Books in general

By Solomon Eagle

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Title: Books in general

Author: Solomon Eagle

Release date: June 21, 2026 [eBook #78901]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS IN GENERAL ***

Books in General

_BOOKS OF ESSAYS_

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
_by Carl Van Vechten_

MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS
_by Carl Van Vechten_

A BOOK OF CALUMNY
_by H. L. Mencken_

A BOOK OF PREFACES
_by H. L. Mencken_

PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES
_by H. L. Mencken_

PAVANNES AND DIVISIONS
_by Ezra Pound_

ALFRED A. KNOPF, _Publisher_

Books in General

By Solomon Eagle

[Illustration]

Alfred A Knopf
New York Mcmxix

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_ARTURO WAUGH_

Preface

These papers are selections from a series contributed weekly, without
intermission, to the _New Statesman_ since April 1913. I do not feel that
the responsibility for reprinting them rests on my shoulders; I trust
that where it does rest it will rest lightly. I shall have done all I
hope to do if I have produced the sort of book that one reads in, without
tedium, for ten minutes before one goes to sleep.

The pseudonym “Solomon Eagle,” I may explain, is not intended to posit
any claim to unusual wisdom or abnormally keen sight. The original bearer
of the name was a poor maniac who, during the Great Plague of London,
used to run naked through the street, with a pan of coals of fire on his
head, crying “Repent, repent.”

S. E.

Contents

Who’s Who, 13

Political Songs, 19

An Oriental on Albert the Good, 25

Epigrams, 31

An Eminent Baconian, 37

The Beauties of Badness, 42

More Badness, 54

A Mystery Solved, 58

Carrying the Alliance too far, 60

May 1914, 63

May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition, 69

The Mantle of Sir Edwin, 75

“The Cattle of the Boyne,” 81

August 1914, 83

Mrs. Barclay sees it through, 88

A Topic of Standing Interest, 94

Was Cromwell an Alligator?, 99

The Depressed Philanthropist, 105

A Polyphloisboisterous Critic, 111

“Another Century, and then ...,” 115

Herrick, 121

The Muse in Liquor, 127

£5 Misspent, 133

Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore, 137

Moving a Library, 143

Table-Talk and Jest Books, 146

Stephen Phillips, 150

Gray and Horace Walpole, 155

A Horrible Bookseller, 161

The Troubles of a Catholic, 166

The Bible as Raw Material, 168

How to avoid Bad English, 172

Woodland Creatures, 177

Other People’s Books, 183

Peacock, 187

Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness, 189

Henry James’s Obscurity, 195

The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade, 201

Music-Hall Songs, 207

More Music-Hall Songs, 213

Utopias, 218

Charles II in English Verse, 224

The Most Durable Books, 229

The Worst Style in the World, 234

The Reconstruction of Orthography, 240

Mr. James Joyce, 245

Tennessee, 251

Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George, 254

Stranded, 259

Mr. Ralph Hodgson, 264

Double Misprints, 268

The History of Earl Pumbles, 270

On Destroying Books, 276

Who’s Who

Works of reference are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil’s
Hell in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to
escape from. Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with
it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass
and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain embedded until
sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the
Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere—things in
which normally he does not take the faintest interest. One may take up a
volume after lunch in order to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe;
but one does not put it down when one has satisfied one’s curiosity. One
turns over a few pages and becomes absorbed in the career of Napoleon.
Thence one drifts to the article on Napier, which sends one to that on
Logarithms in another volume; and when night closes in and (as we used to
construe it) sleep brings rest to weary mortals, one still sits in one’s
chair, bending heavy-eyed over the book, with a dozen pressing duties
left undone and the last post missed. By that time one has reached,
perhaps, the abnormally complex diagrams which illustrate the article on
Metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology—of which science, the reader
will remember, Voltaire was the father and Herr Doktor Pangloss the first
professor.

_Who’s Who_ takes me in the same way. Ordinarily I have no particular
thirst for it. I should not dream of carrying it about in my waistcoat
pocket for perusal on the Underground Railway. But once I have allowed
myself to open it, I am a slave to it for hours. This has just happened
to me with the new volume, upon which I have wasted a valuable afternoon.
I began by looking up a man’s address; I then read the compressed
life-story of the gentleman next above him (a major-general), wondering,
somewhat idly, whether they read of each other’s performances and whether
either of them resented the possession by the other of a similar, and
unusual, surname. Then I was in the thick of it. There was nothing
especially exciting about most of the information that met my eye.
Generally speaking, the biographies were of people of whom I had never
previously heard, and whose doubtlessly reputable achievements had been
recorded in spheres as unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon.
What can it mean to me that Mr. J. Fitztimmins Gubb worked for five
years under Schmitt at Magdeburg and is now demonstrator in Comparative
Obstetrics at the Robson Institute? Or that the Bishop of the Cocos
Islands has been five times married and was educated at King Edward
VI Grammar School, Chipping Chester, and Pembroke College, Oxford? Yet
I read of some six or seven hundred such, and found it as difficult to
refrain from “Just one more” as would a wealthy dipsomaniac just parting
from an old friend in a public-house at five minutes before closing time.
I cannot easily account for the attraction. Something, I suppose, may
be put down to the fact that character comes out in a man’s account,
however bald, of himself; and that the _Who’s Who_ autobiographies, in
spite of their compression, exhibit many and diverse interesting traits
of character. But mainly, I think, it must be that we most of us have
collector’s mania in some form or another, and that one cannot resist the
temptation of collecting facts even when they are so irrelevant and of
so little importance to one that they slip through one’s fingers as soon
as one has gathered them. For I am sure that I do not know now whether
I have got the number of the Bishop’s wives right, or the sites of his
education, or even the name of his diocese.

I suppose that no one ever tells an untruth in _Who’s Who_. There is not
much scope for it, though it is conceivable that there may have been
exaggerations of the truth. The compilers are extremely capable; and the
contributors seem to be as uniform in their veracity as they are various
in their loquacity. Only in rare circumstances could any one hope to
impose on _Who’s Who_ without very rapid detection. An opportunity of
that nature did once occur to me. There is a compilation called the
_American Who’s Who_, published (if I remember correctly) in Chicago.
By some curious accident, which I have never been able to explain, its
conductors got hold of my name—I don’t mean “Eagle,” but the other. By
some accident more curious still they got the impression that I was an
American settled in London; and with admirable enterprise they sent
me, for two or three years in succession, yellow forms on which I was
requested to inscribe my age, antecedents, and accomplishments. Each year
I was dazzled by the idea of a joke which, I felt, would immensely amuse
me, and which could (so the Devil argued) hurt nobody. On each occasion I
filled the form exhaustively. I put down my name and address correctly;
but beyond that not a word of truth did I tell. I invented for myself a
career, a career not imposing enough to arouse suspicions, but far more
picturesque than my actual career has been. I described my parents as
being Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, of St. Louis, Mo. I copied out of an
American minor poet’s autobiographical preface a list of academies at
which I had been educated; and then I launched out.

I had, I stated, left America for Europe at the age of nineteen. I had
written (I was cunning enough to put down the names of one or two of
my actual works) such and such books, including a Manual (for Schools)
on Political Economy and a small brochure on Polycarp. I had travelled
over four continents; my recreations were “all forms of sport, especially
big-game hunting”; I had gone through the Balkan War as a volunteer with
the Greek Army; and I possessed several decorations, including the Blue
Boar of Rumania, the St. Miguel and All Angels of Portugal, and the
fourth class of the Turkish Medjidie. Notice the fourth class; no common
liar would have thought of so convincingly modest a claim as that. Each
year, as I say, I lived laborious days in the delineation of an imaginary
pedigree and a supposititious career. Then I broke down. There was no
risk of punishment attached, and, I take it, small risk of discovery.
But my softer self began telling me that it was a scandalous thing to
hoax foreigners; that the trick was unworthy of an Englishman, or,
indeed, an adult of any nationality, down to the most backward of Nicobar
Islanders; and that the only fitting punishment for a person addicted to
such practices would be to have pins put upon his chair by his children
or his back chalked by infants in the street. I weakened and broke;
sentiment overcame reason; my heart gained the victory over my head. And
each year, with reluctant deliberation, I tore up the well-filled sheet
and destroyed again my other self, my American self, the romantic self
who had done the things I had never done, who had stalked the bear in
the snowy fastnesses of the Caucasus and won the gratitude of exotic
potentates. The forms have stopped coming now; but the memory of my
vision still burns with a melancholy yet tender brightness; and those
mythical progenitors, Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, are to me all that his
Dream Children were to Charles Lamb.

Political Songs

If one goes up a mountain and surveys all the kingdoms of the world one
sees a good many horrible things. Few of them are worse, in their way,
than the modern political song. There have been bad political songs
in all ages. Cæsar’s soldiers used to sing some which were not merely
uninspiring but irrelevant, and _Lilli Burlero_ (or _Lillibulero_)
itself was no great shakes as a poem although its tune had a swing.
But there have never been any to equal in badness the kind of songs
that has been generated by the British party system. The only modern
politicians who ever manage to generate a good song are the Socialists.
Socialist song-books, in spite of their plenitude of hack phrases about
chains and freedom’s dawn, always have a good deal of tolerable poetry
in them. William Morris’s political songs are excellent, and some of
the modern foreign Socialist songs are really worthy expressions of the
movement. When their words are not good their tunes are: witness the
_Internationale_ and that stirring Italian labour song that is now, I
believe, prohibited by King Victor’s Government. But the kind of songs
that our good Liberals and Conservatives sing at their meetings are
gruesome.

I hold in my hand—as the saying goes—the _Liberal Song Sheet_ now being
used at big party meetings. One or two of the more facetious ditties show
some ingenuity, and there is a certain go about the first line of “Stamp,
stamp, stamp upon Protection”; but for the rest the only song the writer
of which would not get a birching in any properly constituted society is
Ebenezer Elliott’s _God Save the People_, which is generations old. “Let
who will make a nation’s laws as long as I make its songs,” said some
writer. One might add: “Let who will make a nation’s songs as long as
they are not done by the people who make its laws.” Caucus-provided laws
may be all right, but caucus-provided songs, written by party agents and
under-secretaries, are not successful.

The chief characteristic of the Liberal songs, apart from their metrical
and linguistic peculiarities, is their insistence upon incongruous
military image. Imagine Mr. Asquith donning bright armour and taking part
in the incidents depicted in these verses—to the tune of _Who will o’er
the Downs?_

_Our leaders, tried and trusted men,_
_Still love the ancient faith,_
_To Freedom and to Conscience true_
_In danger and in death._
_And they have donned their armour bright,_
_Their courage all aglow,_
_To lead the toilers of the land_
_Against the Tory foe._

_For years we’ve suffered pain and loss,_
_By privilege oppressed;_
_Our birthright has been filched from us_
_And left us sore distress’d._
_But now our leaders—trusted, tried—_
_Are keen to strike a blow,_
_And wrest our stolen acres from_
_The proud, disdainful foe._

It is not my business to discuss the justness of the judgments here
implied, but what on earth is the point of suggesting that Mr. Asquith,
Mr. George, Mr. Lulu Harcourt, Lord Haldane, and so on, are true “in
danger and in death”? They may have come unscathed through the fire of
Suffragette dog-whips, but nobody calls them to die for disestablishment.
There is here an utter lack of reality, a lack that must prevent these
songs from moving anybody to action, as good songs should do. They are as
conventionally false as the cheapest kind of leading article.

Here are some more extracts from the same source:

_We defend the right we won in ages past;_
_We demand the measures by the Commons passed,_
_Let no Lords presume to wreck the work at last,_
_For we go marching on._
_Freedom for our trade and nation_
_From all insolent vexation._
_For democracy’s salvation_
_We all go marching on._

_Peers and Tories may to wreck the work unite,_
_Britain’s sons for Britain’s freedom still shall fight;_
_None shall hinder us till triumph is in sight,_
_As we go marching on._

_Then up to the sky with your Hip-hip-Hooray!_
_For the unbeaten leader, who leads us to-day._
_For ASQUITH—to-day, after long, weary years,_
_Our victorious Captain o’er Tories and Peers._
_Then cheer with a will for the great deed is done;_
_Attacking the Veto, we’ve fought and we’ve won;_
_Henceforward these islands of ours are to be_
_Not the Land of the Peers but the Land of the Free._

_Long, long in shameful slavery_
_The emerald isle hath lain,_
_The victim of past knavery,_
_And Unionist disdain._
_But Freedom’s day is coming—_
_See how the foemen flee!_
_Home Rule is just_
_And come it must_
_To set old Ireland free!_

_One blow will end the matter!_
_Strike, strike it with a will!_
_The enemy we’ll scatter_
_And quickly pass our Bill._
_Our leaders are determined,_
_True followers are we,_
_Our arms are strong_
_To right the wrong_
_And set old Ireland free._

A curious thing is that almost universally in these songs the virtues
and actions of the party leaders get almost as much attention as the
political questions at issue. This is the mark of the caucus.

It is a very difficult thing to write a good propagandist song at all.
A first-rate tune will often cover up the most prosaic words, but
generally speaking political songs split on the rock of the specific.
It is the greatest mistake to expect to stir people with verses dealing
with a particular Bill. The spirit of freedom, the spirit of revolt, the
passion of love, or the passion of hate, may make good songs, but it is a
hopeless task to try to make poetry out of the taxation of land values or
an import duty on corn. A good Socialist song may deal with brotherhood
or service, but it cannot deal with “the nationalization of the means
of production, distribution, or exchange.” One should avoid the kind of
concrete details that produce a sense of anticlimax, and the kind of
personalities that sound false. The spirit of Liberty may appropriately
be depicted in a helmet, but it is silly to conjure up a picture of Mr.
Asquith with a suit of armour over his frock-coat. Even the fact that
a thing is glaringly true does not necessarily make it suitable for
metrical statement. It is true that there is an insufficient supply of
sanatoria and that the thought profoundly moves many people. But a song
emphasizing the fact must be a failure. Modern political songwriters fail
(1) because they are usually people who cannot write verse at all, (2)
because they try to make their songs like extra-rhetorical speeches or
articles. Probably the next Liberal song will deal with the ravages of
pheasants.

An Oriental on Albert the Good

The award of the Nobel Prize to Mr. Rabindranath Tagore is generally
approved. I do not entirely agree with those who think that Mr. Tagore’s
poems are masterpieces in English; for I find his English poetical
prose monotonous and without rhythmical beauty, although, in a sense,
immaculate. But those who know the Indian originals say that they are
really great, and that they have got a hold on the general population
unprecedented for centuries past.

I have just acquired a book by an Indian poet who was not so wise in his
choice of subjects as is Mr. Tagore. The book is an English version (made
in 1864 by the tutor of Sir J. Jeejeebhoy’s sons, and published by the
Bombay Education Society) of an Epic on the Prince Consort by the Parsee
poet “Munsookh.” The poem is enlivening if not inspiring.

It opens with the usual Oriental invocation to Heaven, ending “With
that remembrance alone will I fill the cup of my heart and sing new and
entertaining stories.” It then plunges straight _in medias res_ with a
first canto, “On the birth of Prince Albert, his education and arrival
at mature years; and his wish to marry Victoria.”

“There is a country of the world called Germany, the eminence
of which is known everywhere. In its interior is a large
district called the Dukedom of Gotha, about thirty-seven miles
in area, and containing about one hundred and fifty thousand
inhabitants. The air of this district is pleasant, dry, and
cool; and the water refreshing and pure. The land is good and
very fertile, and every article of food and clothing is cheap
there. In its neighbourhood is the city of Coburg, where the
richest blessings of Providence display themselves, near which
flows the river Itz, and where is a magnificent ducal castle,
having the appropriate name of Rosina, with a garden entirely
surrounding it. Here the birth of Albert took place.”

Prince Albert grew up wise and studious, and at last his preceptor
said to him: “My accomplished pupil, this is the one hope of my soul,
that thou make a hearty effort to be united to the worthy heiress
of the Kingdom of England, and if thou do this, thou wilt not be
disappointed.... Put in action therefore the effective dagger of
contrivance; engraft speedily the plant of love ... lose not thy time,
for if thou do thou wilt be considered a fool.”

Queen Victoria’s portrait was sent to Albert, the bearer telling him
that he was searching the world for a worthy, loving, and religious
prince. “Thou hast administered the medicine for my secret pain,” was the
reply, and the Prince wrote a letter acknowledging the present. “When I
would write thee a letter,” he said, “the water of my eyes flows from my
pen instead of the black ink.... In my feeling of love for thee I am mad:
I am a moth flying around a candle.... Though I swim always in a flood
of tears, my body is burning to a cinder.” When Victoria’s mother heard
about this she was glad, but said that “the hearts of the English people
are intoxicated with haughtiness; they despise a stranger and a foreigner
... nor will they consider it honourable that thou should be united in
love to a child of Germany.” Various letters passed, but Albert’s father
was astonished at his rashness. “Foolish boy, heretofore engrossed in
eating, drinking, and learning. Where didst thou get this information and
these notions?... A nation proud and haughty like the English will think
thee thoroughly mad.” But letters from England convinced the Duke; he
admonished his son as to his future behaviour; and the party sailed for
the port of London, where “Victoria immediately went upon the terrace.”
The lovers met and sang, and the Prince returned home to complete his
studies. “A little time after this occurrence the Queen again remembered
Albert; she caused a letter, official, and according to rule, to be
written to his father.”

“Albert’s father prepared himself at once, taking necessary provisions,
furniture, and money. Having sat in a boat Prince Albert went forward
accompanied by his family. The gallant vessel floated down the stream,
and did not leave her track on the way. From a distance she appeared
like an alligator, or like the moon of the second day sailing through
the heavens, or like a tree growing in the midst of deep waters, casting
its shadows as it moved in a hundred directions; or she was like a
horse leaping without feet, and bound only to the surface of the water,
so swift and lofty of mien that the sun from afar uttered a shout of
approbation. As a lover weeps on account of separation from his beloved,
so the ship beating her breast, filled her skirts with water. She
sometimes appeared from her motion tired and weary, and the bubbles about
her seemed like blisters on the feet. In body she was a strong negress,
but in speed lively; in her womb were hundreds of children, yet did she
never bear.”

“Albert thought the waves were like an infuriated elephant,” but he
arrived safely, and the marriage was celebrated amid general rejoicings.

“The voice of triumph arose from every side with guns and bells and
bands of music; in every house, too, arose the heart-charming sounds of
cornets, flutes, harps, pianos, and singing of various sorts; cannons
boomed from every fort—one making a whirring noise, another a noise
like thunder.... So pure became the waters of the Thames that one could
see in them the image even of the soul of his body. It was not a river,
but as it were a flower garden; and the bodies of the fishes glittered
like rose-leaves. Everywhere were clusters of variously decked boats;
the vessels were as shaking mountains, which made graceful motions like
peacocks coquetting in the garden of Paradise.”

A great banquet followed, and when “the reign of wine” was finished
the music began. “Trombones sounded so impressively that letters were
imprinted upon the face of the air.” Then came the dancing. “What shall
I say of the Mendozas and Polkas? for the philosophic and the pious lost
their peace of mind through them.... The Polka was kept up with such zest
and excitement that there was a stir among the angels of heaven.... In
short, the ball was gracefulness itself which made the stars bite their
own bodies with jealousy.” The dead rose up from the ground enamoured
of the dancing, and the lamps put their hands over their eyes. The
festivities over the royal pair retired and sang to each other.

Next year a princess was born, and all England was merry. Other children
followed, and for twenty years the royal pair lived in happiness. In 1843
the Queen and the Prince revisited his native country in a ship furious
as a leopard, that broke through hundreds of whales. Home awoke tender
thoughts in the Prince. “Collecting himself he sang” a chant comparing
himself to Joseph, and his bride to Zuleika—which indicates a somewhat
different view of the Potiphar’s wife episode from that prevalent in
Occidental circles. The rest of the work is mainly taken up with the
Great Exhibition, the Prince’s death, and numerous maxims for the use of
his son, such as:

“King must keep entirely aloof from several hurtful things as
... chess.

“A king’s country is like a beautiful woman, and the merchants
of that country are, as it were, the precious jewels and
ornaments of that woman; and the more these jewels and
ornaments are, the more heart-charming and beautiful she looks.”

This last aphorism is disputable.

Epigrams

Any one who reads Mr. R. N. Leonard’s charming little anthology of
English epigrams in the Oxford Garlands Series will regret that the
practice of writing poetical epigrams has died out. Until the Victorian
age almost all professional writers, as well as many amateurs, tried
their hands at epigram. If you had anything especially offensive to say
about any one—and especially about politicians, doctors, and ladies
unduly addicted to cosmetics—it was the natural thing to put it into a
couplet or a quatrain. Ministers and Privy Councillors used to compose
epigrams about each other; but who can imagine Sir Henry Dalziel writing
witty quatrains about Sir Alfred Mond, or _vice versa_? Why the habit has
died out I don’t profess to say. There may be some significance in the
fact that the great age of epigrams was the eighteenth century—the prose
age _par excellence_. There is probably more in the decay of knowledge
of Greek and Latin. When almost every educated man was familiar with the
Greek Anthology and the works of Martial—whence all kinds of epigrams,
elegiac, amatory, and satirical, descend—it was perhaps natural that the
temptation to continue the good work should be generally felt. It may
even be that a form so small is incapable of infinite variety and grows
exhausted. Johnson wrote a ludicrous burlesque epigram—

_If the man who turnips cries_
_Cry not when his father dies,_
_’Tis a proof that he had rather_
_Have a turnip than his father._

—and there is undoubtedly sound criticism in it. After a certain time the
making of epigrams may proceed almost on a formula. At all events, the
decline of the epigram is obvious. The well-meant effusions which the
late Sir Wilfrid Lawson used to waft across the benches of the House of
Commons were scarcely equal to the old level of our political quips; it
is very rarely that a tolerable metrical epigram appears in the Press;
and the poets have almost all abandoned the habit of attempting to get
their thoughts into so small a compass. The custom of composing epigrams
for private albums is virtually extinct. Every schoolgirl writes in every
other schoolgirl’s album that there is nothing Original in her excepting
Original Sin; and even that not very splendid _mot_ was constructed by
Thomas Campbell nearly a hundred years ago. The rest is silence.

The greater number of our epigrams are satirical, and Mr. Lennard’s
selection is mainly composed of these verses with stings in their tails.
One of the most taking of these is A. Evans’s on a Fat Man:

_When Tadlow walks the streets, the paviours cry_
_“God bless you, sir!” and lay their rammers by._

But that, perhaps, is not really stinging; if Mr. Tadlow was
good-tempered, he must have liked it himself. Good couplets like these
are few, but Coleridge’s on the Swan-Song is one:

_Swans sing before they die—’twere no bad thing_
_Should certain persons die before they sing._

The most brutal epigrams we have are Byron’s on Castlereagh’s suicide,
after that statesman had cut his throat. These are not very good, but
Mr. Lennard gives them; and, in fact, almost every famous epigram in the
language. He classifies them under headings: “Political,” “Professional
and Trading,” “Amatory,” and so on. Of the Literary epigrams one of the
best is Bishop Stubbs’s on two of his nineteenth-century contemporaries:

_Froude informs the Scottish youth_
_That parsons do not care for truth._
_The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries_
_History is a pack of lies._

_What cause for judgments so malign?_
_A brief reflection solves the mystery—_
_Froude believes Kingsley a divine,_
_And Kingsley goes to Froude for history._

Lord Erskine’s on Scott’s Waterloo Poem is good:

_On Waterloo’s ensanguined plain_
_Lie tens of thousands of the slain,_
_But none, by sabre or by shot,_
_Fell half so flat as Walter Scott._

Theodore Hook’s epigram suggesting that it would be impossible to find a
reader who would pay for the binding of _Prometheus Unbound_ now falls as
flat as Scott, owing to the utter falsification of the prophecy.

Mr. Lennard gives a fair number of epitaphs, including Evans’s well-known
one on Vanbrugh and Gay’s even better-known one on himself. But I don’t
think we have in English an epitaph so delightful as that written for his
own tomb by the obscene French poet Piron:

_Ci-gît Piron_
_Qui ne fut rien,_
_Pas même_
_Académicien._

Landor’s “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” however,
could not be surpassed by any serious epitaph. From Landor Mr. Lennard
has naturally had to draw freely for his more serious sections. Landor
came nearer than any English writers to rivalling the feats of the best
Greek epigrammatists. Many people would say that his _Dirce_ is the most
beautiful epigram in the language.

Mr. Lennard’s selection is, as I have said, a very good one. The only old
one I miss is Richard Bentley’s on German scholarship:

_The Germans in Greek_
_Are sadly to seek;_
_Not one in five score,_
_But ninety-nine more._
_All, all except Hermann—_
_And Hermann’s a German._

The omission is the stranger in that Landor’s greatly inferior epigram
on Germans is included. About the longest poem admitted is Clough’s
revised version of the Ten Commandments: it is flat in places, but
contains one famous couplet. Only when he comes to the moderns might
Mr. Lennard have cast his net wider. Browning, who wrote some neat
versicles, is unrepresented; and so is Mr. Watson, who, in his earlier
days, wrote epigrams, some of which, if not masterpieces, were as good
as some of Mr. Lennard’s old ones. And it would have been worth while to
collect a few of the miscellaneous modern ones that float about. There
are Limericks—and some Limericks will satisfy the narrowest definition
of an epigram—which would be worth preserving; and then there are odd
fragments like the effort alleged to have been written on the blackboard
by a Cheltenham schoolgirl:

_Miss Buss and Miss Beale_
_Cupid’s darts do not feel._
_How different from us_
_Miss Beale and Miss Buss._

Tolerable modern epigrams are so few that it would be worth while saving
all there are. Unfortunately the pleasantest personal ones that one
hears privately, though they would have been printed in a franker day,
must mostly remain unprinted in an age when direct satire is considered
ungentlemanly, and the law of libel is so easily invoked. I remember Mr.
——’s epigram on Lady —— and Mr. ——’s on Sir —— ——. Mr. Lennard cannot be
expected to publish these.

An Eminent Baconian

A very curious chapter in the history of the Bacon-Shakespeare
controversy closes with the death of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence. Amid
all the strange multitude of retired judges, lawyers, astrologers, and
American ladies who have championed the cause of Lord Verulam there has
been no figure more singular than that of this affluent old ex-M.P., who,
after a lifetime spent in business, platform speaking, and the study of
modern mechanical improvements, suddenly plunged into the fight with
unprecedented enthusiasm and methods of argument never equalled in their
singularity. Setting out with the conviction that Shakespeare could not
possibly have written the plays, and that Bacon was the only man who
could have, Sir Edwin became so obsessed with the subject that he found
proofs of his contention everywhere, and gradually came to the conclusion
that Bacon wrote almost all the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature that
is worth reading. We have heard of the devout mystic who sees “every
common bush afire with God”: to Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence every common
bush was afire with Bacon. His outlook being of this character, it is
scarcely to be wondered at that his methods of reasoning and of research
were most surprising.

Most people who read his pamphlet, _The Shakespeare Myth_, must have
been astounded by the _naïveté_ of some of the “proofs” there contained.
The fact that Bacon was called Bacon—a name so easily interchangeable
with pig, hog, and rasher—was a great help; for where the application of
ciphers did not obtain one word it might obtain another. Bacon, according
to Sir Edwin, must have been at least as preoccupied with ensuring his
identification by posterity as with the writing of good verse, for he
would take great pains to work in such a word as “hang-hog,” or to
make three consecutive lines begin with words—such as Pompey, In, and
Got—out of the initials of which could be constructed the appellation
“pig.” Everything was pork that came to Sir Edwin’s net, and he would
by tortuous ratiocination get evidence from the most seemingly innocent
contemporary English and foreign engravings. For there was a secret
brotherhood at work carrying on the Baconian tradition, and the artist
who gave the portrait of Shakespeare two left sleeves (the confirmation
of this was, I think, obtained from the editor of the _Tailor & Cutter_)
had a subtle and profound intention. Sir Edwin collected a very large
library in connexion with his work, and the study of it was his passion;
but, save industry, he had none of the qualifications for his task.

I myself obtained in a strange way an amusing insight into his looseness
of procedure. He had been writing letters maintaining his thesis in a
contemporary weekly. Wondering whether he could be hoaxed, I sent to
the paper a letter over what might have seemed, to a man with any real
detective faculty, the suspicious signature “P. O. R. Ker.” In this
letter I called Sir Edwin’s attention to a quotation (which I had myself
invented and written in Elizabethanese) which I ascribed to one of the
best-known works of Greene. My “quotation” (I forget its wording, but
it contained phrases about “Shakescene” and “the semblance of a hogg”)
made it perfectly clear that Shakespeare was merely Bacon’s dummy. Any
man with the slightest qualifications for his work would have looked up
Greene for reference—and would not have found it. Not so Sir Edwin. He
wrote in at once (the editor, in order to spare his feelings, did not
print the communication) to say that the fact that Mr. Ker’s important
and convincing reference had been ignored by the Shakespeareans showed
their utter incompetence.

But the most striking thing about him was his detestation of Shakespeare.
There are people who hate Napoleon; there are people who object to
Torquemada; there are even people who feel a pronounced distaste for
Nero. But never has any one loathed and despised a dead man as the
really mild and amiable Sir Edwin despised and loathed Shakespeare. No
epithets were, he felt, too opprobrious for this rascal, who for three
hundred years had cheated another man out of his due fame. He denied
Shakespeare any virtue at all; he pointed out that there existed no proof
that Shakespeare could even read; and he habitually referred to him as
the “drunken, illiterate clown of Stratford,” “the sordid money-lender of
Stratford,” and “the mean, drunken, ignorant, and absolutely unlettered
rustic of Stratford.” So strong, indeed, were his feelings that when the
_Times_ says that “One cannot but feel that he was happy in not living
to see the celebrations which the British Academy and other friends of
literature are to hold in 1916, the third centenary of Shakespeare’s—not
Bacon’s—death,” it is not making a weak and untimely jest, but stating
the sober truth.

Who will now take on Sir Edwin’s mantle as the most conspicuous
Baconian? Mr. George Greenwood is _hors concours_ because, though an
anti-Shakespearean, he has doubts about Bacon; and we have heard nothing
lately about that romantic American doctor who a year or two ago began
digging for evidence in the bed of the sylvan Wye. That another ardent
combatant will soon appear is pretty certain; in fact, there will
probably be a continual succession of such for all time unless—which
is unlikely—somebody discovers documentary proofs of Shakespeare’s
authorship so irrefutable that no one could dream of challenging them.
For the examination of a mystery—if you can persuade yourself that there
is a mystery—is always fascinating, and the search for and application
of ciphers and hidden meanings produces such entertaining results that
it would be almost worth while becoming a Baconian for the fun of it.
Almost, but not quite.

The Beauties of Badness

The collector of amusingly bad poetry has never had such splendid
opportunities as to-day. The world is all before him where to choose.
Modern cheap production has made it easy for any one who can raise £20
to get a volume of poems printed; and of recent years the field has been
greatly enriched by the growing body of verse-writers in America and
the Colonies. There have always, of course, been poets who have given
unintentional rather than intentional pleasure. I have before me a volume
published (at Cambridge) in 1825, entitled _Original Poems in the Moral,
Heroic, Pathetic and other Styles, by a Traveller_, which contains poems
in the following style—amongst others:

INGRATITUDE

_My Muse, who oft recites on Love,_
_Or Heavenly Beatitude,_
_Her strains more melancholy move_
_Devoted to ~INGRATITUDE~._

_With thee, Dark Demon—what can charm?_
_Nor manners polish’d—chaste, or rude;_
_Nor Friendship’s hand—nor Safety’s arm_
_So vile art thou—~INGRATITUDE~!_

_Tho’ dear a Female’s face, or form;_
_Tho’ elegant her attitude;_
_We fly, as from the winged storm—_
_If she pours forth ~INGRATITUDE~._

But it is seldom that the collector comes across one of these delightful
relics from an older day. The greater part of any collection must be
formed of books published within the last forty years. Our age may
be—indeed, it is—deficient in some respects, but in the production of
unintentionally amusing writers no age, not even the Renaissance or the
great ages of Greece and Rome, can vie with it.

It might be possible for a man with the industry of a Herbert Spencer
exhaustively to classify the writers of whom I am speaking, and to
tabulate the qualities which give to their works their peculiar
virtues—incongruity of image, unfortunate use of colloquialisms, hopeless
slavery to the necessity of rhyme, and so on. I am no Spencer; indeed,
the only things I have in common with that philosopher are a taste for
billiards and the recollection of a single visit to the Derby. To me
there is a single broad division which connoisseurs may find useful in
arranging their collections: in one class we may put those poets who are
specifically cranky; in the other those (some silly, some quite sensible
people apart from their artistic proclivities) who (Macaulay’s Robert
Montgomery is the type) try to write poems like other people’s, but whose
total lack of poetic perception leads them into strange aberrations of
expression.

