of
Ibsen and particularly Rosmersholm for examples
of perfect technique. You may be irritated by his
characters and you may be, occasionally, depressed

THE PLAY 131

by his subjects and his atmosphere; but his manipu-
lation of a subject with an eye to presentation in the
theatre has never been excelled.

"What, never? No, never !" as they say in Pina-
fore. That doesn't mean that he was the greatest of
all dramatists. The greatest of all dramatists, as also
the greatest of all poets and the most understanding
of all men, was undoubtedly William Shakespeare
of whom we know so little that people are perpetually
suggesting fresh members of the Elizabethan House
of Lords as candidates for his throne. There is nothing
in any play which Shakespeare has not done better,
more dexterously, or more dashingly. He knew every
trick: he knew, by sheer, uncanny instinct, a great
many tricks that nobody before him had practised.
He played upon his audiences with every shade of
day and night: nobody was more dexterous than he
with the tolling of bells and the striking of clocks.
But he was hurried; his audiences were uncritical;
and he was never so slipshod as not to be able to get
his .hearers back by something magnificent. The best
constructed play of Shakespeare is probably Coriolanus.
King Lear and As You Like It run it close. Any
modern "play-doctor" (an American phrase) could
improve any of them: he was really very lazy. But
the "play-doctors" might cut out the good with the
bad. They have their rules. You must have action.
You mustn't have long speeches. Shakespeare, when

132 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

at the top of his form, broke all their rules. Witness
the play Richard II. There is very little action in it.
The interest centres in a series of recitations by that
fascinating, though decadent, king. His recitations are
so full of music and of personality that we want him
to go on speaking for ever. All the rules that are
made for common men are broken in this play, and
the ordinary manager would turn it down on the
soliloquies, but it fascinates one, all the same. It
doesn't, in fact, matter how you hold the audience
as long as you do hold it.

But you may hold a contemporary audience and
not hold a later one. Shakespeare would never have
held anybody had he not had a gift for the theatre;
but he would not hold us now had he not had some-
thing over and above that and the same thing applies
to the ancient Greeks. One year, in a competent play,
a joke about the Indian Conference might bring down
the house; or just bring in a dwarf and let somebody
call him Camera, fifty years hence dons will be
writing footnotes explaining who Camera was, just
as, to-day, they write elaborate footnotes explaining
the exhibits at Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair.
Shakespeare had his topical allusions; nobody knows
how many, though they are always arguing about it.
But the reason that he is still the most compelling
dramatist in the world, for all the careless technique
that he mixed up with the consummate technique, is

THE PLAY 133

that his main preoccupation was not with the topical
but with the eternal Take any of the great speches,
and you will find that they will hit you as hard as
they might have hit any of his contemporaries. "To
be or not to be," "To-morrow and to-morrow/'
"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank"
not only are they completely free from the colour of
a fleeting age, not only do they cry across the cen-
turies our common humanity, but they are even
phrased as a poet of our own day might phrase them.
Fashions change and systems alter, but the human
heart does not change.

He wrote in verse mostly. So, it may be observed,
have most of the dramatists (except for a few comedy
writers) whose works have long survived. The point
should be noted. Verse in the theatre is, at the
moment, out of fashion. The reason probably is that
modern poets who write for the theatre think more
about the verse than about the theatre. Shakespeare
wrote great speeches: so will they. Shakespeare used
images: so will they. Tennyson's Queen .Mary, with
its archaic dialogue of citizens, with its great descrip-
tion copied from Shakespeare's description of Cleo-
patra, is a warning; that great poet was thinking, not
of an audience in the theatre, but of the language of
a mighty predecessor. Poetry and the language of
poetry is language of the heart and the imagination
at their highest pitch of excitement will never come

i 3 4 * THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

back to the theatre until the poets realize they are
writing for the theatre and not for the study. On the
other hand, the theatre will never be healthy until
the poets come back to it. But will the managers know
who are the poets ? Probably not !

