Books in 
 General
 
 Books in General 
 By Solomon Eagle 
 
 New York : Alfred A. Knopf 
 
 MCMXIX
 
 Printed in Great Britain
 
 ARTURO WAUGH 
 
 2081323
 
 Preface 
 
 THESE papers are selections from a series 
 contributed weekly, without intermission, 
 to the New Statesman since April 1913. I 
 do not feel that the responsibility for reprinting 
 them rests on my shoulders ; I trust that where 
 it does rest it will rest lightly. I shall have done 
 all I hope to do if I have produced the sort of 
 book that one reads in, without tedium, for ten 
 minutes before one goes to sleep. 
 
 The pseudonym " Solomon Eagle," I may 
 explain, is not intended to posit any claim to 
 unusual wisdom or abnormally keen sight. The 
 original bearer of the name was a poor maniac 
 who, during the Great Plague of London, used 
 to run naked through the street, with a pan 
 of coals of fire on his head, crying " Repent, 
 repent." 
 
 S. E.
 
 Contents 
 
 Who's Who, ii 
 
 Political Songs, 16 
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good, 21 
 
 Epigrams, 27 
 
 An Eminent Baconian, 33 
 
 The Beauties of Badness, 37 
 
 More Badness, 48 
 
 A Mystery Solved, 52 
 
 Carrying the Alliance too far, 54 
 
 May 1914, 56 
 
 May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition, 62 
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin, 67 
 
 " The Cattle of the Boyne," 73 
 
 August 1914, 75 
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through, 79 
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest, 85 
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator ?, 90 
 
 The Depressed Philanthropist, 96 
 
 A Polyphloisboisterous Critic, 101 
 
 "Another Century, and then . . . ," 105 
 
 Herrick, no 
 
 The Muse in Liquor, 116 
 
 5 Misspent, 122 
 
 Shakespeare's Women and Mr. George Moore, 
 
 126 
 Moving a Library, 131
 
 Contents 
 
 Table-Talk and Jest Books, 134 
 
 Stephen Phillips, 138 
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole, 143 
 
 A Horrible Bookseller, 149 
 
 The Troubles of a Catholic, 153 
 
 The Bible as Raw Material, 155 
 
 How to avoid Bad English, 159 
 
 Woodland Creatures, 163 
 
 Other People's Books, 168 
 
 Peacock, 172 
 
 Wordsworth's Personal Dullness, 174 
 
 Henry James's Obscurity, 179 
 
 The " Ring" in the Bookselling Trade, 184 
 
 Music-Hall Songs, 190 
 
 More Music-Hail Songs, 195 
 
 Utopias, 200 
 
 Charles II in English Verse, 205 
 
 The Most Durable Books, 210 
 
 The Worst Style in the World, 214 
 
 The Reconstruction of Orthography, 220 
 
 Mr. James Joyce, 225 
 
 Tennessee, 230 
 
 Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George, 233 
 
 Stranded, 237 
 
 Mr. Ralph Hodgson, 242 
 
 Double Misprints, 245 
 
 The History of Earl Pumbles, 246 
 
 On Destroying Books, 251 
 
 10
 
 Who's Who 
 
 WORKS of reference are extremely useful ; 
 but they resemble Virgil's Hell in that 
 they are easy things to get into and 
 very difficult to escape from. Take the Encyclo- 
 paedia. I imagine that my experience with it is 
 universal. I have only to dip my toe into this 
 tempting morass and down I am sucked, limbs, 
 trunk and all, to remain embedded until sleep or 
 a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read 
 things in the Encyclopaedia that he would never 
 dream of looking at elsewhere things in which 
 normally he does not take the faintest interest. 
 One may take up a volume after lunch in order 
 to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe ; 
 but one does not put it down when one has 
 satisfied one's curiosity. One turns over a few 
 pages and becomes absorbed in the career of 
 Napoleon. Thence one drifts to the article on 
 Napier, which sends one to that on Logarithms 
 in another volume ; and when night closes in 
 and (as we used to construe it) sleep brings rest 
 to weary mortals, one still sits in one's chair, 
 bending heavy-eyed over the book, with a dozen 
 pressing duties left undone and the last post 
 missed. By that time one has reached, perhaps, 
 the abnormally complex diagrams which illus- 
 
 II
 
 Books in General 
 
 trate the article on Metaphysico-theologico- 
 cosmolo-nigology of which science, the reader 
 will remember, Voltaire was the father and Herr 
 Doktor Pangloss the first professor. 
 
 Who's Who takes me in the same way. Ordi- 
 narily I have no particular thirst for it. I 
 should not dream of carrying it about in my 
 waistcoat pocket for perusal on the Underground 
 Railway. But once I have allowed myself to 
 open it, I am a slave to it for hours. This has 
 just happened to me with the new volume, upon 
 which I have wasted a valuable afternoon. I 
 began by looking up a man's address ; I then 
 read the compressed life-story of the gentleman 
 next above him (a major-general), wondering, 
 somewhat idly, whether they read of each other's 
 performances and whether either of them re- 
 sented the possession by the other of a similar, 
 and unusual, surname. Then I was in the thick 
 of it. There was nothing especially exciting 
 about most of the information that met my eye. 
 Generally speaking, the biographies were of 
 people of whom I had never previously heard, 
 and whose doubtlessly reputable achievements 
 had been recorded in spheres as unfamiliar to me 
 as the dark side of the moon. What can it mean 
 to me that Mr. J. Fitztimmins Gubb worked for 
 five years under Schmitt at Magdeburg and is 
 now demonstrator in Comparative Obstetrics 
 at the Robson Institute ? Or that the Bishop 
 of the Cocos Islands has been five times married 
 
 12
 
 Who's Who 
 
 and was educated at King Edward VI Grammar 
 School, Chipping Chester, and Pembroke College, 
 Oxford ? Yet I read of some six or seven 
 hundred such, and found it as difficult to refrain 
 from " Just one more " as would a wealthy 
 dipsomaniac just parting from an old friend in a 
 public-house at five minutes before closing time. 
 I cannot easily account for the attraction. 
 Something, I suppose, may be put down to the 
 fact that character comes out in a man's account, 
 however bald, of himself ; and that the Who's 
 Who autobiographies, in spite of their compres- 
 sion, exhibit many and diverse interesting traits 
 of character. But mainly, I think, it must be 
 that we most of us have collector's mania in 
 some form or another, and that one cannot 
 resist the temptation of collecting facts even when 
 they are so irrelevant and of so little importance 
 to one that they slip through one's fingers as 
 soon as one has gathered them. For I am sure 
 that I do not know now whether I have got the 
 number of the Bishop's wives right, or the sites 
 of his education, or even the name of his diocese. 
 
 I suppose that no one ever tells an untruth in 
 Who's Who. There is not much scope for it, 
 though it is conceivable that there may have been 
 exaggerations of the truth. The compilers are 
 extremely capable ; and the contributors seem 
 to be as uniform in their veracity as they are 
 various in their loquacity. Only in rare circum- 
 stances could any one hope to impose on Who's 
 
 13
 
 Books in General 
 
 Who without very rapid detection. An oppor- 
 tunity of that nature did once occur to me. 
 There is a compilation called the American 
 Who's Who, published (if I remember correctly) 
 in Chicago. By some curious accident, which I 
 have never been able to explain, its conductors 
 got hold of my name I don't mean " Eagle," 
 but the other. By some accident more curious 
 still they got the impression that I was an 
 American settled in London ; and with admirable 
 enterprise they sent me, for two or three years in 
 succession, yellow forms on which I was requested 
 to inscribe my age, antecedents, and accomplish- 
 ments. Each year I was dazzled by the idea of a 
 joke which, I felt, would immensely amuse me, 
 and which could (so the Devil argued) hurt 
 nobody. On each occasion I filled the form 
 exhaustively. I put down my name and address 
 correctly ; but beyond that not a word of truth 
 did I tell. I invented for myself a career, a 
 career not imposing enough to arouse suspicions, 
 but far more picturesque than my actual career 
 has been. I described my parents as being 
 Homer E. - - and Anna P. - , of St. Louis, 
 Mo. I copied out of an American minor poet's 
 autobiographical preface a list of academies 
 at which I had been educated ; and then I 
 launched out. 
 
 I had, I stated, left America for Europe at the 
 age of nineteen. I had written (I was cunning 
 enough to put down the names of one or two of 
 H
 
 Who's Who 
 
 my actual works) such and such books, including 
 a Manual (for Schools) on Political Economy 
 and a small brochure on Polycarp. I had 
 travelled over four continents ; my recreations 
 were " all forms of sport, especially big-game 
 hunting " ; I had gone through the Balkan 
 War as a volunteer with the Greek Army; and 
 I possessed several decorations, including the 
 Blue Boar of Rumania, the St. Miguel and All 
 Angels of Portugal, and the fourth class of the 
 Turkish Medjidie. Notice the fourth class ; 
 no common liar would have thought of so con- 
 vincingly modest a claim as that. Each year, as 
 I say, I lived laborious days in the delineation of 
 an imaginary pedigree and a supposititious career. 
 Then I broke down. There was no risk of 
 punishment attached, and, I take it, small risk 
 of discovery. But my softer self began telling 
 me that it was a scandalous thing to hoax 
 foreigners ; that the trick was unworthy of an 
 Englishman, or, indeed, an adult of any na- 
 tionality, down to the most backward of Nicobar 
 Islanders ; and that the only fitting punishment 
 for a person addicted to such practices would 
 be to have pins put upon his chair by his chil- 
 dren or his back chalked by infants in the street. 
 I weakened and broke ; sentiment overcame 
 reason ; my heart gained the victory over my 
 head. And each year, with reluctant delibera- 
 tion, I tore up the well-filled sheet and destroyed 
 again my other self, my American self, the 
 romantic self who had done the things I had 
 
 15
 
 Books in General 
 
 never done, who had stalked the bear in the 
 snowy fastnesses of the Caucasus and won the 
 gratitude of exotic potentates. The forms have 
 stopped coming now ; but the memory of my 
 vision still burns with a melancholy yet tender 
 brightness ; and those mythical progenitors, 
 
 Homer E. and Anna P. , are to me all 
 
 that his Dream Children were to Charles Lamb. 
 
 Political Songs 
 
 IF one goes up a mountain and surveys all 
 the kingdoms of the world one sees a good 
 many horrible things. Few of them are 
 worse, in their way, than the modern political 
 song. There have been bad political songs in all 
 ages. Caesar's soldiers used to sing some which 
 were not merely uninspiring but irrelevant, and 
 Lilli Burlero (or Lillibulero) itself was no great 
 shakes as a poem although its tune had a swing. 
 But there have never been any to equal in badness 
 the kind of songs that has been generated by the 
 British party system. The only modern politi- 
 cians who ever manage to generate a good song 
 are the Socialists. Socialist song-books, in 
 spite of their plenitude of hack phrases about 
 chains and freedom's dawn, always have a good 
 deal of tolerable poetry in them. William 
 Morris's political songs are excellent, and some 
 of the modern foreign Socialist songs are really 
 16
 
 Political Songs 
 
 worthy expressions of the movement. When 
 their words are not good their tunes are : witness 
 the Internationale and that stirring Italian 
 labour song that is now, I believe, prohibited by 
 King Victor's Government. But the kind of 
 songs that our good Liberals and Conservatives 
 sing at their meetings are gruesome. 
 
 I hold in my hand as the saying goes the 
 Liberal Song Sheet now being used at big party 
 meetings. One or two of the more facetious 
 ditties show some ingenuity, and there is a 
 certain go about the first line of " Stamp, stamp, 
 stamp upon Protection " ; but for the rest the 
 only song the writer of which would not get a 
 birching in any properly constituted society is 
 Ebenezer Elliott's God Save the People, which is 
 generations old. " Let who will make a nation's 
 laws as long as I make its songs," said some writer. 
 One might add : " Let who will make a nation's 
 songs as long as they are not done by the people 
 who make its laws." Caucus-provided laws 
 may be all right, but caucus-provided songs, 
 written by party agents and under-secretaries, 
 are not successful. 
 
 The chief characteristic of the Liberal songs, 
 apart from their metrical and linguistic pecu- 
 liarities, is their insistence upon incongruous 
 military image. Imagine Mr. Asquith donning 
 bright armour and taking part in the incidents 
 depicted in these verses to the tune of Who will 
 o'er the Downs ? 
 
 B 17
 
 Books in General 
 
 Our leaders, tried and trusted men, 
 
 Still love the ancient faith, 
 To Freedom and to Conscience true 
 
 In danger and in death. 
 And they have donned their armour bright, 
 
 Their courage all aglow, 
 To lead the toilers of the land 
 
 Against the Tory foe. 
 
 For years we've suffered, 'pain and loss, 
 
 By privilege oppressed ; 
 Our birthright has been filched from us 
 
 And left us sore distressed. 
 But now our leaders trusted, tried 
 
 Are keen to strike a blow, 
 And wrest our stolen acres from 
 
 The proud, disdainful foe. 
 
 It is not my business to discuss the justness of 
 the judgments here implied, but what on earth 
 is the point of suggesting that Mr. Asquith, Mr. 
 George, Mr. Lulu Harcourt, Lord Haldane, and 
 so on, are true " in danger and in death " ? 
 They may have come unscathed through the fire 
 of Suffragette dog-whips, but nobody calls them to 
 die for disestablishment. There is here an utter 
 lack of reality, a lack that must prevent these 
 songs from moving anybody to action, as good 
 songs should do. They are as conventionally false 
 as the cheapest kind of leading article. 
 
 Here are some more extracts from the same 
 source : 
 18
 
 Political Songs 
 
 We defend, the right we won in ages past ; 
 
 We demand the measures by the Commons passed, 
 
 Let no Lords presume to wreck the work at last, 
 
 For we go marching on. 
 Freedom for our trade and nation 
 From all insolent vexation, 
 For democracy's salvation 
 We all go marching on. 
 
 Peers and lories may to wreck the work unite, 
 Britain's sons for Britain 's freedom still shall fight ; 
 None shall binder us till triumph is in sight, 
 As we go marching on. 
 
 'Then up to the sky with your Hip-hip-Hooray ! 
 For the unbeaten leader, who leads us to-day, 
 For ASQUITH to-day, after long, weary years, 
 Our victorious Captain o'er Tories and Peers. 
 Then cheer with a will for the great deed is done ; 
 Attacking the Veto, we've fought and we've won ; 
 Henceforward these islands of ours are to he 
 Not the Land of the Peers but the Land of the Free. 
 
 Long, long in shameful slavery 
 
 The emerald isle hath lain, 
 The victim of past knavery, 
 
 And Unionist disdain. 
 But Freedom! s day is coming 
 See how the foemenJLee ! 
 Home Rule is just 
 And come it must 
 To set old Ireland free / 
 
 '9
 
 Books in General 
 
 One blow will end the matter ! 
 Strike, strike it with a will ! 
 The enemy we'll scatter 
 
 And quickly pass our Bill. 
 Our leaders are determined, 
 True followers are we, 
 Our arms are strong 
 To right the wrong 
 And set old Ireland free. 
 
 A curious thing is that almost universally in these 
 songs the virtues and actions of the party 
 leaders get almost as much attention as the 
 political questions at issue. This is the mark of 
 the caucus. 
 
 It is a very difficult thing to write a good 
 propagandist song at all. A first-rate tune will 
 often cover up the most prosaic words, but 
 generally speaking political songs split on the 
 rock of the specific. It is the greatest mistake 
 to expect to stir people with verses dealing with a 
 particular Bill. The spirit of freedom, the spirit 
 of revolt, the passion of love, or the passion of 
 hate, may make good songs, but it is a hopeless 
 task to try to make poetry out of the taxation of 
 land values or an import duty on corn. A good 
 Socialist song may deal with brotherhood or 
 service, but it cannot deal with " the nationaliza- 
 tion of the means of production, distribution, or 
 exchange." One should avoid the kind of 
 concrete details that produce a sense of anti- 
 climax, and the kind of personalities that sound 
 
 20
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good 
 
 false. The spirit of Liberty may appropriately be 
 depicted in a helmet, but it is silly to conjure up 
 a picture of Mr. Asquith with a suit of armour 
 over his frock-coat. Even the fact that a thing 
 is glaringly true does not necessarily make it 
 suitable for metrical statement. It is true that 
 there is an insufficient supply of sanatoria and 
 that the thought profoundly moves many people. 
 But a song emphasizing the fact must be a 
 failure. Modern political song-writers fail (i) 
 because they are usually, people who cannot 
 write verse at all, (2) because they try to make 
 their songs like extra-rhetorical speeches or 
 articles. Probably the next Liberal song will 
 deal with the ravages of pheasants. 
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good 
 
 THE award of the Nobel Prize to Mr. 
 Rabindranath Tagore is generally ap- 
 proved. I do not entirely agree with 
 those who think that Mr. Tagore's poems are 
 masterpieces in English ; for I find his English 
 poetical prose monotonous and without rhyth- 
 mical beauty, although, in a sense, immaculate. 
 But those who know the Indian originals say 
 that they are really great, and that they have 
 got a hold on the general population unprece- 
 dented for centuries past. 
 
 21
 
 Books in General 
 
 I have just acquired a book by an Indian poet 
 who was not so wise in his choice of subjects as is 
 Mr. Tagore. The book is an English version 
 (made in 1864 by the tutor of Sir J. Jeejeebhoy's 
 sons, and published by the Bombay Education 
 Society) of an Epic on the Prince Consort by the 
 Parsee poet " Munsookh." The poem is enliven- 
 ing if not inspiring. 
 
 It opens with the usual Oriental invocation to 
 Heaven, ending "With that remembrance alone 
 will I fill the cup of my heart and sing new and 
 entertaining stones." It then plunges straight 
 in medias res with a first canto, " On the birth 
 of Prince Albert, his education and arrival 
 at mature years ; and his wish to marry 
 Victoria." 
 
 " There is a country of the world called Ger- 
 many, the eminence of which is known every- 
 where. In its interior is a large district called the 
 Dukedom of Gotha, about thirty-seven miles in 
 area, and containing about one hundred and fifty 
 thousand inhabitants. The air of this district 
 is pleasant, dry, and cool ; and the water re- 
 freshing and pure. The land is good and very 
 fertile, and every article of food and clothing is 
 cheap there. In its neighbourhood is the city of 
 Coburg, where the richest blessings of Providence 
 display themselves, near which flows the river 
 Itz, and where is a magnificent ducal castle, 
 having the appropriate name of Rosina, with a 
 
 22
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good 
 
 garden entirely surrounding it. Here the birth 
 of Albert took place." 
 
 Prince Albert grew up wise and studious, and 
 at last his preceptor said to him : " My accom- 
 plished pupil, this is the one hope of my soul, 
 that thou make a hearty effort to be united to the 
 worthy heiress of the Kingdom of England, and 
 if thou do this, thou wilt not be disappointed. 
 . . . Put in action therefore the effective dagger 
 of contrivance ; engraft speedily the plant of 
 love . . . lose not thy time, for if thou do thou 
 wilt be considered a fool." 
 
 Queen Victoria's portrait was sent to Albert, 
 the bearer telling him that he was searching 
 the world for a worthy, loving, and religious 
 prince. "Thou hast administered the medicine 
 for my secret pain," was the reply, and the 
 Prince wrote a letter acknowledging the present. 
 " When I would write thee a letter," he said, 
 " the water of my eyes flows from my pen instead 
 of the black ink. ... In my feeling of love 
 for thee I am mad : I am a moth flying around a 
 candle. . . . Though I swim always in a flood 
 of tears, my body is burning to a cinder." When 
 Victoria's mother heard about this she was glad, 
 but said that " the hearts of the English people 
 are intoxicated with haughtiness ; they despise 
 a stranger and a foreigner . . . nor will they 
 consider it honourable that thou should be united 
 in love to a child of Germany." Various letters 
 
 23
 
 Books in General 
 
 passed, but Albert's father was astonished at his 
 rashness. " Foolish boy, heretofore engrossed 
 in eating, drinking, and learning. Where didst 
 thou get this information and these notions ? . . . 
 A nation proud and haughty like the English 
 will think thee thoroughly mad." But letters 
 from England convinced the Duke ; he ad- 
 monished his son as to his future behaviour ; and 
 the party sailed for the port of London, where 
 " Victoria immediately went upon the terrace." 
 The lovers met and sang, and the Prince returned 
 home to complete his studies. " A little time 
 after this occurrence the Queen again remem- 
 bered Albert ; she caused a letter, official, and 
 according to rule, to be written to his father." 
 
 " Albert's father prepared himself at once, 
 taking necessary provisions, furniture, and 
 money. Having sat in a boat Prince Albert 
 went forward accompanied by his family. The 
 gallant vessel floated down the stream, and did 
 not leave her track on the way. From a distance 
 she appeared like an alligator, or like the moon 
 of the second day sailing through the heavens, 
 or like a tree growing in the midst of deep waters, 
 casting its shadows as it moved in a hundred 
 directions ; or she was like a horse leaping 
 without feet, and bound only to the surface of 
 the water, so swift and lofty of mien that the 
 sun from afar uttered a shout of approbation. 
 As a lover weeps on account of separation from 
 his beloved, so the ship beating her breast, filled 
 24
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good 
 
 her skirts with water. She sometimes appeared 
 from her motion tired and weary, and the 
 bubbles about her seemed like blisters on the 
 feet. In body she was a strong negress, but in 
 speed lively ; in her womb were hundreds of 
 children, yet did she never bear." 
 
 " Albert thought the waves were like an in- 
 furiated elephant," but he arrived safely, and the 
 marriage was celebrated amid general rejoicings. 
 
 " The voice of triumph arose from every side 
 with guns and bells and bands of music ; in 
 every house, too, arose the heart-charming 
 sounds of cornets, flutes, harps, pianos, and 
 singing of various sorts ; cannons boomed from 
 every fort one making a whirring noise, another 
 a noise like thunder. ... So pure became the 
 waters of the Thames that one could see in them 
 the image even of the soul of his body. It was 
 not a river, but as it were a flower garden ; and 
 the bodies of the fishes glittered like rose-leaves. 
 Everywhere were clusters of variously decked 
 boats ; the vessels were as shaking mountains, 
 which made graceful motions like peacocks 
 coquetting in the garden of Paradise." 
 
 A great banquet followed, and when " the 
 reign of wine " was finished the music began. 
 " Trombones sounded so impressively that 
 letters were imprinted upon the face of the air." 
 Then came the dancing. " What shall I say of 
 
 25
 
 Books in General 
 
 the Mendozas and Polkas ? for the philosophic 
 and the pious lost their peace of mind through 
 them. . . . The Polka was kept up with such 
 zest and excitement that there was a stir among 
 the angels of heaven. ... In short, the ball was 
 gracefulness itself which made the stars bite 
 their own bodies with jealousy." The dead rose 
 up from the ground enamoured of the dancing, 
 and the lamps put their hands over their eyes. 
 The festivities over the royal pair retired and 
 sang to each other. 
 
 Next year a princess was born, and all England 
 was merry. Other children followed, and for 
 twenty years the royal pair lived in happiness. 
 In 1843 the Queen and the Prince revisited his 
 native country in a ship furious as a leopard, that 
 broke through hundreds of whales. Home awoke 
 tender thoughts in the Prince. " Collecting 
 himself he sang " a chant comparing himself to 
 Joseph, and his bride to Zuleika which indicates 
 a somewhat different view of the Potiphar's 
 wife episode from that prevalent in Occidental 
 circles. The rest of the work is mainly taken 
 up with the Great Exhibition, the Prince's death, 
 and numerous maxims for the use of his son, 
 such as : 
 
 " King must keep entirely aloof from several 
 hurtful things as ... chess. 
 
 " A king's country is like a beautiful woman, 
 and the merchants of that country are, as it 
 were, the precious jewels and ornaments of that 
 26
 
 Epigrams 
 
 woman ; and the more these jewels and orna- 
 ments are, the more heart-charming and beauti- 
 ful she looks." 
 
 This last aphorism is disputable. 
 
 Epigrams 
 
 A'TY one who reads Mr. R. N. Lennard's 
 charming little anthology of English 
 epigrams in the Oxford Garlands Series 
 will regret that the practice of writing poetical 
 epigrams has died out. Until the Victorian 
 age almost all professional writers, as well as 
 many amateurs, tried their hands at epigram. 
 If you had anything especially offensive to 
 say about any one and especially about poli- 
 ticians, doctors, and ladies unduly addicted to 
 cosmetics it was the natural thing to put it 
 into a couplet or a quatrain. Ministers and 
 Privy Councillors used to compose epigrams 
 about each other ; but who can imagine Sir 
 Henry Dalziel writing witty quatrains about Sir 
 Alfred Mond, or vice versa ? Why the habit has 
 died out I don't profess to say. There may be 
 some significance in the fact that the great age 
 of epigrams was the eighteenth century the 
 prose age -par excellence. There is probably 
 more in the decay of knowledge of Greek and 
 Latin. When almost every educated man was 
 familiar with the Greek Anthology and the 
 
 27
 
 Books in General 
 
 works of Martial whence all kinds of epigrams, 
 elegiac, amatory, and satirical, descend it was 
 perhaps natural that the temptation to continue 
 the good work should be generally felt. It may 
 even be that a form so small is incapable of 
 infinite variety and grows exhausted. Johnson 
 wrote a ludicrous burlesque epigram 
 
 If the man who turnips cries 
 Cry not when his father dies, 
 ^lis a proof that he had rather 
 Have a turnip than his father. 
 
 and there is undoubtedly sound criticism in it. 
 After a certain time the making of epigrams may 
 proceed almost on a formula. At all events, 
 the decline of the epigram is obvious. The 
 well-meant effusions which the late Sir Wilfrid 
 Lawson used to waft across the benches of the 
 House of Commons were scarcely equal to the 
 old level of our political quips ; it is very rarely 
 that a tolerable metrical epigram appears in the 
 Press ; and the poets have almost all abandoned 
 the habit of attempting to get their thoughts into 
 so small a compass. The custom of composing 
 epigrams for private albums is virtually extinct. 
 Every schoolgirl writes in every other school- 
 girl's album that there is nothing Original in 
 her excepting Original Sin ; and even that not 
 very splendid mot was constructed by Thomas 
 Campbell nearly a hundred years ago. The rest 
 is silence. 
 28
 
 Epigrams 
 
 The greater number of our epigrams are satiri- 
 cal, and Mr. Lennard's selection is mainly 
 composed of these verses with stings in their 
 tails. One of the most taking of these is 
 A. Evans's on a Fat Man : 
 
 When Tadlow walks the streets, the paviours cry 
 " God bless you, sir/" and lay their rammers by. 
 
 But that, perhaps, is not really stinging ; if Mr. 
 Tadlow was good-tempered, he must have liked 
 it himself. Good couplets like these are few, 
 but Coleridge's on the Swan-Song is one : 
 
 Swans sing before they die "'twere no bad, thing 
 Should certain persons die before they sing. 
 
 The most brutal epigrams we have are Byron's on 
 Castlereagh's suicide, after that statesman had 
 cut his throat. These are not very good, but 
 Mr. Lennard gives them ; and, in fact, almost 
 every famous epigram in the language. He 
 classifies them under headings : " Political," 
 " Professional and Trading," " Amatory," and 
 so on. Of the Literary epigrams one of the best 
 is Bishop Stubbs's on two of his nineteenth- 
 century contemporaries : 
 
 Froude informs the Scottish youth 
 That parsons do not care for truth. 
 The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries 
 History is a pack of lies. 
 
 29
 
 Books in General 
 
 W 'hat cause for judgments so malign ? 
 
 A brief reflection solves the mystery 
 Froude believes Kingsley a divine, 
 
 And Kingsley goes to Froude for history. 
 
 Lord Erskine's on Scott's Waterloo Poem is 
 
 good : 
 
 On Waterloo's ensanguined plain 
 Lie tens of thousands of the slain, 
 But none, by sabre or by shot, 
 Fell half so flat as Walter Scott. 
 
 Theodore Hook's epigram suggesting that it 
 would be impossible to find a reader who would 
 pay for the binding of Prometheus Unbound now 
 falls as flat as Scott, owing to the utter falsifica- 
 tion of the prophecy. 
 
 Mr. Lennard gives a fair number of epitaphs, 
 including Evans's well-known one on Vanbrugh 
 and Gay's even better-known one on himself. 
 But I don't think we have in English an epitaph 
 so delightful as that written for his own tomb 
 by the obscene French poet Piron : 
 
 Ci-git Piron 
 
 Qui ne fut rien. 
 Pas meme 
 
 Academicien. 
 
 Landor's " I strove with none, for none was 
 worth my strife," however, could not be surpassed 
 30
 
 Epigrams 
 
 by any serious epitaph. From Landor Mr. 
 Lennard has naturally had to draw freely for 
 his more serious sections. Landor came nearer 
 than any English writers to rivalling the feats of 
 the best Greek epigrammatists. Many people 
 would say that his Dirce is the most beautiful 
 epigram in the language. 
 
 Mr. Lennard's selection is, as I have said, a 
 very good one. The only old one I miss is 
 Richard Bentley's on German scholarship : 
 
 The Germans in Greek 
 Are sadly to seek ; 
 Not one in Jive score, 
 But ninety-nine more. 
 All, all except Hermann 
 And Hermann's a German. 
 
 The omission is the stranger in that Landor's 
 greatly inferior epigram on Germans is included. 
 About the longest poem admitted is dough's 
 revised version of the Ten Commandments : 
 it is flat in places, but contains one famous 
 couplet. Only when he comes to the moderns 
 might Mr. Lennard have cast his net wider. 
 Browning, who wrote some neat versicles, is 
 unrepresented ; and so is Mr. Watson, who, in 
 his earlier days, wrote epigrams, some of which, 
 if not masterpieces, were as good as some of Mr. 
 Lennard's old ones. And it would have been 
 worth while to collect a few of the miscellaneous 
 
 3'
 
 Books in General 
 
 modern ones that float about. There are 
 Limericks and some Limericks will satisfy the 
 narrowest definition of an epigram which would 
 be worth preserving ; and then there are odd 
 fragments like the effort alleged to have been 
 written on the blackboard by a Cheltenham 
 schoolgirl : 
 
 Miss Suss and Miss Eeale 
 Cupid's darts do not fed. 
 How different from us 
 Miss Beale and Miss Buss. 
 
