UC-NRLF B 3 SSD S33 ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE THE ACADEMIC COMMITTEE COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES ON ANDREW LANG BY W. P. KER AND ON ARTHUR WOOLLQAR VERRALL BY J. W. MACKAIL Award of the EDMOND DE POUQNAC PRIZE THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28th, 1912 LONDON HENPtY FED WD I-; OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, AMEN CORNER, E.C. 1913 Price One Shilling Net. ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE THE ACADEMIC COMMITTEE COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES ON ANDREW LANG BY W. P. KER AND ON ARTHUR WOOLLQAR VERRALL BY J. W. MACKAIL Award of the EDMOND DE POLIQNAC PRIZE THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28th, 1912 LONDON' ■ HENRY FROWDE OXFOED UNIVERSITY PRESS, AMEN CORNER, E.C. 1913 THE ACADEMIC COMMITTEE. Alfred Austin. James Matthew Barrie. Arthur Christopher Benson. Laurence Binyon. Andrew Cecil Bradley. Eobert Bridges. Joseph Conrad. William John Couhthope. Austin Dobson. Edward Dowden. James Gteorge Frazer. John Galsworthy. Edmund Gosse. Viscount Haldane of Cloan, Thomas Hardy. Maurice Hewlett. William Henry Hudson (Author of ' The Purple Land ' j. Henry James. William Paton Ker. John William Mackail. Thomas Sturge Moore. Viscount Morley. George Gilbert Murray. Henry Newbolt. Sir Arthur. Wing Pinero. George Walter Prothero. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Sir Walter Ealeigh. Anne Isabella, Lady Ritchie. George Bernard Shaw. George Wyndham. William Butler Yeats. Samuel Henry Butcher died Dec. 29th, 1910. Edward Henry Pember died April 5tli, 1911. Alfred Comyn Lyall died April lOtli, 1911. Arthur Woollgar A-^errall died June 19th, 1912. Andrew Lang died July 21st, 1912. Percy W. Ames, Secretary. 265300 CONTENTS. List of Members of the J^ cademic Committee Address by Mr. J, M. Barrie . Address by Mr. W. P. Ker Address by Mr. J. V\\ ]\Iackail Address by Mr. Edmund Gosse . PAGE 20 34 ACADEMIC COMMITTEE. Meeting at Caxtox Hall, Westminster. Thtrsdcuj, Novemher 28th, 1912. Chairman: Mr. J. M. Barrie. Mr. J. M. Barrie said that the Academic Committee existed to attend, as far as it could, to the standard of style in this country. They were present to hear what two of their mem- bers had to say about two dead members, whose style, after all was said and done, was what they had left l)eliind them. He remembered long ago being with a very distinguished writer in a club where they were always talking about style, and on that occasion everyone was very brilliant on the subject. At last liis friend said something, and in comparison it was rather childish. How strange it was, and yet, perhaps, not strange at all, that the only man among them who had a style was the only one who did not seem to know all about it. Style, he fancied, was simply the way in which an artist painted his picture. There was no other difference be- tween a Venus by Titian and a Venus by Tom Smith. Rather hard on Tom. Mr. Verrall was a " little candle," as all men were, but that candle had cast its beams far. He had found his grave in the hearts of young men. It was there he had painted his picture. There are two ways in A\diich Mr. Lang may be considered, besides the other waj^s : The one as a writer who had every good quality except that he was not a Scot, and the other that he was as Scotch as peat. I do not know from which point of view Professor Ker is to speak, but I should like to talk of the other. I am like the Scotsman who, when he was dying, said, " I want neither priest nor doctor. What I want to do is to aro-ue." That was one of tlie things Mr. Lang liked to do. Lang and Stevenson were the two Scottish musketeers- All through their style one can hear what Mr. Howells called the swashbuckler swashing on his buckler. I think Mr. Lang always puzzled the Sassenach a little. Perhaps that is the first duty of the Scot. He was so prodigal of his showers of gold, and so wayward. There was a touch of the elf about him. Touch hardly seems the right word, because one could never touch him ; he was too elusive for that. The same could be said about Steven- son. Perhaps it was their way of preserving the great national secret. In making the second award of the Edmond de Polignac Prize we are honouring one who in my opinion has produced incomparably the finest literature of the year. May the good God direct his sails. ANDREW LANG, D.Litt. BY W. P. KEE, M.A. I REMEMBER long ago liow soiiie people in Oxford and elsewhere used to speak of Andrew Lang and wonder if he would ever do anything really great. To those well-meaning friends and acquaintances he seemed to be squandering his genius in desultory studies. There were other persons at the same time who were well enough pleased to read whatever he wrote on any subject, and did not ask or care whether he would ever do anything great or not. Now that he is dead and his work is ended, I do not believe that those who have been reading his books these forty years will be much concerned to ask whether any one book gives the best that was in him. The thoughts of most of us have taken a different turn, for we see too clearly how much Ave owed to his spirit and wit and judgment, and