The first kind are comparatively rare, but there are some good examples
still going strong. There is, for instance, a gentleman (at one time a
distinguished scholar of Balliol) who describes himself as “The Modern
Homer,” and has written a number of epics, including _The Human Epic_,
_The Epic of London_, _The Epic of Charlemagne_, and _The Epic of God and
the Devil_. Preoccupation with his matter leads him to such phrases as:

_When Murder is on the ~tapis~_
_Then the Devil is happy._

But he, perhaps, is not so interesting as Mr. William Nathan Stedman,
who used to live in London, and now, I believe, is settled in Australia.
This gentleman is addicted to prefaces proving that Mr. Gladstone, “this
DIRTY OLD DEVIL,” “this sly old wizard, a protoplasm from the abyss of
nowhere,” was the Beast of the Revelations, and he has an aversion from
Mr. R. J. Campbell, whom he calls “moo-cow, kid-gloved Campbell.” It
is well worth while buying his _Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics_. The poems
themselves are not so amusing, though we sometimes came across such
ambiguous phrases as:

_And when upon your dainty breast I lay_
_My wearied head—more soft than eiderdown._

But the illustrations—wood-blocks from eminent artists like Albert Dürer
and Louis Wain—are charmingly irrelevant, and the prose passages are
unique. The poet refers to the Laureateship—“an office I refused after
Tennyson’s death, though made with the offer of a premier’s daughter
and £30,000”—and he is violently down on critics who have failed to see
the merits of a certain novelist whom he calls “Queen Marie,” “a woman
who did you no wrong, nor envied ye your bones and offal, but gave Most
Interesting Books for your betterment and education. Are ye not dirty
dogs and devils? Eh?” “Bull-browed bastards” is one of the mildest terms
he applies to the critics.

Difficult to place in either class are the poets who have some technical
faculty, who are not necessarily cranks, but who endeavour to put such
extraordinarily prosy things into verse that the result is as comic as
though they were. I have, for example, a book containing “a lyrical
romance in verse,” which tells a story, that might have gone quite well
in prose, of a man who falls in love with a girl and has long discussions
with her about politics. The author’s choice of a metrical form leads him
to pages and pages of this sort of thing:

_I ceased, and somewhat eagerly she asked:_
_“Then you would justify the Socialist,_
_Or Anarchist, the brute assassin, masked_
_As a reformer, him who has dismissed_
_All scruples, and himself or others tasked_
_To murder innocence? Can there exist_
_A reason to excuse Luccheni’s action,_
_Of life’s great rights most dastardly infraction?”_

_“Excuse it, no!” I said; “nor justify it;_
_But understand it yes!—I find confusion_
_In both your questions; and, your words imply it,_
_They have their base in popular illusion._
_In Socialism and Anarchism, deny it_
_Who will, there’s no imperative inclusion_
_Of violence. Each, aiming at reform,_
_Would lay life’s ever-raging life and storm.”_

The growth of the Socialist and Suffragist movements has led to a great
increase in this kind of argumentative verse; but the bad poems in the
Conservative or Militarist interests are generally very much worse, a
type-specimen being this:

_And so with foes about us_
_Just waiting for their chance_
_We must become a nation armed_
_Like Germany and France._

Another example of Imperialist verse is:

_I’m old John Bull of England,_
_My triumphs are in song._
_I’ve fought and won great victories_
_Which did not take me long._

_I’ve fought in many a battle_
_By sea as well as land._
_I’ve fought in Russia, Belgium,_
_Africa and India’s golden strand,_

which occurs in a work appealing for better treatment for British
Honduras.

But most of the best bad verse is not propagandist. Amongst the classics
of the kind the Works of Johnston-Smith rank high. These have been
published complete in one volume, but the best of them are to be found in
a smaller book entitled _The Captain of the Dolphin_. Mr. Johnston-Smith
had a great vocabulary and peculiar gifts of metaphor and of abrupt
conclusion. Here are some typical passages:

_A balminess the darkened hours had brought from out the South,_
_Each breaker doffed its cap of white and shut its blatant mouth._

_Strike, strike your flag, Sidonia,_
_And lessen death and pain;_
_“Strike,” “Fight” are but synonyma_
_For misery to Spain._

_On speedy wing the graceful sea-fowl follow fast—_
_They seem to me the souls of seamen drowned,_
_Who have for sailors, ships and ocean’s briny blast_
_Dumb love which they are yearning to propound._

_O’er the sea’s edge the sun, a dazzling disc,_
_In splendour hangs, preparing for his plunge;_
_Upon the heaven’s bright page he stamps an asterisk_
_Of yellow beams which Western things expunge._

_Reluctant I leave, like a lover who goes_
_From the side of the maid of his choice,_
_By whom he is held with a cord actuose_
_Spun out of her beauty and voice._

“Actuose” is very characteristic of this poet, who uses enormous numbers
of astonishing words of which he does not tell us the meaning, although
he gives us a glossary containing such definitions as:

_Derelict. An abandoned ship._

_Outward-bound. Sailing from home._

_Yo-heave-ho! A phrase used by sailors when two or more pull in
concert at the same rope._

One of his nicest surprises is the ending of:

_Where the sun circles round for the half of the year_
_And is cold—like a yellow balloon._

The kind of thrill produced by this unexpected ending is, of course,
common in verse. Some readers will be acquainted with the epitaph:

_Here beneath this stone at rest_
_Lies the dear dog who loved us best._
_Within his heart was nothing mean,_
_He seemed just like a human being._

But a University poet’s anticlimax on Actæon may not be so generally
known:

_His hands were changed to feet, and he in short_
_Became a stag...._

Nor this affecting stanza from a woman’s book recently published:

_What o’ the wind?_
_It hisses through a vessel’s spars._
_What o’ the wind?_
_It is in truth to mercy blind,_
_It surely from all rest debars,_
_And even frights the sturdy “tars.”_
_What o’ the wind?_

An equal bathos is sometimes produced by inappropriate metaphor. The
worst instance I know is found in the poems of quite a well-known writer
who describes roses:

_Aft before and fore behind_
_Swung upon the summer wind._

But the author of a recent drama of the Near East came pretty near it with

_... the diamond shaft of the fierce searchlight_
_From the lens of the crystal moon._

The chase after the unusual almost always means disaster. This is another
recent example:

_I have found thee, dear! on the edge of time,_
_Just over the brink of the world of sense;_
_In dream-life that’s ours, when with love intense_
_We function above, in a fairer clime._

_I have found thee there, in a world of rest,_
_In the fair sweet gardens of sunlit bliss,_
_Where the sibilant sound of an Angel’s kiss_
_Is the sanctioned seal of a Holy quest._

But nothing produced in this manner is so attractive as the merely
commonplace can be when carried to its farthest pitch. A year or two
ago a young American published a volume with a preface ending: “He was
apprised of the death of his invalid brother, whose remaining portion of
his grandfather’s legacy accruing to him facilitated the publication of
this book.” The epilogue ran as follows:

_Oh, the rain, rain, rain!_
_All the day it doth complain._
_On the window-pane, just near me,_
_How it sputters, oh, how dreary!_
_One becomes so awful weary_
_With the rain, rain, rain._

The difference between this and Verlaine’s _Il pleut sur la ville_ would
be hard to define, but there certainly is a marked difference.

Most of the poets quoted above have, at any rate, the gift of moving
with some freedom within their metres. But some people who publish verse
cannot even do that, however simple the forms they choose. They struggle
through their poems like flies in treacle. A good example may be taken
from a book (excellently produced) issued only a year ago by one of the
foremost publishers. Apart from its other qualities, it shows a most
extraordinarily revolutionary conception of the way in which lines may be
ended:

_A man’s home is a woman’s breast. There see_
_Him in infancy, and later, seeks he_
_Inspiration from the self-same source. ’Tis_
_His home, t’wards which, from cradle to the grave,_
_He doth gravitate, accomplishing his_
_Greatest works by aid of it. Man on the_
_Woman’s aid depends. Oft unconsciously_
_’Tis given, oft loyally the truth’s in_
_Loving breast safeguarded—less often ’tis_
_In cruelty withheld._

This supplies the only case I know of in which the article “the” has been
used as a rhyme. But for sheer struggle the poem does not excel parts of
this other one, which was published in a recent anthology:

_Along a marsh a hungry crane_
_With patient steps, his way did take_
_Each cranny of the rivage fain_
_To ransack with his slender beak,_

_When, suddenly, his watchful eye,_
_At but four paces distance, saw_
_A worm, that back, as suddenly,_
_To his subterranean hole did draw._

_Nathless the crane did, straight, begin_
_His beak, and claw, alike, to ply_
_And hoping the retreat be, in_
_The end, of the insect might destroy,_

_The turf did tear up, and dispel_
_The clods, and with such vigour strive_
_That he, at last, perceives his bill_
_At of the cave the depth arrive;_

_But lo! just when of all his toil,_
_The object he was nigh to get,_
_Beneath his very nib, a mole,_
_Without ado, devoured it!_

_Thus often, lurchers, onward who_
_Are prone by shady ways to creep_
_May the reward to those that’s due_
_Who, openly, have acted, reap._

This fable is called by the author _A Surreptitious Catch_; but it might
equally fitly have been entitled _The Apotheosis of the Comma_.

I have, as I say, insufficient scientific talent to enter upon an
analytic criticism of this kind of poetry; and in this brief discourse I
have done little more than string quotations together. But that operation
is all that is needed to serve my present object—viz. the propagation of
the cult. Any one who has ever read the novel of Mrs. Amanda M’Kittrick
Ros knows how much sustenance the human spirit may derive from the byways
of literature; but it is very rarely that one meets, even amongst the
best-read of men, one who is conscious of the peculiar poetic treasures
that lie about in the publishers’ offices and on the second-hand
bookstalls simply imploring to be collected.

More Badness

My appeal for interesting specimens of bad verse has brought me a large
mass of material; but most of my correspondents seem not to realize that
merely feeble and meaningless verse is so common as not to be worth
preserving. The best single line I have received—sent me by a notorious
dramatist who has forgotten its place of origin—is:

_The beetle booms adown the glooms and bumps among the clumps;_

and what promised to be the best whole poem is one that begins by rhyming
“Atlantic” to “blanket.” But when I had got through it I found that my
correspondent had got it out of a visitors’ book in an hotel. I really
cannot count anything that has not been properly published; although I
confess to being tempted by such lines as:

_Farewell, farewell, bonny St. Ives,_
_May I live to see you again,_
_Your air preserves people’s lives_
_And you have so little rain._

So really the best acquisition I have made is the following, the author
of which I should like to discover:

_In this imperfect, gloomy scene_
_Of complicated ill,_
_How rarely is a day serene,_
_The throbbing bosom still!_
_Will not a beauteous landscape bright_
_Or music’s soothing sound,_
_Console the heart, afford delight,_
_And throw sweet peace around?_
_They may; but never comfort lend_
_Like an accomplished female friend!_

_With such a friend the social hour_
_In sweetest pleasure glides;_
_There is, in female charms a power_
_Which lastingly abides;_
_The fragrance of the blushing rose,_
_Its tints and splendid hue,_
_Will, with the seasons, decompose,_
_And pass as flitting dew;_
_On firmer ties his joys depend_
_Who has a faithful female friend!_

_As orbs revolve, and years recede,_
_And seasons onward roll,_
_The fancy may on beauties feed_
_With discontented soul;_
_A thousand objects bright and fair_
_May for a moment shine,_
_Yet many a sigh and many a tear_
_But mark their swift decline;_
_While lasting joys the man attend_
_Who has a polished female friend!_

My correspondent says that he received this from a friend (perhaps a
polished female friend), who did not tell him whence it was extracted.
I myself have seen two lines of it before—the last two of the second
stanza. They occurred in a letter I received some time ago from a
clerical acquaintance who was apologizing for having got engaged. He, on
inquiry, pretended (with a mendacity very rare amongst clergymen) that he
had written the lines himself; but I did not believe him. The poem bears
the marks of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. Can it be by
Thomas Haynes Bayly?

One interesting thing I should like to trace is a metrical version of
Holy Writ containing such lines as these on Jonah:

_Three dreadful days beneath the deep,_
_In fish’s belly dark lay he._
_How terrible methinks his fate._
_May no such torment fall on me._

The most ingenious writer who contributes the “Observator” column to the
_Observer_ offers me a couple of specimens, one of which is new to me.
The old one is the late Mr. Alfred Austin’s remark about Nature:

_She sins upon a larger scale_
_Because she is herself more large._

And the other, a touching narrative of a gipsy woman who fell ill, was a
discovery of Andrew Lang’s:

_There we leave her,_
_There we leave her,_
_Far from where her swarthy kindred roam,_
_In the Scarlet Fever,_
_Scarlet Fever,_
_Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home._

A Mystery Solved

Apparently the poem about “a polished female friend” is to be found in
one of Mr. E. V. Lucas’s books. It was written, it seems, by a parson
named Whur or Whurr, who flourished in Norfolk about a century ago. Whur
delighted in all calamities, and described a father, on the birth of a
child with no arms, exclaiming: “This armless child will ruin me.” No
one has yet brought to my notice any whole volumes of bad verse worth
acquiring, though various choice fragments have reached me. There is an
epithalamium ending:

_And never, never she’ll forget_
_The happy, happy day,_
_When in the church, before God’s priest,_
_She gave herself away._

There is an _in memoriam_ poem beginning:

_Dear Friends, we had a sudden Blast_
_Which came to us unexpected._

And there is a loyal song to their present Majesties in which occur the
lines:

_Our King and Queen are never proud_
_They mingle with the densest crowd._

But the most attractive new specimen is a poem on the late monarch’s
death. It was printed and sold as a broadsheet in London, and runs:

_The will of God we must obey._
_Dreadful—our King taken away!_
_The greatest friend of the nation,_
_Mighty monarch and protection!_

_Heavenly Father, help in sorrow_
_Queen Mother, and them to follow,_
_What to do without him who has gone!_
_Pray help! help! and do lead us on._

_Greatest sorrow England ever had_
_When death took away our Dear Dad;_
_A king was he from head to sole,_
_Loved by his people one and all._

_His mighty work for the Nation,_
_Making peace and strengthening union—_
_Always at it since on the throne:_
_Saved the country more than billion._

There are two more verses. Personally, I find this considerably more
interesting than any of Mr. Alfred Noyes’s various Coronation Odes.

Carrying the Alliance too far

Why is it that Japanese authors are allowed to write in English
newspapers any sort of barbarous jargon they like? Mr. Yoshio Markino
was the first to be licensed. To start with, one found his “delightfully
quaint” English amusing in a mild way, but with repetition his sedulously
cherished howlers became irritating. Still, he was only one; and
primarily a painter at that. But now Mr. Yone Noguchi has turned up, and
he is doing the same thing. Mr. Noguchi is considered in Japan—at least
so his friends tell us—the first poet of the day. Those who remembered
his last residence here assured us that on his return he would compel all
men—like Helen of Troy or Mr. Tagore. He comes. One is prepared to be
conquered. One turns to one’s _Westminster Gazette_ to read his works;
and one finds there columns of stuff, possibly inspired, but certainly
written in such pidgin-English that one cannot bother to read it.

Mr. Noguchi’s pidgin-English is not of quite so curious a breed as Mr.
Markino’s, but it is sufficiently bad. One does not blame him for that.
He writes English a great deal better than I do Japanese. But why on
earth cannot the newspapers who print his works translate them into
normal English? Is it that their sub-editors shrink from the task? Is it
that they fondly believe that we are all so fascinated by English of the
Noguchi-Markinesque brand that we had much rather have it than any other
sort; or is it that a tradition has been established that Anglo-Japanese
articles are not to be altered? If this is true, it is a thousand pities
that, for all their charm, Mr. Markino’s early productions were not
unmercifully damned. What should we say if newspapers began printing in
all their native crudity articles by Frenchmen and Germans imperfectly
acquainted with the tongue of this country? Suppose some journal came out
next week with an essay beginning:

“What sadly fall the leaves of automne! What of sadness tumble
on the heart because that the winter put his snows on all the
country. And sad also the spring, the spring who arouse the
love in the soul, and who make to think to all the springs of
the time past. My heart weep like a bird who have lose her
companion.”

Or suppose a German were allowed by the _Westminster_ to present its
readers with a political article opening:

“No Dutcher has the by Mr. Gamaliel Zoop, Amerikansh
postaltelegrafkommunikationdepartment minister on
politishekonomy famose lecture to a at Manchester
people-coming-together delivered recently without outerorderly
pleasure read.”

Obviously we should not tolerate it. Can it be that, even after the
war with Russia, even after Japanese professors have written works on
sociology, the superstition lingers here that a thing cannot possibly be
truly Japanese unless it has the odour of an old curiosity shop?

None of this, I may say, is meant to be discourteous to Mr. Noguchi.
I merely suggest that it would be better for him if he vetoed every
endeavour to print his English articles as he writes them. If he were
the Japanese Homer—indeed, he may be that for all I know—I should say
precisely the same thing. Can he be aware that even his faulty spelling
goes uncorrected?

May 1914

I write “these lines” just after arriving in Berlin. Not that I have
anything to say about that. I merely mention the fact. It may explain
my difficulties. The journey is really very dull. All those hundreds of
miles over the Great Plain of Europe with never a hill except the ridge
of Minden, very little water, nothing but endless flat fields sprinkled
with trees, church spires, and red farm-houses. There is simply nothing
to look at. If you put your head out of the window at Osnabrück, you may
see some coal; and at Münster you may, if you choose, speculate as to
which of the people on the platform are Anabaptists. That is not much
during a twelve-hour run from Flushing.

A pleasant travelling companion is an alleviation on such occasions. The
other occupant of my carriage had points about her. She was a young,
cheerful, and rather obese Jewess going home with a plethora of scarves
and wraps, several boxes, two lobsters (for her father), and a canary.
At Goch she was incensed to find that she had to pay a heavy duty on
the lobsters, so heavy that it would have paid her better to get the
creatures in Berlin and have a drink on the balance. This story might
make an illustration for one of Mr. Lloyd George’s homely speeches on
Free Trade. But there was no duty on the canary. In his little cage,
covered with a green curtain, the canary sat, non-dutiable but very
phlegmatic. At frequent intervals his mistress lifted the green curtain,
looked him in the eyes with a bewitching smile, and piped “Peep, Peep.”
The bird never replied, though perhaps he looked his response. The lady
then turned to me and said, “Is ’e not a nice bird? Is ’e not goot?” and
common politeness—leaving gallantry out of the question—compelled me to
reply always, “Yes, a beautiful little bird.” About twice an hour she
retired to the dining-car and came back exuding smiles and sighs “I half
joost ’ad a bifsteck. I dawn’t like steck.” How true it is that in life
we have to be content with second-bests! But I did not discuss the matter.

In intervals of silence I finished Mrs. Russell Barrington’s _Life of
Walter Bagehot_ (Longmans, 12s. 6d. net). It is a strange thing—and
unfortunate, since so much material has disappeared with the passage
of time—that Bagehot should have had to wait nearly forty years for a
biography. But now it has come it is an interesting one. The author
being Bagehot’s sister-in-law (daughter of James Wilson, who founded the
_Economist_), the work has rather a family air. Bagehot’s more obvious
virtues are a little too much insisted upon, and excessive importance is
attributed to irrelevant details. The long description of his ancestry
and birthplace, for instance, might have been curtailed. But the _Life_
is well written; it contains a great many interesting letters, and it
gives a really living picture of one whom Lord Bryce has called “the most
original mind of his generation.”

One would wish, however, for a supplement giving a fuller analysis of
Bagehot’s literary work. Mrs. Barrington gives little more than a list
of the titles of his essays. It is true that to most people Bagehot
is still primarily the political and economic writer. There are few
intelligent Englishmen to-day who have not been influenced by _The
English Constitution_ and, in a lesser degree, by _Physics and Politics_.
His _Economic Studies_ make the rudiments of political economy as simple
and even as entertaining as a good fairy-tale, and those who have read
_Lombard Street_ speak of it as a masterpiece. But the most extraordinary
thing about it is that this man, who knew all about currency, who was in
the confidence of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and who invented Treasury
Bills, was also one of the most illuminating and sympathetic literary
critics that England has ever produced. Personally I find his literary
essays inferior to those of no other English critic who was not himself
a poet, and I think that in some respects, though not in all, they are
better than Arnold’s.

Probably Bagehot’s celebrity as an economist militated for some years
after his death against the popularity of his literary work. Many
literary people, looking through the complete list of his works, and
seeing _Literary and Biographical Studies_ jostling shoulders with
works on money, may very pardonably have assumed that these Studies,
however able, must have been of a dry, hard character. They are very
far from that; no English criticism is more human than his, less coldly
intellectual; his temperament, naturally emotional and mystical, was most
valuably reinforced by the balance, the tolerance, the sanity that were
developed by his more mundane activities, but the temporal man in him
never overcame the eternal. Such essays as those on Hartley Coleridge,
on Shelley, on Dickens, on Cowper, on the _Edinburgh_ Reviewers, are
bound before long to be recognized as among the great classics of English
criticism. Naturally he was not impeccable; posterity may think, for
example, that he attached too much importance to his friend Clough. But
he is usually completely convincing. Take the following passage from the
comparison of Wordsworth and Jeffrey:

“A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at
once from the symbolic, the unfounded, the indefinite. The
misfortune is that mysticism is true. There certainly are
kinds of truths, borne in as it were instinctively on the
human intellect, most influential on the character and the
heart, yet hardly capable of stringent statement, difficult
to limit by an elaborate definition. Their course is shadowy;
the mind seems rather to have seen than to see them, more
to feel after than definitely apprehend them. They commonly
involve an infinite element which, of course, cannot be stated
precisely, or else a first principle—an original tendency
of our intellectual constitution, which it is impossible
not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms
and words. Of this latter kind is what has been called the
religion of Nature, or more exactly, perhaps, the religion
of the imagination. This is an interpretation of the world.
Accordingly, to it the beauty of the universe has a meaning,
its grandeur a soul, and its sublimity an expression. As we
gaze on the faces of those whom we love; as we watch the light
of life in the dawning of their eyes, and the play of their
features, and the wildness of their animation; as we trace in
changing lineaments a varying sign; as a charm and a thrill
seem to run along the tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a
mere word; as a tone seems to roar in the ear; as a trembling
fancy hears words that are unspoken; so in Nature the mystical
sense finds a motion in the mountain, and a power in the
waves, and a meaning in the long white line of the shore, and
a thought in the blue of heaven, and a gushing soul in the
buoyant light, an unbounded being in the vast void of air, and

_Wakeful watching in the pointed stars_

“There is a philosophy in this which might be explained, if
explaining were to our purpose. It might be advanced that there
are original sources of expression in the essential grandeur
and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though fainter kind
to those familiar, inexplicable signs by which we trace in
the very face and outward lineaments of man the existence
and working of the mind within. But be this as it may, it is
certain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind of religion and
that Lord Jeffrey did not believe a word of it.”

The visionary and the epigrammatist are near allied, and both the
practical and the ideal in Bagehot are illustrated in his own phrase:
“If you would vanquish Earth, you must invent Heaven.” Bagehot, as he
appeared to ordinary people every day, is portrayed in another sentence.
“He left many,” it is said, “with the idea that he was a good fellow, yet
with no idea that he was a great man.” A great man can have no better
epitaph.

May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition

Any one who imagines that the English can, or at all events do, compete
with the Germans in beauty of book-production had better go to Leipzig
this summer and visit the Buchgewerbe und Graphik Exhibition—or “Bugra,”
as it is universally called in Germany. The new railway station—the
finest in the world—is also worth going to see; but that, presumably,
will last after this year. In many respects the exhibition is like
all other big exhibitions. It is much too enormous to be capable of
thorough inspection. Leaving out of account the huge buildings devoted
to the mechanics of printing and so on, there are a palace (“The Hall
of _Kultur_,” of course), filled with engravings and photographs; a
colossal structure containing the exhibits of German publishers of books
and music; and pavilions for most of the other nations of the earth.
Even Corea has a building—though I did not see it—and Siam is well to
the fore. The exhibition grounds are very extensive; they contain (need
I say?) a “Street of Nations,” many fountains, and countless cafés.
There is a reproduction of Heidelberg Castle, full of drinking-cups and
the weapons with which German students put a little interest into each
other’s faces. There is a Bavarian Hall, where real peasant maidens bring
your beer and the latest and cheapest musical-comedy tunes are played
by real peasant musicians, with feathered hats and costume complete
down to the bare knees that they insist on retaining in the face of a
proclamation by the local Catholic hierarchs to the effect that such a
display of naked charms is grossly indecent. There is no wiggle-woggle,
but there is a waterchute and a shooting-gallery whose proprietors invite
you to come in and try your skill at “live objects.” The man who was
with me—he is a person who, like Mr. Galsworthy, would not touch a fly
“save” (as the old verse has it) “in the way of kindness,”—refused to
come in. Naïvely distrustful of aliens he was afraid, he said, that the
targets might be dogs. But he need not have been alarmed, for we were
afterwards informed that they were merely big game thrown on a screen by
a cinematograph. When you hit an animal it did not drop, but a red light
showed.

Naturally comparisons between the exhibits should be made very
cautiously; the exhibition is being held on German soil and the German
display is much larger than any other. In many respects England shows up
very well. The English section in the _Halle der Kultur_ is certainly as
good as any, and the etchings shown by Mr. Muirhead Bone, Mr. Charles
Shannon, Sir Charles Holroyd, and other British artists are possibly
the very best things in the place. The main English exhibit is housed
in a pleasant Tudor building with some beautiful rooms. The Shakespeare
exhibit of editions and portraits is most interesting for those who
like that sort of thing; a fine collection of original Beardsley
drawings has been lent by Mr. Lane; the Caxtons are coming; there are
admirable specimens of the works of the Kelmscott, Riccardi, Florence,
and other presses; there is a gallery of Medici prints unsurpassed by
any colour-reproductions in the exhibition (the print of the Dresden
Van Eyck triptych is the most completely satisfying colour-print I
have ever seen); and the elaborate bindings by Riviere’s, the Oxford
Press, and other establishments are not inferior even to the exquisite
leather bindings by Noulhac and R. Kieffer shown in the French building.
Everything our officials could have done has been done to perfection;
and the special exhibits have been very well chosen. Where we fall sadly
short is in the ordinary book of commerce.

I cannot but think that the English publishers who have taken
stalls—and, of course, the selection of exhibits here had to be left
to the publishers themselves—could have brought together a more
attractive-looking lot of books than they have done. Most of them—I
mention no names—seem to have bundled together their books without
any consideration either of the contents or of the appearance of the
volumes. Of course there are English publishers who have no fine books
and few decent-looking books on their lists; but some of the specimens
at Leipzig look almost like remnants which it is hoped to sell off to
visitors. But even if all the English publishers had shown all their
best books, and none of their worst, they would still have been put in
the shade by the Germans. Even the French publishers—whose achievements
in typography and in illustration have been great—are not now fit to be
mentioned in the same breath as the Germans.

The German exhibits are a revelation. The mid-Victorian tradition in
print and design—which was so tenacious in Germany—has now been almost
completely abandoned. I don’t suggest that all German books are more
presentable than English ones. Scientific works, theology, and shilling
fiction are equally ugly in both countries. But there are to-day in
Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich at least a dozen firms publishing for the
ordinary market books whose average of beauty is far higher than that
reached by the books of any considerable English publishing firm. Many
thousands of really beautiful new books are now being produced every
year in Germany; and of what can be done, especially in the way of
making cheap books look presentable, our own publishers have no idea.
There is, of course, a much larger educated reading public in Germany
than in England. In every bookshop you are confronted by volumes of
Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, and other writers who, were they Englishmen, would
never reach large circles of readers in their lifetimes. Anthologies of
contemporary German poets sell literally by tens of thousands; and you
can even get an infinite variety of doses of classical and modern authors
by dropping pennies into automatic machines on the stations. This much
may be admitted: that there is a larger literary public and more interest
in contemporary art, literary and pictorial. But, even granting all that,
the German publishers in meeting the market have shown a taste, and above
all an enterprise (sometimes reaching audacity, no doubt), which most of
our own publishers have never revealed in the slightest degree.

To give a full account of the show is beyond my ability, desire,
and space. But in looking at the latest products of commercial
colour-printing in the French pavilion I was struck by the extraordinary
divorce between craftsmanship and taste in modern industry. Here were
some of the vilest pictures (I don’t mean morally) ever moulded by the
mind of man; yet the experts were raving over them as being the last word
in their own kind of colour-process. Needless to say, the exhibition,
not being half over, is not yet completely ready. The Italian pavilion,
when I was at the exhibition, could not be entered at all, and there were
other lacunæ all over the place. This is the kind of thing that makes
the whole world kin.

Amongst the German authors whose portraits grace the walls of the
exhibition is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. They have naturalized him, like
Shakespeare, and the next thing will certainly be a statue at Weimar.

The Mantle of Sir Edwin

I have just spent three days reading Mr. E. G. Harman’s _Edmund Spenser
and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon_, published by the firm of
Constable. There are books which he who runs may read; there are also
books from which he who reads will run. This to me comes into neither
category. It is very large and crowded with most complicated detail;
it is, though quite competently written, devoid of literary grace;
and it supports a monstrous thesis with arguments many of which are
of staggering absurdity. Yet in point of deadly fascination it vies
with the basilisk. It is a monument of the “scientific method.” The
author’s learning and industry are terrifying; his tone seems completely
dispassionate; he proceeds from discovery to discovery with mild
ruthlessness; and not the most uncompromising of Wospolus was ever more
sternly resolved to embrace logical conclusions. His chief fault is
that his premises are usually arbitrary or quite insufficient; but the
objective charm of his massive progress, as of a steam-roller, from stage
to stage, is not affected by this.

Mr. Harman does not in this volume discuss in detail Bacon’s authorship
of Shakespeare’s plays. He assumes that. He assumes also that
Bacon did publish literature under the rose and that he did employ
impersonators; his reasons being that he had to express his feelings
and that acknowledgement of authorship would have damaged his prospects
of political promotion. This much granted, Mr. Harman looks around for
writings in which he thinks he can detect traces of Bacon and examines
the evidence for their reputed authorships. He does not descend to the
puerile level of the late Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, with his “Hic,
Hæc, Hog.” He says nothing of cryptogram. But in case after case he
finds (1) that there are marks of Baconian thought and language, (2)
that allegorical references to Bacon’s political disappointments may be
found, (3) that documentary evidence supporting accepted authorships is
very slight. Nothing stops him. Where there is a real resemblance in
style things are easy. Where there are marked differences we are asked
to note the fact that Bacon’s method enabled him to write in a variety
of styles—as though serious writers expressing their inmost selves could
put on styles like trousers. If somebody has borne witness that an
Elizabethan wrote his own works, then that somebody was in the plot too.

As to Spenser, with whom Mr. Harman chiefly deals, one is certainly
struck with the paucity of the evidence for him. We know less about
him than we know about Shakespeare; and his biographers have had to
rely almost entirely upon “internal evidence” drawn from his works.
But personally I must say that I prefer their methods to Mr. Harman’s.
He, analysing exhaustively the plot of the _Faerie Queene_, with its
Britomarts, Arthegalls, and Blatant Beasts, finds a knowledge of court
life that could not be possessed by Spenser, who lived in Ireland and
was (according to him) an ex-Board School boy in a small Civil Service
job—which is at any rate politer than “drunken, illiterate clown.”
This is question-begging; but what shall we say of the assumption that
if Spenser had written the poem the rivers of Ireland would have been
described as fully as the rivers of England? Why should the emigrant
Civil servant know anything about the rivers of Ireland? As far as that
goes, there is one slip in the description of the rivers of England which
indicates to my mind that the author relied on some inaccurate map for
his information about them. The Baconian authorship forces Mr. Harman to
the conclusion that some of Spenser’s sonnets were written by Bacon when
he was eight or nine years old. But Mr. Harman is a strong man. After
all, Mozart was a precocious child, so why not Bacon? He does not shrink
from this any more than he shrinks from arguing that any book or letter
which favourably mentions one of Bacon’s cryptic works must also have
been written or instigated by him. They _must_ have been written by him,
and, this granted, internal corroboration must be sought for. Anything
is good enough for this purpose. Mr. Harman even finds evidence in the
occurrence in several “Baconian” works of the phrase “golden wyres” as
applied to the Queen’s hair. If he would read the body of Elizabethan
lyrics, or even extracts of them in such a contemporary anthology as
_England’s Parnassus_, he would find that an Elizabethan poet could no
more help comparing a lady’s Hayre to Golden Wyres than he could help
likening her Teares to Pearles or her Brests to Iuorie.

But there is no space here for detailed examination. It is enough to
yield oneself to the pleasure of following the Harmanian trail. I have
noted the works which in the course of his narrative or in footnotes he
ascribes to Bacon. The Authorized Version of the Bible is not mentioned.
But, apart from his voluminous acknowledged writings, Bacon wrote the
works of Spenser (including the _Faerie Queene_, the longest poem in
the world, which Bacon published before he was out of his twenties);
the works of Shakespeare; practically the whole body of Elizabethan
poetical criticism (including Webbe’s _Discourse of Poesie_, Puttenham’s
_Art of Poesie_, Sidney’s _Apologie_, Daniel’s _A Defence of Ryme_, and
Meres’s _Palladis Tamia_); many of the poems of Gascoigne (written by
Bacon before he was twelve); certain works imputed to Nashe, Greene, and
Gabriel Harvey; the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh and the _Last Fight of
the “Revenge”_; the works of Essex; Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and _Astrophel
and Stella_ (with this key Bacon unlocked his heart); Lyly’s _Euphues_
(a long book); Bryskett’s _Discourse of Civil Life_; Sir Humphrey
Gilbert’s _Discourses_ and the account of his last voyage; _Leicester’s
Commonwealth_ and _Leicester’s Ghost_; and other minor scraps. If this be
all correct, we shall have to revise our opinion of the Elizabethan time
as a time replete with various genius. All we shall be able to refer to
now will be “the spacious Bacon of great Elizabeth.”