BIOGRAPHY

THE passion for reading and writing biographies is a
comparatively modern one. Beyond those immortal
short lives of Plutarch's the ancients have left us very
little first-class biographical writing, though a host
of the anecdotes in which they so delighted. They
took, as a rule, more interest in characteristics than
in character: eccentricities make good anecdotes; the
Greeks and Latins, on the whole, lacked our curiosity
as to fine shades of sensibility and motive : they pre-
ferred the dramatic to the analytic. There is one Greek
figure whom we know intimately in his everyday
habits and speech. That is Socrates. Read Plato's
Symposium, read the account of the philosopher's
death, and read one or two of the Dialogues, and
you are left feeling that you know the old man as
well as you know Dr. Johnson. Plato, in a sense, was
as much a dramatist as a philosopher: his happy
accident has led to our priceless possession of a
speaking portrait of the subtlest and most invulnerable
talker who ever lived. There is one other portrait of
a philosopher, or pseudo-philosopher, which is much
less widely familiar. I suppose that if I suggest that
you should read the Life of Apollonius of Tyana

136 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

by Philostratus, many of those who have not had a
classical training may jump to the conclusion that it
is something terrifyingly out-of-the-way and calls for
great erudition in the reader. It is nothing of the sort.
It is one of the most amusing and easily readable
books conceivable. It dates from that period of the
Roman Empire when official traditional religion had
broken down, and society toyed with every sort of
exotic and quack religion, magic, and pseudo-mysti-
cism, and Apollonius of Tyana, a wandering vege-
tarian and wit, who was now with the Egyptian
philosophers, now with the Assyrians, now with the
Indians, was just the sort of figure to appeal to it.
He is a fascinating character: half-genuine, half-
charlatan, picturesque of speech, most impudently
witty, a man who said to emperors and kings imper-
tinent things that nobody else would have dared to
say. There is published by the Oxford Press a quite
perfect translation of the book by the late Professor
Phillimore. Anybody who takes the trouble to get
hold of it will make the acquaintance of a personality
just as amusing as Samuel Butler or Mr. Bernard Shaw,
and having a good deal in common with both of them.
The one other outstanding biographical work from
ancient times is, I suppose,

Augustine, the prime parent of all books of intimate
self-analysis and self-exposure, a work of the most
passionate honesty and noble eloquence. The descent

BIOGRAPHY 137

is straight from that to the Confessions of Rousseau,
to Newman's Apologia, to Amiel's Journal, and to
the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseffdk those frank
self-revelations in which men and women have bared
themselves either in order to justify themselves or
out of vanity.

The medievals were no more addicted to elaborate
biography than the ancients. The chroniclers would
roughly sketch a man's character and appearance and
record a few typical deeds and sayings, but they never
spent years accumulating material about him. It wasn't
wholly, I dare say, that they were more interested in
large events than in individual people, or that they
preferred romance to reality: to some extent, it may
be presumed that the absence of the printing press
and the prevalence of illiteracy made a difference.
Where all copies of books had to be written out by
hand slow in the making and slow in the reading
there was a natural tendency to concentrate on works
with a general appeal. A really hearty modern library
subscriber can devour, or at least skim, a book a day,
which means that he has time to read even incom-
petent lives of unimportant people. Our own age has
honoured the members of Charles IFs harem with
far more elaborate biographies than the medievals ever
compiled for such great figures as Edward the First
and Edward III. Moreover, since printing, reading,
and writing became widespread, materials are much

i 3 8 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

more easily accessible for full biographies. Edward,
the Black Prince, may have made as many speeches
as his present namesake and successor; but there were
no shorthand writers to take them down and no
newspapers to report them. The absence of a postal
system made letters few, and people had not the idea
of hoarding documents because they might be of
interest to posterity. The invention of printing made
a profound difference; so did the Renaissance, which
enormously stimulated the antiquarian and historical
sense. In the Tudor age we have excellent little lives
of Wolsey and Thomas More, and in James the
First's day we begin to get monographs on the
lives of statesmen and even collections of corre-
spondence.

But still the interest is centred on affairs rather than
on personality, and the man of affairs is deemed more
interesting than the man of thought, feeling, or even
action who has no great position in the political
world. We know immeasurably more about the
Burghleys and the Walsinghams than about any of
the poets of the time, who to us, as persons, would
be immeasurably more interesting. Interest in the
analysis of passion and motive was manifested in the
theatre before it affected the historical kind of writing.
It was not until the eighteenth century that the big,
would-be-exhaustive Life in several volumes began
to appear.

