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 Cornell University Library 
 PR 99.S77B71 1920 
 
 Books in general, 
 
 3 1924 013 354 869 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013354869 
 
Books in General 
 By Solomon Eagle 
 
 [Second Series] 
 
 — iCa»^ 
 
 Alfred • A • Knopf 
 
 New York Mcmxx 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 
 
 I\ii-ili^ 
 
 PRINTBD IN THE tTNITED STATES 01' AUBBIOA 
 
TO 
 DONALD MACAULAY 
 
 in the hope that 
 
 meeting in these and, similar pages 
 
 so many of 
 
 His Brethren 
 
 amongst them being 
 
 DoNNE, Herbert, Traherne, Sterne, 
 
 Herrick, Taylor, Swift, Hooker, 
 
 Burnet, Lewis Carroll 
 
 AND 
 
 The Venerable Bede 
 
 It may Occur to Him to Write 
 A Book Himself 
 
Preface 
 
 THESE papers are selections from a series 
 contributed weekly, without intermission, 
 to the New Statesman since April, 19 13. 
 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, cry- 
 ing " Repent, repent." 
 
 This preface was written for, and printed in, the 
 first series of these reprints. As it is accurate and 
 I have nothing to add to it, I thought it would do 
 again now. S. E. 
 
Contents 
 
 The Descendants of Shakespeare, 1 1 
 
 The Diary of Charles Footer, 17 
 
 Thomas Traherne, 23 
 
 Scientific Management for Pegasus, 29 
 
 The New Browning Poems, 35 
 
 Pidgin-English for Germans, 40 
 
 Signor Marinetti's Masterpiece, 44 
 
 Fitzgerald's Second Thoughts, 48 
 
 Property in Proper Names, 53 
 
 The Inferior Poems of Keats, 58 
 
 One's Favourite Author Defined, 63 
 
 Swinburne's Vocabulary, 66 
 
 Blake and His Myths, 69 
 
 Mutual Compliments, 75 
 
 Invective, 77 
 
 A Picture of Chaos, 8 1 
 
 Shelley's Letters, 86 
 
 On Cleaning Books, 90 
 
 The Essay in America, 95 
 
 The Prices of Restoration Books, loi 
 
 The Humours of Hymnology, 107 
 
 A Dreadful Story, iii 
 
 Dr. Donne's Tomb, 115 
 
 Russian Wit, 119 
 
 The Goncourt Journal in English, 120 
 
 Poland and Our Poets, 126 
 
Contents 
 
 Literature and the Advertiser, 131 
 
 Cobbett as Housekeeper, 134 
 
 Autography, 138 
 
 A Forgotten Caroline, 140 
 
 The Diarist in our Midst, 145 
 
 A Parody in Slang, 150 
 
 Dialect in Literature, 152 
 
 Greene's Groatsworth, 157 
 
 James Whitcomb Riley, 163 
 
 Edinburgh: The Missing Monument, 169 
 
 Verhaeren, 174 
 
 A Shakespeare MS.? 177 
 
 A Seaside Library, 180 
 
 A Voice from the Past, 185 
 
 Francis Thompson's Method, 191 
 
 Tobacco, 194 
 
 Charles Churchill, 203 
 
 Commonplace Books, 207 
 
 The Songs of the Trenches, 212 
 
 The Limits of Imitation, 218 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George as a Vers-Librist, 223 
 
 William Cartwright, 228 
 
 On Submitting Manuscripts, 233 
 
 Mr. H. G. Wells and Lord Tennyson, 238 
 
 The Statistics of Genius, 244 
 
 Coleridge at Table, 250 
 
 Fragments of China, 254 
 
 Rupert Brooke in Retrospect, 256 
 
 Mr. Max Beerbohm's Idyll, 262 
 
 Fire and the Heart of Man, 268 
 
Books in General 
 
 [Second Series] 
 
The Descendants of 
 Shakespeare 
 
 ON April 23, 1919 (Shakespeare's birthday), 
 I looked at the front page of the Daily 
 News. I read there that the Italians 
 had decided to take no further part in the dis- 
 cussions on the Adriatic problem, their view being 
 formed; I learned, also that the Roumanians had in- 
 vaded Hungary. This done I turned, as a man will, 
 to the back page, which was covered with photo- 
 graphs. There were photographs of aeroplanes, 
 of soldiers, of a lord and his son, of Count 
 Brockdorff-Rantzau ; and my eye roamed over 
 them, until it was suddenly caught, as a bird's 
 by a snake, by two bald and bearded human 
 heads side by side. " On the left," I read, " is a 
 photograph of Mr. Alfred Thomas Shakespeare 
 Hart, of Lichfield, and on the right a portrait of 
 Shakespeare, whose lineal descendant he is. The 
 likeness is very striking." It is also very striking 
 that a journalist could have published without more 
 comment than this two portraits of two gentlemen 
 of whom the later cannot possibly be a lineal de- 
 scendant of Shakespeare, and the earlier is most un- 
 likely to be Shakespeare himself. Any likeness 
 which may exist between the two busts — and it is 
 
 II 
 
Books in General 
 
 true that Mr. A. T. S. Hart has a bald and rounded 
 forehead, a little pointed beard and an expanse of 
 collar which vie with those pertaining to the Por- 
 trait (of, probably, an ItaHan) — is therefore not 
 important. 
 
 Otherwise it would be very interesting. Even the 
 remotest relative of Shakespeare must have a fasci- 
 nation about him: doubly strong, if we could feel 
 sure that the dramatist's traits, by some far-reach- 
 ing Mendelian sport, had been repeated in him. To 
 the lineal descendants or collaterals of other poets 
 no such interest seems to attach. There are Cole- 
 ridges and Wordsworths in plenty fulfilling various 
 useful functions, but their names give us only a mild 
 thrill. If the present Lord Byron and the present 
 Lord Tennyson were walking down Bond street to- 
 gether, the public would be no more excited than 
 they are when the Duke of Wellington or Lord Nel- 
 son writes a letter to the Times or Mr. Dickens, 
 K.C., rises in the Courts. A lineal descendant of 
 Shakespeare would be the most exciting descendant 
 on earth, more to be envied than the posterity of 
 Confucius and Mahomet, each still greatly honoured 
 in their own climes. But Mr. Alfred Thomas 
 Shakespeare Hart is not a lineal descendant of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Shakespeare had three children, Hamnet (who 
 died young) , Judith Quiney, and Susannah Hall. 
 Judith had three children who died young and with- 
 
 12 
 
The Descendants of Shakespeare 
 
 out issue. Susannah, wife of an eminent physician, 
 and hostess (at New Place) of Queen Henrietta 
 Maria, had one only daughter, Elizabeth. Eliza- 
 beth, Shakespeare's solitary grandchild, married, 
 first, Thomas Nash, by whom she had no children, 
 and then (Sir) John Barnard of Abington Manor, 
 by whom also she had no children. Lady Barnard 
 died in February, iBBg-yo and she was the last of 
 Shakespeare's " lineal descendants." The family of 
 Hart (to which I presume Mr. Alfred Thomas 
 Shakespeare Hart, of Lichfield, belongs) is de- 
 scended from Shakespeare's sister Joan, who mar- 
 ried a Hart. To these Harts Lady Barnard be- 
 queathed what is known as Shakespeare's Birthplace, 
 which was in their occupation and which they had 
 turned into an inn. The inn existed until 1 846 ; the 
 Harts sold it in 1806. Sir Sidney Lee quotes Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare Hart (1778-1834) as saying: 
 " My grandfather used to obtain a great deal of 
 money by showing the premises to strangers who 
 used to visit them." There are advantages, as well 
 as lustre, in being descended from Shakespeare's sis- 
 ter; but it is not the same thing as being a lineal 
 descendant. 
 
 The last lineal descendant to be discovered by the 
 Press was announced in the Morning Post ten years 
 ago. He was Mr. Charlemagne K. Hopper, an 
 American then staying at the Carlton Hotel. His 
 home was in the rising town of Bismarckville, Mo., 
 where he dealt in " wheat both white and red, and of 
 
 13 
 
Books in General 
 
 both spring and autumn varieties, maize or Indian 
 corn, oats, rye, buckwheat of every variety, seed 
 corn, and bearded barley," and he had " the entree 
 to the most exclusive coteries of Albany and Buf- 
 falo." Mr. Hopper's story was that Lady Barnard 
 had a studiously concealed, illegitimate daughter 
 Anne, who was ancestor of the Pooke family, whose 
 connection with Mr. Hopper had been traced by 
 " Mr. Cohen, a charming and cultivated genealogist, 
 whose business is mainly with America and the Colo- 
 nies." The last of the Pookes had, it seemed, left 
 a daughter, Cassiopeia, who married the Rev. Mr. 
 Aesop Hopper, a minister of the Hicksite persuasion 
 in Cincinnati. The announcement was taken seri- 
 ously by evening papers, who sent reporters hur- 
 riedly round to the Carlton Hotel to interview the 
 Cygnet of Avon. But Mr. Hopper was merely an 
 invention of Mr. Belloc's: his story may still be read 
 in the volume of collected essays called On Every- 
 thing. 
 
 We are certain, as far as we can be certain of any- 
 thing of this sort, that Lady Barnard left no chil- 
 dren and no descendants. But her husband's fam- 
 ily is still going strong, and there is at least one liv- 
 ing Barnard who has contributed to the Shakespeare 
 discussion. This is Mr. Finch Barnard, who pub- 
 lished recently a booklet which he called Science and 
 the Soul, but which was in reality chiefly concerned 
 with the genealogical glories of his family. He, as 
 a Barnard, is not having the Baconian theory; but he 
 14 
 
The Descendants of Shakespeare 
 
 says that it is quite obvious that Shakespeare of 
 Stratford never wrote the plays. " The real Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare," he says, " was a fast declasse," 
 and he seems to imagine that this is enough ground 
 for saying that the author of Shakespeare was one of 
 the Barnards. " There is small probability of a 
 love match, and it is possible that Sir John Barnard 
 married Shakespeare's grand-daughter for his sec- 
 ond wife, partly in order to acquire thq different 
 MSS. of which the actors were probably allowed 
 possession for stage purposes." The suggestion is 
 that Sir John destroyed all the Shakespeare manu- 
 scripts, as some of them were too licentious to see 
 the light of day. 
 
 Francis Feeble and Barnardine are both satires 
 by the fast declasse of his relative Francis Barnard. 
 Silence and Slender " owe the same original " ; " the 
 venom of the Author of Shakespeare sticks at noth- 
 ing." It will have been deduced by now that Mr. 
 Finch Barnard is a little too interested in his family. 
 How interested we begin to realize when he leaves 
 Shakespeare and heads a chapter : 
 
 " Christianity and the Barnards 
 
 " Some Historical and Genealogical Evidences 
 of the Descent of the Barnards and Finches from 
 Charlemagne and from Adam." 
 
 S. Bernard was a Barnard; so was S. Francis of 
 
 IS 
 
Books in General 
 
 Assisi. They were both descended from the Em- 
 peror Charlemagne. S. Francis " was in his youth 
 a leader of his young fellow nobles of Assisi; he 
 turned from profligate to priest. In many ways a 
 true Barnard." Charlemagne came from Adam 
 through Askenaz, a German giant : 
 
 " Askenaz was the son of Gomer, who was son of 
 Japhet, eldest son of Noah, and elder branch to the 
 Jews. Aventinus, however, makes Askenaz a 
 fourth son of Noah. This great family was rep- 
 resented in England by the ancient Barnard and 
 Finch family." 
 
 " Where," proceeds Mr. Barnard, " would 
 Shakespeare or any other of our literature in West- 
 ern Europe have been without the Barnards and the 
 monasteries ? " There was Charles Martel, there 
 were Roland and Oliver. But, examining the gene- 
 alogy of a greater still, he says: 
 
 " The great and mystic significance attaches to the 
 name of Barnard in regard to life and religion, and 
 the mysterious relations between spiritual and ani- 
 mal life. . . . There is not only a spiritual lien and 
 a pedigreal between themselves, but probably also a 
 blood, as well as a spiritual, tie with Jesus Christ." 
 
 This is the sort of thing that happens to people who 
 are too enthusiastic about their ancestors. 
 
 i6 
 
The Diary of Charles Footer 
 
 IN an oudandish place a man, who had recently 
 seen a newspaper, told me that Mr. Weedon 
 Grossmith was dead. I had as I frequently 
 have, The Diary of a Nobody with me ; and I have 
 read it again with that added respect that one has 
 for a good book when its author is recently dead; for 
 the book has now, at this latest re-reading, obviously 
 survived its author, and passed one more mark on the 
 road towards being a classic. 
 
 Otie frequently, in reviews (though, happily, not 
 so frequently as one did ten years ago), finds a book 
 described as " a slice of life." If the term were cor- 
 rectly applied it would be all very well ; books which 
 accurately reflect daily life are a very good sort of 
 books. But, in practice, when we find a book de- 
 scribed as " a slice of life " we know that what we 
 are to expect is in fact something far other. It will 
 be a novel in which, probably, great care will have 
 been taken about the representation of material ob- 
 jects and of character. But the material objects will, 
 usually, be grimy, and the characters will invariably 
 be weak. Nobody will (although, in "real life," 
 people often do) lead a happy existence or even die 
 an honourable death. Nobody will marry the per- 
 son he or she ought to marry, nobody will have the 
 
 17 
 
Books in General 
 
 strength to resist any temptation or to dare any de- 
 cisive action, nobody will laugh (save bitterly), no- 
 body will make festival or feel the sun. The term 
 " a slice of life " applied to a book certainly advises 
 us that we need not fear (if we are disposed to fear) 
 any " romantic nonsense," but it also promises us 
 that we shall read about people far more uniformly 
 miserable and impotent than the generality of men, 
 and that, whatever the place selected for the termi- 
 nation of the narrative, it shall not be a place at 
 which the outlook of any of the principal characters 
 Is promising. They will be dead, disgraced, de- 
 bauched and dipsomaniac, and lucky if they have 
 avoided suicide. 
 
 Yet, as I say, the term has been perverted. For 
 myself, I should be far more inclined to apply it to 
 The Diary of a Nobody than to most of the books 
 that are usually accorded it. This work was written 
 by George and Weedon Grossmlth, and illustrated 
 by the latter. It first appeared in Punch under the 
 editorship of Burnand (who suggested its title), and 
 was expanded before republication in book form. 
 The realist may complain that the end is somewhat 
 forced; that all the members of the Footer family 
 are left too simultaneously fortunate. But I do not 
 think that he could complain of anything else ; unless 
 of that faint touch of caricature, that slight height- 
 ening, that discreet selection, which are necessary if 
 we are to reflect the actual without being boring. 
 The book purports to be the diary of Mr. Charles 
 1 8: 
 
The Diary of Charles Footer 
 
 Footer, of Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, whose am- 
 bition is realized when (half-way through the book) 
 he becomes a senior clerk in the firm of Perkupp, 
 which he has faithfully served for twenty-one years. 
 Diaries by more important persons record visits to 
 Windsor and troubles in the Cabinet; this one re- 
 cords (and the events were as important to the 
 Footers as other events were to Lady Euphemia R'e- 
 gesan or Lord Zox) visits to Acton and Sutton and 
 troubles with the laundress, the plumber and the 
 butcher. Around Mr. and Mrs. Charles Footer 
 circle a numerous body: their son Lupin Footer, 
 Mrs. James (of Sutton), Mr. Franching (of Feck- 
 ham), Mr. Gowing (of the velveteen jacket), Mr. 
 Cummings (the veteran tricyclist). Miss Daisy Mut- 
 lar, Mr. Murray Fosh (of Fosh's hats), Sarah the 
 housemaid, and others. Their actions and reactions 
 are, I think, far more faithfully described than Zola 
 would have described them, and I am not alone in 
 thinking that it will carry the name of Grossmith 
 down the ages. 
 
 The Diary of a Nobody was first published as a 
 book in 1892. There were two subsequent editions 
 in 1894, but it was another eleven years before the 
 fourth edition was called for in 1905. Five more 
 years, and in 19 10 Mr. Arrowsmith issued a pocket 
 edition with re-engraved drawings, the best and most 
 portable edition to possess. The sale in eighteen 
 years had not been great, but the publisher had, quite 
 justifiably, the feeling that the book's audience was a 
 
 19 
 
Books in General 
 
 good if not a large one, and that time would widen 
 it. He was able to preface to the 19 lo edition let- 
 ters from Lord Rosebery and Mr. Birrell, and an 
 extract from an essay by Mr. Belloc. That these 
 three all happen to be persons in whom political in- 
 terests join with literary is a coincidence; the book 
 has no political bearing at all, though sociologists of 
 a remote future may treat it as a document (far 
 more accurate because less lopsided than, say, the 
 novels of Gissing) recording what London lower- 
 middle-class life was like in the eighteen-nineties. 
 But the three have things in common all the same. 
 They all like, and practise, irony; each admires, and 
 possesses, a clear English style; each is superior to 
 the contemporary fashion in books and likes things 
 old and new; and each has shown a fondness for odd 
 character. 
 
 Lord Rosebery wrote to say that he had probably 
 " purchased and given away more copies than any 
 living man." The book was so familiar to him that 
 the keen edge of his discrimination had worn off and 
 he was incapable of a reasoned criticism of it. 
 " But," he concluded, " I regard any bedroom I 
 occupy as unfurnished without a copy of it." Mr. 
 Birrell said, " I dare not tell you my view of Charles 
 Footer. I rank him with Don Quixote. It is a 
 matter of great pride with me and all in this house, 
 that our name is borne by one of the characters in 
 this bit of immortality — by an illiterate charwoman, 
 it is true, who never touched a book — but what of 
 20 
 
The Diary of Charles Footer 
 
 that? I am there." Mr. Belloc's tribute, from an 
 essay On People in Books (he has celebrated the 
 work elsewhere, as also that neglected modern 
 classic, The Wallet of Kai Lun^) , is noble : 
 
 " Take, for instance, that immoderately common 
 type, among the most common of God's creatures, 
 which I will call ' the Silent Fool,' the man who 
 hardly ever talks, and when he does, says something 
 so overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all 
 one's life. I can recollect but one Silent Fool in 
 modern letters, but he comes in a book which is one 
 of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our 
 time, a book like a decisive battle, or like the statue 
 of John the Baptist at South Kensington, a glory for 
 us all. I mean The Diary of a Nobody. In that 
 you will find the silent Mr. Padge, who says ' That's 
 right ' — and nothing more." 
 
 Mr. Belloc's statement is not quite literally true, 
 I think. On the first and most important occasion, 
 when he occupied (and refused to leave even when 
 tempted by food) the best arm-chair, Mr. Padge did 
 certainly contribute nothing to the conversation save 
 an infrequent (but, I contend, always apt and rele- 
 vant) " That's right." But we have just one more 
 example of his speech. Mr. Belloc forgot Mr. 
 Padge's reappearance at the East Acton Volunteer 
 Ball: 
 
 " I assisted Carrie and her newly-formed acquaint- 
 ance, who said her name was Lupkin, to some cham- 
 
 21 
 
Books in General 
 
 pagne; also myself, and handed the bottle to Mr. 
 Padge to do likewise, saying, ' You must look after 
 yourself.' He replied: ' That's right,' and poured 
 out half a tumbler and drank Carrie's health, as he 
 said, ' with her worthy lord and master.' " 
 
 " We had," adds Mr. Footer, " some splendid 
 pigeon-pie, and ices to follow." But poor Mr. 
 Footer! He thought the refreshments were all a 
 part of the show to which he had been invited. 
 They were not. They were extras. The waiter 
 presented him with a bill for £3 os. 6d. (including 
 sixpence for a cigar for Mr. Padge), which he could 
 not quite meet; and his taking a cab without any 
 money resulted in a row with the cabman and a long, 
 dreary trudge. " We had to walk home in the pour- 
 ing rain, nearly two miles, and when I got in I put 
 down the conversation I had with the cabman, word 
 for word, as I intend writing to the Telegraph for 
 the purpose of proposing that cabs should only be 
 driven by men under government control, to prevent 
 civilians being subjected to the disgraceful insult 
 and outrage that I had had to endure." Is that not 
 a typical slice of life ? 
 
 22 
 
Thomas Traherne 
 
 A BORROWED house. Sun all day. The 
 first sulphur butterflies on the first flow- 
 ers. I have not read anything for several 
 days. I have talked no word about literature, its 
 present position and future prospects. For all I 
 have heard to the contrary, the whole body of Brit- 
 ish authors has suddenly been wiped out by a plague 
 — which should certainly work to the advantage of 
 the single survivor, who has long stood in need of a 
 real opportunity. Anyhow, what with one thing 
 and another, the usually teeming brain was not teem- 
 ing at all. So in I went to see what I could find. I 
 came out with a beautiful large white mock-vellum 
 copy of the late Mr. Dobell's The Poetical Works 
 of Thomas Traherne, B.D., 167,6 {!) -16']/^. It 
 is some time since I read that strangely resurrected 
 man. I thought I would have another look at him; 
 or, in more professional language, revise my esti- 
 mate. 
 
 There is, however, many a slip. No sooner had 
 I sat down than I perceived that the owner, who had 
 presumably possessed the book since 1903, had not 
 cut the pages. And these were no ordinary pages. 
 They were made of incredibly stout paper — incred- 
 ible, that is, in these days. Tops and sides, they 
 
 23 
 
Books in General 
 
 were as firm as rocks. And I have no knife. No 
 doubt somewhere on the premises there was a bas- 
 ket full of knives. There always is; but "some- 
 where " is not the same thing as here. Oh, why, 
 why do they sell books like this? There are 
 books whose pages you can open with a match, 
 replacing the match, when broken, with a new 
 one. This was not one of them; and in any case 
 the pages were not likely toi have become so rec- 
 onciled to the use of substitutes as to yield good- 
 humouredly to the broad, smooth beam of a patent 
 benzine lighter. Hairpins, when accessible, have 
 been known to do good work; but I don't see a hair- 
 pin getting through these. My thumb, if employed 
 as it has so often been, would simply tear these pages 
 out by the roots, and probably make many of them 
 difficult to read ; even my little finger, lean as it is on 
 the rations, would be useless. Old letters ? These 
 pages laugh at them. A pocket of postcards would 
 go nowhere; one edge would turn the sharpest cut- 
 ting blade that serviceable postcard e'er displayed. 
 It certainly ought to be stopped. At the very least 
 the top edges should be cut and gilt. If there be an 
 advantage — and I admit the charm once the job is 
 done — to have rough edges, let the manufacturers 
 do the extra work needed. To sell the public an un- 
 opened book is to sell them a half-manufactured ar- 
 ticle. You might as well sell them envelopes with- 
 out any gum on them. If publishers ever go into 
 bookshops to buy — I have no evidence that they 
 do — has it never occurred to them that other cqs- 
 
Thomas Traherne 
 
 tomers' behaviour is precisely like their own? Are 
 they incapable of generalizing that they should have 
 failed to realize that a man who picks up an un- 
 opened book by an unfamiliar author tends — even 
 when he is at liberty to slit the leaves — to look only 
 at the few pages that are completely exposed, and to 
 give the sheltered pages, at the most, one or two ob- 
 lique squints? How many masterpieces have I ig- 
 nored because of this vile practice of publishing 
 books in locked chests that have to be burst open I 
 How often have the really great passages of a book 
 I have handled been hermetically sealed whilst I have 
 misjudged the author by more accessible banalities ! 
 
 But at last ingenuity and hard work laid Traherne 
 bare before me. I found that my previous opinion 
 that Traherne was, as a rule, too awkward, too dull, 
 and too monotonous to be placed anywhere near Cra- 
 shaw and Vaughan was an opinion I am not likely 
 to abandon. More; I think the fact that the claim 
 was made for him when Mr. Dobell first published 
 those two-hundred-years-lost manuscripts has prob- 
 ably led many to give him less than his due. For a 
 great part of him is repetitive ; his imagery is seldom 
 rich ; his language is usually abstract and diffuse ; and 
 his best things have to be looked for. The glory of 
 God was his object; he kept his eye too directly and 
 exclusively on' the object for a man who writes a 
 large number of poems. Much of his work is little 
 more than versified prose, prose like that of Felt- 
 ham's Resolves or his own, often most moving and 
 
 25 
 
Books in General 
 
 eloquent, Centuries of Meditations. And the life 
 has gone out of the prose; never do you get anything 
 so " atmospheric " and so touching as those recd- 
 lections in the Centuries, such as that on his young 
 innocence, which opens: 
 
 " The corn was orient and immortal wheat which 
 never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I 
 thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. 
 The dust and stones of the street were as precious 
 as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. 
 The green trees, when I saw them first through one 
 of the) gates, transported and ravished me; their 
 sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, 
 and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange 
 and wonderful things. The Men! O what ven- 
 erable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! 
 Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering 
 and sparkhng angels, and maids strange seraphic 
 creatures of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumb- 
 ling in the street were moving jewels: I knew not 
 that they were born or should die. But all things 
 abided eternally as they were in their proper places. 
 Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and 
 something infinite behind everything appeared, which 
 talked with my expectation and moved my desire. 
 The City seemed to stand in Eden or to be built in 
 Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was 
 mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold 
 and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, 
 fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, 
 26 
 
Thomas Traherne 
 
 and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the 
 world was mine; and I the only spectator and en- 
 joyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor 
 bounds nor division, but all proprieties and divisions 
 were mine, all treasures and the possessors of them. 
 So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to 
 learn the dirty devices of this world, which now I 
 unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again 
 that I may enter into the Kingdom of God." 
 
 It is strange that neither his editor nor Traherne 
 himself should have perceived that it was sheer anti- 
 climax to follow this beautiful, this sounding and af- 
 fecting prose with a poem " based on it " like The 
 Approach: 
 
 " O Lord, I wonder at Thy Love, 
 
 Which did my Infancy so early move, 
 
 But more at that which did forbear, 
 
 And move so long, tho' slighted many a year; 
 
 But most of all, and last that Thou 
 
 Thyself shouldst me convert, I scarce know how. 
 
 Thy Gracious Motions oft in vain 
 Assaulted me: my Heart did hard remain 
 Long time: I sent my God away, 
 Grieved much that He could not impart His joy. 
 I careless was, nor did regard 
 The End for which He all those Thoughts pre- 
 pared." 
 
 27 
 
Books in General 
 
 The life, the music, the colour, the communicated 
 emotion even, have gone during the effort to write 
 foot-rule rhymed verse, for which Traherne had little 
 gift. He was a saint, he was sensitive, he loved 
 beauty, he had a fine intellect and a natural gift of 
 language; so that accidental great things were 
 bound to appear in his poems. But I would give al- 
 most all of them for a few pages of his prose or of 
 that strange poetical prose of the Christian Ethics, 
 which in places, as Mr. Dobell observes, startlingly 
 anticipates Whitman both in manner and matter — 
 which we should not have expected a Caroline cler- 
 gyman to do. Christian Ethics Is one of the rarest 
 of seventeenth-century books. Why does not some 
 one reprint it? 
 
 28 
 
Scientific Management for 
 Pegasus 
 
 IT was very kind of a friend to send me a copy 
 of The Editor, an American " Journal of In- 
 formation for Literary Workers." It is pub- 
 lished at Ridgewood, New Jersey, and it is ap- 
 parently of respectable age. But I had never seen 
 a copy before, and I am sorry I hadn't. It is a per- 
 fectly serious trade journal. It caters for manufac- 
 turers of literature, just as the Iron and Steel Trades 
 Journal and The Undertaker's Journal do for iron- 
 masters and interment experts. 
 
 The first article contains advice to poetical begin- 
 ners. It is by Ella Randall Pearce, who describes 
 herself as " a versifier of many seasons, with enough 
 acceptances on record to soothe the hurt of un- 
 counted rejection slips." She has " learned the re- 
 quirements of many of these publishing houses," and 
 has " trained the Muse to feed on ginger-snaps oc- 
 casionally instead of angel- food and ambrosia " ; 
 and she has found the composition of four-line verses 
 for post-cards " a pleasant and profitable side-line." 
 She gives several useful tips. " Rules of rhyme 
 and metre " must be observed; but " even the tender 
 addresses to 'Mother,' 'Father,' 'Dear Wife,' 
 
 29 
 
Books in General 
 
 ' Friend o' Mine,' etc., should carry a cheerful, 
 heart-warming quality." 
 
 "Another editorial warning is this: 'Nothing 
 trite.' What can poet say that poet has not said 
 before? Nothing, perhaps; but one must find a 
 fairly new way of saying it to draw the pay checks. 
 One dollar for a four-line verse seems to be the usual 
 payment; although a few publishing houses pay 
 more, and some — may they live to repent ! — pay 
 less. Especially clever ideas sometimes bring 
 higher prices. I have received two dollars each for 
 couplets or short prose sentiments, and five dollars 
 for verses of six or eight lines; and I have also ac- 
 cepted a check for ten dollars for two dozen miscel- 
 laneous sentiments from a publisher who buys them 
 in dozens when he buys at all." 
 
 The principle of the magazine is that the successes 
 of the trade should give their juniors the benefit of 
 their experience. After an article by a magazine 
 photograph expert, who says that last summer he 
 " made some comic insect pictures " which interested 
 the editor of Photo-Era, we come to Helen B. John- 
 son on " Genius and the Market." This lady says 
 that when the inspiration is on you, you must write 
 without thinking of the market : 
 
 " Forget there is a market. Never mind what 
 the editor wants. Forget him! If grammar 
 bothers you, forget it ! Rhetoric, grammar, syntax, 
 30 
 
Scientific Management for Pegasus 
 
 spelling, punctuation — push them all in the back- 
 ground and let them take care of themselves. 
 Make way for the king. Just let the king rule, and 
 be as lawless about it as you are inspired to be. Get 
 the idea, while it is on the wing, and capture it with 
 your individuality. When the blood is cool again, 
 the heart and mind in harmonious vibration, delib- 
 erately turn your coat and make your obeisance to 
 king market." 
 
 And you should always have several inspirations in 
 progress at once: 
 
 " Did you ever make a dish of pop-corn? You 
 never did by popping one at a time. The best way 
 is to put in a handful and keep it circulating over a 
 hot fire. Then the corn pops. Now, get more than 
 one idea into your popper, and be sure they have as 
 much life in them as each kernel of corn. Keep 
 them circulating in the hotbed of the market, and 
 they will pop — checks your way." 
 
 There follows " Arriving: How These Writers Did 
 It " ; a " symposium," as some call it, or " a round 
 table story-fest," as it is called here, of the members 
 of the Missouri Writers' Guild. Maude Radford 
 Warren says: " For several years I had been writ- 
 ing Henry James things for which there seemed to 
 be no market." Being short of money when " down 
 town " once, she went into a cheap restaurant: 
 
 31 
 
Books in General 
 
 " That was the first time I had ever come in corl- 
 tact with the ' people,' as I had always lived in a uni- 
 versity atmosphere. They interested me wonder- 
 fully, and the result was The Wearing of the 
 Green." 
 
 Randall Parrish says he sold his first book for 
 $3000, at the age of forty-three. " I went into the 
 writing game in the cold-blooded way I would start 
 in any business," continued Mr. Parrish. " I do not 
 try to write literature; I write books to sell." And 
 Mr. William H. Hamby, " one of Missouri's most 
 prolific writers," says that the first sum he earned by 
 his pen was $1.50 for an article on " How to 
 Write." 
 
 " I thought it was worth more, but I was glad to 
 get that, and bought a red tie and some silk socks 
 with the money." 
 
 Whereafter, a somewhat soberer article on " For- 
 eign Local Colour." 
 
 An " Open Letter to Authors," by Frank R. 
 Adams, begins: 
 
 "Fellows : — Do you ever find yourself, as I often 
 find myself, high and dry, with lots of time to write, 
 and not a plot in the locker? If you do, read on. 
 Otherwise turn to the automobile advertisements. 
 This is not for you." 
 32 
 
Scientific Management for Pegasus 
 
 The remedy is a note-book, in which plots should be 
 jotted down: 
 
 " When I am absolutely stuck for an idea and the 
 groceryman is beginning to think he is stuck for my 
 last month's bill, I turn desperately to my dog-eared 
 vest-pocket memoranda." 
 
 Once the plot has been fixed : 
 
 " The rest is mere machine work of course. I 
 write my story or article, as the case may be, and 
 then after lunch take my wife for a ride in our 19 lO 
 caracole." 
 
 Nellie B. Mace is more idealistic. " Writing, as a 
 vocation, had not possessed my plans . . . until 
 four years ago, when, by a happy leading, an oppor- 
 tunity was opened to me to do regular work in one of 
 the departments of a certain widely-circulated publi- 
 cation." She finds that " writing pays," and al- 
 though " I do not aspire to hang in the hall of 
 fame," the gratitude of readers whose troubles have 
 been assuaged by her is additional payment. " The 
 Plot and Idea Forum " is followed by " The Liter- 
 ary Market," in which " Wants " are given public- 
 ity, the things required ranging from " sermonettes " 
 to " Jewish juvenile plays." The editor of a paper 
 at Salem, Mass., writes: 
 
 " We could use a good political story if we could 
 
 33 
 
Books in General 
 
 get one that has something in it besides a paving 
 graft expose in which the political boss tries to use 
 his beautiful daughter as a lever to pry the young 
 mayor or the young newspaper editor from the 
 straight and narrow." 
 
 And, finally, there is " The Experience Exchange," 
 in which readers give information about editors and 
 papers, such as " Miss Fassett, of The JVoman's- 
 World, is one of the most courteous of editors; it 
 pays to cultivate her acquaintance," and " The man- 
 aging editor of Today's, Miss Eberle, is very cour- 
 teous and writes nice letters of criticism. Quite a 
 welcome change from the last incumbent." 
 
 Amongst the books advertised at the end are 
 Points About Poetry, by Donald G. French; looi 
 Places to Sell Manuscripts; and The Fiction Factory, 
 by John Milton Edwards, who has " made more 
 than $1,000,000.00 with a typewriting machine and a 
 thinking apparatus." I am informed that a recent 
 issue contained an article on " Hymn Writing as a 
 Side-line." 
 
 The above is all true. 
 
 34 
 
The New Browning Poems 
 
 SIR FREDERIC KENYON has edited a 
 whole volume of New Poems by Robert and 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Ten of the 
 " new " poems Included appeared in the Centenary 
 Edition of Robert Browning, but there are nineteen 
 others by him that have never before appeared in a 
 collected edition, and six by Mrs. Browning. Many 
 of these were found amongst the MSS. dispersed at 
 the recent Browning sale. Sir Frederic naturally 
 feels some compunction about publishing poems that 
 their authors refrained from putting Into their 
 books. " One might wish," he says, 
 
 " that the unpublished verses of both poets had been 
 destroyed by them out of hand when once the deci- 
 sion had been taken not to publish them. Such 
 waifs and strays are a permanent difficulty to ed- 
 itors. If the author Is sufficiently eminent, publica- 
 tion of everything of his that remains above ground 
 is eventually inevitable, and an editor is torn between 
 the natural desire to make his edition complete, and 
 his equally natural reluctance to print matter which Is 
 not worthy of its author, and which the author him- 
 self did not consider worthy of publication. The 
 ultimate solution Is probably some limbo of an ap- 
 
 35 
 
Books in General 
 
 pendix, which can be searched once for all by the 
 curious and then left to its obscurity." 
 
 This is sound enough theory; but here we have the 
 volume in the familiar dark mud-coloured binding 
 (I speak descriptively and not at all derisively) of 
 the old Collected Edition. And very few of the 
 new poems are better saved than lost. 
 
 There is a certain interest about The First Born 
 of Egypt — astonishing blank verse for a boy of 
 thirteen; Helen's Tower is a tolerable sonnet which 
 might be by any one; and the unfinished fragment, 
 ^schylus' Soliloquy, is really fine. It is the day of 
 .^schylus' death " at the hands of a tortoise 
 dropped by an eagle," as the schoolboy put it. He 
 sits, " an old and solitary man," on a Sicilian plain, 
 hoping to evade the death by something falling from 
 above that had been predicted for him. He hears 
 the life of men in the distance like the droning of a 
 bee at sunset: 
 
 Ay, and that bee's hum. 
 The buzzing fly and mouthing of the grass 
 Cropped slowly near me by some straying sheep 
 Are strange to me with life — and separate from me 
 The outside of my being — / myself 
 Grow to silence, fasten to the calm 
 Of inorganic nature . . . sky and rocks — 
 / shall pass on into their unity 
 When dying down into impersonal dusk. 
 36 
 
The New Browning Poems 
 
 Ah, ha — these flats are wide! 
 The prophecy which said the house would fall 
 And thereby crush me, must bring down the sky, 
 The only roof above me where I sit 
 Or ere it prove its oracle today. 
 Stand fast, ye pillars of the constant Heavens 
 As Life doth in me — / who did not die 
 That day in Athens when the people's scorn 
 Hissed toward the sun as if to darken it 
 Because my thoughts burned too much for the eyes 
 Over my head, because I spoke my Greek 
 Too deep down in my soul to suit their case. 
 Who did not die to see the solemn vests 
 Of my white chorus round the thymele 
 Flutter like doves, and sweep back like a cloud 
 Before the shrill-lipped people. . . . 
 
 Except for these, the new poems by Robert Brown- 
 ing are either failures or trifles. There are rhym- 
 ing tours de force, of which the best is the fre- 
 quently quoted quatrain : 
 
 Venus, sea-froth's child, 
 Playing old Gooseberry, 
 Marries Lord Rosebery 
 To Miss de Rothschild. 
 
 As I have heard it, by the way, the word " Hannah " 
 has taken the place of the word " Miss." There 
 are also odd squibs and album-pieces of the sort 
 that no great poet would commit if he thought they 
 
 37 
 
Books in General 
 
 would be reprinted after his death. The Mrs. 
 Browning poems are no better worth preserving. 
 A line from The Enchantress and another from 
 Leila, a Tale, will convey an idea of their nature 
 more exactly than any words of mine : 
 
 A little bark is sleeping on the billow 
 
 " It is," the Father cried, " It is, it is my boy! " 
 
 One is reminded of Gilbert's : "It was, it was the 
 cat." " They're right; it was the cat." 
 
 The Epistle to a Canary is neat, but cannot be men- 
 tioned in the same breath with the poetess's To 
 Flash, My Dog, with which the public has been fa- 
 miliar for about seventy years. So on the whole 
 one hopes that, in spite of Sir Frederic Kenyon's 
 theory of inevitability, the rest of Mrs. Browning's 
 unpublished works will remain undisturbed in the 
 tomb. She was occasionally a great poet, but the 
 corpus of her inferior verse is already large enough 
 to tax the perseverance of most of her readers. 
 
 The most interesting part of the volume (except 
 for ^schylus' Soliloquy) is certainly the collection, 
 at the end, of certain criticisms by Miss Barrett upon 
 her future husband's poems. These alone would 
 make the new volume worth having. They are pre- 
 cisely what one would expect from Mrs. Browning. 
 She is down on Browning's bad grammar, on his 
 38 
 
The New Browning Poems 
 
 obscurities, and, above all, on his rhythmical inequali- 
 ties. She is always acute, and her position is always 
 defensible; but often, in her passion for restoring 
 missing particles, for smoothing things out and reg- 
 ularizing them, for making Browning softer, she 
 suggests changes (he adopted some of them) that 
 are not improvements. She takes the line (from 
 The Boy and the Angel) 
 
 Morning, noon, eve and night 
 
 and asks if Browning prefers it to 
 
 Morning, evening, noon and night. 
 
 Or she quotes from Saul: 
 
 For in the black midtent silence 
 three drear days 
 
 and says characteristically: "A word seems omit- 
 ted before silence — and the short line is too short 
 to the ear." But her suggestions are sometimes 
 very striking in their rightness; and these notes are 
 an interesting addition to the small body of good 
 material of the sort that exists in English. 
 