An enormous number of people—including supposed writers and their
relations—must have been in the secret. Sometimes they must have
marvelled at Bacon’s extraordinary behaviour, as for instance when he
wrote for Raleigh a laudatory poem on the Queen:

“Bacon (who, in my opinion, is the author of the poem) makes
use of the opportunity in taking up the personality of Ralegh
to express his own feelings. He was undoubtedly most unhappy at
his exclusion from access and the waning of all his hopes of
advancement. This is what is reflected under the disguise of
Ralegh’s loss of favour in the poem.”

They must have wondered how on earth Bacon expected his grievances to be
remedied if his complaints were published over another man’s name, and
why, if Raleigh could address poems to the Queen _in propria persona_
without loss of caste, Bacon could not do the same. But no doubt most of
them, for many were impecunious, did not allow such questions to bother
them much. They were content to take Bacon’s bribes for the use of their
names. What he must have spent in subsidies to sham authors one gasps to
contemplate. No wonder that for years he was in such financial straits,
and that at one point things came to such a pass with him that he was
arrested for debt.

“The Cattle of the Boyne”

I have referred before to the frequency of misprints in the penny
_Times_. It does seem a pity that the conductors of the paper cannot keep
it up to its old traditions in this respect. Last week there was a more
curious instance than usual. These words appeared:

“The anniversary of the Cattle of the Boyne was celebrated with
unusual enthusiasm throughout Canada.”

I was so moved by the report of these zoological novelties that I made a
little poem about them, full of Celtic twilight. It runs thus:

THE SANDS OF BOYNE

_Och, Geoffrey, go and call the Cattle home,_
_And call the Cattle home,_
_And call the Cattle home,_
_Acrost the sands of Boyne._
_Shure, ye’re the bhoy that’s got inured to foam,_
_So come, bring in the koine._

_Och, are they fish, flesh, fowl or good red herrings?_
_Perhaps they are red herrings,_
_Forlorn and wildered herrings,_
_Strayed from their native broine,_
_This hapless party which has lost its bearings_
_Fornint the sands of Boyne._

_No, no, they have no herring for their father._
_The proof-reader’s their father,_
_A most prolific father_
_By mishap or desoign._
_If this is what wan penny means, I’d rather_
_Stump up the ancient coin_

_Than daily find—Och tempora, Och ~Times~!—_
_Bad grammar in my ~Times~_
_And misprints in my ~Times~_
_In ivry other loine,_
_Capped by this worst of typographic crimes_
_“The ~CATTLE~ of the Boyne”!_

But perhaps one ought not really to complain of misprints, even in the
_Times_, when they are funny.

August 1914

And it is less than three months since I was writing complacently about
the Leipzig book exhibition! I wrote about the exquisite collections
of bindings and drawings, the bands, the parading crowds of peaceful
Germans, the pavilions of all nations from Holland to Siam, and the
charming Tudor structure erected by Britain, with its long low halls
containing cases of Shakespeare folios and editions from the Kelmscott
Press. Enormous crowds from all over Europe would, it was hoped, visit
the exhibition as the summer wore on. “August, of course,” said the
officials to me, “will be _the_ month.”

The buildings in the wide Street of Nations are still there, no doubt.
The flags, perhaps, have been hauled down, but those files of white wood
and plaster palaces still stand behind their flower-beds along the broad
avenues. The crowds are dispersed. The officials in charge of the various
buildings have fled to their respective domiciles. The cheerful male
members of the Bavarian Peasants’ Band have taken off their green hats
and put on helmets, left the women behind, and gone off to burn villages
like their own, and disembowel sunburnt French peasants as naturally
amiable as themselves. Memories so recent make the pit of one’s stomach
sink. In May last a German barber in Berlin had his razor at my throat,
and when he scratched my skin he was most concerned and apologetic.
“Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus.” The remark was
made by a Swedish statesman in the eighteenth century. Voltaire, looking
down from heaven—if one may risk his displeasure by presuming his
presence in so uncongenial a place—must feel that since the eighteenth
century there has been no great change, and that the human race is as
horribly ridiculous an institution as ever it was.

But here we are.[1] Like most other inhabitants of the “civilized” world,
I have for the last week read no books, but only newspapers. Fourteen
a day is about my average, which means nearly a hundred a week. And
nine-tenths of them contain nothing that one did not know before. There
never was a war, since telegraphs were invented, about which news was
so scarce. Almost every rumour that comes through is dubious, and it is
invariably contradicted. In successive issues and even in the same issue
of a journal one reads that troops have and have not entered a certain
village, that somebody’s neutrality has and has not been violated,
and that a naval engagement has and has not taken place. If you go
over the eight pages of “war news” in a daily and make a summary of
the unquestionable facts contained therein, as distinguished from the
doubtful reports and the office-written padding, you find it could all
be got into a paragraph. We have frequently heard that the day of the
war correspondent was over. We heard it during the Russo-Japanese War—of
which we certainly got very little news—and we heard it during the Balkan
campaign. But at the moment of writing I have scarcely seen a single item
regarding a single encounter which looked indisputable or which appeared
to come direct from an eye-witness. Almost all the information we have
been getting has come either from rumour travelling across many tongues
or from official sources. Both these founts of news are great liars, the
former excelling in the _suggestio falsi_, and the latter both in that
and in the _suppressio veri_.

The desperate straits in which we have been for news could be gathered
(if in no other way) from the outlandish places of origin ascribed to
reports that get into print. Stockholm informs one that advices from
Teheran report a conflict at Toul; and we hear that the _Mercure de
Bruxelles_ states “on excellent authority” that something has happened at
Basle. Deliberate fabrication has been at work all over the place. Our
good old friend the doctor, with the cholera microbes which he puts into
wells, even turned up at the very start. This mythical gentleman is at
least as old as the Franco-German War of 1870, and his last appearance
was in the Balkans. No sooner does a war start than one of the combatants
hastens to describe his diabolical activities in the hope, presumably,
of making the world’s blood boil at the thought of an “outrage against
humanity.”

The papers cannot be blamed for printing rumours, but they might give the
clearest indication, whenever possible, of the value of their sources.
Rumours before they get into print presumably travel in much the same
way as after they get into print. Of how rapidly “news” develops I had
an experience in a club on Tuesday night. A late evening paper printed a
brief report, stating that Aberdeen doctors had gone to attend to wounded
who were being landed at Cromarty. Five minutes after I had seen this, I
was told by a member that single British and German destroyers had had
a brush off the Scottish coast. Five minutes after that the vessels had
expanded into flotillas, and within the hour a club servant, with very
gloomy face, remarked to me, “I don’t know if you’ve heard it, sir, but
there’s been a great naval battle in the North Sea and the British Fleet
has met with an awful disaster.” With correspondents kept out of the area
of hostilities, it is no wonder that by the time reports of occurrences
reach the persons who send them to our newspapers they bear very little
relation to the events (if any) which have originally generated them.
War correspondents in Europe to-day seem to be able to do little more
than sit in friendly foreign capitals and send home little bits of news
out of the local papers. And if we want a really accurate and full
description of the big battles, especially the big naval battles, of the
future we shall usually have to wait until peace allows combatants to
publish such books as the Japanese _Human Bullets_, describing the attack
on Port Arthur, and those vivid Russian books which told the story of
Rozhdestvensky’s voyage to the China Sea with his mouldy squadron and the
magnificent and pitiful end of it at Tsushima. But of no great modern war
will the whole truth ever be properly known. Forces work over such vast
areas that full information is impossible to collect.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have left all this as I wrote it.—S. E.

Mrs. Barclay sees it through

_Over the turmoil of a world in arms_
_There floats a rich indomitable coo ..._
_’Tis Barclay.... Though excursions and alarms_
_Torture the firmament, though Wilhelm II_
_In shining armour waits his Waterloo,_
_Though on all sides the blood rains down in torrents_
_Love’s interests still are in safe hands with Florence._

_What though the rest of us are turning tail,_
_Assured by those who have a right to speak_
_That only Patriotism has a sale?_
_~She~ knows Love’s drawing-power remains unique;_
_~Her~ books need never be postponed a week;_
_Sure of her subject, certain of her vogue,_
_She has no need to adjourn, much less prorogue._

_Business as usual. Yet who knows, who knows_
_Whether she has not chosen the better part,_
_Swelling the proud full sail of her great prose_
_Still with the gentler zephyrs of the heart,_
_Rather than seize an Amazonian dart,_
_Leaping into the middle of the fray_
_Like certain other poets of the day._

_Has Robert Bridges’ success with fighting_
_Been such as to encourage emulation?_
_Or Dr. Watson’s “bit them in the Bight”-ing?_
_Or the same author’s other lucubration_
_(Yet one more blow for a disthressful nation)_
_In which, dead gravelled for a rhyme for “Ireland,”_
_He struggled out with “motherland and sireland”?_

_Did even the voice from Rudyard Kipling’s shelf_
_Say anything it had not said before?_
_And was not Stephen Phillips just himself?_
_And was not Newbolt’s effort on the war_
_Distinctly less effective than of yore?_
_And would not German shrapnel in the leg be_
_Less lacerating than the verse of Begbie?_

When the Muse seized me, in this manner, by the hair, it was three
o’clock in the morning, and I had just finished the new novel by the
author of _The Rosary_. Had it been earlier I should have written
more. But next day the mouse of inspiration had fled to its hole; the
spell of the book had been dissipated; my vision had faded into the
light of common day; and I resumed my consideration of the position of
Przemysl, a place of which, until this week, I had never heard. But what
a fascination the book exercised while one was reading it! I can well
understand why Mrs. Barclay commands a greater audience than perhaps any
other living writer. She can beat the basilisk at its own game.

The reader is swept away with a rush of strong emotion at the very start.
A tall, reticent, bronzed man arrives by the boat train at Charing Cross.
Thrown over by a woman, he has been abroad for ten years, nursing his
grief and creating a reputation as a novelist. No sooner does he get to
the station than he extracts from the coy bookstall clerk a confession
that to him the books of Rodney Steele are the best in the world. Lump
in the throat number one; and a sovereign in the pocket of the clerk.
Steele leaves the station to drive to a flat a friend has left him. Oh,
the fragrance and glitter of dear old smoky London! Oh, the beauty of the
Queen Victoria Memorial!

“Mysterious through the gloom, he saw the nation’s fine
memorial to a deathless memory. The gush of green waters, the
golden figure at the summit, needed sunlight for their better
seeing. But clear through the orange darkness gleamed the white
marble majesty of England’s Great Queen.

“Rodney Steele lifted his hand in reverent salute as he
passed....

“‘Lest we forget!’ quoted Rodney Steele as he looked at the
majestic marble figure, throned outside the palace above the
rushing waters. ‘Yet—could we, who really remember, ever
forget?’”

The rest of the book tells how he was wooed and won by his old love, now
a widow. She had deserted him under a misapprehension and was resolved
to recover him. She therefore took the next flat to his—or rather to her
brother’s, which Steele was occupying. She had heard that owing to a
change of telephone numbers her brother was constantly being rung up by
mistake for a Hospital. One night therefore Steele was rung up and a Kind
Voice asked for the Matron. The voice reminded him of Madge. He began to
feel so lonely that he willed, with all his will, that the unknown Kind
Voice should ring him up again.

“‘Speak to me again,’ he said, ‘you, you spoke to me last
night. Speak to me again. What wait I for? I wait for you! Just
now—in my utter loneliness, in my empty solitude—I wait for
you.’...

“The distant clock slowly chimed a quarter past the hour of
ten; and—as that sound died away—the bell of the telephone
rang.”

This time he made the Kind Voice promise to ring him up nightly in order
to console him in his loneliness. The Kind Voice consented. Ultimately on
the telephone they discussed (he not revealing his identity or knowing
hers) his novels. This is the kind of thing they say over the telephone:

“‘The thing of first importance is to uplift your readers; to
raise their ideals; to leave them with a sense of hopefulness,
which shall arouse within them a brave optimism such as
inspired Browning’s oft-quoted noble lines.’”

When finally he confesses to the Kind Voice that his life has been ruined
by a girl with whom he is still in love, Madge thinks the time ripe for
an appointment. They meet. He finds that the Kind Voice has been Madge
all the time and he steels his breast against the woman who has added
deception to her previous crime. But her “gracious gracefulness” and
other qualities win in the end, and we finish at Christmas with Herald
Angels and wedding-bells.

Mrs. Barclay certainly has skill. Nobody else can write a silly story
half so well as she. Her English is fluent and vivid, although loose; her
humour is genuine if not subtle; and she handles her dialogue, such as it
is, very cleverly. But, above all, she knows how to serve out the glamour
and the pathos with a ladle. The hero of this book is as generous as he
is clever. He can conjure; he can make seagulls settle on his shoulder;
and he does kind actions to widows. There are also an heroic ex-soldier
who saved a man’s life at Spion Kop; a bishop’s window brimming over with
love and reminiscences; and an honest, stupid Englishman with no thoughts
of self. The only bad character dies, and the end is a pæan of joy. As
long as she can keep this up Mrs. Barclay will never lose her hold. In
spite of the war, this book, I should think, will sell in millions and
millions.

_Vorwärts_ reports that Dr. Ludwig Frank, a member of the Reichstag, has
been killed in battle near Lunéville. Dr. Frank, who sat for Mannheim,
was one of the leaders of the Southern Revisionists. I had tea with him
at the Reichstag last May. He took me into the Strangers’ Gallery of
the House, where I heard Dr. Liebknecht makes one of his anti-armament
speeches, the one in which he incidentally accused a Prussian general of
negotiating sales of decorations. It seems very remote now. Dr. Frank was
barrister; a big Jew with a heavy, handsome face—sallow skin, aquiline
nose, black moustache, strong chin, dominating eyes. His romantic air—he
was supposed to resemble Lassalle—made him very popular in the rich
Jewish salons of Berlin. He was a strong man, and one would have said an
ambitious one. But a middle-class man who enters the German Socialist
Party sacrifices so much that he _ipso facto_ clears himself of the
suspicion of mere ambition.

A Topic of Standing Interest

The Oxford University Press has just issued a beautiful little edition of
Erasmus’s _Praise of Folly_, with a good reproduction of Quentin Matsys’
portrait of Erasmus as a frontispiece. The last edition of the _Encomium
Moriæ_ with which I am familiar is that issued in 1887 by the firm of
Hamilton, Adams. It had a binding which did not please, but contained
Holbein’s interesting illustrations. Whether any considerable sale of
the book is likely nowadays I very much doubt. Erasmus’s humour was an
improvement on mediæval humour, which, except in a few cases, cannot
make a modern man laugh save sometimes through the brazenness of its
indecency. Erasmus was a child of the Renaissance, a wit, a scholar, a
questioner of all things, a man of the world, a revolutionary conformist.
But there are long dull passages in his most famous book, and many
remarks that seemed most daring to the men of his own time are to us
platitudinous; whilst he often labours some obvious joke in the worst
mediæval way.

At the same time, any one who cares to go through the book will find
occasional amusement. Erasmus had a mild theory of the satirist’s
rights. “Wits,” said he, “have always been allowed this privilege,
that they might be smart upon any transactions of life, if so be their
liberty did not extend to railing”; and he disclaimed a desire to imitate
Juvenal by “raking into the sink of vices to procure a laughter.” With
these qualifications, he let out all around him with some vigour. The
personification of Folly is rather feebly sustained, though the character
is pleasantly introduced with the sentence: “I was born neither in the
floating Delos nor on the frothy sea, nor in any of the privacies where
too forward mothers are wont to retire for undiscovered delivery.” But
the _obiter dicta_ on various classes of men who have often been the
butts of satirists since his day are still entertaining and must in his
own time have been shocking. He refers to priests as “wisely foreseeing
that the people, like cows, which never give down their milk so well as
when they are gently stroked, would part with less if they knew more,
their bounty proceeding only from a mistake of charity.” He speaks of
“The Carthusians, which order alone keeps honesty and piety among them,
but really keeps them so close that nobody ever yet could see them,” and
he is especially down on the scholastic theologians. Sterne, it will be
remembered, described a dispute “as to whether God could make a nose as
big as the steeple of Strasburg.” This is scarcely a caricature of the
kind of discussion ridiculed by Erasmus:

“Whether this proposition is possible to be true; that the
first person of the Trinity hated the second?

“Whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a
man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, a beast, an
herb, or a stone. And were it possible that the Godhead had
appeared in the shape of an inanimate substance, how he then
should have preached his gospel? Or how have been nailed to the
cross? Whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the
same time our Saviour was hanging on the cross, the consecrated
bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that
remained on the tree?”

Word-spinning he detested, and he refers the Nominalists, the Realists,
the Thomists, the Albertists, the Scotists, etc., to the primitive
disciples who were “well acquainted with the Virgin Mary, yet none of
them undertook to prove that she was preserved immaculate from original
sin.”

“The disciples baptized all nations, and yet never taught
what was the formal, material, efficient, and final cause of
baptism, and certainly never dreamt of distinguishing between a
delible and an indelible character in this sacrament.”

Chaucer, with his observations about relics and “pigges bones,” and the
novelists who never hesitated to put friars in the most ignominious
positions (e. g. in chimneys and under tables) had made sport of the
clergy, but Erasmus’s particular method of battering current theology
had not been so devastatingly employed since Lucian. He showed, like
Rabelais, that it is possible to reconcile the profession of Christianity
with something of what a recent writer calls “the old Voltairean love of
humanity.”

Erasmus made the familiar sport of lawyers and pedantic critics. He would
have agreed with Sterne: “Of all the cants which are canted in this
canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of
criticism is the most tormenting.” “When any of them,” he says,

“has found out who was the mother of Anchises, or has lighted
upon some old unusual word, such as bubsequa, bovinator,
manticulator, or other like obsolete cramp terms, or can,
after a great deal of poring, spell out the inscription of
some battered monument: Lord! what joy, what triumph, what
congratulating their success, as if they had conquered Africa,
or taken Babylon the Great!”

It was for such people’s benefit that he must have made his irritating
final remark: “I hate a hearer that will carry anything away with him.”

Erasmus was the mildest of the famous satirists, but he has his place
in the great succession, though his works cannot now compete for
readableness with those of Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Voltaire.
Satirists have usually been considerable plagiarists, and _The Praise of
Folly_ has an important historical place in the development of this kind
of literature. Richard Burton cribbed a good deal from it, in spite of
his own drastic remark about persons who “lard their lean bookes with fat
of others’ workes” and his question: “If that severe doom of Synesius
be true it is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labours than their
cloaths, what shall become of most writers?” But Burton has an account on
the other side, for Sterne later on reprinted chunks of his work almost
literally without any acknowledgement whatever.

The new Oxford edition gives a modernized reprint of the Caroline
Version by John Wilson. In the introduction Mrs. P. S. Allen gives some
interesting bibliographical particulars. Over forty editions of the
_Encomium Moriæ_ were published in the author’s lifetime; within forty
years of its first Latin issue French, Italian, and English translations
had been published; and later versions have appeared in (amongst other
languages) Swedish, Czech, Polish, and Modern Greek.

Was Cromwell an Alligator?

Some people—who at least avoid the error of ascribing the invention to
Steele or Addison—say that Abraham Cowley was the Father of the English
Essay. It might alternatively be suggested that Q. Horatius Flaccus was
one of its parents and Montaigne the other; Bacon having, so to speak, a
watching brief at the birth. But the other statement is true in a sense:
for though in patches Bacon (and Burton) anticipated the tone and method
of that type of writing which was brought to its fullest perfection by
Charles Lamb, Cowley was the man who fixed the type. His essays have
just been republished in a beautiful little edition of the Collected
Prose Works, issued by the Oxford University Press, and edited by Mr.
A. B. Gough. Mr. Gough is a most painstaking editor, and his notes are
abnormally full. They are so full that one feels that most people who are
likely to acquire such a book will find nine-tenths of them unnecessary;
but one ought not to grumble at that, since they have the complementary
advantage of always supplying information when one looks for it.

The edition is especially to be welcomed as there are many persons
capable of appreciating Cowley who have never come into contact with
him. “Who now reads Cowley?” Pope asked in 1737; if the question were
repeated to-day you certainly would not get a forest of hands raised,
even in an audience replete with pince-nez and bulging brows. It was
Cowley’s misfortune, as it was his ambition, to be known in his own days
as one of the greatest poets of his time; when men discovered that he
was not that, they at once concluded that he was nothing else. Not that
his poems are as negligible as some critics assert; his mere skill and
neatness make him worth reading. Even if he had, as Mr. Gough remarks,
“too little passion and spontaneity to be a great lyric poet,” he was at
any rate a good metrist and a most admirable phrasemaker. But his prose
writings are certainly superior to the others; and this is true not only
of the Essays. His _Vision Concerning Oliver Cromwell_, for example, is
full of witty and whimsical things. Occasionally he employs very drastic
language, as when he refers to the Protector as an “alligator” and when
he abuses him for meditating the calling in of the Jews. This is how
Cowley disports himself. The italics are mine:

“From which he was rebuked by the universal outcry of the
Divines, and even of the Citizens too, _who took it ill that a
considerable number at least among themselves were not thought
Jews enough by their own Herod_. And for this design, they say,
he invented ... to sell St. Pauls to them for a synagogue, if
their purses and devotions could have reacht to the purchase.
And this indeed if he had done onely to reward that Nation
which had given the first noble example of crucifying their
King, _it might have had some appearance of gratitude_, but
he did it onely for love of their Mammon; and would have
sold afterwards for as much more St. Peters (even at his own
Westminster) to the Turks for a Mosquito [Mosque]. Such was
his extraordinary Piety to God, that he desired he might be
worshipped in all manners, excepting only that heathenish way
of the Common Prayer Book.”

But this strong language is not the strong language of a man whose
breast is a burning fiery furnace; it is the invective of a man who is
amused by his opponents and who regards them chiefly as pegs for cunning
sentences. His hard words would certainly have broken no bones; and one
can even imagine that, in the secrecy of their chambers, the Puritans
themselves—at all events, the less ironsided of them—may have shaken
their sides over his character-sketch of the man whom they doubtless
referred to in public as “our great leader.”

But if such qualities are defects when a man is writing political tracts
or attempting the higher flights of poetry, they are invaluable to him if
he is writing essays. Cowley’s Essays—and his Prefaces are as good—are
most delightful, and they have as personal a turn as Lamb’s. They all,
virtually, have one text: the Sabine Farm text; the retired _Urbs in
Rure_ text. They speak of the country’s charms in the ex-townsman’s way;
they gibe at the turmoil and press of cities in a manner which attests
a still lively interest in these contemptible things; they praise the
pleasures of horticulture, solitary meditation, and à Kempis’s “little
book in a corner.” Their learning is lightly worn; their language
natural; their arguments not so serious as to stand in the way of any
jest that offers itself; and many passages in them might almost as well
have been written in 1720 or 1820 as in 1660. These, for instance:

“There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear
often that a man does not know how to pass his Time. ’Twould
have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred
sixty ninth year of his Life.

“I have been drawn twice or thrice by company to go to Bedlam,
and have seen others very much delighted with the fantastical
extravagancie of so many various madnesses, which upon me
wrought so contrary an effect, that I always returned, not only
melancholy, but e’en sick with the sight. My compassion there
was perhaps too tender, for I meet a thousand Madmen abroad,
without any perturbation; though, to weigh the matter justly,
the total loss of Reason is less deplorable than the total
depravation of it.

“I thought when I went first to dwell in the country, that
without doubt I should have met there with the simplicity
of the old Poetical Golden Age: I thought to have found no
inhabitants there, but such as the Shepherds of Sir Phil.
Sydney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d’Urfé upon the Banks of
Lignon; and began to consider with myself, which way I might
recommend no less to Posterity the Happiness and Innocence of
the Men of Chertsea; but to confess the truth, I perceived
quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old
England.

“The civilest, methinks, of all Nations, are those whom we
account the most barbarous. There is some moderation and
good Nature in the Toupinamhaltians who eat no men but their
Enemies, whilst we learned and polite and Christian Europeans,
like as many Pikes or Sharks prey upon everything we can
swallow.”

The last sentence reads, perhaps, more like a certain living writer than
like, say, Charles Lamb.

The best of Cowley’s Essays are _Of My Self_ and _Of Greatness_. I have
no room to quote them at length. The first—in which he is writing of
poetry and of his childhood’s memories—is more full of feeling than
is usual with him. The other is one of the most picturesque pieces of
light moralizing in the language, full of what we all call the Playful
Irony of the Gentle Elia, as in sentences like: “The Ancient Roman
Emperours, who had the Riches of the whole world for their Revenue, had
wherewithal to live (one would have thought) pretty well at ease, and to
have been exempt from the pressures of extream Poverty”; and it describes
the pleasures of littleness most alluringly. But somehow, in spite of
his assertions, one never quite believes in the genuineness of his
middle-aged preference for “Prettiness,” as against “Majestical Beauty.”
One suspects the existence in him of a disappointed ambition, a hankering
after action, which frequently afflict men who are constitutionally
fitted for nothing but looking on and making charming comments. But he
had certainly been very badly treated by the Stuart family, which he had
faithfully served. The Restoration gave him neither employment nor money.
It gave him, however, a very fine funeral. Evelyn says that his coffin
was followed to the Abbey by a hundred noblemen’s coaches and large
numbers of wits, bishops, and clergymen.

The Depressed Philanthropist

I do not see why any one but myself should be interested in the mere
fact that, except in the way of casual reference, I have always avoided
writing a line about Mr. John Galsworthy. But as one’s feelings commonly
typify those of some section or other of one’s fellows it may be relevant
to one’s purpose. I frequently begin writing something about Mr.
Galsworthy and then tear it up. I constantly feel like abusing him, and
am then checked by the thought that after all he is too good a man to
go for. He is a sensitive and humane man of very great intelligence. He
is a conscientious writer and an acute observer. He has a great respect
for truth and a desire to state it at all costs. He detests pettinesses,
hypocrisies, and shams. On almost every issue that might arise I am sure
I should find myself voting on the same side as he, though perhaps we
might differ in our views of the relative importance to be attached to
the problem of World Peace and that of the hardships inflicted by mankind
on ants, wasps, and bees. And yet as I read his books I feel as if I were
in some cheerless seaside lodging-house on a wet day.

I have just been reading his new miscellany _The Little Man_. The book
does not show his qualities at their best, but it shows his defects at
their worst. The principal contents are _The Little Man_ and _Studies
in Extravagance_. The first is a short play showing how a German, an
American full of altruistic platitudes, and two self-contained and
“proper” English people shrink in the most selfish and cowardly way from
a forlorn baby suspected (falsely, of course, for the sake of the extra
irony) of typhus. The “studies” are examinations of various “types” such
as “The Artist,” “The Plain Man,” “The Housewife,” “The Preceptor,” and
“The Latest Thing.” And there is none of them good—no, not one. Mr. Max
Beerbohm once did a cartoon of Mr. Galsworthy Looking upon Life and
Finding it Foul, Life being represented as a fat and ferocious goblin
with horns, a forked tail, and teeth like a wild boar’s. It was just a
little wrong. Mr. Galsworthy’s vision should not have had so much of
the positive about it. He does not find Life vigorously diabolical, but
meanly cruel and pallidly contemptible. Many great men have been gloomy
or pessimistic. Mr. Hardy is not exactly a merry grig, Schopenhauer was
consistently disgruntled, and the man who would look for _joie de vivre_
in Leopardi would look in vain. And as Mr. Galsworthy suggests himself—it
is a commonplace—it is often the duty of a serious contemporary writer to
be horrifying, unpleasant, and shocking. The regeneration of mankind—to
continue the commonplace—is not possible if we hold the view that things
may be done that may not be discussed, and that the failings of man and
the diseases of society should, as far as possible, be stowed away in
the cupboard, where the skeletons are. What is wrong with Mr. Galsworthy
is that one cannot quite believe him. One suspects him of cooking the
evidence. One does not mind a man presenting a black view of life if
(_a_) he is temperamentally inclined to it and can be melancholy with
a certain gusto, or (_b_) if, being a professed realist, he appears to
have taken cognizance of every aspect that has presented itself to him.
But Mr. Galsworthy presents so one-sided a case that we at once suspect
his _bona fides_ and react against his views. It would be unfair to
classify him with that school of novelists who give their books titles
like _Dull Monotony_ and live up to their titles by giving a photographic
reproduction of an intolerable tedium peculiar to, and comprehensible by,
the households which they themselves afflict. He usually escapes being
thoroughly boring partly because of his gift for occasionally happy and
incisive phrase and partly because here and there, behind the grey brow
of the dejected Hanging Judge, one catches a gleam of something more
exhilarating than his expressed sentiments. But he is often very nearly
dull, all the same: for his realism is often bogus. He starts with an
intention to paint a caricature in greys, and a caricature which is not
amusing. Even in his very well-made plays the characters are not, to my
mind, usually interesting in themselves. One does not believe in them as
persons. They are just a set of types, as stagy and unreal as the old
stage figures of melodrama, though they are called charwomen, clerks,
magistrates, and company directors instead of being called Irishmen,
highwaymen, and wicked baronets. His plays argue cases, but they do not
present life as we know it. I find the same sort of unreality about his
prose; and, since the unreality takes the form of making mankind look
utterly paltry and uninteresting, one wonders why on earth a man who has
such an opinion of it bothers about it at all.

So in _The Little Man_ and in these studies. All these average people
do not get a dog’s chance; we have all sinned and fall short of the
glory of God, but we really are not quite so dull, feeble, and silly
as all this. Some characteristics—as those of the Plain Man—are very
cleverly recorded, but the whole of the man is not here, nor even the
most important parts of him. As an illustration of Mr. Galsworthy’s
pseudo-realistic method take him on the ground most favourable to
him—that of the beef-and-whisky-fed sportsman:

“What led to him was anything that ministered to the coatings
of the stomach and the thickness of the skin ... to be ‘hard’
was his ambition, and he moved through life hitting things,
especially balls—whether they reposed on little inverted tubs
of sand or moved swiftly towards him, he almost always hit
them, and told people how he did it afterwards. He hit things,
too, at a distance, through a tube, with a certain noise....”

Now, apart from the fact that a full and accurate description of a
sportsman would put in many things Mr. Galsworthy leaves out (e. g. some
indication that he was a human being, as we know the species), this is
not good, though it is superficially plausible description, even so
far as it goes. The plain statement that the gentleman played golf and
cricket and shot a good deal would convey a better idea of him than
this specious circumlocution. To say that a man is smoking a cigarette
positively contains a greater measure of suggestion than to say that he
is inhaling grey fumes through a cylinder of paper filled with dried
herbs. Much of Mr. Galsworthy’s attack upon all kinds of men and women,
self-centred authors, idealists who oppress their wives, worldly women
who have never found their souls, cultured people who chase the new,
and Philistines who run away from the new, has the same sort of defect.
It is really “guying” which passes for photography merely because it
is heavy-footed and unamusing. I object to Mr. Galsworthy’s ostensible
view of life partly because I don’t believe he takes it, and partly
because if he did I should think it an absurdly unjust view. At heart
a humanitarian, he has got into a dismal and costive kind of literary
method which makes him look like a fretful and dyspeptic man who curls
his discontented nostrils at life as though it were an unpleasing smell.
As Ibsen used so often to remark, there is a great deal wrong with the
drains; but after all there are other parts of the edifice.

A Polyphloisboisterous Critic

I remember—that is to say, I wish I remembered, for I have forgotten
most of it—a poem that I used to recite at my mother’s knee. Its subject
was an antediluvian man of sesquipedalian height, who let out the blood
of an ichthyosaurus with a polyphloisboisterous shout; and its claim to
attention was a plethora of polysyllables very embarrassing to an infant,
and indeed to any, tongue. It was of that poem that I was reminded whilst
reading _European Dramatists_, by Archibald Henderson.

Mr. Henderson, an American professor, is not a stranger to the British
public. It was he who produced, a few years ago, a biographical
study of Mr. Bernard Shaw so vast that a single copy might well have
served—were not Mr. Shaw still happily with us—as Mr. Shaw’s tombstone.
The work, indeed (to use the phrase Mr. Henderson himself applies to
a play of Strindberg’s), was “colossal in its incommensurability.”
It was the kind of book one had thought could only be produced by a
large committee of Chinese scholars; and although it did not lead one
to respect the author’s powers of judging the relative importance of
his various facts, it at least compelled one to admire his colossal
energy and his incommensurable supply of these facts. From _European
Dramatists_ one gets precisely the same feeling. Parts of the book have
appeared in journals published in Boston and in Berlin, in Stuttgart
and in Stockholm, in Helsingfors, Paris, New York, and Ghent. And one
may be sure that Mr. Henderson could have talked to the editors of all
these papers and beaten all of them hollow in knowledge of the modern
literature of their respective countries. The actual subjects of his
papers are familiar enough: Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck,
Granville Barker, and Wilde. But in discussing them he shows an amazing
acquaintance with everybody who has recently written anything in any
country. He can refer you to the December 1913 issue of the _Przemysl
Review_; he can tell you what the Servian critic, Ivan Peckitch, thinks
of the Finnish poet, D. D. Bilius. He knows all about everything, though
one is not quite sure that he knows anything else. But what chiefly
pleases one about him is not so much what he says as the charming
way he says it. Like Hudibras, he cannot ope his mouth but out there
flies a trope. Everything happens with him in metaphors; people are
always digging into soils, moulding things in fires or clothing them in
vestures. And above all he is polysyllabic and rotund of speech.