BIOGRAPHY 139

Nobody can complain of a shortage of biographies
now. Almost every Victorian or Edwardian politician
who strutted his little hour as Chancellor of the
Duchy of Lancaster or First Commissioner of Works
has duly received his massive tombstone in two or
more volumes. These countless modern large bio-
graphies vary in quality according to the competence
of the authors and the qualities of the subjects. The
best of them all, to my mind, is the Buckle and
Monypenny Disraeli, now obtainable in a two-volume
edition. The writing is excellent. The pages teem with
living people, and the central figure, who combined
the characteristics of the wit and the poet with those
of the statesman (much to the bewilderment of Mr.
Gladstone and millions of other serious people), is
fascinating throughout, and speaks a great deal in his
own vivacious person. Nor are the pages unduly over-
loaded with the dull details of dead political disputes
such as encumber most of these works. I cannot say
as much for Lord Morley's Life of Gladstone^ which
has always seemed to me greatly over-praised, a book
heavy with unimportant detail, ill-proportioned, and
throwing very little illumination upon the very
obscure personality of its hero. We seem in our
own time to have evolved a new system in biography.
If these huge books can be justified at all, they can
be justified as works of reference, as quarries. For a
century laborious "official" biographers have been

i 4 o THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

piling these vast repositories of facts on our groaning
shelves; now a new race of biographers has arisen
who use these things as mines, and produce short
and summary books which aim at giving vivid por-
traits by selecting only salient features. Mr. Lytton
Strachey, with his Eminent Victorians and Queen
Victoria, was the pioneer of the method and its
ablest practitioner thus far. It has its danger. If an
author wishes to behave like an advocate, he can, with
a sufficient bulk of material to select from, demonstrate
almost any dead person, in a short and cunning
biography, to be either very foolish or very wise,
either very crooked or very straight. Nothing can be
more agreeable than Mr. Strachey's concise and witty
portraits and his coloured re-creations of departed
scenes. But, when some imitator having neither wit
nor vision thinks he is vying with Mr. Strachey by
pert cheap scores off the dead, presumptuous famili-
arity with the great, impertinent assumption of insight,
and the piling up of bogus picturesque details, even
the most devastating dullness would come as a relief.
The Strachey infection has spread widely, particularly
in America. I think the worst case I have come across
was a "smart" American Life of Longfellow. Long-
fellow may not have been a great poet, but he was a
scholar and a gentleman, and he certainly did not
deserve to be called Henry all the time by a patronizing
modern puppy with no talents at all. However, Mr.

BIOGRAPHY 141

Guedalla, Mr, Osbert Burdett, and M. Andre Maurois
have used the method very delightfully.

What are the best biographies in English? There
are many charming short Lives: there are Johnson's
Lives of the Poets very entertaining reading; there
are Walton's Lives of Donne and others. "So near
and yet so far" it is a pity that no contemporary
thought of writing a life of Shakespeare, of whom all
we know, personally, is that (according to Ben
Jonson) he was high-spirited at table to such a degree
that he sometimes had to be (by Ben Jonson) sat
upon. I take it that the four best biographies in
English are Boswell's Life of Johnson, Lockhart's
Life of Scott, Forster's Life of Dickens, and Mr. E. V.
Lucas's Life of Charles Lamb. The first three were
written by persons intimate with, and junior to, their
subjects; the last was written, almost a century after
the subject's death, by a devoted admirer who was
gifted with an almost uncanny sympathy with his
hero, and pieced together all the significant letters and
stories so skilfully and revealingly that even a man
who had known Charles Lamb could not have done
it better. If only Mr. Lucas had been in Boswell's
position! Boswell is the greatest biographer in the
language, because he had the finest subject possible
and was so devoted that, after any evening's con-
versation, he went straight home and wrote down all
that he could remember of it. We must be eternally

Mi THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

grateful to him for recording so much of Johnson's
conversation: we are closer to Dr. Johnson, as he
lived and moved and talked, than we are to any other
dead man; even Lockhart's Scott and Forster's Dickens
are dim figures compared with him. Yet there is some
truth in Macaulay's contention that Boswell was a
fool. Often and often in that Life we find that "a
gentleman present" makes an asinine remark and is
crushed by Johnson, and we know that the "gentle-
man" is Boswell. He was so devoted, he so enormously
admired Johnson's powers of repartee, that he deliber-
ately invited crushing remarks in order to go home
and write them down. Johnson, encountered outside
Boswell, is not quite such a bear as he appears in
Boswell. Many of his rudest remarks were made
to Boswell, and Boswell invited them: Johnson, in a
general way, did not talk intolerantly, and he was
especially popular with women, who never can bear
rudeness and find it difficult to pardon slovenliness.
Had Boswell been a little more intelligent, the greatest
of all biographies might have been even greater than
it is. However, we ought not to look a gift horse in
the mouth, and here was an almost grovelling admirer
of a great man recording for our benefit, verbatim ac
literatim, countless remarks made by his hero. I wished,
just now, that Mr. Lucas had been in BoswelPs place.
Ought I not rather to have wished that alioswell had
been a companion of Shakespeare's ? Imagine it ! There