how many pleasant things in many different regions have lost something of their savour because it is no longer possil^le to hear what he thinks about them. There are man}^ here who knew him much better than I, but I know for myself well enough how very cheer- ful the business of learninsf became wherever Lang was interested. He honoured me some- times with his confidence — -I touched on fringes of one of his favourite subjects, the prol)lems of the Border ballads and of ballad poetry in general — and when I think of those sudden letters that came, showering sparks, into the centre of a controversy, I can guess truly what is lost, and wdiat is missed, by other correspondents and readers in the other subjects ; how many these were it Avould not be easy to reckon except in a general and summary way. Think of all the varieties of his work on Homer — in mythology — in Scottish and other history. Wherever he was interested there was sure to come the same sort of inspiring and generous letter ; I remember York Powell, not long- before his death, showing one of them that had just arrived — a piece of good fortune, as he reerarded it. 10 The postscript to the preface of Mr. AYalter Leaf's " Troy " — which Lang had read in proof — is a record such as many a scholar might wish to have for himself; it is better than anything I can say, and I ask leave to quote it : "This preface, hardly passed for press, already stands in need of a sad postscript. When Andrew Lang returned me the proof of it, there stood, scribbled beside the allusion to our differences, " Why, you are j;/i;,-S' roi/aliste que le vol.'''' Ten days later his acute and versatile spirit, in the maturity of its power and with energy un- abated, passed from us. It is not without gratitude that I think of this seal to a friend- ship of over thirty years. Begun with col- laboration in Homer, it has ended Avith tlie sense that beneath all our differences there has at least been common ground, and with the hope that the following pages may contriljute somethino: to that ultimate, if far distant ao-ree- ment for which we have both, in our several ways, striven to work." Learning and the pursuits of literature have had many hard things saitl of tlieni ; but they 11 are essentially honourable, and few men of letters have done more to show this than Andrew Lang, in two ways particularly — in the help he gave so freely to anyone who wanted it, and in his absolutely regardless fashion of working on any question which he took up. Where his not unkindly but not very clear-sighted early critics went wrong — those, I mean, who asked, foi'ty years ago, if Lang was ever going to do some- thing great — was that they had a conventional idea of the big book as a result, and not much understanding of the motives and methods with which Lang was busy all the time. He would not, he said, write a ' Key to All Mythologies ' ; but this was exactly what he was doing — not in order to get the approval of his very respect- able contemporaries, but because he saw the defects of the current teaching about mythology, and because he had found, and went on finding more and more fully and surely, the evidence for another theory. The simple reason for all his historical work was that he wanted to find out ; he was an historian in the old true sense of the word, and when he began an inquiry he 12 would not be stopped. The singular thing was that his hardest work left his mind free to take his serious business lightly. Everyone knows how his mythological work would spring into rhyme, as in the ' Chorus of the Barbarous Bird-gods,' or into stories like ' The End of Phaeacia.' Even his deadly' attacks on the philologists and their rival formulas, ' Storm- god,' ' Sun-god,' and so forth, may often, perhaps, have escaped notice, and been taken for mere literature. •' Custom and Myth ' (1884), which the author himself compared to an advance of skirmishers in front of an army, is not difficult reading. Many of the essays had appeared in popular magazines, and the philo- logical or mythological theories may very well have refused to believe that they were killed by a trifling sword of sharpness which they could not see. But their heads were off, for all that, though they might not know it at the time. The little book of three hundred pages did what Lang had been planning for many years. He followed it with the larger book, ' Myth, Ritual and Religion,' more methodical 13 and systematic ; it occupied ground from which I beHeve it has not yet been displaced. But one woukl choose the earlier and lighter book to show best of all what Lano- had been drivinof at, the thoroughness of his reading, his keen- ness in debate, and everywhere the delight in a new vision of the world, and in the music which he overheard, like that which he quotes from the ' Kalevala.' " These lays were found by the wayside, and gathered in the depths of the copses, blown from the branches of the forest, and culled among the plumes of the pine trees. . . . The cold has spoken to me, and the rain has told me her runes ; the winds of heaven, the waves of the sea, have spoken and sung to me ; the wild birds have taught me, the music of many waters has been my master." I have quoted that