He begins well with Strindberg, of whose first married years he
observes that they “were undoubtedly happy—certainly in the passional
sense, if not in the restful consciousness of hallowed union.” “In
1886,” he proceeds, “Strindberg began to be obsessed with the monomania
of animadversion against the female sex.” Later, “goaded by titanic
ambition, he cast off the shackles of provinciality for the freedom
of cosmopolitanism”—i. e. he travelled. Ibsen and Strindberg were “so
antipodal in temperament, yet so cognate in the faculties of intuitive
perception and searching introspectiveness.” One of Strindberg’s works
blurs the vision of the average spectator, “with its kinetoscopic
heterogeneity of spiritual films”: Peer Gynt (on the other hand, shall I
say?) stood for “the disciplinary bankruptcy of laxity.” “Concretizes”
and “inscenation” are the kind of words he rejoices in, but perhaps two
or three longer extracts will better illustrate the quality of his style:

“To peep into the workshop of the great master’s brain and
assist at the precise balancing of the arguments _pro_ and
_con_, to observe how an idea first finds lodgment in the
brain, and to note the gradual symmetrical accretion of the
fundamental nuclei for the final creation—this is a privilege
that has perhaps [_sic_] never fully been realized by an
observer.

“America is young and hopeful, at least; it is not peopled, we
are confidently assured, with soul-sick tragedians mouthing
their futile protests against the iron vice of environment,
the ineradicable scar of heredity, the fell clutch of
circumstance.

“Yet the reiterant ejaculations, the hyper-ethereal imaginings
of the symbolist manner, are the symptoms of a tentative
talent, not of an authoritative art.”

I don’t think Professor Henderson’s remarks are ever quite meaningless,
but I suspect that the most elephantine of them, if reduced to
essentials, would be as commonplace as his more comprehensible statements
that “Social criticism is the sign manual of the age,” and that “the
emancipation of woman, in the completest sense, is on the way”—which last
gets a whole paragraph to itself. But it is pleasant to read it all; to
see “Ibsen, Pinero, or Phillips” thus bracketed; to learn that Wilde’s
father was also “the father of modern otology,” and to be told that
Maeterlinck’s “eternal prayer” is, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh
would melt”! That is on page 203; but the effect is somewhat marred by
the fact that precisely the same “cry” has been, on page 37, attributed
to Strindberg. Personally I plump for Maeterlinck.

“Another Century, and then ...”

There is a certain sort of dull criticism which Dr. Johnson admirably
stigmatized when he said that “there is no great merit in telling
how many plays have ghosts in them and how this ghost is better than
that.” A great deal of American (not to speak of German) academic
criticism belongs to this category; and especially those theses which
are written by postgraduate students and candidates for the doctor’s
degree. These persons, when they are not exhuming dead reputations
from well-deserved sepulchres, show an uncanny ingenuity in inventing
original classifications and instituting unnecessary comparisons. But
now and again such students manage to produce some enlightening piece
of “research” work, and _The French Revolution and the English Novel_
(Putnams) is one of the best of its kind. It is by Allene Gregory; and as
I cannot tell from the name whether she is a gentleman or a lady, I shall
call him Miss.

“This study in the _tendenz_ novel was begun with the idea of paralleling
Dr. Hancock’s book, _The French Revolution and the English Poets_.” That
is the first sentence of the preface, and it has a strictly academic
flavour about it. The book is a “scientific” treatise; it would not
have been written, so to say, either by a French Revolutionary or by an
English novelist. If it dealt with the purely literary merits, which are
few, of its subjects, it would be a useless sort of book. But its real
purpose is to supply a chapter to the history of ideas, and especially
Liberal political and social ideas. Many people talk as though they
thought that the novel which canvasses the “problems” of sex, property,
and religion were an invention of the last thirty years; and many others
are under the impression that Charles Dickens was the first person to use
fiction—though not, of course, the first person to employ fictions—for
the promotion of legislation. Books about Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
are occasionally written; and quite recently Thomas Holcroft, one of the
chief of our Revolutionary novelists, was given considerable notice in
Mr. Brailsford’s excellent little book in the Home University Library.
But, as far as my experience goes, there seem to be very few who know
that England produced a century ago a whole group of novelists whose
principal aim was not to “tell a straightforward story” or make the flesh
creep, but to blow up the foundations of society with the gunpowder in
the jam.

Miss Gregory’s book is very comprehensive. Her principal figures are
Holcroft, Godwin, and Robert Bage; and she gives synopses of all their
novels, with extracts illustrating their doctrines. Holcroft, one of
the most lovable figures in the history of English democracy, was the
sort of man who is regarded as an obscure crank in his lifetime, then
forgotten for a time, and ultimately recognized as a person of historical
importance. He lived a long life, and harmed nobody in the course of it.
As a stable-boy in a racing stable he read Addison, Bunyan, and Swift
(whose tribute to the Houyhnhnms must have had a local colour for him);
he was afterwards a strolling actor, a hack writer, translator, novelist,
and playwright, one of his plays being _The Road to Ruin_. When the
Society for Constitutional Reformation was raided Holcroft was arrested
with Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke, and it was alleged against him, as
justification for a charge of high treason, that he had extolled moral
as against physical force. His associates being acquitted, he was never
brought to trial: there comes a point at which even a Government begins
to feel it is making an ass of itself. Holcroft’s courage never weakened
“when Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and even Blake had recanted, and
Godwin and Paine had fallen silent, and all the world seemed to have
forgotten its vision of democracy.” He himself stated in terms: “Whenever
I have undertaken to write a novel I have proposed to myself a specific
moral purpose.” His best novels are _Hugh Trevor_ and _Anna St. Ives_.
In the latter the hero, Frank Henley, who shocks the orthodox by taking
service rather than self-interest as his guiding principle, remarks:

“Let men look around and deny if they can that the present
wretched system of each providing for himself instead of the
whole for the whole does not inspire suspicion, fear, and
hatred. Well, well!—another century, and then....”

Just a century has passed.

Of Godwin’s novels _Caleb Williams_ is the only one that is at all read
nowadays. In spite of its impossibilities of character and action, it is
a very good tract, especially where it deals with the prison system. Miss
Gregory’s extracts from _Caleb Williams_ might have been more profuse;
but she gives interesting accounts of _St. Leon_ and _Fleetwood_. In
the first of these a gentleman who possesses the philosopher’s stone
breaks into long reflections on “gold _versus_ actual wealth”; in the
other there are eloquent passages about the horrors of child-slavery in
factories which anticipate the factory reports of a generation later,
and which were so much in advance of their time that they still hold
good in reference to certain of the States of America. Godwin saw the
whole thing very clearly: the pale, emaciated child given the free man’s
right of selling his labour at his own price in the open market and, as
Godwin put it, able to earn salt to his bread at four, but unable to
earn bread to his salt at forty. The placid Bage’s novels were admired
by Walter Scott. The most original is _Hermsprong, or Man as he is not_,
the hero of which—who enters civilized society after being brought up
among the Red Indians, and quails at the change—criticizes institutions
with something of the tone of the versatile Mr. Smilash in _An Unsocial
Socialist_.

Shelley’s _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_ are only interesting, if
interesting at all, because they were written by their author. Miss
Gregory ploughs through them, and also through the novels of Charlotte
Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. She has a very interesting chapter
on Mary Wollstonecraft and the early Women’s Rights authors. I find most
alluring the bare mention made of a certain Ann Plumptre, a novelist of
whom I had never previously heard, who admired Napoleon enthusiastically.
In 1810, according to Crabb Robinson,

“she declared she would welcome him if he invaded England
because he would do away with aristocracy and give the country
a better government.”

Finally Miss Gregory has given space to the anti-revolutionary novelists,
especially George Walker and Charles Lucas, of _The Infernal Quixote_.
Ridicule of visionaries and demagogues through the medium of novels
was a recognized sport then as now; and Lucas instituted an elaborate
comparison between political and religious revivalists. A good
bibliography rounds off a very laudable compilation which should interest
all persons of subversive views and direct the reading of the curious
into some very agreeable channels.

Herrick

Mr. F. W. Moorman has edited for the Oxford Press a new edition of
Herrick, which should supersede all its predecessors. There is very
little editorial matter; Mr. Moorman has already written a _Life_, and
his introduction and notes have a purely textual reference. The text,
which is as satisfactory a one as we are likely to get, is based upon a
collation of various divergent copies of the first edition; for Herrick
appears to have hung about the printer’s making alterations whilst the
sheets were going through the press. And a full list is given of variants
which occur in other printed copies of some of the poems and in MSS., of
which the editor records several which have not previously been dealt
with.

Any one who regards Herrick as an unsophisticated warbler pouring forth
profuse strains of unpremeditated art may study these variants and
correct himself. Mr. Moorman—I suppose he has sufficient reason, though
he leaves one to guess what it is—assumes that the versions in MSS. and
anthologies, etc., including those published after the _Hesperides_, are
all earlier than the versions in the _Hesperides_. Now and then one is
sorry that this should be so, as when the presumably earlier

_And night will come when men will swear_
_Time has spilt snow upon your haire,_

is changed into

_And time will come when you shall weare_
_Such frost and snow upon your haire._

But almost invariably the changes are improvements; and they are
exceedingly numerous. Sometimes alterations in almost every line of a
poem may be studied; sometimes there is a whole series of attempts at a
line; and if we had more of Herrick’s original MSS. available, we should
no doubt find every poem a mass of trial trips and deletions. He blotted,
filed, and pumice-stoned as much as any English poet, and he had the most
delicate and deliberate sense of all the complex mechanism of verse. This
rubicund Royalist rector was above all else a craftsman and a connoisseur.

What distinguishes his best—they are so well known that I need not quote
them—poems from his second best is usually that the former have some
especially taking touch of tenderness. It is never very deep; even in an
epitaph he is more concerned with turning it well than with the, often
apocryphal, death of the person commemorated. His adorations and griefs
are as light as rose-leaves, but they are genuine in their way, and it is
rather a slight difference in the quality of his emotion than a relative
superiority of craftsmanship that distinguishes his most perfect lyrics.
His strongest characteristic, one that runs through the whole body of his
verse, was his intense sensual appreciation of the material world. He was
a connoisseur in life as in art. His admired record of the “liquefaction”
of Julia’s silks is characteristic of him. “O how that glittering taketh
me!” he might have said of a thousand other things. He looked at colours
and felt surfaces like a connoisseur; he tasted substances like an
epicure tasting wines. He crushes all the distinctive hues and flavours
out of flowers and spices, roses and primroses and violets, tulips,
lilies, marigolds, cherryblossoms, virgins’ skins, jet, ivory, amber, and
gums. There is nothing romantic about him, and nothing dim; all things
are equally vivid and clear, no thing is mysteriously vaster than other
things. The moon and cream are both white—he will compare his lady’s
cheek to either indifferently or to both in a sentence; he relishes the
loveliness of each and he drinks each, with exquisite pleasure, out
of the same sized liqueur glass. Few other writers give one so keen a
contact with the beauties of the physical world. But it is usually their
sensuous appeal that is registered, sometimes their sentimental appeal,
but never their mystic appeal. Herrick was a thoroughgoing pagan.

His capacity for conveying vivid impressions of the physical was not
invariably employed upon such agreeable objects as daffodils and
maidens. His sheer virtuosity made him compose those offensive epigrams
which some bashful editors exclude from their collections. It is not
to be supposed that he really wished to vent his spleen against Lungs,
Gryll, Clasco, Scobble, Bunce, and his other, presumably pseudonymous,
butts; though if his efforts in this direction got about in his
Devonshire village and people took them to apply to themselves it is no
wonder that the natives behaved towards him, as he complained, like surly
savages. “Upon Batt” is one of the mildest of them:

_Batt he gets children, not for love to reare ’em,_
_But out of hope his wife might die to beare ’em._

A more characteristic, but still a mild one, is “Upon Lungs”:

_Lungs (as some say) ne’er sits him down to eate_
_But that his breath do’s Fly-blow all the meate._

He tells—I refrain from the grossest ones—of another gentleman whose eyes
were so sticky in the morning that his wife had to lick them open; of
another whose raw eyes would supply an angler with a day’s bait; and of
another (very parsimonious) who preserved his nails, warts, and corns in
boxes to make jelly for his broth. It is not astonishing that when the
“sprightly Spartanesse” appeared to him in dream she remarked:

_Hence, Remove,_
_Herrick thou art too coorse for love._

But as one goes on through these things one is too amused to be
disgusted; one wonders what on earth the man is going to think of next.
And that was the idea. He had compressed all the fragrance of the spring
into short lyrics—how much concentrated beastliness could he get into a
couplet? He had rivalled Horace and Anacreon in one line; could he rival
Martial in another? You may picture him making these things—sitting at a
table in the sun outside the rectory, quaffing, as was his wont, a social
tankard with his favourite pig, and working and working at these singular
concoctions until there came the thrill of the artist who knows he has
produced a perfect cameo.

His outlook and methods being such, it is not surprising that when he
gave up his “unbaptized Rhimes” and took to “Noble Numbers” he was
comparatively unsuccessful. Quaintness and neatness do not go far in
religious verse, and the congenital materialism of Herrick’s imagery
sometimes produced the most grotesque effects.

_God is all forepart, for we never see_
_Any part backward in the Deitie._

An epigram which might have had some point if applied to a man is merely
vapid when applied to the Deity. And the vapid becomes comic in

_I crawle, I creep; my Christ I come_
_To thee, for curing Balsamum,_

and

_Lord, I confesse, that thou alone are able_
_To purifie this my Augean stable;_
_Be the Seas water, and the Land all Sope,_
_Yet if thy Bloud not wash me, there’s no hope._

Herrick was not an exalted religious poet. But it doesn’t much matter
what he was not; what he was is one of the greatest small masters in the
history of verse.

The Muse in Liquor

In former times men wrote about drinking without the slightest
self-consciousness. Our forefathers, from Teos to Chertsey, from
Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, sang the praises of
what nobody in those days dreamt of calling alcohol, as they sang the
praises of the other amenities of life. To Homer “bright wine” was as
indispensable a commodity as bread: no home could be complete without it.
If Anacreon and Horace were rather more sophisticated about it and tasted
their liquor with a deliberate and spun-out sensuality, they still had no
idea that there was anything morally questionable about drink. So onwards
to mediæval times. When the Anglo-Saxon leech laid it down that if a man
has fainted from hunger one should

“pull his locks from him, and wring his ears, and twitch his
whiskers; when he is better give him some bread broken in wine,”

there was no rival school of leeches to jump up and protest that to
inject alcoholic poisons into a debilitated frame was about the worst
thing you could do. Drinking in the Middle Ages was unchallengeably
respectable. “The introduction of wine and viticulture,” says Mr. A. L.
Simon in his history of the _Wine Trade in England_,

“is coeval with the introduction of the Christian religion. As
the numbers of clergy increased, greater supplies of wine were
required, so vines were planted at home, and a considerable
foreign wine trade came into being.”

The drinking-songs of the Middle Ages were largely composed by
theological students, and it was (at least I am of that party which
maintains that it was) an archdeacon of the English Church who wrote one
of the two best lyrics of the kind that this island has produced—that
perfect song in which he expresses the hope that he shall meet his latter
end in a hostelry and that some one should hold a pottle-pot before his
dying eyes:

_Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori_
_“Deus sit propitius huic potatori.”_

Our other great song has also been attributed to an ecclesiastic, Bishop
Still.

But if a modern bishop wrote a song about hot whisky, he would get into
hot water. Times have changed. When a modern English king wants to do
the popular thing, he takes the pledge; when Henry III wanted to, he
gave his old wine to the poor—the gift was not so noble as it sounds,
for in his day old wine was bad, owing to the lack of glass bottles and
well-made casks. Bishop Still, when he wrote (if he wrote) about the
ale-swallowing capacity of himself and Tib, his wife, was on the safe
side, for his sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, was addicted herself. Her
Ministers had a job keeping her supplied with beer. When she was on one
of her royal progresses, the Earl of Leicester wrote to Lord Burleigh:

“There is not one drop of good drink for her. We were fain to
send to London and Kenilworth and divers other places where ale
was; her own here was so strong as there was no man able to
drink it.”

But since that time a question of principle has arisen, and the changed
attitude of society towards drink has been accompanied by a corresponding
change in the tone of those who write in praise of drink. They used to be
natural and expository; they are now self-conscious and on the defensive.

I note the transition in a volume (1862) called _How to Mix Drinks,
or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion_, by Jerry Thomas, formerly principal
bartender at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, and the Planter’s
House, St. Louis. It is an ingenious book and a suitable companion
to its shelf-neighbour, _The Maltworm’s Vade-mecum_, a guide to the
public-houses of early Georgian London. But if Mr. Thomas had been a
contemporary of his brother connoisseur, it would never have occurred to
him to write a preface apologizing for the mere compilation of such a
book:

“Whether it is judicious that mankind should continue to
indulge in such things, or whether it would be wiser to abstain
from all enjoyments of that character, it is not our province
to decide. We leave that question to the moral philosopher. We
simply contend that a relish for ‘social drinks’ is universal;
that those drinks exist in greater variety in the United States
than in any other country in the world, and that he, therefore,
who proposes to impart to those drinks not only the most
palatable but the most wholesome characteristics of which they
may be made susceptible, is a genuine public benefactor.”

You see the uneasiness coming in; the devotee is conscious of a
disapproving eye. And what was perceptible in 1862 is much more marked
to-day, when a considerable percentage of the population looks askance at
a man who has been seen coming out of a bar, and when most of our priests
and half our politicians denounce fermented drinks as an invention of the
Devil. The results of this are seen in the twentieth-century Bacchanal’s
writings. He is on the defensive. He cannot write a mere song in praise
of drink: his Muse is largely, even mainly, concerned with dispraise of
the opponents of drink. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, belauding drinks
as against beverages, strike an attitude which Anacreon simply would not
have understood. They cannot lie and lap their liquor in dreamy content.
Whenever they take up a pot of beer they have to march out and drink it
defiantly in the middle of the Strand. It is almost as if they knew they
were the champions of a lost, though noble, cause; and felt that at any
moment they might be called upon to Die in the Last Tankard.

This tendency is strongly marked in Mr. Chesterton’s volume _Wine, Water,
and Song_. Mr. Chesterton spends half his time in abusing abstemious
American and English millionaires, tea, cocoa, mineral waters, and
grocers—who, lacking the genial proclivities of publicans, have never
been known

_To crack a bottle of fish sauce_
_Or stand a man a cheese._

But the novelty of tone makes the songs all the better: for the old
material of drinking-songs was getting threadbare. To my thinking, these
songs—most of them appeared in _The Flying Inn_, and it was a pity
that they were omitted from the volume of collected _Poems_ recently
issued—are amongst the finest bibulous songs ever written, and some of
Mr. Chesterton’s very best work. You can read them aloud to other people
and very seldom come across a stilted or obscure phrase which makes you
feel sheepish to say it. But, more than that, _Wine and Water_, _The Good
Rich Man_, _The Song against Songs_, and the two poems on the English
Road are the sort of infectiously musical things that one learns by heart
without knowing one has done it.

_Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,_
_He ate his eggs with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,_
_And the soup he took was Elephant Soup, and the fish he took was
whale,_
_But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to
sail,_
_And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,_
_“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”_

Lives there a man with soul so dead that when he comes across this or
_The Road to Roundabout_ (which is about the best of the lot) he does not
automatically improvise a tune to it and start, according to his ability,
singing it?

£5 Misspent

Any one who is interested in what nobody has yet asked us to call
the British language must have felt apprehensive if he read the
correspondence recently printed in the _Times_ on the subject of a
synonym for the word “Colonial.” It appears that this word is “strongly
objected to” in the—er—Dominions, and especially in Canada. The Central
Committee of the Overseas Club therefore started a Missing Word
Competition. It offered a prize of £5 for the best synonym and “members
have been most prolific in their ideas.” The examples given of their
fecundity are, however, so malformed as to lead to the hope that in
future they will practise an intellectual Malthusianism. The Chairman of
the Club says that amongst the terms suggested are Britainer, Britonial,
Imperialist, Dominion, Britannian, Britoner, Greater Briton, Anglian
Pan-Briton, and such repulsive composts as Empirean, Transmarine (why not
Ultramarine?), Away-Born, Out-Briton, Co-Briton, Albionian, MacBriton,
and Britson. What those which he does not publish were like one can
only surmise; but no doubt Ap-Briton, O’Briton, Britidian, Britkinson,
Dominisher, Fraternanglian, Nonsunsetton, and Heptathalassian were among
them. And so, possibly, was Oversear.

It needs must be that new words should come; and one should not cry
woe against those through whom they come. We are constantly inventing
or importing words to convey ideas or shades of feeling for which we
previously had no exact means of expression. We also necessarily acquire
new words for new objects, such as chemicals and machines. When men made
the telephone they had to call it something; and the same thing applied
to the omnibus. We can frequently trace new words to their inventors.
But we may safely say that successful new words are seldom “made up”
cold-bloodedly merely for the sake of the thing. An author hits upon a
word half-accidentally, developing it usually from some word already
familiar; or a philosopher or scientist constructs one out of fragments
of Greek, or Latin, or Greek and Latin mixed, because he has a new object
to describe. The process is going on continually. The rivals “airman” and
“aviator” (somebody once asked if you could call a miner a “talpiator”)
are at present[2] fighting it out in the Press and on men’s tongues; and
if some central authority is in the future established over the heads of
the sovereign Powers, it is likely that the word “supernational,” now
being bruited about, may come into use to describe it. We may get in
time, too, an inclusive word which will imply “citizen of the British
Empire,” covering both Britons (or, if you prefer it, Britirish) and
Colonials. But I doubt whether such a word will result from a public
competition.

When it comes it will come because some one person starts using it and
others take to it. And when it is a case of inventing a synonym, a new
word as a substitute for an old one in general use, I think it most
unlikely that a group of persons such as the Overseas Club could persuade
the race to abandon a universally used word like “Colonial” for some
£5 prize word merely because hypersensitive people think that the word
used to have a faintly derogatory flavour. “Colonial” is very strongly
entrenched. One can just understand how the Americans have come to use
the abominable word “Britisher” instead of the ancient “Briton”; for it
falls more trippingly off the tongue. But “Colonial” is a most liquid,
easy, and euphonious word. If it is ever superseded, it will be so
because some other word comes in with the larger connotation to which I
have referred, a word which is bound to come into being when we cease to
think of the Empire as composed of the United Kingdom on the one hand and
the Colonies on the other, but think of it as a federation of equal and
distinct units.

It is a pity that people take so seriously the fact that when the
words “Colonies” and “Colonial” were first used by us they had certain
associations. For it is evident that to the vast majority of our
countrymen they are entirely divested of them. Whatever one’s habits,
one automatically thinks when the word “Colonial” is mentioned, not of a
humble emigrant who wants shepherding, but of a person who is the very
quintessence of independence. Any one who has even the most superficial
acquaintance with the language knows that words can lose their old
associations utterly. If, for example, I were arrested and charged for
alleging, in a public speech, one of our Royal Princes to be “a silly
knave,” I should not find the magistrate very sympathetic if I said I
was using the words in a Shakespearean (which in this case would be
equivalent to a Pickwickian) sense, and that I merely meant to call him
“a simple boy.” Similarly, where an object changes its form its name
changes its connotation. If one could talk of a bottle to a mediæval
ancestor, he would think of something made of leather; to-day a bottle
is essentially something made of glass. If we always wanted a new term
directly a new association was created, there would be no end to the
process; we should have to have a Ministry of Constructive Philology
always at work. After all, Charleston was named after an English king
when the North American plantations were very subordinate indeed; and
Melbourne after a member of the British House of Lords, an institution
of which few modern Australians approve. So, on the whole, saving the
Overseas Club’s reverence, we may as well, for the time being, stick to
“Colonial.”

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Airman happily seems (July 1918) to have won.—S. E.

Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore

Handling the Porcupine of Avon is always ticklish work. When Mr. George
Moore, after containing himself for years, at last wrote to explain that
it was he, and not Mr. Shaw or Mr. Franz Heinrichs, who discovered the
fact that Shakespeare’s female characters were weak because they were
written for boy-actors, it was only natural that another correspondent
should show that Mr. Moore had been forestalled by an eighteenth-century
Frenchman. Mr. Moore’s remark about the boy-actors was, however, merely
a passing observation in a lecture in French (published in the _Revue
Bleue_ in 1910) which is an important document in the movement against
what Mr. Shaw calls Bardolatry.

“He is inconceivably wise; the others conceivably.” Thus Emerson; and a
few generations of such sweeping remarks were bound to be followed by a
reaction. For a hundred years we have swallowed Shakespeare steadily and
swallowed him whole; a man has even written a book on _The Messiahship
of Shakespeare_. And of all his powers, that of creating an infinite
variety of female character has been perhaps more enthusiastically
praised than any other. The professors have given us treatises on
Shakespeare’s Feminine Types; and the less erudite public has been
deluged with Posies from Shakespeare’s Garden of Girls. “O Nature! O
Shakespeare! which of ye drew from the other?” That is typical. Dr.
Lewes, one of the ablest German writers on the subject, kneels and
adores, and asks women to do the same. “This piece,” he says of _Henry
VIII_,

“this piece and its female characters should indeed inspire
women with profound gratitude towards a poet who represents
a queen and a heroine who is above all things an excellent
woman, displaying in the midst of frightful trials all the best
womanly qualities, thus proving that a noble, pure feminine
heart is the home of the noblest virtue, the highest truth and
purity. Seldom has more flattering homage been paid to the sex
than by Shakespeare in his presentation of Catherine of Aragon.”

And hear Mrs. Jamieson, author of the best-known English book on these
women. Dare any one apply the epithet “clever” to Portia, “this heavenly
compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness”? As for Lady
Macbeth, with her “Gothic grandeur, rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned
colours,” even she is not to be insulted by comparison with other
villainesses. Sophocles’ Clytemnestra had been mentioned, but

“would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel
murderess and unnatural mother with Lady Macbeth? _Lady Macbeth
herself would certainly shrink from the approximation._”

One _has_ sometimes felt that her ladyship was probably president of the
local branches of the G.F.S. and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families
Association.

There was nothing of this sort about Mr. George Moore’s lecture. It
opened with a strong protest against the “vast clamour” of Shakespeare’s
worshippers:

“One might take them for a gathering of negro Methodists in
a chapel, each one straining his lungs to out-bellow his
neighbour, in order to attract the Almighty’s attention. Is it
that the critics think that Shakespeare is listening to them?
At any rate, the madness increases daily, and, if the cult
of Jahveh should happen to decay in England, I should not be
surprised were they to promote Shakespeare to the vacant throne
in the heavens.”

After this engaging beginning he went on to the general contention that
neither Shakespeare nor any of his contemporaries drew or painted a
real woman. The Renaissance was interested in women only as queens or
odalisques, and Shakespeare at most made a few delicious silhouettes
of women. His men were another matter. “Hamlet is the secret thought
of all men”; and, though it hurts Mr. Moore to agree with Tolstoi, he
reaffirmed Tolstoi’s statement that “Falstaff is the most universal and
original thing in Shakespeare.” “Hamlet is the hieroglyphic and symbol
of the intellect; Falstaff is the symbol and arabesque of the flesh.”
But Shakespeare, like Balzac, was chiefly concerned with “the eternal
masculine.”

But suppose it be admitted that Shakespeare has no female Hamlet and
no female Falstaff; is it not arguable that then the case for the
superiority of Shakespeare’s males over his females is very much less
strong? It would be absurd to attempt to dogmatize on the subject; but
personally I doubt whether any one who cannot get inside the minds of
most (though many would exempt Heine’s “ancient Parisienne” Cleopatra,
and one or two more) of Shakespeare’s women will get inside the minds of
most of his men either. When Professor Dowden said that he had “edited
a whole play for love of Imogen” the remark (if he heard it) may have
sounded strange to Mr. Moore; but would he understand, either, any
one editing a whole play for love of Antonio, Bassanio, Benedict, the
Duke of _Twelfth Night_, King Lear, Othello, Mark Antony, or Henry V?
It is possible to hold the view that Shakespeare “put himself” into
a few characters and observed the others “from the outside,” making
them most interesting when they are most markedly what are called
“character parts.” Personally, though I should certainly know Hamlet
or Falstaff if I met them in swallowtails, I don’t think there are
many other of Shakespeare’s characters whom I should recognize if I
encountered them clothed in other than their traditional garments. But
I do not think it is easy to sustain the argument that, as a whole, his
women are less carefully and sympathetically drawn than his men—Lady
Macbeth than Macbeth, Juliet than Romeo, Cleopatra than Anthony,
Beatrice than Benedict, Rosalind than Orlando—or, still more, that he
was not interested in women and regarded them in a casual lazy way as
decorations. Shakespeare’s politics were Heaven knows what; and he may
not necessarily have drawn Portia as an argument for the admission of
women to the Inns of Court. But one would have imagined that if ever
there were a writer who treated women and men on a footing of complete
equality, and even perhaps elevated women’s moral superiority to an
indefensible pitch, it was he. If his female characters are not living
human beings it is certainly not because he despised them. He gave them
plenty of virtue, wit, courage, and will, and an ample share of the
stage; it is, with all due respect to Mr. Moore, grotesque to suggest
that he thought of them merely as properties.

The recent correspondence sent me back to Mr. Moore’s paper, and I
read it with admiration for the fruits of what he called a month’s
rather exhausting liaison with the French language. But something about
it—perhaps it was the catalogue of heroines, each with an appropriate
criticism—seemed familiar. I have tracked it; here also Mr. Moore has
been anticipated. It was the late Max O’Rell—it is almost like being
anticipated by Charley’s Aunt—who remarked that

“The heroines of Shakespeare are for the most part slaves or
fools. Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a sort of submissive
odalisque, Beatrice a chatterbox, and Ophelia a goose.”

It is very difficult indeed to say anything new about Shakespeare.

Moving a Library

I do not remember that any of our meditative essayists has written on
the subject of Moving One’s Books. If such an essay exists I should be
glad to go to it for sympathy and consolation. For I have just moved from
one room to another, in which I devoutly hope that I shall end my days,
though (as Mr. Asquith would put it in his rounded way) “at a later,
rather than at an earlier, date.” Night after night I have spent carting
down two flights of stairs more books than I ever thought I possessed.
Journey after journey, as monotonously regular as the progresses of a
train round the Inner Circle: upstairs empty-handed, and downstairs
creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, dangerously bulging
column of books wedged between my two hands and the indomitable point
of my chin. The job simply has to be done; once it is started there is
no escape from it; but at times during the process one hates books as
the slaves who built the Pyramids must have hated public monuments.
A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul. How ignominious
to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men’s
sentiments! Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the rubbish
where it lies and walk out into the world a free, untrammelled,
illiterate Superman? Civilization! Pah! But that mood is, I am happy
to say, with me ephemeral. It is generated by the necessity for tedious
physical exertion and dies with the need. Nevertheless the actual
transport is about the briefest and least harassing of the operations
called for. Dusting (or “buffeting the books,” as Dr. Johnson called
it) is a matter of choice. One can easily say to oneself, “These books
were banged six months ago” (knowing full well that it was really twelve
months ago), and thus decide to postpone the ceremony until everything
else has been settled. But the complications of getting one’s library
straight are still appalling.

Of course, if your shelves are moved bodily it is all right. You can
take the books out, lay them on the floor in due order, and restore them
to their old places. But otherwise, if you have any sense of congruity
and proportion, you are in for a bad time. My own case could not be
worse than it is. The room from which I have been expelled was low and
square; the room into which I have been driven is high and L-shaped.
None of my old wall-shelves will fit my new walls; and I have had to
erect new ones, more numerous than the old and totally different in shape
and arrangement. It is quite impossible to preserve the old plan; but
the devisal of another one brings sweat to the brow. If one happened to
be a person who never desired to refer to his books the obvious thing
to do would be to put the large books into the large shelves and the
small ones into the small shelves and then go and smoke a self-satisfied
pipe against the nearest post. But to a man who prefers to know where
every book is, and who possesses, moreover, a sense of System and wishes
everything to be in surroundings proper to its own qualities, this is not
possible. Even an unsystematic man must choose to add a classification by
subject to the compulsory classification by size; and, in my case, there
is an added difficulty produced by a strong hankering for some sort of
chronological order. There is nothing like that for easy reference. If
you know that Beowulf will be at the left-hand end of the shelf that he
fits and Julia Ward, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, at the right-hand end,
you save yourself a good deal of time. But when your new compartments do
not fit your old sections, when the large books of Stodge are so numerous
as to insist upon intruding into the shelves reserved for large books of
Pure Literature, and the duodecimos of Foreign Verse surge in a tidal
wave over the preserves of the small books on Free Trade, Ethics, and
Palæontology, one is reduced to the verge of despair. That is where I
am at this moment; sitting in the midst of a large floor covered with
sawdust, white distemper, nails, tobacco-ash, burnt matches, and the
Greatest Works of the World’s Greatest Masters. Fortunately, in Ruskin’s
words, “I don’t suppose I shall do it again for months and months and
months.”