BIOGRAPHY 143

was a Mermaid Tavern. We know from a poet of the
day that entracing tales were told there and jests
made that "set the table in a roar"; but we have none
of the tales and none of the jests. The Elizabethans
were very trying people. They took an immense
interest in the past, but they never thought of
posterity. That, perhaps, is an exaggeration.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

wrote Shakespeare; and that was not the only passage
in which he expressed his confidence in the durability
of his verse. But it never seemed to occur to him, or
to his poetical contemporaries, that posterity might
like to know something about their personalities, apart
from their works; and the result is that the biographers
of Shakespeare, painfully delving in the Record Office,
present us with the picture of a man chiefly occupied
with loans and mortgages which is absurd.

I may, in conclusion, since we are supposed to be
concerned with the enjoyment of what we have and
not with lamentations over what we have not, recom-
mend one or two biographies which I have enjoyed
and which many have not. I suppose it is hardly
necessary to mention the Father and Son of the late
Sir Edmund Gosse, but his short Life of Swinburne
is a model biography/ Trelawny's autobiographical
Adventures of a Younger Son is much less well known:

i 4 4 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

half of it lies, but what glorious lies ! Where I do feel
sure that I am recommending something neglected is
when I mention Burdy's Life of Skelton, which the
Oxford Press reprinted some years ago. To say that
it is a short life of an eighteenth-century Irish parson
is inadequate. But I can truly say that anyone who
can enjoy Boswell could enjoy Burdy, and anyone
who can love Dr. Johnson could love Dr. Skelton.

VI
CRITICISM

"CRITICISM": it is simply a derivation from a Greek
word and means "judgment" or, better still perhaps,
"judging."

The first thing that should be realized about critics
is that there are all sorts of them. I frankly confess
that the sort that I most value are those who have
the ability to perceive, amongst the welter of bad and
ephemeral and ephemerally good books, those which
will have some sort of permanent appeal. Of such
was Leigh Hunt. He never said anything very impor-
tant about any book or author, but he had the
instinctive feeling for the good: he said, "In the house
of poetry are many mansions"; he had no bias, and,
so far as I am aware, he never missed a good thing
though occasionally he may have deplored the fact
that some obviously great author's opinions did not
agree with his own.

There is a saying that "the Critics are never right."
This is a half-truth. There are always some critics
who are right. Those who write biographies of great
writers and delve abou| for early reviews of their first
books can usually find preposterous commentaries on
them. "Truly we are th children, and wisdom was

Flowers of Speech K

i 4 6 THE ENJOYMENT QF LITERATURE

born with us" : it is very refreshing to think that our
ancestors made great mistakes which we should not
have made ourselves. Critics are much* the same in
all ages. Mistakes are being made at this moment by
persons with great reputations. A hundred years hence
the critics of our day will look just as foolish as the
critics of a hundred years ago do to us. All the
fashionable authors will have disappeared, or almost
all; all the exciting novelties will have become old,
and exploded, eccentricities. One more generation of
critics will be derided as persons who gloated over
the lead and the silver and missed the gold.

Critics quarrel amongst themselves to-day. They
would not quarrel so much if they would only realize
that they approach their subjects from all sorts of
different aspects and are fulfilling all kinds of different
functions. The most numerous class of practising
critics to-day are the reviewers iij the daily and
weekly papers. Now, what is their job, or what are
their jobs? At least one, and at most two. At least,
since the book is a new book and nobody knows
anything about it, their job jis to expose the nature
of the book, indicate the talents of the author, and,
by copious and representative quotation, show enough
of the author's style and habit of mind as to indicate
to the reader whether he or she would like the book.
And, at most, it is their business to convey at once
the topical appeal of a book and it prospects of a

CRITICISM 147

permanent appeal. Those who certainly do no job at
all are those who air their own theories all the time
without remembering the hungry sheep who look up
and are not fed. It is a very common fault. Often and
often I see quite long reviews of new volumes of
verse even (in which the matter of execution must
be paramount) containing not a single quotation. The
job of a reviewer of contemporary work, particularly
verse, is to select the most characteristic passages,
good or bad, and write his review round them; not
to start some argument of his own and then find
passages to illustrate it. The late John Freeman, a
very good poet and an excellent critic, said that all
you could say about anything in the last resort was,
"This is good," or "This is bad."