because it shows how his scientific work in anthropology was not sepa- rate from anything else in his writing, and how quick he w^as to take note of beautiful, fanciful things as he came upon them; these were the inspiration of all his learned work, though he 14 never allowed himself to be turned aside by the glamour of the fairy world from the business of his logical argument — when that happened to be his business. Did he ever know how much his poetry was admired ? Perhaps those who liked it most and had lived with it longest were too slow and diffident to speak out what they thought. It is a pity, if so it was. I may not say much now, but I read the 'Ballads and Lyrics of Old France ' very soon after they first appeared with an admiration that has never slackened since, and I have a large debt to acknowledge, and never to repay, to the author of that and the succeeding books of poems. This is not the time to describe them, even if one had the power to speak rightly of all the various moods and tunes and themes — the tale of Troy, the XXXII ballades, those graver poems into Avhicli he put the thought that was stirred by the death of Gordon at Khartoum, a thought that never failed him in his unbroken, un- shaken worship of loyalty. If I Avere to choose among them all I would 15 certainl}^ take, for one reason or another, the two poems written for his edition of Kirk's ' Secret Commonwealth.' One of these is in the old Scots comic verse, and it is addressed to Stevenson in Samoa, condoling with him on the low condition of his l)arbarous islands : " There are iiae bouiiy U. P. kirks, An awfu' place ; Nane kens the Covenant o' Works, Frae that o' Grace." It ends Avith a stanza nnlike the rest of the piece, in a mood of depression, as if life were not " more amusino; than we thono-ht." It was left out Avhen the poem was reprinted, yet it is needed for the conclusion, and the poem is incomplete without it. The other poem is " The Fairy Minister " (on the author of the ' Secret Commonwealth,' the Rev. Robert Kirk, who was carried off by the fairies) : " He heard, he saw, he knew too Avell The secrets of your fairy clan ; You stole him from the haunted dell, Who never more was seen of man. 16 " Now far from heavenj and safe from hell, Unknown of earth, he wanders free; Would that he might return and tell Of his mysterious company ! " If tlie epistle to Stevenson should seem to anj'one nothing better than ordinary conversa- tional rhyme (which is a plausible opinion, though it might be refuted), there will be no such challeno'e broug-ht asrainst this : "^ And half I envy him who now, Clothed m her Court's enchanted green, By moonlit loch or mountain's brow, Is Chaplain to the Fairv Queen." Another passage comes to mind along with this, a variation on the same theme, at the close of the ' Fortunate Islands,' which is a fantasy suggested by Lucian's ' True History,' answering to Mr. Grosse's poem on the same occasion : "There with the shining Souls I lay. When, lo, a Voice that seemed to say. In far-off haunts of Memory, ' Whoso doth taste the Dead Men's bread, Shall dwell for ever with these Dead, Nor ever shall his hodv lie 17 Beside his friends, on tlie grey hill Where rains weep, and the curlews slirill, And the brown water wanders by.' "Then did a new soul in nie wake, The dead men's bread I feared to break, Their fruit I would not taste indeed Were it but a pomegranate seed. Xay, not with these I made iny choice To dwell for ever and rejoice, For otherwhere the River rolls That girds the home of Christian souls, And these my whole heart seeks are found On otherwise enchanted ground. " Even so I put the cup away, The vision wavered, dimmed, and broke. And, nowise sorrowing, I woke "While, grey among the ruins grey. Chill through the dwellings of the dead. The Dawn crept o'er the Northern sea, I'lien, in a moment, flushed to red, Flushed all the broken minster old, And turned the shattered stones to gold, And wakened half the Avorld with me ! " Every reader of Lang's verse and prose is aware of his love for places — St. Andrews — 18 Oxford — his own native Forest of Ettrick. Some critics are wrongly inclined to grudge a poem the favour it may win from local or personal associations. But this poet was able to put what he really meant into the verse which he wrote about those places, and the critics may grudge and cavil who have nothing better to do. I go back to the first volume, the 'Ballads and Lyrics,' and to the poem of the Eildon Hills : " Three crests against the saffron sky Beyond the purple plain, The dear remembered melody Of Tweed once more ao-ain. " Like a loved ghost, thy fabled flood Fleets through the dusky land ; Where Scott, come home to die, has stood, My feet returning stand. " A mist of memory broods and floats, The Border waters flow, The air is full of ballad notes Borne out of lono- au'o." 19 I Avill read no more than tliese three verses liere. They were written in 1 870, before the last great age of English poetry had come to an end, and they have their place in the House of Fame as surely as any poem by the greater masters. They have added something also to the meaning of the place to which they belong, and that is no small thing when one