 Tolerable modern epigrams are so few that it 
 would be worth while saving all there are. 
 Unfortunately the pleasantest personal ones that 
 one hears privately, though they would have 
 been printed in a franker day, must mostly re- 
 main unprinted in an age when direct satire is 
 considered ungentlemanly, and the law of libel 
 
 is so easily invoked. I remember Mr. 's 
 
 epigram on Lady and Mr. -'s on Sir - 
 
 . Mr. Lennard cannot be expected to 
 
 publish these. 
 
 3 2
 
 An Eminent Baconian 
 
 An Eminent Baconian 
 
 A VERY curious chapter in the history of 
 the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy closes 
 with the death of Sir Edwin Durning- 
 Lawrence. Amid all the strange multitude of 
 retired judges, lawyers, astrologers, and American 
 ladies who have championed the cause of Lord 
 Verulam there has been no figure more singular 
 than that of this affluent old ex-M.P., who, after 
 a lifetime spent in business, platform speaking, 
 and the study of modern mechanical improve- 
 ments, suddenly plunged into the fight with 
 unprecedented enthusiasm and methods of 
 argument never equalled in their singularity. 
 Setting out with the conviction that Shakespeare 
 could not possibly have written the plays, and 
 that Bacon was the only man who could have, 
 Sir Edwin became so obsessed with the subject 
 that he found proofs of his contention everywhere, 
 and gradually came to the conclusion that Bacon 
 wrote almost all the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 literature that is worth reading. We have heard 
 of the devout mystic who sees " every common 
 bush afire with God " : to Sir Edwin Burning- 
 Lawrence every common bush was afire with 
 Bacon. His outlook being of this character, it 
 is scarcely to be wondered at that his methods 
 of reasoning and of research were most sur- 
 prising. 
 
 c 33
 
 Books in General 
 
 Most people who read his pamphlet, The 
 Shakespeare Myth, must have been astounded by 
 the naivete of some of the " proofs " there 
 contained. The fact that Bacon was called 
 Bacon a name so easily interchangeable with 
 pig, hog, and rasher was a great help ; for 
 where the application of ciphers did not obtain 
 one word it might obtain another. Bacon, ac- 
 cording to Sir Edwin, must have been at least 
 as preoccupied with ensuring his identification 
 by posterity as with the writing of good verse, 
 for he would take great pains to work in such a 
 word as " hang-hog," or to make three consecu- 
 tive lines begin with words such as Pompey, 
 In, and Got out of the initials of which could be 
 constructed the appellation " pig." Everything 
 was pork that came to Sir Edwin's net, and he 
 would by tortuous ratiocination get evidence 
 from the most seemingly innocent contemporary 
 English and foreign engravings. For there was 
 a secret brotherhood at work carrying on the 
 Baconian tradition, and the artist who gave the 
 portrait of Shakespeare two left sleeves (the 
 confirmation of this was, I think, obtained from 
 the editor of the Tailor y Cutter) had a subtle and 
 profound intention. Sir Edwin collected a very 
 large library in connexion with his work, and the 
 study of it was his passion ; but, save industry, 
 he had none of the qualifications for his task. 
 
 I myself obtained in a strange way an amusing 
 insight into his looseness of procedure. He had 
 34
 
 An Eminent Baconian 
 
 been writing letters maintaining his thesis in a 
 contemporary weekly. Wondering whether he 
 could be hoaxed, I sent to the paper a letter 
 over what might have seemed, to a man with any 
 real detective faculty, the suspicious signature 
 " P. O. R. Ker." In this letter I called Sir 
 Edwin's attention to a quotation (which I had 
 myself invented and written in Elizabethanese) 
 which I ascribed to one of the best-known 
 works of Greene. My " quotation " (I forget its 
 wording, but it contained phrases about " Shake- 
 scene " and " the semblance of a hogg ") made it 
 perfectly clear that Shakespeare was merely 
 Bacon's dummy. Any man with the slightest 
 qualifications for his work would have looked up 
 Greene for reference and would not have found 
 it. Not so Sir Edwin. He wrote in at once 
 (the editor, in order to spare his feelings, did not 
 print the communication) to say that the fact 
 that Mr. Ker's important and convincing re- 
 ference had been ignored by the Shakespeareans 
 showed their utter incompetence. 
 
 But the most striking thing about him was his 
 detestation of Shakespeare. There are people 
 who hate Napoleon ; there are people who object 
 to Torquemada ; there are even people who feel 
 a pronounced distaste for Nero. But never has 
 any one loathed and despised a dead man as the 
 really mild and amiable Sir Edwin despised and 
 loathed Shakespeare. No epithets were, he felt, 
 too opprobrious for this rascal, who for three 
 
 35
 
 Books in General 
 
 hundred years had cheated another man out of his 
 due fame. He denied Shakespeare any virtue 
 at all ; he pointed out that there existed no proof 
 that Shakespeare could even read ; and he 
 habitually referred to him as the " drunken, 
 illiterate clown of Stratford," " the sordid money- 
 lender of Stratford," and " the mean, drunken, 
 ignorant, and absolutely unlettered rustic of 
 Stratford." So strong, indeed, were his feelings 
 that when the Times says that " One cannot 
 but feel that he was happy in not living to 
 see the celebrations which the British Academy 
 and other friends of literature are to hold in 
 1916, the third centenary of Shakespeare's not 
 Bacon's death," it is not making a weak and 
 untimely jest, but stating the sober truth. 
 
 Who will now take on Sir Edwin's mantle as 
 the most conspicuous Baconian ? Mr. George 
 Greenwood is hors concours because, though an 
 anti-Shakespearean, he has doubts about Bacon ; 
 and we have heard nothing lately about that 
 romantic American doctor who a year or two ago 
 began digging for evidence in the bed of the 
 sylvan Wye. That another ardent combatant 
 will soon appear is pretty certain ; in fact, there 
 will probably be a continual succession of such 
 for all time unless which is unlikely somebody 
 discovers documentary proofs of Shakespeare's 
 authorship so irrefutable that no one could dream 
 of challenging them. For the examination of a 
 mystery if you can persuade yourself that there 
 36
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 is a mystery is always fascinating, and the 
 search for and application of ciphers and hidden 
 meanings produces such entertaining results that it 
 would be almost worth while becoming a Baconian 
 for the fun of it. Almost, but not quite. 
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 THE collector of amusingly bad poetry has 
 never had such splendid opportunities 
 as to-day. The world is all before him 
 where to choose. Modern cheap production has 
 made it easy for any one who can raise 20 to get 
 a volume of poems printed ; and of recent years 
 the field has been greatly enriched by the growing 
 body of verse-writers in America and the Colonies. 
 There have always, of course, been poets who 
 have given unintentional rather than intentional 
 pleasure. I have before me a volume published 
 (at Cambridge) in 1825, entitled Original Poems 
 in the Moral, Heroic, Pathetic and other Styles, 
 by a Traveller, which contains poems in the 
 following style amongst others : 
 
 INGRATITUDE 
 
 My Muse, who oft recites on Love, 
 
 Or Heavenly Beatitude, 
 Her strains more melancholy move 
 
 Devoted to INGRATITUDE. 
 
 37
 
 Books in General 
 
 With thee, Dark Demon what can charm ? 
 
 Nor manners polished chaste, or rude ; 
 Nor Friendship's hand nor Safety's arm 
 
 So vile art thou INGRATITUDE ! 
 
 Tho' dear a Female's face, or form ; 
 
 Tho 1 elegant her attitude ; 
 We fly, as from the winged storm 
 
 If she pours forth INGRATITUDE. 
 
 But it is seldom that the collector comes across 
 one of these delightful relics from an older day. 
 The greater part of any collection must be formed 
 of books published within the last forty years. 
 Our age may be indeed, it is deficient in 
 some respects, but in the production of unin- 
 tentionally amusing writers no age, not even 
 the Renaissance or the great ages of Greece 
 and Rome, can vie with it. 
 
 It might be possible for a man with the 
 industry of a Herbert Spencer exhaustively to 
 classify the writers of whom I am speaking, and 
 to tabulate the qualities which give to their 
 works their peculiar virtues incongruity of 
 image, unfortunate use of colloquialisms, hopeless 
 slavery to the necessity of rhyme, and so on. I 
 am no Spencer ; indeed, the only things I have 
 in common with that philosopher are a taste for 
 billiards and the recollection of a single visit to 
 the Derby. To me there is a single broad 
 division which connoisseurs may find useful in 
 arranging their collections : in one class we may 
 38
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 put those poets who are specifically cranky ; 
 in the other those (some silly, some quite sensible 
 people apart from their artistic proclivities) who 
 (Macaulay's Robert Montgomery is the type) 
 try to write poems like other people's, but whose 
 total lack of poetic perception leads them into 
 strange aberrations of expression. 
 
 The first kind are comparatively rare, but there 
 are some good examples still going strong. There 
 is, for instance, a gentleman (at one time a distin- 
 guished scholar of Balliol) who describes himself 
 as "The Modern Homer," and has written a 
 number of epics, including The Human Epic, The 
 Epic of London, The Epic of Charlemagne, and 
 The Epic of God and the Devil. Preoccupation 
 with his matter leads him to such phrases as : 
 
 When Murder is on the tapis 
 Then the Devil is happy. 
 
 But he, perhaps, is not so interesting as Mr. 
 William Nathan Stedman, who used to live in 
 London, and now, I believe, is settled in Aus- 
 tralia. This gentleman is addicted to prefaces 
 proving that Mr. Gladstone, " this DIRTY OLD 
 DEVIL," " this sly old wizard, a protoplasm 
 from the abyss of nowhere," was the Beast of the 
 Revelations, and he has an aversion from Mr. 
 R. J. Campbell, whom he calls " moo-cow, kid- 
 gloved Campbell." It is well worthwhile buying 
 his Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics. The poems them- 
 selves are not so amusing, though we sometimes 
 came across such ambiguous phrases as : 
 
 39
 
 Books in General 
 
 And when upon your dainty breast I lay 
 My wearied head more soft than eiderdown. 
 
 But the illustrations wood-blocks from eminent 
 artists like Albert Durer and Louis Wain are 
 charmingly irrelevant, and the prose passages 
 are unique. The poet refers to the Laureateship 
 " an office I refused after Tennyson's death, 
 though made with the offer of a premier's 
 daughter and 30,000 " and he is violently 
 down on critics who have failed to see the merits 
 of a certain novelist whom he calls " Queen 
 Marie," " a woman who did you no wrong, nor 
 envied ye your bones and offal, but gave 
 Most Interesting Books for your betterment 
 and education. Are ye not dirty dogs and 
 devils ? Eh ? " " Bull-browed bastards " is 
 one of the mildest terms he applies to the 
 critics. 
 
 Difficult to place in either class are the poets 
 who have some technical faculty, who are not 
 necessarily cranks, but who endeavour to put 
 such extraordinarily prosy things into verse that 
 the result is as comic as though they were. I 
 have, for example, a book containing " a lyrical 
 romance in verse," which tells a story, that 
 might have gone quite well in prose, of a man 
 who falls in love with a girl and has long dis- 
 cussions with her about politics. The author's 
 choice of a metrical form leads him to pages and 
 pages of this sort of thing : 
 40
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 / ceased, and somewhat eagerly she asked : 
 
 " Then you would justify the Socialist, 
 Or Anarchist, the brute assassin, masked 
 As a reformer, him who has dismissed 
 All scruples, and himself or others tasked 
 To murder innocence ? Can there exist 
 A reason to excuse Luccheni's action, 
 Of life's great rights most dastardly in- 
 fraction ? " 
 
 " Excuse it, no/ " I said ; " nor justify it; 
 But understand it yes ! I find, confusion 
 In both your questions ; and, your words 
 
 imply it, 
 
 They have their base in popular illusion. 
 In Socialism and Anarchism, deny it 
 Who will, there's no imperative inclusion 
 Of violence. Each, aiming at reform, 
 Would lay life's ever-raging life and 
 storm." 
 
 The growth of the Socialist and Suffragist move- 
 ments has led to a great increase in this kind of 
 argumentative verse ; but the bad poems in the 
 Conservative or Militarist interests are generally 
 very much worse, a type-specimen being this : 
 
 And so with foes about us 
 
 Just waiting for their chance 
 We must become a nation armed 
 
 Like Germany and France. 
 
 Another example of Imperialist verse is : 
 
 4 1
 
 Books in General 
 
 Pm old John Bull of England, 
 
 My triumphs are in song. 
 I've fought and won great victories 
 
 Which did not take me long. 
 
 Pve fought in many a battle 
 
 By sea as well as land. 
 Pve fought in Russia, Belgium, 
 
 Africa and India's golden strand, 
 
 which occurs in a work appealing for better 
 treatment for British Honduras. 
 
 But most of the best bad verse is not propa- 
 gandist. Amongst the classics of the kind the 
 Works of Johnston-Smith rank high. These 
 have been published complete in one volume, 
 but the best of them are to be found in a smaller 
 book entitled 'The Captain of the Dolphin. Mr. 
 Johnston-Smith had a great vocabulary and 
 peculiar gifts of metaphor and of abrupt con- 
 clusion. Here are some typical passages : 
 
 A balminess the darkened hours had brought from 
 
 out the South, 
 Each breaker doffed its cap of white and shut its 
 
 blatant mouth. 
 
 Strike, strike your flag, Sidonia, 
 
 And lessen death and pain ; 
 " Strike," " Fight " are but synonyma 
 
 For misery to Spain. 
 
 On speedy wing the graceful sea-fowl follow fast 
 
 They seem to me the souls of seamen drowned, 
 42
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 Who have for sailors, ships and ocean' 's briny blast 
 Dumb love which they are yearning to propound. 
 
 O'er the sea's edge the sun, a dazzling disc, 
 
 In splendour hangs, preparing for his plunge ; 
 
 Upon the heaven's bright page he stamps an asterisk 
 Of yellow beams which Western things expunge. 
 
 Reluctant I leave, like a lover who goes 
 From the side of the maid of his choice, 
 
 By whom he is held with a cord actuose 
 Spun out of her beauty and voice. 
 
 " Actuose " is very characteristic of this poet, 
 who uses enormous numbers of astonishing 
 words of which he does not tell us the meaning, 
 although he gives us a glossary containing such 
 definitions as : 
 
 Derelict. An abandoned ship. 
 Outward-bound. Sailing from home. 
 To-heave-ho ! A phrase used by sailors when two 
 or more pull in concert at the same rope. 
 
 One of his nicest surprises is the ending of : 
 
 Where the sun circles round for the half of the year 
 And is cold like a yellow balloon. 
 
 The kind of thrill produced by this unexpected 
 ending is, of course, common in verse. Some 
 readers will be acquainted with the epitaph : 
 
 Here beneath this stone at rest 
 Lies the dear dog who loved us best. 
 
 43
 
 Books in General 
 
 Within his heart was nothing mean, 
 He seemed- just like a human being. 
 
 But a University poet's anticlimax on Actaeon 
 may not be so generally known : 
 
 His hands were changed, to feet, and he in short 
 Became a stag. . . . 
 
 Nor this affecting stanza from a woman's book 
 recently published : 
 
 What 0' the wind ? 
 It hisses through a vessel's spars. 
 
 What 0' the wind ? 
 It is in truth to mercy blind, 
 It surely from all rest debars. 
 And even frights the sturdy " tars." 
 
 What 0' the wind ? 
 
 An equal bathos is sometimes produced by 
 inappropriate metaphor. The worst instance I 
 know is found in the poems of quite a well-known 
 writer who describes roses : 
 
 Aft before and fore behind 
 Swung upon the summer wind. 
 
 But the author of a recent drama of the Near 
 East came pretty near it with 
 
 . . . the diamond shaft of the Jierce searchlight 
 From the lens of the crystal moon. 
 
 44
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 The chase after the unusual almost always means 
 disaster. This is another recent example : 
 
 I have found ihee, clear ! on the edge of time, 
 Just over the brink of the world of sense ; 
 In dream-life that's ours, when with love intense 
 We function above, in a fairer dime. 
 
 I have found ihee there, in a world of rest, 
 In the fair sweet gardens of sunlit bliss, 
 Where the sibilant sound of an Angel's kiss 
 Is the sanctioned seal of a Holy quest. 
 
 But nothing produced in this manner is so attrac- 
 tive as the merely commonplace can be when 
 carried to its farthest pitch. A year or two ago 
 a young American published a volume with a 
 preface ending : " He was apprised of the death 
 of his invalid brother, whose remaining portion 
 of his grandfather's legacy accruing to him 
 facilitated the publication of this book." The 
 epilogue ran as follows : 
 
 Oh, the rain, rain, rain ! 
 All the day it doth complain. 
 On the window-pane, just near me, 
 How it sputters, oh, how dreary ! 
 One becomes so awful weary 
 With the rain, rain, rain. 
 
 The difference between this and Verlaine's // 
 pleut sur la ville would be hard to define, but 
 there certainly is a marked difference. 
 
 45
 
 Books in General 
 
 Most of the poets quoted above have, at any 
 rate, the gift of moving with some freedom 
 within their metres. But some people who pub- 
 lish verse cannot even do that, however simple 
 the forms they choose. They struggle through 
 their poems like flies in treacle. A good example 
 may be taken from a book (excellently produced) 
 issued only a year ago by one of the foremost 
 publishers. Apart from its other qualities, it 
 shows a most extraordinarily revolutionary con- 
 ception of the way in which lines may be ended : 
 
 A man's home is a woman's breast. There see 
 Him in infancy, and later, seeks he 
 Inspiration from the self-same source. 'Tis 
 His home, t* wards which, from cradle to the grave, 
 He doth gravitate, accomplishing his 
 Greatest work by aid of it. Man on the 
 Woman's aid depends. Oft unconsciously 
 ""Tis given, oft loyally the truth' *s in 
 Loving breast safeguarded less often 'tis 
 In cruelty withheld. 
 
 This supplies the only case I know of in which the 
 article " the " has been used as a rhyme. But 
 for sheer struggle the poem does not excel parts 
 of this other one, which was published in a recent 
 anthology : 
 
 Along a marsh a hungry crane 
 
 With patient steps, his way did take 
 
 Each cranny of the rivage fain 
 To ransack with his slender beak,
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 When, suddenly, his watchful eye, 
 At but four paces distance, saw 
 
 A worm, that back, as suddenly, 
 To bis subterranean hole did draw. 
 
 Nathless the crane did, straight, begin 
 His beak, and claw, alike, to ply 
 
 And hoping the retreat he, in 
 
 The end, of the insect might destroy, 
 
 The turf did tear up, and dispel 
 
 The clods, and with such vigour strive 
 
 That he, at last, perceives his bill 
 At of the cave the depth arrive ; 
 
 But lo ! just when of all his toil, 
 The object he was nigh to get, 
 
 Beneath his very nib, a mole, 
 Without ado, devoured it ! 
 
 Thus often, lurchers, onward who 
 Are prone by shady ways to creep 
 
 May the reward to those that's due 
 Who, openly, have acted, reap. 
 
 This fable is called by the author A Surrep- 
 titious Catch ; but it might equally fitly have 
 been entitled The Apotheosis of the Comma. 
 
 I have, as I say, insufficient scientific talent to 
 enter upon an analytic criticism of this kind of 
 poetry ; and in this brief discourse I have done 
 
 47
 
 Books in General 
 
 little more than string quotations together. But 
 that operation is all that is needed to serve 
 my present object viz. the propagation of the 
 cult. Any one who has ever read the novels of 
 Mrs. Amanda M'Kittrick Ros knows how much 
 sustenance the human spirit may derive from the 
 byways of literature ; but it is very rarely that 
 one meets, even amongst the best-read of men, 
 one who is conscious of the peculiar poetic 
 treasures that lie about in the publishers' offices 
 and on the second-hand bookstalls simply im- 
 ploring to be collected. 
 
 More Badness 
 
 MY appeal for interesting specimens of 
 bad verse has brought me a large 
 mass of material ; but most of my 
 correspondents seem not to realize that merely 
 feeble and meaningless verse is so common as 
 not to be worth preserving. The best single 
 line I have received sent me by a notorious 
 dramatist who has forgotten its place of origin 
 is : 
 
 The beetle booms adown the glooms and bumps 
 among the clumps ; 
 
 and what promised to be the best whole poem 
 is one that begins by rhyming " Atlantic " to
 
 More Badness 
 
 " blanket." But when I had got through it I 
 found that my correspondent had got it out of a 
 visitors' book in an hotel. I really cannot count 
 anything that has not been properly published ; 
 although I confess to being tempted by such 
 lines as : 
 
 Farewell, farewell, bonny St. Ives, 
 
 May I live to see you again, 
 Tour air preserves people's lives 
 
 And you have so little rain. 
 
 So really the best acquisition I have made is 
 the following, the author of which I should like 
 to discover : 
 
 In this imperfect, gloomy scene 
 
 Of complicated ill, 
 How rarely is a day serene, 
 
 The throbbing bosom still ! 
 Will not a beauteous landscape bright 
 
 Or music's soothing sound, 
 Console the heart, afford delight, 
 
 And throw sweet peace around ? 
 They may ; but never comfort lend 
 Like an accomplished female friend ! 
 
 With such a friend the social hour 
 
 In sweetest pleasure glides ; 
 There is, in female charms a power 
 
 Which lastingly abides ; 
 
 D 49
 
 Books in General 
 
 The fragrance of the blushing rose, 
 
 Its tints and splendid hue, 
 Will, with the seasons, decompose, 
 
 And pass asjlitting dew ; 
 On firmer ties his joys depend 
 Who has a faithful female friend! 
 
 As orbs revolve, and years recede 
 
 And seasons onward roll, 
 The fancy may on beauties feed 
 
 With discontented soul ; 
 A thousand objects bright and fair 
 
 May for a moment shine, 
 Tet many a sigh and many a tear 
 
 But mark their swift decline ; 
 While lasting joys the man attend 
 Who has a polished female friend ! 
 
 My correspondent says that he received this 
 from a friend (perhaps a polished female friend), 
 who did not tell him whence it was extracted. I 
 myself have seen two lines of it before the last 
 two of the second stanza. They occurred in a 
 letter I received some time ago from a cleiical 
 acquaintance who was apologizing for having got 
 engaged. He, on inquiry, pretended (with a 
 mendacity very rare amongst clergymen) that 
 he had written the lines himself ; but I did not 
 believe him. The poem bears the marks of the 
 earlier decades of the nineteenth century. Can 
 it be by Thomas Haynes Bayly ? 
 
 One interesting thing I should like to trace is a 
 5
 
 More Badness 
 
 metrical version of Holy Writ containing such 
 lines as these on Jonah : 
 
 Three dreadful days beneath the deep, 
 In fish's belly dark lay he. 
 How terrible methinks his fate. 
 May no such torment fall on me. 
 
 The most ingenious writer who contributes the 
 " Observator " column to the Observer offers me 
 a couple of specimens, one of which is new to me. 
 The old one is the late Mr. Alfred Austin's remark 
 about Nature : 
 
 She sins upon a larger scale 
 Because she is herself more large. 
 
 And the other, a touching narrative of a gipsy 
 woman who fell ill, was a discovery of Andrew 
 Lang's : 
 
 There we leave her, 
 There we leave her, 
 
 Far from where her swarthy kindred roam, 
 In the Scarlet Fever, 
 Scarlet Fever, 
 Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home.
 
 Books in General 
 
 A Mystery Solved 
 
 APARENTLY the poem about " a polished 
 female friend " is to be found in one of 
 Mr. E. V. Lucas's books. It was written, 
 it seems, by a parson named Whur or Whurr, 
 who flourished in Norfolk about a century ago. 
 Whur delighted in all calamities, and described 
 a father, on the birth of a child with no arms, 
 exclaiming : " This armless child will ruin me." 
 No one has yet brought to my notice any whole 
 volumes of bad verse worth acquiring, though 
 various choice fragments have reached me. There 
 is an epithalamium ending : 
 
 And never, never she'll forget 
 
 The happy, happy day, 
 
 When in the church, before God's priest, 
 
 She gave herself away. 
 
 There is an in memoriam poem beginning : 
 
 Dear Friends, we had a sudden Blast 
 Which came to us unexpected. 
 
 And there is a loyal song to their present Majesties 
 in which occur the lines : 
 
 Our King and Queen are never proud 
 They mingle with the densest crowd. 
 52
 
 A Mystery Solved 
 
 But the most attractive new specimen is a poem 
 on the late monarch's death. It was printed and 
 sold as a broadsheet in London, and runs : 
 
 The will of God we must obey. 
 Dreadful our King taken away I 
 The greatest friend of the nation, 
 Mighty monarch and protection ! 
 
 Heavenly Father, help in sorrow 
 Queen Mother, and them to follow, 
 What to do without him who has gone ! 
 Pray help ! help I and do lead us on. 
 
 Greatest sorrow England ever had, 
 When death took away our Dear Dad ; 
 A king was he from head to sole, 
 Loved by his people one and all. 
 
 His mighty work for the Nation, 
 Making peace and strengthening union 
 Always at it since on the throne : 
 Saved the country more than billion. 
 
 There are two more verses. Personally, I find 
 this considerably more interesting than any of 
 Mr. Alfred Noyes's various Coronation Odes. 
 
 53
 
 Books in General 
 
 Carrying the Alliance too far 
 
 WHY is it that Japanese authors are 
 allowed to write in English news- 
 papers any sort of barbarous jargon 
 they like ? Mr. Yoshio Markino was the first to 
 be licensed. To start with, one found his 
 " delightfully quaint " English amusing in a 
 mild way, but with repetition his sedulously 
 cherished howlers became irritating. Still, he 
 was only one ; and primarily a painter at that. 
 But now Mr. Yone Noguchi has turned up, and he 
 is doing the same thing. Mr. Noguchi is con- 
 sidered in Japan at least so his friends tell us 
 the first poet of the day. Those who remembered 
 his last residence here assured us that on his 
 return he would compel all men like Helen of 
 Troy or Mr. Tagore. He comes. One is pre- 
 pared to be conquered. One turns to one's 
 Westminster Gazette to read his works ; and one 
 finds there columns of stuff, possibly inspired, but 
 certainly written in such pidgin-English that one 
 cannot bother to read it. 
 
 Mr. Noguchi's pidgin-English is not of quite so 
 curious a breed as Mr. Markino's, but it is suffi- 
 ciently bad. One does not blame him for that. 
 He writes English a great deal better than I do 
 Japanese. But why on earth cannot the news- 
 papers who print his works translate them into 
 
 54
 
 Carrying the Alliance too far 
 
 normal English ? Is it that their sub-editors 
 shrink from the task ? Is it that they fondly 
 believe that we are all so fascinated by English 
 of the Noguchi-Markinesque brand that we had 
 much rather have it than any other sort ; or is it 
 that a tradition has been established that Anglo- 
 Japanese articles are not to be altered ? If this 
 is true, it is a thousand pities that, for all their 
 charm, Mr. Markino's early productions were not 
 unmercifully damned. What should we say if 
 newspapers began printing in all their native 
 crudity articles by Frenchmen and Germans 
 imperfectly acquainted with the tongue of this 
 country ? Suppose some journal came out next 
 week with an essay beginning : 
 
 " What sadly fall the leaves of automne ! 
 What of sadness tumble on the heart because 
 that the winter put his snows on all the country. 
 And sad also the spring, the spring who arouse 
 the love in the soul, and who make to think to 
 all the springs of the time past. My heart weep 
 like a bird who have lose her companion." 
 
 Or suppose a German were allowed by the 
 Westminster to present its readers with a political 
 article opening : 
 
 " No Dutcher has the by Mr. Gamaliel Zoop, 
 Amerikansh postaltelegrafkommunikationdepart- 
 ment minister on politishekonomy famose lecture 
 to a at Manchester people - coming - together 
 
 55
 
 Books in General 
 
 delivered recently without outerorderly pleasure 
 read." 
 
 Obviously we should not tolerate it. Can it be 
 that, even after the war with Russia, even after 
 Japanese professors have written works on 
 sociology, the superstition lingers here that a 
 thing cannot possibly be truly Japanese unless it 
 has the odour of an old curiosity shop ? 
 
 None of this, I may say, is meant to be dis- 
 courteous to Mr. Noguchi. I merely suggest that 
 it would be better for him if he vetoed every 
 endeavour to print his English articles as he 
 writes them. If he were the Japanese Homer 
 indeed, he may be that for all I know I should 
 say precisely the same thing. Can he be aware 
 that even his faulty spelling goes uncorrected ? 
 
 May 1914 
 
 I WRITE " these lines " just after arriving 
 in Berlin. Not that I have anything to 
 say about that. I merely mention the 
 fact. It may explain my difficulties. The 
 journey is really very dull. All those hundreds 
 of miles over the Great Plain of Europe with 
 never a hill except the ridge of Minden, very little 
 water, nothing but endless flat fields sprinkled 
 with trees, church spires, and red farm-houses. 
 
 56
 
 May 1914 
 
 There is simply nothing to look at. If you put 
 your head out of the window at Osnabriick, you 
 may see some coal ; and at Miinster you may, if 
 you choose, speculate as to which of the people 
 on the platform are Anabaptists. That is not 
 much during a twelve-hour run from Flushing. 
 