If that were so, most critics would be out of work.
For most critics practising critics are more occu-
pied with commenting on works whose goodness or
badness has long ago been determined than they are
with committing themselves to opinions about the
new. There are the academic and editorial critics: the
people who take works (as it might be the works of
Shakespeare) which are indubitably established as
classics and write incidental notes about them. Many
of the English literature professors (though by no
means all) come into # this class: they know nothing
about contemporary literature, and, if they did turn
their attention to it, they would probably fall into

i 4 8 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

the grossest errors, either because of a propensity for
the derivative thing which reminded them of the
masterpieces of the past, or because of some kink
about subject or meaning, or bias for or against some
explicit or implicit doctrine in the author.

And there are the philosophic, historical, and
scientific critics. These are interested in ideas: in the
evolution of theories about this world and the next,
in the relation between the works of great writers
(poets being the special victims) and the trend of
events and opinions in their times, in the reflections,
in the works of the masters, of actual material history.
These people are very often very informative. They
can tell us far more about Milton's spiritual ancestry
than Milton ever knew; far more about the evolution
of the sonnet than Shakespeare ever knew; far more
about the influence of Rousseau on Wordsworth and
Shelley than either of those poets were ever aware of.
Critics of this historical and philosophic kind are not
to be underrated: there is very great interest in the
development and conflict of human ideas, religious
and political, and the poets are very sensitive recorders.
But it is possible to be a tenth-rate author and have
very sound, or at least very interesting, ideas; I dare
say Martin Tupper was orthodox and sensible to a
degree. But it is* also possible tp be a first-rate writer
and have totally impracticable Ideas, or none, very
definitely, at all. It is also possible not to know what

CRITICISM 149

your ideas are: books have been written about the
religion of Tennyson and the religion of Browning
which would have told those two gentlemen a great
deal that they did not know before.

My advice to anyone who reads books is this: do
not be frightened by critics or their reputations. Great
critics are rare: Dryden, Johnson, and Arnold are
amongst the number. Discerning critics of contem-
porary literature are rarer still: they exist, in some
numbers, in private life, but there is never any reason
to suppose that the majority of them will both wish
to pursue the practice of journalism and have the
knack of it. The ordinary newspaper, in this age, as
in every other age in which there were newspapers,
demands readability first; and your wit and your
phrase-maker is very often a bad judge of literature,
or, if not a bad judge, cares much more for his
witticisms and his phrases than he does for truth.
Test your man, in the papers, by your own reactions;
decide whether you think about the books he recom-
mends what he thinks; and if you feel, on mature
consideration, that you are right and he is wrong,
throw him over ! The mere fact that a man is allowed
to sign columns in a newspaper does not necessarily
mean that he is a wiser judge of literature than his
fellows: it may merely mean that he is pushing, or
knows people, or has a gift of flashy phraseology that
makes hirii widely read.

150 THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE

I think that most of the best critics I have known
have never published a line; and that most of that
most have been timid about their own opinions. For
myself, though I can read my Wallace and my
Oppenheim with the rest of them, I confess that I
am chiefly interested in the literature which I think
may last. Not for ever, perhaps. What is ever? They
say that after certain millions of years the earth will
go cold, and all our strivings, and all our dreams, the
League of Nations, the vine, the nightingale, the rose,
will be occluded by deep drifts of final snow. But we
have to take these things relatively. By common
consent of mankind those things are great which are
still readable after hundreds of years; and, for myself,
I am content to regard as the best of critics the man
who can single out from the welter of contemporary
books those few which, long years after we are all
dead, will still appeal to that minority of men and
women who are content to find consolation and
refreshment in the works of the dead. That angle and
that approach are not common; those who take that
angle and that approach, realizing that this year's
fashion in books is like this year's fashion in hats,
that fleeting innovations of technique matter not at
all when related to the eternal movements of the
heart, that the last triumphs of art are simple and not
complicated, and that, in the last resort, all human life
(whatever its mechanical appurtenances) is limited by

CRITICISM i 5I

the same conditions and surrounded by the same
mysteries, read books in the only way possible to a
genuine critic or judge. But, over and above all that
sense, they must have a feeling for the accuracy of
words, and an ear for music which conveys more
than any words can ever convey. Can it be wondered
at that critics are few ?

However, as a professional and a fallible critic, I
ask for pardon for what mistakes I have made, both
of commission and of omission. We have our bright
moments; occasionally we are drugged by the great
spate of books which pours from the press; some-
times, relieved by the symptoms of intelligence in a
book, we over-praise; sometimes, dulled by drudgery,
we under-praise. The infallible critic would be in-
human.

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