thinks of all the poetry of Tweed, Ettrick and Yarrow, and how along with the "ballad notes" there is the truest poem ever written about the autumn of the year and the close of life : "No public and no private cai-e The t'ree-born inind eiithralHiig." It is hard to find better or nobler words than those of ' Yarrow Revisited ' in which to bid farewell to a poet. They are more touching than any lament, and at the same time they are full of life and spirit, " the forest to embolden." It is to that company that the poetry of Andrew Lang belongs by right of birth and loyal service. He has won the best part of fame if anywhere he is remembered along with the places and the heroes that were most in his own mind. 20 ARTHUR AYOOLGAR VERRALL, Litt.D. BY JOHN WILLIAj\[ MACKAIL, M.A., LL.D. Arthur Verrall was not, technicallj and professionally, a man of letters ; he was a classical scholar and student. In that field, he was an able exponent of the fine and con- tentious art of textual criticism ; he was a subtle and also a daring interpreter. On the one hand he was an instance of the old- fashioned scholarship at its best, equal, per- haps, to any scholar of his time in the peculiarly English art of Latin and Greek composition : on the other, he was a potent force in the movement which has transformed scholarship by altering the whole attitude of our minds towards the ancient classics. But to the larger circle of those who practise the art of English letters, or who are its critics and historians, he was little known. In his own University, and among scholars, he was known certainly as a brilliant writer, but as a 21 writer of works of scholarship. The master of a graceful, flexible, and lucid pen, he, in fact, wrote comparatively little. His Clark Lectures, and those few which he was able to give from the Chair of English Literature, were not com- mitted to paper. He was not the author of any single great work. The collection of his literary essays, which is now being made, will not place him among the writers who have in this age made English letters illustrious. Yet he was a strength and an ornament to the Academic Council which is now recording his loss : and when he was chosen by the Crown to be the first Professor of English Literature at Cam- bridge, the choice was recognised by those most competent to judge as not only justifiable, but singularly happy. It should not indeed be necessary, if the relations between scholarship and literature were such as they ought to be, to draw a line between men of letters and classical scholars. For the classical writers received and retain that name, because their works represent the highest and best of what has been created in 22 the art of letters. Just as our whole civilisation is based on, grows out of, that created and established by the Greek and the Latin genius, so the whole of modern letters have the ancient masterpieces before them as patterns of excel- lence, beneath them as a soil from which they draw nutriment. But in fact, as we all know — as the opponents of classical education trium- phantly point out, and as its defenders must candidly, if not ruefully, acknowledge — it is not thecasethat all scholars have a genius for letters, any more than that all writers of genius are scholars. Education based on those ancient masterpieces, life spent in their study, too often are an illiberal education, and a wasted life. The creative artist has often never possessed scholarship, or has flung away what he pos- sessed of it. What has been his loss, what may have been his incidental gain, by being thus cut away from the traditions of the past, or hy cutting them away through his own act, is a large question. But this much at least can be said : that a waiter to whom scholarship is meaningless can have no trained sense of the 23 organic continuity of the art of letters : lie has forgone, from circumstances which may or may not have been inevitable, for reasons which may or may not be judged adequate, the power of placing himself in the stream of history. It will not, to be sure, profit him to have gained touch with the past if he has lost touch with the present, and submerged his own genius. But neither is it to be expected that his own genius can thrive on a sustenance which is of the day only. All live art is a new birth ; but the present is the integration of the past, and the art of the present is but one manifestation of a single continuous art. On the other hand, it will not be denied that the scholar has often contracted into a pedant, for whom literatui-e is not a living art, out of touch with the creative and imaginative movement of his own time. For scholars of this kind the noblest of all arts has little vital reality, the actual movement of the human mind has but a faint interest. They are linguists, archaeologists, critics ; but they move like laborious ghosts, out of the daylight, im- mersed in a dead world. 