 39 
 
Pidgin-English for Germans 
 
 "Y^URZES Handbuch fur Neger-Englisch an 
 m^ der JVestkuste Afrikas unter besonderer 
 -*■ -^ Berucksichtigung von Kamerun: von Gun- 
 ther V. Hagen, Leutnant in der Kaiserlichen Schutz- 
 truppe fur Kamerun. That is the title of a book 
 which a friend of mine, with an eye for something 
 more amusing than helmets or pieces of shell, 
 brought home from the Cameroons. It was always 
 a sore point with the Germans in West Africa that 
 they had to learn pidgin-English to talk to the na- 
 tives in their own colony. Curiously, pidgin-Eng- 
 lish was much more widely known in the German 
 Cameroons than in our own neighbouring colonies. 
 The publication in my hands is a primer of pidgin- 
 English for the use of Germans on the West Coast. 
 It is drawn up on the usual word-book model, and 
 gives the English words in German phonetic spelling. 
 The effect is odd. 
 
 Food naturally comes first. You get columns like 
 this. (I omit the marks of quantity.) 
 
 Blatter 
 
 lif 
 
 leaf 
 
 Bohnen 
 
 bins 
 
 beans 
 
 Butter 
 
 hotter 
 
 butter 
 
 Dosenfleisch 
 
 tin-mit 
 
 tin-meat 
 
 40 
 
 
 
Pidgin-English for Germans 
 
 Eine Dose 
 
 won tin fruit 
 
 one tin f n 
 
 Frijchte 
 
 
 
 Gemiise 
 
 wedjetebel 
 
 vegetable 
 
 Kase 
 
 dschiss 
 
 cheese 
 
 Mostrich 
 
 mostert 
 
 mustard 
 
 Sauce 
 
 ssos 
 
 sauce 
 
 After this come more general articles, such as: 
 
 Kopftuch 
 
 hankis 
 
 handkerchief 
 
 Spazierstock 
 
 woaker-stick 
 
 walker-stick 
 (sic) 
 
 Tischtuch 
 
 tebel-klot 
 
 table-cloth 
 
 Eine Stuck 
 
 won piss klot 
 
 one piece cloth 
 
 Zeng 
 
 
 
 and then parts 
 
 of the body, such 
 
 as: 
 
 Brust, bauch 
 
 belli 
 
 belly 
 
 Bruste 
 
 bobbi 
 
 (bob?) 
 
 Mund 
 
 maus 
 
 mouth 
 
 " Sponge " in German pidgin-English appears as 
 " spantsch," "toothbrush" as " tuss-brosch," 
 " small-boy " as " ssmoalbeu," " too much " as " tu 
 motsch," " duck " as " dock-faul," and another an- 
 imal as " tschakass." " Church " is phonetically 
 metamorphosed into " tschortsch," and " gottes- 
 lehre " falls to " gott-palawer." 
 
 The strangest effects, however, occur when the 
 
 41 
 
Books in General 
 
 useful sentences are reached. They look queerer in 
 the German type, but I don't want to make myself 
 a nuisance to the printer. Here are some of them: 
 
 gif mi korn for mei hors. 
 
 ei wont fresch mit. 
 
 mek onjons for dem Bifstick. 
 
 tell dem king, hi ssell mi won faul end tri egs. 
 
 tu de, ei no wont ombrella. 
 
 dem weit kot ei tek onli for ssonde. 
 
 hi get fiwer, gif him kinin. 
 
 ju most tek dem spir wonteim autsseit for him 
 
 backsseit. 
 beu, dem neif bi dorti, bring oser won. 
 dem mischen-massa scho dem mischen-beu mek buk 
 
 for dschormen. 
 dem dog bi dorti. 
 ei won't oal haus for won sseit of dem taun, bikosz 
 
 mi no wont me pipel tif ju szom ting, 
 ju mek proper hoi raund mei tent, if ren kom for 
 
 neitteim? 
 
 The isolated phrases lead up at last to a regular con- 
 versation: 
 
 Q. elefant lif for busch? 
 
 A. no massa. 
 
 Q. bot ei tink, won ssonde bifor jur broser kill 
 
 won? 
 A. jes, bot onli ssmoal won. 
 
 42 
 
Pidgin-English for Germans 
 
 The next section is devoted to conversations, " auf 
 dem Kriegsmarsche " and are largely concerned 
 with the commissariat. " Stillge-standen ! Augen 
 rechts ! " are German remarks introduced freely 
 amid the pidgin-English. Finally, are instructions 
 for the conduct of negotiations, " in einer Faktorei." 
 The answer to a man who tells you he will give you 
 so much tobacco for a shilling is: " dem no bi ennof, 
 }u most gif mi tu lif mor." 
 
 The author in his Vorwort, wrote that: " Pid- 
 gin-English is a makeshift which, in a measurable 
 time will, one may hope, become obsolete, owing to 
 the spread of the German tongue amongst the na- 
 tives." Alas, for human hopes! 
 
 43 
 
Signer Marinetti's Masterpiece 
 
 CURIOUS things seem to get into charitable 
 sales. A little while ago one, in aid of 
 wounded soldiers, was held in the Cale- 
 donian Market, and the public flocked to see 
 duchesses spreading their wares on stones usually 
 consecrated to the venders of second-hand tables, 
 chairs, vases, door-knockers, and gas-brackets. 
 Amongst the articles sold on this occasion were a 
 number of books autographed by their authors. 
 Some of these fetched large prices — some of them 
 did not. The latter included a copy of Mafarka, 
 Le Futuriste, signed in a fine flowing hand by its 
 author, Signor Marinetti. It has now reached me. 
 Though I had been familiar with many of Signor 
 Marinetti's works, and though I had heard him re- 
 cite his famous Siege of Adrianople with the per- 
 spiration pouring down his forehead and his voice 
 growing hoarse from intermittent efforts to imitate 
 the boom of the Bulgarian guns, this novel I had not 
 hitherto read. I have now read it ; and I certainly 
 think that the hair, however long, of the lady who 
 sttld it would have stood for long on end had she 
 been made acquainted with its contents. I have an 
 idea that, after running into several editions, it was 
 suppressed in France. It certainly deserved to be. 
 44 
 
Signer Marinetti's Masterpiece 
 
 An English translation would not have a lifetime of 
 five minutes. The iridescent hues of The Rainbow 
 pale and fade before it. 
 
 The book has several prominent characteristics, 
 some of which I need not mention, but undoubtedly 
 the dominant theme is the panegyric of savagery, fe- 
 rocity, and blood. There is more carnage to the 
 square inch in this book than in any other that I have 
 read ; and though it is conceivable that the novels of 
 the Marquis de Sade — to which I have never had 
 access — are still more gruesome, I am inclined to 
 doubt it. I will not sketch the plot — for there is 
 no plot. But I may indicate one or two of the de- 
 tails, so as to give an idea of what Signor Marinetti 
 finds beautiful and amusing. In one chapter there 
 is a great battle between King Mafarka and his 
 brother and an innumerable host of wild desert dogs, 
 which are pounded into a pulp by large stones flung 
 from catapults. Later on, Mafarka's brother, who 
 is newly married, disappears. Mafarka, very con- 
 cerned, goes to look for him, and finds on the 
 floor of his bedroom a few strips — which are all 
 that is left of the bride — whilst the bridegroom, 
 who has been infected by hydrophobia, sits like an 
 ape on the top of a pillar with strings of foam hang- 
 ing from his jaws. 
 
 But the most striking episode — the most strik- 
 ing mentionable episode — is that in which Mafarka 
 shows a decadent and timid world how it really 
 
 45 
 
Books in General 
 
 ought to deal with its enemies. He assembles his 
 Court in a dimly lit underground chamber. One 
 wall of this chamber is of glass, and forms one side 
 of an enormous tank, communicating, by means of 
 gratings, with the sea overhead. In this tank are 
 collected sharks, octopuses, and all the ugliest and 
 most uncanny fish which infest the oceans of the 
 world. There is aj meal; and then, reclining on 
 luxurious cushions, and feeding their senses on the 
 most languorous of scents, the guests watch a some- 
 what torrid Oriental dance. The chamber is then 
 darkened — though the tank is not — and two of 
 the king's enemies, a fat old man and a thin young 
 one, are shot into the top of the tank struggling. 
 The sharks float up, twist them down, and bite off 
 portions; the bits float up again and bump against 
 the top, whilst the sharks sail round below wonder- 
 ing what has become of their prey. Soon they track 
 It again, and the process recommences. The details 
 of the disintegration, the lines and colours made by 
 the " remains " as they drift and toss through green 
 waters, the horrible quiet movements of the fishes — 
 these are all described with a revolting accuracy 
 which makes one's blood cold. It still haunts my 
 dreams. It was certainly an odd thing to get at a 
 Wounded Allies sale. But I suppose it all brings 
 grist to the mill. 
 
 In the end the hero, if he may be so described, 
 goes to something that appears to be heaven in 
 something that looks like an aeroplane — but about 
 46 
 
Signer Marinetti's Masterpiece 
 
 here Signer Marinetti's lyricism gets too confused 
 for my understanding. This was, I believe, the first 
 manifesto of the Futurist School which, before the 
 war, some people took almost seriously. The 
 world before the war must indeed have been a bar- 
 ren place to its author; he had to get what poor sus- 
 tenance he could out of watching fights with fists 
 at public meetings. Let us hope that he has found 
 slaughter as invigorating and enjoyable as he always 
 said it was. 
 
 47 
 
Fitzgerald's Second Thoughts 
 
 TIERE have been versions of Omar Khay- 
 yam since Fitzgerald's. There have been 
 versions more literal than his, and ver- 
 sions which have included far more than he did 
 of the many hundreds of quatrains which float 
 about the East attached to the name of Omar. But 
 a comparison of other translations with Fitzgerald's 
 is the best means of heightening one's wonder at his 
 supreme genius for translation. Omar is so exceed- 
 ingly pointed that he is interesting even in the bald- 
 est version; but Fitzgerald made him a great Eng- 
 lish poet. This is all commonplace, but common- 
 places would cease to be recognized as such if they 
 were not occasionally repeated, and one must do 
 one's duty. The occasion of these remarks is the 
 appearance of a beautiful variorum edition of Fitz- 
 gerald's Omar, by Mr. Frederick Evans. 
 
 Generally speaking, variorum editions appeal 
 more to the scholar than to the ordinary reading 
 person, who prefers to " go straight on " and is con- 
 tent with " any good edition." Even where writers 
 have been in the habit of touching-up their work at 
 every fresh issue the alterations are not usually so 
 extensive as to command the attention of any one 
 but the " professed student " : a description normally 
 48 
 
Fitzgerald's Second Thoughts 
 
 applied to the kind of person to whom the " Corpus 
 Poetarum " is really the " Corpus Vile Poetarum." 
 But the case of Fitzgerald's work is certainly an ex- 
 ception. Fitzgerald's modifications in his text were 
 so extensive and so varying in quality that an ac- 
 quaintance with a single edition of it is really quite 
 inadequate. 
 
 Mr. Evans's edition gives, " for the first time col- 
 lectively, each Stanza in the full text of each of its 
 versions, as given in the four editions (1859, 1868, 
 1872, 1879), that contain any differences in text." 
 Each stanza has a whole page to itself ; if it appears 
 in one edition only, then the spaces that variant 
 stanzas, had there been any in other editions, would 
 have occupied are left blank. The whole history of 
 each stanza, therefore, can be seen at a glance with- 
 out reference to notes or appendices. The nature 
 and extent of Fitzgerald's modifications may be illus- 
 trated by the life-story of the very first stanza. In 
 the first edition this appeared as: 
 
 Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night 
 Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight; 
 
 And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught 
 The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light. 
 
 In the second edition it was changed to : 
 
 Wake! For the Sun behind yon Eastern height 
 Has chased the Session of the Stars from Night; 
 
 49 
 
Books in General 
 
 And, to the field of Heaven ascending, strikes 
 The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light. 
 
 In the third and fourth editions it becomes : 
 
 Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight 
 The Stars before him from the Field of Night, 
 Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and 
 strikes 
 The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light. 
 
 The first draft of edition three having begun : 
 
 Wake! For the Sun before him into Night 
 A Signal flung that put the Stars to flight. 
 
 This is certainly one of the cases in which the first 
 version was unquestionably the best. There are 
 others; but the cases in which improvements were 
 made were more numerous ; and although Fitzgerald 
 in only two or three instances left a quatrain un- 
 changed in all his editions there was point enough in 
 his alteration to acquit him of an unnecessary itch 
 for tinkering. 
 
 Of the stanza quoted the first version is the one 
 that has passed into common speech. But in, an- 
 other even better-known quatrain the " current " ver- 
 sion is the last. 
 
 A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, 
 
 A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou . . 
 
 50 
 
Fitzgerald's Second Thoughts 
 
 originally ran : 
 
 Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, 
 A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou. 
 
 In yet another familiar instance it is difficult to 
 choose between the two principal variations. In the 
 first version we get: 
 
 What, without asking, hither hurried Whence? 
 And, without asking. Whither hurried hence! 
 
 Another and another Cup to drown 
 The Memory of this Impertinence. 
 
 But in the fourth edition the last two lines run : 
 
 Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine 
 Must drown the memory of that insolence! 
 
 The first is obviously the more terse, more vigor- 
 ous and more amusing; but the other would com- 
 mend itself to some as being more placid, less abrupt 
 in transition and working in the additional point of 
 Prohibition. 
 
 Each man can make his selection of versions for 
 himself. For me, I have made my own. But 
 there is one stanza at which I cannot help smiling in 
 all its forms. It is the one which contains the state- 
 ment that the Lion and the Lizard keep the Courts 
 where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep. When- 
 
 51 
 
Books in General 
 
 ever I look at it I think of a skit play which St. John 
 Hankin wrote, and in which, after a heated exchange 
 of words, the Lion demanded of the Lizard : " Are 
 you keeping this Court or am I? " A thing of this 
 sort is enough to make one defile the grave, if one 
 could identify it, of the man who invented burlesque. 
 That, of course, is the reason why I give it further 
 publicity. 
 
 52 
 
Property in Proper Names 
 
 A MULTITUDE of British novelists breathed 
 a sigh of relief when it became known 
 that a British jury had turned down very 
 emphatically the claim for damages, brought against 
 Mr. George Moore by a music-hall artist named 
 Louis Seymour. Mr. Moore produced a new edi- 
 tion of his book, A Modern hover, under the new 
 name of Lewis Seymour and Some Women. The 
 real Mr. Seymour alleged that he had suffered con- 
 siderable annoyance owing to this. Some very un- 
 pleasant things were said about the book in the 
 course of the action. Counsel for the plaintiff made 
 a reference to " a mass of salacious and disgusting 
 details which rendered the book unique in porno- 
 graphy," and the judge jumped hard both upon the 
 hero and upon the book. Many people perhaps 
 will share the judge's views of some of Mr. Moore's 
 literary efforts, and some perhaps would be happy 
 to see Mr. Moore mulcted anywhere and for any 
 reason. But no sensible man can help feeling that 
 the jury was perfectly right when it said: ( i ) that 
 no reasonable person would think that the Lewis 
 Seymour of Mr. Moore's book was a portrait of a 
 real person; and (2) that no reasonable person 
 would think that Mr. Moore's book referred to the 
 plaintiff. One cannot help feeling, in fact, that the 
 
 53 
 
Books in General 
 
 plaintiff must have been a pretty cool customer to 
 bring the action at all, for the book was written long 
 ago, and the real Mr. Seymour only took his present 
 name a few days ago, his father's name being Kemp- 
 ner! There therefore could be no possible sugges- 
 tion that Mr. Moore had maliciously attacked him 
 or had even heard of him when he wrote. 
 
 I remember two other cases of the sort. In the 
 first case a paper in the North published a sketch 
 in which a character named, I think, Artemus Jones, 
 was exhibited in an unfavourable light. It was held 
 to be proved that plaintiff was liable to suffer serious 
 damage from the libel, and he was awarded a large 
 sum of money. A year or two later a Sunday news- 
 paper ran a serial story in which one of the less ex- 
 emplary characters bore a conspicuous and unusual 
 name which happened to be that of a gentleman who 
 lived in much the same professional world as the 
 fictitious character. Here, again, heavy damages 
 were given. Even those cases caused novelists 
 qualms, for it was evident that coincidence might go 
 far and the most innocent of men might possibly libel 
 and, if he were accidentally close enough in his de- 
 scription, seriously injure, a total stranger. But if 
 the enterprising Mr. Seymour had won his case, one 
 simply does not know what novelists would have 
 done. They would still presumably have been all 
 right with their heroes and heroines — at least 
 with those that were well up to the usual novelist's 
 standard of impeccability. But as for the ordinary 
 54 
 
Property in Proper Names 
 
 light and shade people, and still more the villains, 
 the weaklings, the profligates, the criminals, the 
 murderers, the blackmailers, the coiners, the spies 
 and the adventuresses, it would have been utterly 
 Impossible to name them at all without imperilling 
 one's household and the whole future of one's wife 
 and children. 
 
 For unusual names are no guarantee of immunity 
 whatever. You may work as hard as you like in 
 the regions of the grotesque and the unlikely, but 
 when you have concocted names like Arabel Pickels 
 or Marmaduke Honeyblossom Whoopingnose, the 
 chances are that from Clapton or Sydenham or 
 Blackpool or Merthyr Tydvil some Dread Unknown 
 will start up and ask why his or her name, long 
 known and honoured in the locality, has been thus pil- 
 loried. Dickens's names look preposterous enough, 
 but he used to get them out of the London Direc- 
 tory. If he had made them up out of his head he 
 would probably have found them in the London Di- 
 rectory afterwards. No name is entirely impossible 
 in this country, as I realized recently when, walking 
 along the main street of a small cathedral city, I ob- 
 served over a draper's shop the almost incredible 
 cognomen of Gotobed. The only people who do 
 occasionally produce an English name that probably 
 is unreal are French novelists. They try to do the 
 thing correctly. They consequently construct their 
 English surnames out of English surnames that they 
 have seen. But they very often put together sylla- 
 
 55 
 
Books in General 
 
 bles which, though quite common, are for some 
 reason quite incompatible. They have seen, for 
 example, such names as Oldham and Hawkins, and 
 they will come out with an English governess called 
 Agnes Oldkins, and a sporting English baronet with 
 the highly improbable designation of Sir John Haw- 
 ham. But even here I do not feel that I am on per- 
 fectly safe ground, and I should not really be sur- 
 prised if after this appears letters reached me from 
 eager readers in the backwoods assuring me that in 
 their districts the name of Oldkins and Hawham are 
 and always have been most common in the parish 
 register. 
 
 Common names, one need scarcely say, would 
 have been no protection whatever if Mr. Seymour 
 had won his action. It was pointed out in Court 
 that there were three persons of the name of 
 Louis Seymour in the London Directory. I do not 
 see why, if one Mr. Seymour had won, another Mr. 
 Seymour should not — assuming that one of the 
 others were the sort of person who would bring an 
 action — have had a go himself and won also; or 
 why, for that matter, twenty Lewis Seymours from 
 all over the kingdom should not have come in turn to 
 Court, alleged in turn that their private lives had 
 been embittered by the poisonous emissions of Mr. 
 Moore's pen, and secured seriatim such damages 
 that in the end Mr. Moore would have had to sell 
 Moore Hall (thus escaping from the dispute about 
 the graziers) and go to America steerage in order 
 56 
 
Property in Proper Names 
 
 to begin a new life in a place where he was not 
 known. Still worse would have been the fate of 
 novelists who should have called the evil-doer John 
 Jones, Henry Smith, William Brown, Edward Wil- 
 liams, or Evan Davies. Claimants would have 
 rushed forward by thousands, and we might even 
 have come to the point at which people would find 
 it worth while to assume the name of Quilp, Raffles, 
 Fagan, Bill Sykes, Svengali, Shylock, or even Cain, 
 in order to sue authors or publishers who appeared 
 prosperous enough to offer a good harvest. In the 
 end novelists would have been driven to calling their 
 people by letters or numbers. We should hfive read 
 that: "A. B. buried her head in her arms, and 
 wept long and bitterly as she thought of that beauti- 
 ful day when she and C. D. had sat in bliss under 
 the blue Mediterranean sky and by the side of the 
 blue Mediterranean sea, before that awful day when 
 E. F. and G. H. had come between them " ; or that: 
 " No. I flung open the door with a shout. As it 
 opened he saw No. 8 and No. 76 in close confabu- 
 lation over a bundle of papers which the latter hur- 
 riedly passed behind his back to No. 2002, though 
 not sufficiently rapidly to escape No. I's attention." 
 The only alternative would have been for novelists 
 to have given up writing altogether. And, on the 
 whole, I am not sure that this 
 
 57 
 
The Inferior Poems of Keats 
 
 THE Florence Press Keats is one of the 
 most beautiful editions of recent years. 
 The edition is, however, interesting for 
 other reasons. In the first place, Sir Sidney Colvin 
 has put in the newly-discovered poems which he pub- 
 lished in the Times Literary Supplement ; and in the 
 second place, he has arranged the poems for the first 
 time in chronological order. Lord Houghton, it 
 may be added, endeavoured to do that in the edition 
 recently reissued in the " Shilling Bohn Series." 
 Keats owes more to Lord Houghton than to any 
 other editor; but that did not make his lordship's 
 chronology sound or even careful. Sir Sidney Col- 
 vin's appears as nearly exact as any editor could 
 make it; where his order is not that of time the de- 
 viation! is deliberate — for example, he lumps to- 
 gether the slight pieces intended to be funny. The 
 object of his plan is to enable readers to see Keats's 
 development in proper perspective, and to place his 
 feebler works in their proper temporal relation to 
 his masterpieces. 
 
 If the edition had no other merits I should use it, 
 if only for its almost perfect print and its total ab- 
 sence of notes. It takes a good deal of effort for a 
 man of Sir Sidney Colvin's learning to restrain him- 
 58 
 
The Inferior Poems of Keats 
 
 self. He is bound to be tempted to explain, for ex- 
 ample (in a quite elementary work), that Apollo- 
 nius must not be confused with ApoUinaris or 
 Apenta; or (in a more ambitious edition) that, 
 although Keats in Lamia refers to ApoUonius as 
 having a bald old crown, Keats's authority, Philos- 
 tratus, expressly states (in another connection) that 
 the philosopher was exceedingly hairy — in fact, as 
 hairy as a sound vegetarian ought to be. This 
 point, by the by, has not (as far as I am aware) 
 been made by any critic before myself. I present it 
 to Keats's next commentator. At this late date any 
 little extra should be welcome. But at any rate, 
 happily. Sir Sidney Colvin has no use for it; and yet 
 how easy it would have been to write a whole volume 
 of notes if he did not go beyond explaining why he 
 chose to think that certain poems were written in 
 September rather than in October or in January 
 rather than in February. 
 
 At the same time I don't think that the chronolog- 
 ical arrangement will much increase one's apprecia- 
 tion of Keats. And the reason is that his inferior 
 poems, wherever you may place them in the book, 
 are so infinitely inferior to his best that one almost 
 thinks, as one reads them, that there must have been 
 two Keats, not one Keats. One may object to selec- 
 tions — to The Golden Book of Ezekiel Peaky- 
 blinder and The Cream of Christopher Marlowe — 
 but Keats's worst is such feeble stuff that it is simply 
 not worth having at all. It is not merely a question 
 
 59 
 
Books in General 
 
 of the early poems. Most of his first volume is 
 worthless — though it contains the Chapman Son- 
 net — but in some of its dullest passages the devel- 
 opment of his craft rtiay be observed. But he went 
 on writing much worse things when his powers were 
 fully matured. It is, perhaps, bad luck on him that 
 his jocular verses in letters have been dug up; but 
 the pompous vapidities of Otho the Great and the 
 skittish vapidities of the Cap and Bells were the 
 results of elaborate efforts made when his genius 
 had reached its culmination. Otho the Great is 
 roughly contemporaneous with Lamia and comes be- 
 tween the Ode to a Nightingale and the Ode to 
 Autumn. Otho is a full length blank-verse play oc- 
 cupying ninety pages in this edition. Its author had 
 already written in Hyperion blank verse equal in 
 places to any in the language. Yet there are 
 scarcely in Otho even a dozen hnes together of good 
 rhetoric, much less! poetry. As he was unused to 
 play-writing one can understand how Keats fell into 
 the trap of Elizabethanism and dealt in Carnage, 
 Wittols and Gulls. But one cannot understand how 
 he disguised himself so completely. 
 
 The Cap and Bells is much worse. It is unfin- 
 ished: that is the only reason it did not come to a 
 bad end. Keats here was deliberately trying to em- 
 ulate Byron's satiric triumphs. Unfortuilately he 
 had no comic ideas, little gift for epigram, a narrow 
 range of contemporary allusion, and could not 
 even tickle the midriff with those polysyllabic or 
 60 
 
The Inferior Poems of Keats 
 
 otherwise eccentric rhymes which are frequently em- 
 ployed by ineffective wags to cover up their resource- 
 lessness and impress a public very much in awe of 
 these properties of the wizard's cave. Now and 
 then you get a stanza of some dignity and vigour. 
 The stanza describing the wedding morning is one 
 such: 
 
 The morn is full of holiday; loud bells 
 With rival clamours ring from every spire; 
 Cunntngly-station' d music dies and swells 
 In echoing places; when the winds respire, 
 Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire. 
 A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm, 
 Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire 
 Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm, 
 While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen 
 alarm. 
 
 This stanza is not quite Keats; but at least it it 
 not the author of The Eve of St. Agnes trying to 
 write like the author of Beppo and Don Juan. 
 
 The brief fragment of King Stephen is much bet- 
 ter. Swinburne thought that it showed that Keats, 
 had he lived, might have been a considerable poetic 
 dramatist. The language here is still Elizabethan. 
 Lines like : 
 
 Now may we lift our bruised visors up 
 And take the flattering freshness of the air — 
 
 6i 
 
Books in General 
 
 and 
 
 Royal Maud 
 From the throng'd towers of Lincoln hath look'd 
 
 down 
 Like Pallas from the walls of Ilion, 
 And seen her enemies havock'd at her feet. 
 She greets most noble Gloucester from the heart — 
 
 are simply burlesque Elizabethan. But the muscles 
 of some of the speeches show through their trick'd 
 up clothing; the action moves quickly; and even in 
 the few pages which are all that remain of the play 
 Keats succeeds in the highly difficult feat of making 
 us take an interest in King Stephen. 
 
 If, by the way, some of the passages in King 
 Stephen hark back too much, there is one at least 
 which appears to hark forward. Royal Maud is 
 discussing the treatment of Stephen, her prisoner- 
 of-war. She is very shocked at the way in which he 
 is being pampered: 
 
 My Lord of Chester, is't true what I hear 
 
 Of Stephen of Boulogne, our prisoner, 
 
 That he, as a fit penance for his crimes. 
 
 Eats wholesome, sweet and palatable food 
 
 Off Gloucester's golden dishes — drinks pure wine, 
 
 Lodges soft? 
 
 It is like the accounts we heard of Donington 
 Hall. 
 62 
 
One's Favourite Author 
 Defined 
 
 A MAN asked me, with mediaeval bluntness, 
 who were my favourite authors. " Oh," 
 I said, "Homer, Dante, &c." This did 
 not satisfy him. " Well," I said, " What do you 
 mean by favourites? I am very fond indeed of 
 Wordsworth." " Yes," he said, " but would you 
 read him in prose on any subject he cared to write 
 about?" "I should think not," I said. "Well, 
 whom would you ? " 
 
 It was a new method of approach, and at first I 
 could think of nobody except Mr. Chesterton whom 
 I would read on any subject — though remembering 
 what he had said would be another matter. All the 
 illustrious dead and the notorious living went through 
 my head seriatim, stretching out pale, appeahng 
 hands which I could not persuade myself to take. 
 Milton on Church Government? No, I would not 
 be able to read that; I would rather read Sir 
 Thomas Browne on the subject, although I do not 
 think him as great a writer as Milton. Sir Thomas 
 B'rowne may do as a start; he was odd and sympa- 
 thetic enough never to bore me. Tennyson on the 
 Needs of the Navy? No, I miss that out, even 
 
 63 
 
Books in General 
 
 when he is writing in verse. Shelley on Proportional 
 Representation? Well! Gibbon on the Needs of 
 Rural Hampshire? Dickens on Metaphysics? 
 Scott on Constitutional History? George Eliot on 
 Rent? Coleridge on the Ego? Or any of them on 
 current Italian politics? As I put all these ques- 
 tions or had them put, I found how limited was my 
 contact with many of the greatest men or, con- 
 versely, how limited was their appeal. And it 
 gradually turned out that I had a most peculiar col- 
 lection of, so to say, intimates, whom I should be 
 happy to read whatever they were writing about and 
 whatever my ignorance — or even theirs ! — of the 
 subjects discussed. 
 
 There are two living poets who seldom step out- 
 side their proper provinces whom I should find en- 
 gaging on anything. I could read anything (except 
 a few of his longer novels) which was written, or 
 would be written, by Henry James. I could read 
 any conceivable thing by Cobbett, and certainly 
 anything by Charles Lamb, were it even on episte- 
 mology or morphology or the scholarship of Mr. 
 Gladstone. Swift is another. He might certainly 
 have written rottenly on ^Esthetics but he would be- 
 yond question have written about them like a man 
 and a humorist. The same may be said of Dr. 
 Johnson, who, to those who have a feeling for him, 
 could never be dull. I would add Keats, Mr. Max 
 Beerbohm, Shakespeare, and Rabelais. It is a queer 
 collection. In another sense some of them are not 
 64 
 
One's Favourite Author Defined 
 
 at all very favourite authors. I do not, for instance, 
 read anything of Cobbett's more than once in three 
 years. But when I do pick up a book of his I do not 
 care what it is about and I have no fear of being 
 bored or only half-interested. He is good company 
 whenever and wherever he is called on. And he 
 certainly would have been in the flesh, whereas 
 Wordsworth or Milton, on an off day, would have 
 reduced one to making remarks about the weather 
 — a subject, however, which Wordsworth found ab- 
 normally interesting. 
 
 65 
 
Swinburne's Vocabulary 
 
 IT has long been a complaint that cheap edi- 
 tions of Swinburne are not obtainable. Mr. 
 Heinemann has now gone some way towards 
 providing one by issuing five small volumes of his 
 poems, containing, respectively. Poems and Ballads 
 (I.), Poems and Ballads (II. and III.), Tristram, 
 Atalanta and Erechtheus, and Songs before Sunrise. 
 The edition is called the " Golden Pine Edition." 
 At first sight one thinks of a brand of marmalade or 
 of Califomian tinned pineapples. Then one notices 
 a design of cones. Presumably somebody desires 
 to forge one more link between Swinburne's name 
 and that of " The Pines," Putney Hill. But even 
 then the " Golden " is a puzzle, for pines, even in 
 Putney, are not conspicuously golden. I give it up. 
 
 Except for certain parts of the plays and a few 
 odd poems, these volumes include everything of 
 Swinburne's in verse that any one but a rare enthusi- 
 ast can want. What a misfortune his diffuseness 
 was. Take even a feeble poem of Swinburne's by 
 itself, and you are struck by his eloquence and ease ; 
 but a lot of them together are tiring and monot- 
 onous to a degree unequalled by any verse of similar 
 standing. One of the best chapters in Mrs. Mey- 
 66 
 
Swinburne's Vocabulary 
 
 nell's recent Hearts of Controversy was that in 
 which, whilst unreservedly admitting the greatness 
 of some of Swinburne's verse and his right to a high 
 place in literature, she analyzed his peculiar weak- 
 nesses. He lived on second-hand enthusiasms de- 
 rived from men living and dead who were the ob- 
 jects of his unreasoning admiration ( to do him justice, 
 his enthusiasms were always for somebody whom he 
 thought morally great, noble in character). He 
 out-shouted Mazzini about Italy and Shelley about 
 Liberty. But directly he was left by himself to 
 judge or to feel for himself he felt weakly or judged 
 inconsistently. And to express and illustrate his 
 second-hand thought he had pocketfuUs of counters. 
 If he was denouncing, as Mrs. Meynell observes, he 
 denounced everybody in precisely the same words 
 and " Hell " was certain to be one of them. All 
 poets have private vocabularies in some measure. In 
 time some professor of German extraction will count 
 the number of times that various writers use various 
 words, find the " dominant-recurrent " words of each 
 and stigmatize his outlook (or, more likely, his dis- 
 ease) accordingly. But Swinburne's habitual vocab- 
 ulary (though he had at call an enormous number of 
 words) was scarcely larger than an agricultural la- 
 bourer's, and he worked it with unparalleled vigour 
 and lack of discrimination. It was a poor sort of 
 thing that could not be described in terms of 
 "foam" "flower," "barren," "salt," "sweet," 
 "sharp," "broken," "token," "light," "fight," 
 " might," and " right " — for many of them hunted 
 
 67 
 
Books in General 
 
 in couples, or even quartets, merely because they hap- 
 pened to rhyme. An out-of-the-way archaism like 
 " guerdon " was used by Swinburne as though it were 
 an ordinary "and," "the," "come" or "go," 
 merely because it made a comfortable rhyme with 
 " burden," and burdens, in his world, were very com- 
 mon. 
 
 At this stage I took the sortes. Quite honestly 
 I opened a chance volume at a chance page and lit- 
 erally the first thing I saw was this stanza of Her- 
 tha : — 
 
 Though sore be my burden 
 
 And more than ye know, 
 And my growth have no guerdon 
 
 But only to grow, 
 Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me 
 
 or deathworms below. 
 There we have it; the language half-obscuring the 
 not very remarkable thought. Consonants and 
 vowels could not be more fluidly arranged; the sound 
 as an abracadabra is beautiful; but the songs of 
 mouth and mind do not harmonize — the former 
 chants the other out of hearing. This is so even 
 here in one of his finer poems; in the others there is 
 vox et praeterea nihil. I wished consequently that a 
 really perfect selection, could be issued. A fairly 
 good one, prepared under Swinburne's own supervi- 
 sion, exists; but a better one is easily conceivable, and 
 his executors and publishers would find it worth their 
 while If they had made one. 
 68 
 
Blake and His Myths 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE is a standing temp- 
 tation. For he was a man of great 
 genius and indisputable sanity, many of 
 whose works are, as his latest critic says, " perhaps 
 the most obscure in the whole range of literature." 
 Ever since people began to realize that the Prophetic 
 Books were something more than the grandiose rav- 
 ings of a harmless lunatic, armies of students have 
 worked continuously with tables of symbols at their 
 sides searching for the key to the mystery. A great 
 deal has been discovered, largely owing to the efforts 
 of Messrs. Ellis and Yeats ; but it is pretty evident by 
 this time that Blake's doctrines will never be pro- 
 pounded as a coherent whole. 
 
 M. Berger (a very good translation of whose 
 French study of Blake has been published by Chap-, 
 man & Hall) has no illusions about it. In a book of 
 four hundred large pages — certainly one of the 
 most learned and interesting works: that has ever 
 been written about Blake — he examines, and so far 
 as he can, explains, Blake's writings; and, although 
 he fully appreciates the frequent grandeur of the 
 poet's ideas and language, arrives at the mournful 
 conclusion that his myth-making was his ruin. No 
 one could be franker. " Many, even of the shorter 
 
 69 
 
Books in General 
 
 pieces," he says, " admit of various interpretations, 
 all equally problematical. As for the long poems 
 . . . they defy all commentators." Any word may 
 mean anything and " his language needs a special 
 dictionary which it would be almost impossible to 
 compile, and the use of which would be destructive 
 of any real poetry." And no sooner have you iden- 
 tified a figure or a symbol than it changes its clothes : 
 " The Clod of Clay, for instance, symbolizes soulless 
 matter; but it represents also man's first mother and 
 the milk of human kindness." 
 
 It is all perfectly true. M. Berger, in spite of his 
 pessimism about the poet, explains as far as he can. 
 He even does much to elucidate passages like the fol- 
 owing : 
 
 Bath . . . is the Seventh, the physician and 
 
 The poisoner; the best and worst in Heaven and 
 
 Hell; 
 Whose Spectre first assimilated ivith Luvah in 
 
 Heaven and Hell, 
 A triple octave he took, to reduce Jerusalem to 
 
 twelve. 
 To cast Jerusalem forth upon the wilds to Poplar 
 
 and Bow, 
 To Maiden and Canterbury in the delights of 
 
 cruelty : 
 The Shuttles of death sing in the sky to Islington and 
 
 Pancrass, 
 Round Marybone to Tyburn's River, weaving black 
 
 melancholy as a net, 
 70 
 
Blake and His Myths 
 
 And despair as meshes closely wove over the west 
 of London, 
 
 Where mild Jerusalem sought to repose in death and 
 be no more. 
 
 She fled to Lambeth's mild vale and hid herself be- 
 neath 
 
 The Surrey Hills where Rephaim terminates. 
 
 But the worst of it is that where Blake's narratives 
 are made comprehensible Tve are not quite certain at 
 the end whether the trouble was worth while. Urizen 
 may be the first creation : that which first divides it- 
 self from Eternity. Los may be Time which binds 
 and rivets Urizen. Los may also be the prophetic 
 spirit and Enitharmon, proceeding from Los, both 
 Space and Pity. But one feels all the time that to us 
 who do not see these personages in vision as Blake 
 did, the ancient classical figures Chronos, Ouranos 
 and Terra, etc., would do just as well. We may dis- 
 cover what Blake meant: but it will not mean any- 
 thing to us. M. Berger said that he wrote as " a 
 mystic for mystics " and that had he written as " a 
 man for men " he " could have stirred all his contem- 
 poraries profoundly." There is a third way: to 
 write as a mystic for " men " ; but even the most mys- 
 tical of mystics can obtain little out of Blake's pecu- 
 liar cosmogony. All that can be done with the 
 Prophetic books is, as M. Berger suggests, to take 
 them " as collections of isolated but richly suggestive 
 fragments." 
 
 71 
 
Books in General 
 
 Blake, as a mystic, was concentrated upon the 
 supernatural. He disbelieved in the evidence of the 
 senses, which, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti rotundly 
 phrased it, he considered " the untrue reporters 
 about ambiguous simulacra," and in the reliability of 
 human reason. 
 
 Thh is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning 
 
 Power 
 And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of 
 
 Desolation. 
 
 He held that " the only real science is art " and his 
 views as to the function of the artist are very clearly 
 put in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: 
 
 " The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, 
 and I asked them how they dared so roundly to as- 
 sert that God spoke to them; and whether they did 
 not think at the time that they would be misunder- 
 stood, and so be the cause of imposition. 
 
 " Isaiah answer'd 'I saw no God, nor heard any, 
 in a finite organical perception; but my senses dis- 
 cover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then 
 persuaded, and remain confirm'd that the voice of 
 honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not 
 for consequences, but wrote.' 
 
 " Then I asked: ' Does a firm persuasion that a 
 thing is so, make it so? ' 
 
 "He replied: 'AH Poets believe that it does, 
 and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion re- 
 72 
 
Blake and His Myths 
 
 moved mountains ; but many are not capable of a firm 
 persuasion of anytiaing.' " 
 
 Biut it is clear that " honest indignation " will fail in 
 its effect if you clothe your words in a jargon which 
 prevents mankind from knowing what you are in- 
 dignant about unless it sits over your works for ten 
 years in a reference library with wet towels round its 
 head. Blake's belief that his words were inspired 
 not merely in general purport, but verbally and lit- 
 erally, almost spoilt him, both as a moral propagan- 
 dist, and as an artist. The wonder is that his draw- 
 ings, instead of being the definite things they are, are 
 not confused jumbles of hands, legs and eyes. 
 
 It is one of the greatest tragedies in English liter- 
 ary history. M. Berger fully perceives this, though 
 he does not seem adequately to appreciate the exqui- 
 site musical quality that Blake's verse had. Blake, 
 when he wrote the Songs of Innocence, was more 
 simple and lucid than Wordsworth at his simplest. 
 When he was making causal couplets about Cromek, 
 Hayley, and his other bugbears, he could be equally 
 clear. His address to the fleshly Rubens is almost 
 Byronic : 
 
 / understood Christ was a carpenter 
 And not a brewer's servant, my Good Sir. 
 
 and there are many epigrams as direct as : 
 
 73 
 
Books in General 
 
 When Sir Joshua Reynolds died 
 
 All Nature was degraded; 
 
 The King dropp'd a tear into the Queen's ear 
 
 And all his pictures faded. 
 
 and that on the painter Cromek: 
 
 A nasty sneaking knave I knew. 
 Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do? 
 