Table-Talk and Jest Books

Samuel Butler’s _Note-Books_ have now gone into another (popular)
edition, issued by Mr. Fifield. I don’t know how large these editions
are: if, as I fear, they run to less than fifty thousand copies apiece,
Samuel Butler has not yet got his due. There is no other volume in the
whole of his collected works to equal this selection from his note-books:
you have here the quintessence of his wisdom, his taste, and his superb
impudence. The book really belongs to the “table-talk” or “ana” class of
books. Butler, that is to say, recorded his own table-talk. His principle
was, he said, that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it
on the wing. If, therefore, he thought of or said anything especially
illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort,
down it went. And it always went down as colloquially and freshly as if
a Boswell had been present recording conversation with a faithful pen.
Butler Boswellized himself. For Boswell’s _Life_, as has been remarked
before, is the greatest collection of “ana” in the language. It consisted
of Johnson’s table-talk strung on a biographical thread.

Personally I find it hard to draw the line between general table-talk
and anecdotes told of certain persons: most collections include both.
But such works, of whatever kind, consisting of detached scraps of great
men’s wit, are an agreeable form of reading, and an old-established one.
The Greeks possessed volumes of excerpts from people’s conversation,
and some Latin wrote a book, now unfortunately lost, under the piquant
title of _De Jocis Ciceronis_. The great age of such collections began,
however, with the Renaissance, when Poggio the Florentine collected
his “facetiæ.” My own extracts from Poggio are included in a German
collection of 1603, all written in Latin, which gives also the “facetiæ”
of other wits, notably of Nicodemus Frischlin of Balingen. This man
was a German scholar of exceptional brilliance who finally, on being
incarcerated for the last of many escapades, broke his neck trying
to escape. We have no such University professors of classics now.
“Ana” so-called begin with the _Scaligerana_, which gave the drastic
conversation of the younger Scaliger as recorded by two of his disciples.
The success of this led to a rush in France. Every one who had known an
eminent man deceased rushed out with a volume of table-talk; _Thuana_,
_Perroniana_, etc. The _Sorberiana_ “sive excerpta ex ore Samuelis
Sorbiere” was famous in its day, but I find it very dull. Much the best
collection is _Menagiana_, “Bon Mots, Rencontres Agréables, Pensées
Judicieuses, et Observations Curieuses de M. Ménage,” of which the
second edition (my copy) is dated 1694-5. This man was a scholar, knew
everybody and had a sharp tongue: he is extremely good reading, though,
nowadays, very little read. The contents of both of these books are
arranged (as is Butler’s) under subject-headings, in alphabetical order.
The same order is observed in Selden’s _Table-Talk_, the next best book
of the kind to Boswell in our tongue. It was published after Selden’s
death by his private secretary, and is full of extraordinarily sensible
and witty things. And, unlike many wits, Selden always possessed a sense
of responsibility. He remarked himself (under heading “Wit,” as he did
not realize) that

“He that lets fly all he knows and thinks may by chance be
satyrically witty. Honesty sometimes keeps a man from growing
rich, and civility from being witty.”

Few of the wits whose sayings are collected are so scrupulous. Our other
classical example in the kind is Coleridge’s _Table-Talk_, which is full
of fine criticism, funny stories, and good epigrams.

These collections shade off into the ordinary jest book. After all, there
is no clear division between stories told by a dead man and stories
collected and published by a living one, between stories about one man
and stories about fifty different men. When the new learning was still
new, men had a mania for collecting pointed anecdotes about the eminent.
The fattest book of the kind I know is Casper Ens’s _Epidorpidum_,
published at Cologne in the early seventeenth century. It is full of the
remarks of Alexander to Diogenes and Pope Innocent to St. Vitus and the
repartees of King Pyrrhus of Epirus to a recalcitrant phalanx. Right on
into the eighteenth century works with titles like _Elite de Bon-Mots_,
and full of such historical personages, were popular on the Continent.
English jest books were perhaps more local and contemporary in their
references. Our eighteenth-century ancestors were addicted to anecdotes
about Mr. Quin and Mr. Foote and what the Duke of Wharton said to the
Bishop. In our own time the larger, if not the smaller, public still
shows some demand for collections of anecdotes of this sort: and popular
weeklies of the _Answers_ and _Tit-Bits_ type usually seem to find it
desirable to print columns of stories about Henry Irving, Mr. Gladstone,
and such people. But it is a long way from _Tit-Bits_ to Samuel Butler:
which shows where one may land oneself if one does not know where to
draw a firm line when shading-off is apparently gradual. I cannot review
Butler at this time of day; but there are very few books existing which
contain more sense to the square inch than this. Though the worst of his
books is good reading, the _Note-Books_ is as certainly his finest book
as Boswell’s _Johnson_ is the finest of Johnson’s.

Stephen Phillips

The announcements of Stephen Phillips’s death must have carried many
people’s thoughts backward. Me personally it took back to a time, years
ago, when I was in the first flush of my youthful beauty and sitting out
at a country dance. Coloured lamps burned between boughs, trees gently
swished under a summer sky, the sound of violins and the glide of many
feet penetrated softly from a distance; and a partner, whose face was
shadowy pale in the faint light, sat clasping her knees, looking out into
the night, and talking in a deep ecstatic voice of _Marpessa_, _Herod_,
and _Paolo and Francesca_. It was not merely that she thought that I was
that sort of person: the same thing was happening in every county in
England. Phillips had the biggest boom that any English poet has had for
a generation. The extravagance of the eulogies seems very strange now.
There was scarcely a critic who did not lose his balance. I have just
been looking up some of these panegyrics, and the pitch of them makes
one feel a little sadly for a man who outlived so great and so early a
fame. The history of literature was ransacked for comparisons. Chapman,
Webster, Wordsworth, Shakespeare himself were brought in: and almost
the most modest of the assessors was Mr. William Archer, who described
Phillips as “the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of Milton.” I
remember the _Daily Mail_ devoting its magazine page to a description of
the poet, in the course of which it explained, with characteristic love
of figures, that here was a man who had discovered how to make £1000 a
year out of poetry. But it did not last. The climax of Phillips’s success
came with _Paolo and Francesca_; the subsequent plays were received with
a diminuendo of warmth; and in the last few years he was comparatively
ignored.

The early adoration was absurd but not incomprehensible. It was due,
one might say, to the fact that Phillips was not an original writer.
Much used to be made of a certain trick he had of accenting occasional
lines of blank verse in a strange manner: on the strength of this he was
treated as a revolutionary innovator in English prosody. In reality, in
spite of this one peculiarity, he was anything but an innovator. He had
an ear for the magniloquent progress of Milton’s verse and the crooning
music of Tennyson’s; he had a great facility for reproducing them; and
to those who are susceptible only to artistic effects which (though they
are unconscious of it) remind them of effects previously experienced, he
seemed, therefore, to be a consummate artist. He gave them precisely what
they had learnt to desire and expect from a poet, the familiar splendours
and the familiar silences, the familiar agonies and the familiar
tendernesses, the scents, the flowers, the gems, the old words with
their unmistakable associations, the brilliant single lines, with here
and there an alliteration and here and there an onomatopœia. His work
was not, of course, a _mere_ compost. He added something. His emotions,
though not deep, were genuine enough; he had a pretty fancy; and he had
a considerable knowledge of how to produce effects on the stage. _Paolo
and Francesca_ was certainly in every way superior to most of the other
attempts which have been made in our time at stage-plays in blank verse.
It was effective in the theatre. One remembers the excitement about the
skilful ending: the murder behind the scenes, the bodies brought in, the
murderer’s revulsion:

_I did not know the dead could have such hair._
_Hide them. They look like children fast asleep._

But those who did not shrink from comparing it with _Romeo and Juliet_
omitted to notice the same deficiencies as appeared in all his work. He
was largely derivative and there was very little hard brainwork behind
his verse.

_Herod_, _Ulysses_, and _Nero_ were all less well made: the last two were
panoramas. In all three the author depended on succulent or flamboyant
“purple patches” for his effects, descriptions too full of redundant
metaphor and violent outbursts of picturesque but too flimsy rhetoric.
There was little characterization in them, the persons were puppets in
the hands of the contriver of stage spectacles: they were carried off
by brilliant and exotic scenery and costumes, by the romantic language,
and by the real and skilful, if conventional, melody of the verse. All
the best qualities of Stephen Phillips, the qualities that gave people
a thrill they were unaccustomed to in the theatre of his time, are
quintessentialized in Herod’s megalomaniac speeches and in the oratorical
Marlowesque remark that one of the suitors in _Ulysses_ made to Penelope:

_Thou hast caught splendour from the sailless sea_
_And mystery from the many stars outwatched._

His defects were observed by few when he was a popular dramatist: but
those readers who only know him by his later work will misjudge him if
they think that he never had more power than he showed in that. His
more recent volumes, written in ill-health, would never have got him a
reputation. Here and there the old bravura appeared, and there is a short
lyric in the volume of 1913 which is certainly equal to anything in the
early book of poems with which he made his name—and in which he showed
signs of contact with the “movement” of the ’nineties. But from most of
these later poems the life had gone, leaving the imitative structure
naked to the eye. His last volume, _Panama and other Poems_, was issued
just before he died by his original publisher, Mr. John Lane; and the way
in which he had succumbed to his influences was very evident. Lines on
the Canal such as

_Chagres by Dam stupendous of Gatun_

not merely remind one of Milton but are exact mechanical reproductions of
Milton.

Incidentally the difficulties of literary biography are illustrated
by his obituary notices. _My Daily News_ gave his age as forty-nine,
my _Times_ gave it as fifty-one; and looking into the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_ to see which of these estimates it would confirm, I found
that it alleged him to be forty-seven. _The Encyclopædia_ says that he
was at Queens’ College, Cambridge, when he joined Mr. Benson’s company;
the _Times_ that he was cramming at Scoones’. When we have this conflict
of evidence about a contemporary who was known personally to hundreds of
people in London, where are we with Elizabethans and Romans? Personally
I believe that, in the matter of birth-dates, nothing is really
reliable—not even a man’s own statement—except public registers.

Gray and Horace Walpole

If a gentleman in Calabria digs up with a spade a hitherto unknown
fragment of the obscure Latin historian P. Pomponius Fatto there is
great excitement about it, and research congratulates itself upon its
achievements. I can quite appreciate the feeling. All treasure-trove
is exciting. The smallest recovery from the long-buried past is worth
having; it may, in itself, fill a gap somewhere and encourages the hope
of greater finds. But why not make just as much of a palaver about Dr.
Paget Toynbee’s disinterment of nearly a hundred “new” letters by the
poet Gray? The new letters are included in _The Correspondence of Gray,
Walpole, West, and Ashton_ (Oxford University Press, 2 vols.); and
they were found in the collection of Captain Sir F. E. Waller, who was
recently killed in action, and to whose memory the volume is dedicated.
Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton formed a “Quadruple
Alliance” at Eton. West went on to Oxford, the other three to Cambridge.
We get first of all an exchange between all four; then West dies, in his
twenties; then, years afterwards, relations with Ashton are broken; and,
finally, there is a long series that passed between Walpole and Gray up
to the time of the poet’s death in 1771. In all there are 248 letters;
of these 153 were written by Gray, eighty-nine of which have never been
published before. Others have never before been printed in full, and few
have escaped maltreatment by previous editors. Their errors ranged from
deliberate alteration, truncation, and blending to bad transcription and
unintelligent acceptance. How easily the most comic errors may creep into
a text where each editor neglects to use, or has not access to, original
sources may be shown by the history of a single word. Gray wrote a Latin
poem about the god of Love in which one line began “Ludentem fuge.”
This was printed by Miss Berry as “Sudentem fuge”; and this has been
“corrected” by subsequent editors into “_Sudantem fuge_”!

The characters of the correspondents come out very clearly. Even when,
just after they have left school, they are all writing rather affectedly
(and with a plethora of classical quotation), Ashton is obviously the one
fundamentally insincere member of the group. He is hyperself-conscious,
nastily artificial. Later on he even refers in Joseph Surface’s very own
words to his “noble sentiments”: this was clearly the man to make, by
his double-dealing, the temporary breach between Gray and Walpole, and,
ultimately, to compel Walpole to cast him off by his incivility when
Walpole was no longer useful to him. Richard West, son of an Irish Lord
Chancellor, has no apparent defect save excessive seriousness. There is
a touch of the priggish mixed with the high-mindedness and generosity
of this able young invalid; but one can understand Gray’s devotion to
him. Some of the poetry of his here given (he appeared in Dodsley’s
_Miscellany_ by the way) is surprisingly good. He was the Arthur Hallam
of the eighteenth century.

The Walpole letters are, as always, unsurpassable of their kind. His
undergraduate letter (in parody of Addison’s descriptions of Italy)
relating a journey from London to Cambridge, is admirable; but the
letters describing his continental tour with Gray are better, and
those, still later, about the _beau monde_ of Paris are perfect. There
is a peculiar charm too about the correspondence with Gray as to the
details and publication of his works, the half-solemn, half whimsical
concentration on the tiny antiquarian details to which each was addicted,
the eager little controversies and explorations, the odd little jokes.
But though Gray, taking his correspondence as a whole, considering both
volume, range, and formal excellence, cannot contest Walpole’s position
as the greatest of English letter-writers, there is a flavour about his
letters that makes them peculiarly delightful. Walpole writes fully
dressed, though with exquisite manner; Gray writes naturally, and without
obvious reserve sometimes even gambolling. There may be people, familiar
with Gray only through his elevated and sombre verse, who fancy him an
exceedingly self-contained and formal man, who feel (like the person
who greatly amused him by addressing him as “The Rev. T. Gray”) that he
simply _must_ have been a divine. There were certainly contemporaries
of his who met him and got the impression that he was constitutionally
grave, reticent, aloof. His letters show that he was anything but that
to his friends. The author of the _Elegy_ habitually “played the goat.”
There are a whole string of skit letters here: in one he writes to
Walpole as “Honner’d Nurse,” addressing the illiterate screed “to mie
Nuss att London”; in another he wallows in Oriental imagery about the dew
of the morning; in another he applies to stagnant Cambridge a whole long
passage from Isaiah describing deserted Babylon, the home of dragons and
haunt of screech-owls. He had a great habit of ending his letters with
something openly idiotic. Once he bursts out with “Pray, did you ever see
an elephant?”; another time his peroration is:

“The Assizes are just over. I was there; but I a’nt to be
transported. Adieu!”

and another excursion concludes with a ludicrous burlesque of the type of
commonplaces usually to be found in letters:

“There is a curious woman here that spins Glass, and makes
short Aprons and furbelow’d petticoats of it, a very genteel
wear for summer, & discover’s all the motions of the limbs to
great advantage. She is a successour of Jack, the Aple dumpling
Spinner’s: my Duck has eat a Snail &c.: & I am—yours sincerely
T. G.”

Those who think of poets as persons without humour who live in a
permanent exaltation and are quite unlike reasonable beings will be
shocked with Gray’s remarks when he had, to the publisher’s alarm,
withdrawn a poem from his forthcoming small volume:

“but to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my work should
be mistaken for the works of a flea or a pismire, I promised
to send him an equal weight of poetry or prose: so, since my
return hither, I put up about two ounces of stuff: viz. The
Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin ... with all this I shall be
but a shrimp of an author.”

On a night nine years before this, General Wolfe, as his boat crept
towards the Quebec bank of St. Lawrence, had recited the _Elegy_ to his
companions and told them that he had rather have written that poem than
take Quebec.

Gray’s judgments on other authors (though he was unjust to the more
fermentative kind of Frenchman) were uniformly good. He suspected
Ossian, but hoped he was a fraud for the sake of the jest. If, he
said, Macpherson had done it all to hoax fools, “I would undertake a
journey into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him.” He read
Boswell’s early book on Corsica and almost prophetically observed:

“The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any
fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only
tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.”

In politics he was interested only mildly, but he liked to gossip about
them. “Do oblige me,” he writes to Walpole,

“with a change in the Ministry: I mean, something one may tell,
that looks as if it were near at hand; or if there is no truth
to be had, then a good likely falsehood for the same purpose. I
am sorry to be so reduced.”

“A good likely falsehood”: is it not in perpetual demand?

A Horrible Bookseller

People often complain that booksellers know too little about the goods
they sell. If only, the argument is, books were sold by men of taste,
familiar with their contents, the public would buy more good literature:
as things are, the blind bookseller leads the blind customer. There is
something in this. An educated bookseller can actually educate other
people. Many intelligent young persons reach the age of twenty-one
without having met a single person with the habit of good reading, and
do not “get on to” literature because it has never been suggested to
them that they will like it. Booksellers may act as teachers. There are
booksellers, though not many, who make a practice of “nursing” promising
young customers, gradually cultivating their taste until they become
confirmed book-lovers and book-buyers. One such complained to me not long
ago that he had had scores of likely colts taken away from him by Lord
Kitchener, and did not know how many of them would come back. That is an
ideal sort of man for the trade in modern literature. One might say, in
fact, that in a perfect world (from the book-buyer’s point of view) the
dealers in new books would know everything about books, and the dealers
in old books would know nothing whatever about them. The point of this
last subsection is obvious, but the other day I had an experience that
greatly fortified my view. I had often met the second-hand bookseller
whose learning prevented one from buying anything cheap from him; I have
now encountered one whose interest in his subject prevented one from
buying anything at all.

He was not so much a really learned man as a man with what is called
“an inexhaustible fund of information.” It is quite possible that if
he had had a real rarity in his shop he would have known nothing about
it. But about the promiscuity of his reading there was no doubt. When I
entered the shop he was seated at a table absorbing something that looked
as if it might be the Travels of Livingstone or Speke. His spectacles
were on his forehead, his elbows on the table, his hands in his hair;
and his beard almost touched his book. “Do you mind if I go through?”
I said. “Sairtainly,” he said, betraying his origin. “And what may you
be interested in?” “Oh ... books,” I replied vaguely. “That is a verra
conseederable category,” he observed. Was it poetry I liked? he went
on. I murmured “Yes,” and he led me to the place where he kept it. But
before I had got my fingers on a book he made it evident that it was he
and not I that was going to have the “look round.” Here, for example,
was a volume of Kirke White. Had I ever read him? How wonderful was that
hymn (quoted at length) of his! What a career! He was a butcher’s son
and a lawyer’s clerk. He had a gift for mathematics, and they gave him a
sizarship at Cambridge. He would have been one of the greatest figures in
English literature had he lived. Was I interested in Italian books? Well,
then, perhaps I would like a good copy of (!!!) _I Promessi Sposi_. It
was extraordinary the number of copies of that book which must have been
printed. But there was no supply without a demand.

I tried in vain to check the torrent with some sort of remark which,
though polite, might, nevertheless, have an air of finality. It was no
good. My fingers never got beyond touching the back of a book before he
had taken down another, pulled me round, and fixed me with a glittering
eye for which the Ancient Mariner himself would have been tempted to
offer a large sum. Godwin, now. Did I like _Caleb Williams_? Yes, of
course! But had I read his History of England? It was by way of being
a reply to Clarendon. Clarendon was a great writer. But he was not
impartial. And the worst of it was that he seemed to be impartial when
he was most unfair. When he was sacrificing everything for his King he
little thought how his loyalty would be rewarded. He was too moral for
Charles II; but, what was worse, he kept the purse-strings too tight.
He would not give him money for one of his mistresses. Was it Barbara
Palmer? No, it was not Barbara Palmer, and it was not Nelly Gwyn. At any
rate, it was one of them. And when, in the end, the grant was made to
her, she died before she got the money!

This appeared to amuse the old man. When he had laughed himself out,
it was to resume with some work, dated 1784, which contained a recipe
for making a Prime Minister: the chief ingredients being hypocrisy,
mendacity, corruption, and cant. This opened up a large field of
speculation. Who was Premier in 1784? Why, of course, it was young Billy
Pitt! (“Yes,” I said.) No, it was Rockingham. (“Yes,” I said.) No, it
wasn’t; it was Bute. So it proceeded. I spent, in all, two hours in
that shop; in the course of which time I had stolen glances at about
six worthless books. For all I know it was as full of gems of purest
ray serene as are the dark unfathomed caves of ocean. I left without
making a single purchase, and the proprietor seemed quite hurt at this
unfriendly response to his attentions. How that old man earns his living
I don’t know. I think he must have private means. But in future I shall
have a warmer feeling than ever for the sort of red-nosed second-hand
bookseller, now, unfortunately, not very common, who knows only the
outsides of books, and who sits smoking on a heap of rubbish in the
corner of his shop with the air of a tramp resting on a roadside pile of
stones.

The Troubles of a Catholic

Being at the moment in bed with influenza, I was at once incapable of
intellectual effort and in need of spiritual sustenance. I had therefore
been reading a little Theology. The more modern works of the kind in
my possession are at once too profound in thought and too arid in
phraseology, so I worked rapidly backwards. One never knows what one is
going to come across, and in the beginning of _A Just Discharge to Dr.
Stillingfleet’s Unjust Charge of Idolatry Against the Church of Rome with
a Discovery of the Vanity of his late Defense in his Pretended Answer
to a Book Entitled Catholicks No Idolaters By way of Dialogue Between
Eunomius, a Conformist, and Catharinus, a Nonconformist_, I struck a
very pathetic thing. The work was written, I believe, by the Catholic
controversialist Godden, and published in 1677. At that time it was
difficult for Catholics to get anything out in England, and this work was
published at Paris. Hence the unhappy author’s statement about “Errata”:

“The English Press being watch’d of late, as the Orchard of
the Hesperides was of old, and a necessity arising from thence
of making use of a Paris Printer, who understands not a word
of English, the Reader will have no cause to wonder, if he
sometimes meet with _ant_ for _and_, _bu_ for _but_, _te_ for
_the_, _is_ for _it_, _tit_ for _tis_, _wish_ for _with_, etc.,
and oftentimes with false Pointings, words unduly joined, and
syllables un-artificially divided at the end of lines, as
_Ro-me_, _appropria-te_, and the like. I can assure him, the
Correction of the Press cost little less pains than the writing
of the Treatise.”

In that century a great many English books were printed on the Continent,
at Paris, Douai, and elsewhere; and the situation thus candidly explained
must have been a common one. A collection of English books printed
abroad, which would be interesting for other reasons, might also have an
added interest as a repository of comic misprints. But my disease must
have brought me very low that I can spend my time thinking of that.

The Bible as Raw Material

Mr. George Moore’s new novel, _The Brook Kerith_, is a Biblical story.
Mr. Moore has adopted the legend which says that Our Lord survived the
Crucifixion. He is taken away alive and joins a colony of the Essenes,
complications afterwards arising with St. Paul. The book is named after
the site of the Essene settlement; Mr. Moore personally toured the Holy
Land looking for a really eligible position. The story opens with a
description of the boyhood of Joseph of Arimathea: a beginning which at
least avoids the reproach of being obvious.

One might almost say that literature about Biblical personages can only
hope to be good if its writers either deal with episodes that are not
related in the Bible or if they tell the Bible stories from an entirely
novel and unconventional point of view. Anatole France’s story about
Pontius Pilate, _The Procurator of Judaea_, has this last quality, and
owes its success mainly to the odd and unexpected angle from which the
subject is approached. The unusual angle we may at least expect from
Mr. George Moore. Attempts at covering the same ground as the Bible, at
amplifying an already fine thing, are almost predestined to failure. One
can understand the temptation. A modern writer comes across a noble story
or a fine lyric passage, and thinks, “What a scandal that this should
be buried away out of sight in the Old Testament! It is just the theme
for me.” The lure is so strong that one contemporary poet has attempted,
and failed (through not ignominiously), to rewrite David’s Lament for
Jonathan, and another has endeavoured to adapt the dramatic poem _Job_ to
the modern stage. It was a lamentable affair, redeemed only from complete
inconspicuousness by a highly incongruous chorus inspired by Swinburne
and by an arresting entry of Satan with the salutation:

_Ho Job! How goes it?_

No modern—but I have not thoroughly ransacked my memory—has really
succeeded in rewriting a Bible story. The most striking of recent efforts
was Mr. Sturge Moore’s _Judith_. Mr. Robert Trevelyan’s poem, _The
Foolishness of Solomon_ (a title that, for some vague reason, I always
resent), belonged to the other class of works dealing with Biblical
personages (though he brought in a Chinese mandarin as well), but not
on the Biblical lines. The most recent effort at elaborate treatment of
the New Testament story was, I suppose, Maeterlinck’s _Mary Magdalene_.
But in spite of its unorthodoxy and the novelty (at least as far as the
Bible is concerned, for some of it was borrowed from a German) of the
incidents, that play scarcely competed, in point of dialogue or dramatic
force, with the more old-fashioned narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John.

Milton is the one English writer who has done anything with Biblical
materials on a large scale. It will be observed, however, that in
_Paradise Lost_ he enormously elaborated the story in Genesis; that his
Adam and Eve are somewhat colourless; and that the finest parts of his
poem are not directly concerned with “man’s first disobedience and the
fruit,” but deal with regions into which the author of Genesis did not
penetrate. In _Samson Agonistes_ he did take a story from the Bible and
make out of it a work of art equal to almost anything in our language.
Byron’s _Cain_ might mostly have been about Nietzsche for all the
connexion it has with the Bible: but it is not very good. Almost every
fine subject in the Scriptures must have been attacked at one time or
another. There have been a few good short Biblical poems, like Browning’s
_Saul_. But the only other really reputable Biblical poem on a large
scale that I can think of is Charles Wells’s _Joseph and His Brethren_,
which has strength as a story and some passages of fine imagery. Wells
belonged to the generation of Keats and lived on into our own time. He
was an engineer, stopped writing when young, and was admired by Rossetti
and Swinburne. His poem, however, cannot really be considered such good
reading as the Bible account of the same story. One of the episodes
that came within his purview, that of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, has
been a subject for poets in all ages. The last endeavour that I can
recall to make something out of it was a somewhat bejewelled one of
Sir Edwin Arnold’s. The longest, I should think, is Joshua Sylvester’s
intolerably tedious series of couplets entitled _The Maiden’s Blush_.
Why he conferred that title upon such a poem I don’t know, unless he was
thinking of what might happen to the less robust of his female readers.
Those parts of Holy Writ which are of purely historical interest have not
been freely drawn on by English writers. I don’t remember that much has
been done with the Maccabees, and the chronicles of the Kings of Israel,
which supplied Racine with a subject for his _Athalie_, have left English
writers cold. Jehu drove furiously, Jeroboam the son of Nebat made Israel
to sin, and Rehoboam afflicted his people with scorpions instead of
whips; but their violence does not seem to fire the poetic imagination as
does that of Herod, about whom we know very little more. But Herod, of
course, was fond of the Russian ballet; which brings him closer to us.

How to avoid Bad English

Good books on the practice of writing are rare. Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s
_On the Art of Writing_ is extraordinarily good. It contains the lectures
he delivered at Cambridge just before the war; and even readers who do
not desire to write at all will find Sir Arthur’s jokes very amusing
and his criticisms, general and particular, sound and (what is more
unusual) new. He touches a great variety of subjects, though always in
some relation to the main theme. He is especially illuminating on the
Authorized Version, and on Homer’s skill in dealing with the “Primary
Difficulty of Verse”—that is to say, the difficulty of filling up the
interstices between highly emotional passages without lapsing into dull
prosiness. His most diverting chapter is that on what he calls “Jargon,”
which he distinguishes from Journalese. The distinction he draws may
be appreciated if I concoct examples of both commodities. Writing in
“Jargon” I might say:

“In the case of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch I am proud and happy
to associate myself in the fullest sense with a work of this
useful, elevating, instructive, and educative character.”

Writing in Journalese, as he defines it, I might say:

“‘Q.’s brilliant book goes to the root of the matter. It
strikes home. He is out to slay the dragons of bad writing.
He burns them with the fire of his passion. He lashes them
with the scourge of his invective. He tears them to shreds and
tatters with the shrapnel of his ridicule. He will not sheathe
the sword until ...”

Yes.... The first kind consists of woolly, indefinite words, of
redundancies and shapeless prolixities; the man who writes the second is
trying to produce what he believes to be “literature” by means of imagery
and rhythmical movement. Sir Arthur says that the greatest propagators of
Jargon are public bodies, politicians, and so on; but he recognizes that
journalists also use it. The two things, in fact, are often seen in one
article. I conceive that there might be passages which would fall into
either of Sir Arthur’s classes. But there is a clear difference between
bad sentences produced by an effort to say something and those produced
by an effort to say something vividly. All bad writers, however, have
common defects, and these are dealt with in other chapters.

Every one who has thought about the art at all has discovered for himself
the truths that Sir Arthur tabulates. One must aim at accuracy (a word
that covers almost everything that is needful) and at clarity; one must,
normally, prefer the concrete to the abstract word, and the short word to
the long; and one must avoid the superfluous adjective. How well we know
these rules; how certain we are of their validity; how feebly we struggle
to obey them! At all times the ready-made sentence, the makeshift
epithet, the pot-shot image must have been ready to the hand. In the
present age, when we live in a honeycomb of print and begin each day by
exposing ourselves, before, during, or after breakfast, to masses of the
weakest English we can find, the job of writing well is more difficult
than ever. Our fluency is the measure of our accursed memory. We have
bales of phrases ready for every experience we describe; our pigeon-holes
are stuffed with dead metaphors and bogus synonyms; and we are always
ready to say in six words what ought to be said in two. Every time we
sit down at a desk or open our lips to speak, the nymphs Jargonia and
Journalesia, besieging us as the sylphs besieged St. Anthony, hold out
their hands full of glittering treasures which will save us the trouble
of thinking. Usually we do not even see them; we find the fatal gifts
in our hands and employ them without remembering their origin. And the
descent to hell is rapid.

It is good to revise: to correct, to improve, and to delete. Few, even of
the most careful writers, find their proof-sheets free from trite and
superfluous words which they would be ashamed to publish. It is better
still to think long before writing, to make sure that one’s thoughts
are clear-cut before one gives them a visible form. That habit it is
a writer’s duty to acquire. But it does not do to be incessantly and
acutely conscious of the qualities of good writing and the difficulty
of securing them. That way madness lies. Sometimes, to a man who broods
overmuch on these things, every phrase will appear a cliché, and every
word a dummy. “God help me!” he will moan, “I have called the sun
‘bright’ and the grass ‘green’! Millions of men before me have written
‘bright sun’ and ‘green grass.’ I know I did not think freshly and
independently _at_ these objects. I put the adjectives down mechanically.
I have merely heard that the grass was green. Why haven’t I looked at it
through my own eyes? If a real writer looked at it, I don’t for a moment
suppose that its greenness would be the attribute which would impinge
most forcibly upon him. Very likely it isn’t green at all.” This, I
say, does not do. I don’t suggest that there is anything peculiar about
grass which should make a novel statement about it impossible. In fact,
Swinburne said that grass is hair, and Mr. Chesterton has very probably
said that it is red. I merely use “green grass” as an example of the sort
of thing that an exaggerated fastidiousness might lead a man to question
in his own work.

There remains one property of good prose that no amount of painstaking
or instruction can produce. That is rhythm. It is, indeed, remarkable
that one of the most elaborate analyses of prose rhythms hitherto made
was made by a writer whose own prose is anything but musical. Either
Providence has given a man an ear or it has not; if it has not, he will
not write great prose. But his prose will be better in proportion as
he obeys the principles of good writing as “Q.” enunciates them. One
suggestion more might be useful for him. That is, that he will be well
advised in making his uneuphonious sentences short if he desires his
writing to be an efficient instrument of persuasion.

Woodland Creatures

“Parnassus in Piccadilly,” is the headline I see in my paper. Follows an
account of a “séance” promoted by Miss Elizabeth Asquith in aid of the
Star and Garter Home. Ten or twelve poets read works of their own to an
audience of four hundred who had paid a guinea apiece. Outside the house
a large concourse watched the poets arrive. There were Mr. Yeats, Sir
O. Seaman, Mr. Hewlett, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. de-la Mare,
Mrs. Woods, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. W. H. Davies, who is described as looking
like “one of his own woodland creatures.” I read that one of the reciters
intoned, that another was bluff, and that a third ought to get somebody
else to read for him; also that Mr. Birrell, the chairman, sat with his
head buried in his hands until the arrival of the first comic turn, Mr.
Belloc’s. But I wish I had been there: for the account does not tell me
how it was really done.

Did the poets sit in the audience and march up to the platform one by
one as their turns came? Did they stand out of sight, each gliding in
singly, and then retiring into the antral seclusion of the wings when
ten minutes was up? Or did they rather, as I prefer to think, sit on the
platform, the whole dozen of them in a semicircle, listening to, and
discreetly applauding, each other’s efforts. I am sorry I missed it. Some
of them will have been exalted by a sense of the holiness of their work;
their eyes will have looked out across the audience with a prophetic and
otherworldly fire. Others will have been uneasy and not knowing (unless a
table was thoughtfully provided) what to do with their feet. And one or
two, I think, will have been preoccupied with the control of their own
faces, which, on such an occasion, must have “strained at the leash of
dignified deportment.”