 A pleasant travelling companion is an allevia- 
 tion on such occasions. The other occupant of 
 my carriage had points about her. She was a 
 young, cheerful, and rather obese Jewess going 
 home with a plethora of scarves and wraps, 
 several boxes, two lobsters (for her father), 
 and a canary. At Goch she was incensed to find 
 that she had to pay a heavy duty on the lobsters, 
 so heavy that it would have paid her better to 
 get the creatures in Berlin and have a drink on the 
 balance. This story might make an illustration 
 for one of Mr. Lloyd George's homely speeches on 
 Free Trade. But there was no duty on the 
 canary. In his little cage, covered with a green 
 curtain, the canary sat, non-dutiable but very 
 phlegmatic. At frequent intervals his mistress 
 lifted the green curtain, looked him in the eyes 
 with a bewitching smile, and piped " Peep, 
 Peep." The bird never replied, though perhaps 
 he looked his response. The lady then turned 
 to me and said, " Is 'e not a nice bird ? Is 'e 
 not goot ? " and common politeness leaving 
 gallantry out of the question compelled me to 
 reply always, " Yes, a beautiful little bird." 
 About twice an hour she retired to the dining- 
 
 57
 
 Books in General 
 
 car and came back exuding smiles and sighs. 
 " I haf joost 'ad a bifsteck. I dawn't like steck." 
 How true it is that in life we have to be content 
 with second-bests ! But I did not discuss the 
 matter. 
 
 In intervals of silence I finished Mrs. Russell 
 Barrington's Life of Walter Bagehot (Longmans, 
 I2s. 6d. net). It is a strange thing and un- 
 fortunate, since so much material has disappeared 
 with the passage of time that Bagehot should 
 have had to wait nearly forty years for a biog- 
 raphy. But now it has come it is an interesting 
 one. The author being Bagehot's sister-in-law 
 (daughter of James Wilson, who founded the 
 Economist), the work has rather a family air. 
 Bagehot's more obvious virtues are a little too 
 much insisted upon, and excessive importance is 
 attributed to irrelevant details. The long de- 
 scription of his ancestry and birthplace, for 
 instance, might have been curtailed. But the 
 Life is well written ; it contains a great many 
 interesting letters, and it gives a really living 
 picture of one whom Lord Bryce has called " the 
 most original mind of his generation." 
 
 One would wish, however, for a supplement 
 giving a fuller analysis of Bagehot's literary 
 work. Mrs. Barrington gives little more than a 
 list of the titles of his essays. It is true that to 
 most people Bagehot is still primarily the political 
 and economic writer. There are few intelligent 
 58
 
 May 1914 
 
 Englishmen to-day who have not been influenced 
 by The English Constitution and, in a lesser 
 degree, by Physics and Politics. His Economic 
 Studies make the rudiments of political economy 
 as simple and even as entertaining as a good 
 fairy-tale, and those who have read Lombard 
 Street speak of it as a masterpiece. But the most 
 extraordinary thing about it is that this man, 
 who knew all about currency, who was in the 
 confidence of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and 
 who invented Treasury Bills, was also one of 
 the most illuminating and sympathetic literary 
 critics that England has ever produced. Per- 
 sonally I find his literary essays inferior to 
 those of no other English critic who was not 
 himself a poet, and I think that in some 
 respects, though not in all, they are better than 
 Arnold's. 
 
 Probably Bagehot's celebrity as an economist 
 militated for some years after his death against 
 the popularity of his literary work. Many 
 literary people, looking through the complete 
 list of his works, and seeing Literary and Bio- 
 graphical Studies jostling shoulders with works 
 on money, may very pardonably have assumed 
 that these Studies, however able, must have 
 been of a dry, hard character. They are very far 
 from that ; no English criticism is more human 
 than his, less coldly intellectual ; his tempera- 
 ment, naturally emotional and mystical, was 
 most valuably reinforced by the balance, the 
 
 59
 
 Books in General 
 
 tolerance, the sanity that were developed by his 
 more mundane activities, but the temporal man 
 in him never overcame the eternal. Such essays 
 as those on Hartley Coleridge, on Shelley, on 
 Dickens, on Cowper, on the Edinburgh Re- 
 viewers, are bound before long to be recog- 
 nized as among the great classics of English 
 criticism. Naturally he was not impeccable ; 
 posterity may think, for example, that he 
 attached too much importance to his friend 
 Clough. But he is usually completely convincing. 
 Take the following passage from the comparison 
 of Wordsworth and Jeffrey : 
 
 " A clear, precise, discriminating intellect 
 shrinks at once from the symbolic, the unfounded, 
 the indefinite. The misfortune is that mysticism 
 is true. There certainly are kinds of truths, 
 borne in as it were instinctively on the human 
 intellect, most influential on the character and 
 the heart, yet hardly capable of stringent state- 
 ment, difficult to limit by an elaborate definition. 
 Their course is shadowy ; the mind seems rather 
 to have seen than to see them, more to feel after 
 than definitely apprehend them. They com- 
 monly involve an infinite element which, of 
 course, cannot be stated precisely, or else a first 
 principle an original tendency of our intellectual 
 constitution, which it is impossible not to feel, 
 and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms 
 and words. Of this latter kind is what has been 
 called the religion of Nature, or more exactly, 
 60
 
 May 1914 
 
 perhaps, the religion of the imagination. This 
 is an interpretation of the world. Accordingly, 
 to it the beauty of the universe has a meaning, 
 its grandeur a soul, and its sublimity an ex- 
 pression. As we gaze on the faces of those whom 
 we love ; as we watch the light of life in the 
 dawning of their eyes, and the play of their 
 features, and the wildness of their animation ; 
 as we trace in changing lineaments a varying 
 sign ; as a charm and a thrill seem to run along 
 the tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a 
 mere word ; as a tone seems to roar in the ear ; 
 as a trembling fancy hears words that are un- 
 spoken ; so in Nature the mystical sense finds a 
 motion in the mountain, and a power in the 
 waves, and a meaning in the long white line of the 
 shore, and a thought in the blue of heaven, and a 
 gushing soul in the buoyant light, an unbounded 
 being in the vast void of air, and 
 
 Wakeful watching in the pointed stars. 
 
 " There is a philosophy in this which might be 
 explained, if explaining were to our purpose. 
 It might be advanced that there are original 
 sources of expression in the essential grandeur 
 and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though 
 fainter kind to those familiar, inexplicable signs 
 by which we trace in the very face and outward 
 lineaments of man the existence and working of 
 the mind within. But be this as it may, it is 
 certain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind 
 
 61
 
 Books in General 
 
 of religion and that Lord Jeffrey did not believe 
 a word of it." 
 
 The visionary and the epigrammatist are near 
 allied, and both the practical and the ideal in 
 Bagehot are illustrated in his own phrase : 
 " If you would vanquish Earth, you must 
 invent Heaven." Bagehot, as he appeared to 
 ordinary people every day, is portrayed in another 
 sentence. " He left many," it is said, " with the 
 idea that he was a good fellow, yet with no idea 
 that he was a great man." A great man can 
 have no better epitaph. 
 
 May 1914 : The Leipzig 
 Exhibition 
 
 AY one who imagines that the English 
 can, or at all events do, compete with 
 the Germans in beauty of book-pro- 
 duction had better go to Leipzig this summer and 
 visit the Buchgewerbe und Graphik Exhibition 
 or " Bugra," as it is universally called in 
 Germany. The new railway station the finest 
 in the world is also worth going to see ; but 
 that, presumably, will last after this year. In 
 many respects the exhibition is like all other big 
 exhibitions. It is much too enormous to be 
 capable of thorough inspection. Leaving out of 
 account the huge buildings devoted to the 
 62
 
 May 1914 : The Leipzig Exhibition 
 
 mechanics of printing and so on, there are a 
 palace (" The Hall of Kultur," of course), filled 
 with engravings and photographs ; a colossal 
 structure containing the exhibits of German 
 publishers of books and music ; and pavilions 
 for most of the other nations of the earth. Even 
 Corea has a building though I did not see it 
 and Siam is well to the fore. The exhibition 
 grounds are very extensive ; they contain (need 
 I say ?) a " Street of Nations," many fountains, 
 and countless cafes. There is a reproduction of 
 Heidelberg Castle, full of drinking-cups and the 
 weapons with which German students put a 
 little interest into each other's faces. There is a 
 Bavarian Hall, where real peasant maidens 
 bring your beer and the latest and cheapest 
 musical-comedy tunes are played by real peasant 
 musicians, with feathered hats and costume 
 complete down to the bare knees that they insist 
 on retaining in the face of a proclamation by the 
 local Catholic hierarchs to the effect that such a 
 display of naked charms is grossly indecent. 
 There is no wiggle-woggle, but there is a water- 
 chute and a shooting-gallery whose proprietors 
 invite you to come in and try your skill at " live 
 objects." The man who was with me he is a 
 person who, like Mr. Galsworthy, would not touch 
 a fly " save " (as the old verse has it) " in the 
 way of kindness," refused to come in. Naively 
 distrustful of aliens he was afraid, he said, that 
 the targets might be dogs. But he need not 
 have been alarmed, for we were afterwards in- 
 
 .63
 
 Books in General 
 
 formed that they were merely big game thrown 
 on a screen by a cinematograph. When you hit 
 an animal it did not drop, but a red light showed. 
 
 Naturally comparisons between the exhibits 
 should be made very cautiously ; the exhibition 
 is being held on German soil and the German 
 display is much larger than any other. In many 
 respects England shows up very well. The Eng- 
 lish section in the Halle der Kultur is certainly as 
 good as any, and the etchings shown by Mr. 
 Muirhead Bone, Mr. Charles Shannon, Sir Charles 
 Holroyd, and other British artists are possibly 
 the very best things in the place. The main 
 English exhibit is housed in a pleasant Tudor 
 building with some beautiful rooms. The Shake- 
 speare exhibit of editions and portraits is most 
 interesting for those who like that sort of thing ; 
 a fine collection of original Beardsley drawings 
 has been lent by Mr. Lane ; the Caxtons are 
 coming ; there are admirable specimens of the 
 works of the Kelmscott, Riccardi, Florence, and 
 other presses ; there is a gallery of Medici prints 
 unsurpassed by any colour-reproductions in the 
 exhibition (the print of the Dresden Van Eyck 
 triptych is the most completely satisfying colour- 
 print I have ever seen) ; and the elaborate 
 bindings by Riviere's, the Oxford Press, and other 
 establishments are not inferior even to the 
 exquisite leather bindings by Noulhac and R. 
 Kieffer shown in the French building. Every- 
 thing our officials could have done has been done 
 64
 
 May 1914 : The Leipzig Exhibition 
 
 to perfection ; and the special exhibits have been 
 very well chosen. Where we fall sadly short is in 
 the ordinary book of commerce. 
 
 I cannot but think that the English publishers 
 who have taken stalls and, of course, the 
 selection of exhibits here had to be left to the 
 publishers themselves could have brought to- 
 gether a more attractive -looking lot of books 
 than they have done. Most of them I mention 
 no names seem to have bundled together their 
 books without any consideration either of the 
 contents or of the appearance of the volumes. 
 Of course there are English publishers who 
 have no fine books and few decent-looking 
 books on their lists ; but some of the specimens 
 at Leipzig look almost like remnants which it 
 is hoped to sell off to visitors. But even if all 
 the English publishers had shown all their best 
 books, and none of their worst, they would still 
 have been put in the shade by the Germans. 
 Even the French publishers whose achievements 
 in typography and in illustration have been 
 great are not now fit to be mentioned in the 
 same breath as the Germans. 
 
 The German exhibits are a revelation. The 
 mid-Victorian tradition in print and design 
 which was so tenacious in Germany has now 
 been almost completely abandoned. I don't 
 suggest that all German books are more pre- 
 sentable than English ones. Scientific works, 
 
 E 65
 
 Books in General 
 
 theology, and shilling fiction are equally ugly in 
 both countries. But there are to-day in Berlin, 
 Leipzig, and Munich at least a dozen firms 
 publishing for the ordinary market books whose 
 average of beauty is far higher than that reached 
 by the books of any considerable English pub- 
 lishing firm. Many thousands of really beauti- 
 ful new books are now being produced every year 
 in Germany ; and of what can be done, especially 
 in the way of making cheap books look present- 
 able, our own publishers have no idea. There 
 is, of course, a much larger educated reading 
 public in Germany than in England. In every 
 bookshop you are confronted by volumes of 
 Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, and other writers who, 
 were they Englishmen, would never reach large 
 circles of readers in their lifetimes. Anthol- 
 ogies of contemporary German poets sell literally 
 by tens of thousands ; and you can even get an 
 infinite variety of doses of classical and modern 
 authors by dropping pennies into automatic 
 machines on the stations. This much may be 
 admitted : that there is a larger literary public 
 and more interest in contemporary art, literary 
 and pictorial. But, even granting all that, the 
 German publishers in meeting the market have 
 shown a taste, and above all an enterprise 
 (sometimes reaching audacity, no doubt), which 
 most of our own publishers have never revealed 
 in the slightest degree. 
 
 To give a full account of the show is beyond my 
 66
 
 May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition 
 
 ability, desire, and space. But in looking at the 
 latest products of commercial colour-printing in 
 the French pavilion I was struck by the extra- 
 ordinary divorce between craftsmanship and 
 taste in modern industry. Here were some of 
 the vilest pictures (I don't mean morally) ever 
 moulded by the mind of man ; yet the experts 
 were raving over them as being the last word in 
 their own kind of colour-process. Needless to 
 say, the exhibition, not being half over, is not yet 
 completely ready. The Italian pavilion, when I 
 was at the exhibition, could not be entered at 
 all, and there were other lacunae all over the 
 place. This is the kind of thing that makes the 
 whole world kin. 
 
 Amongst the German authors whose portraits 
 grace the walls of the exhibition is Mr. George 
 Bernard Shaw. They have naturalized him, 
 like Shakespeare, and the next thing will certainly 
 be a statue at Weimar.
 
 Books in General 
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin 
 
 I HAVE just spent three days reading Mr. 
 E. G. Harman's Edmund Spenser and the 
 Impersonations of Francis Bacon, pub- 
 lished by the firm of Constable. There are 
 books which he who runs may read ; there are 
 also books from which he who reads will run. 
 This tome comes into neither category. It is 
 very large and crowded with most complicated 
 detail ; it is, though quite competently written, 
 devoid of literary grace ; and it supports a 
 monstrous thesis with arguments many of which 
 are of staggering absurdity. Yet in point of 
 deadly fascination it vies with the basilisk. It 
 is a monument of the " scientific method." The 
 author's learning and industry are terrifying ; 
 his tone seems completely dispassionate ; he 
 proceeds from discovery to discovery with mild 
 ruthlessness ; and not the most uncompromising 
 of Wospolus was ever more sternly resolved to 
 embrace logical conclusions. His chief fault is 
 that his premises are usually arbitrary or quite 
 insufficient ; but the objective charm of his 
 massive progress, as of a steam-roller, from stage 
 to stage, is not affected by this. 
 
 Mr. Harman does not in this volume discuss 
 in detail Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's 
 plays. He assumes that. He assumes also that 
 68
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin 
 
 Bacon did publish literature under the rose and 
 that he did employ impersonators ; his reasons 
 being that he had to express his feelings and 
 that acknowledgment of authorship would have 
 damaged his prospects of political promotion. 
 This much granted, Mr. Harman looks around for 
 writings in which he thinks he can detect traces 
 of Bacon and examines the evidence for their 
 reputed authorships. He does not descend to 
 the puerile level of the late Sir Edwin Durning- 
 Lawrence, with his " Hie, Hsec, Hog." He says 
 nothing of cryptogram. But in case after case 
 he finds (i) that there are marks of Baconian 
 thought and language, (2) that allegorical re- 
 ferences to Bacon's political disappointments 
 may be found, (3) that documentary evidence 
 supporting accepted authorships is very slight. 
 Nothing stops him. Where there is a real 
 resemblance in style things are easy. Where 
 there are marked differences we are asked to 
 note the fact that Bacon's method enabled 
 him to write in a variety of styles as though 
 serious writers expressing their inmost selves 
 could put on styles like trousers. If somebody 
 has borne witness that an Elizabethan wrote 
 his own works, then that somebody was in the 
 plot too. 
 
 As to Spenser, with whom Mr. Harman 
 chiefly deals, one is certainly struck with the 
 paucity of the evidence for him. We know less 
 about him than we know about Shakespeare ; 
 
 69
 
 Books in General 
 
 and his biographers have had to rely almost 
 entirely upon " internal evidence " drawn from 
 his works. But personally I must say that I 
 prefer their methods to Mr. Harman's. He, 
 analysing exhaustively the plot of the Faerie 
 Queene, with its Britomarts, Arthegalls, and 
 Blatant Beasts, finds a knowledge of court life 
 that could not be possessed by Spenser, who 
 lived in Ireland and was (according to him) an 
 ex-Board School boy in a small Civil Service 
 job which is at any rate politer than " drunken, 
 illiterate clown." This is question-begging ; but 
 what shall we say of the assumption that if 
 Spenser had written the poem the rivers of 
 Ireland would have been described as fully as 
 the rivers of England ? Why should the emi- 
 grant Civil servant know anything about the 
 rivers of Ireland ? As far as that goes, there is 
 one slip in the description of the rivers of England 
 which indicates to my mind that the author 
 relied on some inaccurate map for his information 
 about them. The Baconian authorship forces 
 Mr. Harman to the conclusion that some of 
 Spenser's sonnets were written by Bacon when 
 he was eight or nine years old. But Mr. Harman 
 is a strong man. After all, Mozart was a pre- 
 cocious child, so why not Bacon ? He does not 
 shrink from this any more than he shrinks from 
 arguing that any book or letter which favourably 
 mentions one of Bacon's cryptic works must 
 also have been written or instigated by him. 
 They must have been written by him, and, this 
 70 '
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin 
 
 granted, internal corroboration must be sought 
 for. Anything is good enough for this purpose. 
 Mr. Harman even finds evidence in the occurrence 
 in several " Baconian " works of the phrase 
 " golden wyres " as applied to the Queen's hair. 
 If he would read the body of Elizabethan lyrics, 
 or even extracts of them in such a contemporary 
 anthology as England 's Parnassus, he would find 
 that an Elizabethan poet could no more help 
 comparing a lady's Hayre to Golden Wyres than 
 he could help likening her Teares to Pearles or 
 her Brests to luorie. 
 
 But there is n space here for detailed examina- 
 tion. It is enough to yield oneself to the pleasure 
 of following the Harmanian trail. I have noted 
 the works which in the course of his narrative or 
 in foot-notes he ascribes to Bacon. The Au- 
 thorized Version of the Bible is not mentioned. 
 But, apart from his voluminous acknowledged 
 writings, Bacon wrote the works of Spenser 
 (including the Faerie Queene, the longest poem 
 in the world, which Bacon published before he 
 was out of his twenties) ; the works of Shake- 
 speare ; practically the whole body of Elizabethan 
 poetical criticism (including Webbe's Discourse 
 of Poesie, Puttenham's Art of Poesie, Sidney's 
 ApologU, Daniel's A Defence of Ryme, and Meres's 
 Palladis Tamia) ; many of the poems of Gas- 
 coigne (written by Bacon before he was twelve) ; 
 certain works imputed to Nashe, Greene, and 
 Gabriel Harvey ; the poems of Sir Walter 
 
 7 1
 
 Books in General 
 
 Raleigh and the Last Fight of the " Revenge " ; 
 the works of Essex ; Sidney's Arcadia and 
 Astrophel and Stella (with this key Bacon un- 
 locked his heart) ; Lyly's Euphues (a long 
 book) ; Bryskett's Discourse of Civil Life ; Sir 
 Humphrey Gilbert's Discourses and the account 
 of his last voyage ; Leicester's Commonwealth 
 and Leicester's Ghost ; and other minor scraps. 
 If this be all correct, we shall have to revise our 
 opinion of the Elizabethan time as a time replete 
 with various genius. All we shall be able to 
 refer to now will be " the spacious Bacon of 
 great Elizabeth." 
 
 An enormous number of people including 
 supposed writers and their relations must have 
 been in the secret. Sometimes they must have 
 marvelled at Bacon's extraordinary behaviour, 
 as for instance when he wrote for Raleigh a 
 laudatory poem on the Queen : 
 
 " Bacon (who, in my opinion, is the author of 
 the poem) makes use of the opportunity in 
 taking up the personality of Ralegh to express 
 his own feelings. He was undoubtedly most 
 unhappy at his exclusion from access and the 
 waning of all his hopes of advancement. This 
 is what is reflected under the disguise of Ralegh's 
 loss of favour in the poem." 
 
 They must have wondered how on earth Bacon 
 expected his grievances to be remedied if his 
 72
 
 "The Cattle of the Boyne" 
 
 complaints were published over another man's 
 name, and why, if Raleigh could address poems to 
 the Queen in propria persona without loss of 
 caste, Bacon could not do the same. But no 
 doubt most of them, for many were impecunious, 
 did not allow such questions to bother them much. 
 They were content to take Bacon's bribes for 
 the use of their names. What he must have 
 spent in subsidies to sham authors one gasps to 
 contemplate. No wonder that for years he was 
 in such financial straits, and that at one point 
 things came to such a pass with him that he was 
 arrested for debt. 
 
 "The Cattle of the Boyne" 
 
 I HAVE referred before to the frequency of 
 misprints in the penny Times. It does 
 seem a pity that the conductors of the 
 paper cannot keep it up to its old traditions in 
 this respect. Last week there was a more curious 
 instance than usual. These words appeared : 
 
 " The anniversary of the Cattle of the Boyne 
 was celebrated with unusual enthusiasm through- 
 out Canada." 
 
 I was so moved by the report of these zoo- 
 logical novelties that I made a little poem about 
 them, full of Celtic twilight. It runs thus : 
 
 73
 
 Books in General 
 
 THE SANDS OF BOYNE 
 
 Och, Geoffrey, go and call the Cattle home, 
 And call the Cattle home, 
 And call the Cattle home, 
 
 Acrost the sands of Boyne. 
 Shure, ye 1 re the bhoy that's got inured to foam, 
 So come, bring in the koine. 
 
 Och, are they Jish,jlesh, fowl or good red herrings ? 
 Perhaps they are red herrings, 
 Forlorn and wildered herrings, 
 
 Strayed from their native broine, 
 This hapless party which has lost its bearings 
 Fornint the sands of Boyne. 
 
 No, no, they have no herring for their father. 
 The proof-reader's their father, 
 A most prolific father 
 
 By mishap or desoign. 
 If this is what wan penny means, Pd rather 
 Stump up the ancient coin 
 
 Than daily find Och tempora, Och Times ! 
 Bad grammar in my Times 
 And misprints in my Times 
 
 In ivry other loine, 
 
 Capped by this worst of typographic crimes 
 " The CATTLE of the Boyne " / 
 
 But perhaps one ought not really to complain 
 of misprints, even in the Times, when they are 
 funny. 
 
 74
 
 August 1914 
 
 August 1914 
 
 AID it is less than three months since I was 
 writing complacently about the Leipzig 
 book exhibition ! I wrote about the 
 exquisite collections of bindings and drawings, 
 the bands, the parading crowds of peaceful 
 Germans, the pavilions of all nations from 
 Holland to Siam, and the charming Tudor 
 structure erected by Britain, with its long low 
 halls containing cases of Shakespeare folios and 
 editions from the Kelmscott Press. Enormous 
 crowds from all over Europe would, it was hoped, 
 visit the exhibition as the summer wore on. 
 " August, of course," said the officials to me, 
 " will be the month." 
 
 The buildings in the wide Street of Nations 
 are still there, no doubt. The flags, perhaps, 
 have been hauled down, but those files of white 
 wood and plaster palaces still stand behind their 
 flower-beds along the broad avenues. The 
 crowds are dispersed. The officials in charge of 
 the various buildings have fled to their respective 
 domiciles. The cheerful male members of the 
 Bavarian Peasants' Band have taken off their 
 green hats and put on helmets, left the women 
 behind, and gone off to burn villages like their 
 own, and disembowel sunburnt French peasants 
 as naturally amiable as themselves. Memories so 
 
 75
 
 Books in General 
 
 recent make the pit of one's stomach sink. In 
 May last a German barber in Berlin had his razor 
 at my throat, and when he scratched my skin he 
 was most concerned and apologetic. " Nescis, mi 
 fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus." The 
 remark was made by a Swedish statesman in the 
 eighteenth century. Voltaire, looking down from 
 heaven if one may risk his displeasure by 
 presuming his presence in so uncongenial a 
 place must feel that since the eighteenth cen- 
 tury there has been no great change, and that 
 the human race is as horribly ridiculous an in- 
 stitution as ever it was. 
 
 But here we are.* Like most other inhabitants 
 of the "civilized " world, I have for the last week 
 read no books, but only newspapers. Fourteen 
 a day is about my average, which means nearly 
 a hundred a week. And nine-tenths of them 
 contain nothing that one did not know before. 
 There never was a war, since telegraphs were 
 invented, about which news was so scarce. 
 Almost every rumour that comes through is 
 dubious, and it is invariably contradicted. In 
 successive issues and even in the same issue of a 
 journal one reads that troops have and have not 
 entered a certain village, that somebody's neu- 
 trality has and has not been violated, and that a 
 naval engagement has and has not taken place. 
 If you go over the eight pages of " war news " 
 in a daily and make a summary of the unques- 
 
 * I have left all this as I wrote it. S. E. 
 7 6
 
 August 1914 
 
 tionable facts contained therein, as distinguished 
 from the doubtful reports and the office-written 
 padding, you find it could all be got into a para- 
 graph. We have frequently heard that the day 
 of the war correspondent was over. We heard 
 it during the Russo-Japanese War of which we 
 certainly got very little news and we heard it 
 during the Balkan campaign. But at the 
 moment if writing I have scarcely seen a single 
 item regarding a single encounter which looked 
 indisputable or which appeared to come direct 
 from an eye-witness. Almost all the information 
 we have been getting has come either from 
 rumour travelling across many tongues or from 
 official sources. Both these founts of news are 
 great liars, the former excelling in the suggestio 
 foist, and the latter both in that and in the 
 suppressio veri. 
 
 The desperate straits in which we have been 
 for news could be gathered (if in no other way) 
 from the outlandish places of origin ascribed to 
 reports that get into print. Stockholm informs 
 one that advices from Teheran report a conflict 
 at Toul ; and we hear that the Mercure de 
 Bruxelles states " on excellent authority " that 
 something has happened at Basle. Deliberate 
 fabrication has been at work all over the place. 
 Our good old friend the doctor, with the cholera 
 microbes which he puts into wells, even turned 
 up at the very start. This mythical gentleman 
 is at least as old as the Franco-German War of 
 
 77
 
 Books in General 
 
 1870, and his last appearance was in the Balkans. 
 No sooner does a war start than one of the com- 
 batants hastens to describe his diabolical 
 activities in the hope, presumably, of making the 
 world's blood boil at the thought of an " outrage 
 against humanity." 
 
 The papers cannot be blamed for printing 
 rumours, but they might give the clearest indica- 
 tion, whenever possible, of the value of their 
 sources. Rumours before they get into print 
 presumably travel in much the same way as 
 after they get into print. Of how rapidly 
 " news " develops I had an experience in a club 
 on Tuesday night. A late evening paper printed 
 a brief report, stating that Aberdeen doctors 
 had gone to attend to wounded who were being 
 landed at Cromarty. Five minutes after I had 
 seen this, I was told by a member that single 
 British and German destroyers had had a brush 
 off the Scottish coast. Five minutes after that 
 the vessels had expanded into flotillas, and 
 within the hour a club servant, with very gloomy 
 face, remarked to me, " I don't know if you've 
 heard it, sir, but there's been a great naval battle 
 in the North Sea and the British Fleet has met 
 with an awful disaster." With correspondents 
 kept out of the area of hostilities, it is no wonder 
 that by the time reports of occurrences reach the 
 persons who send them to our newspapers they 
 bear very little relation to the events (if any) 
 
 78
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through 
 
 which have originally generated them. War 
 correspondents in Europe to-day seem to be able 
 to do little more than sit in friendly foreign 
 capitals and send home little bits of news out 
 of the local papers. And if we want a really 
 accurate and full description of the big battles, 
 especially the big naval battles, of the future we 
 shall usually have to wait until peace allows 
 combatants to publish such books as the Japanese 
 Human Bullets, describing the attack on Port 
 Arthur, and those vivid Russian books which 
 told the story of Rozhdestvensky's voyage to the 
 China Sea with his mouldy squadron and the 
 magnificent and pitiful end of it at Tsushima. 
 But of no great modern war will the whole truth 
 ever be properly known. Forces work over 
 such vast areas that full information is impossible 
 to collect. 
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through 
 
 OVER the turmoil of a world in arms 
 There floats a rich indomitable coo . . . 
 'Tis Barclay. . . . Though excursions and 
 
 alarms 
 
 Torture the flrmament, though Wilhelm II 
 In shining armour waits his Waterloo, 
 Though on all sides the blood rains down in torrents 
 Love's interests still are in safe hands with Florence. 
 
 79
 
 Books in General 
 
 What though the rest of us are turning tail, 
 Assured by those who have a right to speak 
 
 That only Patriotism has a sale ? 
 
 She knows Love's drawing-power remains unique ; 
 Her books need never be postponed a week ; 
 
 Sure of her subject, certain of her vogue, 
 
 She has no need to adjourn, much less prorogue. 
 
 Business as usual. Yet who knows, who knows 
 Whether she has not chosen the better part, 
 
 Swelling the proud full sail of her great prose 
 Still with the gentler zephyrs of the heart, 
 Rather than seize an Amazonian dart, 
 
 Leaping into the middle of the fray 
 
 Like certain other poets of the day. 
 
 Has Robert Bridges' 9 success with fighting 
 Been such as to encourage emulation ? 
 
 Or Dr. Watson's " bit them in the Bight "-ing ? 
 Or the same author's other lucubration 
 (Yet one more blow for a disthressful nation) 
 
 In which, dead gravelled for a rhyme for " Ireland," 
 
 He struggled out with " motherland and sir eland " ? 
 
 Did even the voice from Rudyard Kipling's shelf 
 Say anything it had not said before ? 
 
 And was not Stephen Phillips just himself ? 
 And was not Newbolfs effort on the war 
 Distinctly less effective than of yore ? 
 