 I do not suggest, of course, that a sack-full of such 
 trifles would be worth the Prophetic Books. But, 
 at any rate, one can understand them without spend- 
 ing the best part of one's life over them, and they 
 show that Blake could be clear enough when he re- 
 stricted the sphere of his operations. But in the 
 Prophetic Books he had bitten off the Cosmos, and it 
 was more than he could chew. 
 
 Had Blake's other poetic achievements not been 
 so great it is probable that we should be more grate- 
 ful for the chaotic magnificences of the Prophetic 
 Books. Had he exercised great influence as a relig- 
 ious teacher and an enemy of mechanical morality, 
 his labours would have been worth while even had 
 he expressed himself in the baldest and most ungram- 
 matlcal prose. But he ceased (save in places) to be 
 a readable poet without becoming an audible 
 prophet; and although a few wrinkled cognoscenti 
 may profess to be illumined by his longer works, 
 most people will continue to feel that the angels with 
 whom he habitually consorted were false guides and 
 led him off the track. 
 74 
 
Mutual Compliments 
 
 IF any one is collecting opinions of Swinburne 
 he should not miss that of Walt Whitman, 
 given by Mr. Ernest Rhys in an interesting 
 chapter of reminiscences which appears in Today. 
 Mr. Rhys's article is very interesting and covers a 
 great deal of ground. He describes his meetings 
 with James Russell Lowell, whom he found a most 
 agreeable person; and he has a good many memories 
 of the lost, but not much lamented, Rhymers' Club. 
 He says Mr. Yeats was the only member of the Club 
 who could read well, and that Davidson " felt him- 
 self incomparably greater as man and poet than 
 all the rest," and described himself as " a Pict among 
 the Celts." If we leave Mr. Yeats out of consider- 
 ation, I think Davidson was perfectly right. Dow- 
 son, and even Johnson, could not compare with him, 
 and most of the others were merely ordinary small 
 fry. But that is a side-issue ; what I wandered away 
 from was Whitman's opinion of Swinburne. Mr. 
 Rhys saw Whitman in the later stages of his " par- 
 alytic imprisonment." He talked in " a deep mono- 
 tone " and " sat still as a statue." " Only once did 
 he appear thoroughly moved out of himself. A 
 chance reference to Swinburne gave the provoking 
 cue, and then his wrath was startling to behold. He 
 turned quickly in his seat, with an angry hand lifted 
 
 75 
 
Books in General 
 
 from the usual arm of the chair, and in vehement, 
 oracular voice said: ' Of all the damned simulacra 
 I have ever known that man is the worst. He 
 brought me to a feast — the table spread with fine 
 dishes, but when I lifted off the covers, lo — noth- 
 ing was there ! ' " 
 
 I do not remember having seen this before. Per- 
 haps it was the rumour of some such utterance which 
 led Swinburne, after writing a metrical salute to 
 Whitman as the " good grey poet," to compose an 
 essay on him which was in the main an attack, which 
 suggested that he was obscene, and which contained 
 the assertion that his language was " sometimes that 
 of a god" (I quote, or paraphrase, from memory) 
 " and sometimes that of a drunken apple-woman roll- 
 ing in the gutter." A similar change overwent Swin- 
 burne's opinion of William Bell Scott, the Pre- 
 Raphaelite. He dedicated a book to him as " Poet 
 and Painter " ; he then read a derogatory reference 
 to himself in Scott's letters ; and Scott at once became 
 a dauber and a poetaster. But his best pronounce- 
 ment on some one he believed to have spoken ill of 
 him was his characterization of Emerson. He de- 
 scribed that extremely amiable, if occasionally 
 cloudy, sage as " a wrinkled and toothless baboon 
 who, having been first hoisted into notoriety on the 
 shoulders of Carlyle, now spits and splutters on a 
 filthier platform of his own framing and fouling." 
 
 76 
 
Invective 
 
 THIS habit of rounded invective is not one 
 to be cultivated. It flourished a hundred 
 years ago; it is almost dead now, in the 
 limited world of literature, when in conversation we 
 are content to call a man a windbag or a pig, and in 
 print we laugh gently at or sweetly reason with even 
 the most vociferous of fools and the vainest of strut- 
 ters. Reviewers, at one time the most offensive of 
 men, have now become so mealy-mouthed that we are 
 frequently at a loss to know whether they consider a 
 book magnificent or futile, and whether they consider 
 its author a reptile or the torch-bearer of a newer 
 and nobler age. This is carrying it a little too far, 
 though there is nothing to regret in civility, provided 
 we do not lose the courage of our opinions ; but there 
 are charms about abuse when the persons at whom it 
 was levelled are dead and beyond being hurt. There 
 is, I think, room for an Anthology of British Invec- 
 tive, in prose and verse. If well selected it would be 
 one of the most entertaining and generally acceptable 
 compilations that could be put together Moribund 
 in polite letters, ingenious abuse still flourishes in the 
 street. Half our best jokes and anecdotes still deal 
 with what the 'bus driver said to his rival about his 
 face, what the cab driver said to his fare about his 
 generosity, and allied topics; and the man who can 
 
 77 
 
Books in General 
 
 be induced to smile at nothing else will smile at a 
 novel form of vigorous insult. The Anthology of 
 Invective would therefore succeed. 
 
 What would be in it ? I see several sections. In 
 the first place I would have a section of anecdotes, 
 the folklore of invective. In the second place I 
 would have a section of political invective. Cob- 
 bett's works are full of wonderful things about land- 
 lords, cotton-spinners and clergymen ; his Legacy for 
 Parsons may be commended. Milton on Salmasius 
 would, I think, yield selections, though Milton was 
 rather on the lofty side. Rebellion and Restoration 
 literature is rich; cf. Cowley's Essay on Cromwell in 
 which, inter alia, he accused the Protector of want- 
 ing to hand over St. Paul's Cathedral to the Jews. 
 The Revolutionary era produced a very large crop; 
 Lamb on the Prince of Wales and the Examiner on 
 the same subject would not be missing; nor Byron 
 on George III ; nor Byron and Shelley on Castle- 
 reagh; nor a famous open letter of Hazlitt's. 
 From Disraeli many admirable specimens could be 
 obtained; Gladstone on the Turks reached a great 
 height; there is Lord Randolph Churchill on Glad- 
 stone, Mr. Maxse on everybody, and Mr. Lloyd 
 George on the Dukes — a subject which may be 
 barred to him henceforth, for probably half of his 
 friends will ultimately become dukes. Literary and 
 general abuse would be freely provided by Swin- 
 burne, by the old Reviewers, by Christopher North ; 
 we should have Dr. Johnson on the Scotch, James 
 78 
 
Invective 
 
 I on the fraternity of Smokers, and half the Eliza- 
 bethan authors on the other half. Finally, there is 
 the enormous body of English satirical poetry, from 
 Skelton and Bishop Hall to Mr. Belloc and Mr. 
 Chesterton. A great deal of it is scarcely ever read. 
 People may dip into the satires of Donne, Marvell, 
 Dryden, Pope and Swift, and the epigrams of Her- 
 rick, which are some of the nastiest if not the neatest 
 in the language. But the gifted vilifier Charles 
 Churchill is generally ignored, Oldham is barely a 
 name to many voracious readers, and the enormous 
 volume of Puritan and Cavalier songs (contained in 
 collections like Songs of the Rump and the State 
 Poems) might well be introduced by extracts to 
 people who will never read them in the mass. What 
 is the most drastic piece of condemnation in the 
 language I do not know. Perhaps : 
 
 Curse the people, blast the people; 
 Damn the lower orders; 
 
 is more comprehensive and sweeping than most ; but 
 that is by Ebenezer Eliot and written ironically. 
 For searching subtlety I think that Pope on Atticus 
 holds the field. I look forward to enlightenment 
 from some one more expert from whom, in pious 
 hope, I await The Thousand Best Insults, A Posy of 
 Invective, or The Oxford Book of English Denun- 
 ciation and Abuse. If nobody else does it in the 
 meantime and I survive the shocks of the modern 
 Honours Lists, I shall probably solace my own old 
 
 79 
 
Books in General 
 
 age with that labour of love, thus bringing a well- 
 spent life of action to a serene and sunny close. But 
 I would rather somebody else did this — and every 
 other job as well. 
 
 80 
 
A Picture of Chaos 
 
 DURING the war Mr. Seeker published an 
 English version of Artzybasheff's Sanine. 
 This book had a tremendous success in Ger- 
 many and Russia. And, as a document, it is well 
 worth studying here. For — leaving out of consid- 
 eration its qualities as a well-written story, which 
 are considerable — it has a treble interest. It dis- 
 cusses " sex-problems " with unusual honesty, if the 
 usual inconclusiveness of books by people who have 
 abandoned authority. It gives a vivid picture, with- 
 in certain limitations, of Russian life, especially as 
 lived by intellectuals in the despairing times after the 
 failure of the Revolution. And it reflects the welter 
 of thoughts and aspirations which are common to the 
 whole contemporary Western world. Mr. Gilbert 
 Cannan's preface suggests that M. Artzybasheff's 
 onslaught against sex-taboos, sexual repression, and 
 sexual hypocrisy is at once the principal purpose and 
 the principal justification of the book. This does 
 not appear to me to be true. The author Is cer- 
 tainly preoccupied, not with sex, but with our ideas 
 about sex; but these Ideas are merely one company 
 in a larger host of ideas about life as a whole, and 
 he is equally interested In them all. He takes a 
 group of typical young men and women who have 
 lost the support of traditional ideas on religion, 
 
 8i 
 
Books in General 
 
 politics, and morals, and who are crippled by their 
 inability to discover an object in Man or the Uni- 
 verse, or a code by which they can live both happily 
 and conscientiously. He shows the confusion of 
 thought and the lamentable results of that confusion. 
 And he presents no solution. 
 
 His own thought appears to be as distracted and 
 uncertain as that of his characters. Presumably he 
 is aware of that. For he cannot really have consid- 
 ered Sanine himself as a solution. Sanine is a sort 
 of Superman : big and blond, though not quite a beast. 
 He has gone through the usual ideals of the sensi- 
 tive intellectual and has come out completely self-re- 
 liant and self-contained. At the beginning of the 
 book, he returns alone to the provincial town where 
 his mother and sister live; for he likes change, and, 
 as he says, " As long as one hasn't found people out, 
 there is always a chance that they may prove in- 
 teresting." He remains there a spectator of the 
 lives of the family and of the local intellectuals. 
 Now and then he intervenes in the action. He pre- 
 vents — after some hesitation — his sister from 
 committing suicide when she has been seduced and 
 left in the lurch by a libidinous officer. Later he has 
 a short amour with a friend's fiancee, who momen- 
 tarily accepts his view that an hour's sensual enjoy- 
 ment in the moonlight is a casual thing which may be 
 looked back upon with pure and elevated pleasure, 
 and not with regret, provided one can clear one's 
 mind of absurd preconceptions. But usually he is 
 
 «2 
 
A Picture of Chaos 
 
 merely watching the antics of the imperfectly emanci- 
 pated people around him. " There's an old hen for 
 you ! " he muses detachedly, as he looks at his bigoted 
 old mother strutting across the room. Deaths and 
 suicides, which occur in profusion, leave him merely 
 mildly regretting people's folly. For he alone has 
 his simple creed: 
 
 " ' What is the good of living? ' asked Yourli. 
 
 " ' One thing I know,' replied Sanine, ' and that 
 is that I don't want my life to be a miserable one. 
 Thus, before all things, one must satisfy one's nat- 
 ural desires. . . .' 
 
 " ' But his desires may be evil.' 
 
 " ' Possibly.' 
 
 '"But what then?' 
 
 " ' Then . . . they must just be evil,' replied 
 Sanine blandly." 
 
 The Yourii who is the interlocutor here Is the 
 most real character in the book. Sanine himself is 
 impossible. If he were possible, he would be loath- 
 some — the worst of fiction is that the novelist can 
 give a man qualities never found together — what- 
 ever M. Artzybasheff may say. But he does not 
 even appear complete. He is rather a section of a 
 character, the embodiment of an impulse present in 
 everybody and of a train of thought that runs 
 through everybody's mind — for, presumably, every 
 man who ever thinks at all sometimes wildly con- 
 ceives of himself as throwing aside all ties and re- 
 straints and striding through Ufe, a law to himself, 
 
 ' 83 
 
Books in General 
 
 like a calm, statuesque god with a. bunch of forked 
 lightnings in his clenched hand. The conception of 
 unfettered individualism — even with Godwin's little 
 postulate of universal benevolence worked in — 
 won't provide either a modus vivendi for one indi- 
 vidual or a panacea for social ills; but as a person- 
 ification of the modern revolt against the blind ac- 
 ceptance of formulae and against the fear of acting 
 according to one's own lights, Sanine is interesting 
 enough. Yourii, however, is a complete character, 
 who is to be met in England as well as in Russia. 
 
 Yourii is an intellectual and an artist who has 
 been mixed up with the Socialist movement. He is 
 disgusted with the slowness of progress, the strength 
 of embattled authority, the inertia of the pro- 
 letariat; and he relapses into a chronic state of self- 
 questioning. He doubts the use of anything, and 
 he doubts the sincerity of himself. He finds self- 
 indulgence at the root of his romanticism, and ambi- 
 tion at the root of his political activities. He goes 
 about trying to get others to answer the questions 
 he cannot answer himself. When he addresses to 
 IvanofF, Sanine's blunt and brutal disciple, an en- 
 quiry as to where happiness is to be sought, he is 
 given a very good Indication of his own character in 
 reply : 
 
 " ' Well, most assuredly not in perpetual sighing 
 and groaning, or incessant questionings such as " I 
 sneezed just now. Was that the right thing to 
 84 
 
A Picture of Chaos 
 
 do? Will it not cause harm to some one? Have 
 I, in sneezing, fulfilled my destiny? " ' " 
 
 With domestic happiness, at all events, at his door, 
 he questions himself until, desperate for want of " a 
 working hypothesis," he kills himself. His death is 
 as hesitating and feeble as his life ; but he is attractive 
 and very vivid. The minor characters — Lida, 
 Karsavlna, Semenoff, Sarudine, Captain von Dietz 
 (the military Tolstoyan), and others — are equally 
 convincing, as individuals and as types ; and the land- 
 scape background is cleverly touched in. There is 
 no attempt at painting more than the life of a set, 
 or rather the spare time of a set. The labouring 
 classes scarcely appear — save as represented by 
 two shy individuals at a futile, smoky and beery 
 revolutionary meeting in a studio — and we are not 
 convinced, though we are told, that various of the 
 persons really earn their living by working all day. 
 But M. Artzybasheff has got the intellectual chaos 
 on paper, and has made it pathetic; and that is a 
 considerable thing to have done. Nevertheless, if 
 the Western World doesn't get out of that chaos 
 it is all up with us. 
 
 85 
 
Shelley's Letters 
 
 MR. ROGER INGPEN'S edition of Shel- 
 ley's Letters has now been published in 
 two volumes of Bohn's Standard Library. 
 It is a model edition. It first appeared, many new 
 letters being included, in 1909; there was a second 
 edition in 191 1 with much additional matter; there 
 is one new letter in the present edition, and there is 
 good reason to believe that the editor has further 
 unpublished letters in prospect. In all there are 486 
 letters in the Bohn edition, which runs to over a 
 thousand pages; and there are also ample notes, a 
 stupendous index and a very full biographical ac- 
 count of Shelley's correspondents. The earliest 
 letter was written before the poet reached his 
 eleventh birthday and the last dates from just be- 
 fore his death. Although there are good books on 
 Shelley no one can get a thoroughly sound idea of 
 what he was like without reading the letters bodily. 
 One still finds people who, bewildered by the lofty 
 nebulosities of Prometheus and The Witch of Atlas 
 and Epipsychidion, hold Matthew Arnold's view of 
 the " beautiful ineffectual angel " ; and others who 
 prefer to think of him as a " beautiful angel " with 
 the " ineffectual " left out. A selection of the more 
 ethereal poems might well generate such an opinion; 
 but no one can read through the letters without 
 86 
 
Shelley's Letters 
 
 realizing that Shelley was ultimately a reasonable 
 being. People forget how young he was when he 
 committed the acts that they regard as most typical 
 of him. 
 
 He married Harriet Westbrook and deserted 
 her; he attempted to convert the University of Ox- 
 ford to an open Atheism; he set libertarian mes- 
 sages adrift in bottles on the turbulent waves of the 
 Bristol Channel; and, from a balcony in Dublin, he 
 attempted to stimulate the depressed spirits of Irish 
 patriots. There was something of the beautiful, be- 
 wildered ineffectual about all these things; but it is 
 dangerous to forget that they were all over and 
 done with before Shelley came of age. Certain 
 characteristics in him persisted. The Shelley who 
 at eighteen wrote " In justice to myself I must also 
 declare that a proof of his existence, or even the 
 divine mission of Christ, would in no manner alter 
 one idea on the subject of morality " was the per- 
 manent, indestructible Shelley. On the other hand, 
 the man who, ten years after, wrote " Epipsy- 
 chidion I cannot look at. . . . It is an idealized 
 history of my life and feelings. I think one is al- 
 ways in love with something or other ; the error, and 
 I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and 
 blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal 
 image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal " was 
 a man whom experience had changed. There is a 
 tendency to telescope Shelley's career in a manner 
 which would have been impossible had he lived 
 
 87 
 
Books in General 
 
 longer, and which ignores the fact that he developed. 
 The most matter-of-fact letters in these volumes 
 will, perhaps, for this reason, be to many the most 
 illuminating. " I write little now," he says at 
 twenty-^nine, to John Qisborne. " It is impossible 
 to compose except under the strong excitement of an 
 assurance of finding sympathy in what you write." 
 This letter to his agents might well shock those 
 who see in Shelley merely a Sensitive Plant: 
 
 " Gentlemen, — The parcel arrived safe, contain- 
 ing most of the books of the original order. 
 
 " I wish any edition of Quintus Curtius, which 
 Is not extremely dear, and which contains the supple- 
 ment of Freinhemius, to be sent as early as con- 
 venient. 
 
 " Your obedient servant, 
 
 "P. B. Shelley." 
 
 And Mr. Ingpen even reproduces in facsimile a per- 
 fectly orderly letter from Shelley to his bankers. 
 He did not live on air. 
 
 The letters are some of the best reading in the 
 language. Only Byron's, Cowper's, Gray's and 
 Horace Walpole's can compete with them. And in 
 no collection of letters that we possess is so fine a 
 human spirit revealed. There are faults. The 
 early letters are, being early, immature; and they 
 have an engagingly naive pomposity. Some of the 
 letters from abroad describing scenery are, though 
 88 
 
Shelley's Letters 
 
 extraordinarily good, rather over-written. In the 
 earlier letters there is also a certain lack of bal- 
 ance; the transmutation of Miss Elizabeth Kitch- 
 ener from a goddess into a Brown Demon (she was 
 probably an ordinary irritating prig and ass) is 
 amusingly rapid. But the grown Shelley is almost 
 always not merely natural, generous, self-sacrificing, 
 and a slave to his ideals, but also extremely sensible. 
 It is possible to present the skeleton of his life in 
 such a form as to make him look like an erratic 
 fanatic; but it is not possible for any one who goes 
 farther into it to think of him as that. 
 
 89 
 
On Cleaning Books 
 
 A CORRESPONDENT writes to ask me 
 " how Solomon Eagle cleans his books," 
 when they are " foxed," etc. The answer 
 is that he doesn't. 
 
 Sometimes I look at my old books, and, lo ! they 
 are very dirty. I then take one of two courses. 
 If the book is valuable, and its condition does not 
 make it past praying for, I send it to a firm of bind- 
 ers and cleaners, who eliminate stains, put invisible 
 patches on corners, gild edges, fill up holes, and 
 cleanse paper until it is whiter than snow. They 
 then send me in a bill for several pounds, and for 
 ever afterwards I have a violent aversion from the 
 book and call it a white elephant. 
 
 This happens seldom and, until I have rescued 
 that rich old lady from the hoofs of a cab-horse, it 
 will happen still less frequently in the future. 
 More usually it is the second course I adopt. I find 
 myself regretting that a page is " foxed," ink- 
 stained, or defaced by the tea, coffee or butter of a 
 bygone generation which had not lived to learn the 
 really economical use of those commodities. All 
 my convictions about the futility of modern men 
 who can do nothing for themselves rise in my mind; 
 90 
 
On Cleaning Books 
 
 " I will prove myself practical," I say, " and do the 
 job myself." I then resort to Mr. Aldis's The 
 Printed Book, to the Encyclopaedia, to Mr. Slater's 
 How to Collect Books, to Hill Burton's The Book- 
 Hunter, and sundry other works of reference in 
 search of information which some of them give. I 
 then find that paraffin-wax, benzol, acetylanilide, 
 trinitritoluol or some such thing is wanted; and I 
 have none in the house. I also find that time, care, 
 patience and kindred terrifying abstractions are 
 necessary; and I am equally lacking in them. The 
 upshot of it is that I put the book back where it 
 came from, consoling myself with the reflection that 
 this mania for renovation and refurbishing is the 
 disease of an age at once too commercial and too 
 fastidious. Does a little " foxing" matter? Why 
 should not a book have a few brown spots on it? 
 Is there not a charm in the stains left by owners 
 long ago in their graves? Are not the tea, the ink 
 and the butter which the centuries have brought 
 to the book an equivalent to the mellow colours and 
 the quiet vegetation which come, with antiquity, to 
 men's houses — a sort of compensation to the book 
 for its inability (unless it is kept in a very wet place) 
 to grow moss ? Why should one want a book three 
 hundred years old to look like one newly emerged 
 from Henrietta Street or St. Martin's Lane? We 
 do not go round washing tombstones with soap and 
 water, we do not cast away oak-panelling because 
 it is getting black; we do not fit an ancient statue 
 with a new nose. A soiled and torn book is a small 
 
 91 
 
Books in General 
 
 chapter of history. Hold this charm in your hand 
 and it provokes to dreams; the dry bones stir and 
 take flesh, one traverses the ages and sees the life 
 of them; every stain becomes, a tear and every 
 scrawl a signature. How, after such reflections, 
 could one go out to the chemist to buy 2 oz. of trini- 
 tritoluol? If he were a chymist and the bottle a 
 phial it might be a little more in keeping. I will 
 leave the book as it is. 
 
 So I am afraid I cannot help my correspondent 
 beyond referring him to the books and the book- 
 binders. They know, they know. Myself, I have 
 never cleaned a book in my life, beyond erasing 
 pencil-marks with india-rubber, pen-marks with the 
 ossiform remains of the cuttlefish, and publishers' 
 embossed stamps with a knife-handle, rubbed very 
 hard. Only two things have I learnt and practised 
 about the physical well-being of books; and these 
 are, how to get rid of bookworms and how to clean 
 bindings. 
 
 Bookworms, though undoubtedly traditional 
 things and the accompaniment of venerable age, I 
 cannot commend and do not wish to preserve. 
 These tiny bradawls go clean through leather, much 
 more paper; and if they are allowed to run loose 
 they may end by destroying the legibility of the text, 
 which, after all, is an integral part of the book. Be- 
 ing once harassed by them, I systematically read 
 them up. There were large pictures of them, by no 
 92 
 
On Cleaning Books 
 
 means alluring; their mandibles, legs and nervous 
 systems were accurately described; their names (like 
 those of so many insects, Latin ones) were written 
 out at length. But I found that no one could give 
 me the only information I wanted. I hadn't the 
 least curiosity about how they lived; I wanted to 
 know how they died. But no one could tell me. 
 All the experts could do was say, doubtfully, that 
 such and such a chemical had been tried with some 
 success ; and that they were believed to languish and 
 lose much of their appetite if dosed with such and 
 such another. I gave them all the chemicals that 
 the heart of bug could desire. The more chemicals 
 they ate, the more paper they ate : it was as if they 
 made sandwiches with them and found the sand- 
 wiches unprecedentedly appetizing. In the end I 
 met a man who said that bookworms liked damp, 
 and that they consequently throve on a clay soil. I 
 therefore moved house and they disappeared. 
 
 The cleaning of bindings I found equally simple, 
 though I do not profess to get more than amateur 
 results. There are limits to one's veneration for 
 dirt; and a quarter of an inch of ancient filth on a 
 back, originally of white vellum, is a little more 
 than the coarsest of us can comfortably stand. All 
 kinds of things were recommended me, but in the 
 end I found that a little paraffin worked very well 
 on ordinary calf — on the labels as well if one did 
 not apply so freely or rub so hard as to get the 
 colour off. And for vellum backs soap and milk; 
 
 93 
 
Books in General 
 
 though at the present moment, with a world-short- 
 age about, I had better express my long held con- 
 viction that there really cannot be any mystic virtue 
 which milk possesses and water lacks. Take a 
 bladk or dark grey vellum binding. Take a rag. 
 Take some soap. Take a saucer of the liquid. 
 Moisten the rag with the liquid, rub it on the soap, 
 and then apply to cover, and a little exercise will 
 show you — what you can scarcely have guessed be- 
 fore — what the cover wasi originally like. The 
 time taken to do the job properly I should assess 
 at a full day for ten large volumes. Unless you 
 are a person of leisure you will end, as one usually 
 does when one has mown grass, mended a lock, 
 put up a fowl-house or done anything else for one- 
 self, by wondering whether it wouldn't have paid 
 better to employ somebody in the trade. And that, 
 finally, is the best advice I can give to my corres- 
 pondent about all such things. 
 
 94 
 
The Essay in America 
 
 THE Oxford University Press has done an 
 interesting thing in issuing an Oxford 
 Book of American Essays. It is not im- 
 plied that, on the whole, there is much to distin- 
 guish American from English essays, or that the 
 best essays in the book might not equally well be 
 included in an anthology of English essays. As the 
 editor, Professor Brander Matthews, remarks, 
 " Just as Alexandrian literature is Greek, so Ameri- 
 can literature is English." What is more, Ameri- 
 can essay-writers have, on the whole, kept perhaps a 
 closer contact with the English tradition of style, 
 language, and form than any other class of Ameri- 
 can writers. The earlier essayists — Irving, for 
 example, and Dana — might quite well have been 
 Englishmen, as far as their essays betray them. As 
 one goes on a peculiarly American turn of speech 
 or humour comes in occasionally; but our contem- 
 porary John Burroughs, with his Idyl of the 
 Honey-Bee, might be own brother to Richard Jef- 
 f eries ; and Henry Cabot Lodge himself, in the very 
 process of protesting against Colonialism in the 
 United States, demands a native Kultur in the 
 phrases and periods of, say, the Times Literary 
 Supplement. 
 
 95 
 
Books in General 
 
 But it was worth publishing the book here, firstly 
 because many of the lesser, but nevertheless quite 
 interesting, American essayists here included would 
 be crowded out of a more general collection, and 
 secondly as a demonstration of the strength of 
 American literature in this particular department. 
 Even in a more general way we rather tend, as a 
 rule, to under-estimate the American literature of 
 the nineteenth century because of our automatic 
 habit of mentally comparing it with the rich con- 
 temporaneous " outputs " (I apologize for this 
 word) of England and France. As Professor Mat- 
 thews remarks, " although American literature has 
 not been adorned by so great a galaxy of brilliant 
 names as illumined British literature in the nine- 
 teenth century, it has had the good fortune to 
 possess more authors of cosmopolitan fame than 
 can be found in the German literature of the past 
 hundred years, in the Italian, or in the Spanish." 
 And the essayists of the U.S.A. have done abnor- 
 mally well. 
 
 The selection is very comprehensive. Franklin, 
 Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, O. W. Holmes, 
 Thoreau, Lowell, Walt Whitman, are represented, 
 as well as Henry James, W. D. Howells, Thomas 
 Wentworth Higginson, Hamilton Wright Mabie, 
 Samuel McChord Crothers, and Theodore Roose- 
 velt. Mr. Roosevelt's contribution is not very in- 
 spired, perhaps: an earnest plea for Whitman and 
 even Futurism based on a study of Dante. 
 96 
 
The Essay in America 
 
 " Dante's masterpiece is one of the supreme works 
 of art that the ages have witnessed; but he would 
 have been the last to wish that it should be treated 
 only as a work of art, or worshipped only for art's 
 sake, without reference to the dread lessons it 
 teaches mankind." A good many of the essays, 
 English enough in expression, are local in reference: 
 the book shows the general, and not inexcusable, 
 American traits of self-consciousness and self- 
 comparison with other peoples. Sense on the 
 subjects of Americanism in Literature is to be found 
 in Higginson's essay : he was anxious that Americans 
 should be American, but he pointed out that "origi- 
 nality is simply a fresh pair of eyes," and that the 
 deliberate constrained effort to be American was as 
 useless as the effort to be French or German. Es- 
 says of this serious kind are frequent in the book, 
 and depend rather on their matter than on their 
 manner for their effect. But one need not cavil at 
 their inclusion, for it is a large book and its contents 
 range from Franklin's pathetic Dialogue on the Gout 
 and Irving's Lambishly meditative reflections on 
 mutability at Westminster to Poe's highly technical 
 account of how he wrote The Raven. No purist 
 would accept this as an essay, though it is of normal 
 essay length. But it is an extraordinarily fascinat- 
 ing and subtle piece of work and one of the few ac- 
 counts we have of the genesis of a work of art in the 
 artist's brain. Whether it is entirely accurate one 
 does not know; he may have laid it on a little bru- 
 tally to shock the sentimental when he explained 
 
 97 
 
Books in General 
 
 how he started with an idea of making an Impres- 
 sion of Beauty; how melancholy seemed the most 
 useful tone to adopt; how a refrain seemed the 
 quickest way of getting the atmosphere; how 
 "Never more" was selected as the best refrain; 
 how a non-reasoning speaker of the refrain was de- 
 cided on to avoid monotony; how his first notion as 
 to the speaker required was not a raven, but a par- 
 rot; and how the climax was written first. If he 
 had selected a parrot, the poem would probably 
 have had a different complexion, though his power 
 was so great that he might even have made a green- 
 and-red Polly an emblem and oracle of tragic doom. 
 
 Turning over casually, I came upon Wendell 
 Holmes' Bread and the Newspaper, in great part an 
 analysis of national and individual feelings in time 
 of war: the nervous restlessness, the inability to 
 read the normal things, and so on. " Another most 
 eminent scholar," he says, " told us in all simplicity 
 that he had fallen into such a state that he would 
 read the same telegraphic dispatches over and over 
 again in different papers, as if they were new, until 
 he felt as if he were an idiot." Time has not mod- 
 ified the human mind here; and I noticed in myself 
 a quickened interest in all the references in these 
 essays to England, Germany, or war. New life and 
 force is given to Lowell's remark, 
 
 " Pachydermatous Deutschland, covered with 
 trophies from every field of letters, still winces 
 98 
 
The Essay in America 
 
 under that question which Pere Bouhours put two 
 centuries ago, Si un Allemande pent etre bel- 
 esprit? " 
 
 Lowell did not, however, reserve his investigations 
 for the Germans. A little farther on one comes to a 
 story of an Englishman: 
 
 " During the Civil War an English gentleman of 
 highest description was kind enough to call upon me, 
 mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how entirely he 
 sympathized with the Confederates, and how sure 
 he felt that we would never subdue them — ' they 
 were the gentlemen of the country, you know.' " 
 
 One whole essay is given up to us. It is Irving's 
 John Bull. It is rather sentimental, and his accept- 
 ance of the conventional Bull as the typical English- 
 man would be even less justified now than it was 
 then. But he appends to his description of old 
 manor-houses, old dependants, old wine, portliness, 
 quick anger, ancestral elms, etc., a certain amount 
 of criticism. He had his views on our chronic de- 
 sire (as he sees it) to volunteer our services to set- 
 tle our neighbour's affairs : 
 
 " He cannot hear of a quarrel between the most 
 distant of his neighbours, but he begins incontinently 
 to fumble with the head of his cudgel, and consider 
 whether his interest or honour does not require that 
 he should meddle in the broil. Indeed he has ex- 
 
 99 
 
Books in General 
 
 tended his relations of pride and policy so com- 
 pletely over the whole country, that no event can 
 take place without infringing some of his finely spun 
 rights and dignities. Couched in his little domain, 
 with these filaments stretching forth in every direc- 
 tion, he is like some choleric bottle-bellied old spider, 
 who has woven his web over a whole chamber, so 
 that a fly cannot buzz, nor a breeze blow, without 
 startling his repose, and causing him to sally forth 
 wrathfuUy from his den. 
 
 My country, 'tis of thee! But 'tis affectionately 
 spoken. 
 
 lOO 
 
The Prices of Restoration 
 Books 
 
 A YEAR or two ago, when discussing book- 
 auction prices, I suggested that sixteenth 
 and early seventeenth century books had 
 now been so thoroughly explored, and had reached 
 such high prices, that collectors would be driven on 
 to the Restoration and Queen Anne and Georgian 
 periods. You have to pay many pounds for a good 
 copy of any minor Elizabethan versifier, your Her- 
 rick may cost you £130, and the market has been so 
 thoroughly ransacked for these early books that the 
 excitement of the chase has almost disappeared from 
 their collection. I also pointed out that the work 
 of scholarship on authors from Spenser and Mar- 
 lowe to Suckling and Vaughan had been pretty 
 thoroughly done, although no doubt many puzzles 
 remain unsolved and there is still ample room for 
 the operations of the textual critic. Scholars, 
 therefore, as well as collectors, must inevitably be 
 pushed onwards to another period — a period, no 
 doubt, poor in the highest classes of literary produc- 
 tion, but still interesting and offering an enormous 
 field for research. Mr. P. J. Dobell has apparently 
 come to similar conclusions: his recent catalogue of 
 Poetical and Dramatic Literature produced between 
 
 lOI 
 
Books in General 
 
 the years 1660 and 1700 is the first attempt I have 
 seen to cover the field. " I do not think," he says, 
 " any work exists from which a general view of the 
 activities of the poets and playrights of the last 
 forty years of the seventeenth century can be, ob- 
 tained." His catalogue is an endeavour to provide 
 such a work. It has, obviously, one great limita- 
 tion. Like that old, but still useful, book Anglo- 
 Poetica, it is a bookseller's catalogue. That is, 
 nothing can be included unless Mr. Dobell has a copy 
 for sale. Even so almost every author of any im- 
 portance appears, and the twelve hundred " titles " 
 include a large number of rare and obscure works. 
 There are a few conspicuous omissions; as, for in- 
 stance, that mysterious and passionate Ephelia about 
 whom Mr. Gosse wrote an essay long ago; and 
 Philip Ayres, who may be regarded as the very last 
 of the Elizabethans and published a volume called 
 Lyric Poems in 1687. But Ephelia is a rare author, 
 as, having vainly looked for a copy of her works for 
 years, I have reason to know. If a complete list of 
 missing editions were to be compiled it would be 
 many times longer than Mr. Dobell's. Neverthe- 
 less, his catalogue will be of immense use as a sup- 
 plement to the, in this department, very inadequate 
 Lowndes. 
 
 There is no room here for a detailed examination 
 of the catalogue. Many of the books here priced 
 may still, by the lucky, be bought at considerably 
 lower prices than Mr. Dobell's, simply owing to the 
 102 
 
The Prices of Restoration Books 
 
 sluggishness hitherto of both dealers and buyers. 
 But considering that he is establishing a market, and 
 has had the very great labour of making and an- 
 notating this catalogue, his prices as a whole seem to 
 me extremely reasonable, and far lower than they 
 can possibly be a few years hence. One of the 
 " items " he stars is a series of papers relative to 
 Dryden's translation of Virgil, mostly in the hand- 
 writing of his publisher, Jacob Tonson. " These 
 papers are of the highest importance, and necessary 
 in making any calculations as to the amount of money 
 Dryden earned by his translation " ; and Mr. Dobell 
 asks £40 for them. I confess that to me they are 
 not highly important, but any one who is tempted to 
 think that such things do not matter should reflect 
 on the price that would be asked and given for sim- 
 ilar papers relating to the transactions between 
 Shakespeare, or Mr. W. H., or some person un- 
 known, and Mr, T. Thorpe. Most of the books 
 are priced in the neighbourhood of a pound or two ; 
 some are cheaper and a few are already expensive. 
 Lord Orrery's posthumous Poems on Most of the 
 Festivals of the Church (" From the peculiar type 
 used it has been suggested that this volume was 
 printed and set up at Cork ") is going for £5. A 
 second edition of Brome's Songs and Other Poems 
 (1664) is priced at six guineas; and the same 
 amount is asked for James Carkesse's Lucida Inter- 
 valla (written from Bedlam, 1679), of which Mr. 
 Wheatley could not find a perfect copy. Four 
 guineas is asked for a slightly defective first edition 
 
 103 
 
Books in General 
 
 of Congreve's The Old Batchelour; six guineas for 
 a first edition of Annus Mirabilis; and seven or eight 
 guineas for other works by Dryden, of whom Mr. 
 Dobell's collection is remarkably comprehensive. 
 A second edition of Farquhar's The Recruiting Of- 
 ficer (recently performed by the Stage Society) is 
 priced at six guineas; and eight guineas is the price 
 of a first edition of Flatman's Poems. Flatman, 
 unknown to the general reader, has a rather 
 strange vogue in the auction room; his most amusing 
 effort is a description of his distaste for an active 
 part in warfare. The most notable book offered, 
 however, is a (supposedly unique) copy of Mar- 
 veil's Miscellaneous Poems, 1681, first recorded 
 eleven years ago. " All other known copies of the 
 book collate irregularly, some of the sheets not hav- 
 ing their full numbers of leaves, and until the dis- 
 covery of this copy no explanation of the irregular- 
 ity was forthcoming, but it is now evident that sup- 
 pressions were made! whilst the book was passing 
 through the press. The missing leaves of the ordi- 
 nary copies, as they appear here, contain the three 
 poems relating to Oliver Cromwell, including the 
 famous ' Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return 
 from Ireland.' It had always been supposed that 
 this ode was not printed until 1776, when it ap- 
 peared in the edition edited by Captain Thompson." 
 Thompson destroyed his manuscript, and the pres- 
 ent volume is the only external authority for the 
 authenticity of the poem. Mr. Dobell asks £275 
 for it, and it ought to go to the British Museum. 
 104 
 
The Prices of Restoration Books 
 
 There is a great field open for editors. The 
 manuscripts of the period have not been thor- 
 oughly read; and many charming things probably 
 remain to be discovered and published. The nu- 
 merous miscellanies have never been properly ex- 
 amined with an eye to ascription of their contents 
 — though here and there (as in the case of Mrs. 
 Behn, who was recently admirably edited by Mr. 
 Montagu Summers) an editor has ransacked them 
 with his eye on a single author. Most even of the 
 principal writers have not been properly edited: 
 even of Dryden no one has collated the early edi- 
 tions. The various volumes and editions of the 
 (often grossly misnamed) " State Poems " would 
 alone give a conscientious editor years of work. 
 The song books (of which the not-yet-adequately- 
 studied Pills to Purge Melancholy is the prince, and 
 the type) contain masses of songs, some new, some 
 traditional, some jingles, some beautiful poetry, of 
 which the texts require purification or the authorship 
 remains to be determined. As one turns Mr. Do- 
 bell's pages one notices the names of authors un- 
 known to any previous compiler; but one notices still 
 more frequently names to which scholarship has not 
 yet done justice. I turn, for instance, to William 
 Walsh. I see that Mr. Dobell offers, for 5s. each, 
 two copies of Walsh's Funeral Elegy upon the 
 death of Queen Mary (1695) ; and, for 30s., four 
 handwritten transcripts of The Golden Age Re- 
 triev'd, or the 4th Eclogue of Virgil translated. 
 The manuscripts give, apparently, a better text than 
 
 105 
 
Books in General 
 
 that printed. Neither of these works is of stupen- 
 dous interest. But Walsh wrote two of the most 
 delightful things of his time, and even when he is 
 writing most nearly to the general current man- 
 ner he retains his individuality. The only attempts 
 at a collected edition of him with which I am ac- 
 quainted are a very bad eighteenth century one and 
 an early nineteenth century one directly cribbed 
 from it. His " output " was small, though research 
 may still add a few pieces to those which are known. 
 But he is well worth editing; and, even if he weren't, 
 they will simply have to edit him when they have 
 done with his predecessors and major contempo- 
 raries. Here are some of the essential materials 
 going in Mr. Dobell's shop for a few shillings. I 
 think I shall have to edit him myself. 
 
 io6 
 
The Humours of Hymnology 
 
 THERE was once an amusing article on the 
 humours of hymnology in the New Wit- 
 ness. It was written by Mr. T. M. Pope 
 and he had collected some strange freaks. Dr. 
 Watts, it appears, began one of his children's hymns 
 with " 'Tis dangerous to provoke a God "; and ob- 
 served in another that there was no sight on earth 
 so fair as death: 
 
 Not all the gay pageants that breathe 
 Can with a dead body compare. 
 