Why is it that so many people feel awkward when they are present at a
public recitation by a poet of his own verse; and why should writers
shrink from such recitations? Amusement on such occasions is closely
allied to sheepishness: both spring from a feeling of inappropriateness,
a sense that “the fitness of things” is being violated. We are
accustomed, of course, to the other kind of recitation, the reading by
an interpreter who is not a creator, and who is not exposing his heart
in public: the prize child and the local elocutionist who declaims
Tennyson’s _Revenge_, daintily fluttering his fingers in the air when
he comes to the part about the pinnace which is like a bird. But our
poets themselves have not recited much. It was not always so. “’Omer
smote his bloomin’ lyre” in public; he had nowhere else to smite it,
for he (presumably) could not write, and his audiences could not read.
Every composer of tribal lays, from Tubal-Cain (unless his songs were
_Lieder ohne Worte_) to the Druidic harpists, sang his compositions to
his admiring fellows without embarrassment; troubadours and mediæval
laureates had no objection at all to public recitation. Most foreigners,
one supposes, do not feel so strongly as we do about it now; but the
timidity of Englishmen in the matter is very pronounced. I am sure that
nothing short of the needs of a War Fund would have induced some of the
Piccadilly performers to face the ordeal.

It is all a part of our national reserve, that very reserve which,
perhaps, accounts for the greatness and volume of our poetry. In poetry
our feelings find an outlet. We have the habit of concealing our finest
sentiments and our profoundest emotions. We don’t mind putting them into
books and then running round the corner out of sight. But we dislike
unbosoming them _viva voce_ in the actual physical presence of strangers.
Our dislike of “scenes” covers equally the public row in a restaurant and
the public demonstration of our yearnings after virtue and the stirrings
of our hearts when we hear the nightingale or listen to the Atlantic at
night. We sit bolt upright at concerts; look at pictures with our mouths
set like vices; and observe “Yes, very nice” as, with wistfulness in our
breasts, we stand on a hill and look at a wooded panorama under the
moon. The grotesque Englishman who stares at a sunset and then laughs
and says it looks like a fried egg is really bolting in terror from the
admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts of the world. So, if
somebody gets up to recite his most intimate feelings, we feel it as
almost an indecency. He is usually bashful about it himself, and unable
therefore to recite with that abandonment which will do his poem justice.
The audience, at least that part of it which is most intelligent and
self-conscious, feels as if it were intruding. It is like eavesdropping
or opening a stranger’s letters. And everybody is conscious of the
national titter in the background. When the authors of Prize Poems at the
Universities give the official reading of their verses, their friends
invariably assemble to grin in the galleries. Undergraduates have still
some naturalness. They titter aloud, but the adult Englishman titters in
silence. It is reserve that brings forth the titter and it is still more
reserve that suppresses it; just as it is reserve that makes our soldiers
sing, not invocations to England, home, or glory, but comic songs about
cowardice and death.

The foregoing series of platitudes, slightly varied in accordance with
each writer’s tastes and talents, is invariably repeated when the
character of English people is under discussion. But it may be that, at
any rate in our attitude towards poetry, we are changing. In the last
four or five years the habit of public readings has been growing; and
some of our poets have grown quite addicted to them. This may be a time
of transition: if the enthusiasts for recitation keep at it hard enough,
people’s constraint may be overcome, and it may be regarded as quite an
ordinary and natural thing for a man to stand on a platform and, with all
the passion he can release and all the vocal modulation he can command,
chant his lyrics to congregations which will yield themselves to him with
all the spontaneity, though less than all the gestures and ejaculations,
of a Welsh revivalist’s converts. It is a commonplace that poetry
gains by being spoken; and that if verse were always read and never
recited, poets would be in danger of getting out of touch with natural
speech-rhythms. We could do with a little less amusement and a little
more excitement; and we might as well, if cowardice or a sense of humour
are the only things that hold us back, hold and attend public readings
until we are as unselfconscious about them as we are about church
services or political meetings. The worst of it is that poets do not
invariably read well, and that few persons with the taste for standing
on a platform and declaiming are competent to take an author’s place as
reciter of his work. There is such a thing as the inspired reader of
other people’s verse; but the understanding, the inclination, and the
voice cannot be expected to come often together. When the author himself
is reciting you can at least be certain that the speaker—unless he is a
very “advanced” poet indeed—understands the work which he is repeating.
With other performers one always has to take one’s chance. From the
professional reciter God save us all.

Other People’s Books

Like most people, I possess a number of books which I have not read. I
am not referring to volumes, such as the _Speculum Morale_ of Vincent of
Beauvais or the commentary of Œcolampadius on St. John’s Gospel, which
I bought merely because they looked pleasant and which nobody on earth
could be expected to read. I mean books in English and of comparatively
recent date. There is, for example, Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, for
which, in a weak moment, I paid some shillings with the feeling that,
as a cogitative being, I ought not leave so notable a stone unturned.
The feeling passed and never came back. And there is Ranke’s _History of
the Popes_—up to the present undisturbed by me; there are _The Last Days
of Pompeii_, _Romola_, _Vittoria_, Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott,
_What Maisie knew_, _What Katy did_, and dozens of other modern works,
some of which, if I live, I shall certainly read, and others of which, I
am sure, I shall never begin. But it makes no difference. Whether he has
read them or not, a man’s own books get, in a manner, stale to him. If a
book remains for years unopened on one’s shelves it becomes increasingly
difficult to read it. Yet if one finds another edition of it in somebody
else’s house one may fly to it, and, under the same conditions, one may
read or re-read almost anything one finds.

So it is, at the moment, with me. I am in a place previously unknown to
me. It is bestrewn with books; and, penned to the house by the brilliant
summer weather, I have been doing some miscellaneous reading. For one
thing I have gone solidly once more through Mr. Thomas Hardy’s verse. How
extraordinarily good it is! And how remarkably he has gone on improving,
especially as a metrist. But more than ever, after a heavy dose of these
compressed statements of his point of view, one realizes his determined
and unmitigated gloom. It is at its densest in _Wessex Poems_, and in
places one laughs outright at it. He illustrated the book himself, his
drawing is naïve, and the sketch of two floors of a church, the pews
(and two lovers) above, and the skulls and cross-bones below, has an “I
_will_ be grim at all costs” air about it that robs it of all its horror.
The story attached is a neat one. The man is a consumptive about to die;
he asks the woman if she loves him? She falsely says “Yes” in order to
brighten his last hours. He dies, and her life is ever after blighted
because she cannot reconcile herself to a Universe in which the telling
of such lies is a moral obligation. There is another small drama in which
a woman, maltreated by her husband, dies, telling her old lover that
she wishes she had married him and that her child could have been his
child, and asking him to see that the brutal husband does not ill-treat
the child. The brutal husband remarries and does ill-treat the child. One
day he finds the lover mourning on the dead wife’s grave, and demands
by what right he is there. The lover, remembering the death-bed remark
and suddenly seeing a chance of saving the child, says that he has every
right to be there as he was really the father of the child. His supposed
offspring is then left on his doorstep, to be looked after carefully,
and he spends his time wondering whether he was justified in telling,
etc. Probably these stories, if expanded into novels, might convince; as
narrative poems they do not; and when they are squeezed into the brief
compass of the _Satires of Circumstance_ they are grotesquely Life as
Thomas Hardy makes it and not Life as Thomas Hardy sees it.

It is a little bold in these days to admit that one hasn’t read the
whole of Mr. Conrad’s works, but until this week I had never laid hands
on _Almayer’s Folly_. It was his first book. In his _Reminiscences_ he
gives an account of how it was begun, in a Pimlico lodging-house, when
he was a sea captain and carried about the ocean for five years until
(when he was thirty-five) he finished it. When, half-done and laid by,
it was yellowing and mouldering, he showed it to his first reader, a
Cambridge man going to Australia for his health, and asked him if it was
worth completing. The passenger, with a nice economy of words, answered
“Distinctly,” and Captain Conrad was thus encouraged to proceed. I had
read all this before, and also the novelist’s statement that before
this he had not attempted literature and had hardly ever written even a
letter—though I suppose there must have been an occasional entry in a
log. I have certainly been surprised by the craftsmanship of _Almayer’s
Folly_. Not only is the structure good, but the writing, except in one
or two places, is astonishingly finished, accurate, and restrained. It
is absurdly unlike a first book. Its weakness, as it appears to me, lies
in the dullness of the principal character. It is difficult to keep up
one’s interest in a person whose main characteristic is his impotence.
But it doesn’t matter so much here as it might, for the subsidiary story
of Dain and Nina is very fascinating, and the real hero, after all, is
none of the people, white or Malay, but the Bornean river (its topography
is not always clear to me) on whose overgrown banks they all live and the
changes of which, night and day, are described with marvellous eloquence
and certainty.

Peacock

Finally, after various minor excursions, I have settled down to the
works of Thomas Love Peacock, of whom I had read nothing before except
some poems. Why? I don’t know, but I think his name has vaguely
repelled me. Anyhow, I am thankful now that I have been able to come
fresh to Peacock’s novels. He has a few devotees, but it is surprising
that so admirable a writer is not more read. _Nightmare Abbey_ and
_Headlong Hall_ are not great masterpieces, but they are certainly small
masterpieces. They belong to the class of intellectual comedy to which
_Candide_, and, in some measure, _Rasselas_ belong; in fact, they must
certainly have been modelled on _Candide_. They are burlesques of oneself
and one’s friends, and every other discussing, theorizing person and his
friends. Charlatans of all kinds, literary, political, ecclesiastical,
and scientific, and philosophers of all kinds from the man who believes
that upward progress is inevitable to the man who believes that downward
progress is undeniable, from the secret revolutionary conspirator to
the professional sceptic; he gets them all in, quintessentializes their
doctrines into exquisitely flowing prose, and knocks their heads together
with charming ruthlessness. Any extract will illustrate the flow of his
dialogue:

“‘The anatomy of the human stomach,’ said Mr. Escot, ‘and the
formation of the teeth, clearly place man in the class of
fungivorous animals.’

“‘Many anatomists,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘are of a different
opinion, and agree in discerning the characteristics of the
carnivorous classes.’

“‘I am no anatomist,’ said Mr. Jenkinson, ‘and cannot decide
where doctors disagree; in the meantime, I conclude that man is
omnivorous, and on that conclusion I act.’

“‘Your conclusion is truly orthodox,’ said the Reverend Doctor
Gaster; ‘indeed, the loaves and fishes are typical of a mixed
diet, and the practice of the Church in all ages shows——’

“‘That it never loses sight of the loaves and fishes,’ said Mr.
Escot.”

If loud asseveration on my part sends to Peacock a few people who have
not tried him before, I shall feel that the recent rain has not descended
in vain.

Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness

The Strange Case of William Wordsworth is to me of perennial interest,
and I have just emerged from several days’ burrowing under Professor C.
G. Harper’s two enormous volumes entitled _William Wordsworth, His Life,
Works, and Influence_. It is a conscientious and valuable piece of work,
very fully documented, and containing much out-of-the-way information
and a great deal of sensible, if not always illustrious, criticism.
The information may perhaps be a little too ample for the weaker
brethren. The map (showing lakes, mountain ranges (brown) and so on)
of Wordsworth’s country with which we open gives the clue to Professor
Harper’s exhaustive method. Every procurable date of Wordsworth’s
continental programme is copied out; and we are even supplied with the
winter and summer timetables of the Grammar School at Hawkshead which he
attended and at which (as Professor Harper rather sententiously observes)
an education different in kind, but perhaps not inferior in quality,
to that supplied by Eton was bestowed upon him. New light is thrown on
certain incidents in his career; his “circle” is elaborately described;
and a very charming picture is given of his sister Dorothy. But the old
problem of Wordsworth’s defects remains much where it did.

It is a commonplace that Wordsworth is the most uneven of great poets.
Every textbook writer tells one that when he was inspired he was a
giant, that when he was not he wrote maundering doggerel, and that he
himself never knew when he was and when he was not at his best. _The
Idiot Boy_ has been held up to the ridicule of generations—beyond its
deserts perhaps. The point was most forcibly put by J. K. Stephen when he
wrote a parody of Wordsworth’s “Two voices are there,” saying that one
of the voices was that of the sea, etc., and the other that of “an old
half-witted sheep.” But a thing less frequently faced, and never, as far
as I know, properly explained, is his personal lack of attractiveness.
Flippant persons may be met who dismiss him as “a pompous old dullard”;
but, generally speaking, whenever one hears such a remark it comes from
some one who openly confesses that he cannot stand Wordsworth’s poetry at
any price, and that he has very seldom attempted to read it. The people
who are in difficulties are those (and I am among them) who agree without
qualification that Wordsworth is our greatest poet since Milton, but
who cannot sincerely say that they are drawn towards him as a man. If
they—any one who does not feel like this is happy and I do not speak for
him—pretend to be fond of him their pretence is glaring. If they do not
stick up for him they feel that they are being faithless to a poet who
still stands in need of all the propagandists he can get. It is not easy
to face the truth about him even in the solitude of one’s own chamber.
But, by heaven, he _is_ a dull man!

“There was a boy” (as Wordsworth would himself begin) who at one time
used nightly to dine in hall under a large oil-painting of the poet.
In this painting Wordsworth was represented sitting on a rock against
a landscape background which was an agreeable and symbolical blend of
wildness and tranquillity. The poet was clad in broadcloth; he held a
book in his hand; his face was smooth and pink; and his mild eye surveyed
the spectator as though the latter were a lamb about to receive a pat
of the hand and his blessing. There he sat, meditative and benevolent,
while the soup gave place to the fish and the fish to the beef; and
when one had drained off the last dregs of one’s beer one went off
still conscious of that meditative and benevolent eye. It became almost
maddening. Every other great English poet had something fascinating about
him. Even Milton, in spite of certain unsociable qualities, had a certain
attractive force, a touch of the virulent, and the scars of suffering.
But this Wordsworth! His genuine philanthropy was unquestionable. His
portrait might, one thought, be that of a pioneer of the Anti-Slave
Trade Agitation, or an inventor of Sunday Schools, or an endower of Bands
of Hope. But not a poet; oh, not a poet!

So it is with all his portraits. Professor Harper gives a selection of
them. Always the sage is a bland and upright man; the _mens conscia
recti_ typified. But never a sign of eloquence or fire; of the
magnificent oratory of his great passages, of the music and profound
tenderness which are so profuse in his poetry. Not a sign of stress;
not a mark of any but the most complacent vicarage thought; no passion,
no enthusiasm, no challenge, and no response. It is not to be explained
away, as Professor Harper attempts to explain it away, by saying that
the myth of “Daddy Wordsworth” (as FitzGerald called him) is based on a
disproportionate view of his life. Professor Harper thinks that far too
little attention has been paid to his early revolutionary period, when
the ideals of the French Revolution gripped him, and far too much to his
later period of orthodoxy and respectability. Professor Harper himself
attempts to redress the balance. He gives as full an account as he can of
the earlier Wordsworth and of his relations with Revolutionary France.
But, as Wordsworth’s French friends would have said (provided they were
not ashamed of using such a worn-out tag) _plus ça change plus c’est la
même chose_. The early Wordsworth may have been a different being; but
Professor Harper certainly does not prove that he was. From birth to
death in this biography he appears as the same high-minded, staid, sober,
solemn monument. He joined in the Revolution not so much a “kid-glove
revolutionary” as a woollen-glove and warm comforter revolutionary. Had
he stayed in France he might have made even the Terror respectable.

On myself and on others Wordsworth’s portraits and his biographies always
leave this sort of impression: the impression of an old bore to whom
one would not be rude simply and solely because one would not willingly
hurt the feelings of a person so worthy. And then one goes back to his
poetry—and his prose—and hears a voice of almost unsurpassed grandeur
speaking the deepest of one’s unexpressed thoughts, appealing to and
drawing out all the divinest powers in man’s nature. Of his greatness
surely no rational and unbiassed being could entertain the slightest
doubt. He is not so popular or so frequently read as some poets, and that
is not difficult to explain. His absence of humour, or an equivalent
vivacity, is not in itself an explanation; but the accompanying general
absence of any luxurious appeal to the senses is. He speaks direct to the
labouring intellect and the sensitive heart; and the enjoyment of him, if
great, is usually enjoyment of the austerer kind, like mountain-climbing.
There is nothing soft or enervating or luxurious which can make reading
him an æsthetic debauch. He does not often sing to a tune which gives
one pleasure even if one does not attend to the words. Without being in
the least obscure he demands an effort from the reader parallel to his
own. That, at least as much as the tediousness of many of his writings
(and his irritating classification of them), is the reason of his
comparative lack of popularity. But ...

Henry James’s Obscurity

Henry James’s last work was his essay on Rupert Brooke, written as an
introduction to _Letters from America_. Mr. James’s essay is a personal
appreciation, and not in any way a biographical memoir. Such a memoir, by
another hand, will follow. Mr. James left unfinished two novels, and a
third volume of the series begun with _A Small Boy and Others_ and _Notes
of a Son and Brother_.

Presumably the public (which might well make a start with the short
stories of which Mr. Secker has already published eight half-crown
volumes, very pleasant to the eye) will at last begin to buy James’s
novels. They have certainly not bought them in the past. He was, in
critical circles, almost universally recognized as one of the three or
four greatest of English writers living a week ago. But some of his books
had not even gone into a second edition. He was intermittently talked
about in the Press. Fifteen years or so ago he had a boom of the sort;
then there was a period of comparative newspaper obscurity; in the last
three or four years he suddenly and silently, like a star appearing from
behind a cloud, took his unchallenged place in the firmament as one of
the established great. But he was not widely read. _Daisy Miller_, ever
so many years ago, had a fairly general success; _The Golden Bowl_, also,
I should think, sold well. But many people who paid lip homage to him
were very unfamiliar with his work.

In no case would a man with his interests, his approach, his subtlety and
avoidance of the grosser excitements, his restraint and delicacy, have
sold by the hundred thousand. But his appeal was still further limited
by the legend of his style. I remember reading an old novel written
in the days when Robert Browning was an Incomprehensible studied by a
Cult. The heroine of it gave herself away rather by remarking, “Oh,
Mr. Browning! I’ve never been able to understand a single thing that
he has written. That is why I have never tried.” One feels that there
were persons who were in the same position as towards Henry James. They
had heard that he was a hard nut to crack; they had seen perhaps—it was
always a great temptation to a reviewer to extract—specimens of his more
elaborate discursions, complicated arabesques of sentences, parenthesis
after parenthesis wandering from comma to comma like barbed wire tangled
around its supports. And they thought therefore that he was an obscure
eclectic as difficult as Jacob Behmen or Swedenborg and lacking their
excuse of religious inspiration. Certainly he was sometimes difficult.
But it was a unique kind of obscurity. There is an obscurity produced
when a man, eagerly tumbling along an argument, writes down only a
sort of fitful shorthand, a language which leaves things out and which
resembles the stray pieces of disconnected paper in gutter or hedge which
merely indicate the course that the runner has taken. There is another
and commoner kind of obscurity of speech which derives from mistiness of
mind; for a man cannot write clearly down what he does not clearly think.
And there is a kind of obscurity which is produced by mere inaptitude for
writing: the awkwardness of the cow handling a rifle. James’s obscurity
was the direct product of his passion for clarity. He detested the
slipshod sentence which, compact as it may look as a piece of grammar,
is a mere pot-shot as a piece of representation. He wanted to make no
statement which did not embody precisely what he wanted to say; what,
that is to say, he saw as Truth. He would have taken, for example, that
last sentence of mine and, endeavouring to give it a more exact shape,
have made of it something like the following:

“He wanted, when, that is, he experienced anything so definite
or, shall we put it, so positively energetic, as a want, to
make no statement, none at any rate which might be taken by
even the least perceptive of his hearers as a _delivered_,
and, as it were, final testimony of his reaction to things as
he saw them, which did not precisely embody what he wanted
(when, once more, he coherently desired anything, as we have
it, ‘higher’ than the elementary physical) to say; what, that
is to say, he saw, at the moment of speech, be it understood,
for the eye of the watcher changes, as what, in the absence of
a happier name, it has pleased us to ennoble with the majestic
name of Truth.”

I don’t suggest that I myself have added anything to my own sentence
by this addition of the pomp and circumstance of parenthesis and
circumlocution. I have merely turned a short platitude into a long one.
But it may serve to show the method by which Henry James arrived at
his more tortuous pages. The method has its disadvantages. The man who
employs it is sometimes like a man working with a pickaxe in a cave.
The more he digs away the larger the unattacked expanse which invites
his strength; or, as one might say, the bigger the hole he is in. But
when this method is employed by a man with the analytical powers, the
sensitiveness to fine shades, material and spiritual, of Henry James,
the result is a “product” (the kind of word that James would always have
put in actual or implied inverted commas) which never stales and from
which one gets more and more enjoyment each time one reads. In the last
resort novels live by the richness of their detail; and James’s detail is
exquisite and inexhaustible.

Few modern writers have exercised so strong an influence over those who
have surrendered themselves to him. He is, I should say, more infectious
than any writer since (what a strange collocation!) Lord Macaulay. A man
with a formed style can usually read and enjoy Carlyle, Jeremy Taylor, de
Quincey, or George Meredith without showing the least tendency (unless
deliberate) to imitate them. But when one has (I don’t speak only for
myself) been reading James one finds for a time that one is tempted to
write even one’s private letters in a style which shows plainly that one
has set him as a seal upon one’s arm. Even now, when I am merely thinking
about him, I feel the pressure of that stern artistic conscience, and can
only with an effort resist the demand that I should guard myself here,
qualify myself here, and elucidate myself there. He was irresistible,
like one of those stammerers or persons with other attractive or
unattractive vocal idiosyncrasies whom one cannot help imitating when one
is with them. A person of any force gets through this and the permanent
effect of a subjugation to James was always good. A too marked echo of
him would be painful: but his example was salutary. It may be possible
to grumble with him for this and that. He did write mainly about persons
with incomes (though these also are God’s creatures); he did occasionally
behave (as Mr. Wells very wittily put it) like a hippopotamus picking
up a pea; and he did annoy some enthusiasts by refusing to place his
pen habitually at the service of the Great Forces of Our Time and other
things whose capital importance is of custom indicated by capital
letters. But in an age of sloppy writing he stood for accuracy of
craftsmanship; and even men whose subjects are Invisible Exports of
the Parthenogenesis of Plants might learn from him how to use to more
advantage their intellects and their pens.

The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade

A bibliophile writes the following complaint: “At the recent sale of
Swinburne’s library, certain lots, chiefly signed presentation copies,
fetched extravagantly high prices. But the outsider is generally puzzled
at the extreme variation in the prices, a variation which passing
fashions in taste do not explain. There is an explanation, as one
would-be purchaser was made somewhat rudely aware. He wanted a book by
a modern poet, a poet of delicate talent and little recognition; and he
asked a bookseller to bid for the lot. He was willing to spend between
ten and thirteen shillings on it. The agent who was to bid arrived late,
and another bookseller bought the lot for five shillings. So the would-be
purchaser asked his bookseller to approach the man who had bought the
lot, and find out if he would sell it. The book was cheap at five and
would be rather dear at ten shillings. When approached, the purchaser
informed his colleague that ‘he had had to pay a good deal more for the
lot than the price given in the rooms, and that he could not part with it
for less than eighteen shillings.’ Such are the blessings of the ‘ring’
at Sotheby’s.

“The ring consists of some of the largest and best-known members of the
bookselling trade—all honest men—and their plan is this: they never
bid against each other, except for show; lots go at small prices, thus
robbing owners and executors of their right profit; and subsequently
these cheap lots are put up again and resold among the members of the
ring. The auctioneers can, of course, do nothing to stop the practice—and
it is as legal as it is dishonourable. At times an outsider with a
big banking account gives the ring a good deal of trouble; but it has
survived all private attacks, and is likely to—though a private buyer
with a confident manner and a quick power of decision can occasionally
get a great deal of amusement by running lots up, and so forcing the ring
to pay exorbitant prices for things they do not want.”

It is true. There exists among the second-hand booksellers precisely
such a ring as gave rise to so much discussion a few years ago when the
scandal of the art-dealers’ “knock-out” was widely discussed. For some
time I myself have been trying to get information about it. But it is not
easy. You can find out from booksellers who are not in the ring (few of
these lone wolves are important) who the booksellers are who are in the
ring, but that is about all. But the method is simple. The attendance
at book sales is not large. Private collectors are lazy people; it is
not now fashionable—as it was in the Duke of Roxburghe’s day—for the
Old Nobility to crowd the salerooms, bidding desperately amid groans of
anguish and cheers of triumph. The result is that very often one will
attend a sale and be the only private person there, and it is a matter of
chance (especially when the sale is a comparatively small one) whether
any one at all is there except the members of the ring. The ring, _pro
forma_, will run a book up to about a third of its value and leave
it at that. At the close of the proceedings its members will adjourn
somewhere—I don’t know where, but let us say a back room in the Charing
Cross Road—and hold a “knock-out” auction of the books they have bought.
The difference between the sums paid here and the sums paid at Sotheby’s
or Hodgson’s will be pooled and divided, so as to equalize the spoil;
and the owners of the libraries sold will have got only, perhaps, a half
of what they really ought to have got considering the prices that the
ultimate purchasers are willing to pay.

But I don’t see what is to be done about it. As my correspondent
remarks, the auctioneers can’t stop it. They also must suffer as their
work is done on a commission basis. It must not be assumed that all the
booksellers like the system, but the minority cannot help themselves.
I remember that one very well known bookseller, now dead, tried for
several years to keep out of it; but in the end, by co-ordinated bidding
against him, he was forced in. There the thing is; the dealers find it
profitable; it is not easy to keep out of it unless you are a prince of
the trade, with rich customers and great resources, or a person with
special knowledge who is after a special kind of book and will be let
alone; and there is no short cut to reform. How can Parliament interfere?
If one dealer who buys a book can sell it to another after the sale, how
can six or a dozen dealers be prevented from exchanging their purchases
similarly. It would be all very well to make the “knock-out” illegal,
but how many does it take to make a ring and how many detectives could
be spared? The only conceivable remedy is for persons who habitually
buy old books to make a point (when the war is over and they are
released from their present occupations) of turning up at the salerooms
and bidding against the pros. Even at that the remedy would only be
efficacious as long as it was actively applied. It might be worth a
guinea a box, but you would have to take a box every day; there would be
no permanent cure. Directly the strangers slacked off again the ring and
the “knock-out” would revive, and my unfortunate friend (for I presume
that the disconsolate buyer he refers to is himself) would have once more
to pay for his books much more than the price recorded at the rooms.
“There is no cure for this disease,” as Mr. Belloc’s poem puts it, unless
auction-frequenting again becomes a popular form of amusement.

But, if I may digress, I must say that, for persons of a bookish turn
of mind, there is nothing more amusing than an occasional visit to
Wellington Street or Chancery Lane. I shouldn’t care to do it every day;
the combined mustiness of books and booksellers is a bit overpowering.
But it is exciting to bid occasionally, and the books that come into the
London auction-rooms are of such quality that sometimes you might almost
as well go to Sotheby’s as to the Exhibition Rooms (now shut up so as to
pay for two minutes of the war) of the British Museum. The bindings that
great collectors put on their books are in themselves wonderful. And the
booksellers, rich and poor, glossy and seedy, as they nod to the rostrum
and paw the goods, are a sight to which only Balzac could do justice.
They all wear looks of settled gloom as though they were on the verge of
bankruptcy; they all (if one speaks to them) swear that “it is impossible
to get anything to-day as everything is going so dear”; and they all have
a sovereign indifference to everything but the commercial value of the
books they deal in. I say all: there are exceptions; but the crowd as a
whole is utterly depressed and completely free from the remotest concern
with literature. But possibly when they get in that back room somewhere
and assess the margin between what executors have got for books and what
they ought to have got for them, their morose countenances may brighten.
For all I know, every “knock-out” auction may end with the circulation
of the punch-bowl, jolly songs, and toasts to the damnation of all the
idiots who waste their money on rotten old books unfit to read and
thereby keep in affluence a set of honest men who read the _Daily Mail_
in the morning and never a line for the rest of the day.

Music-Hall Songs

Mr. William Archer contributes to the _Fortnightly_ an attack on the
music-hall. He says that it is the home of vulgarity and inanity; that
the audiences, as a rule, would enjoy much better stuff than they are
given; and that “the music-hall seems to have killed a genuine vein of
lyric faculty in the English people.” With all that I don’t think that
any one but a poseur could disagree. Mr. Archer makes an extraordinary
slip when he puts forward _Sally in our Alley_ as a folk-product of
which neither the composer nor the author is known to fame: both words
and music being by Henry Carey, who was scarcely an obscure person in
his day and is not entirely forgotten now. He concludes, too, with a
somewhat vague suggestion of a remedy which has no bearing whatever upon
the improvement of music-hall songs, and which one suspects to spring
from his perennial desire to induce the public to go and see Ibsen.
But his case as a whole is irrefutable. The nation’s songs since the
industrial revolution have been immeasurably worse than at any other time
in its history. They are almost all commercial products manufactured by
half-wits.

Mr. Archer’s case being so sound, it is all the more a pity that he
overdoes it. It is true that almost all these songs are vile rubbish, and
that the songs of the _Villikins and his Dinah_ and _Champagne Charlie_
periods were even more fatuous than those of the present day. But it is
exaggeration to say that

“what is certain is that the whole music-hall movement has
produced not one—literally not one—piece of verse that can rank
as poetry of the humblest type, or even as a really clever bit
of comic rhyming,”

for such songs turn up fairly frequently. Possibly Mr. Archer’s horror
of the “red-nosed comedian” prevents him from ever listening to his
words: certainly one gets from Mr. Archer’s article the impression
that the critic is only acquainted with a few of the most famous of
music-halls songs. But although I heartily support his general case and
would willingly consent to the execution of all music-hall managers and
versifiers and most music-hall artists, I must protest that “really
clever bits of comic rhyming” do turn up occasionally.

I wish I had a better verbal memory. But I can at least refer Mr.
Archer to a few songs of which, if he cares to spend a month in the
Museum with old volumes of Francis, Day and Hunter’s song-books and
other collections, he can find the full words. For instance, there is
Mr. Harry Lauder’s _It’s Nice to get up in the Morning_. As I remember
them (and here and elsewhere I don’t guarantee that my quotations are
literally accurate) the words of the chorus are:

_Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning when the sun begins to shine,_
_At four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time;_
_But when the snow is falling, and it’s murky overhead,_
_It’s nice to get up in the morning—but it’s nicer to stay in bed._

Of course the tune helped it. But it is quite well turned and it springs
clean out of popular experience. It is folk-poetry even if the folk
didn’t write it. It is not the folk-poetry of the seventeenth century,
but it is distinctly the folk-poetry of modern commercial and urban
England. _We sat upon the Baby on the Shore_ I’m not sure about; it
didn’t, I suspect, have a music-hall origin, though I do not know. But
_A Little Bit off the Top_ was quite comic in places; so were _The Four
Horse Charabanc_, _Right in the Middle of the Road_, _Whitewash_, and _’E
dunno where ’e are_. I wish I could recall the words of the song which
had a chorus beginning:

_More work for the undertaker,_
_Another little job for the tombstone-maker;_

but even that high-spirited couplet shows their quality. These
mock-tragic songs are often quite good. The best known was _His Day’s
Work was done_, which was undeniably a comic conception well carried out.
Did Mr. Archer ever hear _If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between_? The
one fragment that sticks in my mind both dates it and shows that it was a
“clever bit of comic rhyming”:

_If the weather had been finer_
_You’d have seen the war in China—_
_If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between._

And what about _Waiting at the Church_?—

_There was I waiting at the church,_
_Waiting at the church._
_When I found he’d left me in the lurch,_
_Lor’, how it did upset me!_
_Then he sent me round a little note,_
_Just a little note,_
_This is what he wrote:_
_“Can’t get away to marry you to-day—_
_My wife won’t let me.”_

That seems to me a well-calculated chorus, and the clinch of the last two
lines couldn’t be beaten. But perhaps the austere Mr. Archer would think
it debasing on the grounds that it led the audience to think lightly of
bigamy.

Bigamy is one of the chief comic-song subjects. Vermin in one’s bed,
drunkenness, and the food in boarding-houses are the others. The “booze”
songs are not, as a rule, as good as they should be. The only one I
remember that was at all neat ran _something_ like:

_First she had some marmalade,_
_And then she had some jam,_
_Then some dozen of oysters_
_And then a plate of ham,_
_A lobster and a crab or two_
_And a pint of bottled beer,_
_A little gin hot to settle the lot_
_—And that’s what made her queer._

I certainly don’t suggest that any of the songs I have quoted—and I’m
certain that consultation with a few expert friends, now in Flanders,
would bring better ones to light—are masterpieces. But I do think they
are quite comic verse, and that if all music-hall songs were as well
turned there would not be much ground for complaint. One does, that
is, laugh _occasionally_ at a music-hall, in spite of Mr. Archer.
But, unhappily, of ninety-nine songs out of a hundred the words are
too abysmal for anything, and the serious ones are almost invariably
imbecile. I wonder, by the way, whether the music-hall authorities ever
try to induce competent comic rhymers, known in other spheres, to turn
out songs for them? Probably not; they think the words don’t matter.
That they are mistaken (though the tunes count for most) is shown by the
way that a song with good words succeeds with the audience. Even one
ingenious line will often bring the house down. I remember the old song
_I can’t change it_. There was a stanza about a bride who appalled her
bridegroom by taking herself to pieces, removing a wig, a glass eye, a
wooden arm, two wooden legs, etc. In the chorus the narrator suddenly
described her as “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree,” and this admirable if
unrefined trope was the most successful thing of the year. But as I say,
I largely agree with Mr. Archer. If only they would let me smoke in
theatres I would never go near a music-hall again until the programmes
were improved, and I imagine many other people are in the same boat.