 And would not German shrapnel in the leg be 
 
 Less lacerating than the verse of Begbie ?
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through 
 
 When the Muse seized me, in this manner, by 
 the hair, it was three o'clock in the morning, and 
 I had just finished the new novel by the author 
 of The Rosary. Had it been earlier I should 
 have written more. But next day the mouse of 
 inspiration had fled to its hole ; the spell of the 
 book had been dissipated ; my vision had faded 
 into the light of common day ; and I resumed 
 my consideration of the position of Przemysl, a 
 place of which, until this week, I had never heard. 
 But what a fascination the book exercised while 
 one was reading it ! I can well understand why 
 Mrs. Barclay commands a greater audience than 
 perhaps any other living writer. She can beat 
 the basilisk at its own game. 
 
 The reader is swept away with a rush of strong 
 emotion at the very start. A tall, reticent, 
 bronzed man arrives by the boat train at Charing 
 Cross. Thrown over by a woman, he has been 
 abroad for ten years, nursing his grief and creating 
 a reputation as a novelist. No sooner does he 
 get to the station than he extracts from the coy 
 bookstall clerk a confession that to him the books 
 of Rodney Steele are the best in the world. Lump 
 in the throat number one ; and a sovereign in the 
 pocket of the clerk. Steele leaves the station to 
 drive to a flat a friend has left him. Oh, the 
 fragrance and glitter of dear old smoky London ! 
 Oh, the beauty of the Queen Victoria Memorial ! 
 
 " Mysterious through the gloom, he saw the 
 nation's fine memorial to a deathless memory. 
 
 F 81
 
 Books in General 
 
 The gush of green waters, the golden figure at the 
 summit, needed sunlight for their better seeing. 
 But clear through the orange darkness gleamed 
 the white marble majesty of England's Great 
 Queen. 
 
 " Rodney Steele lifted his hand in reverent 
 salute as he passed. . . . 
 
 " ' Lest we forget ! ' quoted Rodney Steele 
 as he looked at the majestic marble figure, throned 
 outside the palace above the rushing waters. ' Yet 
 could we, who really remember, ever forget ? ' 
 
 The rest of the book tells how he was wooed 
 and won by his old love, now a widow. She had 
 deserted him under a misapprehension and was 
 resolved to recover him. She therefore took 
 the next flat to his or rather to her brother's, 
 which Steele was occupying. She had heard 
 that owing to a change of telephone numbers her 
 brother was constantly being rung up by mistake 
 for a Hospital. One night therefore Steele was 
 rung up and a Kind Voice asked for the Matron. 
 The voice reminded him of Madge. He began to 
 feel so lonely that he willed, with all his will, 
 that the unknown Kind Voice should ring him 
 up again. 
 
 " ' Speak to me again,' he said, * you, who 
 spoke to me last night. Speak to me again. 
 What wait I for ? I wait for you ! Just now 
 in my utter loneliness, in my empty solitude I 
 wait for you ' . . . 
 82
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through 
 
 " The distant clock slowly chimed a quarter 
 past the hour of ten ; and as that sound died 
 away the bell of the telephone rang." 
 
 This time he made the Kind Voice promise to 
 ring him up nightly in order to console him in his 
 loneliness. The Kind Voice consented. Ulti- 
 mately on the telephone they discussed (he not 
 revealing his identity or knowing hers) his 
 novels. This is the kind of thing they say over 
 the telephone : 
 
 " ' The thing of first importance is to uplift 
 your readers ; to raise their ideals ; to leave 
 them with a sense of hopefulness, which shall 
 arouse within them a brave optimism such as 
 inspired Browning's oft-quoted noble lines.' ' 
 
 When finally he confesses to the Kind Voice 
 that his life has been ruined by a girl with whom 
 he is still in love, Madge thinks the time ripe for 
 an appointment. They meet. He finds that 
 the Kind Voice has been Madge all the time and 
 he steels his breast against the woman who has 
 added deception to her previous crime. But her 
 " gracious gracefulness " and other qualities win 
 in the end, and we finish at Christmas with 
 Herald Angels and wedding-bells. 
 
 Mrs. Barclay certainly has skill. Nobody else 
 can write a silly story half so well as she. Her 
 English is fluent and vivid, although loose ; her 
 
 83
 
 Books in General 
 
 humour is genuine if not subtle ; and she handles 
 her dialogue, such as it is, very cleverly. But, 
 above all, she knows how to serve out the 
 glamour and the pathos with a ladle. The hero 
 of this book is as generous as he is clever. He 
 can conjure ; he can make seagulls settle on his 
 shoulder ; and he does kind actions to widows. 
 There are also an heroic ex-soldier who saved a 
 man's life at Spion Kop ; a bishop's widow 
 brimming over with love and reminiscences ; and 
 an honest, stupid Englishman with no thoughts 
 of self. The only bad character dies, and the end 
 is a paean of joy. As long as she can keep this 
 up Mrs. Barclay will never lose her hold. In 
 spite of the war, this book, I should think, will 
 sell in millions and millions. 
 
 Vorwarts reports that Dr. Ludwig Frank, a 
 member of the Reichstag, has been killed in 
 battle near Luneville. Dr. Frank, who sat for 
 Mannheim, was one of the leaders of the Southern 
 Revisionists. I had tea with him at the Reichs- 
 tag last May. He took me into the Strangers' 
 Gallery of the House, where I heard Dr. Lieb- 
 knecht make one of his anti-armament speeches, 
 the one in which he incidentally accused a 
 Prussian general of negotiating sales of decora- 
 tions. It seems very remote now. Dr. Frank 
 was a barrister ; a big Jew with a heavy, hand- 
 some face sallow skin, aquiline nose, black 
 moustache, strong chin, dominating eyes. His 
 romantic air he was supposed to resemble
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest 
 
 Lassalle made him very popular in the rich 
 Jewish salons of Berlin. He was a strong man, 
 and one would have said an ambitious one. But 
 a middle-class man who enters the German 
 Socialist Party sacrifices so much that he ipso 
 facto clears himself of the suspicion of mere 
 ambition. 
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest 
 
 THE Oxford University Press has just 
 issued a beautiful little edition of 
 Erasmus's Praise of Folly, with a good 
 reproduction of Quentin Matsys' portrait of 
 Erasmus as a frontispiece. The last edition of 
 the Encomium Morice with which I am familiar 
 is that issued in 1887 by the firm of Hamilton, 
 Adams. It had a binding which did not please, 
 but contained Holbein's interesting illustrations. 
 Whether any considerable sale of the book is 
 likely nowadays I very much doubt. Erasmus's 
 humour was an improvement on mediaeval 
 humour, which, except in a few cases, cannot 
 make a modern man laugh save sometimes 
 through the brazenness of its indecency. Eras- 
 mus was a child of the Renaissance, a wit, a 
 scholar, a questioner of all things, a man of the 
 world, a revolutionary conformist. But there 
 are long dull passages in his most famous book, 
 and many remarks that seemed most daring to 
 
 85
 
 Books in General 
 
 the men of his own time are to us platitudinous ; 
 whilst he often labours some obvious joke in the 
 worst mediaeval way. 
 
 At the same time, any one who cares to go 
 through the book will find occasional amusement. 
 Erasmus had a mild theory of the satirist's rights. 
 " Wits," said he, " have always been allowed 
 this privilege, that they might be smart upon 
 any transactions of life, if so be their liberty did 
 not extend to railing " ; and he disclaimed a 
 desire to imitate Juvenal by " raking into the 
 sink of vices to procure a laughter. With these 
 qualifications, he let out all around him with 
 some vigour. The personification of Folly is 
 rather feebly sustained, though the character is 
 pleasantly introduced with the sentence : " I 
 was born neither in the floating Delos nor on the 
 frothy sea, nor in any of the privacies where too 
 forward mothers are wont to retire for undis- 
 covered delivery." But the obiter dicta on 
 various classes of men who have often been the 
 butts of satirists since his day are still entertaining 
 and must in his own time have been shocking. 
 He refers to priests as " wisely foreseeing that the 
 people, like cows, which never give down their 
 milk so well as when they are gently stroked, 
 would part with less if they knew more, their 
 bounty proceeding only from a mistake of 
 charity," He speaks of " The Carthusians, 
 which order alone keeps honesty and piety 
 among them, but really keeps them so close that 
 86
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest 
 
 nobody ever yet could see them," and he is 
 especially down on the scholastic theologians* 
 Sterne, it will be remembered, described a dispute 
 " as to whether God could make a nose as big 
 as the steeple of Strasburg." This is scarcely 
 a caricature of the kind of discussion ridiculed by 
 Erasmus : 
 
 " Whether this proposition is possible to be 
 true ; that the first person of the Trinity hated 
 the second ? 
 
 " Whether God, who took our nature upon him 
 in the form of a man, could as well have become a 
 woman, a devil, a beast, an herb, or a stone. 
 And were it possible that the Godhead had ap- 
 peared in the shape of an inanimate substance, 
 how he then should have preached his gospel ? 
 Or how have been nailed to the cross ? Whether 
 if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the 
 same time our Saviour was hanging on the cross, 
 the consecrated bread would have been transub- 
 stantiated into the same body that remained on 
 the tree ? " 
 
 Word-spinning he detested, and he refers the 
 Nominalists, the Realists, the Thomists, the 
 Albertists, the Scotists, etc., to the primitive 
 disciples who were " well acquainted with the 
 Virgin Mary, yet none of them undertook to 
 prove that she was preserved immaculate from 
 original sin." 
 
 87
 
 Books in General 
 
 " The disciples baptized all nations, and yet 
 never taught what was the formal, material, 
 efficient, and final cause of baptism, and certainly 
 never dreamt of distinguishing between a delible 
 and an indelible character in this sacrament." 
 
 Chaucer, with his observations about relics 
 and " pigges bones," and the novelists who never 
 hesitated to put friars in the most ignominious 
 positions (e.g. in chimneys and under tables) 
 had made sport of the clergy, but Erasmus's 
 particular method of battering current theology 
 had not been so devastatingly employed since 
 Lucian. He showed, like Rabelais, that it is 
 possible to reconcile the profession of Christianity 
 with something of what a recent writer calls 
 " the old Voltairean love of humanity." 
 
 Erasmus made the familiar sport of lawyers and 
 pedantic critics. He would have agreed with 
 Sterne : " Of all the cants which are canted in 
 this canting world though the cant of hypo- 
 crites may be the worst the cant of criticism 
 is the most tormenting." " When any of them," 
 he says, 
 
 " has found out who was the mother of Anchises, 
 or has lighted upon some old unusual word, such 
 as bubsequa, bovinator, manticulator, or other 
 like obsolete cramp terms, or can, after a great 
 deal of poring, spell out the inscription of some 
 battered monument : Lord ! what joy, what 
 triumph, what congratulating their success, as
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest 
 
 if they had conquered Africa, or taken Babylon 
 the Great ! " 
 
 It was for such people's benefit that he must have 
 made his irritating final remark : " I hate a 
 hearer that will carry anything away with him." 
 
 Erasmus was the mildest of the famous 
 satirists, but he has his place in the great suc- 
 cession, though his works cannot now compete 
 for readableness with those of Lucian, Rabelais, 
 Swift, Sterne, and Voltaire. Satirists have 
 usually been considerable plagiarists, and The 
 Praise of Folly has an important historical place 
 in the development of this kind of literature. 
 Richard Burton cribbed a good deal from it, 
 in spite of his own drastic remark about persons 
 who " lard their lean bookes with fat of others' 
 workes " and his question : " If that severe 
 doom of Synesius be true it is a greater offence 
 to steal dead men's labours than their cloaths, 
 what shall become of most writers ? " But 
 Burton has an account on the other side, for 
 Sterne later on reprinted chunks of his work 
 almost literally without any acknowledgment 
 whatever. 
 
 The new Oxford edition gives a modernized 
 reprint of the Caroline Version by John Wilson. 
 In the introduction Mrs. P. S. Allen gives some 
 interesting bibliographical particulars. Over 
 forty editions of the Encomium Morice were 
 published in the author's lifetime ; within forty
 
 Books in General 
 
 years of its first Latin issue French, Italian, and 
 English translations had been published ; and 
 later versions have appeared in (amongst other 
 languages) Swedish, Czech, Polish, and Modern 
 Greek. 
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator ? 
 
 SOME people who at least avoid the error 
 of ascribing the invention to Steele or 
 Addison say that Abraham Cowley was 
 the Father of the English Essay. It might 
 alternatively be suggested that Q. Horatius 
 Flaccus was one of its parents and Montaigne the 
 other ; Bacon having, so to speak, a watching 
 brief at the birth. But the other statement is 
 true in a sense : for though in patches Bacon 
 (and Burton) anticipated the tone and method of 
 that type of writing which was brought to its 
 fullest perfection by Charles Lamb, Cowley was 
 the man who fixed the type. His essays have 
 just been republished in a beautiful little edition 
 of the Collected Prose Works, issued by the 
 Oxford University Press, and edited by Mr. 
 A. B. Gough. Mr. Gough is a most pains- 
 taking editor, and his notes are abnormally 
 full. They are so full that one feels that most 
 people who are likely to acquire such a book 
 will find nine-tenths of them unnecessary ; but 
 one ought not to grumble at that, since they have 
 90
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator 
 
 the complementary advantage of always supply- 
 ing information when one looks for it. 
 
 The edition is especially to be welcomed as 
 there are many persons capable of appreciating 
 Cowley who have never come into contact with 
 him. " Who now reads Cowley ? " Pope asked 
 in 1737 ; if the question were repeated to-day 
 you certainly would not get a forest of hands 
 raised, even in an audience replete with pince-nez 
 and bulging brows. It was Cowley's misfortune, 
 as it was his ambition, to be known in his own 
 days as one of the greatest poets of his time ; 
 when men discovered that he was not that, they 
 at once concluded that he was nothing else. Not 
 that his poems are as negligible as some critics 
 assert ; his mere skill and neatness make him 
 worth reading. Even if he had, as Mr. Gough 
 remarks, " too little passion and spontaneity to 
 be a great lyric poet," he was at any rate a good 
 metrist and a most admirable phrasemaker. 
 But his prose writings are certainly superior 
 to the others ; and this is true not only of the 
 Essays. His Vision Concerning Oliver Cromwell, 
 for example, is full of witty and whimsical 
 things. Occasionally he employs very drastic 
 language, as when he refers to the Protector as an 
 " alligator " and when he abuses him for medi- 
 tating the calling in of the Jews. This is how 
 Cowley disports himself. The italics are mine : 
 
 " From which he was rebuked by the universal 
 outcry of the Divines, and even of the Citizens 
 
 9 1
 
 Books in General 
 
 too, who took it ill that a considerable number at 
 least among themselves were not thought Jews 
 enough by their own Herod. And for this design, 
 they say, he invented ... to sell St. Pauls to 
 them for a synagogue, if their purses and devo- 
 tions could have reacht to the purchase. And 
 this indeed if he had done onely to reward that 
 Nation which had given the first noble example 
 of crucifying their King, it might have had some 
 appearance of gratitude, but he did it onely for 
 love of their Mammon ; and would have sold 
 afterwards for as much more St. Peters (even at 
 his own Westminster) to the Turks for a Mos- 
 quito [Mosque]. Such was his extraordinary 
 Piety to God, that he desired he might be wor- 
 shipped in all manners, excepting only that 
 heathenish way of the Common Prayer Book." 
 
 But this strong language is not the strong lan- 
 guage of a man whose breast is a burning fiery 
 furnace ; it is the invective of a man who is 
 amused by his opponents and who regards them 
 chiefly as pegs for cunning sentences. His hard 
 words would certainly have broken no bones ; 
 and one can even imagine that, in the secrecy 
 of their chambers, the Puritans themselves at 
 all events, the less ironsided of them may have 
 shaken their sides over his character-sketch of the 
 man whom they doubtless referred to in public 
 as " our great leader." 
 
 But if such qualities are defects when a man is 
 92
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator 
 
 writing political tracts or attempting the higher 
 flights of poetry, they are invaluable to him if 
 he is writing essays. Cowley's Essays and his 
 Prefaces are as good are most delightful, and 
 they have as personal a turn as Lamb's. They 
 all, virtually, have one text : the Sabine Farm 
 text ; the retired Urbs in Rure text. They 
 speak of the country's charms in the ex-towns- 
 man's way ; they gibe at the turmoil and press of 
 cities in a manner which attests a still lively 
 interest in these contemptible things ; they 
 praise the pleasures of horticulture, solitary 
 meditation, and a Kempis's " little book in a 
 corner." Their learning is lightly worn ; their 
 language natural ; their arguments not so serious 
 as to stand in the way of any jest that offers 
 itself ; and many passages in them might almost 
 as well have been written in 1720 or 1820 as in 
 1660. These, for instance : 
 
 " There is no saying shocks me so much as that 
 which I hear often that a man does not know how 
 to pass his Time. 'Twould have been but ill 
 spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred 
 sixty ninth year of his Life. 
 
 " I have been drawn twice or thrice by company 
 to go to Bedlam, and have seen others very much 
 delighted with the fantastical extravagancie of 
 so many various madnesses, which upon me 
 wrought so contrary an effect, that I always 
 returned, not only melancholy, but e'en sick 
 with the sight. My compassion there was 
 
 93
 
 Books in General 
 
 perhaps too tender, for I meet a thousand 
 Madmen abroad, without any perturbation ; 
 -though, to weigh the matter justly, the total loss 
 of Reason is less deplorable than the total 
 depravation of it. 
 
 " I thought when I went first to dwell in the 
 country, that without doubt I should have met 
 there with the simplicity of the old Poetical 
 Golden Age : I thought to have found no in- 
 habitants there, but such as the Shepherds of 
 Sir Phil. Sydney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d'Urfe 
 upon the Banks of Lignon ; and began to con- 
 sider with myself, which way I might recommend 
 no less to Posterity the Happiness and Innocence 
 of the Men of Chertsea ; but to confess the 
 truth, I peceived quickly, by infallible demon- 
 strations, that I was still in Old England. 
 
 " The civilest, methinks, of all Nations, are 
 those whom we account the most barbarous. 
 There is some moderation and good Nature in the 
 Toupinamhaltians who eat no men but their 
 Enemies, whilst we learned and polite and 
 Christian Europeans, like as many Pikes or Sharks 
 prey upon everything we can swallow." 
 
 The last sentence reads, perhaps, more like a 
 certain living writer than like, say, Charles 
 Lamb. 
 
 The best of Cowley's Essays are Of My Self 
 and Of Greatness. I have no room to quote them 
 at length. The first in which he is writing of 
 9-1-
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator 
 
 poetry and of his childhood's memories is more 
 full of feeling than is usua with him. The other 
 is one of the most picturesque pieces of light 
 moralizing in the language, full of what we all 
 call the Playful Irony of the Gentle Elia, as in 
 sentences like : " The Ancient Roman Emperours, 
 who had the Riches of the whole world for their 
 Revenue, had wherewithal to live (one would have 
 thought) pretty well at ease, and to have been 
 exempt from the pressures of extream Poverty " ; 
 and it describes the pleasures of littleness most 
 alluringly. But somehow, in spite of his asser- 
 tions, one never quite believes in the genuineness 
 of his middle-aged preference for " Prettiness," 
 as against " Majestical Beauty." One suspects 
 the existence in him of a disappointed ambition, 
 a hankering after action, which frequently 
 afflict men who are constitutionally fitted for 
 nothing but looking on and making charming 
 comments. But he had certainly been very 
 badly treated by the Stuart family, which he had 
 faithfully served. The Restoration gave him 
 neither employment nor money. It gave him, 
 however, a very fine funeral. Evelyn says that 
 his coffin was followed to the Abbey by a hundred 
 noblemen's coaches and large numbers of wits, 
 bishops, and clergymen. 
 
 95
 
 Books in General 
 
 The Depressed Philanthropist 
 
 I DO not see why any one but myself should 
 be interested in the mere fact that, except 
 in the way of casual reference, I have 
 always avoided writing a line about Mr. John 
 Galsworthy. But as one's feelings commonly 
 typify those of some section or other of one's 
 fellows it may be relevant to one's purpose. I 
 frequently begin writing something about Mr. 
 Galsworthy and then tear it up. I constantly 
 feel like abusing him, and am then checked by 
 the thought that after all he is too good a man to 
 go for. He is a sensitive and humane man of 
 very great intelligence. He is a conscientious 
 writer and an acute observer. He has a great 
 respect for truth and a desire to state it at all 
 costs. He detests pettinesses, hypocrisies, and 
 shams. On almost every issue that might arise 
 I am sure I should find myself voting on the 
 same side as he, though perhaps we might differ 
 in our views of the relative importance to be 
 attached to the problem of World Peace and 
 that of the hardships inflicted by mankind on 
 ants, wasps, and bees. And yet as I read his 
 books I feel as if I were in some cheerless seaside 
 lodging-house on a wet day. 
 
 I have just been reading his new miscellany 
 The Little Man. The book does not show
 
 The Depressed Philanthropist 
 
 his qualities at their best, but it shows his 
 defects at their worst. The principal contents 
 are The Little Man and Studies in Ex- 
 travagance. The first is a short play showing 
 how a German, an American full of altrustic 
 platitudes, and two self-contained and " proper " 
 English people shrink in the most selfish and 
 cowardly way from a forlorn baby suspected 
 (falsely, of course, for the sake of the extra 
 irony) of typhus. The " studies " are examina- 
 tions of various " types " such as " The Artist," 
 "The Plain Man," "The Housewife," "The 
 Preceptor," and "The Latest Thing." And 
 there is none of them good no, not one. Mr. 
 Max Beerbohm once did a cartoon of Mr. Gals- 
 worthy Looking upon Life and Finding it Foul, 
 Life being represented as a fat and ferocious 
 goblin with horns, a forked tail, and teeth like a 
 wild boar's. It was just a little wrong. Mr. 
 Galsworthy's vision should not have had so much 
 of the positive about it. He does not find Life 
 vigorously diabolical, but meanly cruel and 
 pallidly contemptible. Many great men have 
 been gloomy or pessimistic. Mr. Hardy is not 
 exactly a merry grig, Schopenhauer was con- 
 sistently disgruntled, and the man who would 
 look for joie de vivre in Leopardi would look in 
 vain. And as Mr. Galsworthy suggests himself 
 it is a commonplace it is often the duty of 
 a serious contemporary writer to be horrifying, 
 unpleasant, and shocking. The regeneration of 
 mankind to continue the commonplace is not 
 
 G 97
 
 Books in General , 
 
 possible if we hold the view that things may be 
 done that may not be discussed, and that the 
 failings of man and the diseases of society should, 
 as far as possible, be stowed away in the cupboard, 
 where the skeletons are. What is wrong with 
 Mr. Galsworthy is that one cannot quite believe 
 him. One suspects him of cooking the evidence. 
 One does not mind a man presenting a black view 
 of life if (a) he is temperamentally inclined to it 
 and can be melancholy with a certain gusto, or 
 () if, being a professed realist, he appears to have 
 taken cognizance of every aspect that has pre- 
 sented itself to him. But Mr. Galsworthy 
 presents so one-sided a case that we at once 
 suspect his bona fides and react against his views. 
 It would be unfair to classfy him with that 
 school of novelists who give their books titles 
 like Dull Monotony and live up to their titles by 
 giving a photographic reproduction of an in- 
 tolerable tedium peculiar to, and comprehensible 
 by, the households which they themselves afflict. 
 He usually escapes being thoroughly boring 
 partly because of his gift for occasionally happy 
 and incisive phrase and partly because here and 
 there, behind the grey brow of the dejected 
 Hanging Judge, one catches a gleam of something 
 more exhilarating than his expressed sentiments. 
 But he is often very nearly dull, all the same : 
 for his realism is often bogus. He starts with an 
 intention to paint a caricature in greys, and a 
 caricature which is not amusing. Even in his 
 very well-made plays the characters are not.
 
 The Depressed Philanthropist 
 
 to my mind, usually interesting in themselves. 
 One does not believe in them as persons. They 
 are just a set of types, as stagy and unreal as 
 the old stage figures of melodrama, though they 
 are called charwomen, clerks, magistrates, and 
 company directors instead of being called Irish- 
 men, highwaymen, and wicked baronets. His 
 plays argue cases, but they do not present life 
 as we know it. I find the same sort of unreality 
 about his prose ; and, since the unreality takes 
 the form of making mankind look utterly paltry 
 and uninteresting, one wonders why on earth a 
 man who has such an opinion of it bothers about 
 it at all. 
 
 So in The Little Man and in these studies. All 
 these average people do not get a dog's chance ; 
 we have all sinned and fall short of the glory 
 of God, but we really are not quite so dull, 
 feeble, and silly as all this. Some characteristics 
 as those of the Plain Man are very cleverly 
 recorded, but the whole of the man is not here, 
 nor even the most important parts of him. As 
 an illustration of Mr. Galsworthy's pseudo- 
 realistic method take him on the ground most 
 favourable to him that of the beef-and-whisky- 
 fed sportsman : 
 
 " What led to him was anything that 
 ministered to the coatings of the stomach and 
 the thickness of the skin . . . to be ' hard ' was 
 his ambition, and he moved through life hitting 
 
 99
 
 Books in General 
 
 things, especially balls whether they reposed 
 on little inverted tubs of sand or moved swiftly 
 towards him, he almost always hit them, and 
 told people how he did it afterwards. He hit 
 things, too, at a distance, through a tube, with a 
 certain noise. . . ." 
 
 Now, apart from the fact that a full and accurate 
 description of a sportsman would put in many 
 things Mr. Galsworthy leaves out (e.g. some 
 indication that he was a human being, as we 
 know the species), this is not good, though it is 
 superficially plausible description, even so far as 
 it goes. The plain statement that the gentleman 
 played golf and cricket and shot a good deal 
 would convey a better idea of him than this 
 specious circumlocution. To say that a man is 
 smoking a cigarette positively contains a greater 
 measure of suggestion than to say that he is 
 inhaling grey fumes through a cylinder of paper 
 filled with dried herbs. Much of Mr. Gals- 
 worthy's attack upon all kinds of men and women, 
 self-centred authors, idealists who oppress their 
 wives, worldly women who have never found 
 their souls, cultured people who chase the new, 
 and Philistines who run away from the new, has 
 the same sort of defect. It is really " guying " 
 which passes for photography merely because it 
 is heavy-footed and unamusing. I object to Mr. 
 Galsworthy's ostensible view of life partly 
 because I don't believe he takes it. and partly 
 because if he did I should think it an absurdly 
 
 100
 
 A Polyphloisboisterous Critic 
 
 unjust view. At heart a humanitarian, he has 
 got into a dismal and costive kind of literary 
 method which makes him look like a fretful 
 and dyspeptic man who curls his discontented 
 nostrils at life as though it were an unpleasing 
 smell. As Ibsen used so often to remark, there 
 is a great deal wrong with the drains ; but after 
 all there are other parts of the edifice. 
 
 A Polyphloisboisterous Critic 
 
 I REMEMBER that is to say, I wish I 
 remembered, for I have forgotten most of 
 it a poem that I used to recite at my 
 mother's knee. Its subject was an antediluvian 
 man of sesquipedalian height, who let out the 
 blood of an ichthyosaurus with a polyphlois- 
 boisterous shout ; and its claim to attention was 
 a plethora of polysyllables very embarrassing 
 to an infant, and indeed to any, tongue. It 
 was of that poem that I was reminded whilst 
 reading European Dramatists, by Archibald 
 Henderson. 
 
 Mr. Henderson, an American professor, is not a 
 stranger to the British public. It was he who 
 produced, a few years ago, a biographical study 
 of Mr. Bernard Shaw so vast that a single copy 
 might well have served were not Mr. Shaw 
 still happily with us as Mr. Shaw's tombstone. 
 
 101
 
 Books in General 
 
 The work, indeed (to use the phrase Mr. Hender- 
 son himself applies to a play of Strindberg's), 
 was " colossal in its incommensurability." It 
 was the kind of book one had thought could 
 only be produced by a large committee of Chinese 
 scholars ; and although it did not lead one to 
 respect the author's powers of judging the rela- 
 tive importance of his various facts, it at least 
 compelled one to admire his colossal energy 
 and his incommensurable supply of these facts. 
 From European Dramatists one gets precisely 
 the same feeling. Parts of the book have appeared 
 in journals published in Boston and in Berlin, 
 in Stuttgart and in Stockholm, in Helsingfors, 
 Paris, New York, and Ghent. And one may be 
 sure that Mr. Henderson could have talked to 
 the editors of all these papers and beaten all of 
 them hollow in knowledge of the modern litera- 
 ture of their respective countries. The actual 
 subjects of his papers are familiar enough : 
 Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, Granville 
 Barker, and Wilde. But in discussing them he 
 shows an amazing acquaintance with every- 
 body who has recently written anything in any 
 country. He can refer you to the December 
 1913 issue of the Przemysl Review; he can tell 
 you what the Servian critic, Ivan Peckitch, 
 thinks of the Finnish poet, D. D. Bilius. He 
 knows all about everything, though one is not 
 quite sure that he knows anything else. But 
 what chiefly pleases one about him is not so 
 much what he says as the charming way he says 
 
 102
 
 A Polyphloisboisterous Critic 
 
 it. Like Hudibras, he cannot ope his mouth but 
 out there flies a trope. Everything happens with 
 him in metaphors ; people are always digging 
 into soils, moulding things in fires or clothing 
 them in vestures. And above all he is poly- 
 syllabic and rotund of speech. 
 