24 This Verrall was not : we are not following a grammarian's funeral. For liim letters, both ancient and modern, were a world crowdedly and intensely alive. He brought to the study of the classics — of those masterpieces wdiich have been so thumbed and worn by long cur- rency — the fresh mind at whose contact they sprang into fresh vitalit}^ He brought the same fresh interest and enjoyment to English letters and the literary art of his own day. To hear him discourse on modern authors was to realise that they were not separated in his mind from the ancient authors among whom he worked professionally. To both alike he applied the same rapid intelligence, in both alike he felt the same living interest. And that was the interest neither of classicism nor of modernism ; it Avas the interest of literature as a fine art. It is an exponent or representative of English letters that we have to regard him here. But English letters are part of a^ larger comnumity. A sane literary nationalism not only keeps touch with, but reinforces, the solidarity of the Republic of Letters : just as the living art of 25 the day is rooted in vital appreciation of the no less living art of the past, and in conscious kinship witli it. For in literature, as in all the arts of life, art is one thing, and artists, of all schools and periods, are one household. In that art he concentrated his study, not on periods, but on qualities ; not on particular writers or particular works for the sake either of their prestige or of their novelty, but for the sake of the artistic quality wliich he found in them ; not on a single province of letters — poetry, history, oratory and the like — as such, but on all these as literature. That his work, so far as it is recorded and accessible, does deal mainly with certain periods and writers, only means that, having to deal with these in the course of his duties, or finding in them the literary quality, as he conceived it, speci- ally prominent, or requiring special promi- nence to be given to it, he took them as instances, and turned upon them the critical spirit in which he read not only them, but all that he read. If we can fancy a mind so rapid and alert as his pausing to describe its own 26 operation as a system, we niay think of liim as saying, whenever he took up a book : This purports to be a work of art ; what sort of art is it ? what is the effect of its art upon my mind ? and what has to be noted in order to ehicidate its art, to enable me or others to appreciate the quality of that art, the process by which the work of art came to be what it is, the meaning that was in the artist's mind ? In advice given by him to students entering on a course of modern English literature, this note is struck with emphatic precision, " Do you honestly enjoy this book, and if so, what in it pleases you r Does your enjoyment increase as you study it, and if so, through what process of thought? Such :ire tlie questions which readers should ask tliem- selves." Such were the questions Avhicli lie asked himself, and in finding answers to which his study of literature in essence consisted. The w^ord " enjoyment " shoukl be noted. For art is, according to the old and sound definition, production with enjoyment and for the sake of enjoyment; and the appreciation of art 27 is the entering into the artist's enjoyment through imaginative sympathy, and in some sense thus renewing his act of creation and the joy of that act. Art is one thing; it is the organic synthesis of all the arts. And the art of letters is like- wise one thing; it is the elan vital incarnating itself in verbal structure. AYhere one artist in letters will differ from another is in his special pursuit of one or another element in his art ; and where one man's appreciation will differ from another's is in his native or trained affinity for one or another of these elements ; in the measure to which he disengages this from other qualities, traces its workings, and makes it in some sort the test or critical moment in all his appreciations. The element in literature to which Verrall's mind had perhaps the greatest affinity was wit, as he himself somewhere defines that am- biguous word. " Wit," he wrote, " or subtlety on the part of the artist in the manipulation of meanings " ; and with this he went on to con- nect, on the part of the recipient or critic. " the enjoyment of sucli subtlety for its own sake, and as the source of a distinct intellec- tual pleasure." Subtlety in the manipulation of meanings — this was at once Verrall's distinctive streno-th in dealing with literature, and in some measure also his besetting temptation. His enjoyment in it was almost a passion. By its exercise he did much towards the modern revivification of scholarship. His effective woi-k lies not so much in any published writings as in the impulse which as a stimulating teacher, and even more perhaps as a brilliant talker, he communicated to pupils and friends. He never brought to any book, were it ancient or modern, the dulled mind. He took no ortho- doxy for granted. In his reading he was always poised ready for a pounce on some shade of meaning, some implication or sugges- tion ; and he followed out their traces acutely, adroitly, alluriugly. Sagacity in its literal sense, the keen scent after things hidden, Avas the habit of his mind. If, as was once said by M remarkable thinke]', imagination is nothing 29 else than the faculty of tracing out conse- quences fully, Yerrall had imagination to a singular degree. To this power of