More Music-Hall Songs

How little do we know the consequences of our acts. “I say there is not
a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel with his squaw, but
the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise?
It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand
alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.” That was Carlyle’s way
of putting it. Somebody wrote a book of theatrical reminiscences: the
book set Mr. William Archer pondering on the fatuity of music-halls; Mr.
Archer’s article made me try to remember comic fragments of music-hall
songs; and my observations would appear, judging from the quantities of
correspondence they have produced, to have tempted whole families to
spend their evenings trying to recall the popular choruses of their youth.

Numbers of them seem to have better memories than mine. Whole verses of
_More Work for the Undertaker_ (I think it was Mr. Dunville’s song) reach
me. The scheme may be illustrated by one stanza:

_Sammy Snoozer laboured on the railway;_
_His work he was very clever at!_
_Sammy one day was a-polishing the metals_
_With a lump of mouldy fat._
_Up come a runaway engine,_
_Sammy stood upon the track;_
_He held out his arms, for he firmly believed_
_He could push that locomotive back._

(The drum: _Boom!!_)

(Chorus)

_More work for the undertaker,_
_Another little job for the tombstone-maker;_
_At the local cemetery they’ve_
_Been very very busy with a brand-new grave,_
_For Snoozer’s_
_Snuffed it!_

I am afraid that I should have to grant Mr. Archer the verse: the second
line, especially, cannot be called a model of good craftsmanship.
But the chorus is very neat. It was varied with each verse. Another
correspondent’s specimen finishes with “For Frederick’s fragments.”

I must bow to the correspondent who suggests that the success of the song
about the bride with artificial limbs was at least as much due to lines
he quotes as it was to “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree.” His lines are:

_I can’t change her!_
_No matter how I try,_
_But I’ll chop her up for firewood_
_In the sweet by-and-by._

An equally impolite chorus is that of Herbert Campbell’s _’Blige a Lady_
which another correspondent sends. The conductor, on a rainy day, asked
the inside males to give up a seat to a lady and go outside, and the
reply was on the lines of

_Said I, “Old chap, she may have my lap,_
_But I don’t get wet for her.”_

That is very typical music-hall; and it will be observed that it gets
its effect by sticking close, as Wordsworth advised, to the natural
phraseology and sequence of everyday speech.

Mr. Albert Chevalier, I admit, I did not mention. He has not been
primarily a music-hall artist, and Mr. Archer himself made an exception
of his songs. Some of Mr. Gus Elen’s certainly might be quoted: _e. g._
_’E dunno where ’e are_ and _What’s the Use of looking out for Work?_ I
am afraid that I am not sufficiently well informed to answer questions
as to the sources of supply of modern music-hall songs. The only thing
I have observed is that large numbers of the worst ones are composed
by persons whose names suggest that the use of the English language is
with them rather an acquired than an inherited characteristic. How far
the practice prevails of a particular star employing a tame author to
write the words of all his songs for him I do not know. I have never
consciously met a writer of music-hall songs, though I did know one
man who made two attempts to produce what he thought the right sort of
commodity. He sent them to an entrepreneur, but all his wit was wasted.
The chorus of one song mentioned a well-known and much-advertised
comestible: this wouldn’t do, as all the vendors of similar articles
would be jealous and, possibly, refuse to advertise any more on the
programme. In the other song the author had had the misfortune to hit
upon an idea which had been used before. His refrain was:

_And when the pie was opened_
_The birds began to sing._

But there was an old song with the same tail to it. It was a song about
a pigeon-pie which was no better than it should be. This reminds me that
in tabulating favourite music-hall subjects one should certainly have
mentioned bad smells. Throughout history any reference to unpleasant
smells has moved the Englishman to roars of laughter. Perhaps it is
because we so thoroughly dislike them. I don’t think that these odours
take all nations in quite the same way: but travellers on the Continent
are sometimes tempted to think that most nations do not notice them so
much as we do.

The music-hall versifier, usually feeble when funny, is certainly at his
worst when serious. Such of the war-songs as I have heard are dreadful.
Perhaps those I have not heard are better. Early in the war I was looking
into a music-shop window in Upper Shaftesbury Avenue and saw two typical
titles. One was _Only a Bit of Khaki that Daddy wore at Mons_, and the
other was _The Little Irish Red Cross Nurse_. I did not dare to buy them,
but I could not help admiring the ingenuity of the author of the second
who had managed to work the perennial Irish Girl theme so neatly into the
new subject. All music-hall poets seem to be obsessed by Irish girls.
They will even work them into translations of foreign songs which do not
mention them. Five or six years ago a German music-hall song which had
nothing whatever to do with Irish girls was imported and became very
popular here. The ideas of the original were largely preserved, but an
Irish girl had to be stuck in. But _quo, Musa, tendis?_ If I go on like
this I shall end by agreeing with Mr. Archer.

Utopias

I saw recently a very entertaining article by Mr. Walter Lippman in the
_New Republic_ on the subject of Utopias. Mr. Lippman raised the question
of why it was Utopias had gone out of fashion. Since Mr. Wells wrote his
_Modern Utopia_ no one has had a shot.

It is, of course, not the longest period in human history which has
gone without a new Utopia. As far as I know, nothing of the sort was
constructed between the time of Plato and that of Sir Thomas More.
Reasons might, no doubt, be discovered for this long lapse. The Romans
were too realistic to bother about such things, and in the Middle Ages
the only people who could write were priests, and they probably did not
dare outline any other perfect society than that of the New Jerusalem.
In fact, Utopias of any merit have until recently always been produced
at long intervals: with the exception of Bacon’s _New Atlantis_ and
Campanella’s _City of the Sun_, which were, I think, published in the
same year. The nineteenth century must have produced more imaginary
states of this kind than all its predecessors put together. And if we
stop constructing Utopias, this will happen not because we have ceased
to hanker after them, but because the complexities of civilization have
become too unmanageable to handle. When the structures of society and
industry were comparatively simple, a man could invent an ideal state
which would not look too far removed from the states he knew. We can
still go on dreaming of little paradises, such as that in Morris’s _News
from Nowhere_; but what it is difficult to do is to describe fully an
imaginary community which is world-wide, or, at any rate, in contact
with the whole world, which has to face the problems of race, and which
has to take over from existing civilization our highly developed methods
of manufacture and distribution of labour. Mr. Wells did try to depict
a state that might grow out of the existing order; but his picture is
notably less complete than those of older writers. He could only hope to
produce his effect by giving us a series of cinema glimpses of various
aspects of life. Personally, I doubt whether any one else will even
attempt the job.

One could wish that somebody would make a thorough study of the principal
Utopias that the mind of man has conceived. Such a study would offer
many interesting paths to research. We might find out, for example, to
how great an extent the Utopians of various ages and nations have been
influenced (as Plato was conspicuously influenced) by the transient
conditions of their own time. For instance, the great variety of opinion
which Utopians have held with regard to the precious metals would be
worth examination. Some have held them in great respect; others have
vindictively suggested that they should be put to the basest possible
uses. Again, how far has each writer of this kind been influenced by his
predecessor? It can scarcely be supposed, for instance, that Campanella
did not lift his communistic ideas bodily from Plato, or that Mr. Wells’s
class of Samurai owed nothing to the same inspiration. Sometimes one sees
a quite minor and obviously personal idea lifted clean or adapted with
slight alterations which make it all the more curious. For example, in
More’s _Utopia_ brides and bridegrooms before marriage always inspected
each other in a state of nature. It is to be presumed that More had
some peculiar crank on this subject; for he mentions the possibility of
concealing deformities as though it were a common practice that should
certainly be guarded against by law. When we get to Bacon we find this
odd idea copied, with the difference that it is now the friends of the
respective parties that make the examination.

The endless queer details in Utopias would in themselves make such a
study amusing. Plato’s passion to secure that no mother should know
her own child; the preposterously exact account of the amount of money
subscribed towards the foundation of the new state in Theodor Hertzka’s
_Freeland_; the wonderful battle between the fleets of, if I remember
rightly, Abyssinia and Europe in the same book; the trains going two
hundred miles an hour, so smoothly that people played billiards on
them, in Mr. Wells’s New World. I remember another Utopia, an obscure
eighteenth-century one, in which persons who had committed murders were
given the choice of being executed in honour or surviving in disgrace.
If they chose death they were led to the scaffold amid universal
applause, their names were inscribed upon rolls of honour, and their
relatives were given fat jobs. Then, again, one could have a quite
interesting chapter on the various literary devices by which authors
have precipitated readers into their supposititious communities. More’s
introduction—with the bronzed and bearded seaman who went out with the
companions of Columbus and was stranded on an unknown island—is as
charming as any. Later dodges have been more far-fetched. Mr. Wells’s
transferment to the twin-world of this one is very subtle; Edward Bellamy
made his hero wake up after centuries in a room where he asked for Edith
(his old fiancée) and was conveniently answered by another lady of the
same name. I say nothing of the books which lie on the outskirts of
Utopian literature, such as various grotesque Utopias and anti-Utopias
and books like Lord Lytton’s _The Coming Race_ and W. H. Hudson’s _The
Crystal Age_, which last is, I believe, the only book on record which
purports to have been written by a man who dies in the last chapter and
describes his own demise. And the practical attempts to set up working
ideal communities—such as the Oneida community which developed into a
prosperous “Mfg. Coy.”—are another pleasant by-way.

I think that with all the peculiarities of time and place, all the
eccentricities of personal taste, and all the genuine varieties of ideals
allowed for, a student of Comparative Utopianism would probably find that
there was a good deal in the way of method and a very great deal in the
way of aim that all Utopians have in common. Mr. Yeats once suggested
that if we put together whatever the great poets have affirmed in their
finest moments we should come as near as possible to an authoritative
religion. In the same way, one feels that if one tabulated the ideals of
the most successful writers of Utopias we should be able to extract, if
not a residuum of agreed schemes, at least a common element of aspiration
which we might fairly say represented the permanent ideals of the human
race respecting the ordering of our life on earth. Really intelligent and
altruistic men—and nobody without some intelligence and some altruism
would bother to conceive a Utopia—have a tendency to dream the same
sort of dreams. To take it on its negative side, no deviser of an ideal
state, as far as I am aware, has proposed immense inequalities in the
distribution of wealth, crowded and insanitary houses, child labour, wars
of aggression, or sweating. There are large numbers of industrious and
accurate people in this country and America who are hunting for subjects
about which they can write volumes of “research.” I wish one of them
would write the book I suggest.

Charles II in English Verse

I was talking to a man the other day about books that ought to have been
written and have not been, when it occurred to me that somebody might
publish a very amusing selection of panegyrics written on undeserving
persons: say, the less immaculate of the English kings. I once thought of
writing a life of Charles II, each chapter of which should be headed by
an extract from some contemporary poem about him. The contrast between
the character and private and public actions of this monarch and the
descriptions of him by literary eulogists would have been illuminating.
Gross flattery was the habit of the time. James the First was given, very
unfairly as I think, the title of the British Solomon; and the Royal
Martyr, who after all had some virtues very highly developed, was written
of in terms which would have been extreme if applied to St. Francis of
Assisi. But no one, not even his father, received such wholehearted
praises as Charles II.

His career as a recipient of them began early. When he was a child
Francis Quarles’s _Divine Fancies_ were dedicated to him. The Dedication
was headed: “To the Royal Bud of Majesty and Centre of our Hopes and
Happiness, Charles,” and began: “Illustrious Infant, Give me leave to
acknowledge myself thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself my Prince.”
The hope is held out that the illustrious infant will become “a most
incomparable Prince, the firm pillar of our happiness and the future
object of the world’s wonder.” Addressing then the boy’s governess, Lady
Dorset, Quarles becomes even more rhapsodical:

“Most excellent Lady,

“You are the Star which stands over the Place where the Babe
lies. By whose directions’ light, I come from the East to
present my Myrrh and Frankincense to the young child. Let not
our Royal Joseph nor his princely Mary be afraid; there are no
Herods here. We have all seen his Star in the East, and have
rejoyced: our loyall hearts are full; for our eyes have seen
him, in whom our Posterity shall be blessed.”

One could scarcely hope that Quarles’s successors would quite live up to
that.

Dryden’s poem on Charles’s return to England is pitched a little lower.
It certainly contains lines like

_The winds that never moderation knew,_
_Afraid to blow too much, too faintly blew;_
_Or out of breath with joy would not enlarge_
_Their straightened lungs...._

but that is a mere excess of avowed fancy. When he wrote his _Threnodia
Augustalis_ on Charles’s death, Dryden decidedly went one better. Perhaps
it was that he had had twenty-five years of Charles’s reign in which to
appreciate fully the King’s reverend qualities. He calls him

_That all-forgiving King_
_The type of Him above,_
_That unexhausted spring_
_Of clemency and love._

He apostrophizes the Muse of History:

_Be true, O Clio, to thy hero’s name!_
_But draw him strictly so_
_That all who view the piece may know;_
_He needs no trappings of fictitious fame,_
_The load’s too weighty._

The anguished poet almost blasphemes against heaven for taking away so
peerless a sovereign; until he remembers that “saints and angels” had
been done out of Charles’s company for so long that their turn might
fairly be considered to have come. And there is the further consolation
that a James has succeeded a Charles:

_Our Atlas fell indeed, but Hercules was near;_

or, as the Earl of Halifax put it,

_James is our Charles in all things else but name._

Which Charles himself at least knew to be untrue.

The Halifax extract comes out of another funeral poem On the Death of His
Most Sacred Majesty. “Farewell,” he cries,

_great Charles, monarch of blest renown,_
_The best good man that ever fill’d a throne._

He sketches Charles’s career. He compares his exile to the banishment of
David (an open crib _from Astræ Redux_) and says of England that, when he
came back,

_to his arms she fled_
_And rested on his shoulders her fair bending head._

He “Us from our foes and from ourselves did save.” Only the almost
inevitable comparison to the Almighty can do him justice:

_In Charles so good a man and King we see_
_A double image of the deity._
_Oh! had he more resembled it! Oh, why_
_Was he not still more like, and could not die?_

What did become of Charles is suggested by “the Lord R” in a poem which
appears in _Miscellany Poems_:

_Good kings are number’d with Immortal Gods_
_When hence translated to the best Abodes,_
_For Princes (truly great) can never die,_
_They only lay aside Mortality._

After which we are told that the deceased is in Olympus passing the
nectar round; an occupation that should have suited him very well.

Perhaps the suggestion will be adopted. Let some publisher with a series
of anthologies get somebody to compile The Hundred Most Fulsome Poems in
the English Language. It would be a more entertaining book than most.
Very few examples, I think, would be drawn from the last hundred years.
As respects the monarchs, Great Elizabeth, the Great Jameses, the Great
Charleses, Great William, Great Anne, and the Great Georges all got
their full share of adulation. The break comes, I think, with George IV;
since whose accession we have lost the habit. Any one who should address
his sovereign to-day in words like those addressed to Charles II by his
subjects (e. g. Great George, the planets tremble at thy nod) would be
suspected of pulling the sovereign’s leg.

The Most Durable Books

The question of what books one would take with one for a prolonged
sojourn on a desert island is an old one. I thought it had lost its
interest for me, as too remote. For I do not propose to live on a desert
island; and if ever, by accident, I am cast upon the shore of one,
clinging to a solitary plank, it is unlikely that I shall have spent the
last hour on shipboard selecting mental food for a highly problematical
future as a hermit. But a letter from a distressed man in the trenches
revives my interest in the question. He complains that he very rapidly
exhausts the books that are sent him; that few of them are much use
as permanent companions; and that, as they take up room, he can carry
only a small bundle of them about with him. He cannot make up his mind
which ones to get and stick to; and he ends by putting the ancient poser
to me: “What three” (it is always three) “books would you rather have
with you if you had to live on a desert island?” He adds, with somewhat
unnecessary bluntness, that he will not believe me if I say that one of
them would be the Bible.

I suppose there must be some definition of what a book—what _one_
book—is. Otherwise one’s first impulse is to demand, as the companions
of solitude, _the Encyclopædia Britannica_, the _Dictionary of National
Biography_, and the _Oxford English Dictionary_—say some hundred and
twenty volumes in all. With these one could spend a fairly long life in
retreat without ever reading the same page twice. One might even read
with a definite scheme which would give one the semblance of systematic
inquiry united with a happy unexpectedness of route. Suppose, for
example, one were to start each day from something one had seen in the
morning. A boa-constrictor, for instance. Having twisted its neck and
left it for dead—castaways are very powerful fellows—one would go home
to the old hut and refer to _Boa in the Encyclopædia_. Having learnt all
about its anatomy, progenitiveness, and habitats, one would then refer
to the _Oxford Dictionary_ for the derivation of its name. Underneath
the philological discourse would be quotations from authors who had
referred to the beast or to its feathery similitude. The swift advent of
the tropic night would find one still immersed in the _D.N.B._ lives of
these authors. On a large rock outside one would keep, with a charred
stick, a list of the objects already dealt with; once in a way perhaps,
for sentiment’s sake, one would start from an old word again and revive
memories of the Boa Trail. A person of simple tastes, granted the island
produced enough goats and not too many constrictors, might well spend in
this way a life as contented as Horace’s. But to select those three books
would be cheating.

One might fairly suggest, in such a connexion, that a book is either
(1) any single coherent work by one author, or two in collaboration; or
(2) any series of works which either has been, or might reasonably be
expected to be, published in a single volume. The edition for island
use would not, however, necessarily be a one-volume edition. This rules
out these distended works of reference, whilst letting in every single
piece of creative literature that exists. There may seem to be an unfair
discrimination between author and author, the poets, especially, as a
body, being at a great advantage over the novelists; but if novelists
will be so verbose they must suffer for it. What, then, would one’s three
books be?

I can think of a good many books that I have not read and that I hope
to enjoy reading. There is _The Life of John Buncle_, there is _Old
Mortality_, there is _Hard Times_, there is Tom Paine’s _Rights of Man_,
there is Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_—and I am imperfectly acquainted
with the works of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. (I have also not
read _Ordeal by Battle_, and I don’t intend to.) But the mere fact that
one has not read a work which one knows to be interesting is not enough
to qualify it. It would be enough if one were proposing to be marooned
for a fortnight or three weeks and then taken off the island by “willing
hands”; but the books one wants for a residence of many years are books
one is sufficiently familiar with to be certain that they will not grow
stale at the fifty-fifth reading.

Well, Gibbon is a large and a very long book. I have been through it
once, and I am pretty sure I shall do so again. But after that I suspect
that the passages with pencil-marks beside them will satisfy me. I
certainly could not, just after finishing it, recommence it at once, as
Lord Randolph Churchill used to do, or make a practice of dipping into
it daily. Great as it is, it is not sufficiently varied or sufficiently
human. For perpetual reference no general history, I think, would do;
one must have something more of the flavour of everyday humanity in it.
And every mood and every kind of character must be represented. Though
the books may supplement one another, one finds one’s choice growing
at once very narrow. Even Horace Walpole’s _Letters_ or Saint-Simon’s
_Memoirs_ would pall—at any rate on me. Shakespeare will do; but I cannot
personally think of anything which, for me, would contest the other
places with Boswell and Rabelais, unless it were _Morte d’Arthur_.

There are people, no doubt, who would take _Don Quixote_ or Montaigne.
One man I know thinks that _Tristram Shandy_ would go with him. But
Sterne is too short; one would get to know him by heart in a month or
two. _Robinson Crusoe_ would have obvious advantages, especially in
an illustrated edition—which would provide one with useful models when
one was cutting out one’s garments. But I think I should take the three
I have mentioned—unless, indeed, I approached the matter from quite a
different angle. There is a strong case for taking a selection of the
more morose and bewildered modern novels—say _La Curée_, _Le Paradis des
Dames_, and _L’Assommoir_, or a judicious selection from Artzybascheff,
Mr. Cannan, and Mr. D. H. Lawrence. For these would do a great deal to
reconcile one to one’s lonely lot. Whenever one was regretting the world
of men one would find an everflowing spring of consolation in them.
“After all,” one would say, after each agued page, “there is a good deal
to be said for a desert island.”

The Worst Style in the World

The word “euphuism” is commonly employed: it is also commonly confused
with “euphemism.” The thing is very properly condemned, and the book
that gave it its name is usually condemned with it. But it is probable
that John Lyly’s _Euphues_ has frequently been abused by persons who
have never opened it. At any rate, confessions of having read it are
few, and have usually proceeded from the small minority who have found
merit in the book. It is very interesting, therefore, to see that Messrs.
Croll and Clemons have just published, through Routledge, a new edition,
fully annotated. A generation unfamiliar with it will have a chance of
reassessing it.

The work is in two parts. _Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit_ was first
published in 1578; _Euphues and his England_ in 1580. How immediately
popular it was is shown by the fact that (my authority is Mr. Arundell
Esdaile’s _Bibliography of English Tales and Romances_) four editions
of the first part, three of the second, and then at least seventeen
editions of both parts together were published in fifty-eight years.
(His name, incidentally, is spelt on various title-pages Lylly, Lyly,
Lylie, Lilie, Lyllie, and Lily: a diversity worthy of “Shakspear.”) For
a time almost everybody with any pretensions talked and wrote euphuism,
very often employing Lyly’s fantastic alliterations, antitheses, and
superfluous imagery without the content of sense that Lyly always had.
Some writers openly ridiculed it. Shakespeare and Jonson made sport with
euphuistic characters, and Sidney (who, I think, did not entirely escape
the influence) ridiculed this

_Talking of beasts, birds, fishes, flies,_
_Playing with words and idle similes._

But the development of English prose was sensibly changed by it, and its
effect may be traced in the prose of Donne, Taylor, and Browne. The book
itself, however, like all extravagantly mannered books, had its slump in
the end. Early in James I’s reign the wider public seems to have turned
away from it, and in 1632, E. Blount, the publisher, prefacing an edition
of Lyly’s plays, referred to him as a forgotten poet whose grave he was
digging up. Blount’s own language is a terrible example of what Euphuism
may come to. He calls his author “a Lilly growing in a Grove of Lawrels”:

“These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a Churchyard;
But I have gathered the scattered branches up, and by a Charme
(gotten from _Apollo_) made them greene againe, and set up as
Epitaphes to his Memory. A sinne it were to suffer these Rare
Monuments of wit, to lie covered with Dust, and a shame, such
conceipted Comedies, should be acted by none but wormes.”

From 1636 to 1868, when the late Professor Arber (a man whose memory
has not been sufficiently honoured) published his edition in the
“English Reprints,” _Euphues_ never appeared again, save in two brief
eighteenth-century adaptations. For almost a hundred years his names
was never mentioned; Lilly the astrologer was much better known. Most
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics dismissed him as a man who,
in Sir Walter Scott’s words, deformed his works “by the most unnatural
affectation that ever disgraced a printed page.” One of the few
exceptions was Charles Kingsley, who in _Westward Ho!_ attacks Lyly’s
critics with tremendous enthusiasm:

“I shall only answer by asking, Have they ever read it? For
if they have done so, I pity them if they have not found it,
in spite of occasional tediousness and pedantry, as brave,
righteous, and pious a book as man need look into; and wish for
no better proof of the nobleness and virtue of the Elizabethan
age than the fact that _Euphues_ and the _Arcadia_ were the two
popular romances of the day.”

Turning at this stage, on a sudden impulse, to my Encyclopædia, to see
whether sense is talked about Lyly there, I find that the article on him
is by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Life is full of surprises.

The truth of the matter is that everybody is right, except those who do
not trouble to read the book. Kingsley is perfectly correct; it would
be difficult to find a book of the time finer in feeling or inspired by
higher conceptions of conduct. Lyly is as full of common sense as of
refinement; and the fact that he drew much of his discourses on education
and religion from other writers does not diminish the impression made
by his attitude to life. His narrative does not come to much; most of
his space is occupied by harangues, debates, treatises, and letters;
his Neapolitan and English love-stories move at a snail’s pace. But—his
first discussion, by the way, is on heredity and environment which, with
startling modernity, he calls Nature and Nurture—he usually argues about
things of perennial interest, and always with subtlety, delicacy, and
an insight into the human heart. Still, Sir Walter Scott really was not
exaggerating the monstrosity—though it is not uniformly monstrous—of his
style. It takes some patience to put up with the construction of his
sentences and his recurrent bunches of similes in order to follow his
argument. On the second page you fall plump into this sentence:

“The freshest colours soonest fade, the keenest Rasor soonest
tourneth his edge, the finest cloth is soonest eaten with
the Moathes, and the Cambricke sooner stayned than the course
Canvas: which appeared well in this Euphues, whose wit beeing
like waxe, apt to receive any impression, and bearing the
head in his own hande, either to use the rayne or the spurre,
disdayning counsaile, leaving his country, loathing his old
acquaintance, thought either by wit to obteyne some conquest,
or by shame to abyde some conflict, who preferring fancy before
friends, and this present humor, before honour to come, laid
reason in water being too salt for his tast, and followed
unbridaled affection, most pleasant for his tooth.”

The mania for balance and alliteration is shown here, but not the equally
characteristic passion for piling animals and plants, mainly out of
Pliny, into mounds of comparisons. They are most tolerable when the
statements made are least verifiable. Here are two specimens:

“The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the Sea-Crab, and
is immediately recured: the Torteyse having tasted the Viper,
sucketh Origanum and is quickly revived: the Beare ready to
pine licketh up the Ants and is recovered: the Dog having
surfetted to procure his vomitte, eateth grasse and findeth
remedy: the Hart beein perced with the dart, runneth out of
hand to the hearb _Dicbanum_, and is healed.”

“Then good Euphues let the falling out of friendes be a
renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble the bones
of the Lyon, which lying stil and not moved begin to rot, but
being stricken one against another break out like fire, and wax
greene.”

Yet sometimes he will conclude a paragraph of such abnormalities with
a short, humorous, or pathetic sentence which is most effective; and
even sentences bearing the evident marks of his style sometimes move
one strongly in their context. I may quote such sentences as Lucilla’s
two complaints: “But I would to God Euphues would repair hither that
the sight of him might mitigate some part of my martyrdome,” and the
extremely sibilant but musical “O my Euphues, lyttle dost thou knowe
the sodeyn sorrowe that I susteine for thy sweete sake.” What a really
judicious critic would do would be to ridicule the style and admire the
book.

The Reconstruction of Orthography

Reconstruction is a blessed word, and very comprehensive: but I doubt
whether the Government, when it established the Reconstruction Committee,
anticipated that it would be asked to consider the problem of Spelling
Reform. The Simplified Spelling Society, however, has sent it a memorial
urging that “the reform of English spelling is eminently one that merits
the practical consideration of the Committee.” The signatories include a
number of scientific and other professors, scores of teachers, and a tail
composed of “men of business, men of letters, editors, etc.” The editors
do not include any man who edits a London daily or a literary weekly,
though the directive minds of the _Lady’s Realm_ and the _Ardrossan and
Saltcoats Herald_ are in the movement; and the only “men of letters”
are Messrs. William Archer, H. G. Wells, Eden Phillpotts, T. Seccombe
(at whom I am surprised), and a few persons who combine authorship with
business or with “etc.” One did not want this piece of negative evidence
to convince one that authors, as a body, will fight Simplifyd Speling
to the last mute k. The memorial makes the usual points about saving
children’s time, facilitating the acquisition of foreign languages,
lightening the work of teaching defective children, and assisting aliens
who are acquiring our tongue. We are also told that “the demand for a
rational spelling may be compared to that for decimalizing our coinage
and our weights and measures.”

This comparison seems to me very misleading, if by decimalization is
meant the introduction of the Continental metric system. For this
latter is uniform in various countries, whereas the reform suggested
by the Simplified Spelling Society would do nothing to approximate the
sound-values of our letters to those of letters in foreign tongues.
Cosmopolitan systems have been proposed, very complex and full of odd
new letters; but this Society’s suggestions, whilst eliminating some
difficulties for the foreigner, would leave English just as difficult for
a Frenchman to pronounce as French is for an Englishman. Take the phrase
(I find it here) “A Ferst Reeder in Simplifyd Speling.” A Frenchman
would still mispronounce it. If he wished to indicate those sounds in
the French way he would write (I am not a phonetician) something like “E
Fœust,” etc. So the Society had better not pitch its promises too high.
This, nevertheless, remains a minor point. The chief considerations
undoubtedly are the domestic effects of this piece of Reconstruction.

It sounds all very simple and convincing when people say: “Our spoken
language has diverged from our written language: let our written language
be made the same as our spoken language.” But directly you go into the
matter you find that the difficulties are enormous. That we have no one
spoken language is a commonplace. Our speech varies from fashion to
fashion and from locality to locality. “Educated” English at present has
an increasing Cockney element in it. The common “cultured” pronunciation
of “No,” for instance, embodies an “o” sound which is anything but pure.
Many rustics, however, still pronounce it with a good broad vowel. Even
the spelling reformers do not agree about words. A. J. Ellis thought
the “r” at the end of “proper” was still there; Sweet thought it had
disappeared. As a matter of fact, it is both there and not there: in some
classes and parts it is pronounced, in some it is not. And it is quite
possible that it will become universal again.

This gets us on to the question of change in time. The Reformers
can be met both ways. If it be argued that phonetic spelling fixes
pronunciation, why have we abandoned the old pronunciation of words
once phonetically spelt? Shakespeare pronounced the initial “k” in
“know” and “knee.” We have dropped it out. And we have no guarantee that
spelling these words according to our present slack pronunciation would
not be followed by another divergence. The history of the word “sea”
is odd. In the Middle Ages it was spelt “see” and pronounced “say.”
In Tudor times the spelling was altered to “sea” in order to make the
spelling correspond to the sound (the same as that in “great”). We have
reached a pronunciation which the original spelling would have correctly
represented! If it be argued that spelling does not fix pronunciation,
the case for the reform is seriously weakened. The truth of the matter
is that nothing can fix a pronunciation, but that the written word,
especially in an age of universal literacy, does exercise a pull. And
that pull can as well be exercised by our present spellings as by new
ones. I think it was Titus Oates who went to the scaffold, or somewhere,
crying “Lard! Lard!” Had he been a spelling reformer he would have quite
unnecessarily assimilated the spelling of “lord” with that of the name of
the white stuff they keep in bladders: a distinct loss to the language.
Mr. Murison, in the _Cambridge History of Literature_, points out that
the word “kiln” was originally pronounced as spelt; then for some time
the “n” was dropped; then the old pronunciation returned. The same thing
happened to words containing the diphthong “oi.” “Join” and “oil” were,
in Middle English, pronounced as they are now. But for centuries men
called them “jine” and “ile,” a habit that still persists amongst many
of the most eager supporters of Spelling Reform. “H’s” were dropped
wholesale and then picked up again. We never know, in fact, whether we
shall not return to an old way of speech; and we might as well do that as
diverge from an old way of writing.

The great consolation of conservatives in this matter is the length of
time during which the enthusiasts have continuously failed to bring about
a change. This is the oldest of the Campaigns. It was already old when in
1585 a book was published with this title-page (differently accented):

“AEsopz Fable’z in true Orto’graphy with Grammar-nótz.
Heryuntoo ar al’so jooined the short sentencez of the wyz Cato
imprinted with lyk form and order: both of which Autorz ar
transláted out of Latin intoo English. By William Bullokar.”

I don’t suppose that the Reconstruction Committee will find time to
consider this matter. But if they do think of handling it they should
realize that they are going to put their hands into a nestful of the
largest hornets.

Mr. James Joyce

Mr. James Joyce is a curious phenomenon. He first appeared in literary
Dublin about (I suppose) a dozen years ago: a strangely solitary and
self-sufficient and obviously gifted man. He published a small book
of verse with one or two good lyrics in it; and those who foresaw a
future for him became certain they were right. He published nothing;
but his reputation spread even amongst those who had never read a
line he had written. He disappeared from Ireland and went to Austria,
where he settled. The war came, and soon afterwards his second
book—_Dubliners_—was issued and reviewed with a general deference, after
wandering about for years among publishers who had been fighting shy of
it because of its undoubted unpleasantness and a reference to Edward VII.
Another interval and _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ began to
run serially in the _Egoist_. “The Egoist, Ltd.,” has now published this
book, and nobody is surprised to find all writing London talking about
it. Mr. Joyce has only done what was expected.

Whether this book is supposed to be a novel or an autobiography I do not
know or care. Presumably some characters and episodes are fictitious,
or the author would not even have bothered to employ fictitious names.
But one is left with the impression that almost all the way one has been
listening to sheer undecorated, unintensified truth. Mr. Joyce’s title
suggests, well enough, his plan. There is no “plot.” The subsidiary
characters appear and recede, and not one of them is involved throughout
in the career of the hero. Stephen Dedalus is born; he goes to school;
he goes to college. His struggles are mainly inward: there is nothing
unusual in that. He has religious crises: heroes of fiction frequently
do. He fights against, succumbs to, and again fights against sexual
temptation: we have stories on those lines in hundreds. All the same, we
have never had a novel in the least degree resembling this one; whether
it is mainly success or mainly failure, it stands by itself.