 He begins well with Strindberg, of whose first 
 married years he observes that they " were 
 undoubtedly happy certainly in the passional 
 sense, if not in the restful consciousness of 
 hallowed union." " In 1886," he proceeds, 
 " Strindberg began to be obsessed with the 
 monomania of animadversion against the female 
 sex." Later, " goaded by titanic ambition, he 
 cast off the shackles of provinciality for the 
 freedom of cosmopolitanism" i.e. he travelled. 
 Ibsen and Strindberg were " so antipodal in 
 temperament, yet so cognate in the faculties of 
 intuitive perception and searching introspective- 
 ness." One of Strindberg's works blurs the 
 vision of the average spectator, " with its kineto- 
 scopic heterogeneity of spiritual films " : Peer 
 Gynt (on the other hand, shall I say ?) stood for 
 " the disciplinary bankruptcy of laxity." " Con- 
 cretizes " and " inscenation " are the kind of 
 words he rejoices in, but perhaps two or three 
 longer extracts will better illustrate the quality of 
 his style : 
 
 " To peep into the workshop of the great 
 master's brain and assist at the precise balancing 
 
 103
 
 Books in General 
 
 of the arguments pro and c on, to observe how an 
 idea first finds lodgment in the brain, and to 
 note the gradual symmetrical accretion of the 
 fundamental nuclei for the final creation this 
 is a privilege that has perhaps [sic] never fully 
 been realized by any observer. 
 
 " America is young and hopeful, at least ; it 
 is not peopled, we are confidently assured, with 
 soul-sick tragedians mouthing their futile pro- 
 tests against the iron vice of environment, the 
 ineradicable scar of heredity, the fell clutch of 
 circumstance. 
 
 " Yet the reiterant ejaculations, the hyper- 
 ethereal imaginings of the symbolist manner, 
 are the symptoms of a tentative talent, not of 
 an authoritative art." 
 
 I don't think Professor Henderson's remarks 
 are ever quite meaningless, but I suspect that 
 the most elephantine of them, if reduced to 
 essentials, would be as commonplace as his more 
 comprehensible statements that " Social criticism 
 is the sign manual of the age," and that " the 
 emancipation of woman, in the completest sense, 
 is on the way " which last gets a whole para- 
 graph to itself. But it is pleasant to read it all ; to 
 see " Ibsen, Pinero, or Phillips " thus bracketed ; 
 to learn that Wilde's father was also " the father 
 of modern otology," and to be told that Maeter- 
 linck's " eternal prayer " is, " Oh, that this too, 
 too solid flesh would melt " ! That is on page 
 203 ; but the effect is somewhat marred by the 
 104
 
 "Another Century, and then . . ." 
 
 fact that precisely the same " cry " has been, 
 on page 37, attributed to Strindberg. Personally 
 I plump for Maeterlinck. 
 
 u Another Century, and then . . ." 
 
 THERE is a certain sort of dull criticism 
 which Dr. Johnson admirably stigmatized 
 when he said that " there is no great 
 merit in telling how many plays have ghosts in 
 them and how this ghost is better than that." 
 A great deal of American (not to speak of German) 
 academic criticism belongs to this category ; 
 and especially those theses which are written 
 by postgraduate students and candidates for 
 the doctor's degree. These persons, when they 
 are not exhuming dead reputations from well- 
 deserved sepulchres, show an uncanny ingenuity 
 in inventing original classifications and institut- 
 ing unnecessary comparisons. But now and 
 again such students manage to produce some 
 enlightening piece of " research " work, and 
 The French Revolution and the English Novel 
 (Putnams) is one of the best of its kind. It is 
 by Allene Gregory ; and as I cannot tell from the 
 name whether she is a gentleman or a lady, I 
 shall call him Miss. 
 
 " This study in the tendenz novel was begun 
 with the idea of paralleling Dr. Hancock's book, 
 
 105
 
 Books in General 
 
 The French Revolution and the English Poets." 
 That is the first sentence of the preface, and it 
 has a strictly academic flavour about it. The 
 book is a " scientific " treatise ; it would not have 
 been written, so to say, either by a French Revo- 
 lutionary or by an English novelist. If it dealt 
 with the purely literary merits, which are few, 
 of its subjects, it would be a useless sort of book. 
 But its real purpose is to supply a chapter to the 
 history of ideas, and especially Liberal political 
 and social ideas. Many people talk as though 
 they thought that the novel which canvasses the 
 " problems " of sex, property, and religion were 
 an invention of the last thirty years ; and many 
 others are under the impression that Charles 
 Dickens was the first person to use fiction 
 though not, of course, the first person to employ 
 fictions for the promotion of legislation. Books 
 about Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft are 
 occasionally written ; and quite recently Thomas 
 Holcroft, one of the chief of our Revolutionary 
 novelists, was given considerable notice in Mr. 
 Brailsford's excellent little book in the Home 
 University Library. But, as far as my expe- 
 rience goes, there seem to be very few who know 
 that England produced a century ago a whole 
 group of novelists whose principal aim was not 
 to " tell a straightforward story " or make the 
 flesh creep, but to blow up the foundations of 
 society with the gunpowder in the jam. 
 
 Miss Gregory's book is very comprehensive. 
 1 06
 
 "Another Century, and then . . ." 
 
 Her principal figures are Holcroft, Godwin, 
 and Robert Bage ; and she gives synopses of 
 all their novels, with extracts illustrating their 
 doctrines. Holcroft, one of the most lovable 
 figures in the history of English democracy, was 
 the sort of man who is regarded as an obscure 
 crank in his lifetime, then forgotten for a time, 
 and ultimately recognized as a person of historical 
 importance. He lived a long life, and harmed 
 nobody in the course of it. As a stable-boy in a 
 racing stable he read Addison, Bunyan, and 
 Swift (whose tribute to the Houyhnhnms must 
 have had a local colour for him) ; he was after- 
 wards a strolling actor, a hack writer, translator, 
 novelist, and playwright, one of his plays being 
 The Road to Ruin. When the Society for Consti- 
 tutional Reformation was raided Holcroft was 
 arrested with Thomas Hardy and Home Tooke, 
 and it was alleged against him, as justification 
 for a charge of high treason, that he had extolled 
 moral as against physical force. His associates 
 being acquitted, he was never brought to trial : 
 there comes a point at which even a Government 
 begins to feel it is making an ass of itself. Hoi- 
 croft's courage never weakened " when Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, Southey, and even Blake had 
 recanted, and Godwin and Paine had fallen 
 silent, and all the world seemed to have forgotten 
 its vision of democracy." He himself stated in 
 terms : " Whenever I have undertaken to write 
 a novel I have proposed to myself a specific moral 
 purpose." His best novels are Hugh Trevor and 
 
 107
 
 Books in General 
 
 Anna St. Ives. In the latter the hero, Frank 
 Henley, who shocks the orthodox by taking 
 service rather than self-interest as his guiding 
 principle, remarks : 
 
 " Let men look around and deny if they can 
 that the present wretched system of each pro- 
 viding for himself instead of the whole for the 
 whole does not inspire suspicion, fear, and hatred. 
 Well, well ! another century, and then ..." 
 
 Just a century has passed. 
 
 Of Godwin's novels Caleb Williams is the only 
 one that is at all read nowadays. In spite of its 
 impossibilities of character and action, it is a 
 very good tract, especially where it deals with 
 the prison system. Miss Gregory's extracts from 
 Caleb Williams might have been more profuse ; 
 but she gives interesting accounts of St. Leon 
 and Fleetwood. In the first of these a gentleman 
 who possesses the philosopher's stone breaks 
 into long reflections on " gold versus actual 
 wealth " ; in the other there are eloquent 
 passages about the horrors of child-slavery in 
 factories which anticipate the factory reports of a 
 generation later, and which were so much in 
 advance of their time that they still hold good 
 in reference to certain of the States of America. 
 Godwin saw the whole thing very clearly : the 
 pale, emaciated child given the free man's right 
 of selling his labour at his own price in the open 
 1 08
 
 " Another Century, and then ..." 
 
 market and, as Godwin put it, able to earn salt 
 to his bread at four, but unable to earn bread to 
 his salt at forty. The placid Bage's novels were 
 admired by Walter Scott. The most original is 
 Hermsprong, or Man as he is not, the hero of 
 which who enters civilized society after being 
 brought up among the Red Indians, and quails 
 at the change criticizes institutions with some- 
 thing of the tone of the versatile Mr. Smilash in 
 An Unsocial Socialist. 
 
 Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne are only 
 interesting, if interesting at all, because they were 
 written by their author. Miss Gregory ploughs 
 through them, and also through the novels of 
 Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. 
 She has a very interesting chapter on Mary 
 Wollstonecraft and the early Women's Rights 
 authors. I find most alluring the bare mention 
 made of a certain Ann Plumptre, a novelist of 
 whom I had never previously heard, who admired 
 Napoleon enthusiastically. In 1810, according 
 to Crabb Robinson, 
 
 " she declared she would welcome him if he 
 invaded England because he would do away 
 with aristocracy and give the country a better 
 government." 
 
 Finally Miss Gregory has given space to the anti- 
 revolutionary novelists, especially George Walker 
 and Charles Lucas, of The Infernal Quixote. 
 
 109
 
 Books in General 
 
 Ridicule of visionaries and demagogues through 
 the medium of novels was a recognized sport 
 then as now ; and Lucas instituted an elaborate 
 comparison between political and religious re- 
 vivalists. A good bibliography rounds off a very 
 laudable compilation which should interest all 
 persons of subversive views and direct the 
 reading of the curious into some very agreeable 
 channels. 
 
 Herrick 
 
 MR. F. W. MOORMAN has edited for 
 the Oxford Press a new edition of 
 Herrick, which should supersede all 
 its predecessors. There is very little editorial 
 matter ; Mr. Moorman has already written 
 a Life, and his introduction and notes have a 
 purely textual reference. The text, which is 
 as satisfactory a one as we are likely to get, 
 is based upon a collation of various divergent 
 copies of the first edition ; for Herrick appears 
 to have hung about the printer's making altera- 
 tions whilst the sheets were going through the 
 press. And a full list is given of variants which 
 occur in other printed copies of some of the 
 poems and in MSS., of which the editor records 
 several which have not previously been dealt 
 with. 
 no
 
 Herrick 
 
 Any one who regards Herrick as an unsophisti- 
 cated warbler pouring forth profuse strains of 
 unpremeditated art may study these variants 
 and correct himself. Mr. Moorman I suppose 
 he has sufficient reason, though he leaves one to 
 guess what it is assumes that the versions in 
 MSS. and anthologies, etc., including those 
 published after the Hesperides, are all earlier 
 than the versions in the Hesperides. Now and 
 then one- is sorry that this should be so, as when 
 the presumably earlier 
 
 And night will come when men will swear 
 Time has spilt snow upon your haire, 
 
 is changed into 
 
 And time will come when you shall weare 
 Such frost and snow upon your haire. 
 
 But almost invariably the changes are improve- 
 ments ; and they are exceedingly numerous. 
 Sometimes alterations in almost every line of a 
 poem may be studied ; sometimes there is a 
 whole series of attempts at a line ; and if we had 
 more of Herrick' s original MSS. available, we 
 should no doubt find every poem a mass of trial 
 trips and deletions. He blotted, filed, and 
 pumice-stoned as much as any English poet, and 
 he had the most delicate and deliberate sense 
 of all the complex mechanism of verse. This 
 rubicund Royalist rector was above all else a 
 craftsman and a connoisseur. 
 
 ill
 
 Books in General 
 
 What distinguishes his best they are so well 
 known that I need not quote them poems from 
 his second best is usually that the former have 
 some especially taking touch of tenderness. It 
 is never very deep ; even in an epitaph he is more 
 concerned with turning it well than with the, 
 often apocryphal, death of the person com- 
 memorated. His adorations and griefs are as 
 light as rose-leaves, but they are genuine in 
 their way, and it is rather a slight difference in 
 the quality of his emotion than a relative supe- 
 riority of craftsmanship that distinguishes his 
 most perfect lyrics. His strongest characteristic, 
 one that runs through the whole body of his 
 verse, was his intense sensual appreciation of the 
 material world. He was a connoisseur in life as 
 in art. His admired record of the " liquefac- 
 tion " of Julia's silks is characteristic of him. 
 " O how that glittering taketh me ! " he might 
 have said of a thousand other things. He looked 
 at colours and felt surfaces like a connoisseur ; 
 he tasted substances like an epicure tasting wines. 
 He crushes all the distinctive hues and flavours 
 out of flowers and spices, roses and primroses 
 and violets, tulips, lilies, marigolds, cherry- 
 blossoms, virgins' skins, jet, ivory, amber, and 
 gums. There is nothing romantic about him, 
 and nothing dim ; all things are equally vivid 
 and clear, no thing is mysteriously vaster than 
 other things. The moon and cream are both 
 white he will compare his lady's cheek to either 
 indifferently or to both in a sentence ; he relishes 
 
 112
 
 Herrick 
 
 the loveliness of each and he drinks each, with 
 exquisite pleasure, out of the same sized liqueur 
 glass. Few other writers give one so keen a 
 contact with the beauties of the physical world. 
 But it is usually their sensuous appeal that is 
 registered, sometimes their sentimental appeal, 
 but never their mystic appeal. Herrick was a 
 thoroughgoing pagan. 
 
 His capacity for conveying vivid impressions 
 of the physical was not invariably employed 
 upon such agreeable objects as daffodils and 
 maidens. His sheer virtuosity made him com- 
 pose those offensive epigrams which some bashful 
 editors exclude from their collections. It is not 
 to be supposed that he really wished to vent his 
 spleen against Luggs, Gryll, Clasco, Scobble, 
 Bunce, and his other, presumably pseudonymous, 
 butts ; though if his efforts in this direction got 
 about in his Devonshire village and people took 
 them to apply to themselves it is no wonder that 
 the natives behaved towards him, as he com- 
 plained, like surly savages. " Upon Batt " is 
 one of the mildest of them : 
 
 Batt he gets children, not for love to reare ''em, 
 But out of hope his wife might die to beare 'em. 
 
 A more characteristic, but still a mild one, is 
 " Upon Lungs " : 
 
 Lungs (as some say) ne'er sits him down to eate 
 But that his breath do's Fly-blow all the meate. 
 H 113
 
 Books in General 
 
 He tells I refrain from the grossest ones of 
 another gentleman whose eyes were so sticky in 
 the morning that his wife had to lick them open ; 
 of another whose raw eyes would supply an 
 angler with a day's bait ; and of another (very 
 parsimonious) who preserved his nails, warts, and 
 corns in boxes to make jelly for his broth. It is 
 not astonishing that when the " sprightly Spar- 
 tanesse " appeared to him in dream she remarked: 
 
 ^ Remove, 
 Herrick thou art too coorse for love. 
 
 But as one goes on through these things one is 
 too amused to be disgusted ; one wonders what 
 on earth the man is going to think of next. 
 And that was the idea. He had compressed all 
 the fragrance of the spring into short lyrics 
 how much concentrated beastliness could he get 
 into a couplet ? He had rivalled Horace and 
 Anacreon in one line ; could he rival Martial in 
 another ? You may picture him making these 
 things sitting at a table in the sun outside the 
 rectory, quaffing, as was his wont, a social 
 tankard with his favourite pig, and working and 
 working at these singular concoctions until there 
 came the thrill of the artist who knows he has 
 produced a perfect cameo. 
 
 His outlook and methods being such, it is not 
 surprising that when he gave up his " unbaptized 
 Rhimes " and took to " Noble Numbers " he was 
 114
 
 Herrick 
 
 comparatively unsuccessful. Quaintness and 
 neatness do not go far in religious verse, and 
 the congenital materialism of Herrick's imagery 
 sometimes produced the most grotesque effects. 
 
 God is all fore-part, for we never see 
 Any 'part backward, in the Deitie. 
 
 An epigram which might have had some point if 
 applied to a man is merely vapid when applied 
 to the Deity. And the vapid becomes comic in 
 
 I crawle, I creep ; my Christ I come 
 To thee, for curing Balsamum, 
 
 and 
 
 Lord, I confesse, that thou alone art able 
 To purifie this my Augean stable ; 
 Be the Seas water, and the Land all Sope, 
 Tet if thy Bloud not wash me, there's no hope. 
 
 Herrick was not an exalted religious poet. 
 But it doesn't much matter what he was not ; 
 what he was is one of the greatest small masters 
 in the history of verse.
 
 Books in General 
 
 The Muse in Liquor 
 
 IN former times men wrote about drinking 
 without the slightest self-consciousness. 
 Our forefathers, from Teos to Chertsey, 
 from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral 
 strand, sang the praises of what nobody in those 
 days dreamt of calling alcohol, as they sang the 
 praises of the other amenities of life. To Homer 
 " bright wine " was as indispensable a commodity 
 as bread : no home could be complete without it. 
 If Anacreon and Horace were rather more 
 sophisticated about it and tasted their liquor 
 with a deliberate and spun-out sensuality, they 
 still had no idea that there was anything morally 
 questionable about drink. So onwards to 
 mediaeval times. When the Anglo-Saxon leech 
 laid it down that if a man has fainted from 
 hunger one should 
 
 " pull his locks from him, and wring his ears, and 
 twitch his whiskers ; when he is better give him 
 some bread broken in wine," 
 
 there was no rival school of leeches to jump up and 
 protest that to inject alcoholic poisons into a 
 debilitated frame was about the worst thing 
 you could do. Drinking in the Middle Ages was 
 unchallengeably respectable. " The introduc- 
 tion of wine and viticulture," says Mr. A. L. 
 116
 
 The Muse in Liquor 
 
 Simon in his history of the Wine Trade in 
 England, 
 
 " is coeval with the introduction of the Christian 
 religion. As the numbers of clergy increased, 
 greater supplies of wine were required, so vines 
 were planted at home, and a considerable foreign 
 wine trade came into being." 
 
 The drinking-songs of the Middle Ages were 
 largely composed by theological students, and 
 it was (at least I am of that party which main- 
 tains that it was) an archdeacon of the English 
 Church who wrote one of the two best lyrics of 
 the kind that this island has produced that per- 
 fect song in which he expresses the hope that he 
 shall meet his latter end in a hostelry and that 
 some one should hold a pottle-pot before his 
 dying eyes : 
 
 Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori 
 " Deus sit propitius huic potatori" 
 
 Our other great song has also been attributed to 
 an ecclesiastic, Bishop Still. 
 
 But if a modern bishop wrote a song about 
 hot whisky, he would get into hot water. Times 
 have changed. When a modern English king 
 wants to do the popular thing, he takes the 
 pledge ; when Henry III wanted to, he gave his 
 old wine to the poor the gift was not so noble 
 
 117
 
 Books in General 
 
 as it sounds, for in his day old wine was bad, 
 owing to the lack of glass bottles and well-made 
 casks. Bishop Still, when he wrote (if he wrote) 
 about the ale-swallowing capacity of himself 
 and Tib, his wife, was on the safe side, for his 
 sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, was addicted 
 herself. Her Ministers had a job keeping her 
 supplied with beer. When she was on one of 
 her royal progresses, the Earl of Leicester wrote 
 to Lord Burleigh : 
 
 " There is not one drop of good drink for her. 
 We were fain to send to London and Kenilworth 
 and divers other places where ale was ; her own 
 bere was so strong as there was no man able to 
 drink it." 
 
 But since that time a question of principle has 
 arisen, and the changed attitude of society 
 towards drink has been accompanied by a corre- 
 sponding change in the tone of those who write 
 in praise of drink. They used to be natural and 
 expository ; they are now self-conscious and on 
 the defensive. 
 
 I note the transition in a volume (1862) called 
 How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivanfs Com- 
 panion, by Jerry Thomas, formerly principal 
 bar-tender at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York, 
 and the Planter's House, St. Louis. It is an 
 ingenious book and a suitable companion to its 
 shelf-neighbour, The Maltworm's Vade-mecum, a 
 118
 
 The Muse in Liquor 
 
 guide to the public-houses of early Georgian 
 London. But if Mr. Thomas had been a con- 
 temporary of his brother connoisseur, it would 
 never have occurred to him to write a preface 
 apologizing for the mere compilation of such a 
 book : 
 
 " Whether it is judicious that mankind should 
 continue to indulge in such things, or whether it 
 would be wiser to abstain from all enjoyments of 
 that character, it is not our province to decide. 
 We leave that question to the moral philosopher. 
 We simply contend that a relish for ' social 
 drinks ' is universal ; that those drinks exist in 
 greater variety in the United States than in any 
 other country in the world, and that he, therefore, 
 who proposes to impart to those drinks not only 
 the most palatable but the most wholesome 
 characteristics of which they may be made 
 susceptible, is a genuine public benefactor." 
 
 You see the uneasiness coming in ; the devotee 
 is conscious of a disapproving eye. And what 
 was perceptible in 1862 is much more marked 
 to-day, when a considerable percentage of the 
 population looks askance at a man who has been 
 seen coming out of a bar, and when most of our 
 priests and half our politicians denounce fer- 
 mented drinks as an invention of the Devil. 
 The results of this are seen in the twentieth- 
 century Bacchanal's writings. He is on the 
 defensive. He cannot write a mere song in 
 
 119
 
 Books in General 
 
 praise of drink : his Muse is largely, even mainly, 
 concerned with dispraise of the opponents of 
 drink. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, belaud- 
 ing drinks as against beverages, strike an attitude 
 which Anacreon simply would not have under- 
 stood. They cannot lie and lap their liquor in 
 dreamy content. Whenever they take up a pot 
 of beer they have to march out and drink it 
 defiantly in the middle of the Strand. It is 
 almost as if they knew they were the champions 
 of a lost, though noble, cause ; and felt that at 
 any moment they might be called upon to Die 
 in the Last Tankard. 
 
 This tendency is strongly marked in Mr. 
 Chesterton's volume Wine, Water, and, Song. 
 Mr. Chesterton spends half his time in abusing 
 abstemious American and English millionaires, 
 tea, cocoa, mineral waters, and grocers who, 
 lacking the genial proclivities of publicans, have 
 never been known 
 
 To crack a bottle offish sauce 
 Or stand a man a cheese. 
 
 But the novelty of tone makes the songs all the 
 better : for the old material of drinking-songs was 
 getting threadbare. To my thinking, these songs 
 most of them appeared in The Flying Inn, and 
 it was a pity that they were omitted from the 
 volume of collected Poems recently issued are 
 amongst the finest bibulous songs ever written, 
 120
 
 The Muse in Liquor 
 
 and some of Mr. Chesterton's very best work. 
 You can read them aloud to other people and 
 very seldom come across a stilted or obscure 
 phrase which makes you feel sheepish to say it. 
 But, more than that, Wine and. Water, The Good 
 Rich Man, The Song against Songs, and the two 
 poems on the English Road are the sort of 
 infectiously musical things that one learns by 
 heart without knowing one has done it. 
 
 Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and, fowls on the 
 
 largest scale, 
 He ate his eggs with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a 
 
 -pail, 
 And, the soup he took was Elephant Soup, and the 
 
 jish he took was whale, 
 But they all were small to the cellar he took when he 
 
 set out to sail, 
 And, Noah he often said, to his wife when he sat 
 
 down to dine, 
 " / dorft care where the water goes if it doesn't get 
 
 into the wine" 
 
 Lives there a man with soul so dead that when he 
 comes across this or The Road to Roundabout 
 (which is about the best of the lot) he does not 
 automatically improvise a tune to it and start, 
 according to his ability, singing it ? 
 
 121
 
 Books in General 
 
 Misspent 
 
 A~TY one who is interested in what 
 nobody has yet asked us to call the 
 British language must have felt appre- 
 hensive if he read the correspondence recently 
 printed in the Times on the subject of a syno- 
 nym for the word " Colonial." It appears that 
 this word is " strongly objected to " in the er 
 Dominions, and especially in Canada. The 
 Central Committee of the Overseas Club there- 
 fore started a Missing Word Competition. It 
 offered a prize of 5 for the best synonym and 
 " members have been most prolific in their ideas." 
 The examples given of their fecundity are, 
 however, so malformed as to lead to the hope 
 that in future they will practise an intellectual 
 Malthusianism. The Chairman of the Club says 
 that amongst the terms suggested are Britainer, 
 Britonial, Imperialist, Dominion, Britannian, 
 Britoner, Greater Briton, Anglian Pan-Briton, 
 and such repulsive composts as Empirean, 
 Transmarine (why not Ultramarine ?), Away- 
 Born, Out-Briton, Co-Briton, Albionian, Mac- 
 Briton, and Britson. What those which he does 
 not publish were like one can only surmise ; 
 but no doubt Ap-Briton, O'Briton, Britidian, 
 Britkinson, Dominisher, Fraternanglian, Nonsun- 
 setton, and Heptathalassian were among them. 
 And so, possibly, was Oversear 
 
 122
 
 Misspent 
 
 It needs must be that new words should come ; 
 and one should not cry woe against those through 
 whom they come. We are constantly inventing 
 or importing words to convey ideas or shades of 
 feeling for which we previously had no exact 
 means of expression. We also necessarily 
 acquire new words for new objects, such as 
 chemicals and machines. When men made the 
 telephone they had to call it something ; and the 
 same thing applied to the omnibus. We can 
 frequently trace new words to their inventors. 
 But we may safely say that successful new words 
 are seldom " made up " cold-bloodedly merely 
 for the sake of the thing. An author hits upon a 
 word half-accidentally, developing it usually 
 from some word already familiar ; or a philo- 
 sopher or scientist constructs one out of frag- 
 ments of Greek, or Latin, or Greek and Latin 
 mixed, because he has a new object to describe. 
 The process is going on continually. The rivals 
 " airman " and " aviator " (somebody once 
 asked if you could call a miner a " talpiator ") 
 are at present * fighting it out in the Press and 
 on men's tongues ; and if some central authority 
 is in the future established over the heads of the 
 sovereign Powers, it is likely that the word 
 " supernational," now being bruited about, may 
 come into use to describe it. We may get in 
 time, too, an inclusive word which will imply 
 " citizen of the British Empire," covering both 
 Britons (or, if you prefer it, Britirish) and 
 
 * Airman happily seems (July 1918) to have won. S. E. 
 
 123
 
 Books in General 
 
 Colonials. But I doubt whether such a word will 
 result from a public competition. 
 
 When it comes it will come because some one 
 person starts using it and others take to it. And 
 when it is a case of inventing a synonym, a new 
 word as a substitute for an old one in general use, 
 I think it most unlikely that a group of persons 
 such as the Overseas Club could persuade the 
 race to abandon a universally used word like 
 " Colonial " for some 5 prize word merely 
 because hypersensitive people think that the 
 word used to have a faintly derogatory flavour. 
 " Colonial " is very strongly entrenched. One 
 can just understand how the Americans have 
 come to use the abominable word " Britisher " 
 instead of the ancient " Briton " ; for it falls 
 more trippingly off the tongue. But "Colonial" 
 is a most liquid, easy, and euphonious word. If 
 it is ever superseded, it will be so because some 
 other word comes in with the larger connotation 
 to which I have referred, a word which is bound 
 to come into being when we cease to think of the 
 Empire as composed of the United Kingdom on 
 the one hand and the Colonies on the other, but 
 think of it as a federation of equal and distinct 
 units. 
 
 It is a pity that people take so seriously the 
 fact that when the words " Colonies " and 
 " Colonial " were first used by us they had certain 
 associations. For it is evident that to the vast 
 124.
 
 Misspent 
 
 majority of our countrymen they are entirely 
 divested of them. Whatever one's habits, one 
 automatically thinks when the word " Colonial " 
 is mentioned, not of a humble emigrant who wants 
 shepherding, but of a person who is the very 
 quintessence of independence. Any one who has 
 even the most superficial acquaintance with the 
 language knows that words can lose their old 
 associations utterly. If, for example, I were 
 arrested and charged for alleging, in a public 
 speech, one of our Royal Princes to be " a silly 
 knave," I should not find the magistrate very 
 sympathetic if I said I was using the words in a 
 Shakespearean (which in this case would be 
 equivalent to a Pickwickian) sense, and that I 
 merely meant to call him " a simple boy." 
 Similarly, where an object changes its form its 
 name changes its connotation. If one could 
 talk of a bottle to a mediaeval ancestor, he would 
 think of something made of leather ; to-day a 
 bottle is essentially something made of glass. If 
 we always wanted a new term directly a new 
 association was created, there would be no end to 
 the process ; we should have to have a Ministry of 
 Constructive Philology always at work. After all, 
 Charleston was named after an English king when 
 the North American plantations were very subordi- 
 nate indeed ; and Melbourne after a member of the 
 British House of Lords, an institution of which few 
 modern Australians approve. So, on the whole, 
 saving the Overseas Club's reverence, we may as 
 well, for the time being, stick to " Colonial." 
 
 125
 
 Books in General 
 
 Shakespeare's Women and 
 Mr. George Moore 
 
 HANDLING the Porcupine of Avon is 
 always ticklish work. When Mr. George 
 Moore, after containing himself for 
 years, at last wrote to explain that it was he, 
 and not Mr. Shaw or Mr. Franz Heinrichs, who 
 discovered the fact that Shakespeare's female 
 characters were weak because they were written 
 for boy-actors, it was only natural that another 
 correspondent should show that Mr. Moore had 
 been forestalled by an eighteenth-century 
 Frenchman. Mr. Moore's remark about the 
 boy-actors was, however, merely a passing 
 observation in a lecture in French (published in 
 the Revue Bleue in 1910) which is an important 
 document in the movement against what Mr. 
 Shaw calls Bardolatry. 
 
 " He is inconceivably wise ; the others con- 
 ceivably." Thus Emerson ; and a few genera- 
 tions of such sweeping remarks were bound to 
 be followed by a reaction. For a hundred years 
 we have swallowed Shakespeare steadily and 
 swallowed him whole ; a man has even written a 
 book on The Messiahship of Shakespeare. And 
 of all his powers, that of creating an infinite 
 variety of female character has been perhaps 
 126
 
 Shakespeare's Women and Mr. G. Moore 
 
 more enthusiastically praised than any other. 
 The professors have given us treatises on Shake- 
 speare's Feminine Types ; and the less erudite 
 public has been deluged with Posies from 
 Shakespeare's Garden of Girls. " O Nature ! 
 O Shakespeare ! which of ye drew from the 
 other ? " That is typical. Dr. Lewes, one of 
 the ablest German writers on the subject, kneels 
 and adores, and asks women to do the same. 
 " This piece," he says of Henry VIII, 
 
 " this piece and its female characters should 
 indeed inspire women with profound gratitude 
 towards a poet who represents a queen and a 
 heroine who is above all things an excellent 
 woman, displaying in the midst of frightful 
 trials all the best womanly qualities, thus proving 
 that a noble, pure feminine heart is the home 
 of the noblest virtue, the highest truth and 
 purity. Seldom has more flattering homage been 
 paid to the sex than by Shakespeare in his presen- 
 tation of Catherine of Aragon." 
 