 But possibly the most finished of his examples was 
 that celebrating the virtues of four saints in one 
 stanza : 
 
 Ever constant in our aims, 
 Like St. Philip and St. James: 
 Always striving to be good, 
 Like St. Simon and St. Jude? 
 
 As an essay in compressed hagiology this could 
 not easily be equalled. 
 
 It is an entertaining subject. Clergymen will 
 often talk about it; there is an indefinable flavour 
 of harmless, indirect blasphemy about it. But there 
 
 107 
 
Books in General 
 
 are places where you can find appalling hymns not 
 in single spies but in battalions. Revivalist hymn- 
 books and those of eccentric sects are always worth 
 inspection. One of the worst on record is that used 
 by the followers of Joanna Southcott. I have a 
 copy dated 1804. The title-page, headed "The 
 Song of Moses and the Lamb," describes it as " An 
 Hymn Book for the Sealed Number or, the Millen- 
 nium-Church, collected from the Writings of Joanna 
 Southcott, the Woman Clothed with the Sun." Un- 
 derneath is a note, unaffectedly prefaced with 
 " N.B.," saying that " Her writings are the leaves 
 of the Tree of Life, for the healing of the Na- 
 tions " ; and a further statement, backed by the 
 authority of Revelations, that " no man could learn 
 that Song, but the 144,000, who were redeemed 
 from the Earth." Personally I should not greatly 
 care to learn it, even though the editors candidly 
 admit that they have made " a few necessary altera- 
 tions, as the metres did require it." They cor- 
 rected cautiously, however, as they held that " every 
 line in this Hymn-Book is true, and not the least in- 
 ferior to the Bible, particularly to the Psalms of 
 David; yea far superior, and exceeds them." 
 
 Joanna's style may be exemplified by the assur- 
 ance that men will never attain to glory until they 
 recognize her divine mission and penitently 
 
 With the woman do agree 
 
 To take the fruit held out by she. 
 
 108 
 
The Humours of Hymnology 
 
 To this use of pronoun she was addicted; another 
 instance is 
 
 The blades that I have call'd be wheat, 
 Are those that judge the calling great, 
 That they from Satan shall be free, 
 And Pharaoh was a type of he. 
 
 Occasionally she is; like most mystics, obscure : 
 
 To warn their friend of ev'ry truth they know, 
 'Tis plain I did for them, the truth is so 
 And so the bread is on the waters cast, 
 And like thy uncle now the Jews will burst. 
 
 And almost invariably she has to labour hard to 
 express herself. A good example is: 
 
 Then as a sparrow on the house. 
 Thou say'st thou stand'st alone. 
 
 And with thee to assisting oft. 
 
 The Lord well know'th thou'st none. 
 
 It is not an improvement on the original image. 
 
 This comparison of David (or another) with the 
 sparrow is a favourite stumbling-block. It supplies 
 one of the best passages in the extraordinary met- 
 rical version of the Psalms which, allowed in the 
 eighteenth century by the Authority of the General 
 Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, is still, I believe, 
 appointed to be sung in Scottish Congregations and 
 Families. When originally issued the version was 
 
 109 
 
Books in General 
 
 announced to be " more plain, smooth, and agree- 
 able to the Text than any heretofore." The spar- 
 row passage runs : 
 
 / like an owl in desart am, 
 
 That nightly there doth moan. 
 
 I watch, and like a sparrow am 
 On the house-top alone. 
 
 which may be agreeable to the text but is scarcely 
 so to the reader. The normal couTse of this great 
 hymnal might be shown by its transformation of By 
 the Waters of Biabylon, which proceeds evenly to 
 a perfect close with: 
 
 Yea, happy shall he he, 
 
 Thy tender little ones 
 Who shall lay hold upon, and them 
 
 Shall dash against the stones. 
 
 This is what the translator had the impudence to 
 call smooth. 
 
 no 
 
A Dreadful Story 
 
 MRS. HUMPHRY WARD in her remi- 
 niscences tells one of the world's most 
 horrible stories. In the eighteen-thirties 
 a Spaniard (who later on was a friend of hers) 
 was hunting for Spanish MSS for Sir Thomas 
 Phillipps. He knew at that time nothing about 
 English books. In a palace at Valladolid he found 
 a friend 
 
 " in the old library of the old house, engaged in a 
 work of destruction. On the floor of the long room 
 was a large brasero, in which the new librarian was 
 burning up a quantity of what he described as use- 
 less and miscellaneous books. . . . There was a 
 pile of old books whose turn had not yet come lying 
 on the floor. Gayangos picked one up. It was a 
 volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shake- 
 speare, and published in 1623. In other words, it 
 was a copy of the First Folio, and, as he declared 
 to me, in excellent preservation. . . . The book had 
 belonged to Count Gondomar; ... its margins 
 were covered with notes in a seventeeth century 
 hand." 
 
 When he reached England he told Sir Thomas and 
 J. O. Halliwell (-Phillipps). They were both 
 
 III 
 
Books in General 
 
 wildly excited. Gondomar was Ambassador in 
 London in Shakespeare's day; the notes were prob- 
 ably his; anything might be in them. Gondomar 
 had possibly set down all the memories of the plays 
 he had seen acted, and perhaps all sorts of informa- 
 tion about Shakespeare. Gayangos was hurried 
 back to Spain. But when he got to Valladolid the 
 book was gone. 
 
 One really well-annotated copy might save us a 
 lot of trouble. It was improbable, however, that 
 annotations by a Spaniard would do one of the most 
 important things — i.e., settle which of the doubtful 
 plays and passages Shakespeare wrote. In a me- 
 morial addressed by the Irish Nationalists to Presi- 
 dent Wilson it was alleged that even the greatest of 
 Englishmen was so congenltally unfair towards 
 other nations that In Henry VI. he wrote in a brutal 
 and blackguardedly way about Joan of Arc. The 
 political relevance of this I will not discuss, nor its 
 tact. But its imbecility as a literary judgment I do 
 feel competent to mention. In the first place, the 
 very objectionableness of the sentiments would dem- 
 onstrate to any unprejudiced person who knows his 
 Shakespeare that Shakespeare could not possibly 
 have written this part of the play. However little 
 we know about Shakespeare, we know he was 
 neither cruel nor a bigot nor a cad. He could no 
 more have written the whole of this play than 
 George Meredith could have done so. That, how- 
 ever, may be considered a matter of opinion, and cer- 
 114 
 
A Dreadful Story 
 
 tainly we are not accustomed to settle questions of 
 authorship by testing moral atmospheres. But these 
 ignorant manifestants, in their heat, did not even 
 attempt to discover whether there was the slightest 
 ground for supposing that Shakespeare wrote the 
 play. Had they remembered that even people with 
 a just grievance have a duty of verifying their 
 charges, however irrelevant, they would have found 
 that for indisputable textual reasons it was long ago 
 decided that Shakespeare had nothing to do with 
 Joan of Arc. The universality of that judgment is 
 notorious; but one may as well give chapter and 
 verse. I may quote Sir Sidney Lee : 
 
 " At the most generous computation no more than 
 300 out of the 2,600 lines of the First Part (of 
 Henry VI.) bear the impress of Shakespeare's style. 
 . . . The lifeless beat of the verse and the crudity 
 of the language conclusively deprive Shakespeare of 
 all responsibility for the brutal scenes travesting the 
 story of Joan of Arc which the author of the first 
 part of Henry VI. somewhat slavishly drew from 
 Holinshed." 
 
 According to Mr. Fleay the play " is evidently 
 written by several hands," and Shakespeare merely 
 added a little after it had been given to the man- 
 ager. Hte thought that Marlowe, Peele, Lodge and 
 Greene botched it up together. Coleridge, in his 
 Notes of 18 18, told us to read first a few passages 
 even from Shakespeare's earliest dramas, and then a 
 
 113 
 
Books in General 
 
 speech from Act I., Sc. i, of Henry VI., Part I. 
 " Read," he says, In words which I commend to Mr. 
 John Dillon, 
 
 " In the same way this speech, with especial attention 
 to the metre ; and if you do not feel the Impossibility 
 of the latter having been written by Shakespeare, all 
 I dare to suggest Is, that you may have ears — for so 
 has another animal — but an ear you cannot have, 
 me judice." 
 
 Dowden, of whom, since he was a Professor, in 
 Dublin, Mr. Dillon and his colleagues may have 
 heard, when arranging Shakespeare's plays, boldly 
 put Henry VI. In the " Pre-Shakesperian Group." 
 
 Hazlitt remarks, by the way, that Joan was even 
 more scurvlly treated In Voltaire's La Pucelle. Vol- 
 taire was not an Englishman, or an Orangeman, or 
 an oppressor of small nationalities. 
 
 114 
 
Dr. Donne's Tomb 
 
 I HAD made a reference to " theological book- 
 sellers who cater for clergymen and regard 
 Donne primarily not as John Donne, but as the 
 Dean of St. Paul's." Two days afterwards I met a 
 soldier in the streets who talked about this. He 
 said that he thought Dr. Inge had points of resem- 
 blance to Donne and was an original and remarkable 
 man. I agreed with this. He then said that he had 
 never seen Donne's tomb and effigy; I said that I 
 knew it only from reproductions. We thought we 
 would go there. We began to walk. It began to 
 rain. We stopped a taxi. I said: "St. Paul's 
 Cathedral, please," and the driver gaped. My com- 
 panion then said: " Don't you know where it is? " 
 and the driver's mouth closed up and expanded hori- 
 zontally. So off we went, quite a happy party. 
 
 Had I the space, the inclinations and the talents 
 of the realistic novelist, I should go on with this lei- 
 surely detail. I should indicate the colour of the 
 cabman's nose (though perhaps you can guess that), 
 the amount of paper on the cathedral steps, the dis- 
 positions of the pigeons, the bleachings and black- 
 enings on pillars and walls, the dress, attitudes and 
 banal remarks of the people who emerged as we 
 went in, the sounds made by various footsteps, the 
 
 115, 
 
Books in General 
 
 light streaming through various windows, and the 
 probable occupations and domestic infelicities of the 
 persons who, scattered about the rows of chairs, 
 were awaiting the opening of the four o'clock, service. 
 But this is impossible. Compression is essential, 
 and all these things must be left to the imagination. 
 For me, I must hurry on with my story, if story it be. 
 
 We went up the south aisle and drew blank; there 
 were some terrible monuments which should cer- 
 tainly join the great majority in Westminster Abbey. 
 We then tried the north aisle. We wondered why 
 Alfred Stevens had put his powerful equestrian 
 statue of the Duke of Wellington so high that no one 
 could see it. We remarked that there was one sen- 
 tence on the tomb of Gordon (that about his remain- 
 ing at Khartoum) which, like many lapidary inscrip- 
 tions, did not tell the whole truth. We thought that 
 the tomb of Lord Leighton, though not a master- 
 piece, illustrated the enormous advance made by 
 modern academic work as against eighteenth century 
 academic work. We then reached the end of the 
 aisle and found a group of vergers. They were 
 white-haired and wrinkled; their black gowns and 
 long silver crooks inspired a respect which verged on 
 fear. The conversation that followed showed that 
 theological booksellers and their customers are not 
 the only people who think of Donne as primarily a 
 divine : 
 
 " ' Could you tell us where the tomb of John 
 Donne is? ' 
 ii6 
 
Dr. Donne's Tomb 
 
 "'Who?' ^ 
 
 " ' John Donne; Dean Donne.' 
 
 '" Oh ;£)e«M Donne!'" 
 
 They lifted a little red rope from its support, 
 showed us across and let us into the aisle at the south 
 of the choir. There, in a dark place flat against the 
 wall, it stood : the only monument in Old St. Paul's, 
 I think, which escaped the great Fire of London. 
 He stands, with his hands folded and the shroud 
 covering him from head to foot; his intense, sardonic 
 face, with its eyes closed, looks out from his hood 
 and is the only thing of him that shows. It is a 
 queer, stark, frozen thing; there is no beauty about 
 it, but a force that makes everything else in the Ca- 
 thedral seem dead. The sculptor was not a great ar- 
 tist ; but he must have been under the spell of Donne 
 when he made it. I think it is in Isaak Walton's 
 Life that one reads the story of Donne's prepara- 
 tions for that effigy; how he rose from his sick-bed, 
 had braziers lit all about his great room at the Dean- 
 ery, and stood upon an urn in that attitude of death 
 whilst a painter sketched him. On that painting the 
 statue in St. Paul's was presumably based. But not 
 entirely. The folds of the drapery are the folds 
 into which a recumbent man's would fall. It ap- 
 pears, therefore, that the sculptor used a recumbent 
 model for his drapery; he may have intended his ef- 
 figy to lie flat along a tomb, as effigies usually do ; for 
 all I know (though here I may have some antiquary 
 correcting me) the effigy did lie flat at first, and was 
 
 117 
 
Books in General 
 
 never erect until Wren had built his new Cathedral. 
 At all events there it is; cold in a quiet corner; and 
 both by its coldness and its strength very out of keep- 
 ing with its surroundings. " Out of keeping " is a 
 weak phrase. In that great, complacent, Italianate 
 building, which looks so much smaller than it is, a 
 building designed with skill but no inspiration, lack- 
 ing all mystery, all fervour, all sense of the fierceness 
 of life, the terror and the importance of death, the 
 insistence of a surrounding eternity, the power or the 
 love or the beauty of God, this small, crinkled statue 
 is like a word of challenge or rebuke, and of lordly 
 derision. No place but a Gothic building would 
 properly hold it ; and it is seemly that that should be 
 so with a statue of Dean Donne. He was, in some 
 ways, a child of the Renaissance : he had Its learning, 
 its curiosity, and, in youth, its swagger and its reck- 
 lessness. But still more he had affinity with the 
 scholars of the Middle Ages in whom he was pro- 
 foundly read ; and that affinity is never more strongly 
 realized than when one is reading his Sermons with 
 their passionate, tortuous extravagant logic and their 
 towering caverns of gloom shot with unearthly fire. 
 Donne's brain was the strangest and most elaborate 
 Gothic building ever seen on earth. 
 
 ii8 
 
Russian Wit 
 
 I HAVE just been reading a little book, Russian 
 Proverbs and their English Equivalents, by 
 Louis Segal, published by Kegan Paul. The 
 editor quotes Bacon's remark: "The genius, wit, 
 and spirit of a nation are discovered by its proverbs." 
 I append a few selected ones in order that my read- 
 ers may have an opportunity of defining the genius, 
 wit, and spirit of the Russians : 
 
 " Curled cows have short horns. 
 
 "Men meet whilst hills stand still. 
 
 " Kings have long arms and many eyes and ears. 
 
 " Beware of the fore part of an ox, the hind part 
 of a mule, and all sides of a monk. 
 
 " Hawks do not pick out hawks' eyes. 
 
 " The ocean is but knee-deep to a drunken man. 
 
 " An unfortunate man would be drowned in a tea- 
 cup. 
 
 " A bad arrangement is preferable to the best law- 
 suit. 
 
 " God is too high and the Tsar is too far away. 
 
 " The world is large enough to contain all the peo- 
 ple." 
 
 These are good. But I think the best proverb I 
 ever struck was an African negro one. It says: 
 " No man can lick his own back." How true that is I 
 
 119 
 
The Goncourt Journal in 
 English 
 
 POLITICAL events affect the manner in which 
 one reads books. I have been reading the 
 late Julius West's English courageous abridg- 
 ment of the Journal des Goncourt, published by Nel- 
 son's at the absurdly low price of a shilling. It is the 
 most diverting of modern literary memoirs. In Jules 
 de Goncourt's diary from 1851 to his death in 1870, 
 and in Edmond's continuation from that year 
 until the 'nineties, one has a long panorama of 
 social and political life in Paris during the second 
 half of the nineteenth century. Almost every prom- 
 inent Frenchman of the time is sketched in the book; 
 every movement is reflected in it; there are endless 
 witty stories and phrases ; and there is also the auto- 
 biography of two extremely interesting men. Yet, 
 looking at it just now, one finds one's eyes glued to 
 every casual statement the diarists made or recorded 
 about national characteristics or about war. Such 
 statements are very numerous in Mr. West's selec- 
 tion; and the part of the journal most fully repre- 
 sented is that which covers the Franco-German War, 
 and especially the siege of Paris, which Edmond de- 
 scribed with the eagerness of a journalist and the de- 
 tachment of an artist. That detachment was never 
 120 
 
The Goncourt Journal in English 
 
 more marked than during the siege : detachment, that 
 is, from the life of action, and the feelings of those 
 around him — not from the physiological influence 
 of external events. There are many authors at this 
 moment who will find their own state anticipated in 
 this, for example : 
 
 "October 15th, 1870. I live on myself. I can 
 only exchange my views for some as little varied as 
 my own; I only read news of a wretched war; I can 
 only find in the newspapers the eternal repetition of 
 these defeats they call ' reconnaissances on the 
 offensive ' ; I am driven from the Boulevards by the 
 forced economy of gas; I can no longer enjoy a noc- 
 turnal life in this city where everybody goes to bed 
 early. I can read nothing. I cannot dwell in the 
 pure realm of thought because of the lowering of 
 that thought by the poverty of its food ; I lack the 
 new, and I vegetate in this brutal and monstrous 
 thing — war. The Parisian in Paris is overcome 
 by a boredom that is like the boredom of a provin- 
 cial town." 
 
 We hear a great deal of the discussion inside the 
 town. We find him dining at Brebant's with Berthe- 
 lot, Saint-Victor, Renan, and others on September 
 6th, 1870. Defeat has been overwhelming; resist- 
 ance is hopeless: 
 
 " We curse that Prussian savagery which Genseric 
 is starting again. 
 
 " On this Renan says: * The Germans have few 
 
 121 
 
Books in General 
 
 joys in life, and the greatest one they know they put 
 into hating; into the thought and the perpetration of 
 vengeance.' " 
 
 Two months later Bismarck is compared with Attila. 
 The ferocity and boorishness of Germans, indeed, is a 
 recurring theme. Here is an entry of April 17th, 
 1877: 
 
 " We were talking about the implacability of the 
 Germans; of the impossibility of speaking to the 
 humanity of these men, so reserved and so inaccessi- 
 ble. Cherbuliez tells us that we are wrong, that the 
 Teutons have a quarter of an hour when they may 
 make concessions ; it Is the quarter of an hour which 
 slips past between dessert after dinner and the tenth 
 whiff of a cigar." 
 
 The last entry of the sort is dated 1890: 
 
 " This young German Emperor, this neurotic 
 mystic, this enthusiast for the religious and warlike 
 operas of Wagner, this man, who, in his dreams, 
 wears the white armour of Parsifal, with his sleepless 
 nights, his sickly activity, his feverish brain, seems to 
 be a monarch who will be very troublesome in the 
 future." 
 
 A few years ago one would have skimmed all these 
 passages ; now they stick out of the page. 
 
 Not that de Goncourt was particularly apprecia- 
 122 
 
The Goncourt Journal in English 
 
 tive of any nation — even his own, which at times 
 appeared to him as a noisy rabble that made the lives 
 of civilized men intolerable. But whereas the Ger- 
 mans are regarded as abominable, the others appear 
 to be rather comic. As light upon his conception of 
 Englishmen we get this (1874) : 
 
 "I am in a compartment of Englishmen, and I 
 saw seven of them simultaneously wind up their 
 watches. It was done so mechanically, so automati- 
 cally, that it nearly frightened me, and I fled into an- 
 other compartment." 
 
 But " when these Englishmen set out to be origi- 
 nal, they do so in a much more striking manner than 
 other Europeans." And early in Jules's diary we find 
 this country held up by two distinguished men as the 
 home of liberty and diffused culture as against bour- 
 geois, philistine, police-ridden France. Taine ob- 
 serves that French literary influence is declining, and 
 that only English authors are read. He 
 
 " talks about the absence of an intellectual movement 
 in provincial France, when compared with all the 
 learned societies in English counties and in German 
 towns. He speaks about this overgrown Paris of 
 ours, which absorbs everything, and of the future of 
 France, which, under existing conditions, must end 
 up by a congestion of the brain. Then he goes on 
 to praise England, and is taken up by Sainte-Beuve, 
 who confides to him his disgust at being a French- 
 
 123 
 
Books in General 
 
 man. ' I know what one is told : a Parisian isn't a 
 Frenchman, he is a Parisian; but one is French all the 
 same, which means one is nothing at all ... a 
 country where there are policemen everywhere . . . 
 I wish I were English ; an Englishman is at any rate 
 somebody.' " 
 
 This will read oddly to those English people who 
 think that every man who can write French is a 
 genius, and that Paris is, and always has been, the 
 centre of the world. 
 
 The Journal is so rich in detail that six pages of 
 extracts would scarcely give an idea of it to a reader 
 unfamiliar with it. We grow intimate, through the 
 de Goncourts, with men like Daudet and Zola, whom 
 we follow from the penury in which (an aspirant to 
 epic poetry) he lived as a youth, luxuriating in a grey 
 pessimism and pawning his shirt to buy food, until 
 the days when, still discontented, he was the " larg- 
 est seller " in France. And we get glimpses of hun- 
 dreds of others, from Baudelaire, with his " studied 
 elegance " and his " voice that cuts like steel " to 
 Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, and President 
 Poincare. Theophile Gautier, during the siege of 
 Paris, has to wear braces for the first time in his life, 
 owing to the attrition of his abdomen, which had pre- 
 viously " done the needful " in the way of support. 
 Maupassant, going mad, has no book but the Alma- 
 nack de Gotha on his table. Wilde, a young poet, 
 turns up and astonishes the incredulous French by 
 124 
 
The Goncourt Journal in English 
 
 telling the American chestnut about " Do not shoot 
 the conductor, he Is doing his best " ; and the self- 
 contained Flaubert, after visiting a house with a 
 small baby in it, says : " A little thing like that in 
 the house is the only thing in the world that mat- 
 ters I " Jumbled together with the daily records are 
 reflections on everything in heaven and earth: on 
 Mexico, where, if you want to collect an army, you 
 get a brass band to play and lassoo those who collect 
 to hear it; on American dentistry, which may some 
 day, during a financial crisis, lead to a wholesale exca- 
 vation of cemeteries for the sake of countless in- 
 terred gold stoppings ; on British bantams, " little 
 birds who are embarrassed by their leg-feathers and 
 run about looking as troubled as people whose trou- 
 sers are coming down." Through it all runs the 
 thread of personal feeling : the struggle of the broth- 
 ers for success, Edmond's grief for his brother, his 
 literary jealousies, his worries about the censorship, 
 his agonies on first nights, and, at the close, a taste of 
 public recognition — a banquet or two, and an old 
 age full of tender and whimsical memories of boy- 
 hood. Edmond's style is not so concise as Jule's, 
 had not that bite and exactitude; but he wrote with 
 unfailing vividness and charm. The difference of 
 styles comes out in the translation. It is an excellent, 
 free version ; but one may just wish that Mr. West 
 had not spoken of a pavement as a " side-walk." 
 We shall be getting " trolley-car " and " hand-grip " 
 acclimatized next. 
 
 125 
 
Poland and Our Poets 
 
 THE restoration of the integrity and inde- 
 pendence of Poland should stir some Brit- 
 ish dust. A century ago Poland was 
 one of the favourite subjects of our poets, and no 
 alien before or since has been more belauded by our 
 writers than Kosciusko, whose name and fame are 
 now very shadowy for most people. Keats ad- 
 dressed to Kosciusko a sonnet coupling the Pole with 
 King Alfred. It is a very bad sonnet, and one of 
 the most distressing examples I know of sense being 
 made to follow rhyme. Byron, taking Don Juan 
 through Poland, observed that — 
 
 Kosciusko's name 
 Might scatter fire through ice like Hecla's flame. 
 
 And there are other references in the same tradi- 
 tional vein in The Age of Bronze: 
 
 Ye who dwell 
 Where Kosciusko dwelt, remembering yet 
 The unpaid amount of Catherine's bloody debt! 
 Poland! o'er which the avenging angel pass'd 
 But left thee as he found thee, still a waste. 
 Forgetting all thy still enduring claim, 
 Thy lotted people and extinguish' d name, 
 126 
 
Poland and Our Poets 
 
 Thy sigh for freedom, thy long-flowing tear, 
 That sound that crashes in the tyrant's ear — 
 Kosciusko! . . . 
 
 To the young Tennyson Poland's blood was " sacred 
 blood," crying: 
 
 Lord, how long shall these things be. 
 How long this icy-hearted Muscovite 
 Oppress the region? 
 
 But the most fervent and frequent singer of Poland's 
 woes was Thomas Campbell, who. was continually 
 writing metrical leading articles on our foreign 
 policy. His Lines on Poland (1831) are typical: 
 
 .... Poles! with what indignation I endure 
 The half-pitying servile mouths that call you poor. 
 Poor! is it England mocks you with her grief. 
 That hates, but dares not chide, the Imperial Thief? 
 France, with her soul beneath a Bourbon's thrall? 
 And Germany that has no soul at all? 
 States, quailing at the giant overgrown. 
 Whom dauntless Poland grapples with alone? 
 No, ye are rich in fame even whilst ye bleed. 
 We cannot aid you — we are poor indeed. . . . 
 
 Parts of this poem are amongst the finest things 
 Campbell wrote. That cannot be said of anything 
 in his drastic The Power of Russia, in which he ar- 
 gued that the conquest of Poland " the last land of 
 heroes," would be followed up: 
 
 127 
 
Books in General 
 
 Russia that on his throne of adamant 
 
 Consults what nation's breast shall be next gored, 
 He on Polonia's Golgotha will plant 
 
 His standard fresh; and horde succeeding horde, 
 On patriot tombstones he will whet the sword 
 
 For more stupendous slaughters of the free, 
 Then Europe's realms, when their best blood is 
 poured. 
 
 Shall miss thee, Poland! as they bend the knee; 
 All — all in grief, but none in glory, likening thee. 
 
 In Campbell's view the " Russ " was made of na- 
 ture's basest clay, and quite beyond redemption. 
 His address to Sir Francis Burdett, who in 1832 
 strongly expressed the below-gangway view on for- 
 eign policy, anticipates much that has been written 
 by opponents of the Russian Entente in the last few 
 years. Trafalgar Square has never outdone the 
 vigour of this: 
 
 Burdett, demand why Britons send abroad 
 Soft greetings to the infanticidal Czar, 
 The Bear on Poland's babes that wages war. 
 
 Once, we are told, a, mother's shriek o'erawed 
 A lion, and he dropped her lifted child: 
 
 But Nicholas, whom neither God nor law. 
 Nor Poland's shrieking mothers overawe, 
 Outholds to us his friendship' s gory clutch; 
 Shrink, Britain! shrink, my King and country, from 
 
 the touch! 
 128 
 
Poland and Our Poets 
 
 He prays to Heaven for England's King, he says; 
 And dares he to the God of Mercy kneel, 
 Besmeared with massacres from head to heel? 
 
 No; Moloch is his god — to him he prays; 
 
 And if his weird-like prayers had power to 
 bring 
 
 An influence, their power would he to curse. 
 His hate is hateful, hut his love is worse — 
 A serpent's slaver deadlier than its sting! 
 Oh, feeble statesmen, ignominious times. 
 
 That lick the tyrants feet, and smile upon his 
 crimes/ 
 
 Swinburne's sonnet on Poland is better known. 
 
 . . . thy sons long dead 
 Against a foe less foul than this made head, 
 Poland, in years that sound and shine afar; 
 Ere the east beheld in thy bright sword-blade's 
 stead 
 The rotten corpse-light of the Russian star 
 That lights toward hell his bond-slaves and their 
 Czar. 
 
 But this was later than the others, and does not 
 ring quite so colivincingly. 
 
 Misgovernment, crime, infringement of liberty 
 could be found elsewhere and nearer home than in 
 Poland. But the circumstances of Polish subjection 
 were such as: to strike the romantic mind. The 
 partition was so nakedly unscrupulous, the principal 
 
 129 
 
Books in General 
 
 conquerors were a people so remote, so numerous, so 
 wild, and at that time so little known ; and the reck- 
 less courage of the Polish risings were so splendid. 
 Poland's sufferings became the measure of her past 
 virtues, and poets who were aflame at her subjec- 
 tion exaggerated most wildly the glories of her his- 
 tory and the quality of her liberties. In reality 
 Poland, in spite of its occasional feats, was a stand- 
 ing example of discord and ill-government. It was 
 run, as has been said, by a democracy of nobles 
 " which persecuted heretics with the fervour of a 
 medisval king, and ill-treated its serfs after the 
 approved methods of Reginald Front de Boeuf." 
 They were not Campbell's " majestic men " by any 
 means. The Aggression from which their country 
 suffered acted, as Wilde said of literary dialect, as 
 " a means of recreating a past that never existed." 
 Modern bards are more sophisticated. We have 
 lost our political illusions. We may believe in 
 Persian or Finnish freedom, but we do not for that 
 reason regard Finns as the finest people on earth, 
 or pretend that Persia in the past has displayed the 
 united virtues of Athens and Sparta and the vices 
 of neither. 
 
 130 
 
Literature and the Advertiser 
 
 ONE of the worst advertisements I have ever 
 seen is before me. It is headed with a well- 
 known portrait of Keats; chosen possibly 
 because it is the one in which the poet is holding his 
 head, a craamon practice with those who are out of 
 sorts. Tnen follows the advertisement: 
 
 A GREAT POET— 
 AND A GREAT TONIC 
 
 PINK RHOMBOIDS 
 
 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 
 Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes 
 He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
 
 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 
 
 " What a bracing effect there is in such Hnes ! 
 (The pity of it, that the writer died at 25.) They 
 send the blood along the veins with an added glow. 
 Supplement this with Pink Rhomboids, the Reliable 
 Tonic. They enrich the blood and increase the 
 number of your red corpuscles — the Army Service 
 Corps of the body. 
 
 " Supplement this " ! But I will not paint the lily, 
 gild refined gold, or add an odour to the violet. I 
 will merely say that had Mr. Leacock or Messrs. 
 Lucas and Graves composed this advertisement, he 
 
 131 
 
Books in General 
 
 or they would have been told this was one more ex- 
 ample of his or their extravagant, though doubtless 
 amusing, humour. The truth of the matter is, of 
 course, that truth is even more horrible than fiction, 
 which is saying a good deal. 
 
 I do not, of course, suggest that advertisers, who 
 desire tO' make their advertisements attractive, 
 should be debarred from " supplementing " their 
 own efforts at composition with extracts from great 
 writers. For the relevant extract no apology is 
 needed: if a tobacco firm advertises its wares with a 
 remark from Charles Lamb that tobacco is the young 
 man's inspiration and the old man's consolation, or 
 one from Burton or Sir W. Raleigh to the effect 
 that this " weede did much solace and gratifie mee 
 whenas I did finde myselfe full of an atrabilious and 
 melancholique humour," nobody can object. Nor 
 can one debar didactic sentences, quotations which are 
 current morahzing coin, from being used here as 
 everywhere else. The first great inventor of the 
 literary advertisement was the late Mr. Eno, or some 
 anonymous expert in his employ, who used to muster 
 to the support of his excellent and (as I think) pal- 
 atable medicine all the sages of all the ages: Soc- 
 rates, Epicurus, Zeno, M. Aurelius, Confucius, 
 Goethe and Emerson. If Emerson or Zeno said, 
 " Virtue is the best path to a long life," or " Early 
 to bed and early to rise," Mr. Eno could certainly 
 not be condemned for giving the truth a wider cur- 
 rency. One would not object to some of Keats being 
 thus employed, as incidental decoration : " A thing 
 132 
 
Literature and the Advertiser 
 
 of beauty is a joy for ever " is the sort of line that 
 can be used anywhere and has nothing in it that will 
 spoil. But not long, beautiful passages, not emo- 
 tional passages, not personal things, wantonly linked 
 to things with which they have no relation, and pro- 
 faned and vulgarized by the contact. If this kind of 
 thing is to be admitted by papers — and it was in 
 a highly respectable Church organ that I saw the 
 Rhomboid effort — there is nothing to protect us 
 from: " Tennyson was a great man. You can tell 
 him by his bald head, his profile, his beard, and his 
 collars. He said: ' I would that my heart could 
 utter the thoughts that arise in me.' What a loss to 
 literature ! Imagine what ' thoughts ' would have 
 been had his heart been able to ' utter ' them. Yet 
 he had nobody but himself to blame for thisf dis- 
 astrous impediment. If he had only taken Jimbo's 
 Pellicules his heart would have been equal to any 
 calls he might have cared to make upon it." Or: 
 " ' Not poppy nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy 
 syrups of the world.' Thus Shakespeare, who cer- 
 tainly at times felt run down and in need of bucking 
 up. But why did he stop the catalogue there? 
 There are syrups which are not opiate and are not 
 ' drowsy ' ; why did he say nothing of Blinkers', the 
 most invigorating syrup in the world?" The uses 
 of somebody's whisky to Adam Cast Forth and the 
 application of somebody's soap to Lady Macbeth's 
 hands offer other possibilities. Are we going to get 
 worse and worse and worse ? Speaking dispassion- 
 ately, I rather think that we are. 
 
 133 
 
Cobbett as Housekeeper 
 
 MR. DOUGLAS PEPLER, of the Hamp- 
 shire House Workshops, Hammersmith, 
 has done a laudably eccentric thing in pub- 
 lishing a reprint of Cobbett's Cottage Economy. 
 For Cobbett is not very widely read in our day, and 
 original editions of most of his hundred or so vol- 
 umes can be picked up for a shilling or two in the 
 second-hand bookshops. Yet he was a great man, 
 and a complete man. His style, at its best, is noble 
 in its rough eloquence and in its complete efficiency 
 for the various uses to which it was put ; he preached 
 the normal life with amazing consistency and force ; 
 and, unlike most persons who are strong on princi- 
 ples, he was a good hand at practical detail. The 
 present work is a cookery book and small-holder's 
 guide. It supplies full, plain, technical instructions 
 for brewing beer, making bread, salting mutton and 
 beef, keeping cows, pigs, bees, geese, ducks, turkeys, 
 fowls, pigeons, rabbits and goats, making illuminants, 
 mustard, clothes, straw-plait and (oddly) ice-houses. 
 But the passion which led him to produce this com- 
 pendium for the agricultural poor bursts through oc- 
 casionally in the hearty dogmatism which is seen, 
 more at large, in such works as his Legacy for Par- 
 sons. He was so pleasantly blunt. When he at- 
 tacks superfluous " book-learning," he says that he 
 objects to It particularly 
 134 
 
Cobbett as Housekeeper 
 
 " in schools over which the parents have no control, 
 and where nothing is taught but the rudiments of 
 servility, pauperism and slavery." 
 
 When giving his instructions about brewing he 
 goes off into a defence of beer as against " liver^burn- 
 ing and palsy-producing spirits " on the one hand, 
 and " tea-messes " on the other. Far more suste- 
 nance is to be got out of beer than from the " corro- 
 sive, gnawing and poisonous " tea (which, in his day, 
 used to be stewed for an hour before drinking), and 
 he illustrates this truth with characteristic concrete- 
 ness: 
 
 " It is impossible for any one to deny the truth of 
 this statement. Put it to the test with a lean hog; 
 give him the fifteen bushels of malt, and he will re- 
 pay you in ten score of bacon or thereabouts. But 
 give him the 730 tea-messes, or rather begin to give 
 them to him, and give him nothing else, and he is 
 dead with hunger, and bequeaths you his skeleton, at 
 the end of about seven days." 
 
 His treatise on keeping pigs is interrupted by a 
 typical diatribe. A paragraph begins with " this 
 hog is altogether a capital thing." In a few lines we 
 reach a denunciation of the poor who have " fallen 
 into the taste of niceness in food and finery in dress; 
 quarter of a bellyful and rags are the consequence " ; 
 and then this is traced to "the system of managing 
 the affairs of the nation " which has made all " flashy 
 and false " : 
 
 135 
 
Books in General 
 
 " Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy, 
 and obscurity, both in speaking and in writing; mock 
 delicacy in manners, mock liberality, mock humanity, 
 and mock religion. Pitt's false money. Peel's flimsy 
 dresses, Wilberforce's potato diet, Castlereagh's and 
 Mackintosh's oratory, Walter Scott's poems, Wal- 
 ter's and Stoddart's paragraphs, with all the bad 
 taste and baseness and hypocrisy which have spread 
 over this country; all have arisen, grown, branched 
 out, bloomed and borne together; and we are now 
 beginning to taste of their fruit." 
 
 It is slightly hyperbolic itself, perhaps; but Cobbett 
 could always give reasons for anything he said, even 
 if they were not always sound reasons. 
 
 The reprint has an introduction by Mr. G. K. 
 Chesterton, who, like his brother and Mr. Hilaire 
 Belloc, has done his best to get Cobbett read by this 
 generation both for his matter and for his man- 
 ner. Mr. Chesterton, in discriminating between 
 Cobbett and Ruskin, makes one rather unjustifiable 
 statement. He suggests (though he admits the 
 charge would be " exaggerative ") that " an unami- 
 able critic might say that Ruskin knew everything 
 about the building of a church except what it is built 
 for." I am more often in agreement with Mr. 
 Chesterton than with Ruskin; but I cannot help re- 
 membering that one of the most eloquent passages 
 Ruskin ever wrote points at length the contrast be- 
 tween an English Cathedral city, where the edifice 
 136 
 
Cobbett as Housekeeper 
 
 still harmonizes with and dominates the feeling of 
 the people, and St. Mark's at Venice, the religious 
 purpose of which is never remembered by the crowd 
 who chatter and hawk their wares around it. 
 
 137 
 
Autography 
 
 SOMEBODY, noticing that I was discussing 
 the prices of books and autographs, writes to 
 tell me that when at school he induced the late 
 Dr. W. G. Grace to sign a postcard portrait. What, 
 he asks, is the market-value of this? I don't know. 
 I should say, subject to correction, that it would not 
 be worth more than a few shillings. Thousands of 
 small boys must have written to Grace for* auto- 
 graphs, and many no doubt got them. This same 
 excessive popularity will, I imagine, militate against 
 the value in posterity's eyes of many of the signatures 
 of the contemporary eminent. The autographs of 
 Miss Edna May, Miss M. Studholme, and Miss Z. 
 Dare, if they acceded to a tenth of the requests made 
 of them, must be enormously plentiful. 
 
 This autograph business is very queer. Letters 
 or inscriptions of any interest signed by any sort of 
 celebrities always have some market value. It is 
 rather strange, therefore, that one does not hear of 
 ruthlessly businesslike persons — I mean private 
 people, not recognized dealers — making systematic 
 collections of MSS. by their own contemporaries. 
 Occasionally one does encounter in the sale-room a 
 letter written by a living man to a living man, and 
 one often sees presentation copies of books which a 
 138 
 
Autography 
 
 living author has given to a living friend. There 
 are, therefore, it seems, persons who are not too timid 
 to sell people's autograph communications to them- 
 selves with the writer's full knowledge. The sort of 
 speculator I have in mind would not need to do any- 
 thing so bold as that. All he would do would be to 
 lay in autographs as wine-merchants lay in wines, and 
 let them mature until the writers are dead. There 
 are numbers of persons living from whom a man of 
 any astuteness could elicit letters, whose MSS. after 
 they are dead will be as valuable as those of the 
 "Great Victorians" are now; and the more exten- 
 sive the speculator's net the more certain he will be 
 of getting a return. One can conceive a large cellar 
 of modern autographs of which some would mature 
 every year thus bringing in to its owner a quite reg- 
 ular income. A man with a large acquaintance 
 amongst authors and a mind of the " real-politik " 
 tj^e could do the thing at the cost of a very few 
 hours' labour a week. 
 