scenting and tracing, of quick and continued apprehensiveness, must be added another if work is to be sound. That other power is comprehensiveness ; the power of seeing things in their proportion to one another, and not exaggerating what is secondary, or losing grasp of the whole plan in curious consideration of some detail or byway. It is, in fact, good sense. Without it, the sagacity of which I have spoken leads straight to paradox. Self-hypnotised by absorption in a certain train of reasoning, the mind in- sensibly sways aside, and the judgment loses its centre. This is a danger which always attaches to fresh interpretations. The essence of paradox is that, however startling, it is true ; its vice is that, however true, it is truth placed in disproportion, and thus distorted. It may be said of Verrall that he did not wholly avoid this danger. His quick insight into subtleties of meaning, and his delight in 80 tracing them out, led him, more tliaii once, into paradox pursued l^eyond measure, novelty of view passing into a more or less conscious whimsicality. It made him fond, perhaps too fond, of a fascinating but dangerous occupa- tion, that of rehabilitating names in the com- monwealth of letters which had either found or simk below their due level,, and reinterpret- ing in a new sense works (like the Odes of Horace), upon which the world had formed a settled, and, it might seem, an unalterable judg- ment. In this his example has affected a whole school of his pupils, some at least of whom may l)e thought to have given way to the temptation of reinterpreting everything, to the pursuit of clues spun by themselves, and the finding of hidden meanings Avhere he who hides finds. A sentence from one of his essays is very characteristic of his own atti- tude towards the authors on whom he turned his danciug searchlight : " What Dante alleges about Statius, he could not have found unless he had sought it with singular determination ; 1)ut find it he did." But anv reservation to be 81 made here as regards Verrall's own work would only be just if accompanied by generous recognition of two things ; first, of his de- lightful love of nonsense, what I may venture to call his attractive and humane impishness ; secondly, of the great service he did to litera- ture by approaching it always with fresh eyes, by realising, for himself and for others, the truth that all works of genius are alive and possess the mobility of life ; that they lend themselves perpetually to fresh interpretation, and have stored in them an unexhausted potential energy. To all his favourite authors Verrall brouofht this vitalising force of a sul^tle and dexterous intellect. He was an accomplished sophist, in the best sense of that needlessly discredited word. He was a master in the art of exposition and the art of persuasion. The power of the live voice, a thing nowadays too little enforced and too little cultivated, was an element in his Sfenius. It made him a fascinatino- lecturer, but this kind of accomplishment leaves no written record. The printed i)age only shows 32 iinperfectl}^ Avitli what adroit and ingratiating skill he handled the work of poets and his- torians, of orators or dramatists or novelists, and showed the live intelligence taking shape in it. His own range of reading was wide, over the whole field of French as well as English letters. His affinitv was for the writers, in either language, in whom wit and subtlety are predominant. But he did not pursue these qualities simplj' for their own sake, or allow them a monopoly in his interest. His two favourite French authors were Racine in poetry and Bossuet in prose, writers of the classical period who renewed, and not as copyists, the authentic classical note. So in English likcAvise, he found his choicest and closest friends among the writers of the central movement — Dryden, Fielding, Scott, Macaulay — the masters of spacious construction and large sanity. An essay on Dryden, the last work on which he was engaged, would have been a real help towards the appreciation of that fertile and perplexing genius, and of the whole age in Eno-lish letters to which he has oiven its name. 38 This is not the occasion for personal record, and my task is not that of the biographer. Bnt a friendship of more than five and twenty years may be allowed a concluding word of more intimate tribute. For what Verrall's friends remember is not so much his tine intellect and brilliant accomplishments as his courtesy and geniality, his kindly nature and winning man- ners, a natural gaiety and clarity never clouded by circumstance, the total absence in him of jealousy and self-assertion, and, above all, the unconquerable spirit which bore him up through the last years in which, crippled by long wasting- illness, he never allowed himself to repine, to be beaten down, or to lose heart. Of the courage, not less than heroic, with which he bore that load of bodily weakness and great pain, the less said the lietter ; it is a thing to admire, not to praise. If I venture to touch upon it now, it is because in such an example we may see how the art of letters can sustain and reinforce the art of living ; how commerce with great writers may and does kindle in their students