 And hear Mrs. Jamieson, author of the best- 
 known English book on these women. Dare 
 any one apply the epithet " clever " to Portia, 
 " this heavenly compound of talent, feeling, 
 wisdom, beauty, and gentleness " ? As for Lady 
 Macbeth, with her " Gothic grandeur, rich 
 chiaroscuro, and deep-toned colours," even she 
 is not to be insulted by comparison with other 
 
 127
 
 Books in General 
 
 villainesses. Sophocles' Clytemnestra had been 
 mentioned, but 
 
 " would any one compare this shameless adul- 
 teress, cruel murderess and unnatural mother 
 with Lady Macbeth ? Lady Macbeth herself 
 would certainly shrink from the approximation" 
 
 One has sometimes felt that her ladyship was 
 probably president of the local branches of the 
 G.F.S. and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families 
 Association. 
 
 There was nothing of this sort about Mr. 
 George Moore's lecture. It opened with a 
 strong protest against the " vast clamour " of 
 Shakespeare's worshippers : 
 
 " One might take them for a gathering of 
 negro Methodists in a chapel, each one straining 
 his lungs to out-bellow his neighbour, in order 
 to attract the Almighty's attention. Is it that 
 the critics think that Shakespeare is listening to 
 them ? At any rate, the madness increases 
 daily, and, if the cult of Jahveh should happen to 
 decay in England, I should not be surprised were 
 they to promote Shakespeare to the vacant 
 throne in the heavens." 
 
 After this engaging beginning he went on to 
 the general contention that neither Shakespeare 
 nor any of his contemporaries drew or painted a 
 128
 
 Shakespeare's Women and Mr. G. Moore 
 
 real woman. The Renaissance was interested in 
 women only as queens or odalisques, and Shake- 
 speare at most made a few delicious silhouettes 
 of women. His men were another matter. 
 " Hamlet is the secret thought of all men " ; 
 and, though it hurts Mr. Moore to agree with 
 Tolstoi, he reaffirmed Tolstoi's statement that 
 " FalstafT is the most universal and original 
 thing in Shakespeare." " Hamlet is the hiero- 
 glyphic and symbol of the intellect ; FalstafT is 
 the symbol and arabesque of the flesh." But 
 Shakespeare, like Balzac, was chiefly concerned 
 with " the eternal masculine." 
 
 But suppose it be admitted that Shakespeare 
 has no female Hamlet and no female FalstafT ; 
 is it not arguable that then the case for the 
 superiority of Shakespeare's males over his 
 females is very much less strong ? It would be 
 absurd to attempt to dogmatize on the subject ; 
 but personally I doubt whether any one who 
 cannot get inside the minds of most (though many 
 would exempt Heine's " ancient Parisienne " 
 Cleopatra, and one or two more) of Shakespeare's 
 women will get inside the minds of most of his 
 men either. When Professor Dowden said that 
 he had " edited a whole play for love of Imogen " 
 the remark (if he heard it) may have sounded 
 strange to Mr. Moore ; but would he understand, 
 either, any one editing a whole play for love of 
 Antonio, Bassanio, Benedict, the Duke of Twelfth 
 Night, King Lear, Othello, Mark Antony, or 
 
 I 129
 
 Books in General 
 
 Henry V ? It is possible to hold the view that 
 Shakespeare " put himself " into a few characters 
 and observed the others " from the outside," 
 making them most interesting when they are 
 most markedly what are called " character 
 parts." Personally, though I should certainly 
 know Hamlet or Falstaff if I met them in swallow- 
 tails, I don't think there are many other of 
 Shakespeare's characters whom I should recognize 
 if I encountered them clothed in other than their 
 traditional garments. But I do not think it is 
 easy to sustain the argument that, as a whole, 
 his women are less carefully and sympathetically 
 drawn than his men Lady Macbeth than 
 Macbeth, Juliet than Romeo, Cleopatra than 
 Anthony, Beatrice than Benedict, Rosalind than 
 Orlando or, still more, that he was not interested 
 in women and regarded them in a casual lazy 
 way as decorations. Shakespeare's politics were 
 Heaven knows what ; and he may not necessarily 
 have drawn Portia as an argument for the ad- 
 mission of women to the Inns of Court. But 
 one would have imagined that if ever there were 
 a writer who treated women and men on a footing 
 of complete equality, and even perhaps elevated 
 women's moral superiority to an indefensible pitch, 
 it was he. If his female characters are not living 
 human beings it is certainly not because he despised 
 them. He gave them plenty of virtue, wit, courage, 
 and will, and an ample share of the stage ; it is, with 
 all due respect to Mr. Moore, grotesque to suggest 
 that he thought of them merely as properties. 
 130
 
 Moving a Library 
 
 The recent correspondence sent me back to 
 Mr. Moore's paper, and I read it with admiration 
 for the fruits of what he called a month's rather 
 exhausting liaison with the French language. 
 But something about it perhaps it was the 
 catalogue of heroines, each with an appropriate 
 criticism seemed familiar. I have tracked it ; 
 here also Mr. Moore has been anticipated. It 
 was the late Max O'Rell it is almost like being 
 anticipated by Charley's Aunt who remarked 
 that 
 
 " The heroines of Shakespeare are for the most 
 part slaves or fools. Juliet is a spoilt child, 
 Desdemona a sort of submissive odalisque, 
 Beatrice a chatterbox, and Ophelia a goose." 
 
 It is very difficult indeed to say anything new 
 about Shakespeare. 
 
 Moving a Library 
 
 I DO not remember that any of our medita- 
 tive essayists has written on the subject of 
 Moving One's Books. If such an essay 
 exists I should be glad to go to it for sympathy 
 and consolation. For I have just moved from 
 one room to another, in which I devoutly hope 
 that I shall end my days, though (as Mr. Asquith 
 would put it in his rounded way) " at a later, 
 
 131
 
 Books in General 
 
 rather than at an earlier, date." Night after 
 night I have spent carting down two flights of 
 stairs more books than I ever thought I possessed. 
 Journey after journey, as monotonously regular 
 as the progresses of a train round the Inner 
 Circle : upstairs empty-handed, and downstairs 
 creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, 
 dangerously bulging column of books wedged 
 between my two hands and the indomitable 
 point of my chin. The job simply has to be 
 done ; once it is started there is no escape from 
 it ; but at times during the process one hates 
 books as the slaves who built the Pyramids must 
 have hated public monuments. A strong and 
 bitter book-sickness floods one's soul. How 
 ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous 
 mass of paper, print, and dead men's sentiments ! 
 Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the 
 rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world 
 a free, untrammelled, illiterate Superman ? 
 Civilization ! Pah ! But that mood is, I am 
 happy to say, with me ephemeral. It is generated 
 by the necessity for tedious physical exertion 
 and dies with the need. Nevertheless the actual 
 transport is about the briefest and least harassing 
 of the operations called for. Dusting (or " buffet- 
 ing the books," as Dr. Johnson called it) is a 
 matter of choice. One can easily say to oneself, 
 " These books were banged six months ago " 
 (knowing full well that it was really twelve 
 months ago), and thus decide to postpone the 
 ceremony until everything else has been settled. 
 132
 
 Moving a Library 
 
 But the complications of getting one's library 
 straight are still appalling. 
 
 Of course, if your shelves are moved bodily 
 it is all right. You can take the books out, lay 
 them on the floor in due order, and restore them 
 to their old places. But otherwise, if you have 
 any sense of congruity and proportion, you are 
 in for a bad time. My own case could not 
 be worse than it is. The room from which I 
 have been expelled was low and square ; the 
 room into which I have been driven is high and 
 L-shaped. None of my old wall-shelves will fit 
 my new walls ; and I have had to erect new ones, 
 more numerous than the old and totally different 
 in shape and arrangement. It is quite impossible 
 to preserve the old plan ; but the devisal of 
 another one brings sweat to the brow. If one 
 happened to be a person who never desired to 
 refer to his books the obvious thing to do would 
 be to put the large books into the large shelves 
 and the small ones into the small shelves and 
 then go and smoke a self-satisfied pipe against the 
 nearest post. But to a man who prefers to know 
 where every book is, and who possesses, moreover, 
 a sense of System and wishes everything to be in 
 surroundings proper to its own qualities, this is 
 not possible. Even an unsystematic man must 
 choose to add a classification by subject to the 
 compulsory classification by size ; and, in my 
 case, there is an added difficulty produced by a 
 strong hankering for some sort of chronological 
 
 133
 
 Books in General 
 
 order. There is nothing like that for easy 
 reference. If you know that Beowulf will be at 
 the left-hand end of the shelf that he fits and 
 Julia Ward, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, at the 
 right-hand end, you save yourself a good deal of 
 time. But when your new compartments do 
 not fit your old sections, when the large books of 
 Stodge are so numerous as to insist upon intrud- 
 ing into the shelves reserved for large books of 
 Pure Literature, and the duodecimos of Foreign 
 Verse surge in a tidal wave over the preserves 
 of the small books on Free Trade, Ethics, and 
 Palaeontology, one is reduced to the verge of 
 despair. That is where I am at this moment ; 
 sitting in the midst of a large floor covered 
 with sawdust, white distemper, nails, tobacco- 
 ash, burnt matches, and the Greatest Works of 
 the World's Greatest Masters. Fortunately, in 
 Ruskin's words, " I don't suppose I shall do it 
 again for months and months and months." 
 
 Table-Talk and Jest Books 
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER'S Note-Books have now 
 gone into another (popular) edition, 
 issued by Mr. Fifield. I don't know 
 how large these editions are : if, as I fear, 
 they run to less than fifty thousand copies 
 apiece, Samuel Butler has not yet got his due. 
 There is no other volume in the whole of his 
 
 134
 
 Table-Talk and Jest Books 
 
 collected works to equal this selection from his 
 note-books : you have here the quintessence of 
 his wisdom, his taste, and his superb impudence. 
 The book really belongs to the " table-talk " or 
 " ana " class of books. Butler, that is to say, 
 recorded his own table-talk. His principle was, 
 he said, that if you wanted to record a thought 
 you had to shoot it on the wing. If, therefore, 
 he thought of or said anything especially illu- 
 minating or amusing, or heard any one else say 
 anything of the sort, down it went. And it 
 always went down as colloquially and freshly 
 as if a Boswell had been present recording 
 conversation with a faithful pen. Butler 
 Boswellized himself. For Boswell' s Life, as has 
 been remarked before, is the greatest collection 
 of " ana " in the language. It consisted of 
 Johnson's table-talk strung on a biographical 
 thread. 
 
 Personally I find it hard to draw the line be- 
 tween general table-talk and anecdotes told of 
 certain persons : most collections include both. 
 But such works, of whatever kind, consisting of 
 detached scraps of great men's wit, are an 
 agreeable form of reading, and an old-established 
 one. The Greeks possessed volumes of excerpts 
 from people's conversation, and some Latin 
 wrote a book, now unfortunately lost, under the 
 piquant title of De Jocis Ciceronis. The great 
 age of such collections began, however, with the 
 Renaissance, when Poggio the Florentine collected
 
 Books in General 
 
 his " facetiae." My own extracts from Poggio 
 are included in a German collection of 1603, all 
 written in Latin, which gives also the " facetiae " 
 of other wits, notably of Nicodemus Frischlin 
 of Balingen. This man was a German scholar of 
 exceptional brilliance who finally, on being in- 
 carcerated for the last of many escapades, broke 
 his neck trying to escape. We have no such 
 University professors of classics now. " Ana " 
 so-called begin with the Scaligerana, which gave 
 the drastic conversation of the younger Scaliger 
 as recorded by two of his disciples. The success 
 of this led to a rush in France. Every one who 
 had known an eminent man deceased rushed out 
 with a volume of table-talk ; Tkuana, Perroniana, 
 etc. The Sorberiana " sive excerpta ex ore 
 Samuelis Sorbiere " was famous in its day, but I 
 find it very dull. Much the best collection is 
 Menagiana, " Bon Mots, Rencontres Agreables, 
 Pensees Judicieuses, et Observations Curieuses 
 de M. Menage," of which the second edition (my 
 copy) is dated 1694-5. This man was a scholar, 
 knew everybody and had a sharp tongue : he is 
 extremely good reading, though, nowadays, very 
 little read. The contents of both of these books 
 are arranged (as is Butler's) under subject- 
 headings, in alphabetical order. The same order 
 is observed in Selden's Table-Talk, the next best 
 book of the kind to Boswell in our tongue. It 
 was published after Selden's death by his private 
 secretary and is full of extraordinarily sensible 
 and witty things. And, unlike many wits, 
 136
 
 Table-Talk and Jest Books 
 
 Selden always possessed a sense of responsibility. 
 He remarked himself (under heading " Wit," 
 as he did not realize) that 
 
 " He that lets fly all he knows and thinks may 
 by chance be satyrically witty. Honesty some- 
 times keeps a man from growing rich, and civility 
 from being witty." 
 
 Few of the wits whose sayings are collected are so 
 scrupulous. Our other classical example in the 
 kind is Coleridge's Table-Talk, which is full of fine 
 criticism, funny stories, and good epigrams. 
 
 These collections shade off into the ordinary 
 jest book. After all, there is no clear division 
 between stories told by a dead man and stories 
 collected and published by a living one, between 
 stories about one man and stories about fifty 
 different men. When the new learning was still 
 new, men had a mania for collecting pointed 
 anecdotes about the eminent. The fattest book 
 of the kind I know is Casper Ens's Epidorpidum, 
 published at Cologne in the early seventeenth 
 century. It is full of the remarks of Alexander 
 to Diogenes and Pope Innocent to St. Vitus and 
 the repartees of King Pyrrhus of Epirus to a 
 recalcitrant phalanx. Right on into the eigh- 
 teenth century works with titles like Elite de 
 Bon-Mots, and full of such historical personages, 
 were popular on the Continent. English jest 
 books were perhaps more local and contemporary 
 
 137
 
 Books in General 
 
 in their references. Our eighteenth-century an- 
 cestors were addicted to anecdotes about Mr. 
 Quin and Mr. Foote and what the Duke of 
 Wharton said to the Bishop. In our own time 
 the larger, if not the smaller, public still shows 
 some demand for collections of anecdotes of this 
 sort : and popular weeklies of the Answers and 
 Tit-Bits type usually seem to find it desirable to 
 print columns of stories about Henry Irving, Mr. 
 Gladstone, and such people. But it is a long way 
 from Tit-Bits to Samuel Butler : which shows 
 where one may land oneself if one does not know 
 where to draw a firm line when shading-off is 
 apparently gradual. I cannot review Butler at 
 this time of day ; but there are very few books 
 existing which contain more sense to the square 
 inch than this. Though the worst of his books 
 is good reading, the Note-Books is as certainly his 
 finest book as BoswelFs Johnson is the finest of 
 Johnson's. 
 
 Stephen Phillips 
 
 THE announcements of Stephen Phillips's 
 death must have carried many people's 
 thoughts backward. Me personally it 
 took back to a time, years ago, when I was in 
 the first flush of my youthful beauty and sit- 
 ting out at a country dance. Coloured lamps 
 burned between boughs, trees gently swished 
 138
 
 Stephen Phillips 
 
 under a summer sky, the sound of violins and 
 the glide of many feet penetrated softly from a 
 distance ; and a partner, whose face was shadowy 
 pale in the faint light, sat clasping her knees, 
 looking out into the night, and talking in a deep 
 ecstatic voice of Marpessa, Herod, and Paolo and 
 Francesca. It was not merely that she thought 
 that I was that sort of person : the same thing 
 was happening in every county in England. 
 Phillips had the biggest boom that any English 
 poet has had for a generation. The extravagance 
 of the eulogies seems very strange now. There 
 was scarcely a critic who did not lose his balance. 
 I have just been looking up some of these pane- 
 gyrics, and the pitch of them makes one feel a 
 little sadly for a man who outlived so great and 
 so early a fame. The history of literature was 
 ransacked for comparisons. Chapman, Webster, 
 Wordsworth, Shakespeare himself were brought 
 in : and almost the most modest of the assessors 
 was Mr. William Archer, who described Phillips 
 as " the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of 
 Milton." I remember the Daily Mail devoting 
 its magazine page to a description of the poet, 
 in the course of which it explained, with charac- 
 teristic love of figures, that here was a man who 
 had discovered how to make .1000 a year out 
 of poetry. But it did not last. The climax 
 of Phillips's success came with Paolo and Fran- 
 cesca ; the subsequent plays were received with 
 a diminuendo of warmth ; and in the last few 
 years he was comparatively ignored. 
 
 139
 
 Books in General 
 
 The early adoration was absurd but not in- 
 comprehensible. It was due, one might say, 
 to the fact that Phillips was not an original 
 writer. Much used to be made of a certain 
 trick he had of accenting occasional lines of 
 blank verse in a strange manner : on the strength 
 of this he was treated as a revolutionary inno- 
 vator in English prosody. In reality, in spite of 
 this one peculiarity, he was anything but an 
 innovator. He had an ear for the magniloquent 
 progress of Milton's verse and the crooning music 
 of Tennyson's ; he had a great facility for repro- 
 ducing them ; and to those who are susceptible 
 only to artistic effects which (though they are 
 unconscious of it) remind them of effects pre- 
 viously experienced, he seemed, therefore, to be a 
 consummate artist. He gave them precisely 
 what they had learnt to desire and expect from a 
 poet, the familiar splendours and the familiar 
 silences, the familiar agonies and the familiar 
 tendernesses, the scents, the flowers, the gems, the 
 old words with their unmistakable associations, 
 the brilliant single lines, with here and there an 
 alliteration and here and there an onomatopoeia. 
 His work was not, of course, a mere compost. 
 He added something. His emotions, though 
 not deep, were genuine enough ; he had a pretty 
 fancy ; and he had a considerable knowledge of 
 how to produce effects on the stage. Paolo and 
 Francesca was certainly in every way superior 
 to most of the other attempts which have been 
 made in our time at stage-plays in blank verse. 
 140
 
 Stephen Phillips 
 
 It was effective in the theatre. One remembers 
 the excitement about the skilful ending : the 
 murder behind the scenes, the bodies brought in, 
 the murderer's revulsion : 
 
 / did not know the dead could have such hair. 
 Hide them. They look like children fast asleep. 
 
 But those who did not shrink from comparing it 
 with Romeo and Juliet omitted to notice the same 
 deficiencies as appeared in all his work. He was 
 largely derivative and there was very little hard 
 brain work behind his verse. 
 
 Herod, Ulysses, and Nero were all less well 
 made : the last two were panoramas. In all 
 three the author depended on succulent or 
 flamboyant " purple patches " for his effects, 
 descriptions too full of redundant metaphor 
 and violent outbursts of picturesque but too 
 flimsy rhetoric. There was little characteriza- 
 tion in them, the persons were puppets in the 
 hands of the contriver of stage spectacles : they 
 were carried off by brilliant and exotic scenery 
 and costumes, by the romantic language, and 
 by the real and skilful, if conventional, melody 
 of the verse. All the best qualities of Stephen 
 Phillips, the qualities that gave people a thrill 
 they were unaccustomed to in the theatre of his 
 time, are quintessentialized in Herod's megalo- 
 maniac speeches and in the oratorical Mar- 
 Hi
 
 Books in General 
 
 lowesque remark that one of the suitors in 
 Ulysses made to Penelope : 
 
 Thou hast caught splendour from the sailless sea 
 And mystery from the many stars outwatched. 
 
 His defects were observed by few when he was a 
 popular dramatist : but those readers who only 
 know him by his later work will misjudge him 
 if they think that he never had more power than 
 he showed in that. His more recent volumes, 
 written in ill-health, would never have got him a 
 reputation. Here and there the old bravura 
 appeared, and there is a short lyric in the volume 
 of 1913 which is certainly equal to anything in 
 the early book of poems with which he made his 
 name and in which he showed signs of contact 
 with the " movement " of the 'nineties. But 
 from most of these later poems the life had gone, 
 leaving the imitative structure naked to the eye. 
 His last volume, Panama and other Poems, was 
 issued just before he died by his original pub- 
 lisher, Mr. John Lane ; and the way in which 
 he had succumbed to his influences was very 
 evident. Lines on the Canal such as 
 
 Chagres by Dam stupendous of Gatun 
 
 not merely remind one of Milton but are exact 
 mechanical reproductions of Milton. 
 
 Incidentally the difficulties of literary biog- 
 raphy are illustrated by his obituary notices. 
 142
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole 
 
 My Daily News gave his age as forty-nine, my 
 Times gave it as fifty-one ; and looking into the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica to see which of these 
 estimates it would confirm, I found that it 
 alleged him to be forty-seven. The Encyclopedia 
 says that he was at Queens' College, Cambridge, 
 when he joined Mr. Benson's company ; the 
 Times that he was cramming at Scoones'. When 
 we have this conflict of evidence about a con- 
 temporary who was known personally to hundreds 
 of people in London, where are we with Eliza- 
 bethans and Romans ? Personally I believe that, 
 in the matter of birth-dates, nothing is really 
 reliable not even a man's own statement 
 except public registers. 
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole 
 
 IF a gentleman in Calabria digs up with a 
 spade a hitherto unknown fragment of the 
 obscure Latin historian P. Pomponius 
 Fatto there is great excitement about it, and 
 research congratulates itself upon its achieve- 
 ments. I can quite appreciate the feeling. 
 All treasure-trove is exciting. The smallest 
 recovery from the long-buried past is worth 
 having ; it may, in itself, fill a gap somewhere 
 and it encourages the hope of greater finds. 
 But why not make just as much of a palaver 
 about Dr. Paget Toynbee's disinterment of 
 
 H3
 
 Books in General 
 
 nearly a hundred " new " letters by the poet 
 Gray ? The new letters are included in The 
 Correspondence of Gray, Walpole, West, and 
 Ashton (Oxford University Press, 2 vols.) ; and 
 they were found in the collection of Captain 
 Sir F. E. Waller, who was recently killed in 
 action, and to whose memory the volume is 
 dedicated. Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard 
 West, and Thomas Ashton formed a " Quadruple 
 Alliance " at Eton. West went on to Oxford, 
 the other three to Cambridge. We get first of 
 all an exchange between all four ; then West 
 dies, in his twenties ; then, years afterwards, 
 relations with Ashton are broken ; and, finally, 
 there is a long series that passed between Walpole 
 and Gray up to the time of the poet's death in 
 1771. In all there are 248 letters ; of these 153 
 were written by Gray, eighty-nine of which have 
 never been published before. Others have never 
 before been printed in full, and few have escaped 
 maltreatment by previous editors. Their errors 
 ranged from deliberate alteration, truncation, 
 and blending to bad transcription and unintelli- 
 gent acceptance. How easily the most comic 
 errors may creep into a text where each editor 
 neglects to use, or has not access to, original 
 sources may be shown by the history of a single 
 word. Gray wrote a Latin poem about the god 
 of Love in which one line began " Ludentem fuge." 
 This was printed by Miss Berry as " Sudentem 
 fuge " ; and this has been " corrected " by subse- 
 quent editors into " Sudantem fuge " ! 
 144
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole 
 
 The characters of the correspondents come out 
 very clearly. Even when, just after they have 
 left school, they are all writing rather affectedly 
 (and with a plethora of classical quotation), 
 Ashton is obviously the one fundamentally 
 insincere member of the group. He is hyper- 
 self-conscious, nastily artificial. Later on he 
 even refers in Joseph Surface's very own words 
 to his " noble sentiments " : this was clearly 
 the man to make, by his double-dealing, the 
 temporary breach between Gray and Walpole, 
 and, ultimately, to compel Walpole to cast him 
 off by his incivility when Walpole was no longer 
 useful to him. Richard West, son of an Irish 
 Lord Chancellor, has no apparent defect save 
 excessive seriousness. There is a touch of the 
 priggish mixed with the high-mindedness and 
 generosity of this able young invalid ; but one 
 can understand Gray's devotion to him. Some 
 of the poetry of his here given (he appeared 
 in Dodsley's Miscellany by the way) is surpris- 
 ingly good. He was the Arthur Hallam of the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 The Walpole letters are, as always, unsur- 
 passable of their kind. His undergraduate 
 letter (in parody of Addison's descriptions of 
 Italy) relating a journey from London to Cam- 
 bridge, is admirable ; but the letters describing 
 his continental tour with Gray are better, and 
 those, still later, about the beau monde of Paris 
 are perfect. There is a peculiar charm too about 
 
 K 145
 
 Books in General 
 
 the correspondence with Gray as to the details 
 and publication of his works, the half-solemn, 
 half-whimsical concentration on the tiny anti- 
 quarian details to which each was addicted, the 
 eager little controversies and explorations, the 
 odd little jokes. But though Gray, taking his 
 correspondence as a whole, considering both 
 volume, range, and formal excellence, cannot 
 contest Walpole's position as the greatest of 
 English letter-writers, there is a flavour about 
 his letters that makes them peculiarly delightful. 
 Walpole writes fully dressed, though with ex- 
 quisite manner ; Gray writes naturally, and 
 without obvious reserve, sometimes even gam- 
 bolling. There may be people, familiar with 
 Gray only through his elevated and sombre 
 verse, who fancy him an exceedingly self-con- 
 tained and formal man, who feel (like the person 
 who greatly amused him by addressing him as 
 " The Rev. T. Gray") that he simply must have 
 been a divine. There were certainly contem- 
 poraries of his who met him and got the impres- 
 sion that he was constitutionally grave, reticent, 
 aloof. His letters show that he was anything 
 but that to his friends. The author of the 
 Elegy habitually " played the goat." There 
 are a whole string of skit letters here : in one he 
 writes to Walpole as " Honner'd Nurse," address- 
 ing the illiterate screed " to mie Nuss att 
 London " ; in another he wallows in Oriental 
 imagery about the dew of the morning ; in 
 another he applies to stagnant Cambridge a 
 146
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole 
 
 whole long passage from Isaiah describing de- 
 serted Babylon, the home of dragons and haunt 
 of screech-owls. He had a great habit of ending 
 his letters with something openly idiotic. Once 
 he bursts out with " Pray, did you ever see an 
 elephant ? " ; another time his peroration is : 
 
 " The Assizes are just over. I was there ; but 
 I a'nt to be transported. Adieu ! " 
 
 and another excursion concludes with a ludicrous 
 burlesque of the type of commonplaces usually 
 to be found in letters : 
 
 " There is a curious woman here that spins Glass, 
 and makes short Aprons and furbelow'd petti- 
 coats of it, a very genteel wear for summer, & 
 discover's all the motions of the limbs to great 
 advantage. She is a successour of Jack, the 
 Aple dumpling Spinner's : my Duck has eat a 
 Snail &c. : & I am yours sincerely T. G." 
 
 Those who think of poets as persons without 
 humour who live in a permanent exaltation and 
 are quite unlike reasonable beings will be shocked 
 with Gray's remarks when he had, to the pub- 
 lisher's alarm, withdrawn a poem from his 
 forthcoming small volume : 
 
 " but to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my 
 work should be mistaken for the works of a flea 
 or a pismire, I promised to send him an equal 
 
 H7
 
 Books in General 
 
 weight of poetry or prose : so, since my return 
 hither, I put up about two ounces of stuff : viz. 
 The Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin . . . with 
 all this I shall be but a shrimp of an author." 
 
 On a night nine years before this, General Wolfe, 
 as his boat crept towards the Quebec bank of St. 
 Lawrence, had recited the Elegy to his companions 
 and told them that he had rather have written 
 that poem than take Quebec. 
 
 Gray's judgments on other authors (though he 
 was unjust to the more fermentative kind of 
 Frenchman) were uniformly good. He suspected 
 Ossian, but hoped he was a fraud for the sake of 
 the jest. If, he said, Macpherson had done it 
 all to hoax fools, " I would undertake a journey 
 into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing 
 him." He read Boswell's early book on Corsica 
 and almost prophetically observed : 
 
 " The pamphlet proves what I have always 
 maintained, that any fool may write a most 
 valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us 
 what he heard and saw with veracity." 
 
 In politics he was interested only mildly, but he 
 liked to gossip about them. " Do oblige me," 
 he writes to Walpole, 
 
 " with a change in the Ministry : I mean, some- 
 thing one may tell ? that looks as if it were near at 
 148
 
 A Horrible Bookseller 
 
 hand ; or if there is no truth to be had, then a 
 good likely falsehood for the same purpose. I 
 am sorry to be so reduced." 
 
 " A good likely falsehood " : is it not in per- 
 petual demand ? 
 
 A Horrible Bookseller 
 
 PEOPLE often complain that booksellers 
 know too little about the goods they sell. 
 If only, the argument is, books were sold 
 by men of taste, familiar with their contents, the 
 public would buy more good literature : as 
 things are, the blind bookseller leads the blind 
 customer. There is something in this. An 
 educated bookseller can actually educate other 
 people. Many intelligent young persons reach 
 the age of twenty-one without having met a 
 single person with the habit of good reading, 
 and do not " get on to " literature because it has 
 never been suggested to them that they will like 
 it. Booksellers may act as teachers. There are 
 booksellers, though not many, who make a 
 practice of " nursing " promising young cus- 
 tomers, gradually cultivating their taste until 
 they become confirmed book-lovers and book- 
 buyers. One such complained to me not long 
 ago that he had had scores of likely colts taken 
 away from him by Lord Kitchener, and did not 
 
 149
 
 Books in General 
 
 know how many of them would come back. 
 That is an ideal sort of man for the trade in 
 modern literature. One might say, in fact, that 
 in a perfect world (from the book-buyer's point 
 of view) the dealers in new books would know 
 everything about books, and the dealers in old 
 books would know nothing whatever about 
 them. The point of this last subsection is 
 obvious, but the other day I had an experience 
 that greatly fortified my view. I had often met 
 the second-hand bookseller whose learning pre- 
 vented one from buying anything cheap from 
 him ; I have now encountered one whose interest 
 in his subject prevented one from buying any- 
 thing at all. 
 