 139 
 
A Forgotten Caroline 
 
 IN America today literary research is being con- 
 ducted on a scale unparalleled in the world's 
 history. In countless universities countless pro- 
 fessors and aspirants to the doctorate are writing 
 treatises or editing old books. A good deal of the 
 work produced is amusingly pedantic and purpose- 
 less. People will write long theses on Ten Solilo- 
 quies of Marlowe Contrasted and Compared or The 
 Use of the Infinitive in Pope's Homer. But often 
 these books put readers of poetry deeply in the debt 
 of American scholarship. Among such is Miss 
 Eloise Robinson's edition of Beaumont, which is pub- 
 lished under the auspices of the Department of Eng- 
 lish Literature at Wellesley College. 
 
 Joseph Beaumont, who was born in 1616 and died 
 in 1699, was a member of that group of poets of 
 which Crashaw, Vaughan, and Traherne are more 
 celebrated members. A High Church clergyman, 
 he was expelled from his fellowship at Cambridge 
 under the Commonwealth, returned to the Univer- 
 sity after the Restoration, and ended his life as Mas- 
 ter of Peterhouse. His long poem Psyche was re- 
 printed by Grosart, who also reprinted the selection 
 from his minor poems first issued in 1749. But the 
 140 
 
A Forgotten Caroline 
 
 majority of his minor poems, which exist in an MS. 
 owned by Professor G. H. Palmer, of Harvard, have 
 never before been printed. Miss Robinson has now 
 made the whole of them accessible; and she has 
 added bibliographical and critical introductions 
 which leave nothing to be desired. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that the discovery of these 
 poems is anything like as important as was that of 
 Traherne's. A great deal of the interest of Beau- 
 mont's poetry lies in the sidelight it throws on the 
 general literary tendencies of the day and on the 
 work of his greater contemporaries in particular. 
 His subject-matter was theirs; his opinions were 
 theirs; his phraseology was largely theirs; but com- 
 parison of his work with that of Crashaw and 
 Vaughan shows how differently men of differing 
 powers will work with the same materials. He will 
 address St. Teresa, but not with Crashaw's passion; 
 he will muse upon eternity, but not with Vaughan's 
 vision ; and the stock classical allusions to the. Phoe- 
 nix (say) or to Arabia, which greater poets could use 
 a hundred times, yet always with freshness, are with 
 him stock allusions and nothing more. All the faults 
 they had Beaumont had in double measure. Most 
 of his poems did not spring from the imagination; 
 his method rather was to seize any event or story 
 that happened-to catch his eye and batter his brains 
 for a spiritual analogy for it. His imagery was 
 sometimes most ludicrously laboured. " Whilst I," 
 he writes on his birthday (only his 32nd) , 
 
 141 
 
Books in General 
 
 behinde Me cast my annual Ey, 
 What do I but my Sodome spy! 
 
 O lamentable sight 
 
 Which justly might 
 
 Not fix me in a pile of Salt, 
 
 But all my guilty Essence melt 
 Into a flood of Pcenitence, whose Tide 
 
 Might drown that which is gone, 
 
 And let me safely on 
 Its back unto the shore of this Year ride. 
 
 The Leviathan, which wrenched from Vaughan 
 his phrase " the comely spacious whale," led Beau- 
 mont to an equally unfortunate effort: 
 
 Thy Prophet Thou didst summon from 
 
 His living Tombe, 
 Where twice-devoured He, 
 Lay drowned both in the Whale, and Sea. 
 
 His image of the Lord of Light passing through 
 " His chrystall Mothers wombe " leaving her " in- 
 tirely whole " exactly anticipates an image that Gib- 
 bon invented to ridicule the Virgin Birth, and when 
 he set for " a Base and 2 Trebles " a lilt beginning: 
 
 Fond Syllogismes, in vaine 
 
 You arme your Propositions Three 
 
 Against Religious Trinitie. 
 
 And proceeding to discuss the " Angles in the Eter- 
 142 
 
A Forgotten Caroline 
 
 nail Trigon " he was certainly writing for an age 
 rather than for all time. A great deal of his verse 
 is not even quaint like this ; but much of it is interest- 
 ing and some of the shorter lyrics are really beauti- 
 ful. The Relapse, The Evening Hymn, The Morn- 
 ing Hymn, The Alarm, Games, The Duel, The Gen- 
 tle Check, Suspirium, would all be worth including in 
 a seventeenth-century anthology. So would the 
 noble Pretence (now first published) , with its exhor- 
 tation to himself " to walk the hardy and heroik 
 Way " and " By his deer Blood to trace The gallant 
 Footsteps of thy Lord.''' It is impossible to quote 
 this in full here, or the exquisite Easter Dialogue 
 either ; but a few lines from the latter will show how 
 beautiful it is. The Magdalen is weeping at the 
 tomb. The Saviour appears and she thinks He is a 
 gardener : 
 
 Jesus : Woman, to what loss do thine Eyes 
 Such full drink offerings sacrifice? 
 
 Magdalene: Sweet Gardner, if thy Hand it 
 
 were 
 Which did transplant Him; Tell me where 
 Thou sett'dst that pretious Root on whome 
 Grow all my Hopes; and I will from 
 That Soile remove him to a Bed 
 With Balme and Myrrh and Spices spred. 
 Where by mine Eyes two Fountains He 
 For evermore shall waterd be. 
 
 143 
 
Books in General 
 
 Jesus : Mary. 
 
 Magdalene : O Master! 
 
 Angel {ist and 2nd) : With what sweet 
 Fury she flies at his deer Feet, 
 To weep and kiss out what She by 
 Her Toung could never signify! 
 
 It was rarely that Beaumont wrote lines as good as 
 these; "sweet fury" could have been bettered by 
 none of his contemporaries. He was not built to 
 become a great poet. Neither poetic nor religious 
 ardours burnt fiercely with him. Poetry he did not 
 consider his serious business, and, as a rule, his self- 
 communings took the form rather of a slightly com- 
 placent self-examination than of real spiritual strife. 
 He was thoroughly religious, but seldom passionately 
 so; he revered the saints, but wrote of them rather as 
 items in a calendar than as suffering and aspiring 
 human beings; he became one of the fattest pluralists 
 of his day, and he lived to a very advanced age in full 
 possession of his faculties and his emoluments. 
 
 144 
 
The Diarist in Our Midst 
 
 MR. GEORGE RUSSELL, who has died un- 
 expectedly young (he was 66), was one 
 of the best of the Victorian diarists. He 
 kept elaborate diaries, and whenever he wanted to 
 write a new book of reminiscences of the illustrious, 
 all he had to do was to meander through them and 
 pluck a sufficiency of flowers by the way. He was 
 not a great wit, a great observer, or a very vivid and 
 eloquent writer. But he was sincere, had a good eye 
 and an immense acquaintance, and was amiable, 
 lively and readable. His diaries exist: the time may 
 come when they will be published; they may, for all I 
 know, equal Greville, though I doubt it. At all 
 events, we cannot finally judge him by what he has 
 written for his contemporaries, with whom a man has 
 all sorts of reservations, and to whose ephemeral in- 
 terests (if he have an eye on them) he is liable to 
 cater in selecting his material. It is possible that he 
 has left something written deliberately for later gen- 
 erations; but I doubt it, and even if he has it will 
 probably be interesting but not a masterpiece. For 
 his attention largely centred on passing controversies 
 and second-rate people temporarily conspicuous. 
 
 The diary takes all sorts of forms; a man may 
 publish in his lifetime a biography which is in essence 
 a diary meant for posterity. Boswell, when he 
 
 145 
 
Books in General 
 
 wrote Johnson's life, did so with the deliberate ob- 
 ject of displaying his hero to succeeding ages, and he 
 told succeeding ages precisely what they wanted to 
 know. Horace Walpole composed his letters to his 
 friends certainly with the object of amusing his 
 friends, but with the equally clear object of being 
 printed and read posthumously. It was a sense of 
 his duty of satisfying the curiosity of his successors 
 that made Crabb Robinson record all the breakfasts 
 he took with poets, painters and lawyers ; and it was 
 certainly with an eye on posterity and not on his con- 
 temporaries (though his scheme of shorthand was 
 such that posterity might not have bothered to pierce 
 the veil of his manuscript) that Pepys made a note 
 of all that happened within his purview, from the 
 doings of King Charles to those of Deb, the maid. 
 We are confronted almost daily with memoirs writ- 
 ten by the living for the living: " Things I Remem- 
 ber," " Things I Can Tell," " Forty Years in the 
 Diplomatic Circle," and so on. But the interesting 
 figure is not the superficial diarist who' accumulates 
 materials for a gossipy volume of reminiscences, but 
 the sagacious, the skilful, the dedicated diarist who 
 makes his notes a lifelong work, cares little for the 
 opinion of his contemporaries, and means to be read 
 " when all the breathers of this world are dead." 
 Where is he ? He is somewhere. Possibly at your 
 elbow now. 
 
 Somewhere today the twentieth century diarist is 
 amongst us. Nobody knows he is doing it; or at 
 146 
 
The Diarist in Our Midst 
 
 least nobody guesses, and few try to guess, what he is 
 putting down. He is recording his impressions of 
 the war, of the peace negotiations, of the mind of the 
 rich and the demonstrations of the poor. Just as 
 Pepys wrote of London streets growing grassy dur- 
 ing the Plague, and Walpole described London illu- 
 minated for victory and London surging with discon- 
 tented weavers, so he is carefully composing descrip- 
 tions of this, that and the other, of Armistice night, 
 of the opening of Parliament, of the railway strike, 
 of President Wilson's drive to the City. He may 
 himself have been a special constable or a temporary 
 civil servant or an organizer of Red Cross Sales, in 
 which event the personal narrative will blend with 
 the public as Pepys's does. He may be an official 
 like Charles Greville, with good opportunities of get- 
 ting behind the scenes: a Cabinet Minister's secre- 
 tary, perhaps. He may be a person of leisure who 
 knows everybody. But somewhere he is walking 
 about. Very likely he is quite an ordinary-looking 
 man, with a bowler hat, a neat black overcoat, a 
 small moustache, and hair growing grey at the tem- 
 ples : familiar to the members of various clubs, wel- 
 comed in many houses as an inoffensive guest, but to 
 the general public entirely unknown. His picture, I 
 fancy, once appeared in the Daily Mirror, standing 
 in the background behind several duchesses, on a 
 charitable occasion. Yet it will be to his writings, 
 more than to all our contemporary mass of journal- 
 ism and descriptive fiction, more than to the huge 
 documented tomes of the professional historians, 
 
 147 
 
Books in General 
 
 that posterity — which means a number of people 
 like you and me who do not happen to be yet born — 
 will go for the most intimate and convincing accounts 
 of the public scene of today. 
 
 And in his book — or, if you like, in their books 
 — there will be a good deal more than this. The 
 diarist! will make familiar to posterity, will even 
 bring into the very foreground of our spectacle of 
 19 19, persons who to contemporary eyes are ciphers, 
 non-existent. As we know General Seymour and 
 Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, Boswell and 
 Sir W. Pen, so posterity will see, walking most con- 
 spicuously about our streets, little Mr. Jones, of 
 whom nobody but the diarist is aware. Posterity 
 will read, and imagine to have been on the lips of all 
 our generation, the witticisms of that young man, 
 who is unknown save at a few dinner-tables in vari- 
 ous capitals. The diarist is noting these, following 
 his game with scrutinizing eyes and a concealed pen- 
 cil. He is most carefully putting down all those 
 epigrams and satirical verses about the Great which 
 go from lip to lip, but which no one Is ever traitor 
 enough to put into print. He Is smilingly rectifying 
 the reputations of politicians and men of affairs: 
 setting irretrievably down the things they say about 
 each other, about their opponents, about the meas- 
 ures they are supposed to support, about their con- 
 stituents. He lunches and dines with men of letters; 
 he knows their weaknesses and their hostilities. 
 And here and there he knows a man of genius, rela- 
 148 
 
The Diarist in Our Midst 
 
 tively obscure to us, but to posterity as interesting as 
 Keats or Shelley is to ourselves ; he is cherishing the 
 observation of such men on their art, recording their 
 facial expressions, receiving their confessions, their 
 admissions, and their contentions : giving himself, in 
 fact, harmless amusement which posterity will regard 
 as an inestimable service. And, incidentally, pos- 
 sibly with full consciousness, and (if he be a person 
 now regarded as an amiable nonentity) with a pleas- 
 ant self-satisfaction at thus building himself a monu- 
 ment over-topping those of the " famous in their 
 day," he is guaranteeing his own fame. ... I hope 
 he exists. 
 
 J 
 But I don't know who he is. Sometimes I suspect 
 
 one man and sometimes another. There is a little 
 man I occasionally play cards with who looks a likely 
 candidate ; there is a superannuated politician whom 
 I sometimes fancy; there is a man of letters, long 
 eminent, of whom I feel that he may posthumously 
 crown a career already great with a diary immeasur- 
 ably finer than anything that he has done. It does 
 not do to linger on this subject too long: or one be- 
 gins choosing one's wards, and even one's company, 
 lest one should go down to posterity pilloried in 
 some foolish sentence, a prize ass. But I cannot 
 help occasionally returning to it. For, important 
 though we may be in our time, urgent though our 
 businesses may be, in the latter end we shall be food 
 for worms — and for diarists. 
 
 149 
 
A Parody in Slang 
 
 I HAVE excavated from a drawer a yellow cut- 
 ting I made from some American newspaper 
 before the war. The journal had offered a 
 prize for a translation of Heine's Lorelei, and one 
 of the competitors submitted this : — 
 
 I sure wish some guy'd put me jerry 
 To what put the jinx on my grin. 
 
 Some stuff that's as ancient as Perry 
 Is buzzin' around in my bean. 
 
 It's time for the glims, and it's chilly 
 There ain't no wild waves on the Rhine; 
 
 And, bo, take a slant at that hill. He 
 'S lit up like a booze-parlour sign. 
 
 A swell-lookin' Jane there is sittin' 
 
 And flashin' a bushel of rocks; 
 Dolled up in her glad rags, loose fittin' 
 
 She chases the comb thro' her locks. 
 
 And while with that 14 X. harrow 
 
 She gives her alfalfa the drag. 
 She spiels like a white-necktie sparrow 
 
 A classy young raggety-rag. 
 150 
 
A Parody in Slang 
 
 The guy in his one-lunger dingey 
 
 Goes nuts on her musical game, 
 And humps on a rock with a bing. He 
 
 Just can't get his lamps of that dame. 
 
 I'll bet you a bone to a m,arble 
 
 He's going to land in the drink; 
 And it's Lorelei's fancy old warble 
 
 That put him for keeps on the blink. 
 
 I am not competent to supply glossary and annota- 
 tions to this, but any one who compares it with the 
 original will find that it is a very close version indeed. 
 
 151 
 
Dialect in Literature 
 
 RECENTLY a writer in the Times reviewed a 
 new book by Mr. J. S. Fletcher, the York- 
 shire author, who has written many readable 
 novels. The point about the new book (it is in 
 verse, but that does not greatly signify) is that it is 
 written in Yorkshire dialect. This appeared greatly 
 to cheer the Times reviewer. " There are," he said, 
 " unmistakablel signs, from Shetland to Cornwall, 
 that dialect poetry is now appreciated. Mr. Bur- 
 gess, the Shetlander, has now a sheaf of slim volumes 
 to his name, as has also Mr. Bernard Gilbert, the 
 Lincolnshire poet ; and the recent publication of Mr. 
 Bernard Moore's A Cornish Chorus is another indi- 
 cation that the idiom and tonality of modem English 
 dialects are appreciated by others as well as by the 
 upland folk in whose speech they are written. Most 
 modem dialect poets unlock their word-hoard in 
 lyrical form. It is hard to say why they should 
 choose this form of expression. . . . Leet Livvy is 
 a fine achievement in modern dialect literature, and 
 whilst it adds fresh lustre to the author's fame, it 
 illuminates the dialect and proves it to be a fitting 
 garment for narrative poetry. If it prove to be the 
 begetter of a further line of longer poems written in 
 modern English dialects, it will do more than we con- 
 fidently hope." I read this; I have read some of the 
 152 
 
Dialect in Literature 
 
 books referred to, though not the " sheaf of slim vol- 
 umes " of the Shetlander. I had before me a quota- 
 tion from Mr. Fletcher, beginning: 
 
 For I haate her waur nor iver 
 
 but shoo pulls, shoo pulls, all t' saame. 
 
 And I began wondering whether I shared that " con- 
 fident hope." I do not think I do. 
 
 I daresay that I start with a prejudice that many 
 people probably share, arising from the fact that I 
 instinctively shirk dialect painfully transferred into 
 print. Barnes, of Dorsetshire (who wanted to call 
 an omnibus a folk-wain), was a man of genius, but 
 I am sure he would be far more widely read had he 
 written in English instead of in broad Dorset. 
 Burns's dialect is, though in many of his best things 
 he does not carry it uncomfortably far, an obstacle 
 to readers south of the border. Tennyson's experi- 
 ments in Lincolnshire look so terrifying that the 
 reader turns the pages until he comes again to the 
 language which, after all, Tennyson himself spoke. 
 Directly I see " haate " with a diaeresis I visualize 
 the author, himself in most cases a person who pro- 
 nounces hate as I do, and certainly one who has been 
 trained to write it as I do, laboriously repeating the 
 local pronunciation to himself and trying with his 
 dots and his broadened vowels to represent it pho- 
 netically. My eye is hurt; the spelling gets in the 
 way of the meaning (which, we should not forget, is 
 
 153 
 
Books in General 
 
 of prime importance) and I tire. The man who 
 writes in dialect, that is to say who does the thing 
 thoroughly, is deliberately limiting his audience. 
 And, in most cases, when he has narrowed it, he does 
 not reach the people who speak the pure dialect that 
 he is recording, but only educated people who have 
 a taste for the curious, or a theory about the value of 
 dialect. Both in verse and prose I think that both 
 author and reader alike are spared much unnecessary 
 trouble, and a far wider audience may be reached, if 
 local or personal differences in speech are indicated 
 only by occasional words and turns of phrase. A 
 tinge is enough. It is maddening to read a novel in 
 which the fact that ond of the characters speaks 
 Cockney leads to every page being sprinkled with 
 distorted vowels, apostrophes and misplaced " h's." 
 
 The question is ably and broadly discussed in a 
 chapter of Mr. G. Gregory Smith's new book, Scot- 
 tish Literature (Macmillan). Mr. Gregory Smith 
 appears to share the views I have expressed above; 
 he also makes the point, which must appeal strongly 
 to one who (like myself) has just promenaded Scot- 
 land, that dialect literature, if the theorists carry 
 out their theories, means an immense amount of sub- 
 division. It is no good composing something you 
 think is Scotch and writing in it, if you wish to be 
 accurate. The Scotch of Glasgow, the Scotch of 
 Roxburghshire, the Scotch of Skye and the Scotch of 
 Aberdeen are not one thing; there is even a differ- 
 ence (I am credibly told) betweenl the pronuncia- 
 154 
 
Dialect in Literature 
 
 tion of various towns on the Clyde but a few miles 
 from each other, though this difference is, I confess, 
 not perceptible to the naked ear of an Englishman. 
 Mr. Gregory Smith makes sport with the enthusiasts 
 who jumble all Scots dialects together " and trans- 
 late the whole into ' fonetik ' for ' scientific ' use on 
 Teutonic gramophones." He defends " the delicate 
 colouring of standard English with northern tints," 
 and I think that what holds good for Scotland holds 
 good also for Devonshire. We have standardized 
 our spelling throughout these islands — it was not so 
 standardized in the times of James I. and Sir David 
 Lyndsay. Write down a word like " worm " and 
 that actual spelling represents different things to dif- 
 ferent people. To an educated Englishman the 
 " r " scarcely exists in the sound of it; to the Scot the 
 word represents " wurrum " ; to various English 
 yokels other varieties of pronunciation are auto- 
 matically suggested. If we are familiar with the 
 dialect of a district or a kingdom, the " tinge " will 
 suffice to give us the local colour throughout, as it 
 does in the works of many modern Irish writers who 
 do not distort the spelling of every English word 
 they use. 
 
 If we are not thus familiar I doubt if any amount 
 of laboured orthography will convey the real thing 
 to us, and few of us will take the trouble to search 
 for it. After all, though the author of Piers Plow- 
 man was right in using the dialect of his time and 
 place and could not help so doing, it cannot be dis- 
 
 155 
 
Books in General 
 
 puted that more people would read him and enjoy 
 him if he had contrived to write English as we know 
 it. I would be a pity were our local pronunciations 
 to fade; and I do not think they will. But let us 
 have a uniform spelling, and do not let us start en- 
 couraging the gifted young in Staffordshire, Cheshire, 
 and Rutland to turn their backs on the spelling they 
 have learnt and begin writing their epics and ro- 
 mances in something that looks to us like Polish. 
 For if so they will hamper themselves by the unnat- 
 ural constraint and prevent most of us from reading 
 them. The one advantage of a general use of dia- 
 lect would be that it would finally demonstrate to our 
 obtuse Simplified Spellers how impossible it is to get 
 a standard phonetic spelling of English when we 
 have no standard pronunciation, and when, in many 
 cases, a provincial pronunciation is near the present 
 spelling of a word whilst the current educated pro- 
 nunciation of it is not. 
 
 156 
 
Greene's Groatsworth 
 
 MR. BLACKWELL of Oxford has for some 
 years been producing cheap modem books 
 very tastefully. Their contents have not 
 invariably commended themselves to all of us, but 
 even where the verse has been immature the cover- 
 papers have always been ingenious and sometimes de- 
 lightful and the type of paper far above the standard 
 usually reached by those of such cheap books. This 
 enterprising publisher, who is all the more interest- 
 ing in that he conducts his operations from what 
 Oxonians may pardon me for describing as a provin- 
 cial town, is now bringing all his arts to bear on the 
 production of small reprints which, either for ap- 
 pearance or textual character, cannot easily be par- 
 alleled. The first three were all translations; the 
 fourth is Greene's Groatsworth of Wit. This small 
 book is here printed in black and red on excellent 
 paper, and bound as though it were really an amus- 
 ing book and not a work of reference for scholars. 
 And it is an amusing book. 
 
 Robert Greene the playwright was born in 1560, 
 went to Cambridge, married in 1585-6, deserted his 
 wife, who had borne him one child, went to the devil, 
 wrote profusely, and died at the age of thirty-two in 
 
 157 
 
Books in General 
 
 miserable poverty. The Groatsworth of Wit was 
 published posthumously in 1592. The most famous 
 thing in it! is the passage which is supposed, with 
 every probability, to refer to William Shakespeare. 
 Of him Greene, and his companions, Nashe and 
 Lodge, who were scholars and not actors, and may 
 not have liked being eclipsed even by a greater than 
 they, were very likely at once contemptuous and en- 
 vious. The reference occurs in the course of a gen- 
 eral denunciation of mummers, " those puppets (I 
 mean) that speak from our mouths, those antics gar- 
 nished in our colours " : 
 
 " Yes, trust them not : for there is an upstart crow 
 beautiful with our feathers, that with his tyger's 
 head, wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well 
 able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you ; 
 and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his 
 own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. Oh, 
 that I might intreat your rare wits to be employed 
 in more profitable courses: and let these apes imi- 
 tate your past excellence, and never more acquaint 
 them with your admired inventions." 
 
 Macaulay, employing upon Greene's coloured 
 prose the analytical method that he favoured when 
 people mixed their metaphors, might have made con- 
 siderable play with these sentences. They are 
 highly zoological ; they almost supply a menagerie in 
 themselves. One of the apes is an upstart crow 
 with a tyger's head; the compost reminds one of the 
 158 
 
Greene's Groatsworth 
 
 worst conjectures of ancient Egyptian theology. 
 Scholars have supposed, that the " tyger's head " 
 should really be a tyger's heart; a man is certainly 
 more likely to have a hide over his heart than 
 over his head. The allusion is to a line in Henry 
 VI. 
 
 This passage comes in the middle of an appendix 
 which hd introduces with! " Albeit weakness will 
 scarce suffer me to write, yet to my fellow scholars 
 about this city will I direct these few ensuing lines." 
 It is to be hoped that some at least of them profited 
 by their friend's experience. There is little evidence 
 that Nashe did, but we may at least be allowed to 
 hope, for Greene's sake, that his exhortations did 
 something for Lodge, who lived to a ripe and unpro- 
 ductive old age. There follows the fable of the ant 
 and the grasshopper, who, like poor Greene himself, 
 " died comfortless without remedy " ; and then, " be- 
 seeching them that shall bury my body, tO' publish 
 this last farewell, written with my wretched hand," 
 he proceeds to humble himself before his wife and 
 entreat her forgiveness, a most moving confession 
 ending, " Thy repentant 'husband for his disloyalty, 
 Robert Greene." 
 
 These be the appendices, historically very interest- 
 ing; the main pamphlet (it is no more) relates the 
 story of one Roberto and his brother, who are ruined 
 by extravagance and vice. It is a thin tale, but the 
 moral, however obviously, is sincerely preached, and 
 
 159 
 
Books in General 
 
 the prose is muscular, vivid and melodious. The iri- 
 troduction, effective enough, is in a modified euphuis- 
 tic Sityle. It opens (fori Greene, unlike modern 
 novelists, wrote for the male reader) : 
 
 " Gentlemen, — The swan sings melodiously be- 
 fore death, that in all his hfetime useth but a jarring 
 sound. Greene, though able enough to write, yet 
 deeplyer searched with sickness than ever heretofore, 
 sends you his swan-like song, for that he fears he 
 shall never again carol to you wonted love-lays, never 
 again discover to you youth's pleasures. However 
 yet sickness, riot, incontinence, have at once shown 
 their extremity, yet, if I recover, you shall all see 
 more fresh springs than ever sprang from me, direct- 
 ing you how to live, yet not dissuading you from love. 
 This is the last I have writ ; and, I fear me, the last I 
 shall write." 
 
 The antithetical mode of writing is deserted di- 
 rectly the narrative is begun. 
 
 What unmistakable charm, what an atmosphere 
 about the very first sentence : — 
 
 "In an island bound with the ocean, there was 
 sometime a City situated, made ridh by merchandize, 
 and populous by long space; the name is not men- 
 tioned In the antiquary, or else worn out by Time's 
 antiquity, what it was it greatly skills not ; but therein 
 thus it happened." 
 1 60 
 
Greene's Groatsworth 
 
 What happened was that there was an old miser with 
 two sons. 
 
 " Wise he was, for he bare office in his parish, and 
 sat as formally in his fox-furred gown as if he had 
 been a very upright dealing burgess: he was reli- 
 gious too; never without a book at his belt, and a 
 bolt in his mouth, ready to shoot through his sinful 
 neighbour." 
 
 Languishing in Death, the old man addresses his 
 two sons, one a stupid materialist, the^ other (Rob- 
 erto, to wit) a scholar who contemns wearlth. The 
 old man says, with the quaintest turn of speech, that 
 he has been unable to entreat, cozen or bribe Death: 
 
 " In brief, I think he hath with this fool my eldest 
 son been brought up in the University, and therefore 
 accounts that in riches is no virtue." 
 
 Thus he proceeds until he complains of an inward 
 pang: 
 
 " ' I, father,' said Roberto, ' it is the worm of 
 conscience that urges you at the last hour to remem- 
 ber your life, that eternal life may follow your re- 
 pentance.' ' Out fool ! ' said this miserable father, 
 ' I feel it now, it was only a stitch.' " 
 
 The old man dies and the two brothers wander off 
 to a light o' love's where the younger is ensnared — 
 
 i6i 
 
Books in General 
 
 to lose all his substance Ini two years, ending no 
 richer than his improvident brother who had but a 
 groat. The story, although short, wanders and 
 digresses. The lady tells, for instance, a fable of 
 no particular value about a Fox — who, to secure 
 his private ends, " made a friday face, counterfeiting 
 sorrow." " Friday," spelt with a small " f " and 
 used as an adjective, looks odd and delightful to our 
 eyes. The adjectival usage is not entirely analogous 
 to that in the phrase " Sunday clothes," which is to 
 be taken literally. The book is full of little fla- 
 voured phrases like this, and you find them every- 
 where in Greene's writings. , In them, as in minor 
 Elizabethan prose and plays generally, you get a 
 closer and fresher view of the life of the time than in 
 greater works and the lyrics which are all that most 
 people read. 
 
 162 
 
James Whitcomb Riley 
 
 IN bed, with a high temperature, and all the re- 
 pellent attributes of forehead, eyes, mouth, and 
 back which are described in patent medicine ad- 
 vertisements, I had not lived, during the week, a 
 strenuous intellectual life. At rare intervals, and 
 for two or three minutes at a time, my leaden eyelids 
 had lifted and I had taken in a few lines of Buried 
 Alive and A Rehours, which, for some, or no, reason, 
 found themselves side by side on my table. Being 
 utterly incapable of thought, I was just wondering 
 from which of these two books I should quote a few 
 passages which, with some perfunctory praise or con- 
 demnation, would fill a yawning page, when one came 
 into my bedroom and told me that the Times had an 
 obituary notice of James Whitcomb Riley. The old 
 man, it seems, had joined the great majority a few 
 days before myself; and I had my selections from 
 Riley brought up, as also a volume of the Encyclo- 
 piedia, to refresh my memory. For the only line of 
 Riley's that I could recall in my condition was one 
 which I have quoted before: "The beetle booms 
 adown the glooms and bumps along the dusk," and 
 which could scarcely be considered representative. 
 
 Riley, like Joaquin Miller and other American 
 bards of the type, probably had many amiable qual- 
 
 163 
 
Books in General 
 
 ities. I should think he would have made a very 
 kind, though a too voluble, grandfather. But he 
 was a very bad writer. And his badness was " of 
 various kinds." In the volume I open the first poem 
 is called A Life Lesson. It begins : — 
 
 There! little girl, don't cry! 
 
 They have broken your doll, I know; 
 And your tea-set blue, 
 And your play-house, too. 
 Are things of the long ago; 
 But childish troubles will soon pass by — 
 There! little girl, don't cry! 
 
 In the next verse it is her slate that is broken ; in the 
 last (need I say it?), her heart. Perhaps what the 
 Encyclopedia writer calls his " naive humour and 
 tenderness " may be held to be illustrated here. 
 But naivete may be carried too far. A few pages 
 later on there is a lyric called A Song, which, though 
 it might elicit storms of applause in a West-end 
 music-hall, could hardly be held, by even the most 
 tolerant of critics, to justify a claim to immortal 
 bays. The text is : — 
 
 There is ever a song somewhere, my dear; 
 There is ever a something sings alway. 
 
 And the chorus is certainly as good a model for that 
 kind of journalist who is, like myself, paid by space, 
 as anything I've ever seen : — 
 164 
 
James Whitcomb Riley 
 
 There is a song somewhere, my dear, 
 Be the skies above or dark or fair, 
 
 There is ever a song that our hearts may hear, 
 There is ever a song somewhere, my dear. 
 There is ever a song somewhere! 
 
 On the whole I think I prefer Riley's dialect 
 poems, even though they do occasionally present an 
 Englis'h reader with such problems as the word 
 " lightning-bug," which I very timidly hazard may 
 be Hoosier for glowworm, though without confi- 
 dence enough to bet on it. The more conventional 
 poems are free from this kind of difficulty, though 
 I am rather puzzled by ,a being with : — 
 
 a plume of red, 
 That spurted about in the breeze and bled 
 In the bloom of the every lad. 
 
 As a rule the difficulty with these poems does not lie 
 in particular words. Where it does lie may be in- 
 dicated if I quote the last stanza of an endeavour to 
 expand and presumably to improve the nursery 
 rhyme of Curly Locks: 
 
 And feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream 
 From a service of silver, with jewels agleam. 
 At thy feet will I bide, at thy beck will I rise. 
 And twinkle my soul in the light of thine eyes! 
 
 Well, really I Goodness only knows what sort of 
 
 165 
 
Books in General 
 
 picture the poet meant to " conjure up " by that last 
 line. Is " twinkle " here a verb transitive or intran- 
 sitive ? 
 
 Take this again: the first two stanzas of The 
 Funny Little Fellow: — 
 
 'Twas a Funny little Fellow 
 
 Of the very purest type, 
 For he had a heart as mellow 
 
 As an apple over-ripe; 
 And the brightest little twinkle 
 
 When a funny thing occurred, 
 And the lightest little tinkle 
 
 Of a laugh you ever heard! 
 
 His smile was like the glitter 
 
 Of the sun in tropic lands 
 And his talk a sweeter twitter 
 
 Than the swallow understands ; 
 Hear him sing — and tell a story — 
 
 Snap a joke — ignite a pun, 
 'Twas a capture — rapture — glory, 
 
 And explosion — all in one! 
 
 I cannot enter into details, or it might be possible 
 to inquire whether it is really complimentary to a 
 person to compare his smile to a tropical sun, or his 
 heart to an over-ripe apple. Whether the poet in- 
 tended the additional dubious compliment of com- 
 paring his friend's singing to an explosion can only 
 i66 
 
James Whitcomb Riley 
 
 be decided by an authoritative elucidation of his 
 rather hectic punctuation. But the stanzas illus- 
 trate very well what was really wrong with Riley; it 
 was not that he was too naive, but that he wasn't 
 naive enough. He was sophisticated without being 
 intelligent. He was always self-conscious, whether 
 he was attempting to write as he conceived that other 
 poets had written, or whether he was setting out to 
 interpret the feelings of the strong and simple folk 
 of the prairie. 
 
 I find that the Encyclopedia appears to regard as 
 one of Riley's principal feats an imitation of Poe 
 that he published in the Anderson Democrat. It 
 had the initials " E. A. P." under it; it was alleged 
 by the editor to have been found " on the fly-leaf of 
 an old Latin-English dictionary " then owned by " an 
 uneducated and illiterate man " in Kokomo, who 
 had received it from his grandfather, in whose tav- 
 ern, near Richmond, Va., it had been left by " a 
 young man w^ho showed plainly the marks of dissipa- 
 tion " ; and it deceived many distinguished critics. I 
 have not seen this work, though I can quite well 
 imagine what it must be like. But I cannot conceive 
 that anything of Riley's could really make it worth 
 the Times' while to speculate, as it did, whether 
 Riley would live or not. Its conclusion, that he has 
 as much chance of living as many others, was at 
 least cautious, but on the whole I incline to think that 
 the Times writer, like myself, had had to go to the 
 Encyclopaedia for his facts, and that, unlike myself, 
 
 167 
 
Books in General 
 
 he had never read any Riley. For the sober truth is 
 that the " Hoosier poet " was neither a better nor a 
 worse writer than Mrs. Wheeler Wilcox, and that 
 both owe their popularity to the same qualities. 
 Mr. G. R. Sims is at least as good, though he doesn't 
 borrow quite so many conventional pretty-pretties to 
 adorn his verse. 
 
 i68 
 
Edinburgh: the Missing 
 Monument 
 
 How a man of letters must respect the 
 Scotch! No other people, not excepting 
 the ancient Athenians or the modern Bos- 
 tonians, have so respected men of letters. Waiters, 
 navvies and bagmen, who were they born English 
 would never have heard of Dickens or Tennyson, 
 seem familiar with every circumstance in the lives, 
 as well as the works, of Scott and Burns. Any man 
 within fifty miles of Scott's numerous homes can tell 
 you the way to it and possibly (though I did not test 
 this)) the charge for admission; and an author in 
 Edinburgh feels that he has reached the author's 
 Paradise. Here do the poet, even the minor poet, 
 and the novelist come into their own; streets, hotels, 
 stations, are named in their honour; their memories 
 are omnipresent and their monuments vie with the 
 grandest. It is a great and a beautiful city; I can 
 find only one (barring the Sunday closing) fault with 
 it. I put it as a question. Why has Edinburgh no 
 monument, or rather no noticeable monument, to 
 Stevenson ? 
 
 I should think that there is no town in the world 
 which has so much commemorative architecture and 
 
 169 
 
Books in General 
 
 sculpture to the square mile as Edinburgh. For 
 more than a century its inhabitants have been pos- 
 sessed with a delightful mania for beautifying the 
 promenades of the living and celebrating the virtues 
 of the dead. The hills of the City are thickly clad 
 with feudal battlements and Grecian porticoes. 
 You will see the dawn through an open classic ar- 
 cade, the mid-day orb over a mediaeval keep, the 
 sunset fretted with Gothic spires and towers. There 
 are vast circular halls that might have pleased Jus- 
 tinian, tall columns that might have excited the envy 
 of Trajan, the fluted pillar, the arch, the broken 
 pediment, the cross, the obelisk: and almost all are 
 memorials. So also, in the nature of things, are the 
 statues. These are in number as the sands of the 
 sea. They throng thd gardens of Prince's-street, 
 the squares, the facades of public buildings; no eli- 
 gible crossroad or patch of sky suitable for silhouet- 
 ting lacks its doctor in marble or its philanthropist 
 in bronze. There are soldiers, some ; lawyers, phy- 
 sicians and theologians, many. There are also men 
 of letters and philosophers. Most, naturally, are 
 Scotsmen. Wellington and Nelson are exceptions: 
 of the former there is an equestrian bronze, and the 
 monument of Nelson is the Kew Pagoda of Edin- 
 burgh as the Scott Monument is the Albert Memo-i 
 rial. Even the enthusiastic writer who, for me, depu- 
 tized the late Baedeker, could find no more to say of 
 it than that it is " a structure more like an observa- 
 tory or a lighthouse than a monument." Abraham 
 Lincoln has a monument, and eke George IV., the 
 170 
 
The Missing Monument 
 
 justification for this, apparently, being that he once 
 visited Edinburgh. Charles II. and Prince Albert 
 stand in these streets, Livingstone and Pitt, David 
 Hume, Dugald Stewart, Allan Ramsay, " Christo- 
 pher North," two publishers and a dog that died of 
 grief. Royal personages sometimes excepted, no 
 doubt all these excellent men, as also the animal, de- 
 served well of Edinburgh, and of the human race. 
 The more memorials the merrier, if the commem- 
 orated be worthy; Edinburgh has been prolific of tal- 
 ent and virtue, and she is a perfect frame for monu- 
 mental art. Moreover, she cannot be accused, in a 
 general way of doing otherwise than handsomely by 
 literature. The Scott Monument is only less con- 
 spicuous than the Castle, which has an unfair pull 
 owing to its eminence ; and if a Greek peripteral tem- 
 ple is not quite the most congruous of conceivable 
 memorials to Burns, the Biurns Monument was at 
 least well meant, is large and conspicuous, and, at a 
 distance, looks uncommonly well. But where is 
 Stevenson ? 
 
 I do not suggest that Edinburgh, merely because 
 it is the capital town, should possess a statue of every 
 Scottish worthy who ever existed. She need not 
 have had a statue of James Watt, who could reason- 
 ably be left to Glasgow and Greenock. If she has 
 no statue — and there may be one — to James 
 Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, after all, kept sheep in 
 Ettrick and now cows in the Cowgate. She may, 
 without thinking of emulation, contemplate the im- 
 
 171 
 
Books in General 
 
 posing effigy of a ram which stands in the market 
 place at Moffat, or the equally impressive (and I 
 hope equestrian) statue of Sir Henry Dalziel which 
 will some time grace the market-place of Kirkcaldy. 
 But she ought to make a point, and she has made 
 rather a point, of overlooking nobody of importance 
 who was born in Edinburgh or who long resided 
 there, or did important work there, or was a bene- 
 factor to the City. And surely Stevenson might 
 come in under any of these categories. 
 