some corresponding greatness of soul ; 3 34 and liow literature is not a region abstract and apart, l)nt a real thing, the image and inter- pretation of hnman life. Mr. Edmund Gosse said : Ladies and Gentle- men, — From the pions and melancholy duty of honouring the dead, we turn to the happy task of welcominof the livinof. This is as it should be ; thus we maintain the unbroken tradition of art, which is eternal, and eternally kept bright by the succession of torch-bearers. The Academic Committee, through the munificence of a learned lady, is able in every November to present a prize —the Edmond de Polignac Prize it is called — to the author of a work of imaginative literature which was published during the twelve months preceding the last November. In other words, one full year — a year of reflection, of reconsideration, must pass l)etween pul)lication and award. The prize may l^e given to a man or to a woman, to verse or to prose ; and I have to announce that this year it is given to a man and a poet. We have not come to this conclusion 35 witlioufc very long and careful consideration. We liave been greatly impressed by the talent, perhaps the genins, which other men, and women too, which other poets and prose- writers, have displayed in works published during the year 1911. But, at length, and following the exhaustive process by wdiich alone these matters can be impartially decided, we have unanimously decided to award the Polio-nac Prize to Mr. John Masefieli> for his poem, " The Everlasting Mercy." But, before coming to this conclusion, we were considerably troubled by a difficnlty for which Mr. Masefield cannot be held blame- worthy. By the terms of our deed, we are instructed to give the Bolignac Prize to a work of promise. It was a question with several of our members whether Mr. Masefield can any longer be considered a writer of promise. His growth, within the last few months, has been so rapid as to resemble that of the tulips which Eastern magicians plant in a pot of warm earth, which bud and leaf and blossom in a few moments, under the eye of the bewildered 36 spectator. Bat this objection was swept away. Twenty months ago, at all events, Mr. Mase- fiekl was still " promising." What is promise, and what performance? Who is to prevent ns from claiming of a poem which we all admire so much as " The Everlasting Mercy " that it is the forerunner of works infinitely more perfect? If the Academic Committee had existed in 1819, was it to be forbidden to crown ' Endymion ' because the ' Eve of St. Agnes ' and ' Hyperion ' were already written ? We commend "The Everlasting Mercy" as a poem wdiich would make memorable any year in recent literary history. We find in it a happy blending of the traditional and the revolutionary, a balancing between those who follow and those who reject the older system of aesthetic. Mr. Masefield retains the recognised forms, the sturdy types of English versification ; here he employs the familiar national measure of octosyllabic couplets which Chaucer used for ' The House of Fame,' and Milton for ' II Penseroso,' and Butler for ' Hudibras,' and Wordsworth for ' The White Doe of Rylestone,' 37 the simplest, the most natural, the most diffi- cult of metres. He has proved, in " The Everlasting Mercj," that the old forms suffice when the inspiration is intense enough to fill them. And the subject, and the treatment of that subject, are of happiest augury. As we read " The Everlasting Mere}''," which is a narrative of conversion, a story of the light of God breaking into a dark soul through the cracks which pain and shame have made in it, we feel the mysterious pulse of humanity beating, throbbing all around us. Mr. Mase- field takes us away from Mayfair, and away from Fleet Street, too. But not into any remote symbolic province or mystically fabulous No-man's land. We stand Avitli him among the familiar inland English hills, in fields where Piers Plowman miglit have walked or Bunyan prayed, and the robust voice of the new poet, like those of all the earlier singers and yet unlike them all, chants to us of the meaning of daily life, and of God's insistent call to human frailty. So far 1 liave ventured to speak for my 38 colleagues. If I dare to add a word which is entirely luy own, and for which the rest of the Academic Committee has no responsibility, it is this. I confidently look forward to a time, not distant, when Mr. Masefield will have become a member of our body. When that is the case, he will have to share the invidious labour of selecting for the Edmond de Polignac prize the work of some younger man. I wish him no luckier chance than to hit on a book of such indubitable merit as "The Everlasting Mercy." In awarding this prize for the first time last year, Lord Haldane gave a full account of its purport and history. I need, therefore, detain you no longer than to announce formally that the Edmond de Polignac prize for a work of imaginative literature published in 1911 is awarded to Mr. John Masefield for " The Everlasting Mercy." ADLAKD AND SON, IMPR., LONDON AND DORKIKG. THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. NOV 9 1^'*^ lOL/cawO L..-' -)A ( - ; "^'D-^ ^ ,^«w Q'i^ .^ ,^ oe,tf i4fli- ^^tfB ^0/ ~r> ^