 He was not so much a really learned man as a 
 man with what is called "an inexhaustible fund 
 of information." It is quite possible that if he had 
 had a real rarity in his shop he would have known 
 nothing about it. But about the promiscuity 
 of his reading there was no doubt. When I 
 entered the shop he was seated at a table absorb- 
 ing something that looked as if it might be the 
 Travels of Livingstone or Speke. His spectacles 
 were on his forehead, his elbows on the table, 
 his hands in his hair ; and his beard almost 
 touched his book. " Do you mind if I go 
 through ? " I said. " Sairtainly," he said, be- 
 traying his origin. " And what may you be 
 interested in ? " "Oh ... books," I replied 
 vaguely. " That is a verra conseederable cate- 
 150
 
 A Horrible Bookseller 
 
 gory," he observed. Was it poetry I liked ? 
 he went on. I murmured " Yes," and he led me 
 to the place where he kept it. But before I had 
 got my fingers on a book he made it evident that 
 it was he and not I that was going to have the 
 " look round." Here, for example, was a volume 
 of Kirke White. Had I ever read him ? How 
 wonderful was that hymn (quoted at length) of 
 his ! What a career ! He was a butcher's son 
 and a lawyer's clerk. He had a gift for mathe- 
 matics, and they gave him a sizarship at Cam- 
 bridge. He would have been one of the greatest 
 figures in English literature had he lived. Was I 
 interested in Italian books ? Well, then, perhaps 
 I would like a good copy of (! ! !) / Promessi Sposi. 
 It was extraordinary the number of copies of 
 that book which must have been printed. But 
 there was no supply without a demand. 
 
 I tried in vain to check the torrent with some 
 sort of remark which, though polite, might, 
 nevertheless, have an air of finality. It was no 
 good. My fingers never got beyond touching 
 the back of a book before he had taken down 
 another, pulled me round, and fixed me with a 
 glittering eye for which the Ancient Mariner 
 himself would have been tempted to offer a large 
 sum. Godwin, now. Did I like Caleb Williams ? 
 Yes, of course ! But had I read his History of 
 England F It was by way of being a reply to 
 Clarendon. Clarendon was a great writer. But 
 he was not impartial. And the worst of it was
 
 Books in General 
 
 that he seemed to be impartial when he was most 
 unfair. When he was sacrificing everything for 
 his King he little thought how his loyalty would 
 be rewarded. He was too moral for Charles II ; 
 but, what was worse, he kept the purse-strings 
 too tight. He would not give him money for 
 one of his mistresses. Was it Barbara Palmer ? 
 No, it was not Barbara Palmer, and it was not 
 Nelly Gwyn. At any rate, it was one of them. 
 And when, in the end, the grant was made to her, 
 she died before she got the money ! 
 
 This appeared to amuse the old man. When 
 he had laughed himself out, it was to resume 
 with some work, dated 1784, which contained a 
 recipe for making a Prime Minister : the chief 
 ingredients being hypocrisy, mendacity, corrup- 
 tion, and cant. This opened up a large field of 
 speculation. Who was Premier in 1784 ? Why, 
 of course, it was young Billy Pitt ! (" Yes," I 
 said.) No, it was Rockingham. (" Yes," I 
 said.) No, it wasn't ; it was Bute. So it pro- 
 ceeded. I spent, in all, two hours in that shop ; 
 in the course of which time I had stolen glances 
 at about six worthless books. For all I know it 
 was as full of gems of purest ray serene as are the 
 dark unfathomed caves of ocean. I left without 
 making a single purchase, and the proprietor 
 seemed quite hurt at this unfriendly response to 
 his attentions. How that old man earns his 
 living I don't know. I think he must have 
 private means. But in future I shall have a 
 152
 
 The Troubles of a Catholic 
 
 warmer feeling than ever for the sort of red- 
 nosed second-hand bookseller, now, unfortunately, 
 not very common, who knows only the outsides 
 of books, and who sits smoking on a heap of 
 rubbish in the corner of his shop with the air of a 
 tramp resting on a roadside pile of stones. 
 
 The Troubles of a Catholic 
 
 BEING at the moment in bed with influenza, 
 I was at once incapable of intellectual 
 effort and in need of spiritual sustenance. 
 I had therefore been reading a little Theology. 
 The more modern works of the kind in my 
 possession are at once too profound in thought 
 and too arid in phraseology, so I worked 
 rapidly backwards. One never knows what one 
 is going to come across, and in the beginning of 
 A Just Discharge to Dr. Stillingflee? s Unjust 
 Charge of Idolatry Against the Church of Rome 
 with a Discovery of the Vanity of his late Defense 
 in his Pretended Answer to a Book Entitled 
 Catholicks No Idolaters By way of Dialogue 
 Between Eunomius, a Conformist, and Catharinus, 
 a Nonconformist, I struck a very pathetic 
 thing. The work was written, I believe, 
 by the Catholic controversialist Godden, and 
 published in 1677. At that time it was diffi- 
 cult for Catholics to get anything out in 
 England, and this work was published at Paris. 
 
 153
 
 Books in General 
 
 Hence the unhappy author's statement about 
 " Errata " : 
 
 " The English Press being watch'd of late, as 
 the Orchard of the Hesperides was of old, and a 
 necessity arising from thence of making use of a 
 Paris Printer, who understands not a word of 
 English, the Reader will have no cause to wonder, 
 if he sometimes meet with ant for and, bu for 
 but, te for the, is for it, tit for tis, wish for with, 
 etc., and oftentimes with false Pointings, words 
 unduly joined, and syllables un-artificially divided 
 at the end of lines, as Ro-me, appropria-U, and 
 the like. I can assure him, the Correction of 
 the Press cost little less pains than the writing 
 of the Treatise." 
 
 In that century a great many English books were 
 printed on the Continent, at Paris, Douai, and 
 elsewhere ; and the situation thus candidly 
 explained must have been a common one. A 
 collection of English books printed abroad, which 
 would be interesting for other reasons, might 
 also have an added interest as a repository of 
 comic misprints. But my disease must have 
 brought me very low that I can spend my 
 time thinking of that. 
 
 '54
 
 The Bible as Raw Material 
 
 The Bible as Raw Material 
 
 MR. GEORGE MOORE'S new novel, 
 The Brook Kerith, is a Biblical story. 
 Mr. Moore has adopted the legend 
 which says that Our Lord survived the Cruci- 
 fixion. He is taken away alive and joins a colony 
 of the Essenes, complications afterwards arising 
 with St. Paul. The book is named after the site 
 of the Essene settlement ; Mr. Moore personally 
 toured the Holy Land looking for a really eligible 
 position. The story opens with a description of 
 the boyhood of Joseph of Arimathea : a beginning 
 which at least avoids the reproach of being 
 obvious. 
 
 One might almost say that literature about 
 Biblical personages can only hope to be good if 
 its writers either deal with episodes that are not 
 related in the Bible or if they tell the Bible 
 stones from an entirely novel and unconventional 
 point of view. Anatole France's story about 
 Pontius Pilate, The Procurator of Judaea, has this 
 last quality, and owes its success mainly to the 
 odd and unexpected angle from which the subject 
 is approached. The unusual angle we may at 
 least expect from Mr. George Moore. Attempts 
 at covering the same ground as the Bible, at 
 amplifying an already fine thing, are almost 
 predestined to failure. One can understand the 
 
 155
 
 Books in General 
 
 temptation. A modern writer comes across a 
 noble story or a fine lyric passage, and thinks, 
 " What a scandal that this should be buried 
 away out of sight in the Old Testament ! It is 
 just the theme for me." The lure is so strong 
 that one contemporary poet has attempted, and 
 failed (through not ignominiously), to rewrite 
 David's Lament for Jonathan, and another has 
 endeavoured to adapt the dramatic poem Job 
 to the modern stage. It was a lamentable 
 affair, redeemed only from complete incon- 
 spicuousness by a highly incongruous chorus 
 inspired by Swinburne and by an arresting entry 
 of Satan with the salutation : 
 
 Ho Job ! How goes it ? 
 
 No modern but I have not thoroughly ransacked 
 my memory has really succeeded in rewriting a 
 Bible story. The most striking of recent efforts 
 was Mr. Sturge Moore's Judith. Mr. Robert 
 Trevelyan's poem, The Foolishness of Solomon 
 (a title that, for some vague reason, I always 
 resent), belonged to the other class of works 
 dealing with Biblical personages (though he 
 brought in a Chinese mandarin as well), but not 
 on the Biblical lines. The most recent effort at 
 elaborate treatment of the New Testament story 
 was, I suppose, Maeterlinck's Mary Magdalene. 
 But in spite of its unorthodoxy and the novelty 
 (at least as far as the Bible is concerned, for some 
 of it was borrowed from a German) of the inci-
 
 The Bible as Raw Material 
 
 dents, that play scarcely competed, in point of 
 dialogue or dramatic force, with the more old- 
 fashioned narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
 and John. 
 
 Milton is the one English writer who has done 
 anything with Biblical materials on a large scale. 
 It will be observed, however, that in Paradise 
 Lost he enormously elaborated the story in 
 Genesis ; that his Adam and Eve are somewhat 
 colourless ; and that the finest parts of his poem 
 are not directly concerned with " man's first 
 disobedience and the fruit," but deal with 
 regions into which the author of Genesis did not 
 penetrate. In Samson Agonistes he did take a 
 story from the Bible and make out of it a work 
 of art equal to almost anything in our language. 
 Byron's Cain might mostly have been about 
 Nietzsche for all the connexion it has with the 
 Bible : but it is not very good. Almost every 
 fine subject in the Scriptures must have been 
 attacked at one time or another. There have 
 been a few good short Biblical poems, like 
 Browning's Saul. But the only other really 
 reputable Biblical poem on a large scale that I 
 can think of is Charles Wells's Joseph and His 
 Brethren, which has strength as a story and some 
 passages of fine imagery. Wells belonged to the 
 generation of Keats and lived on into our own 
 time. He was an engineer, stopped writing 
 when young, and was admired by Rossetti and 
 Swinburne. His poem however cannot really
 
 Books in General 
 
 be considered such good reading as the Bible 
 account of the same story. One of the episodes 
 that came within his purview, that of Joseph 
 and Potiphar's wife, has been a subject for poets 
 in all ages. The last endeavour that I can recall 
 to make something out of it was a somewhat 
 bejewelled one of Sir Edwin Arnold's. The 
 longest, I should think, is Joshua Sylvester's 
 intolerably tedious series of couplets entitled 
 The Maiden's Blush. Why he conferred that 
 title upon such a poem I don't know, unless he 
 was thinking of what might happen to the less 
 robust of his female readers. Those parts of 
 Holy Writ which are of purely historical interest 
 have not been freely drawn on by English 
 writers. I don't remember that much has been 
 done with the Maccabees, and the chronicles of 
 the Kings of Israel, which supplied Racine with a 
 subject for his Athalie, have left English writers 
 cold. Jehu drove furiously, Jeroboam the son 
 of Nebat made Israel to sin, and Rehoboam 
 afflicted his people with scorpions instead of 
 whips ; but their violence does not seem to fire 
 the poetic imagination as does that of Herod, 
 about whom we know very little more. But 
 Herod, of course, was fond of the Russian ballet ; 
 which brings him closer to us. 
 
 158
 
 How to avoid Bad English 
 
 How to avoid Bad English 
 
 GOOD books on the practice of writing are 
 rare. Sir A. Quiller-Couch's On the Art 
 of Writing is extraordinarily good. It 
 contains the lectures he delivered at Cambridge 
 just before the war ; and even readers who do 
 not desire to write at all will find Sir Arthur's 
 jokes very amusing and his criticisms, general 
 and particular, sound and (what is more unusual) 
 new. He touches a great variety of subjects, 
 though always in some relation to the main 
 theme. He is especially illuminating on the 
 Authorized Version, -and on Homer's skill in 
 dealing with the " Primary Difficulty of Verse " 
 that is to say, the difficulty of filling up the 
 interstices between highly emotional passages 
 without lapsing into dull prosiness. His most 
 diverting chapter is that on what he calls " Jar- 
 gon," which he distinguishes from Journalese. 
 The distinction he draws may be appreciated if I 
 concoct examples of both commodities. Writing 
 in " Jargon " I might say : 
 
 " In the case of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch 
 I am proud and happy to associate myself 
 in the fullest sense with a work of this 
 useful, elevating, instructive, and educative 
 character." 
 
 159
 
 Books in General 
 
 Writing in Journalese, as he defines it, I might 
 say : 
 
 " ' Q.'s ' brilliant book goes to the root of the 
 matter. It strikes home. He is out to slay the 
 dragons of bad writing. He burns them with 
 the fire of his passion. He lashes them with the 
 scourge of his invective. He tears them to 
 shreds and tatters with the shrapnel of his ridi- 
 cule. He will not sheathe the sword until . . ." 
 
 Yes. . . . The first kind consists of woolly, 
 indefinite words, of redundancies and shapeless 
 prolixities ; the man who writes the second is 
 trying to produce what he believes to be " litera- 
 ture " by means of imagery and rhythmical 
 movement. Sir Arthur says that the greatest 
 propagators of Jargon are public bodies, politi- 
 cians, and so on ; but he recognizes that jour- 
 nalists also use it. The two things, in fact, are 
 often seen in one article. I conceive that there 
 might be passages which would fall into either 
 of Sir Arthur's classes. But there is a clear 
 difference between bad sentences produced by an 
 effort to say something and those produced by 
 an effort to say something vividly. All bad 
 writers, however, have common defects, and 
 these are dealt with in other chapters. 
 
 Every one who has thought about the art at all 
 has discovered for himself the truths that Sir 
 Arthur tabulates. One must aim at accuracy 
 1 60
 
 How to avoid Bad English 
 
 (a word that covers almost everything that is 
 needful) and at clarity ; one must, normally, 
 prefer the concrete to the abstract word, and 
 the short word to the long ; and one must avoid 
 the superfluous adjective. How well we know 
 these rules ; how certain we are of their validity ; 
 how feebly we struggle to obey them ! At all 
 times the ready-made sentence, the makeshift 
 epithet, the pot-shot image must have been 
 ready to the hand. In the present age, when we 
 live in a honeycomb of print and begin each day 
 by exposing ourselves, before, during, or after 
 breakfast, to masses of the weakest English we 
 can find, the job of writing well is more difficult 
 than ever. Our fluency is the measure of our 
 accursed memory. We have bales of phrases 
 ready for every experience we describe ; our 
 pigeon-holes are stuffed with dead metaphors and 
 bogus synonyms ; and we are always ready to say 
 in six words what ought to be said in two. Every 
 time we sit down at a desk or open our lips to 
 speak, the nymphs Jargonia and Journalesia, 
 besieging us as the sylphs besieged St. Anthony, 
 hold out their hands full of glittering treasures 
 which will save us the trouble of thinking. 
 Usually we do not even see them ; we find the 
 fatal gifts in our hands and employ them without 
 remembering their origin. And the descent to 
 hell is rapid. 
 
 It is good to revise : to correct, to improve, 
 and to delete. Few, even of the most careful 
 
 L 161
 
 Books in General 
 
 writers, find their proof-sheets free from trite 
 and superfluous words which they would be 
 ashamed to publish. It is better still to think 
 long before writing, to make sure that one's 
 thoughts are clear-cut before one gives them a 
 visible form. That habit it is a writer's duty to 
 acquire. But it does not do to be incessantly 
 and acutely conscious of the qualities of good 
 writing and the difficulty of securing them. 
 That way madness lies. Sometimes, to a man 
 who broods overmuch on these things, every 
 phrase will appear a cliche, and every word a 
 dummy. " God help me ! " he will moan, " I 
 have called the sun ' bright ' and the grass 
 ' green ' ! Millions of men before me have 
 written ' bright sun ' and ' green grass.' I know 
 I did not think freshly and independently at 
 these objects. I put the adjectives down 
 mechanically. I have merely heard that the 
 grass was green. Why haven't I looked at it 
 through my own eyes ? If a real writer looked 
 at it, I don't for a moment suppose that its 
 greenness would be the attribute which would 
 impinge most forcibly upon him. Very likely 
 it isn't green at all." This, I say, does not 
 do. I don't suggest that there is anything 
 peculiar about grass which should make a 
 novel statement about it impossible. In fact, 
 Swinburne said that grass is hair, and Mr. 
 Chesterton has very probably said that it is 
 red. I merely use " green grass " as an ex- 
 ample of the sort of thing that an exaggerated 
 162
 
 Woodland Creatures 
 
 fastidiousness might lead a man to question in 
 his own work. 
 
 There remains one property of good prose that 
 no amount of painstaking or instruction can 
 produce. That is rhythm. It is, indeed, re- 
 markable that one of the most elaborate analyses 
 of prose rhythms hitherto made was made by a 
 writer whose own prose is anything but musical. 
 Either Providence has given a man an ear or it 
 has not ; if it has not, he will not write great 
 prose. But his prose will be better in proportion 
 as he obeys the principles of good writing as 
 " Q." enunciates them. One suggestion more 
 might be useful for him. That is, that he will be 
 well advised in making his uneuphonious sen- 
 tences short if he desires his writing to be an 
 efficient instrument of persuasion. 
 
 Woodland Creatures 
 
 " T^ARNASSUS in Piccadilly," is the head- 
 
 I ^ line I see in my paper. Follows an 
 
 JL account of a " seance " promoted by 
 
 Miss Elizabeth Asquith in aid of the Star and 
 
 Garter Home. Ten or twelve poets read works 
 
 of their own to an audience of four hundred who 
 
 had paid a guinea apiece. Outside the house a 
 
 large concourse watched the poets arrive. There 
 
 were Mr. Yeats, Sir O. Seaman, Mr. Hewlett, 
 
 163
 
 Books in General 
 
 Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. de la Mare, 
 Mrs. Woods, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. W. H. Davies, 
 who is described as looking like " one of his own 
 woodland creatures." I read that one of the 
 reciters intoned, that another was bluff, and 
 that a third ought to get somebody else to read 
 for him ; also that Mr. Birrell, the chairman, 
 sat with his head buried in his hands until the 
 arrival of the first comic turn, Mr. Belloc's. But 
 I wish I had been there : for the account does 
 not tell me how it was really done. 
 
 Did the poets sit in the audience and march up 
 to the platform one by one as their turns came ? 
 Did they stand out of sight, each gliding in 
 singly, and then retiring into the antral seclusion 
 of the wings when ten minutes was up ? Or did 
 they rather, as I prefer to think, sit on the 
 platform, the whole dozen of them in a semi- 
 circle, listening to, and discreetly applauding, 
 each other's efforts. I am sorry I missed it. 
 Some of them will have been exalted by a sense 
 of the holiness of their work ; their eyes will 
 have looked out across the audience with a 
 prophetic and otherworldly fire. Others will 
 have been uneasy and not knowing (unless a 
 table was thoughtfully provided) what to do 
 with their feet. And one or two, I think, will 
 have been preoccupied with the control of their 
 own faces, which, on such an occasion, must 
 have " strained at the leash of dignified de- 
 portment." 
 164
 
 Woodland Creatures 
 
 Why is it that so many people feel awkward 
 when they are present at a public recitation by a 
 poet of his own verse ; and why should writers 
 shrink from such recitations ? Amusement on 
 such occasions is closely allied to sheepishness : 
 both spring from a feeling of inappropriateness, a 
 sense that " the fitness of things " is being 
 violated. We are accustomed, of course, to the 
 other kind of recitation, the reading by an in- 
 terpreter who is not a creator, and who is not 
 exposing his heart in public : the prize child and 
 the local elocutionist who declaims Tennyson's 
 Revenge, daintily fluttering his fingers in the air 
 when he comes to the part about the pinnace 
 which is like a bird. But our poets themselves 
 have not recited much. It was not always so. 
 " 'Omer smote his bloomin' lyre " in public ; 
 he had nowhere else to smite it, for he (pre- 
 sumably) could not write, and his audiences 
 could not read. Every composer of tribal 
 lays, from Tubal-Cain (unless his songs were 
 Lieder ohne Worte) to the Druidic harpists, sang 
 his compositions to his admiring fellows with- 
 out embarrassment ; troubadours and mediaeval 
 laureates had no objection at all to public 
 recitation. Most foreigners, one supposes, do 
 not feel so strongly as we do about it now; 
 but the timidity of Englishmen in the matter 
 is very pronounced. I am sure that nothing 
 short of the needs of a War Fund would have 
 induced some of the Piccadilly performers to 
 face the ordeal. 
 
 165
 
 Books in General 
 
 It is all a part of our national reserve, that very 
 reserve which, perhaps, accounts for the greatness 
 and volume of our poetry. In poetry our feelings 
 find an outlet. We have the habit of concealing our 
 finest sentiments and our profoundest emotions. 
 We don't mind putting them into books and then 
 running round the corner out of sight. But we 
 dislike unbosoming them viva voce in the actual 
 physical presence of strangers. Our dislike of 
 " scenes " covers equally the public row in a 
 restaurant and the public demonstration of our 
 yearnings after virtue and the stirrings of our 
 hearts when we hear the nightingale or listen to 
 the Atlantic at night. We sit bolt upright at 
 concerts ; look at pictures with our mouths 
 set like vices ; and observe " Yes, very nice " as, 
 with wistfulness in our breasts, we stand on a 
 hill and look at a wooded panorama under the 
 moon. The grotesque Englishman who stares 
 at a sunset and then laughs and says it looks like 
 a fried egg is really bolting in terror from the 
 admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts 
 of the world. So, if somebody gets up to recite 
 his most intimate feelings, we feel it as almost an 
 indecency. He is usually bashful about it him- 
 self, and unable therefore to recite with that 
 abandonment which will do his poem justice. 
 The audience, at least that part of it which is 
 most intelligent and self-conscious, feels as if it 
 were intruding. It is like eavesdropping or 
 opening a stranger's letters. And everybody is 
 conscious of the national titter in the background. 
 166
 
 Woodland Creatures 
 
 When the authors of Prize Poems at the Univer- 
 sities give the official reading of their verses, their 
 friends invariably assemble to grin in the galleries. 
 Undergraduates have still some naturalness. They 
 titter aloud, but the adult Englishman titters in 
 silence. It is reserve that brings forth the titter 
 and it is still more reserve that suppresses it ; 
 just as it is reserve that makes our soldiers sing, 
 not invocations to England, home, or glory, but 
 comic songs about cowardice and death. 
 
 The foregoing series of platitudes, slightly 
 varied in accordance with each writer's tastes 
 and talents, is invariably repeated when the 
 character of English people is under discussion. 
 But it may be that, at any rate in our attitude 
 towards poetry, we are changing. In the last 
 four or five years the habit of public readings 
 has been growing ; and some of our poets have 
 grown quite addicted to them. This may be a 
 time of transition : if the enthusiasts for recita- 
 tion keep at it hard enough, people's constraint 
 may be overcome, and it may be regarded as quite 
 an ordinary and natural thing for a man to stand 
 on a platform and, with all the passion he can 
 release and all the vocal modulation he can 
 command, chant his lyrics to congregations 
 which will yield themselves to him with all the 
 spontaneity, though less than all the gestures and 
 ejaculations, of a Welsh revivalist's converts. 
 It is a commonplace that poetry gains by being 
 spoken ; and that if verse were always read and 
 
 167
 
 Books in General 
 
 never recited, poets would be in danger of getting 
 out of touch with natural speech-rhythms. We 
 could do with a little less amusement and a little 
 more excitement ; and we might as well, if 
 cowardice or a sense of humour are the only 
 things that hold us back, hold and attend public 
 readings until we are as unselfconscious about 
 them as we are about church services or political 
 meetings. The worst of it is that poets do not 
 invariably read well, and that few persons with 
 the taste for standing on a platform and declaim- 
 ing are competent to take an author's place as 
 reciter of his work. There is such a thing as the 
 inspired reader of other people's verse ; but the 
 understanding, the inclination, and the voice 
 cannot be expected to come often together. 
 When the author himself is reciting you can at 
 least be certain that the speaker unless he is a 
 very " advanced " poet indeed understands the 
 work which he is repeating. With other per- 
 formers one always has to take one's chance. 
 From the professional reciter God save us all. 
 
 Other People's Books 
 
 E1E most people, I possess a number of 
 books which I have not read. I am not 
 referring to volumes, such as the Speculum 
 Morale of Vincent of Beauvais or the commentary 
 of (Ecolampadius on St. John's Gospel, which I 
 168
 
 Other People's Books 
 
 bought merely because they looked pleasant and 
 which nobody on earth could be expected to read. 
 I mean books in English and of comparatively 
 recent date. There is, for example, Kant's 
 Critique of Pure Reason, for which, in a weak 
 moment, I paid some shillings with the feeling 
 that, as a cogitative being, I ought not to leave 
 so notable a stone unturned. The feeling passed 
 and never came back. And there is Ranke's 
 History of the Popes up to the present undis- 
 turbed by me ; there are The Last Days of 
 Pompeii, Romola, Fittoria, Carlyle's essays on 
 Burns and Scott, What Maisie knew, What 
 Katy did, and dozens of other modern works, 
 some of which, if I live, I shall certainly read, 
 and others of which, I am sure, I shall never 
 begin. But it makes no difference. Whether 
 he has read them or not, a man's own books get, 
 in a manner, stale to him. If a book remains 
 for years unopened on one's shelves it becomes 
 increasingly difficult to read it. Yet if one finds 
 another edition of it in somebody else's house one 
 may fly to it, and, under the same conditions, one 
 may read or re-read almost anything one finds. 
 
 So it is, at the moment, with me. I am in a 
 place previously unknown to me. It is bestrewn 
 with books ; and, penned to the house^by the 
 brilliant summer weather, I have been doing 
 some miscellaneous reading. For one thing I 
 have gone solidly once more through Mr. Thomas 
 Hardy's verse. How extraordinarily good it is ! 
 
 169
 
 Books in General 
 
 And how remarkably he has gone on improving, 
 especially as a metrist. But more than ever, 
 after a heavy dose of these compressed statements 
 of his point of view, one realizes his determined 
 and unmitigated gloom. It is at its densest in 
 Wessex Poems, and in places one laughs outright 
 at it. He illustrated the book himself, his 
 drawing is naive, and the sketch of two floors 
 of a church, the pews (and two lovers) above, 
 and the skulls and cross-bones below, has an " I 
 will be grim at all costs " air about it that robs 
 it of all its horror. The story attached is a 
 neat one. The man is a consumptive about to 
 die ; he asks the woman if she loves him ? She 
 falsely says " Yes " in order to brighten his last 
 hours. He dies, and her life is ever after blighted 
 because she cannot reconcile herself to a Universe 
 in which the telling of such lies is a moral obliga- 
 tion. There is another small drama in which a 
 woman, maltreated by her husband, dies, telling 
 her old lover that she wishes she had married 
 him and that her child could have been his child, 
 and asking him to see that the brutal husband 
 does not ill-treat the child. The brutal husband 
 remarries and does ill-treat the child. One day 
 he finds the lover mourning on the dead wife's 
 grave, and demands by what right he is there. 
 The lover, remembering the death-bed remark 
 and suddenly seeing a chance of saving the child, 
 says that he has every right to be there as he was 
 really the father of the child. His supposed 
 offspring is then left on his doorstep, to be looked 
 170
 
 Other People's Books 
 
 after carefully, and he spends his time wondering 
 whether he was justified in telling, etc. Prob- 
 ably these stories, if expanded into novels, 
 might convince ; as narrative poems they do 
 not ; and when they are squeezed into the brief 
 compass of the Satires of Circumstance they are 
 grotesquely Life as Thomas Hardy makes it and 
 not Life as Thomas Hardy sees it. 
 
 It is a little bold in these days to admit that 
 one hasn't read the whole of Mr. Conrad's works, 
 but until this week I had never laid hands on 
 Almayer's Folly. It was his first book. In his 
 Reminiscences he gives an account of how it was 
 begun, in a Pimlico lodging-house, when he was a 
 sea captain and carried about the ocean for five 
 years until (when he was thirty-five) he finished 
 it. When, half-done and laid by, it was yellowing 
 and mouldering, he showed it to his first reader, a 
 Cambridge man going to Australia for his health, 
 and asked him if it was worth completing. The 
 passenger, with a nice economy of words, 
 answered " Distinctly," and Captain Conrad was 
 thus encouraged to proceed. I had read all this 
 before, and also the novelist's statement that 
 before this he had not attempted literature and 
 had hardly ever written even a letter though I 
 suppose there must have been an occasional 
 entry in a log. I have certainly been surprised 
 by the craftsmanship of Almayer's Folly. Not 
 only is the structure good, but the writing, except 
 in one or two places, is astonishingly finished, 
 
 171
 
 Books in General 
 
 accurate, and restrained. It is absurdly unlike 
 a first book. Its weakness, as it appears to me, 
 lies in the dullness of the principal character. 
 It is difficult to keep up one's interest in a person 
 whose main characteristic is his impotence. 
 But it doesn't matter so much here as it might, 
 for the subsidiary story of Dain and Nina is very 
 fascinating, and the real hero, after all, is none 
 of the people, white or Malay, but the Bornean 
 river (its topography is not always clear to me) 
 on whose overgrown banks they all live and the 
 changes of which, night and day, are described 
 with marvellous eloquence and certainty. 
 