 He was born in Edinburgh, he went to school in 
 Edinburgh, he was an undergraduate at Edinburgh 
 University. And above all he loved the City and 
 everything within reach of it. There is nothing 
 more convincing in his last letters from Samoa than 
 those passages, in which, overshadowed by death, he 
 told one correspondent that he knew he would never 
 see Auld Reekie again, and asked another to go down 
 to the burn at Glencorse and look into the water for 
 him. He had his limitations, and I for one am not 
 of the unqualified admirers. But if there is one 
 thing more than another that he did, and did mar- 
 vellously, it was the depiction of Edinburgh and her 
 borders, done so vividly that a stranger who has 
 read him knows them place by place when he sees 
 them: the wynds and closes off the High Street 
 where such as the Body-Snatchers lived, the discreet 
 Georgian squares and crescents of the New Town 
 where young Edinburgh quarrelled with its dour 
 father, the roads that led through meadows and 
 172 
 
The Missing Monument 
 
 small woods to the Pentlands and the desolate Lam- 
 mermuirs, the little pier by Queensferry, the Bass 
 Rock. He felt a profound affection, and he com- 
 municated his affection. Edinburgh was perhaps 
 more to him than to Scott himself, and he certainly 
 showed us more of Edinburgh as we know it. All 
 this is known to Scotsmen, and, judging by the 
 bookseller's counters, there is a larger consumption 
 of his books in Edinburgh than in any other 
 town in the world. Yet Edinburgh has not put 
 up a monument to him. There is a tablet on a 
 church wall, there may be a plaque on some one of 
 the houses in which he lived, and Swanston is beauti- 
 fully kept and garnished by a devotee. But there is 
 no statue, no Greek temple, no decorated pile, no 
 Duomo : at least if there be such as thing it must be 
 too recent for my guide book or my local interlocu- 
 tors to have heard of it and either too small and se- 
 cluded to be noticed or too huge to be suspected. 
 One always likes to guard oneself on these occasions, 
 and I shall be only too happy to find that I have 
 made a ridiculous mistake. Perhaps that new 
 church was the thing ... or that sumptuous cin- 
 ema in the Babylonian Renaissance style. If I am 
 wrong I withdraw; but if I am right I am very much 
 puzzled. Do they want a subscription started in 
 England ? 
 
 173 
 
Verhaeren 
 
 A STUPID accident has robbed the world of 
 Emile Verhaeren. Before the war prob- 
 ably not one Englishman knew his name f"- 
 every hundred who were familiar with the works of 
 his fellow-Belgian Maeterlinck. Whether the war 
 has greatly increased his reading public here I do not 
 know; possibly not, for a great deal of his poetry 
 is rather toughi work for the ordinary foreigner. 
 But at least his importance is now appreciated. He 
 came to England shortly after the outbreak of the 
 war, and spent many months here. He contributed 
 to English papers — I remember particularly an 
 article in the Daily News and a fine poem on aero- 
 planes over Antwerp in Poetry and Drama — and 
 he made several public appearances. At a Labour 
 meeting in October, 1914, he recited — or read — 
 his heroic poem, Ceux de Liege, in which steel-cupo- 
 las probably made their first appearance in verse. I 
 met him once or twice. He was a man whom, if one 
 had that habit, one would be tempted to describe as 
 an "old dear"; absolutely natural, gentle, kindly, 
 free from the burden of a reputation, interested in 
 everything, willing to talk and to listen without a 
 trace of pontifical authority or spurious concentra- 
 tion ; if anything, a little timid. He had a fine head : 
 greying hair, lean, broad, bony face, with prominent 
 cheekbones and aquiline nose, and a sensitive mouth 
 174 
 
Verhaeren 
 
 and chin half-covered by a flowing, uncultivated 
 moustache. The marks of suffering and thought 
 were on the face: the forehead was wrinkled, the 
 eyebrows raised, the lids drooped rather sadly over 
 the contemplative eyes. 
 
 Verhaeren began as a painter of Flemish scenes, 
 with something of seventeenth century Flanders 
 about them. After a period of hankering for the 
 safety of Catholicism he plunged, in the late 'eighties, 
 into an abyss of melancholy and pessimism bordering 
 on madness. Part of this time he spent in London, 
 which usually depresses sensitive foreigners. The 
 despair of the three books of this period ends with 
 Les Apparus dans mes Chemins. His later volumes 
 are the work of a man who accepts and exults over 
 life, even at its foulest. His pictures. In Les Cam- 
 pagnes Hallucines, Les Villes Tentaculaires and Les 
 Villages Illusoires, of the deterioration of the coun- 
 tryside and the spread of the urban fester, have their 
 gloomy side, and, as a Socialist, he detested capitalis- 
 tic society; but the poet in him took a fierce pleasure 
 in any manifestation of energy, however misdirected. 
 Le Multiple Splendeur and Les Visages de la Vie 
 are lighter, more radiant, and some of his love- 
 poetry is very simple, tender and happy. Of his 
 plays the best known is Le Cloitre. Even French- 
 men sometimes find him obscure and knotty. But 
 his difficult passages are never deliberately so ; they 
 are the strong writhings of a Laocoon in the toils of 
 the serpents of Spirit and Matter. 
 
 175 
 
Books in General 
 
 A certain amount has been written about him in 
 English. There exists a volume of poetical transla- 
 tions from him by Miss Alma Strettell, and Messrs. 
 Constable have recently published an interesting 
 prose translation of his " Love Poems " by Mr. F. S. 
 Flint. Constable also published, some years ago, 
 what is probably the best monograph yet written "" 
 him: that by Stefan Zweig, a young Viennese poet 
 and critic. It is rather a lopsided book : exuberant, 
 precipitous, festooned with a tropical profusion of 
 metaphors. The author is an idolator, and, like all 
 idolators, rather anthropomorphic. But he is often 
 right, always interesting and sometimes illuminating. 
 Herr Zweig is not a Frenchman or a Belgian. His 
 principal error of omission is his failure to consider 
 Verhaeren's poetry as French verse. His main error 
 of the other sort was made when he claimed the poet 
 as a pillar of German culture : a view perhaps that 
 he may, by now, have modified. 
 
 176 
 
A Shakespeare MS.? 
 
 SIR EDWARD MAUNDE THOMPSON be- 
 lieves that in the British Museum there is a 
 holograph MS. in Shakespeare's handwriting. 
 The arguments in favour of this are to be found in a 
 volume {Shakespeare's Handwriting) recently issued 
 by the Oxford University Press. The general ques- 
 tion of Shakespeare's fist was dealt with by Sir Ed- 
 ward in a contribution to Shakespeare's England: I 
 remember that he argued, not altogether to my sat- 
 isfaction, that the Bard, in spite of appearances, 
 really wrote a bold and fluent — I forget if he said 
 elegant — hand. The present volume is an expan- 
 sion of that study; and is " strictly paleographical, 
 . . . altogether eschewing criticism of a literary na- 
 ture." 
 
 " ' My researches,' says Sir Edward, ' in due 
 course led to an examination of the well-known addi- 
 tion, written in an unidentified hand, to the MS. play 
 of Sir Thomas More, now the Harleian MS. 7368 in 
 the British Museum. Nearly half-a-century has 
 passed since, in, 1871, this addition was brought to 
 public notice in a contribution to Notes and Queries 
 by the Shakespearean student, Richard Simpson, who 
 suggested it was an autograph composition of 
 Shakespeare. This attribution could not be substan- 
 
 177 
 
Books in General 
 
 tiated at the time ; the key of the problem was still 
 undiscovered. When I lately renewed acquaint- 
 ance with the Harleian MS. it was with a lively inter- 
 est that I recognized in the handwriting of the addi- 
 tion certain features which I had already noted in 
 Shakespeare's signatures. A careful study of the 
 MS. ensued, and in this monograph I have set out r"" 
 reasons for concluding that at length we have found 
 what so many generations have vainly desired to be- 
 hold — a holograph MS. of our great English 
 poet.' " 
 
 The MiS. in question is portion of a play most of 
 which is by Anthony Munday. Of 20 sheets, 13 are 
 in the author's handwriting. There are several edi- 
 tions of the play, of which the latest is Dr. Greg's 
 (191 1 ), and the MS. was reproduced in collotype 
 in the Tudor Facsimile Texts in 19 10, by Mr. J. S. 
 Farmer. 
 
 Three of the pages attributed to Shakespeare are 
 reproduced by the present author. Into his long 
 and elaborate comparison of the script with Shakes- 
 peare's signatures one cannot enter here, but it is ex- 
 tremely convincing in its cumulative effect. And 
 there is certainly a good deal in the text which any- 
 body might wager to be Shakespeare if he came 
 across it unawares. More is quelling a riot of ap- 
 prentices who are demanding the expulsion of aliens, 
 and addresses them thus (I modernize the lan- 
 guage) : 
 178 
 
A Shakespeare MS.? 
 
 Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise 
 Hath chid down all the majesty of England. 
 Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, 
 Their babies at their backs, and their poor luggage, 
 Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation. 
 And that you sit as kings in your desires, 
 Authority quite silenced by your brawl, 
 And you, in ruff of your opinions clothed, 
 What had you got? I'll tell you, you had taught 
 How insolence and strong hand should prevail, 
 How ordered should be quelled, and by this pattern 
 Not one of you should live an aged man, 
 For other ruffians as their fancies wrought 
 With self-same hand, self-reasons, and self-right. 
 Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes 
 Would feed on one another. 
 
 This is undeniably Shakespearean in temper, argu- 
 ment, language and prosody. I observe, by the way, 
 that Shakespeare's lazy habit of putting, for a signa- 
 ture, a few letters and then a shorthand squiggle is 
 paralleled here. He calls More (Moor), in one 
 place, " Moo " — feeling that that is quite sufficient 
 to make his meaning clear. 
 
 179 
 
A Seaside Library 
 
 N' 
 
 *'']^ 7"*-^'" ^ thought, " I won't take any books 
 with me. I want a rest. I shall swLw. 
 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 Gardi- 
 ner; 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, saun- 
 tering down the main, and indeed the only, street, 
 I caught sight of the words, " Grocer, Chemist, To- 
 bacconist, 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 
 doorway and into a back room. " A shilling de- 
 posit, and twopence on each book," she said; and 
 i8o 
 
A Seaside Library 
 
 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 go- 
 ing 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 M'alet : that was about spiritualism, and pretty 
 thorough rubbish 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 child- 
 hood 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 re- 
 stored 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 cow- 
 ered and obeyed when he emitted a short, sharp oath 
 
 i8i 
 
Books in General 
 
 or looked like emitting one. William Black I never 
 liked at any time, so nothing by him need detain me. 
 Flames? No. Dodof Oh dear, no. Ships That 
 Pass in the Night? No. There was edelweiss in it, 
 and an old man who, like Lord Randolph Churchill, 
 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, de- 
 bated 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, ex- 
 cept 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 that that im- 
 182 
 
A Seaside Library 
 
 mortal paragraph, reproduced in facsimile from the 
 author's own script, appeared in the Strand Maga- 
 zine, with pictures of the great novelist in various 
 postures? It would be Ethel M. Dell now, I sup- 
 pose ; but they don't seem to keep Miss Dell's works 
 in this Circulating Library, of which the circulation 
 appears to have stopped many, many years since. 
 They keep instead Frankfort Moore and G. B. Bur- 
 gin. 
 
 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. An- 
 thony Hope, who was very nearly a first-rate writer, 
 must have put it better than that ; but I'm sure that is 
 what it was about. Seton Merriman now. This is 
 better. But will or will not a reperusal of The Vul- 
 tures and Roden's Corner diminish the respect that 
 still survives in me for him ? He gave me immense 
 pleasure at the 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 remember 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 was as 
 good fish in the sea as ever came out of it ; and that 
 I must really take care of my health. Catching sight 
 
 183 
 
Books in General 
 
 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 store, 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 cobble-stones. As I passed into the sun, it oc- 
 curred to me that it was not surprising that even the 
 minor works in this library were like old friends. 
 For — and things like these do strangely remain 
 known, yet for a time, unrelated — I spent a sum- 
 mer in this village fifteen years ago. 
 
 184 
 
A Voice from the Past 
 
 SUMMER having set in with its usual severity, 
 I sat down with Mr. John F. Tattersall's edi- 
 tion of Charles Macfarlane's Reminiscences of 
 a Literary Life ( Murray) . It has something of the 
 interest of Pompeii and Mycenae. It was written 
 sixty years ago by a man who had been a fairly well- 
 known author and traveller with a wide acquaintance 
 and ended his days as a Brother of the Charterhouse. 
 When his active career was over he dictated his mem- 
 ories of the eminent and peculiar people he had met. 
 What became of the MS. when he died we do not 
 know; for all practical purposes it was lost until 
 19 1 6. A provincial bookseller bought it with a lot 
 of ledgers at a country sale — thus saving it from 
 probable destruction — and the present editor was 
 struck by its description in the bookseller's catalogue 
 as a manuscript mentioning the names of Shelley and 
 Keats. The result is that we have here a volume of 
 new stories about many of the celebrities of the 
 Regency and succeeding periods. 
 
 This Macfarlane was a Tory and a stout Church- 
 man. He disliked extreme opinions, cranks and sol- 
 emn persons; but if a man appeared to be a decent 
 soul opinions were not much of a barrier. He was 
 not at all a theorizer : though he would talk politics 
 
 185 
 
Books in General 
 
 and literature over his port, he was not the sort of 
 man who would be living in a rarefied atmosphere 
 of speculation most of his time. The result is that 
 it was the normal rather than the abnormal aspects 
 of men that he most noticed and that, indeed, would 
 naturally be most often presented to him. He rec- 
 ognized genius; but most of his stories about genius 
 are of the kind which remind us that even the most 
 highly-endowed of our ancesters occasionally be- 
 haved like people in 'buses : that Shelley, for instance, 
 was not uninterruptedly posing for his portrait with 
 his shirt open at the neck. 
 
 One can scarcely say that the new anecdotes of 
 Shelley and Keats, thus unexpectedly recovered, are 
 highly important; though they may quite possibly 
 make a brace of professors feel that such " new ma- 
 terial " justifies new biographies. There is a touching 
 account of an afternoon on the seashore with Shelley, 
 who sat despondently looking out over the waves, 
 " with the glowing sunset shining full on his pale, 
 haggard face." The excursion was terminated by a 
 visit to a macaroni factory, where Shelley showed (I 
 suppose one might) " all the hilarity and fun of a 
 schoolboy." Mary Shelley Macfarlane found " a 
 very delicate, elegant, charming person; and there 
 seemed to be great affection and an entire confidence 
 between them." Shelley at this stage was, we are 
 informed, " a practical and daily practising Chris- 
 tian " and " an assiduous reader of the New Testa- 
 ment " ; the one thing needful was the alteration of 
 i86 
 
A Voice from the Past 
 
 a few words in his vocabulary. It is surprising but 
 refreshing to find a man describing Keats as " one of 
 the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever 
 knew." " I firmly believe," he says, " that by the 
 side of any friend Keats would have faced a battery, 
 and would have stood under a shower of cannon- 
 balls, chain-shot, canister or grape " — which is suf- 
 ficiently specific. Keats, like Shelley, appears to 
 have owed some happy moments to macaroni : 
 
 " He had intense enjoyment in halting close to the 
 Capuan Gate, and in watching a group of lazzaroni 
 or labouring men as, at a stall with fire and cauldron 
 by the roadside in the open air, they were disposing 
 of an incredible quantity of macaroni, introducing it 
 in long, unbroken strings into their capacious mouths, 
 without the intermediary of anything but their hands. 
 ' I like this,' said he ; ' these hearty fellows scorn the 
 humbug of knives and forks. Fingers were in- 
 vented first. Give them some carlini that they may 
 eat more! Glorious sight! How they take it 
 
 Macfarlane's description of Godwin is as familiar 
 and cheerful as his references to the plucky little fel- 
 low: 
 
 " Old Godwin greatly preferred a quiet game of 
 whist in a cosy corner to conversation. In his man- 
 ner he was a quiet, retiring, unpretentious old gentle- 
 man." 
 
 187 
 
Books in General 
 
 He is alleged to have thrown over his early princi- 
 ples bodily. It is at any rate a relief to know that 
 he played cards. 
 
 Once, when he alludes casually and without fur- 
 ther explanation to " Miss Crump, the authoress," I 
 feel a grievance against Macfarlane : those four 
 words make me hunger for more. But as a rule he 
 does not drag anybody's name in unless he has some- 
 thing to say about him. Some of his stories are 
 amusing. Rogers, the poet, a notoriously slow 
 writer, headed a long poem Lines Written at Pas- 
 turn: Sydney Smith, discovering that Rogers was 
 only at Paestum for a few hours, said that this title 
 must be mendacious, " for we all know that when 
 he is delivered of a single couplet, straw is spread 
 in St. James's Place, and his friends call with 
 anxious inquiries, and are told that he is as well as 
 can be expected after his labour." Macfarlane 
 liked Leigh Hunt in spite of his dislike of Hunt's 
 financial incompetence. Hunt described Landor, 
 who owed £20,000, as " a very lucky fellow to 
 have been able to get so much credit," and there 
 is a delightful story of a fiver which the Carlyles were 
 always lending Mrs. Hunt and which was at last kept 
 in a separate case labelled " Hunt money." He re- 
 spected Coleridge, found Wordsworth unexpectedly 
 human and friendly, and had an immense affection 
 for Tom Moore ; but De Quincey he could not stand. 
 His diatribes against that writer are not very inter- 
 esting, but it is amusing to learn that (he never had 
 188 
 
A Voice from the Past 
 
 any money) " whenever he had engaged to write a 
 magazine article or to do any other work for the 
 booksellers, those gentlemen were almost certain to 
 receive from him, in a day or two, a note stating that 
 he was out of laudanum." This homely detail does 
 not, I think, come into the Confessions of an Opium- 
 Eater. 
 
 Macfarlane's descriptions are always sprightly. 
 Their one defect is that, as a rule, they are too 
 slight and short. One of the few exceptions is a long 
 passage on Hartley Coleridge, the best — and the 
 tenderest — chapter in the book. The picture is the 
 usual one: the small, fragile man, gentle as a child, 
 chivalrous, vivacious, a fine and learned talker, uni- 
 versally beloved; but continually drunk. When 
 Macfarlane first went in search of him he was in a 
 village inn, a small, seedy gentleman surrounded by 
 gigantic waggoners and farmers. " The bibulous 
 little sprite " went off to order a magnum of port for 
 dinner and see the chill taken off it, and a farmer at 
 once confided in the visitor his opinion of the " won- 
 derful gentleman " who lived in a cottage and knew 
 everybody for miles around: 
 
 " Some do say that he has more book-learning 
 than Mr. Wordsworth or Professor Wilson, and 
 that he can beat them hollow at verse-making. We 
 all love him, sir, for he is so good and kind, and so 
 fond of our children. We would do anything for 
 our poet, that we would! But it's a great pity that 
 
 189 
 
Books in General 
 
 he is not more steady and more regular at his meals, 
 for tippling, though only with this small ale, is bad 
 on an empty stomach, and when he gets queer in the 
 head he doesn't always know what he is about; 
 more's the pity, for he's a gentleman, every inch of 
 him, and would not hurt a worm." 
 
 Dipsomania, as a fellow-journalist said about the 
 war, " has no doubt its seamy side." But a man of 
 letters who got such an epitaph from such a source 
 cannot be said to have been a complete failure In life. 
 I had rather have been he than, say, Jeremy Ben- 
 tham. 
 
 190 
 
Francis Thompson's Method 
 
 A RECENT number of The Dublin Review 
 contains a very interesting article on Francis 
 Thompson's Note-Books, several fragmen- 
 tary unpublished poems by Thompson being given. 
 Thompson's note-books were almost his only prop- 
 erty. 
 
 " They were a preoccupation, things to be remem- 
 bered when he collected his hat and coat, or to be 
 most anxiously retrieved when forgotten or mislaid. 
 They were his other self; his companions through 
 many solitary years; his life-work and his library; 
 they were the only things he never discarded. The 
 few volumes that came his way as a reviewer, when 
 they overflowed more than a small shelf, would be 
 sold, and if he changed his lodging nothing of ac- 
 count had to be removed save the many dozens of 
 shabby exercise-books that filled a large tin box — 
 dense piles of unstitched leaves covered with faded 
 pencil-marks." 
 
 In these books — penny books lettered in " Station- 
 ers' Gothic " — he used to keep masses of quotations 
 from authors of all ages — religious and profane — 
 as well as the drafts of his poems. 
 
 191 
 
Books in General 
 
 Few poetical MSS. of modern times can have pre- 
 sented such difficulties to their editors as these. 
 Miasses of Thompson's sketches for poems still, I be- 
 lieve, remain undeciphered; or rather, unarranged. 
 His ideas about order were peculiar. He would 
 begin one poem at the beginning of a book and an- 
 other at the end; the two would cross in the middle. 
 He would cover a page with alternative suggestions 
 for stanzas, lines and words — often mixed up with 
 quite different stanzas or pieces of stanzas — strewn 
 about in the most extraordinary order. He did not 
 delete on the paper ; deletion had gone on in his mind 
 before he wrote. But he would put down in a little 
 column half-a-dozen feasible variants of a word or a 
 line and leave them there to be chosen from. 
 " Sometimes," says the writer of the article, " where 
 he found the pencillings of an old volume conven- 
 iently faded, he has turned it over and filled it again 
 with new matter." Specimen stanzas of his well- 
 known and beautiful cricket song are given, which 
 show his method of working. But nobody could 
 really get an idea of it who had not inspected these 
 incredible little exercise-books. I contracted a head- 
 ache from one of them myself not long ago when I 
 spent an afternoon trying to put one of the jig-saws 
 together. In the end it was clear that it was a poem, 
 of, say, 20 stanzas, appearing in some such order as 
 I, 2, 6, 4, 15, variant of 2, 3, 19, 20, variant of 15, 
 14, 13, a disconnected verse which obviously wouldn't 
 have gone in, 5, 7, 8, 16; verses 17 and 18 being miss- 
 ing, and notions for single lines being liberally 
 192 
 
Francis Thompson's Method 
 
 sprinkled about, sometimes at great distances from 
 their natural homes. The scholars of the future will 
 find these manuscripts a great quarry for emenda- 
 tions, theories of poetic craftsmanship, &c. 
 
 193 
 
Tobacco 
 
 THE Western World waited a long time for 
 tobacco. Pithecanthropus erectus, the first 
 proprietor of the Piltdown skull, Buddha, 
 the Pharaohs, Aristophanes, Caractacus, Rabelais, 
 and Henry VIII. all did without it. Assyria never 
 knew a hookah, and Rome Declined and Fell without 
 suspecting that its historian would take snuff. 
 Through one knows not how many ages the lean, red, 
 unimagined men of America sat in circles on their 
 haunches, with travelling-rugs around their shoul- 
 ders, and sent up grey swirls of smoke to fade in the 
 air, whilst our own fathers lived and died without 
 discovering what to do with their hands and mouths. 
 The swift and tremendous triumph of tobacco is not 
 easy to express in a phrase. Statistics do not convey 
 it. To realize it one should be in a crowd. Go to a 
 great football match in mid-winter and look across 
 the field at the grand stand. In full daylight a mist 
 of smoke rises from it; as darkness begins to come 
 over, it is dotted, first palely, then brightly, with little 
 flames that leap and suddenly die. Sometimes 
 twenty will be burning together for an instant, some- 
 times two ; but always the torch is carried on. Mul- 
 tiply to the dimensions of the world, and one can 
 catch a picture of the whole globe sprinkled uninter- 
 194 
 
Tobacco 
 
 mittently with these little spurting fires : what more 
 suitable name than Vestas? When Jean Nicot, Sir 
 Ralph Lane, and Sir Walter Raleigh brought their 
 dried leaves across the water, they had no thought of 
 this. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth, as every traveller knows, spent 
 the whole of her long reign in a feverish effort to 
 sleep in the maximum number of four-poster beds. 
 Charles II., after the Battle of Worcester, dedicated 
 himself to a similar endeavour ; whilst Cromwell had 
 an arduous time of it stabling his horses in even the 
 most secluded and inaccessible churches in order to 
 provide every parish with its legend. Sir Walter 
 Raleigh was another of these solicitous persons. 
 When he smoked the pioneer pipe in his garden and 
 his vigilant valet threw a jug of beer over him to put 
 him out, the turn was, apparently so successful that it 
 was repeated in all parts of the country, and even in 
 Ireland. This, however, is an iconoclastic age, and 
 Mr. Apperson* throws cold water on Sir Walter and 
 on the story. But, whoever introduced what one 
 may refrain from calling The Weed or Our Lady 
 Nicotine, tobacco on fire was soon going like a house 
 on fire. There is no reason to suppose that Shakes- 
 peare (who never mentions tobacco) smoked any 
 more than there is to suppose that he did anything 
 else; and Queen Elizabeth found her first and per- 
 haps only experience of a pipe upsetting. But Bur- 
 
 * A Social History of Smoking. By G. L. Apperson. Seeker. 
 
Books in General 
 
 leigh smoked, Spenser wrote of " divine Tabacco," 
 Lilly described it as a " holy herb," smoking was 
 soon general even in theatres, and within a genera- 
 tion of tobacco's introduction a satirist could say that 
 among the qualifications for a gallant were " to take 
 Tobacco well " and " to spit well." Naturally, so 
 great and sudden a change of habits meant polemics 
 in opposition. Burton of the Anatomy described 
 tobacco as 
 
 " a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, 
 lands, health, hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, 
 the ruin and overthrow of body and soul." 
 
 Dekker called it a " beggarly Monarche of Indians, 
 and setter-up of rotton lung'd chimney-sweepers"; 
 and Sylvester wrote a poem entitled Tobacco Bat- 
 tered and the Pipes Shattered {about their Ears that 
 idlely Idolize so base and barbarous a Weed, or at 
 Leastwise Over-Love so loathsome Vanitie) by A 
 Volley of Holy Shot Thundered From Mount Heli- 
 con, in which he suggested that it was only to be ex- 
 pected that " Tobacconists " should be drunkards 
 and adulterers. (Mr. Apperson, by the way, does 
 not appear to have noticed that Sylvester anticipated 
 Person's celebrated joke — which he quotes — about 
 ™ paKx<!>.) It was these wild men that Ben Jon- 
 son was ridiculing when he made a character in 
 one of his plays swear that four people had died of 
 smoking in one house in one week, and that one of 
 them had " voided a bushel of soot." But the cap- 
 196 
 
Tobacco 
 
 tain of them was Ben's monarch, James I., whose 
 Counterblaste to Tobacco is a very hearty piece of 
 invective. He asked why we should be " mooved 
 to imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the 
 wilde, godless and slavish Indians, especially in so 
 vile and stinking a custome ? " Non-smokers were 
 annoyed by smokers who at meals made " the filthy 
 smoke and stinke thereof to exhale athwart the 
 dishes and infect the aire " ; and wives either had to 
 corrupt their own sweet breath with tobacco " or else 
 resolve to live in a perpetuall stinking torment." 
 James' last sentence was certainly the most eloquent 
 peroration — it is not saying a great deal — ever 
 perpetrated by an English king : 
 
 " A custome lothsome to the eye, hateful to the 
 Nose, harmefuU to the braine, dangerous to the 
 Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, 
 neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the 
 pit that is bottomlesse." 
 
 The struggle went on. In 1621, during a Com- 
 mons debate, two knights urged total Prohibition, 
 one of them saying that tobacco was now " so com- 
 mon that he hath seen ploughmen take it as they are 
 at plough." Prohibition was not, however, adopted ; 
 the nearest approach to it under the British Flag was 
 a Puritan Colonial law of Connecticut restricting 
 the use of tobacco to bona-fide travellers. A man 
 could have one pipe if he went ten miles, but never 
 two pipes in a day. In England itself, by 1650, 
 
 197 
 
Books in General 
 
 smoking seems to have been permitted even in the 
 House of Commons itself. 
 
 The unfashionable classes never dropped it again ; 
 draymen, ploughmen, minor officials, country clergy- 
 men and landlords, eccentric dons and authors, stuck 
 to their clay pipes through all the changes of upper- 
 class custom. The turn of the tide amongst the 
 polite began soon after the Restoration. A snuffbox 
 was more manageable than a clay pipe, which you 
 could not carry about with you very easily and which 
 in any case might soil your clothes; and, in an age 
 when women were at once fastidious and influential, 
 regard for their wishes must have had something to 
 do with it. I have never tried eighteenth-century 
 tobacco but it is likely that tobacco was in bad odour 
 because there was bad odour in tobacco. In garrets, 
 cellars, taverns, and country rectories the " clouds of 
 incense " still rose. The seventeenth-century Buck- 
 inghamshire parson who, running short of tobacco, 
 cut up his bell-ropes and smoked them would have 
 found congenial company among such successors as 
 Dr. Farmer, Master of Emmanuel and author of the 
 fine Essay on Shakespeare's Learning, who always 
 spent the day smoking with the farmers when he vis- 
 ited his country church to do duty, and used to greet 
 them weekly with : " I am going to read prayers, 
 but shall be back by the time you have made the 
 punch." The proletariat had its pipe and clung to it 
 with frenzy; when a Bill imposing an' excise on 
 tobacco was thrown out, all the church bells in Derby 
 198 
 
Tobacco 
 
 were rung; they did not realize, apparently, that the 
 best way of guaranteeing the future of your vices is 
 to give the State a vested interest in them. But 
 plum-coloured coats and fine ruffles were not defiled 
 by the plebeian habit. Snuff was paramount in Soci- 
 ety, from the Throne downwards: Queen Char- 
 lotte was always referred to by her sons as " Old 
 Snuffy." As late as the 'forties Wellington issued 
 a very ungrammatical injunction to commanding of- 
 ficers to stop their juniors from smoking; that an 
 undergraduate of Trinity was sent down for smok- 
 ing a cigar during service in the College chapel is 
 perhaps not so strange. The final defeat of the 
 " Anti-Tobacconists " came with the introduction of 
 more perfect implements — the cigar, the cigarette, 
 and, ultimately, the briar pipe. Victory was grad- 
 ual. Queen Victoria, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Rus- 
 kin did not smoke. Men, for a time, did not light 
 their cigars until they had shut their doors behind 
 them; they changed Into embroidered caps and jack- 
 ets in order to avoid having their hair and their ordi- 
 nary coats permeated with the odour of the herb ; 
 they refrained from smoking before ladies, and the 
 idea that smoking was vulgar and indecent still leaves 
 a few traces behind it, as in the absurd rule of some 
 Cambridge colleges that smoking is not allowed in 
 the courts before dark. The briar — made from 
 the root of the bruyer, or French white heath — 
 was the weapon with which the smokers finally routed 
 their opponents. Today there is nothing monstrous 
 in Charles Lamb's wish that his last breath should 
 
 199 
 
Books in General 
 
 be drawn in through a pipe and exhaled in a pun ; and 
 a Kingsley would not have to conceal caches of pipes 
 under bushes and hedges on his rural walks, but 
 would emerge from the rectory with the vulcanite 
 between his teeth. In one only respect we have not 
 yet equalled the achievements of our ancestors. No 
 boy at Eton has, in our time, been flogged for refus- 
 ing to smoke. But the precedent for that occurred 
 in 1665 during the Great Plague, against which to- 
 bacco was considered a defence. 
 
 Mr. Apperson confines his attention to England. 
 Had he gone beyond these shores, he might have 
 found some curious facts. In seventeenth-century 
 Russia, for example, smoking was forbidden under 
 penalty of having the nose cut off, a penalty which 
 might have been deemed more appropriate to snuff- 
 taking. In Persia, formerly, smoking was a capital 
 offence, the belief being held that it made people in- 
 fertile. The sections on Smoking in Church and 
 Smoking by Women are very interesting; in the re- 
 marks on the medicinal use of tobacco I miss (per- 
 haps I have overlooked) a notice of the fact that at 
 one time doctors used to prescribe " syrup of to- 
 bacco " for various ailments; those who occasionally 
 take involuntary sips of this syrup will shudder at 
 the thought. Mr. Apperson's remarks on the old 
 tobacconists' signs are very interesting; the Black 
 Boys, the Highlanders, and the Sir Walter Raleighs 
 have now almost all disappeared. The survivors 
 lead a solitary and unhonoured life ; the last of the 
 200 
 
Tobacco 
 
 London Highlanders stands outside a linoleum em- 
 porium, and a romantic tobacconist in the centre of 
 London who recently tried to fix up a wooden effigy 
 of Sir Walter outside his shop found that passers-by 
 would insist on breaking off its protuberant parts 
 with their walking-sticks. Tobacco is now com- 
 pletely victorious. Cigarettes are served out as ra- 
 tions to our troops, and the old female objection 
 has so thoroughly broken down that the next Great 
 Offensive against the habit may possibly be based on 
 the contention that it is effeminate. The result of 
 the general spread of smoking, however, is that in- 
 terest in it is less keen. You cannot be an enthusiast 
 for a habit that is shared by the whole human race. 
 Mr. Apperson, who writes in the traditional style, 
 does occasionally refer to the virtues of smokers as 
 though they were still a sort of eclectic fraternity. 
 But that is now anachronistic. The Kaiser is one of 
 his fellow-smokers, and the late George Smith was 
 probably another. It is as absurd to talk now of 
 the geniality and reasonableness of Smokers as it 
 would be to propound the peculiar philosophic pow- 
 ers of men with two legs, or to suggest that the Brit- 
 ish Constitution is kept intact mainly owing to the 
 efforts of those members of the community whose 
 hair is neither green nor purple. A History of 
 Sleeping is inconceivable; the time will come when 
 smoking also will cease to have a history. A few 
 more club libraries have to be thrown open to it; a 
 few more restaurants have to abandon their silly bias 
 against pipes; theatres have to come into line with 
 
 20 1 
 
Books in General 
 
 music-halls; and the pipe, now forcing an entrance 
 among middle-class women-workers, may possibly 
 win the last of its conquests. Beyond this no future 
 " history" is easily conceivable for tobacco; unless 
 it goes out of fashion again, which seems most un- 
 likely. It has become an integral and universal ele- 
 ment in the social life of mankind, which has decided 
 that, on the whole, it is worth going on with an in- 
 flamed palate, a furred tongue, a husky throat, and 
 a deadened sense of smell. And it will, possibly, 
 have little more literature. This last fact, however, 
 cannot be deplored, for good panegyrics of it are 
 few. For myself I like as well as any of its eulogies 
 the following terse epigram recorded by Steinmetz 
 of The Smoker's Guide: 
 
 Poor wretch! I don't fancy that anything pays 
 For toiling and moiling; I live all my days 
 A sort of a god, with my bakky and jug, 
 And as jolly and snug as a bug in a rug. 
 
 That dithyramb was the work of a British Peer — 
 Lord Southesk. 
 
 202 
 
Charles Churchill 
 
 I 
 
 OBSERVE in a new biography of Wilkes a sur- 
 prising reference to his friend Charles Church- 
 ill. " He was," says the author, 
 
 " a dull fello'cd at the best, without a spark of hu- 
 mour, having little merit save a species of rugged 
 vehemence." 
 
 Probably most who see it will take this judgment at 
 its face-value, for Churchill is very little read now. 
 But I feel I must lift up my small voice in protest, 
 even though it fade away into nothing in a week. 
 
 The Rev. C. Churchill, in his day the most popu- 
 lar of satirists, had several sparks of humour, wrote 
 remarkably skilful verse, and in Gotham even pro- 
 duced what Cowper, who was fairly fastidious, 
 called " a noble and beautiful " poem. He was not 
 an altogether admirable or pleasant person: few 
 satirists are. He did not invariably attack things 
 that ought to be attacked : few satirists do. Never- 
 theless, though he was malicious, foul-mouthed, de- 
 bauched, and addicted to lucrative hack-work — in 
 short, a thorough disgrace to the cloth — he had a 
 sense of humour, and he was not always a dull poet. 
 He was good enough to be entitled to a place in the 
 
 203 
 
Books in General 
 
 notable succession of satirists, from Hall and Donne 
 to Marvell and Oldham, from Dryden and Pope to 
 Byron, who have exposed the vices of society and the 
 weaknesses of their enemies in the rhymed penta- 
 meter couplet. 
 
 Churchill was born in 173 1. He was extraordi- 
 narily prolific. This at least had to be acknowl- 
 edged by Dr. Johnson, who liked neither his morals 
 nor his politics: " To be sure he is a tree that can- 
 not produce good fruit: he only bears crabs. But, 
 sir, a tree that produces a great many crabs is better 
 than a tree which produces only a few." His most 
 celebrated poem was the Rosciad, a metrical treatise 
 on contemporary actors, which is more vigorous, and 
 I should think more truthful, than any dramatic critic 
 would dare to write in an age of libel-actions. It 
 wants a good many explanatory footnotes, and its 
 wit can scarcely be called delicate ; but it still makes 
 very good reading. There are good passages in 
 The Ghost and The Duellist. My own favourite, 
 however, is The Prophecy of Famine, a fantasia on 
 Scotland and the Scotch which beats in extravagance 
 anything else which the mid-century peaceful invasion 
 of Scots called forth from the subjected English. 
 Here the Tory Johnson and the demagogic Church- 
 ill were on common ground: 
 
 fFaft me, some muse, to Tweed's inspiring stream, 
 Where all the little Loves and Graces dream; 
 Where, slowly winding, the dull waters creep, 
 204 
 
Charles Churchill 
 
 And seem themselves to own the powers of sleep; 
 Where on the surface lead, like feathers, swims; 
 There let me bathe my yet unhallowed limbs, 
 As once a Syrian bathed in Jordan's 'flood, 
 Wash of my native stains, correct that blood 
 Which mutinies at call of English pride. 
 And, deaf to prudence, rolls a patriot tide. 
 
 But his finest efforts in exaggeration come when he 
 describes the utter nakedness and hungriness of Scot- 
 land: 
 
 Jockey, whose manly, high-boned cheeks to crown. 
 
 With freckles spotted, flamed the golden down, 
 
 With meikle art could on the bag-pipe play. 
 
 E'en from the rising to the setting day; 
 
 Sawney as long without remorse could bawl 
 
 Home's madrigals, and ditties from Fingal; 
 
 Oft at his strains, all natural though rude. 
 
 The Highland lass forgot her want of food. 
 
 And, whilst she scratch' d her lover into rest, 
 
 Sank pleased, though hungry, on her Sawney's breast. 
 
 Far as the eye could reach, no tree was seen. 
 
 Earth, clad in russet, scorn' d the lively green; 
 
 The plague of locusts they secure defy. 
 
 For in three hours a grasshopper must die; 
 
 No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there, 
 
 But the cameleon, who can feast on air. 
 
 No birds, except as birds of passage, flew; 
 
 No bee was known to hum, nor dove to coo: 
 
 No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear, 
 
 205 
 
Books in General 
 
 Were seen to glide or heard to warble here; 
 Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran, 
 Furnish'd, with bitter draughts, the steady clan; 
 No flowers embalm' d the air, but one white rose. 
 Which, on the tenth of June, by instinct blows; 
 By instinct blows at morn, and when the shades 
 Of drizzly eve prevail, by instinct fades. 
 
 The white rose is the flower of Jacobitism, which, it 
 is suggested, is not remembered for 364 days in the 
 year when something is to be made out of the House 
 of Windsor. The climax of the passage is reached 
 with the line : 
 
 And half-starved spiders prey'd on half-starved 
 flies. 
 
 The imagery of the poet describing national penury 
 and leanness could scarcely go farther than that. 
 
 Churchill died at thirty-three, principally of drunk- 
 enness. He wrote his own epitaph, " Life to the last 
 enjoy'd, here Churchill lies," and painted his own 
 portrait with great force in Independence. He was 
 a hearty, honest ruffian; he was loyal to his friends 
 and, after his fashion, loved his country. 
 