You recognize its individuality in the very first paragraph. Mr. Joyce
tries to put down the vivid and incoherent memories of childhood in
a vivid and incoherent way: to show one Stephen Dedalus’s memories
precisely as one’s own memories might appear if one ransacked one’s mind.
He opens:

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a
moocow coming down along the road and the moocow that was down
along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ...”

“His mother had a nicer smell than his father,” he proceeds. There is
verisimilitude in this; but a critic on the look-out for Mr. Joyce’s
idiosyncrasies would certainly fasten upon his preoccupation with
the olfactory—which sometimes leads him to write things he might as
well have left to be guessed at—as one of them. Still, it is a minor
characteristic. His major characteristics are his intellectual integrity,
his sharp eyes, and his ability to set down precisely what he wants to
set down. He is a realist of the first order. You feel that he means to
allow no personal prejudice or predilection to distort the record of what
he sees. His perceptions may be naturally limited; but his honesty in
registering their results is complete. It is even a little too complete.
There are some things that we are all familiar with and that ordinary
civilized manners (not pharisaism) prevent us from importing into general
conversation. Mr. Joyce can never resist a dunghill. He is not, in fact,
quite above the pleasure of being shocking. Generally speaking, however,
he carries conviction. He is telling the truth about a type and about
life as it presents itself to that type.

He is a genuine realist: that is to say, he puts in the exaltations as
well as the depressions, the inner life as well as the outer. He is
not morosely determined to paint everything drab. Spiritual passions
are as powerful to him as physical passions; and as far as his own
bias goes it may as well be in favour of Catholic asceticism as of
sensual materialism. For his detachment as author is almost inhuman. If
Stephen is himself, then he is a self who is expelled and impartially
scrutinized, without pity or “allowances,” directly Mr. Joyce the artist
gets to work. And of the other characters one may say that they are
always given their due, always drawn so as to evoke the sympathy they
deserve, yet are never openly granted the sympathy of the author. He is
the outsider, the observer, the faithful selector of significant traits,
moral and physical; his judgments, if he forms them, are concealed. He
never even shows by a quiver of the pen that anything distresses him.

His prose instrument is a remarkable one. Few contemporary writers are
effective in such diverse ways; his method varies with the subject-matter
and never fails him. His dialogue (as in the remarkable discussions at
home about Parnell and Stephen’s education) is as close to the dialogue
of life as anything I have ever come across; though he does not make
the gramophonic mistake of spinning it out as it is usually spun out
in life and in novels that aim at a faithful reproduction of life and
only succeed in sending one to sleep. And his descriptive and narrative
passages include at one pole sounding periods of classical prose and
at the other disjointed and almost futuristic sentences. The finest
sustained pages in the book contain the sermon in which a dear, simple
old priest expounds the unimaginable horrors of hell: the immeasurable
solid stench as of a “huge and rolling human fungus,” the helplessness
of the damned, “not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws
it,” the fierceness of the fire in which “the blood seethes and boils in
the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast
glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the
tender eyes flaming like molten balls.” Stephen, after listening to this,

“came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the
scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched
by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the
corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs
hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and
shapeless.”

No wonder. For myself, I had had an idea that this kind of exposition had
died with Drexelius; but after I had read it I suddenly and involuntarily
thought, “Good Lord, suppose it is all true!” That is a sufficient
testimony to the power of Mr. Joyce’s writing.

This is not everybody’s book. The later portion, consisting largely of
rather dull student discussions, is dull; nobody could be inspired by
the story, and it had better be neglected by any one who is easily
disgusted. Its interest is mainly technical, using the word in its
broadest sense; and its greatest appeal, consequently, is made to the
practising artist in literature. What Mr. Joyce will do with his powers
in the future it is impossible to conjecture. I conceive that he does
not know himself: that, indeed, the discovery of a form is the greatest
problem in front of him. It is doubtful if he will make a novelist.

Tennessee

Letters from strangers can usually be accounted for. But why on earth I,
more than any one else, should have received a letter from America asking
me to contribute towards the re-establishment of a backwoods library I
don’t know. This, however, has been my experience, and I trust that I am
not endangering the new Anglo-Saxon Entente by relieving my feelings in
the following:

LINES

_Written on receiving from the Librarian of a College which
educates “the mountain youth of Tennessee” a request for “a
book” to assist in the re-formation of the Library, which was
recently destroyed by fire._

_Mine ears have heard your distant moan,_
_O mountain youth of Tennessee;_
_Even the bowels of a stone_
_Would melt to your librarian’s plea._
_Although we’re parted by the ocean,_
_I’m most distressed about your fire:_
_Only I haven’t any notion_
_What sort of volume you require._

_I have a Greene, a Browne, a Gray,_
_A Gilbert White, a William Black,_
_Trollope and Lovelace, Swift and Gay,_
_And Hunt and Synge: nor do I lack_
_More sober folk for whom out there_
_There may be rather better scope,_
_Three worthy men of reverend air,_
_A Donne, a Prior, and a Pope._

_Peacock or Lamb, discreetly taken,_
_Might fill the hungry mountain belly,_
_Or Hogg or Suckling, Crabbe or Bacon_
_(Bacon’s not Shakespeare, Crabbe ~is~ Shelley)_
_And if—for this is on the cards—_
_You do not like this mental food,_
_I might remit less inward bards:_
_My well-worn Spenser or my Hood._

_Longfellows may be in your line_
_(Littles we know are second-raters),_
_Or one might speed across the brine_
_A Mayflower full of Pilgrim Paters._
_Or, then again, you may devote_
_Yourselves to less æsthetic lore,_
_Yet if I send you out a Grote[3]_
_For all I know you’ll ask for More._

_O thus proceeds my vacillation:_
_For now the obvious thought returns_
_That after such a conflagration_
_A fitting sequel might be Burns._
_And now again I change my mind_
_And, almost confidently, feel_
_That since to Beg you are inclined_
_You might like Borrow, say, or Steele...._

Envoi

_Yes, Prince, this song ~shall~ have an end._
_A sudden thought has come to me—_
_The thing is settled: I shall send_
_A Tennyson to Tennessee!_

But, as a matter of fact, unless I get a special permit for the export of
second-hand books, I shan’t be able to send them even that.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Or, with an appearance of greater generosity, one might return them
the Pound they sent us some years since.

Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George

“Representatives of literature and art” usually appear in the Honours
Lists, and they are usually queer representatives. The knighted
_littérateur_, as a rule, is either a second-rate man or a man long past
his prime. Possibly more men than we know of refuse these knighthoods.
For myself I do not see what on earth a really distinguished artist wants
with a knighthood, unless he is poor, and thinks that a title would add
a guinea or two per thousand to the price of his work. If Sir Samuel
Johnson, Sir Charles Dickens, Sir William Blake, Sir Robert Browning,
Sir W. Wordsworth, Sir S. Taylor Coleridge, Sir George Meredith stood
beside Sir Lewis Morris and Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, Sir Henry Dalziel,
and Sir Hedley le Bas (of the Caxton Publishing Company), I do not
conceive that those eminent writers would be held in greater honour than
they are, or that literature would cut a more important figure in our
social life. The one man to whom a knighthood may _usefully_ be given is
the deserving person who has worked conscientiously for years without
adequate recognition and of whose existence the public might—to his and
its advantage—be officially reminded. As the crown of a famous career a
knighthood is absurd.

Sir William Watson has presumably got his knighthood for being one of
the most industrious of the war-poets—and a war-poet congenial to the
Powers-that-now-Be. Twenty years ago he had a greater reputation than he
now has, and wrote several good and many respectable poems. He is still
skilful, and can echo effectively the accents of Wordsworth and Milton;
but he is certainly not a man of whom one thinks when one is estimating
the vital forces in contemporary poetry. A new volume, _The Man who Saw_,
has just appeared. The title-poem is about the Prime Minister:

_Out of that land where Snowdon night by night_
_Receives the confidence of lonesome stars,_
_And where Carnarvon’s ruthless battlements_
_Magnificently oppress the daunted tide,_
_There comes—no fabled Merlin, son of mist,_
_And brother to the twilight, but a man_
_Who in a time terrifically real_
_Is real as the time; formed for the time;_
_Not much beholden to the munificent Past,_
_In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour;_
_No faggot of perfections, angel or saint,_
_Created faultless and intolerable;_
_No meeting-place of all the heavenlinesses,_
_But eminently a man to stir and spur_
_Men, to afflict them with benign alarm,_
_Harass their sluggish and uneager blood,_
_Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal;_
_A man with something of the cragginess_
_Of his own mountains, something of the force_
_That goads to their loud leap the mountain streams._

Sir William proceeds to a peroration on

_the man of Celtic blood,_
_Whom Powers Unknown, in a divine caprice,_
_Chose and did make their instrument, wherewith_
_To save the Saxon; the man all eye and hand,_
_The man who saw, and grasped, and gripped, and held._
_Then shall each morrow with its yesterday_
_Vie, in the honour of nobly honouring him,_
_Who found us lulled and blindfolded by the verge_
_Of fathomless perdition and haled us back._
_And poets shall dawn in pearl and gold of speech,_
_Crowning his deed with not less homage, here_
_On English ground, than yonder whence he rose._

This must certainly be the most eulogistic poem ever written about a
British politician.

There is nothing about Mr. W. M. Hughes, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, or
Lord Devonport in the volume; these, perhaps, will be dealt with in Sir
William’s next book, which, I do not doubt, will be ready before long.
But Sir Edward Carson gets his meed in a sonnet _To the Right Hon. Sir
Edward Carson, on leaving Antrim, June 30, 1916_, and another sonnet
acclaims Lord Northcliffe—to whom, possibly, there is a delicate allusion
in the line quoted above, beginning “Whom Powers.” The sonnet is called
_The Three Alfreds_; the three being King Alfred, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
and Alfred Lord Northcliffe:

_Three Alfreds let us honour. Him who drove_
_His foes before the tempest of his blade_
_At Ethandune—him first, the all-glorious Shade,_
_The care-crowned King whose host with Guthrum strove._
_Next—though a thousand years asunder clove_
_These twain—a lord of realms serenely swayed;_
_Victoria’s golden warbler, him who made_
_Verse such as Virgil for Augustus wove._
_Last—neither king nor bard, but just a man_
_Who, in the very whirlwind of our woe,_
_From midnight till the laggard dawn began,_
_Cried ceaseless, “Give us shells—more shells,” and so_
_Saved England; saved her not less truly than_
_Her hero of heroes saved her long ago._

It is a pity that there could not have been added some reference to Lord
Northcliffe’s conviction that nobody in his senses ever dreamed of using
shrapnel against wire. Had the shells passage been expanded it might
have been less cacophonous. As it stands, it gives rise to the suspicious
illusion that the sibilant cry was uttered by Mr. (or is it Sir?) Wilkie
Bard. But no; it was “neither King nor Bard.”

Stranded

“No,” I thought, “I won’t take any books with me. I want a rest. I
shall swim. I shall catch fish. There is sure to be a billiard-room in
that pub., and pretty certain to be a few people who play bridge. The
overtaxed brain must be allowed relaxation. So good-bye, Plato; good-bye,
Spinoza; good-bye, Samuel Rawson Gardiner; good-bye, Freud. I won’t take
any of you.”

I had been in the place twenty-four hours, and had plumbed the depths of
my neighbours’ incapacity to play any games of skill or chance (except
possibly—I did not ask this—loo and vingt-et-un), when, sauntering down
the main, and indeed the only, street, I caught sight of the words,
“Grocer, Chemist, Tobacconist, Draper, and Circulating Library.” It would
be ungracious, I felt, to let such versatility go unrecognized. Besides,
one might as well take a novel or two out with one in the boat. It might
make the intervals between the bites seem a little shorter. So in I went.

A young girl with a pigtail escorted me past the Quaker Oats and the
Gold Flakes, under a little low doorway and into a back room. “A
shilling deposit, and twopence on each book,” she said; and left me to
the shelves. There were books there all right: about two thousand of
them, reaching from floor to ceiling on both sides. There was no sort
of order, alphabetical or otherwise, so it was no good expecting to
find a particular author right off. The only thing for it was beginning
somewhere and going steadily along the rows.

B. M. Croker: yes, I think I read a great many of hers in my youth. They
were about penniless young ladies going to India and getting married. It
is no good tackling this one. _The Gateless Barrier_, by Lucas Malet;
that was about spiritualism, and pretty average tosh it was; I shall
probably come to _Sir Richard Calmady_ presently, but I shall give him a
miss too. _The Iron Pirate_: I liked that rather, but it would be a pity
not to like it so much now. I feel the same about _Saracinesca_, _The
Witch of Prague_, and _In the Palace of the King_, which are all in a
lump together where some late devotee has replaced them. Marion Crawford,
upon whose every word my childhood hung, I dare not attempt you again;
even _A Cigarette Maker’s Romance_ and the chronicle of _Mr. Isaacs_ (who
enjoyed Kant and deluded me, for a time, into the belief that I should
like him too) will be more dear to the memory if they are not restored to
sight. _Count Hannibal_: that was the man who either massacred somebody
or escaped massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had a great square
jaw and eyes that made you jump; and women cowered and obeyed when he
emitted a short, sharp oath or looked like emitting one. William Black
I never liked at any time, so nothing by him need detain me. _Flames_?
No. _Dodo_? Oh dear, no. _Ships that pass in the Night_? No. There was
edelweiss in it, and an old man who was otherworldly and read nothing but
Gibbon. Queen Victoria thought highly of it, but I don’t want to read it
again. Nor _Red Pottage_ either. The husband and the other man (I think)
had a duel. They drew straws, and the man with the shortest straw had
to kill himself. What the lady thought about it I don’t remember. But
one of them was a Lord, New Zealand came in somewhere, and at suitable
places in the conversation a moth would flutter or a kingfisher flash by.
It is by touches like these that one can distinguish really imaginative
literature, but I am not tempted.

It is not reasonable to expect a man at this date to return to _A Yellow
Aster_, or _Moths_ by Ouida. As for _The Silence of Dean Maitland_, the
predicament of that respected ecclesiastic with the undisclosed sin on
his conscience is still fresh in my mind, and I still remember how my
elders, when it first came out, debated whether such a book ought to be
written, and whether Maxwell Gray was a man or a woman. Of _The Sorrows
of Satan_ I recall little of the plot, except that the Devil was a
gentleman. I think that the first sentences were: “Do you know what it is
to be poor? Not with that—poverty that—on ten thousand a year, but with
that grinding poverty that,” etc. How many years ago is it since that
immortal paragraph, reproduced in facsimile from the author’s own script,
appeared in the _Strand Magazine_, with pictures of the great novelist in
divers postures? It would be Ethel M. Dell now, I suppose; but they don’t
seem to keep Miss Dell’s works in this Circulating Library, of which the
circulation seems to have stopped many, many, many years since. They keep
instead Frankfort Moore and G. B. Burgin.

Anthony Hope now. Here is _The Intrusions of Peggy_. There was a grizzled
inventor who lived in the Temple, and he had a daughter (?) who shone
like a sunbeam amidst the dusty shades of the law. Anthony Hope, who was
very nearly a first-rate writer, must have put it better than that; but
I’m sure that that is what it was about. Seton Merriman now. This is
better. But will or will not a reperusal of _The Vultures_ and _Roden’s
Corner_ diminish the respect that still survives in me for him? He gave
me immense pleasure at one time; can I risk it? I don’t know.

With meditations like the above I roamed up and down before the frayed
and wrinkled backs of these veterans, fascinated by so systematic a
recovery of the familiar. Then I remembered that the sun was shining in
a blue sky, only slightly fleeced with cloud; that the salt wind blowing
shoreward was driving broken sunlight over the waves; that there were
as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it; and that I must really
take care of my health. Catching sight of _She_ and _Many Cargoes_,
which I have read at least ten times apiece, but am always good for
again, I detached them from their faded companions and took them into the
front shop, meditating upon the astonishing sluggishness of this shop,
where even Mrs. Barclay had not yet penetrated and Garvice was a cloudy
speculation in the far future.

I paid my one-and-fourpence and stepped out on to the cobblestones. As I
passed into the sun, it occurred to me that it was not surprising that
even the minor works in the library were like old friends. For—and things
like these do strangely remain known, yet for a time, unrelated—I spent a
summer in this village fifteen years ago.

Mr. Ralph Hodgson

Mr. Ralph Hodgson is a poet who has still not quite got his due. He
has just collected into one volume (_Poems_), with a few others, the
verses published in a series of “Flying Fame Booklets” with Mr. Lovat
Fraser’s charming and ingenious cuts. Ten years’ work goes into seventy
pages, so that a charge of over-production is scarcely possible. In
the circumstances Mr. Hodgson might have included one or two poems,
_The Last Blackbird_, for example, from his earlier book. That book as
a whole, however, was not comparable with this, which contains _The
Bull_, indubitably one of the finest poems of our generation, _The Song
of Honour_, which is almost as good, and many charming lighter lyrics.
_Eve_, particularly, is a feat. Mr. Hodgson makes a delicate tripping
song out of the Fall of Man; he pictures Eve, “that orchard sprite,”

_Wondering, listening,_
_Listening, wondering,_
_Eve with a berry_
_Half-way to her lips,_

and the serpent, a graceful beast,

_Tumbling in twenty rings_
_Into the grass._

The whole story trips like that.

_“Eva!” Each syllable_
_Light as a flower fell,_
_“Eva!” he whispered the_
_Wondering maid,_
_Soft as a bubble sung_
_Out of a linnet’s lung,_
_Soft and most silverly_
_“Eva!” he said._

But—and this is the achievement—one is not left with a sense of
inadequacy and triviality. For the feeling throughout is sincere, and the
nature of the calamity is conveyed as clearly by Mr. Hodgson, who makes
the small birds chatter with sorrow and indignation when Eve falls, as it
would have been by another man with all the paraphernalia of darkening
heavens, thunderous voices, and long Latin words.

But this poem is not on the same plane as _The Bull_ and _The Song of
Honour_. No writer has ever entered more completely into the feelings
of an animal than does Mr. Hodgson as, in a setting of tropical forest
and swamp, he shows the defeated, expelled, and dying leader of the herd
remembering his calfhood, and his early fights, and his prowess and his
final fall, whilst the obscene birds circle round overhead waiting for
his death. _The Song of Honour_, an attempt to echo the Hymn of Praise
sung by all things to their Maker, is, in the nature of things, more
disjointed and impressionistic, less exact and well-shaped. It owes as
much as any poem can decently owe to another to Christopher Smart’s _Song
to David_. But the strength of feeling never fails, and parts of the
breathless pæan are very beautiful.

_The music of a lion strong_
_That shakes a hill a whole night long,_
_A hill as loud as he,_
_The twitter of a mouse among_
_Melodious greenery,_
_The ruby’s and the rainbow’s song,_
_The nightingale’s—all three,_
_The song of life that wells and flows_
_From every leopard, lark and rose_
_And everything that gleams or goes_
_Lack-lustre in the sea._

_I heard it all, I heard the whole_
_Harmonious hymn of being roll_
_Up through the chapel of my soul_
_And at the altar die,_
_And in the awful quiet then_
_Myself I heard, Amen, Amen,_
_Amen I heard me cry!_
_I heard it all and then although_
_I caught my flying senses, Oh,_
_A dizzy man was I!_
_I stood and stared; the sky was lit,_
_The sky was stars all over it,_
_I stood, I knew not why,_
_Without a wish, without a will,_
_I stood upon that silent hill_
_And stared into the sky until_
_My eyes were blind with stars and still_
_I stared into the sky._

Those are two of the last stanzas, and even standing alone, I think, give
something of the quality of the poem. They certainly are characteristic
in the simplicity of their language.

Double Misprints

I take the following paragraph from the _Connersville (Ind.) Herald_:

“The Guest Day meeting of the literary club will be held at the
home of Mrs. L. A. Frazer to-morrow afternoon. Mrs. De Morgan
Jones, of Indianapolis, will lecture on ‘William Butler Meats
and the Garlic Revival.’”

I think the Lady of Shalott should have been brought in. Double misprints
are rare, but I remember another which also was perpetrated in America
but which has not quite so convincing an air of sheer accident as this
one. A Colonel, who had fought in the Civil War, was described in
his local paper as “a battle-scared veteran.” This imputation on his
courage brought him to the office with a big stick and a demand that
the paragraph should be reprinted with the offensive remark corrected.
It was: but another misprint crept in and the word appeared as
“bottle-scarred.” Every one who has dealings with the Press occasionally
corrects, amid the mass of quite meaningless “literals,” a misprint
that really makes some sort of sense. I myself in the last few months
have had to emend printers’ references to Mr. Hotairio Bottomley and
Mr. Edmund Goose. The former one felt tempted to leave uncorrected, the
derangement of letters being so extremely apt.

The History of Earl Pumbles

“The late Earl (Eorl?) Pumbles was of lowly birth. He was born in the
thorp of Stoke Parva in 1850, the son of a penniless timber-wright.
Outdriven from his first school, he became a fighting-man. He was a
dreadless and fearnought wight, and was once left for dead on the field,
bleeding at every sweat-hole. The saw-bones brought him through. Coming
back to England he saw the haplihood of making a gold-hoard in the
soap-trade. He set up a business with the gold of others; got rid of his
yoke-mates by sundry under-slinkings, and soon became amazingly wealthy.
An earldom followed; though it is markworthy that on the morning after
its bestowal a great songsmith wrote to the _Daily Score_ to say: ‘The
Gusher of Fair-Name is befouled.’ In 1910 Lord Pumbles went as sendling
to the King of Siam, with a bode-word from our King. In the back-end
of the next year his health gave out; he became bit-wise worse; and he
died last night of belly-ache. Lord Pumbles was often to be seen at Sir
Henry Wood’s Out-Road Glee-Motes at Queen’s Hall, but he was almost a
comeling at the House of Lords. He was cunning in Kin-lore, and in his
fair wonestead at Pumbles wrote a great book on the stem-tree of his
kin. By ill hap he was an eat-all and rather soaksome. He will be buried
on Wednesday in the bone-yard at Pumbles, in which lich-rest his wife
already lies. The earldom goes, by out-of-the-way odd-come-short, to his
daughter.”

This little biography may have puzzled those who have got thus far.
They may have thought it absurd. I compiled it with the help of “C. L.
D.’s” _Word-Book of the English Tongue_, just published by Routledge.
“C. L. D.” (the initials are, I observe, those of the author of _Alice
in Wonderland_) is one of those enthusiasts who long “to shake off the
Norman yoke” which lies so heavy on our speech. He follows, that is
to say, in the footsteps of the late Rev. William Barnes (of Dorset),
who asked his countrymen to call a perambulator a “child-wain” and an
omnibus a “folk-wain.” “What many speakers and writers,” he remarks,
“even to-day, call English, is no English at all but sheer French.
Nevertheless, there are many who feel not a little ashamed of the
needless loan-words in which their speech is clothed, and of the borrowed
feathers in which they strut. Over and over again it has been said, and
most truly, that for liveliness and strength, manliness and fulness of
meaning, the olden English Tongue were hard to beat.” “In this little
Word-Book, therefore,” he says:

“after having chosen a few thousand stock loan-words, I have
striven to set by the side of each, not indeed ‘synonyms,’ but
other good English words, which may stand in their stead.”

Which is certainly (or, I think I should say, “ywis” or “in good sooth”)
a pure English sentence.

One primary fault “C. L. D.” avoids almost entirely. He does not (as
he might have done had he cared to take all the astonishing Latin
words from Johnson’s Word-Book) load the dice by including in his
list of “loan-words” words which we hardly ever use. There are a few.
Only a scientist would say “acephalous” when he meant “headless”;
and the general public does not need to be warned to say “grind,”
“bristly,” “stalkless,” and “barefooted,” instead of “comminute,”
“aristate,” “acaulescent,” and “discalced.” It would never dream of
saying acaulescent. Where our author errs is where he would inevitably
err: in suggesting to us (1) Saxon words which we simply won’t use,
and (2) Saxon words which do not take the place of the Latin words of
which he disapproves. Take, for instance, as an instance of the latter
category, this very word “disapprove.” All he can give us is a list of
“strong” words beginning with “hiss” and “hoot,” none of which gets the
exact shade of meaning required. Similarly with “decry,” for which his
suggestions are “boo” and “hoot.” In suggesting “clean,” “flat,” etc.,
for “absolute” he is merely booing and hooting the slang use of that
word, but he has not found a Saxon equivalent for the real “absolute.”
For “complimentary” he gives “smooth-spoken”; but how would, say, the
Archbishop of Canterbury like to get a letter of thanks beginning: “My
dear Archbishop,—Many thanks for your very smooth-spoken remarks”?
For “uncomfortable” he can only suggest “writhing”—as though we could
say that we had spent a fortnight in a most writhing hotel; and for
“temporalities” he has nothing but “loaves and fishes”—which is simply
offensive. If one began using words like these promiscuously, one would
simply (here I consult the _Word-Book_ again) be asking for misluck.

To turn to the other lot, it is altogether too late to ask us to say
“rede-craft” for “logic”; “back-jaw” for “retort”; “handmaid” for
“servant”; “outganger” for “emigrant”; “wanhope” (a most beautiful word,
I admit) for “despair”; “scald” or “songsmith” for “poet”; “hight” or
“yclept” for “denominated”; “uplooking” for “aspiring”; “fourwinkled” for
“quadrangular”; and, above all, to replace “depilatory” by “hair-bane.”
“Ereold” and “foreold” for “ancient” are no longer possible; and the man
who should say that the King was crowned and besmeared in Westminster
Abbey would be quite unable to persuade people that he wasn’t merely a
rather coarse satirist. In cases where both terms are alive, the Latin
is often more convenient—because shorter—than the Saxon. If we always
used “breach of wedlock” instead of “adultery,” many modern novels, and
most Sunday newspapers, would use up twice as much paper and ink. (There
was once a half-way word: the mediæval heralds used to say that the
leopard was “begotten in spouse-breach between the lion and the pard.”)
In proposing “hand-grip” for portmanteau, our wordloresman is doing an
audacious thing: adopting a bit of modern American—though, as often as
not, the term is shortened, across the water, to “grip” _tout court_.

There remain, of course, a very large number of words for which “C.
L. D.” does provide genuine living synonyms which, in many cases, are
stronger and terser than the originals. Even here, of course, there are
occasional difficulties; we have, at any rate in print, thrown over
“C. L. D.’s” favourites “belly-ache” and “gripes” in favour of “colic”
simply because they _are_ what is called “good sturdy Saxon,” altogether
too apt and sturdy. As for his proposal of “ropes” and “manifolds” for
“intestines,” all I can say is that I much prefer here to remain under
the Norman yoke. At the same time, too much Latinity is a nuisance and
a danger to the vividness of our tongue; and, whilst refraining from
following “C. L. D.” to his thorps or Barnes to his folk-wain, I think I
shall sometimes find the _Word-Book_ useful.

On Destroying Books

“It says in the paper” that over two million volumes have been presented
to the troops by the public. It would be interesting to inspect them.
Most of them, no doubt, are quite ordinary and suitable; but it was
publicly stated the other day that some people were sending the oddest
things, such as magazines twenty years old, guides to the Lake District,
Bradshaws, and back numbers of _Whitaker’s Almanack_. In some cases, one
imagines, such indigestibles get into the parcels by accident; but it is
likely that there are those who jump at the opportunity of getting rid of
books they don’t want. Why have kept them if they don’t want them? But
most people, especially non-bookish people, are very reluctant to throw
away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses that
one knows every worthless or ephemeral volume that is bought finds its
way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to
keep rubbish merely because it is printed: it is positively a public duty
to destroy it. Destruction not merely makes more room for new books and
saves one’s heirs the trouble of sorting out the rubbish or storing it:
it may also prevent posterity from making a fool of itself. We may be
sure that if we do not burn, sink, or blast all the superseded editions
of Bradshaw, two hundred years hence some collector will be specializing
in old railway timetables, gathering, at immense cost, a complete series,
and ultimately leaving his “treasures” (as the Press will call them) to a
Public Institution.

But it is not always easy to destroy books. They may not have as many
lives as a cat, but they certainly die hard; and it is sometimes
difficult to find a scaffold for them. This difficulty once brought me
almost within the Shadow of the Rope. I was living in a small and (as
Shakespeare would say) heaven-kissing flat in Chelsea, and books of
inferior minor verse gradually accumulated there until at last I was
faced with the alternative of either evicting the books or else leaving
them in sole, undisturbed tenancy and taking rooms elsewhere for myself.
Now, no one would have bought these books. I therefore had to throw
them away or wipe them off the map altogether. But how? There were
scores of them. I had no kitchen range, and I could not toast them on
the gas-cooker or consume them leaf by leaf in my small study fire—for
it is almost as hopeless to try to burn a book without opening it as to
try to burn a piece of granite. I had no dustbin; my debris went down a
kind of flue behind the staircase, with small trap-doors opening to the
landings. The difficulty with this was that the larger books might choke
it; the authorities, in fact, had labelled it “Dust and Ashes Only”; and
in any case I did not want to leave the books intact, and some dustman’s
unfortunate family to get a false idea of English poetry from them. So in
the end I determined to do to them what so many people do to the kittens:
tie them up and consign them to the river. I improvised a sack, stuffed
the books into it, put it over my shoulder, and went down the stairs into
the darkness.

It was nearly midnight as I stepped into the street. There was a cold
nip in the air; the sky was full of stars; and the greenish-yellow lamps
threw long gleams across the smooth, hard road. Few people were about;
under the trees at the corner a Guardsman was bidding a robust good
night to his girl, and here and there rang out the steps of solitary
travellers making their way home across the bridge to Battersea. I turned
up my overcoat collar, settled my sack comfortably across my shoulders,
and strode off towards the little square glow of the coffee-stall which
marked the near end of the bridge, whose sweeping iron girders were
just visible against the dark sky behind. A few doors down I passed
a policeman who was flashing his lantern on the catches of basement
windows. He turned. I fancied he looked suspicious, and I trembled
slightly. The thought occurred to me: “Perhaps he suspects I have swag
in this sack.” I was not seriously disturbed, as I knew that I could
bear investigation, and that nobody would be suspected of having stolen
such goods (though they _were_ all first editions) as I was carrying.
Nevertheless I could not help the slight unease which comes to all who
are eyed suspiciously by the police, and to all who are detected in any
deliberately furtive act, however harmless. He acquitted me, apparently;
and, with a step that, making an effort, I prevented from growing more
rapid, I walked on until I reached the Embankment.

It was then that all the implications of my act revealed themselves. I
leaned against the parapet and looked down into the faintly luminous
swirls of the river. Suddenly I heard a step near me; quite automatically
I sprang back from the wall and began walking on with, I fervently hoped,
an air of rumination and unconcern. The pedestrian came by me without
looking at me. It was a tramp, who had other things to think about; and,
calling myself an ass, I stopped again. “Now’s for it,” I thought; but
just as I was preparing to cast my books upon the waters I heard another
step—a slow and measured one. The next thought came like a blaze of
terrible blue lightning across my brain: “What about the splash?” A man
leaning at midnight over the Embankment wall: a sudden fling of his arms:
a great splash in the water. Surely, and not without reason, whoever was
within sight and hearing (and there always seemed to be some one near)
would at once rush at me and seize me. In all probability they would
think it was a baby. What on earth would be the good of telling a London
constable that I had come out into the cold and stolen down alone to the
river to get rid of a pack of poetry? I could almost hear his gruff,
sneering laugh: “You tell that to the Marines, my son!”

So for I do not know how long I strayed up and down, increasingly fearful
of being watched, summoning up my courage to take the plunge and quailing
from it at the last moment. At last I did it. In the middle of Chelsea
Bridge there are projecting circular bays with seats in them. In an agony
of decision I left the Embankment and hastened straight for the first of
these. When I reached it I knelt on the seat. Looking over, I hesitated
again. But I had reached the turning-point. “What!” I thought savagely,
“under the resolute mask that you show your friends is there really
a shrinking and contemptible coward? If you fail now, you must never
hold your head up again. Anyhow, what if you _are_ hanged for it? Good
God! you worm, better men than you have gone to the gallows!” With the
courage of despair I took a heave. The sack dropped sheer. A vast splash.
Then silence fell again. No one came. I turned home; and as I walked I
thought a little sadly of all those books falling into that cold torrent,
settling slowly down through the pitchy dark, and subsiding at last on
the ooze of the bottom, there to lie forlorn and forgotten whilst the
unconscious world of men went on.

Horrible bad books, poor innocent books, you are lying there still;
covered, perhaps, with mud by this time, with only a stray rag of your
sacking sticking out of the slime into the opaque brown tides. Odes to
Diana, Sonnets to Ethel, Dramas on the Love of Lancelot, Stanzas on a
First Glimpse of Venice, you lie there in a living death, and your fate
is perhaps worse than you deserved. I was harsh with you. I am sorry I
did it. But even if I had kept you, I will certainly say this: I should
not have sent you to the soldiers.

THE END

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