 206 
 
Commonplace Books 
 
 A COMMONPLACE book is defined by Web- 
 ster as " a book in which passages or events 
 are set down or recorded as important for 
 future use or reference," and Swift is quoted: 
 " Whatever, in my reading, occurs concerning this 
 ... I do never fail to set it down by way of com- 
 monplace." " Important " is a word with an im- 
 portant sound; though it would apply, no doubt, to 
 commonplace books like that enormous one of Rob- 
 ert Southey's which is full of very long and usually 
 dull extracts from works of philosophy, divinity and 
 history. The lexicographer is vague as to the 
 sources of the " passages set down." But there is, 
 to me at any rate, a flavour of the second-hand about 
 the term, and I should not apply it to a notebook in 
 which a man put down nothing but his own happy 
 thoughts, with an eye on future platforms, dinner- 
 tables or articles, or merely with a view to private 
 self-gratification. One suspects that this type of 
 notebook is more common amongst modern men of 
 letters than the old book of extracts. One does 
 know some writers whose strange profuseness of quo- 
 tation suggests that they stick to the old custom on 
 the sly — since, for some reason imperceptible to 
 me, it seems to be considered altogether more tal- 
 
 207 
 
Books in General 
 
 ented to fork a quotation out of your memory than 
 to rummage for one in an old notebook. But the 
 habit has evidently declined. Perhaps we have too 
 little leisure. Perhaps we have lost the literary col- 
 lector's spirit. Perhaps we are too lazy. As far as 
 I am concerned this last is certainly the cause. 
 Twice in the first bloom of my manhood I decided 
 to go through my books, turn up the pages which 
 enthusiasm had dog's-eared oi* otherwise defaced, 
 and tabulate " for future use or reference " the best 
 remarks of the world's authors. The two books 
 are still with me. One begins with twenty pages of 
 Gibbon, beautifully transcribed and with neat lines 
 ruled between each slice of cynicism or profanity; 
 and thereafter the pages cry to be filled and none 
 heareth them. The other similarly opens with 
 flowers from Lord Verulam, and then slides down 
 into the mean status of an address-book. One sim- 
 ply cannot. It is too much bother. Henceforward, 
 if I am observed quoting Gibbon or Bacon, it will be 
 clear where the quotations come from — though, as 
 a fact, I seldom remember my little compilations un- 
 til too late. 
 
 Mr. Austin Dobson's A Bookman's Budget is a 
 commonplace book by any definition: and a very 
 characteristic one. We all of us know people who 
 fill their apartments with every sort of object of art: 
 Chinese dragons, Hepplewhite chairs, bureaux and 
 commodes, plates, jugs, basins, gods, swords, paper- 
 knives, Greek heads, busts of Rousseau, chessmen, 
 steel-engravings, miniatures, lecterns, old morocco 
 208 
 
Commonplace Books 
 
 bindings, oak, ebony, ivory, malachite, alabaster, 
 Lord knows what, and water-colours by the proprie- 
 tor. Of such the prime example was Horace Wal- 
 pole: and since he was a man of taste, a man with 
 likes and dislikes for which he could give reasons, 
 we may be certain that his collection, however varie- 
 gated in origins and character, and however prepon- 
 deratingly designed for " reference " rather than for 
 " use," had somehow a unity about it which differ- 
 entiated it from the limbless and trunkless higgledy- 
 piggledy of the old curiosity shop. Mr. Dobson's 
 volume is precisely such a collection of works of art 
 and " curios." Anything goes in as long as it has 
 amused, touched or interested him, including pass- 
 ages from his own books. And all the oddments in 
 this strange miscellany are linked by personality. 
 It is with something of a shock that one comes across 
 a batch of war-poems, about Belgium, &c. But it is 
 all right : even when he is writing a poem about Bel- 
 gium this inveterate connoisseur makes it a Roundel. 
 It is not very successful, but no one else could have 
 done it without being preposterous. 
 
 Mr. Dobson's extracts come out of hundreds of 
 authors of all ages. But the eighteenth century ii 
 dominant. His illustrations are mostly silhouettes, 
 with a portrait of Lord George Gordon and a quaint 
 Blake ; and, making an extract from an author so 
 modern as William Morris, he characteristically 
 pitches on Morris's pretty inscription for a four- 
 poster bed. There are a great number of anecdotes 
 
 209 
 
Books in General 
 
 about men of letters, statesmen and clergymen, and 
 many odd literary collector's " facts." In one place 
 we get a little group of extracts illustrating the futil- 
 ity of pedants and cocksure critics. Macaulay in 
 1850, said that since 1825 — Dickens, Thackeray, 
 Tennyson and Browning, not to mention others, were 
 hard at it — no English book had been written which 
 would be read in 1900. In another we are pre- 
 sented with the fact that Dr. Arnold had read Hum- 
 phrey Clinker fifty times. I don't think this fact 
 comes into Mr. Lytton Strachey's biographical study 
 of Arnold; it gives him quite another complexion. 
 Humphrey Clinker, too; a book which, compared 
 with Peregrine Pickle, has been neglected, but a far 
 finer piece of art. Mr. Dobson hunts up the origin 
 of the phrase, " the Republic of Letters," makes notes 
 on the will of Andrew Millar, the publisher, on fam- 
 ily pews, on London topography, on the pronuncia- 
 tion of the word " Pamela," on Fielding's tomb, and 
 on Cobbett's observation that " foot-notes " should 
 be written " fool-notes." Then he turns aside to do 
 justice to Tom Hood and — a stranger and more 
 striking performance — to look for and to discover 
 a really fine passage from the works of George 
 Augustus Sala. " Cromwell's Motto " and " Liter- 
 ary Breakfasts " elbow sonnets by Andrew Lang and 
 epigrams by deceased Frenchmen, and almost on the 
 last page we are informed that on April 4, 1663, 
 Pepys gave to seven or eight guests a dinner (pre- 
 pared by a single maid, ye housewives!) consisting 
 of: — 
 210 
 
Commonplace Books 
 
 " a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton 
 boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of 
 lambe, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lob- 
 sters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a 
 dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all 
 things mighty noble and to my great content." 
 
 The scattered poems are mostly graceful. The 
 short epigrams are the best, particularly the four on 
 Art, which are extremely close imitations of the real 
 eighteenth century article. As, for instance, Silent 
 Criticism : — 
 
 / read my rhymes to Jack, who straight 
 Slips off to Sleep's dominion; ' 
 
 Then yawns, when I expostulate — 
 " Why sleep is ... my opinion! " 
 
 But I cannot think Mr. Dobson's epitaph on Queen 
 Victoria a masterpiece : — 
 
 Great Queen, great Lady, Mother most of all! 
 Beyond the turmoil of Earth's hopes and fears. 
 How should you need the tribute of our tears — 
 
 Our helpless, useless tears! But they must fall. 
 
 It is odd, incidentally, to run across this in the same 
 week in which one encounters the statement in Sir C. 
 Dilke's Life that after the Great White Queen's 
 funeral a select quorum of the Privy Council met 
 with relief, and an unwonted cheerfulness plain upon 
 its face. 
 
 211 
 
The Songs of the Trenches 
 
 THERE has been a general desire that some- 
 body would collect the folk-songs of the 
 Army. The thing has now been done. 
 Tommy's Tunes (Erskine Macdonald) is described 
 as " A Comprehensive Collection of Soldiers' Songs, 
 Marching Melodies, Rude Rhymes, and Popular 
 Parodies, Composed, Collected, and Arranged on 
 Active Service with the B.E.F. by F. T. Nettleing- 
 ham, 2nd Lt. R.F.C." As the title suggests Mr. 
 Nettleingham has not specialized in any class of 
 song. He gives not merely the songs which have 
 come during the war from no one knows where, and 
 the burlesques of music-hall ditties and hymns ; but a 
 number of traditional songs and some compositions, 
 largely drawn from the R.F.C, that are obviously 
 the work of clever individuals. These are interest- 
 ing as extras. So are the old songs, but not all those 
 to which Mr. Nettleingham refers as heirlooms of 
 the Old Army are peculiarly Army songs, and some 
 are widely diffused among the population. Among 
 those for which he makes no such claim is The Green 
 Grass Grew All Round. I suppose that collectors 
 have printed it before. They may even have de- 
 cided that it is an allegory, religious or otherwise, 
 like / Will Sing You One — 0. But I have cer- 
 tainly never seen it in print before. Yet it is one of 
 
 212 
 
The Songs of the Trenches 
 
 the most widely dispersed of our popular songs; 
 whatever music-hall ballads come and go, this goes 
 on, and you are liable to hear parties of youths sing- 
 ing it almost anywhere in the country. Several 
 songs of this sort are given ; but the greatest interest 
 must lie in those queer, unique songs — whimsical, 
 ironical, grumbling — which have come into being 
 in the Army during the war, and many of which, in 
 the true fashion of folk-poetry, exist in numerous 
 versions. 
 
 The most famous of these, and the type of most 
 of them, is / Want to Go Home, with its utter fed- 
 upness. It was pretty early. I remember the first 
 time I heard of it. A gunner officer (he is dead 
 now) sent it to me, with the tune roughly dotted 
 down. He said that his men would sing that melan- 
 choly tune very quietly and slowly when grooming 
 their horses, and that he had never heard anything 
 in his life which moved him more. The difference 
 between various versions of it usually lies in the 
 third line. Mr. Nettleingham gives " Where 
 there are shells and Jack Johnsons galore " ; of those 
 I have heard, I think " For oh the Jack Johnsons, 
 they make such a roar," sounds likelier to the gen- 
 eral. The full verse is: 
 
 / want to go home 
 
 I want to go home 
 For oh! the Jack Johnsons they make such a roar 
 I don't want to go to the trenches no more, 
 
 213 
 
Books in General 
 
 / want to go over the sea 
 Where the Alleymans can't snipe at me. 
 Oh, my, I don't want to die, 
 I want to go home. 
 
 Another song, which would do equally well as the 
 type, is that which appears on the wrapper of this 
 book: 
 
 When this ruddy war is over, 
 
 0/ how happy I shall be, 
 
 the tune of which seems to derive from Massa's in 
 the Cold Ground. Mr. Nettleingham's discretion 
 about " ruddy " is not altogether kept up; occasion- 
 ally he admits things which make one think one is 
 reading a collection of Tom D'Urfey's instead of a 
 twentieth-century book. Of Grousing, another of 
 the sort, the compiler says that Company Comman- 
 ders have been known to suppress it " when men 
 have spent long hours on the march." It is unmiti- 
 gated. It goes to the tune of Holy, Holy, Holy, 
 and the last verse is : 
 
 Marching, Marching, Marching, 
 Always ruddy well marching. 
 Marching all the morning. 
 And marching all the night. 
 Marching, Marching, Marching, 
 Always ruddy well marching. 
 Roll on till my time is up 
 And I shall march no more. 
 214 
 
The Songs of the Trenches 
 
 Another of the sort is, Why Did We Join the 
 Armyf — 
 
 Why did we join the Army, boys? 
 Why did we join the Army? 
 Why did we come to Salisbury Plain? 
 We must have been ruddy well balmy. 
 Fol-the^ol-lol, &c. 
 
 One of the most widespread is that which, sung to 
 the tune of The Church's One Foundation, has been 
 adapted to all sorts of branches, and of which one 
 version is: 
 
 We are Fred Karno's Army, 
 A jolly fine lot we are; 
 Fred Karno is our Captain 
 Charlie Chaplin our O.C. 
 And when we get to Berlin, 
 The Kaiser he will say : 
 Hoch! Hochf Mein Gott! 
 What a jolly fine lot 
 Are the 2 — 4th R.E., T. 
 
 In most variations the second couplet is : 
 
 We cannot fight, we cannot shoot, 
 What earthly use are we? 
 
 or words to that effect. 
 
 Of the adaptations of The Tarpaulin Jacket, the 
 
 215 
 
Books in General 
 
 cleverest Is that in which the dying airman requests 
 his mechanics to reassemble the engine, the parts of 
 which are embedded in various sections of his body. 
 A less literary one is : 
 
 Oh had I the wings of an Avro, 
 
 Chorus: " of an Avro." 
 Then far, far away I would soar, 
 
 " would soar." 
 Right of to my pals down in Holland 
 
 " in Holland." 
 And rest there the rest of the war, 
 
 " the war." 
 
 I cannot go on quoting indefinitely, but one may men- 
 tion that even the little repetitive marching scraps 
 are not omitted. Words and music are given of 
 Hoo-Ha (" There's the man with the big red nose, 
 Hoo Ha, Hoo Ha Ha ! ") , and Left, Left, which is 
 about the most epigrammatic of the lot. 
 
 Mr. Nettleingham asks for supplementary songs. 
 He has taken so much trouble with his collection 
 that he has probably got almost everything that has 
 had a general circulation. But there are no doubt 
 many more good regimental ones. One that reached 
 me from a Fusilier battalion the other day may or 
 may not be a local adaptation of a song common to 
 many regiments. It is a chorus only, to the tune of 
 Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy, and runs : 
 
 21$ 
 
The Songs of the Trenches 
 
 Hold your head down, Fusilier, 
 Hold your head down, Fusilier, 
 There's a bloody great Hun 
 With a bloody great gun 
 Who'll shoot you 
 Who'll shoot you: 
 There's a sniper up a tree 
 Waiting for you and me. 
 
 If you want to get back to your home any 
 more. 
 Hold your head down, Fusilier. 
 
 It is sung in the London vernacular, and is certainly 
 in the Flanders tradition. 
 
 It may be observed, by the way, that Mr. Nettle- 
 ingham says in his preface — every soldier who has 
 mentioned it to me has certainly said the same thing 
 — that Tipperary " was never Tommy's song." It 
 merely happened that a Daily Mail correspondent 
 heard a few troops of the Expeditionary Force sing- 
 ing it at Boulogne. It was a chance that he did not 
 hear other troops singing something else. In the 
 anthologist's opinion the most popular song in the 
 Army is, beyond question, Annie Laurie. 
 
 217 
 
The Limits of Imitation 
 
 SOMEBOOY suggests that it did not much mat- 
 ter if Stephen Phillips was a bit reminiscent 
 of other poets at times, for Wordsworth was 
 at his best when he was most Miltonic. 
 
 Let me observe at once that I have no sympathy at 
 all with the kind of critics who are always nosing 
 about after verbal plagiarism. Tennyson was think- 
 ing of these when he complained that it was impos-^ 
 sible to remark that " the sea roars " without being 
 informed as to the exact passage in Homer from 
 which the observation had been stolen. It is ridicu- 
 lous to suggest that all resemblances mean plagiar- 
 ism; it is ridiculous also to hold that every plagiar- 
 ism must necessarily be a reprehensible weakness. 
 As everybody knows, all great poets have learnt 
 from their predecessors, all have been influenced by 
 their predecessors, and most have borrowed direct 
 from their predecessors. And a good thing too. 
 If a new and effective word, process of thought, 
 rhythmical device, or stanza form is hit upon by one 
 man, it is all to the good if other people make use of 
 his discoveries. Writers may even, if they like, 
 cold-bloodedly study the manner in which particular 
 effects have been produced and endeavour to produce 
 similar effects by similar means. There is no limit 
 218 
 
The Limits of Imitation 
 
 to the use which an original writer can make of other 
 writers. But he can escape the charge of imitation 
 on one condition only: and that is that he should be 
 more himself than anybody else. If he really is any 
 good, we may identify things he owes to other peo- 
 ple, but we shall feel his individuality all the time. 
 We shall not, even when he is obviously plagiarizing, 
 have the impression of one who has heard some- 
 body's else's voice and is automatically mimicking 
 it because he is dominated by it, or of one who has no 
 natural force compelling him to express himself and 
 who consequently sits down and makes things in con- 
 ventional moulds. Taking any other basis, one 
 would soon be led to the ridiculous view that there 
 is no such thing as bad imitation. 
 
 Example is best. Suppose some admirer of Mr. 
 Lloyd George or the Kaiser were to write an Ode to 
 him in the course of which he said : 
 
 The light of the might of thy right burns bright like 
 the radiant bow of the god Apollo, 
 And deep in the dark of the dank and dim damp 
 dungeons of Death thy foemen lie, 
 And the flight of thy fleet sweet feet is fast and fast 
 is the wind of the wings that follow, 
 And loud the joy of the quenchless sea and the 
 mirth of the wide inexhaustible sky. 
 
 Or suppose that some one with a less favourable 
 opinion of one of these eminent statesmen were to 
 break out with : 
 
 219 
 
Books in General 
 
 He spake. And as by Indus banks some toad, 
 
 Beastly and venomous, before the sun 
 
 Sets purpure, and the clouds of heaven dark 
 
 Spread for his proud and fallen majesty 
 
 A regal couch magnific and stupend, 
 
 So he, unconscious of the ruin impending. 
 
 Sat. 
 
 It would be remarked infallibly that not only were 
 these passages meaningless (as, indeed, they are), 
 but that the authors were mere imitators of Swin- 
 burne and Milton, the mechanical quality of whose 
 imitations made it unmistakably clear that they were 
 incapable of writing anything worth reading. 
 There are many writers, in fact, who, whenever they 
 sit down to write, have other people's tunes running 
 in their heads so persistently that their thoughts fall 
 involuntarily into the ready-made framework, which 
 — as they are not the thoughts of the man who made 
 the framework — they do not in reality quite fit. 
 It is very easy, if you are at all well-read, to compose 
 on this plan. If you are content to be an imitator, 
 you may safely adopt Sterne's recipe of writing down 
 one sentence and trusting to God for the next. The 
 Lord will provide. The flow will come. Every 
 word hasi hallowed associations, every sound has 
 familiar sequences, every situation has established 
 developments : you may go ahead like a house on 
 fire. But the result might as well be in the house 
 on fire. 
 
 220 
 
The Limits of Imitation 
 
 The undesirable and damning form of imitation 
 may be defined as Parody which is not Meant to be 
 Funny. And the species of it which is most common 
 is Parody not of one writer, but of a whole bundle of 
 writers. This kind is often missed by critics with an 
 inadequate knowledge of the body of modern litera- 
 ture, though in process of time it is always discov- 
 ered. In any age there is always a large mass of 
 verse and of prose which imitates everybody who 
 has gone just before. A sort of stock compost of 
 manner and matter is produced; all can grow the 
 flower, for all have got the seed. You read a hun- 
 dred novels and concoct a hundred and first, which 
 is the G.C.M. of them all. I think as I write of a 
 certain kind of descriptive passage to be found al- 
 most anywhere. Scores of novelists write it, each 
 using a formula without realizing that he is using a 
 formula. This is the kind of thing : 
 
 " Evening came quietly over. The outHnes of 
 things, of houses and trees and hedges, softened and 
 dimmed in the fading light. Low in the west a 
 single streak of flaming orange still proclaimed the 
 sunken sun. The fields were empty. The last 
 labourer had gone home. A deserted plough, which 
 seemed to accentuate the solitude, stood by the near- 
 est of the gnarled and forlorn file of pollard willows 
 that marked the course of the stream. A little 
 breeze shivered the leaves, and fell away again. An 
 owl hooted; and, from some distant village, a dog 
 barked " 
 
 221 
 
Books in General 
 
 Or: 
 
 " The storm was approaching. From north and 
 west furious black battalions of clouds, their edges 
 ragged like the banners of a desperate army, flew to 
 mid-heaven for the fray. The wind had died sud- 
 denly down, and there was a queer stillness over the 
 fields; and objects stood out with a strange clearness 
 in the intensified air. Against the dark background 
 of Billericay Woods the gold vane of Billericay 
 Church, etc." 
 
 Now this kind of description was not always stale or 
 valueless. Deliberately foolish as the above two 
 examples are, even they could not have been written 
 by an Elizabethan. There is something in them 
 that he would not have thought of, an attitude and a 
 progress of the sentences. They are dated, within 
 limits. But they are machine-made ; like millions of 
 others of the same kind, they are rubbish. And it 
 is a bad thing to be taken in by such stuff. 
 
 But why do I labour? Am I a Professor of 
 Tubingen that I should even set one foot upon the 
 road that leads men to write volumes on the Hun- 
 dred Species of Plagiarism and the Fundamentals of 
 the Original and the Derivative in Art? Why 
 should one argue till one is black in the face? All 
 one can really say is that the wind bloweth where it 
 listeth, and that sometimes it bloweth through a 
 hole and cometh out as mere wind. 
 
 222 
 
Mr. Lloyd George as a Vers- 
 Librist 
 
 BOOKS about Mr. Lloyd George have been 
 pouring from the press ever since he became 
 Prime Minister. The oddest that I have 
 seen is The Wit and Wisdom of Lloyd George, by 
 Dan Rider. It is an anthology of Mr. George's 
 sagest observations and most effective mots. Very 
 few politicians could go through the process of an- 
 thologizing unscathed, and I cannot say that Mr. 
 George's tit-bits are as effective when they are ex- 
 tracted from their contexts and laid coldly on paper 
 as they were when we first heard them. Mr. Rider, 
 however, has no such doubts. To him Mr. George is 
 a warrior-bard, " in the direct line of the old Welsh 
 tradition and spiritually akin to the House of 
 David." Impressed by " the rhythmic quality of his 
 utterance, his eloquent pauses and his poetic imagery 
 — that artistic shell wherein he packs the high ex- 
 plosive of his thought," he has 
 
 " ventured to arrange that parts of some of his 
 speeches shall be presented in the form of free verse, 
 into which they fall naturally." 
 
 It was to these, of course, that one turned first. 
 
 223 
 
Books in General 
 
 The longest of them is a poem on Great Britain, 
 of which I can only give the first two stanzas. 
 These go thus : 
 
 This is a great country, 
 
 A country with a good many natural advantages. 
 
 That it is an island is not a matter to be despised, 
 
 Be thankful there is a fine old moat round this castle, 
 
 Don't take advantage of that to do nothing, 
 
 Work all the harder for gratitude that you have got 
 
 it, 
 Work all the harder to preserve it. 
 They are trying to bridge it. 
 
 They are trying to make it impossible for us to use it. 
 Defend your island. 
 Defend the moat that is round it. 
 
 This is a rich land. 
 
 Rich in its soil. 
 
 Rich in the deposits under its soil. 
 
 Rich in its people, 
 
 Rich in its past, 
 
 Rich in its present, 
 
 God knows what riches there are in its future — 
 
 That depends upon its people today. 
 
 This is a great land. 
 
 It has the possession of a great past. 
 
 Which the struggles of generations for freedom have 
 matured into the traditions of liberty. 
 
 That have enriched it, and have ennobled its insti- 
 tutions. 
 
 And dignified its people. 
 
 224 
 
Mr. Lloyd George as a Vers-Librist 
 
 I hardly think that it comes up to the Psalmist, and I 
 feel that the rhythmical effect is rather that of the 
 improvising speaker who repeats himself whilst wait- 
 ing for the next thought to occur. But one cannot 
 help being struck with the close resemblance between 
 a prose speech thus printed and the ordinary ad- 
 vanced " poems " one sees in American magazines. 
 If Mr. George is a poet, it is rather to Ezra than to 
 David that one must look for his filiation. 
 
 The above extract, however, is not representative 
 of Mr. George at his most rhetorical. When he 
 really gets going he almost invariably employs more 
 imagery than this. And he has two sorts of im- 
 agery, the ordinary and the perorational. The ordi- 
 nary may come from anywhere ; from the motor-car, 
 the aeroplane, the coal-mine, or the tavern. His 
 range is futuristic in comparison with that, say, of 
 Mr. Churchill or Lord Curzon, both of whom are 
 good at dignified Victorian imagery. When he is in 
 high spirits he is sometimes as fertile as Hudibras, 
 who 
 
 could not ope 
 His mouth but out there flew a trope. 
 
 It is at these times, when he is making light play 
 with miscellaneous metaphors, that he is at his best 
 and most amusing. I cannot agree with those who 
 think he comes off when he is really laying himself 
 out to be solemn or sublime. The odd forced rasp 
 that comes into his voice at those times is reflected 
 
 225 
 
Books in General 
 
 in a certain hoUowness of language. And the pau- 
 city of what I have called his perorational imagery 
 gives a clue. His fancy is no longer working; in- 
 stead of seeing the similitudes of things, he employs 
 stock decorations which he believes to be fitting : and, 
 looking for something grand, he is almost invariably 
 driven back to the mountains and the rills of " my 
 own little country." These turn up with monoto- 
 nous iteration. The most high-sounding peroration 
 Mr. George ever delivered was that of his speech at 
 Queen's Hall, September 19th, 19 14. And it illus- 
 trated more strikingly than any the absence of that 
 poetical quality of which Mr. Rider talks. The 
 Welsh mountains appeared for the hundredth time, 
 and the language — directly the lower levels of argu- 
 ment and satire had been left — is astonishingly thin. 
 The most characteristic thing, perhaps, was the con- 
 stant return to the word " great," which, after being 
 absent for pages, does duty in every sort of connec- 
 tion in the last paragraphs. In the very last para- 
 graph of all we get " great mountains," " great spec- 
 tacle," " great everlasting things," " great peaks," 
 " great pinnacle," " great mountain peaks," and 
 " great war." It is almost his only great adjective. 
 He does try to be Biblical sometimes. In the cele- 
 brated Paris speech he used the unnatural word 
 " yea " twice. Each time it gave one shudders down 
 the back. 
 
 I dp not think that Mr. Rider has done justice to 
 his subject's humour. The reader could have done 
 226 
 
Mr. Lloyd George as a Vers-Librist 
 
 with some more of his best forgotten satirical pass- 
 ages in lieu of such mots as: 
 
 " The average Briton is too shy to be a hero until 
 he is asked." 
 
 " Drink is doing us more damage in the war than 
 all the German submarines put together." 
 
 " The land is the bountiful mother that gives to 
 the children of men sustenance, security, and rest." 
 
 " If you fill the lungs of the children with good air, 
 you empty the purses of the parsons of good gold." 
 
 " I should like to create a campaign against snob- 
 bishness. It would purge the nation." 
 
 Even such of these remarks as are sound are not so 
 brilliant as to be peculiarly Lloyd-Georgian. " It is 
 singularly unfair that future generations should have 
 to bear the brunt of expenditure incurred by their 
 forefathers " is a quotation that the friends of taxa- 
 tion might recall, and the passages about the miser- 
 able amount we spend on education are still highly 
 relevant. But I begin to impinge upon political con- 
 troversy. Leaving the merit or demerits of Mr. 
 George's character, opinions and policy out of ac- 
 count, I must say that, although I enjoy his speeches 
 as " turns," I have never thought them very striking 
 as literature, and that Mr. Rider's collection does 
 them much less than justice. I must therefore close 
 by not recommending it. 
 
 227 
 
William Cartwright 
 
 IN the seventeenth century there were several 
 writers who had great contemporary reputa- 
 tions but have since been unduly neglected. 
 Cleveland is one ; Cartwright is another ; Randolph, 
 a Cambridge don, who died young and who really 
 had the makings of a great writer in him, is a third. 
 In recent years an edition of Cleveland has been 
 published in America; Randolph was edited, in a 
 comprehensive! but characteristically slovenly way, 
 by the late W. C. Hazlitt, and now there appears 
 (Cambridge University Press) an edition of Cart- 
 wright's poems by Mr. R. C. Goffin, who dates his 
 preface from Gauhati, Assam. 
 
 William Cartwright was born in 1611, took holy 
 orders, and died, a fervent Royalist, in 1643, at Ox- 
 ford. King Charles went into mourning for him; 
 he had dazzled all his contemporaries with his grace 
 and learning. His scholarship was, by the standards 
 of his time, universal; he was personally charming; 
 he was a fine preacher; and he wrote before he was 
 twenty-five a large number of poems. Whatever 
 merits may be found in the best of them no modern 
 reader is likely to find them as a whole as good as 
 his friends thought them. But he was a fascinating 
 prodigy, and even his least meritorious work is sufli- 
 ciently interesting to carry one on. 
 228 
 
William Cartwright 
 
 A good deal of it is interesting chiefly on account 
 of its defects. Mr. GofEn may go too far when he 
 says the " metaphysicals " as a group were " all head 
 and no heart." That statement would have to be 
 qualified considerably before it could be applied to 
 Donne, to Crashaw or to Vaughan. But it can be 
 applied almost as it stands to Cartwright, whose 
 works are almost entirely exercises in intellectual in- 
 genuity. In a few songs, sensual or delicately fanci- 
 ful, he escapes from his conceits and writes naturally 
 and musically; and in a few personal addresses he 
 speaks directly and with feeling, notably in the pass- 
 age in which he congratulates the Queen on bravery 
 in face of danger. Sometime his fancies go trip- 
 pingly, as in : 
 
 Tell me who taught thy subtle Eyes 
 To cheat true hearts with fallacies? 
 Who did instruct thy Sighs to Lie? 
 Who taught thy kisses Sophistry? 
 Believe 'tis far from honest Rigour; 
 
 O how I loath 
 
 A tutor'd oath! 
 
 I'l ne'er come nigh 
 
 A learned Sigh, 
 Nor credit vows in Mood and Figure. 
 
 And, rarely, one finds in him a stray touch of sublim- 
 ity, as in that image in which he symbolizes the 
 broken residue of a dream that is left to us when we 
 wake from the dream : 
 
 229 
 
Books in General 
 
 As Nilus sudden Ebbing, here 
 Doth leave a scale, and a scale there. 
 And somewhere else perhaps a Fin, 
 Which by his stay had Fishes been; 
 So Dreams, which overflowing be, 
 Departing leave Half-things. . . . 
 
 But as a rule his " game of similes " is so fantastic 
 that whatever pleasure we find in them, it is not the 
 pleasure we get from poetry. His Gnat shows his 
 cleverness at its highest and just comes off. He can- 
 not congratulate a friend on a son and heir without 
 beginning : 
 
 Y' are now transcrib'd, and Publike View 
 Perusing finds the Coppy true. 
 Without Erratas new crept in, 
 Fully Complete and Genuine; 
 And nothing wanting can espy. 
 But only Bulk and quantity; 
 
 and this is simple compared to his effort on the Great 
 Frost. A few of his poems are deliberately humor- 
 ous. The Bill of Fare, on living in, a shortage, 
 would have been topical not long ago had Tirpitz 
 had his way. The meal for twenty men consists of : 
 
 Imprimis some Rice Porredge, sweet, and hot, 
 Three knobs of Sugar season the whole Pot. 
 Item, one pair of Eggs in a great dish. 
 So ordered that they cover all the Fish. 
 230 
 
William Cartwright 
 
 Item, one gaping Haddock's Head, which will 
 At least afright the Stomach, if not fill. 
 Item, one thing in Circles, which we take 
 Some for an Eele, hut the Wiser for a Snake. 
 
 Follows a description of a congregation's mouth 
 watering while the preacher talks about the fatted 
 calf that was killed for the Prodigal Son. 
 
 Mr. GofEn's edition is a careful one, and his pre- 
 liminary reading, although he does not parade it, has 
 clearly been extensive. He gives variants and his 
 notes hit the happy mean between inadequacy and 
 superfluity. One cannot but regret, however, that a 
 critical editor of Cartwright having turned up for 
 the first time in over 250 years he did not do the job 
 once and for all by covering the whole field. As 
 things are, he has limited himself in such a way that 
 some one will still have to produce a complete edi- 
 tion. It is not only that he has left out Cartwright's 
 plays, the largest portion of his work. He has also 
 — 'though one does not know, of course, what re- 
 strictions as to space may or may not have been im- 
 posed on him — omitted the preliminary matter to 
 the 1 65 1 edition, which is so voluminous and inter- 
 esting that no reprint could be really satisfactory 
 which lacked it. The preface (in which Donne is 
 referred to as " the highest Poet our language can 
 boast of ") is good, but it is far outweighed in im- 
 portance by the mass of commendatory poems which 
 follow it. I do not think that the collected edition 
 
 231 
 
Books in General 
 
 of any English writer is accompanied by tributes at 
 once so numerous and so interesting by virtue of their 
 origin. There are about fifty of these eulogistic epi- 
 taphs; amongst their authors being " Orinda," 
 Vaughan, Brome, Sherburne, James Howell, Izaak 
 Walton, and Jasper Mayne, who remarks, inter alia, 
 " in thee Ben Jonson still held Shakespeare's quill." 
 The rear is brought up by Hum. Moseley, the pub- 
 lisher who modestly observes : 
 
 / say Amen to all, like a glad Cleark 
 
 {For those that cannot write may make their Mark) . 
 
 and then, getting to business, concludes with : 
 
 Six hundred pages of good Wit? Read, try it; 
 Would all that cannot mend this Book would buy it. 
 
 Which would make a very good inscription for a 
 title-page. As an afterthought Moseley (who had 
 almost a monopoly of verse-publishing in his time) 
 adds a Postscript: 
 
 " We shall not trouble you with an Index, for al- 
 ready the Book is bigger than we meant it, although 
 we chose this Volume and Character purposely to 
 bring down its bulk. The Printer's faults (such as 
 they are) must lye at his own door; for the written 
 Coppy was very exact. But (to save you that la- 
 bour) the next Page tells you his Errata." 
 
 This was written before men learned to sink their 
 
 personalities in their trades. 
 
 232 
 
On Submitting Manuscripts 
 
 I WAS staying with a man who was " submit- 
 ting" (as they call it) a manuscript to a paper. 
 He was not used to this sort of thing, and he 
 asked what he should say to the editor in the accom- 
 panying note. A mere perfunctory announcement 
 of the fact that he was enclosing a manuscript and 
 a stamped addressed envelope for its return seemed 
 to him brusque, uncivil, inhuman. I suggested that 
 what the person at the other end wanted to see — if 
 he wanted to see anything — was his manuscript, not 
 his letter, which would in any case have no bearing 
 on the merits of his work; and that, as a matter of 
 fact, especially as there was a paper shortage, he 
 would do best to waste no notepaper at all, but to 
 send the manuscript, the stamped envelope and noth- 
 ing else. I believe it was good advice. 
 
 In the back of his mind, I think, was the idea that 
 if he wrote an obviously intelligent, even sprightly, 
 letter, the editor on whom he was bestowing his at- 
 tentions would realize at once that he was dealing 
 with an unusual individual and read the manuscript 
 with double the care which would otherwise have 
 been spent upon it. It is a common delusion. I re- 
 member that when I sent to a paper the first of the 
 few bow-at-a-venture contributions I have ever at- 
 
 233 
 
Books in General 
 
 tempted, I informed the recipient that if he did not 
 like what I sent he could throw it into the fire — 
 where, possibly, it went. I suppose that I thought 
 that remark had a certain panache about it; but I 
 little knew how many hundreds of other authors an- 
 nually make the same remark. It happens that since 
 then I have at various times seen a number of letters 
 which both editors and publishers have received with 
 manuscript from strangers, and it is odd how well- 
 defined are the classes into which they fall. 
 
 Many of them spring from an awkward feeling 
 that something must be said; some from a feeling 
 that compliments may bring forth good fruit; some 
 perhaps from a suspicion that pressure may be ap- 
 plied. But It is not, as a rule (unless you know 
 your particular editor's weaknesses), much use to 
 say, " Dear Sir, — I should be glad if you would 
 print the enclosed verses. I may add that I am a 
 second-cousin of the Duke of Dorset." There is 
 little point in saying, " Don't bother to return this 
 if you can't use It; it can go into your waste-paper 
 basket," since hundreds of other people per diem are 
 writing the same sort of thing; and a similar objec- 
 tion applies to statements that one would rather 
 one's stuff appeared in " your admirable pages " than 
 In any of the comparatively inferior pages of the 
 paper's contemporaries. 
 
 One class of these covering letters was discussed 
 by Thackeray in his Roundabout Papers. He was 
 234 
 
On Submitting Manuscripts 
 
 editing the Cornhill, and he found that his bed was 
 strewn with thorns. His lot was worse than most; 
 for he was so well known that piles of M'SS. used to 
 be addressed to his private residence, although he 
 advertised in his magazine that contributions should 
 only be sent to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. He re- 
 printed one of the numerous appeals ad miserkor- 
 diam which he said he had received. It ran as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 " Camberwell, June 4. 
 " Sir, — May I hope, may I entreat, that you will 
 favour me by perusing the enclosed lines, and that 
 they may be found worthy of insertion in the Corn- 
 hill Magazine? We have known better days, sir. 
 I have a sick and widowed mother to maintain, and 
 little brothers and sisters who look to me. I do my 
 utmost as a governess to support them. I toil at 
 night when they are at rest, and my own hand and 
 brain are alike tired. If I could add but a little to 
 our means by my pen, many of my poor invalid's 
 wants might be supplied, and I could procure for her 
 comforts to which she is now a stranger. Heaven 
 knows it is not for want of will or for want of energy 
 on my part that she is now in ill-health, and our little 
 household almost without bread. Do — do cast a 
 kind glance over my poem, and if you can help us, 
 the widow, the orphans will bless you I — I remain, 
 Sir, in anxious expectancy, your faithful servant, 
 
 "S. S. S." 
 
 I do not suppose that Thackeray actually did receive 
 
 235 
 
Books in General 
 
 this letter ; he would scarcely have had the bad taste 
 to reprint it if it had been genuine. More prob- 
 ably it was the common measure of a large number 
 of similar ones. It hurt him, he said, to have these 
 people " calling for bread which I can give them if I 
 choose," when he knew that he could only " choose " 
 by betraying his editorial trust and printing unsuit- 
 able literature. 
 
 Covering letters to publishers must, I suppose, 
 usually be written. There are so many things to be 
 stated : willingness or unwillingness to cut, desire to 
 have MSS. back in two weeks if not acceptable, and 
 so on. There is also, in many cases, something to 
 be said about finance. The chastest example of this 
 that I can remember was thel letter that Shelley, 
 when at school, wrote to Messrs. Longmans concern- 
 ing his first novel. It is to be presumed that he 
 wanted to suggest that he was ready, if necessary, to 
 pay for its publication, and that pride, or an unchar- 
 acteristic caution, prevented him from saying so in 
 terms. This was the letter that left Royal Henry's 
 shades : 
 
 "Eton College, May 7, 1809. 
 " Gentlemen, 
 
 " It is my intention to complete and publish a 
 Romance, of which I have already written a large 
 portion, before the end of July. My object in writ- 
 ing it was not pecuniary, as I am independent, being 
 the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county 
 236 
 
On Submitting Manuscripts 
 
 of Sussex, and prosecuting my studies as an Oppidan 
 at Eton ; from the many leisure hours I have, I have 
 taken an opportunity of indulging my favourite pro- 
 pensity in writing. Should it produce any pecuniary 
 advantages, so much the better for me, I do not ex- 
 pect it. If you would be so kind as to answer this, 
 d'rect it to me at the Rev. George Bethell's. Might 
 I likewise request the! favour of secrecy until the 
 Romance is published, 
 "lam 
 
 " Your very humble servant, 
 " Percy Shelley." 
 
 " Be so good as to tell me whether I shall send 
 you the original manuscript when I have completed 
 it or one corrected, etc." 
 
 Messrs. Longmans observed that they would " be 
 happy to see the MS." But they did not publish it, 
 and the " pecuniary advantages " certainly were not 
 " produced." 
 
 237 
 
Mr. H. G. Wells and Lord 
 Tennyson 
 
 I HAVE been reading Mr. Wells's book The 
 Undying Fire, and I certainly agree with those 
 who call it the best book he has written since 
 his early scientific romances and A Modern Utopia. 
 But when I was reading it something kept on whis- 
 pering " Where have I recently gone through all this 
 argument somewhere else?" I then remembered 
 that a few months ago I had returned to that great, 
 if uneven, poem In Memoriam; and it was at once 
 plain that, though it may not be possible to call Mr. 
 Wells the Lord Tennyson of this age, Tennyson in 
 that poem had conducted almost exactly the same 
 argument as Mr. Wells in almost exactly the same 
 way. Let me make a few extracts. 
 
 The most passionate and eloquent parts of Mr. 
 Huss's discourse are those in which he describes the 
 blankness of a godless universe and the horrible 
 cruelties of Nature " red in tooth and claw." 
 " What was most in my thoughts on that day when 
 the world of Nature showed its teeth to me was the 
 wretchedness of animal life " : 
 
 " It was as if the universe had put aside a mask it 
 238 
 
Mr. H. G. Wells and Lord Tennyson 
 
 had hitherto worn, and shown me Its face, and it was 
 a face of boundless evil. ... It was as if a power 
 of darkness sat over me and watched me with a 
 mocking gaze, and for the rest of that day I could 
 think of nothing but the feeble miseries of living 
 things. I was tortured, and all life was tortured 
 with me." 
 
 Tennyson's passages on evolution need no quoting. 
 If, he said, man's place in Nature was what it seemed, 
 in these words, if he 
 
 Who roll'd the psalm to empty skies, 
 Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer 
 
 is to end in ineffective dust, he is : 
 
 A monster then, a dream, 
 A discord. Dragons of the prime. 
 That tear each other in the slime, 
 Were mellow music match' d with him. 
 
 Or, as Mr. Wells puts it : 
 
 " If right and wrong are to perish together indif- 
 ferently, if there is aimless and fruitless suffering, if 
 there opens no hope for an eternal survival in conse- 
 quences of all good things, then there Is no meaning 
 in such a belief In Christianity." 
 
 We notice here a slight difference. Mr. Wells un- 
 
 239 
 
Books in General 
 
 obtrusively slips in that " in consequences," presum- 
 ably to shelve what to Tennyson was " the larger 
 hope " of personal immortality. But the vision is 
 the same and the reaction much the same. Mr. 
 Huss (facing the spectres of the mind, as Tenny- 
 son put it) feels at moments that 
 
 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, 
 
 Like birds the charming serpent draws, 
 To drop head foremost in the jaws 
 
 Of vacant darkness and to cease. 
 
 To the brooding mind of Mr. Huss it seems that 
 perhaps we have made a god in our own image, and 
 that 
 
 " where we had thought a God, somehow akin 
 to ourselves, ruled in the universe, it may be there is 
 nothing but black emptiness and a coldness worse 
 than cruelty." 
 
 That horrible doubt appears early in In Memoriam: 
 
 " The stars," she whispers, " blindly run; 
 
 A web is wov'n across the sky; 
 
 From out waste places comes a cry. 
 And murmurs from the dying sun: 
 
 " And all the phantom, Nature, stands — 
 With the music in her tone, 
 A hollow echo of my own, 
 A hollow form with empty hands." 
 240 
 
Mr. H. G. Wells and Lord Tennyson 
 
 The animate world is a shambles; all things pass. 
 The diagnosis and the treatment are similar ; we even 
 find that both Tennyson and Mr. Wells, imaginative 
 men, when surveying the processes of evolution, are 
 struck by the splendour and pride and pitiful tran- 
 sience of those larger monsters which preceded man. 
 In two of the most eloquent of his pages Mr. Wells 
 admires the magnificence of " Behemoth in a thou- 
 sand forms, Demotherium, Titanotherium, Hellado- 
 therium," creatures which were in some regards finer 
 and more powerful than we, but which have never- 
 theless passed, " and we wax in our turn. . . . How 
 can we at last escape the common fate? " Tenny- 
 son — in a sort of overflow passage embodied in 
 Maude — was arrested by a similar thought : 
 
 A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of 
 Earth; 
 
 For him did his high sun flame, and his river billow- 
 ing ran, 
 
 And he felt himself in his force to he Nature's crown- 
 ing race. 
 
 As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for 
 his birth. 
 
 So many a million ages have gone to the making of 
 man. 
 
 He now is fkst. But is he the last? Is he not too 
 base? 
 
 But there comes an escape from these self-tortur- 
 ings ; and the escape Is the same to both. 
 
 241 
 
Books in General 
 
 Mr. Wells, or rather his Mr. Huss, confronted 
 with the horrors of Nature, says : 
 
 " If there is no God, no mercy, no human kindness 
 in the great frame of space and time, if life is a writh- 
 ing torment, an itch upon one little planet, and the 
 stars away there in the void no more than huge 
 empty flares, signifying nothing, then all the brighter 
 shines the God in my heart." 
 
 To Tennyson, too, at moments Time seemed 
 
 a maniac scattering dust 
 And Life, a Fury slinging flame. 
 
 But, amplifying, he falls back on the same fountain 
 of courage: 
 
 / found him not in world or sun, 
 Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; 
 Nor thro' the questions men may try. 
 
 The petty cobwebs we have spun. 
 
 If e'er when faith had fallen asleep 
 I heard a voice " Believe no more " 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 
 That tumbled in the godless deep; 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part. 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 Stood up and answer' d " I have felt." 
 242 
 
Mr. H. G. Wells and Lord Tennyson 
 
 And starting from that firm basis both Mr. Wells 
 and Tennyson find that they have discovered a start- 
 ing-point for regenerative effort. 
 
 The end of our struggle here, concludes Mr. 
 Wells, is to remould surely in the light of service, " to 
 draw all men together out of themselves into one 
 common life and effort with God." Only through 
 the will of men can the race greater than man come. 
 The lesson of the war should be that men, inspired 
 by the Divine courage, should say: " This and all 
 . such things must end." " Social truth shall spread," 
 cried the voice of Tennyson's comforter. Love; he 
 saw in all things "toil co-operant to an end"; he 
 watched Titanic maidens who stood : 
 
 As one would sing the death of war 
 And one would chant the history 
 Of that great race, which is to be. 
 
 And though Tennyson's theology does not separate 
 " the God in the Heart " from all without, and 
 though superficially he appears to regard the desired 
 processes as automatic, I don't think that at bottom 
 he is any more complacent or less encouraging than 
 Mr. Wells. 
 
 243 
 
The Statistics of Genius 
 
 SOME years ago Mr. Havelock Ellis published 
 a Study of British Genius, in which he inves- 
 tigated the ancestry and characteristics of 
 eminent men born in these islands. I cannot at the 
 moment recall — but there is no necessity — any of 
 the conclusions at which he arrived, save only that 
 he stated that my own country was very prolific in 
 geniuses and that its products were of a uniquely 
 brilliant, adventurous and fascinating type. In- 
 spired, apparently, by his example and by that of 
 Monsieur Odin, who has made a similar study of 
 eminent Frenchmen, Professor Edwin Leavitt Clarke 
 has now written a book, American Men of Letters: 
 Their Nature and Nurture, which appears as No. i, 
 Vol. LXXIL, of the Columbia University Studies in 
 History, Economics and Public Law. 
 
 Professor Clarke (who dedicates his book " to my 
 Father and Mother, to whom I owe the Nature and 
 Nurture which made this Study possible ") takes the 
 thousand leading American men of letters born in 
 or before 1850 and subjects them to a very elaborate 
 scrutiny. He is less fortunate than Mr. Ellis and 
 Professor Odin in having to draw his materials from 
 a brief period of time and a community which has 
 244 
 
The Statistics of Genius 
 
 thus far been relatively infertile of first-class men. 
 He had to have a large number for the sake of his 
 statistics, but many of them must be very small fry. 
 Of the whole looo names only 91 are known to me 
 (an intelligent foreigner), including those of Mrs. 
 Eddy, W. L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, and others 
 of the sort, besides names like H. Timrod and Jones 
 Very, casual mentions of which have stuck in my 
 memory merely because they are odd. But they ap- 
 pear to have been selected on sound principles ; they 
 are the thousand best obtainable; and Professor 
 Clarke's numerous tables with regard to their origin, 
 upbringing, connubial state and so on are as careful 
 and exhaustive as the lay reader could wish them 
 to be. 
 
 The thousand includes a certain number of libra- 
 rians, erudite men, actors, orators, publicists, popu- 
 larizers, bibliophiles and patrons {e.g., Pierpont 
 Morgan), besides the more numerous writers of his- 
 tory, novels, essays and poems. Nine " important 
 environmental conditions " are considered. These 
 are : " ( i ) Social environment, by which is meant 
 the ideals and customs of a group at any given time 
 and place; (2) geographic environment; (3) local 
 environment; (4) education; (5) economic condition 
 of parents; (6) occupation of father; (7) occupa- 
 tion of the literati themselves; (8) early religious 
 training; and (9) birth-rank in the family of broth- 
 ers and sisters." The investigation of these " forces 
 of nurture " leads to the production of many interest- 
 
 245 
 
Books in General 
 
 ing, if few surprising, facts. American literary 
 fecundity (the date3 are birth-dates) was at its 
 highest in the decade 1 791-1800, which produced 
 " twenty-three authors per million." The rate was 
 " practically constant " for twenty years more; fell 
 off by 40 per cent, in 1821-30, and thereafter stead- 
 ily declined. Professor Clarke divides his people 
 into " men of talent " (higher class) and " men of 
 merit," and says that the proportion of the former to 
 the latter has declined. The influences which have 
 militated against authorship have apparently most 
 strongly affected men of exceptional ability; perhaps 
 the " men of superior ability were the first to sense 
 the baneful influence of approaching phihstinism." 
 The proportion of literary women has increased; in 
 itself, as the Professor observes, a tribute to the 
 power of environmental conditions. In all but one 
 of the departments of literary activity New England 
 produced more literati, in proportion to population, 
 than any other group of States. The one exception 
 was the drama ; and here the Puritan influence may be 
 traced. " As a whole, authors appeared most fre- 
 quently, and showed the greatest skill and versatility, 
 when their contemporaries were in sympathy with 
 their work." The importance of the Southern 
 States was slight. 
 
 It was found, in respect of education, that 50.6 per 
 cent, of all the persons catalogued had received a full 
 college course. The proportion is even higher than 
 one would have thought likely; and though it de- 
 clined, it did not decline largely. The professional 
 246 
 
The Statistics of Genius 
 
 classes, especially clergyman and lawyers, produced 
 many times their proportionate number of literary 
 persons. " The class of mechanics, clerks and la- 
 bourers produced relatively very few men of letters." 
 " If relative numbers are considered, the Unitarian 
 body apparently had the greatest proportion of lit- 
 erary persons born within its ranks, and the Congre- 
 gationalists, Friends and Universalists followed in 
 order." First-born children are rather more fre- 
 quently literary, in almost every size of family, than 
 would have seemed probable. So, also, were last- 
 born children. And explanations suggest themselves 
 for this. As to " nationality strain " no fewer than 
 93.8 per cent, of the 1000 were British and 1.4 Irish. 
 This proportion is fairly representative of the esti- 
 mated proportion in the whole population up to 1840 
 or so. 
 
 Professor Clarke's conclusion is explained in a 
 comprehensible if scarcely audacious simile. Nature 
 is likened to seed and nurture to ground : — 
 
 " A combination of either good ground and poor 
 seed or poor ground and good seed will produce a 
 better crop than when poor seed is sown on poor 
 ground. No good crop is ever produced, however, 
 without the use of both good seed and good ground. 
 In like manner gifted children who lack opportunity, 
 and dull children who possess every opportunity, 
 achieve far more than dull children who lack favour- 
 able conditions of environment." 
 
 247 
 
Books in General 
 
 Galton and L. F. Ward were both right in insisting 
 respectively on breeding and nurture, and " the so- 
 ciologist is justified in advocating, with all the force 
 at his command, the extension of those fundamental 
 American privileges, economic and social opportunity 
 and education, by means of which all the innate abil- 
 ity which exists may be given the environment neces- 
 sary for its maximum development." It is extraor- 
 dinary — or rather, it is not extraordinary — how 
 often statistical inquiries confirm the conclusions of 
 common observation and reasoning. I remember 
 seeing hefty great tables which proved conclusively 
 that slum children are not so tall and heavy as public- 
 school boys. But such tables are very useful as 
 against people who can be convinced by no other 
 means. 
 
 It may be added that Professor Clarke says little 
 about the production of the highest forms of genius. 
 He quotes with approval some one who says that 
 great genius is the perfect fruit from a twig which 
 has grown in perfect conditions. He allows it to be 
 deduced from scattered sentences that he does not 
 expect much great genius from America in its present 
 transitional chaos. If not a settled order, at least a 
 strong and coherent body of doctrine or a powerful 
 wave of emotion infecting the community or a com- 
 pact part of it is, he appears to suggest, wanted. 
 But this is a more academic matter. We may be 
 able to give people better food and education, but we 
 are not yet equipped with efficient schemes for pro- 
 248 
 
The Statistics of Genius 
 
 ducing religious unanimity or intense spiritual atmos- 
 pheres. Some part of man's environment will 
 always escape our deliberate regularization. We 
 ought not to be sorry. 
 
 249 
 
Coleridge at Table 
 
 WHEN Mr. Max Beerbphm produced a 
 volume of caricatures entitled The Poet's 
 Corner, he thought he could best repre- 
 sent Coleridge by showing him laying down the law 
 at an originally festive board, his rapt eyes shining 
 upwards, oblivious of the fact that his companions 
 are all snoring hard, with their mouths open and 
 their cheeks on each other's shoulders. Coleridge's 
 proclivities as a talker are, of course, notorious; ev- 
 erybody has heard of the dialogue between him and 
 Lamb : " I think, Charles, that you never heard 
 me preach." " My dear boy, I never heard you do 
 anything else." The fact that his Table Talk — 
 which was first published in 1835 by his nephew, 
 Henry Nelson Coleridge — has not been very widely 
 read in this generation may be due to a misapprehen- 
 sion of these stories. For Coleridge, though he 
 often talked boringly and incomprehensibly, usually 
 talked far too long, and invariably monopolized 
 what only a fantastic courtesy could call a conversa- 
 tion, was at his best one of the best talkers on record. 
 
 The last reprint of the Table Talk with which I 
 am acquainted is that (1884) in Henry Morky's 
 Universal Library, a most interesting series much 
 250 
 
Coleridge at Table 
 
 handicapped by the criminal smallness of its print, 
 A new edition has been published by the Oxford Uni- 
 versity Press. It includes, as Morley's reprint did 
 not include, Coleridge's Omniana (contributed to an 
 1 8 12 volume of Southey's) and supplementary Table 
 Talk from Alsop's Recollections of 1836. By way 
 of preface there appears H. N. C.'s original introduc- 
 tion and a paper written in 1886 for the St. James' 
 Gazette by Coventry Patmore. Patmore remarks 
 that Coleridge's table talk was his best prose work; 
 the finest thoughts in his books " shine only as the 
 more lustrous points of luminous nebulas, in his re- 
 corded conversations glitter as brightly and distinctly 
 as stars in a frosty night." Patmore's quotations 
 are mostly political quotations selected because they 
 fortified his own convictions, e.ff.: 
 
 " I have never known a trader in philanthropy who 
 was not wrong in heart somewhere or other. Indi- 
 viduals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their 
 family relations — men not benevolent or beneficent 
 to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavish- 
 ing money and labour and time on the race, the ab- 
 stract notion. The cosmopolitism which does not 
 spring out of, and blossom upon, the deep-rooted 
 stem of nationality or patriotism, is a spurious and 
 rotten growth." 
 
 The first part of this is rather too sweeping a gen- 
 eralization, but the truth about almost all politicians 
 in all ages reposes in another : 
 
 251 
 
Books in General 
 
 " See how triumphant in debate and in action 
 O'Connell is I Why? Because he asserts a broad 
 principle, and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, 
 and has faith in it. Our ministers — true Whigs in 
 that — have faith in nothing but expedients de die 
 in diem." 
 
 But it is misleading to fasten particularly on his 
 political remarks, for almost every subject in this 
 world and the other was canvassed by him and he 
 had an amazing faculty for linking up subjects not 
 commonly associated and drawing illustrations from 
 the most surprising sources. 
 
 I may give a few examples of some of the kinds of 
 things he said : 
 
 " A rogue is a roundabout fool. 
 
 " Our theatres — Drury Lane and Covent Gar- 
 den — are fit for nothing: they are too large for 
 acting, and too small for a bull-fight. 
 
 " The Reformation in the sixteenth century nar- 
 rowed Reform. As soon as men began to call them- 
 selves names, all hope of further amendment was 
 lost. 
 
 " The best way to bring a clever young man who 
 has become sceptical and unsettled to reason, is to 
 make him feel something in any way. Love, if sin- 
 cere and unworldly, will, in nine cases out of ten, 
 bring him to a sense and assurance of something real 
 and actual; and that sense alone will make him think 
 252 
 
Coleridge at Table 
 
 to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is 
 thinking," 
 
 There are hundreds of Coleridge's acutest literary 
 judgments in these pages ; and in few, I think, would 
 the common sense of posterity differ from him. 
 There are also some excellent light poems (including 
 two on the bad smells of Cologne) and many anec- 
 dotes. I would recommend this book to any one 
 who is not too lazy to think, but likes to do his think- 
 ing without systematic solemnity. 
 
 253 
 
Fragments of China 
 
 A CORRESPONDENT in China, noting a ref- 
 erence I made to 'School Magazines, sends 
 me some numbers of The Yellow Dragon, 
 the magazine of Queen's College, Hongkong. 
 Most of the boys appear to be Chinese, and East 
 meets West pretty intimately in the school chronicles. 
 The form is the usual form; there is a Latin poem, 
 there are accounts of football matches and a chess 
 tournament ; but after much that is familiar one sud- 
 denly comes across the announcement that the Head- 
 master has received the following letter from a gen- 
 tleman apologizing for the absence of two boys from 
 school : 
 
 " Dear Sir, — Having instantly received the awful 
 tidings that Cheuk Yuk Ling, in class Full 3 A and 
 Cheuk Yuk Tat, In class 7, have been both kidnapped 
 by thieves when visiting their ancestors' tombs, I beg 
 you to kindly grant them a few days of absence as 
 they will be ransomed in a short time. As soon as 
 they are freed they will attend to school." 
 
 Curiously, another correspondent in China sends me 
 almost simultaneously two cuttings from the Central 
 China Post. One of them is a notice which could 
 have appeared nowhere in the world but in that suav- 
 est of countries : 
 254 
 
Fragments of China 
 
 " To Carpet Buyers." 
 
 " Mr. Tien Chun-chien of the Tien Chang Carpet 
 Company, No. 36 San Teh Li, French Concession, 
 begs to request his patrons to call before nine in the 
 morning or after half-past four in the afternoon 
 when he will have the pleasure of attending to them 
 personally, as he fears that they may be overcharged 
 by his assistants." 
 
 But the other is, unhappily, merely an Oriental 
 version of a universal tragic story. It is a letter to 
 the Editor: it is headed " Yangtze Scenery and Jap- 
 anese Advertisements " ; and it is one more proof of 
 the readiness of the Japanese to imitate the worst 
 features of our commercial civilization. It runs : 
 
 " Honourable Mister, — My friend have tell 
 me just now you like that Japan pill notices in hills of 
 Ichang. Any man can understand that pill notice 
 in hills most highest unreason, certainly for cause 
 that pills very perhaps wholesome I don't know for 
 bloods and other internal juices of the interior body. 
 Pill notice in hill very much confounded, walking men 
 (and otherwise women) travelling in hills so can 
 perspect the views. More proper can put Japan pill 
 notice in bath rooms I think so very much. With 
 you much kindness — Yours very friendly, 
 
 " P. Z. TONG. 
 
 " Wuchang, Aug. 31st." 
 
 My heart bleeds for Ichang. 
 
 255 
 
Rupert Brooke in Retrospect 
 
 IN Rugby School Chapel there are tablets com- 
 memorating Matthew Arnold and Clough. 
 There might also have been one to Landor. 
 But Landor was expelled at an early age as an incor- 
 rigible. An incorrigible he was. He was after- 
 wards sent down from Oxford for firing a gun into 
 the rooms of a Tory undergraduate, which offence 
 was made worse (it is said) because he refused to 
 give an explanation. The mere fact that an institu- 
 tion has ejected a great man does not always prevent 
 it from claiming credit for helping to shape him. 
 Shelley was turned out of University College, Ox- 
 ford, for firing a controversial blunderbuss (he at 
 least would have been prepared to explain and de- 
 fend his action indefinitely), but there is a vast me- 
 morial to him there : a creepy great marble model of 
 his nakied corpse lying under a hollow ceiling painted 
 dark blue with stars on it, and intended (the visitor 
 conceives) to represent the sky. Rugby has been 
 more reserved. She has foregone Landor, but to 
 Arnold and Clough she has now added Rupert 
 Brooke, a tablet to whom was unveiled on March 
 29, 1 9 19, by Sir Ian Hamilton. 
 
 Sir lan's address was delivered under difficult con- 
 ditions : in the chapel, where an audience is precluded 
 256 
 
Rupert Brooke in Retrospect 
 
 from making those signs of approval, and even dis- 
 approval, which, by filling up a speaker's pauses, help 
 him to keep going. But its clarity and directness, 
 and the happy choice of its words, impressed one 
 when one heard it, and in print it seemed still better. 
 Sir Ian suggested that Brooke's personality was even 
 more remarkable than his work, which he had hardly 
 begun. Brooke will be a legendary figure ; when our 
 generation has been long dead his personality will 
 fascinate posterity; they will magnify him; a myth 
 will gather around him; he will be one of those 
 figures around whom creative literature is written. 
 I think that is true ; he was one of those men of whom 
 one feels that accidents do not happen; that their 
 personalities, without effort, compel their careers; 
 men to whom " romantic " lives and deaths seem to 
 come as naturally as its predestined passage to a 
 flower. I thought of this as I was coming home, but 
 when I got home I turned back to his work to see 
 how I now found it. 
 
 I found it better than before, and especially the' 
 latest of it. In his lifetime and after his death too 
 much attention, relatively, was given to the extrava- 
 gances, the mild extravagances, of his youth. A 
 great number of the poems in his first book were half- 
 serious, over-emphasized exercises on themes chosen 
 (however unconsciously) because they would annoy 
 sentimentalists. Laughing audacities akin to these 
 are to be found in the book on Webster. But it is a 
 mistake to telescope a man's work ; and it is especially 
 
 257 
 
Books in General 
 
 so when dealing with a man who bridged the gulf be- 
 tween precocity and maturity in a very few years and 
 then died. Even in Brooke's earliest work, few 
 though were the poems in his first book that would 
 have lasted on their own merits, there was evident a 
 t;echnlcal_niastery, which seldom failed, over the 
 handling of verse, and the promise of an extraordi- 
 narily clear and straightforward style. If one puts 
 these behind one -and'coirsrdrrs-tnfly'the work of his 
 last two or three years, one finds that^tylein_fujl 
 bloom, unstained by forced words or tricksof expres- 
 sion. No modern man has written prose more clear 
 and charming than is to be found in the letters from 
 America or the confession on the outbreak of war, 
 a prose which most easily adapted itself both to 
 the lightest raillery or irony and to the profoundest 
 feelings of the heart, contemplating the universe and 
 death. And his verse was the twin of his prose. 
 
 Time would have brought a fuller content; and, 
 automatically, that larger volume of production 
 which makes a man's powers so much more evident 
 and definable. But any one who freshly reads his 
 last work must, I think, agree that, emotionally and 
 intellectually, Brooke had already found himself ; and 
 that he had actually perfected his instrument. His 
 war-sonnets have been so quoted and requoted that, 
 for the time being, the ear is dulled to them ; but they 
 were not all he had done in the sonnet form, and had 
 he never written them, the others, for number and 
 quality, exceed anything in the kind that any of his 
 258 
 
Rupert Brooke in Retrospect 
 
 contemporaries had done. I think the most beauti- 
 ful is The Busy Heart; but how good are all those 
 sonnets written in the Pacific! How easily, yet 
 gravely, they progress to an inevitable end! Take 
 the( endings of them together and how well they 
 stand : 
 
 And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again, 
 
 And still remember, a tale I have heard, or known; 
 An empty tale, of idleness and pain, 
 
 Of two that loved — or did not love — and one 
 Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly 
 A long while since and by some other sea. 
 
 So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams, 
 Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams. 
 
 Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men. 
 Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible ; 
 
 And light on waving grass, he knows not when. 
 And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell. 
 
 Spend in pure converse our eternal day; 
 
 Think each in each, immediately wise; 
 Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say 
 
 What this tumultuous body now denies; 
 And feel, who have laid Our groping hands away; 
 
 And see, no longer blinded by our eyes. 
 
 They say that the Dead die not, but remain 
 
 Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth. 
 I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these, 
 
 259 
 
Books in General 
 
 In wise, majestic, melancholy train, 
 And -a^atch the moon, and the still-raffing seas 
 And ti^n, coming Mid going on the earth. 
 
 In eacji-^ these cases the last line is perfect and 
 deta<5nable; yet it is patent that in none has the poet 
 " written up to " the last line ; it grows naturally out 
 of what comes before. And in the phraseology of 
 all these sonnets, in the (neglected) Song beginning: 
 
 All suddenly the wind comes soft. 
 
 And Spring is here again; 
 And the hawthorn quickens with buds of green. 
 And my heart with buds of pain, 
 
 and, indeed, in all the later poems, there Is a large, 
 assured simplicity of language, whatever is being 
 saidTthat is^pmiTIaF to' poets'oFtTie' fir st order. His 
 style reacheH full maturity in thosie fragmSits which 
 Mr. Marsh appended to his Memoir, particularly 
 the scattered lines from an unwritten poem on the 
 approach of the Fleet to the Troad, lines like that in 
 which the ghost of the Greek past hears " more than 
 Olympian thunder on the sea " and that in which 
 Achilles, aware of the great events impending, 
 " moved the great shades that were his limbs." 
 
 There is little of his best ; but what there is of it 
 could not be better. And it is worth remarking that 
 the more he developed, the more lucid he became. 
 There exists at present among most of our semi-good 
 260 
 
Rupert Brooke in Retrospect 
 
 poets (and not all our good ones are always free 
 from it) a habit of writing in dark abracadabras 
 which it is difficult to fathom. Profound thoughts 
 and recondite images cannot always be fully grasped 
 at first reading, and most good literature makes 
 some demands upon the intelligence of the reader. 
 But I think it may be postulated that, however mul- 
 tiple and deep may be the meanings of a poem or a 
 phrase, it is the characteristic of all the greatest 
 poetry that a surface meaning at least can be compre- 
 hended at sight. Brooke, in this regard, was a 
 model ; at the time of his death he was, without fore- 
 going any thought that he wanted to express, the 
 simplest and clearest of good English writers; he 
 used no word and no construction that was beyond^ 
 the range of intelligent English conversation. With 
 such a personality, such a brain, and such a command 
 over words and their order, he might, had he lived, 
 have produced a body of work which would have 
 stood beside that of Keats. 
 
 261 
 
Mr. Max Beerbohm's Idyll 
 
 THERE is no law under which authors can be 
 punished for insufficient output. If there 
 were, Mr. Max Beerbohm would have a 
 thin time. Since he left off writing dramatic criti- 
 cisms for the Saturday Review he seems to have con- 
 tracted the idea that a small book once in five years, 
 and a short article or story once in two years, satis- 
 factorily represent the extent of his duty to society. 
 He does an occasional cartoon as well, and we should 
 be grateful for that; but it is absurd that if one wants 
 to say anything about him one should be driven to 
 write about his old books. For he is one of the best 
 parodists, essayists and critics alive, and every day 
 scores of thoughts must go flitting across his mind 
 which would be both salutary and enlivening to us if 
 ■ only he were not so unpardonably idle. 
 
 Mr. John Lane, possibly in despair about getting 
 anything new out of him, has reprinted expensively 
 with dexterous illustrations by George Sheringham, 
 The Happy Hypocrite, one of Mr. Beerbohm's 
 earliest " works." It looks odd in a large volume 
 with illustrations and a herbaceous cover; it is the 
 sort of story that should be printed in a format small 
 and choice. But even if it were got up like a Blue- 
 262 
 
Mr. Max Beerbohm's Idyll 
 
 Book or a Family Bible it would be welcome. It 
 cannot be defined. It is a silly short story, a mad 
 parable, a grotesque fairy tale, a ferocious burlesque, 
 a fantastic pastiche. It reads as well now as it did 
 in the 'nineties; and as well on tenth reading (judi- 
 cious intervals allowed) as on first. 
 
 How could man open better than this : 
 
 " None, it is said, of all who revelled with the 
 Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell. I 
 will not trouble my little readers with a long recital 
 of his great naughtiness. But it were well they 
 should know that he was greedy, destructive, and 
 disobedient. I am afraid there Is no doubt that he 
 often sat up at Carlton House until long after bed- 
 time, playing at games, and that he generally ate and 
 drank far more than was good for him. His fond- 
 ness for fine clothes was such that he used to dress 
 on week-days quite as gorgeously as good people 
 dress on Sundays. He was thirty-five years old and 
 a great grief to his parents." 
 
 He was candid, and some maintained that his can- 
 dour was a redeeming virtue : 
 
 " But, painful as It Is to me to dissent from any 
 opinion expressed by one who is now dead, I hold 
 that Candour is good only when it reveals good ac- 
 tions or good sentiments, and that when it reveals 
 evil, itself is evil, even also." 
 
 263 
 
Books in General 
 
 That last touch of preposterous and tautologous 
 pomposity is characteristic, 
 
 The vein, for a while, is kept up : 
 
 " It is pleasant to record that many persons were 
 inobnoxious to the magic of his title and disapproved 
 of him so strongly that, whenever he entered a room 
 where they happened to be, they would make straight 
 for the door and watch him very severely through the 
 keyhole." 
 
 The children knew him as King Bogey. 
 
 " It is true that his Lordship was a non-smoker — 
 a negative virtue, certainly, and due, even that, I 
 fear, to the fashion of the day — but there the list of 
 his good qualities comes to an abrupt conclusion. 
 He loved with an insatiable love the town and the 
 pleasures of the town, whilst the ennobling influences 
 of our English lakes were quite unknown to him. 
 He used to boast that he had not seen a buttercup 
 for twenty years. . . ." 
 
 " No card-player in St. James's cheated more per- 
 sistently than he. As he was rich and had no wife 
 and family to support, I can offer no excuse for his 
 conduct." He would royster nightly at Garble's, 
 with a dancer on his arm, " clad in Georgian cos- 
 tume, which was not then, of course, fancy dress, as 
 it is now." But love and Miss Mere came; Lord 
 264 
 
Mr. Max Beerbohm's Idyll 
 
 George was smitten at sight, sought the Fair behind 
 the scenes, and fell on his knees before her " with 
 a loud crash." 
 
 I will not detail the process which transformed 
 Lord George Hell into Lord George Heaven : how 
 he bought the beautiful and saintly mask to hide his 
 degraded face; how his face changed; how, at the 
 pastrycook's, he said: "Which are buns, Jenny; I 
 should like to have one, too " ; how " they were mar- 
 ried according to the simple rites of a dear little reg- 
 istry office in Covent Garden " ; how they hid from 
 the world; how they celebrated the mensiversary of 
 their wedding; and how they surmounted the last 
 trial. The most remarkable thing to be noted, in my 
 opinion, is the way in which Mr. Beerbohm, in the 
 face of all his self-imposed difficulties, keeps one in- 
 terested in his indescribably impossible characters, 
 and makes one wish, as one should always wish, for 
 a happy ending; and the effect he produces of having 
 written a tale not farcical but beautiful. 
 
 The nearest thing to it that exists is its contem- 
 porary. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, that attractive 
 story in which murder is treated as a thing which at 
 best may be a duty, and at worst an extravagant but 
 rather charming caprice. But that book lacks the 
 peculiar fragrance of Mr. Beerbohm's. The era 
 from which it sprang was one in which the common- 
 est cliches were the cliches of Arcadia. Poets wrote 
 lines on the model of " the viol, the violet, and the 
 
 265 
 
Books in General 
 
 vine " ; and, what is odder, were praised for them. 
 Pierrot and Columbine were driven very hard; the 
 scenes of Watteau, usually viewed through the eyes 
 of Verlaine, were everywhere reproduced. Leaden 
 Cupids, on pedestals by sobbing fountains, watched 
 fantastic lovers kissing in the moon ; fauns lamented 
 their misfortunes on their pipes; the jeunesse pou- 
 dree, with a deplorable lack of humour, sighed for 
 •Dresden shepherdesses and strawberries, for simplic- 
 ity chapleted with roses; dandyisms and delicacies 
 were accumulated from all the centuries, from Theo- 
 critus to Petronius, from Ronsard to Brummel and 
 d'Orsay. It all falls very flat now; and one of the 
 reasons is that it was only half, if half, meant, but 
 was not said as though it were half meant; and the 
 reaction against the cult has been so great that most 
 modern writers are thoroughly afraid to use such a 
 word as " roses." But, queerly, Mr. Beerbohm, the 
 one man who treated the whole convention flippantly 
 and used its stock materials as a parodist, succeeds 
 in doing something permanently delightful with 
 them. A man who cannot contemplate without 
 boredom the weary prettlness of Dowson or the 
 gluttonous philanderings of Richard le Gallienne, 
 can find Mr. Beerbohm's Arcadianisms, in spite of — 
 or rather because of — their ridiculous setting, 
 charming and even touching in themselves. It is not 
 altogether in mockery that he uses his porcelain 
 words. As he does not believe that making decora- 
 tions is the chief object of life, or attempt to pile on 
 them a load which they cannot carry, he captivates 
 266 
 
Mr. Max Beerbohm's Idyll 
 
 us, and I think himself, with them. He brings out 
 all the stock properties with a wicked smile ; but au- 
 thor and reader both end by saying: " But these 
 things are rather delicious after all." What we are 
 not asked to believe we believe. The grotesque 
 menage in St. James's Park, the pure and simple 
 open-air amour, the repasts of seed-cake and dew- 
 berry wine, the fresh, bird-haunted dawns, the wild 
 flowers and the ribbons, and the aged woodman who 
 walked the woods by the Ken with faggots on his 
 back: they are made credible because they are de- 
 scribed in jest, and I at least always find the adven- 
 tures of Lord George Hell and his blushing maid 
 linger In the memory not as a piece of wild buffoon- 
 ery but as a scented idyll. 
 
 267 
 
Fire and the Heart of Man 
 
 IT was eleven o'clock at night. I was preparing 
 to write an essay. I was going to write it about 
 a book. The book was a good and a beautiful 
 book ; it filled me with the noblest thoughts, made me 
 a better man and fit for the most heroic actions. It 
 was full of sagacity, of sound reasoning, of imagina- 
 tion checked by sense, of reflection shot through 
 with vision. It was not only a good book, but a 
 large and solid book, a book to be chewed like the 
 cud, remembered and returned to, a virtuous and 
 courageous book, a book of mettle, a book of weight. 
 Unfortunately, or fortunately, just as I had finished 
 reading the book and was biting the end of my foun- 
 tain-pen, wondering how in God's name I was to do 
 it justice, I looked out of my attic window. The 
 trees stood dark across the road; the river lay dark 
 beyond the trees ; but the light of the stars was not 
 the only light. On the horizon, behind some trees 
 and a house, glowing, reddening, rolling, there was 
 a Fire. 
 
 There may be people who, when they see Fire in 
 the distance, say, " Oh, what a pity ! I hope the 
 Insurance Company will not suffer heavily " ; or, 
 " What a waste of material 1 " There may be peo- 
 ple who say, " There is a Fire " — and then go to 
 268 
 
Fire and the Heart of Man 
 
 bed. There may even be people who say, " Well, 
 what if there is a Fire ? " — and turn grumpily to re- 
 sume their discussion about the Ethics of Palaeontol- 
 ogy or the Finances of a Co-operative Kitchen. If 
 such people exist, I am not among them. When I 
 saw this Fire I ran downstairs as hard as I could pelt 
 and knocked up a neighbour. I said to him, " There 
 is a Fire. Look! " He answered, " By Jove! so 
 there is." I said, " It may be twenty miles away or 
 two miles away. The farther the bigger. If it is 
 a long walk the compensation is proportionate." 
 He said, " Wait a minute till I put on my boots." 
 I said, " All right; but buck up or the Fire may die 
 down." He hurried; and we started walking. We 
 did not know whither we were walking. All we 
 knew was, and this thought slightly depressed us, 
 that the direction of the Fire put out of the question 
 any hope that it was the Albert Memorial or the 
 Queen Victoria Memorial that was in process of com- 
 bustion. 
 
 We walked along the river, past the terrace and 
 the cocoa-butter factory, and the nuns' school, and 
 the creek, and the boathouses. The glare increased 
 steadily as we went. When we reached the bridge 
 it was in full view. An enormous factory was blaz- 
 ing away on the edge of the river below the bridge ; 
 the great span cut dark across the flames and the 
 glow. As we climbed to the bridge we saw that 
 there was a thin row of silent people leaning over 
 the ironwork — looking at the Fire. The stars 
 
 269 
 
Books in General 
 
 were above them and the velvet dark sky; the river 
 flowed below them ; a few hundred yards away great 
 flames and intervolved clouds of smoke poured out 
 of a huge building, the top windows of which were 
 almost intolerably bright. The roof had gone and 
 the pillars of stonework between the windows looked 
 like the pillars of some ruined Greek temple against 
 a magnificent gold sunset. It was all gold and blue ; 
 the moving gold and the still, all-embracing blue; 
 and the crowd said nothing at all. There was no 
 sound except when a great stretch of masonry fell 
 in, and then there was a swelling sigh like that which 
 greets the ascent of a rocket at a firework display. 
 There was a wind, and it was chill ; we passed on 
 over the bridge and descended to the tow-path on the 
 opposite bank. Along that path we went until we 
 were opposite the Fire. About eight people, very 
 indistinct in the gloom, were scattered amongst the 
 waterside bushes. In front of us a fire-boat took up 
 its position. Below and around the Fire little lights 
 flashed; there were lights above the river (which was 
 at low tide) ; voices shouted terrifically from the 
 other bank; voices, addressed to 'Arry, answered 
 from the boat, and made reference to a line. An en- 
 gine began working; hoses could be seen sending 
 rising and falling sprays of water against a blaze 
 that seemed capable of defying all the water in all 
 the seas. 
 
 There we stood, watching. Only one sentence 
 did we hear from our awed neighbours. There was 
 270 
 
Fire and the Heart of Man 
 
 a man who in the darkness looked portly and mous- 
 tached. He took his pipe out of his mouth and said, 
 optimistically, " Nice breeze ; it ought to fan it 
 along." " Along " meant an enormous oil ware- 
 house and wharf. Overhearing that remark, I told 
 myself the truth. The moral man in me, the citizen, 
 the patriot, were all fighting hard for supremacy. I 
 was trying to say to myself: " This may mean ruin 
 to somebody; you ought to pray that It should be got 
 under at once " ; and " How can you bear to see so 
 much painfully-won material wastefuUy consumed? " 
 and " This stuff would probably bei useful at the 
 Front ; it has employed labour ; its loss may be seri- 
 ous ; its replacement may be difficult ; Germany, Ger- 
 many, Germany, Germany. . . ." B'ut all that com- 
 pany of virtuous selves fought a losing battle. 
 Aloud or in quietness I (or they) could say all this 
 and much more; but the still, small voice kept on re- 
 peating, " Don't you be a humbug. It's no good. 
 You want this Fire to spread. You want to forget 
 what it all means. You will be disappointed If the 
 firemen get it under. You would like to see the next 
 place catch fire, and the next place, and the next 
 place, for it would be a devil of a great display." 
 Peccavi ; that was certainly so. 
 
 They got it under. They cornered it. Flames 
 gave way to a great smoke; the smoke grew and 
 grew; the path and the bushes faded from red Into 
 the indistinct hue of the starlit night. The mental 
 glow died down; we felt cold, and moved, and 
 
 271 
 
Books in General 
 
 walked towards home. And as we walked I medi- 
 tated on the glory of Fire, fit subject for a poet, re- 
 freshment for the human spirit and exaltation for 
 the soul. My emotions, when looking at it, had not 
 been entirely base; I had felt, not merely a sensuous 
 pleasure in the glories of that golden eruption under 
 the blue roof of night, but wonder at the energies we 
 keep under, their perpetuity and their source, and 
 the grandeur of man, living amid so much vastness 
 and power, valiantly struggling to cope with things 
 greater than himself, save that they have no souls. 
 And I thought that in the perfect and hygienic State 
 where the firemen would find water, water, every- 
 where, where the Super-Hose would be in use, where 
 everything would be built of fireproof materials, and 
 where extinguishers of a capacity not conceived by us 
 would be available as a last resort, the wise sover- 
 eign would set apart beautiful large buildings, all 
 made of timber, filled with oil, tar and sugar, sur- 
 rounded with waste land and fronted by a wide re- 
 flecting river, which would periodically be set on fire 
 for thej consolation and the uplifting of men. I 
 don't want a big Fire made impossible. 
 
 And I wondered why it was that fire on a huge 
 scale had never yet adequately inspired a poet. And 
 then I thought that poets had, after all, done as yet 
 very little, considering the materials that are daily 
 displayed before them ; and then I found great com- 
 fort and courage in the thought that the common- 
 place things, the things we all see and know, live by 
 272 
 
Fire and the Heart of Man 
 
 and live with, have so far merely been skirted, and 
 that the provinces which remain to be explored and 
 described and celebrated by imaginative writers are 
 endless, and that only corners have as yet been spied 
 into. 
 
 THE E.ND 
 
 273