 Peacock 
 
 FINALLY, after various minor excursions, I 
 have settled down to the works of Thomas 
 Love Peacock, of whom I had read noth- 
 ing before except some poems. Why ? I don't 
 know, but I think his name has vaguely repelled 
 me. Anyhow, I am thankful now that I have 
 been able to come fresh to Peacock's novels. 
 He has a few devotees, but it is surprising that so 
 admirable a writer is not more read. Nightmare 
 Abbey and Headlong Hall are not great master- 
 pieces, but they are certainly small masterpieces. 
 They belong to the class of intellectual comedy to 
 which Candide, and, in some measure, Rasselas 
 belong ; in fact, they must certainly have been 
 172
 
 Peacock 
 
 modelled on Candide. They are burlesques of 
 oneself and one's friends, and every other dis- 
 cussing, theorizing person and his friends. Char- 
 latans of all kinds, literary, political, ecclesiastical, 
 and scientific, and philosophers of all kinds from 
 the man who believes that upward progress is 
 inevitable to the man who believes that downward 
 progress is undeniable, from the secret revolu- 
 tionary conspirator to the professional sceptic ; 
 he gets them all in, quintessentializes their 
 doctrines into exquisitely flowing prose, and 
 knocks their heads together with charming ruth- 
 lessness. Any extract will illustrate the flow of 
 his dialogue : 
 
 " ' The anatomy of the human stomach,' said 
 Mr. Escot, ' and the formation of the teeth, 
 clearly place man in the class of fungivorous 
 animals.' 
 
 " * Many anatomists,' said Mr. Foster, ' are 
 of a different opinion, and agree in discerning the 
 characteristics of the carnivorous classes.' 
 
 " ' I am no anatomist,' said Mr. Jenkinson, 
 * and cannot decide where doctors disagree ; 
 in the meantime, I conclude that man is omni- 
 vorous, and on that conclusion I act.' 
 
 " ' Your conclusion is truly orthodox,' said the 
 Reverend Doctor Gaster ; ' indeed, the loaves and 
 fishes are typical of a mixed diet, and the prac- 
 tice of the Church in all ages shows 
 
 " ' That it never loses sight of the loaves and 
 fishes,' said Mr. Escot." 
 
 173
 
 Books in General 
 
 If loud asseveration on my part sends to Peacock 
 a few people who have not tried him before, I 
 shall feel that the recent rain has not descended 
 
 in vain. 
 
 Wordsworth's Personal Dullness 
 
 THE Strange Case of William Wordsworth 
 is to me of perennial interest, and I 
 have just emerged from several days' 
 burrowing under Professor C. G. Harper's two 
 enormous volumes entitled William Words- 
 worth., His Life, Works, and Influence. It 
 is a conscientious and valuable piece of work, 
 very fully documented, and containing much 
 out-of-the-way information and a great deal of 
 sensible, if not always illustrious, criticism. The 
 information may perhaps be a little too ample 
 for the weaker brethren. The map (showing 
 lakes, mountain ranges (brown) and so on) of 
 Wordsworth's country with which we open gives 
 the clue to Professor Harper's exhaustive method. 
 Every procurable date of Wordsworth's continen- 
 tal programme is copied out ; and we are even 
 supplied with the winter and summer time- 
 tables of the Grammar School at Hawkshead 
 which he attended and at which (as Professor 
 Harper rather sententiously observes) an educa- 
 tion different in kind, but perhaps not inferior 
 in quality, to that supplied by Eton was bestowed
 
 Wordsworth's Personal Dullness 
 
 upon him. New light is thrown on certain 
 incidents in his career ; his " circle " is 
 elaborately described ; and a very charming 
 picture is given of his sister Dorothy. But the 
 old problem of Wordsworth's defects remains 
 much where it did. 
 
 It is a commonplace that Wordsworth is the most 
 uneven of great poets. Every textbook writer 
 tells one that when he was inspired he was a 
 giant, that when he was not he wrote maundering 
 doggerel, and that he himself never knew when 
 he was and when he was not at his best. The 
 Idiot Boy has been held up to the ridicule of 
 generations beyond its deserts perhaps. The 
 point was most forcibly put by J. K. Stephen 
 when he wrote a parody of Wordsworth's " Two 
 voices are there," saying that one of the voices 
 was that of the sea, etc., and the other that of 
 " an old half-witted sheep." But a thing less 
 frequently faced, and never, as far as I know, 
 properly explained, is his personal lack of 
 attractiveness. Flippant persons may be met 
 who dismiss him as " a pompous old dullard " ; 
 but, generally speaking, whenever one hears 
 such a remark it comes from some one who openly 
 confesses that he. cannot stand Wordsworth's 
 poetry at any price, and that he has very seldom 
 attempted to read it. The people who are in 
 difficulties are those (and I am among them) 
 who agree without qualification that Wordsworth 
 is our greatest poet since Milton, but who cannot 
 
 175
 
 Books in General 
 
 sincerely say that they are drawn towards him as 
 a man. If they any one who does not feel like 
 this is happy and I do not speak for him pretend 
 to be fond of him their pretence is glaring. 
 If they do not stick up for him they feel that they 
 are being faithless to a poet who still stands in 
 need of all the propagandists he can get. It is 
 not easy to face the truth about him even in the 
 solitude of one's own chamber. But, by heaven, 
 he is a dull man ! 
 
 " There was a boy " (as Wordsworth would 
 himself begin) who at one time used nightly to 
 dine in hall under a large oil-painting of the poet. 
 In this painting Wordsworth was represented 
 sitting on a rock against a landscape background 
 which was an agreeable and symbolical blend 
 of wildness and tranquillity. The poet was clad 
 in broadcloth ; he held a book in his hand ; his 
 face was smooth and pink ; and his mild eye 
 surveyed the spectator as though the latter were 
 a lamb about to receive a pat of the hand and his 
 blessing. There he sat, meditative and benevo- 
 lent, while the soup gave place to the fish and the 
 fish to the beef ; and when one had drained off 
 the last dregs of one's beer one went off still 
 conscious of that meditative and benevolent eye. 
 It became almost maddening. Every other great 
 English poet had something fascinating about 
 him. Even Milton, in spite of certain unsociable 
 qualities, had a certain attractive force, a touch 
 of the virulent, and the scars of suffering. But 
 176
 
 Wordsworth's Personal Dullness 
 
 this Wordsworth ! His genuine philanthropy 
 was unquestionable. His portrait might, one 
 thought, be that of a pioneer of the Anti-Slave 
 Trade Agitation, or an inventor of Sunday 
 Schools, or an endower of Bands of Hope. But 
 not a poet ; oh, not a poet ! 
 
 So it is with all his portraits. Professor Harper 
 gives a selection of them. Always the sage is a 
 bland and upright man ; the mens conscia recti 
 typified. But never a sign of eloquence or fire ; 
 of the magnificent oratory of his great passages, 
 of the music and profound tenderness which are 
 so profuse in his poetry. Not a sign of stress ; 
 not a mark of any but the most complacent 
 vicarage thought ; no passion, no enthusiasm, 
 no challenge, and no response. It is not to be 
 explained away, as Professor Harper attempts 
 to explain it away, by saying that the myth of 
 " Daddy Wordsworth " (as FitzGerald called 
 him) is based on a disproportionate view of his 
 life. Professor Harper thinks that far too little 
 attention has been paid to his early revolutionary 
 period, when the ideals of the French Revolution 
 gripped him, and far too much to his later period 
 of orthodoxy and respectability. Professor 
 Harper himself attempts to redress the balance. 
 He gives as full an account as he can of the earlier 
 Wordsworth and of his relations with Revolu- 
 tionary France. But, as Wordsworth's French 
 friends would have said (provided they were not 
 ashamed of using such a worn-out tag) plus (a 
 
 M 1/7
 
 Books in General 
 
 change plus c'est la mme chose. The early 
 Wordsworth may have been a different being ; 
 but Professor Harper certainly does not prove 
 that he was. From birth to death in this biog- 
 raphy he appears as the same high-minded, 
 staid, sober, solemn monument. He joined in 
 the Revolution not so much a " kid-glove revo- 
 lutionary " as a woollen-glove and warm com- 
 forter revolutionary. Had he stayed in France 
 he might have made even the Terror respectable. 
 
 On myself and on others Wordsworth's por- 
 traits and his biographies always leave this sort 
 of impression : the impression of an old bore to 
 whom one would not be rude simply and solely 
 because one would not willingly hurt the feelings 
 of a person so worthy. And then one goes back 
 to his poetry and his prose and hears a voice 
 of almost unsurpassed grandeur speaking the 
 deepest of one's unexpressed thoughts, appealing 
 to and drawing out all the divinest powers in 
 man's nature. Of his greatness surely no ra- 
 tional and unbiassed being could entertain the 
 slightest doubt. He is not so popular or so 
 frequently read as some poets, and that is not 
 difficult to explain. His absence of humour, 
 or an equivalent vivacity, is not in itself an 
 explanation ; but the accompanying general 
 absence of any luxurious appeal to the senses is. 
 Hs speaks direct to the labouring intellect and 
 the sensitive heart ; and the enjoyment of him, 
 if great, is usually enjoyment of the austerer 
 178
 
 Henry James's Obscurity 
 
 kind, like mountain-climbing. There is nothing 
 soft or enervating or luxurious which can make 
 reading him an aesthetic debauch. He does not 
 often sing to a tune which gives one pleasure even 
 if one does not attend to the words. Without 
 being in the least obscure he demands an effort 
 from the reader parallel to his own. That, at 
 least as much as the tediousness of many of his 
 writings (and his irritating classification of 
 them), is the reason of his comparative lack of 
 popularity. But . . . 
 
 Henry James's Obscurity 
 
 HENRY JAMES'S last work was his 
 essay on Rupert Brooke, written as an 
 introduction to Letters from America. 
 Mr. James's essay is a personal appreciation, and 
 not in any way a biographical memoir. Such a 
 memoir, by another hand, will follow. Mr. 
 James left unfinished two novels, and a third 
 volume of the series begun with A Small Boy 
 and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother. 
 
 Presumably the public (which might well make 
 a start with the short stories of which Mr. Seeker 
 has already published eight half-crown volumes, 
 very pleasant to the eye) will at last begin to buy 
 James's novels. They have certainly not bought 
 them in the past. He was, in critical circles, 
 
 179
 
 Books in General 
 
 almost universally recognized as one of the three 
 or four greatest of English writers living a week 
 ago. But some of his books had not even gone 
 into a second edition. He was intermittently 
 talked about in the Press. Fifteen years or so 
 ago he had a boom of the sort ; then there was a 
 period of comparative newspaper obscurity ; in 
 the last three or four years he suddenly and 
 silently, like a star appearing from behind a 
 cloud, took his unchallenged place in the firma- 
 ment as one of the established great. But he was 
 not widely read. Daisy Miller, ever so many 
 years ago, had a fairly general success ; The 
 Golden Bowl, also, I should think, sold well. 
 But many people who paid lip homage to him 
 were very unfamiliar with his work. 
 
 In no case would a man with his interests, his 
 approach, his subtlety and avoidance of the 
 grosser excitements, his restraint and delicacy, 
 have sold by the hundred thousand. But his 
 appeal was still further limited by the legend 
 of his style. I remember reading an old novel 
 written in the days when Robert Browning was 
 an Incomprehensible studied by a Cult. The 
 heroine of it gave herself away rather by remark- 
 ing, " Oh, Mr. Browning ! I've never been able 
 to understand a single thing that he has written. 
 That is why I have never tried." One feels 
 that there were persons who were in the same 
 position as towards Henry James. They had 
 heard that he was a hard nut to crack ; they had 
 1 80
 
 Henry James's Obscurity 
 
 seen perhaps it was always a great temptation 
 to a reviewer to extract specimens of his more 
 elaborate discursions, complicated arabesques of 
 sentences, parenthesis after parenthesis wander- 
 ing from comma to comma like barbed wire 
 tangled around its supports. And they thought 
 therefore that he was an obscure eclectic as 
 difficult as Jacob Behmen or Swedenborg and 
 lacking their excuse of religious inspiration. 
 Certainly he was sometimes difficult. But it 
 was a unique kind of obscurity. There is an 
 obscurity produced when a man, eagerly tum- 
 bling along an argument, writes down only a 
 sort of fitful shorthand, a language which leaves 
 things out and which resembles the stray pieces 
 of disconnected paper in gutter or hedge which 
 merely indicate the course that the runner has 
 taken. There is another and commoner kind of 
 obscurity of speech which derives from mistiness 
 of mind ; for a man cannot write clearly down 
 what he does not clearly think. And there is a 
 kind of obscurity which is produced by mere 
 inaptitude for writing : the awkwardness of the 
 cow handling a rifle. James's obscurity was the 
 direct product of his passion for clarity. He 
 detested the slipshod sentence which, compact 
 as it may look as a piece of grammar, is a 
 mere pot-shot as a piece of representation. He 
 wanted to make no statement which did not 
 embody precisely what he wanted to say ; what, 
 that is to say, he saw as Truth. He would 
 have taken, for example, that last sentence of
 
 Books in General 
 
 mine and, endeavouring to give it a more exact 
 shape, have made of it something like the fol- 
 lowing : 
 
 " He wanted, when, that is, he experienced 
 anything so definite or, shall we put it, so posi- 
 tively energetic, as a want, to make no statement, 
 none at any rate which might be taken by even 
 the least perceptive of his hearers as a delivered, 
 and, as it were, final testimony of his reaction 
 to things as he saw them, which did not precisely 
 embody what he wanted (when, once more, he 
 coherently desired anything, as we have it, 
 " higher " than the elementary physical) to say ; 
 what, that is to say, he saw, at the moment of 
 speech, be it understood, for the eye of the 
 watcher changes, as what, in the absence of a 
 happier name, it has pleased us to ennoble with 
 the majestic name of Truth." 
 
 I don't suggest that I myself have added any- 
 thing to my own sentence by this addition of the 
 pomp and circumstance of parenthesis and 
 circumlocution. I have merely turned a short 
 platitude into a long one. But it may serve to 
 show the method by which Henry James arrived 
 at his more tortuous pages. The method has 
 its disadvantages. The man who employs it is 
 sometimes like a man working with a pickaxe 
 in a cave. The more he digs away the larger the 
 unattacked expanse which invites his strength ; 
 or, as one might say, the bigger the hole he is in. 
 182
 
 Henry James's Obscurity 
 
 But when this method is employed by a man 
 with the analytical powers, the sensitiveness to 
 fine shades, material and spiritual, of Henry 
 James, the result is a " product " (the kind of 
 word that James would always have put in 
 actual or implied inverted commas) which never 
 stales and from which one gets more and more 
 enjoyment each time one reads. In the last 
 resort novels live by the richness of their detail ; 
 and James's detail is exquisite and inexhaustible. 
 
 Few modern writers have exercised so strong 
 an influence over those who have surrendered 
 themselves to him. He is, I should say, more 
 infectious than any writer since (what a strange 
 collocation ! ) Lord Macaulay. A man with a 
 formed style can usually read and enjoy Carlyle, 
 Jeremy Taylor, de Quincey, or George Meredith 
 without showing the least tendency (unless de- 
 liberate) to imitate them. But when one has 
 (I don't speak only for myself) been reading 
 James one finds for a time that one is tempted to 
 write even one's private letters in a style which 
 shows plainly that one has set him as a seal upon 
 one's arm. Even now, when I am merely 
 thinking about him, I feel the pressure of that 
 stern artistic conscience, and can only with an 
 effort resist the demand that I should guard 
 myself here, qualify myself here, and elucidate 
 myself there. He was irresistible, like one of 
 those stammerers or persons with other attractive 
 or unattractive vocal idiosyncrasies whom one
 
 Books in General 
 
 cannot help imitating when one is with them. 
 A person of any force gets through this and the 
 permanent effect of a subjugation to James was 
 always good. A too marked echo of him would 
 be painful : but his example was salutary. It 
 may be possible to grumble with him for this and 
 that. He did write mainly about persons with 
 incomes (though these also are God's creatures) ; 
 he did occasionally behave (as Mr. Wells very 
 wittily put it) like a hippopotamus picking up a 
 pea ; and he did annoy some enthusiasts by re- 
 fusing to place his pen habitually at the service 
 of the Great Forces of Our Time and other things 
 whose capital importance is of custom indicated 
 by capital letters. But in an age of sloppy 
 writing he stood for accuracy of craftsmanship ; 
 and even men whose subjects are Invisible 
 Exports or the Parthenogenesis of Plants might 
 learn from him how to use to more advantage 
 their intellects and their pens. 
 
 The "Ring" in the Bookselling 
 Trade 
 
 A BIBLIOPHILE writes the following com- 
 plaint : " At the recent sale of Swinburne's 
 library, certain lots, chiefly signed pre- 
 sentation copies, fetched extravagantly high 
 prices. But the outsider is generally puzzled at
 
 The " Ring" in the Bookselling Trade 
 
 the extreme variation in the prices, a variation 
 which passing fashions in taste do not explain. 
 There is an explanation, as one would-be pur- 
 chaser was made somewhat rudely aware. He 
 wanted a book by a modern poet, a poet of 
 delicate talent and little recognition ; and he 
 asked a bookseller to bid for the lot. He was 
 willing to spend between ten and thirteen 
 shillings on it. The agent who was to bid 
 arrived late, and another bookseller bought the 
 lot for five shillings. So the would-be purchaser 
 asked his bookseller to approach the man who had 
 bought the lot, and find out if he would sell it. 
 The book was cheap at five and would be rather 
 dear at ten shillings. When approached, the 
 purchaser informed his colleague that ' he had 
 had to pay a good deal more for the lot than the 
 price given in the rooms, and that he could not 
 part with it for less than eighteen shillings.' 
 Such are the blessings of the ' ring ' at Sotheby's. 
 
 " The ring consists of some of the largest and 
 best-known members of the bookselling trade 
 all honest men and their plan is this : they 
 never bid against each other, except for show ; 
 lots go at small prices, thus robbing owners and 
 executors of their right profit ; and subsequently 
 these cheap lots are put up again and resold 
 among the members of the ring. The auc- 
 tioneers can, of course, do nothing to stop the 
 practice and it is as legal as it is dishonourable. 
 At times an outsider with a big banking account
 
 Books in General 
 
 gives the ring a good deal of trouble ; but it has 
 survived all private attacks, and is likely to 
 though a private buyer with a confident manner 
 and a quick power of decision can occasionally 
 get a great deal of amusement by running lots 
 up, and so forcing the ring to pay exorbitant 
 prices for things they do not want." 
 
 It is true. There exists among the second-hand 
 booksellers precisely such a ring as gave rise to 
 so much discussion a few years ago when the 
 scandal of the art-dealers' " knock-out " was 
 widely discussed. For some time I myself have 
 been trying to get information about it. But 
 it is not easy. You can find out from booksellers 
 who are not in the ring (few of these lone wolves 
 are important) who the booksellers are who are 
 in the ring, but that is about all. But the method 
 is simple. The attendance at book sales is not 
 large. Private collectors are lazy people ; it is 
 not now fashionable as it was in the Duke of 
 Roxburghe's day for the Old Nobility to 
 crowd the salerooms, bidding desperately amid 
 groans of anguish and cheers of triumph. The 
 result is that very often one will attend a sale and 
 be the only private person there, and it is a 
 matter of chance (especially when the sale is a 
 comparatively small one) whether any one at all 
 is there except the members of the ring. The 
 ring, -pro forma, will run a book up to about a 
 third of its value and leave it at that. At the 
 close of the proceedings its members will adjourn 
 1 86
 
 The " Ring " in the Bookselling Trade 
 
 somewhere I don't know where, but let us say 
 a back room in the Charing Cross Road and 
 hold a " knock-out " auction of the books they 
 have bought. The difference between the sums 
 paid here and the sums paid at Sotheby's or 
 Hodgson's will be pooled and divided, so as to 
 equalize the spoil ; and the owners of the libraries 
 sold will have got only, perhaps, a half of what 
 they really ought to have got considering the 
 prices that the ultimate purchasers are willing to 
 pay. 
 
 But I don't see what is to be done about it. 
 As my correspondent remarks, the auctioneers 
 can't stop it. They also must suffer as their 
 work is done on a commission basis. It must not 
 be assumed that all the booksellers like the 
 system, but the minority cannot help themselves. 
 I remember that one very well known bookseller, 
 now dead, tried for several years to keep out of 
 it ; but in the end, by co-ordinated bidding 
 against him, he was forced in. There the thing 
 is ; the dealers find it profitable ; it is not easy 
 to keep out of it unless you are a prince of the 
 trade, with rich customers and great resources, 
 or a person with special knowledge who is after a 
 special kind of book and will be let alone ; and 
 there is no short cut to reform. How can Parlia- 
 ment interfere ? If one dealer who buys a 
 book can sell it to another after the sale, how 
 can six or a dozen dealers be prevented from 
 exchanging their purchases similarly. It would 
 
 187
 
 Books in General 
 
 be all very well to make the " knock-out " illegal, 
 but how many does it take to make a ring and 
 how many detectives could be spared ? The 
 only conceivable remedy is for persons who 
 habitually buy old books to make a point (when 
 the war is over and they are released from their 
 present occupations) of turning up at the sale- 
 rooms and bidding against the pros. Even at 
 that the remedy would only be efficacious as 
 long as it was actively applied. It might be 
 worth a guinea a box, but you would have to take 
 a box every day ; there would be no permanent 
 cure. Directly the strangers slacked off again 
 the ring and the " knock-out " would revive, 
 and my unfortunate friend (for I presume that 
 the disconsolate buyer he refers to is himself) 
 would have once more to pay for his books much 
 more than the price recorded at the rooms. 
 " There is no cure for this disease," as Mr. 
 Belloc's poem puts it, unless auction-frequenting 
 again becomes a popular form of amusement. 
 
 But, if I may digress, I must say that, for 
 persons of a bookish turn of mind, there is nothing 
 more amusing than an occasional visit to Welling- 
 ton Street or Chancery Lane. I shouldn't care 
 to do it every day ; the combined mustiness of 
 books and booksellers is a bit overpowering. 
 But it is exciting to bid occasionally, and the 
 books that come into the London auction-rooms 
 are of such quality that sometimes you might 
 almost as well go to Sotheby's as to the Ex- 
 188
 
 The " Ring " in the Bookselling Trade 
 
 hibition Rooms (now shut up so as to pay for 
 two minutes of the war) of the British Museum. 
 The bindings that great collectors put on their 
 books are in themselves wonderful. And the 
 booksellers, rich and poor, glossy and seedy, as 
 they nod to the rostrum and paw the goods, are a 
 sight to which only Balzac could do justice. 
 They all wear looks of settled gloom as though 
 they were on the verge of bankruptcy ; they all 
 (if one speaks to them) swear that " it is im- 
 possible to get anything to-day as everything is 
 going so dear " ; and they all have a sovereign 
 indifference to everything but the commercial 
 value of the books they deal in. I say all : 
 there are exceptions ; but the crowd as a whole is 
 utterly depressed and completely free from the 
 remotest concern with literature. But possibly 
 when they get in that back room somewhere 
 and assess the margin between what executors 
 have got for books and what they ought to have 
 got for them, their morose countenances may 
 brighten. For all I know, every " knock-out " 
 auction may end with the circulation of the 
 punch-bowl, jolly songs, and toasts to the 
 damnation of all the idiots who waste their 
 money on rotten old books unfit to read and 
 thereby keep in affluence a set of honest men who 
 read the Daily Mail in the morning and never a 
 line for the rest of the day. 
 
 189
 
 Books in General 
 
 Music-Hall Songs 
 
 MR. WILLIAM ARCHER contributes to 
 the Fortnightly an attack on the music- 
 hall. He says that it is the home of 
 vulgarity and inanity ; that the audiences, as a 
 rule, would enjoy much better stuff than they 
 are given ; and that " the music-hall seems to 
 have killed a genuine vein of lyric faculty in the 
 English people." With all that I don't think 
 that any one but a poseur could disagree. Mr. 
 Archer makes an extraordinary slip when he 
 puts forward Sally in our Alley as a folk-product 
 of which neither the composer nor the author is 
 known to fame : both words and music being by 
 Henry Carey, who was scarcely an obscure person 
 in his day and is not entirely forgotten now. He 
 concludes, too, with a somewhat vague sugges- 
 tion of a remedy which has no bearing whatever 
 upon the improvement of music-hall songs, and 
 which one suspects to spring from his perennial 
 desire to induce the public to go and see Ibsen. 
 But his case as a whole is irrefutable. The 
 nation's songs since the industrial revolution 
 have been immeasurably worse than at any other 
 time in its history. They are almost all com- 
 mercial products manufactured by half-wits. 
 
 Mr. Archer's case being so sound, it is all the 
 more a pity that he overdoes it It is true that 
 190
 
 Music-Hall Songs 
 
 almost all these songs are vile rubbish, and that 
 the songs of the Villikins and his Dinah and 
 Champagne Charlie periods were even more 
 fatuous than those of the present day. But it is 
 exaggeration to say that 
 
 " what is certain is that the whole music-hall 
 movement has produced not one literally not 
 one piece of verse that can rank as poetry of the 
 humblest type, or even as a really clever bit of 
 comic rhyming," 
 
 for such songs turn up fairly frequently. Possibly 
 Mr. Archer's horror of the " red-nosed comedian " 
 prevents him from ever listening to his words : 
 certainly one gets from Mr. Archer's article the 
 impression that the critic is only acquainted with 
 a few of the most famous of music-hall songs. 
 But although I heartily support his general case 
 and would willingly consent to the execution of 
 all music-hall managers and versifiers and most 
 music-hall artists, I must protest that " really 
 clever bits of comic rhyming " do turn up 
 occasionally. 
 
 I wish I had a better verbal memory. But I 
 can at least refer Mr. Archer to a few songs of 
 which, if he cares to spend a month in the 
 Museum with old volumes of Francis, Day and 
 Hunter's song-books and other collections, he can 
 find the full words. For instance, there is Mr. 
 Harry Lauder's It's Nice to get up in the Morning. 
 
 191
 
 Books in General 
 
 As I remember them (and here and elsewhere I 
 don't guarantee that my quotations are literally 
 accurate) the words of the chorus are : 
 
 Oh, it's nice to get up in the morning when the sun 
 begins to shine, 
 
 At four or Jive or six o'clock in the good old summer 
 time ; 
 
 But when the snow is falling, and it's murky over- 
 head, 
 
 It's nice to get up in the morning but it's nicer 
 to stay in bed. 
 
 Of course the tune helped it. But it is quite well 
 turned and it springs clean out of popular ex- 
 perience. It is folk-poetry even if the folk didn't 
 write it. It is not the folk-poetry of the seven- 
 teenth century, but it is distinctly the folk- 
 poetry of modern commercial and urban England. 
 We sat upon the Baby on the Shore I'm not sure 
 about ; it didn't, I suspect, have a music-hall 
 origin, though I do not know. But A Little Bit 
 off the Top was quite comic in places ; so were 
 The Four Horse Charabanc, Right in the Middle 
 of the Road, Whitewash, and 'E dunno where 'e 
 are. I wish I could recall the words of the song 
 which had a chorus beginning : 
 
 More work for the undertaker, 
 
 Another little job for the tombstone-maker ; 
 
 but even that high-spirited couplet shows their 
 192
 
 Music-Hail Songs 
 
 quality. These mock-tragic songs are often 
 quite good. The best known was His Day's 
 Work was done, which was undeniably a comic 
 conception well carried out. Did Mr. Archer ever 
 hear If it wasn't for the Houses in Between ? 
 The one fragment that sticks in my mind both 
 dates it and shows that it was a " clever bit of 
 comic rhyming " : 
 
 // the weather had been finer 
 You'd have seen the war in China 
 // it wasn't for the Houses in Between. 
 
 And what about Waiting at the Church ? 
 
 There was I waiting at the church. 
 
 Waiting at the church. 
 
 When I found he'd left me in the lurch, 
 
 Lor' , how it did upset me ! 
 
 Then he sent me round a little note, 
 
 Just a little note, 
 
 This is what he wrote : 
 
 " Can't get away to marry you to-day 
 
 My wife won't let me." 
 
 That seems to me a well-calculated chorus, and 
 the clinch of the last two lines couldn't be beaten. 
 But perhaps the austere Mr. Archer would think 
 it debasing on the grounds that it led the audience 
 to think lightly of bigamy. 
 
 Bigamy is one of the chief comic-song subjects. 
 Vermin in oiv's bed, drunkenness, and the food 
 
 N 193
 
 Books in General 
 
 in boarding-houses are the others. The " booze " 
 songs are not, as a rule, as good as they should be. 
 The only one I remember that was at all neat ran 
 something like : 
 
 First she had some marmalade, 
 
 And then she had some jam. 
 Then some dozen of oysters 
 
 And then a plate of ham, 
 A lobster and a crab or two 
 
 And a pint of bottled beer, 
 A little gin hot to settle the lot 
 
 And that's what made her queer. 
 
 I certainly don't suggest that any of the 
 songs I have quoted and I'm certain that 
 consultation with a few expert friends, now 
 in Flanders, would bring better ones to light 
 are masterpieces. But I do think they are 
 quite comic verse, and that if all music-hall 
 songs were as well turned there would not be 
 much ground for complaint. One does, that is, 
 laugh occasionally at a music-hall, in spite of Mr. 
 Archer. But, unhappily, of ninety-nine songs 
 out of a hundred the words are too abysmal for 
 anything, and the serious ones are almost in- 
 variably imbecile. I wonder, by the way, 
 whether the music-hall authorities ever try to 
 induce competent comic rhymers, known in 
 other spheres, to turn out songs for them ? 
 Probably not ; they think the words don't matter. 
 That they are mistaken (though the tunes count 
 194
 
 More Music-Hall Songs 
 
 for most) is shown by the way that a song with 
 good words succeeds with the audience. Even 
 one ingenious line will often bring the house down. 
 I remember the old song / can't change it. 
 There was a stanza about a bride who appalled 
 her bridegroom by taking herself to pieces, 
 removing a wig, a glass eye, a wooden arm, two 
 wooden legs, etc. In the chorus the narrator 
 suddenly described her as " 'Arf a woman and 
 'arf a tree," and this admirable if unrefined trope 
 was the most successful thing of the year. But 
 as I say, I largely agree with Mr. Archer. If 
 only they would let me smoke in theatres I 
 would never go near a music-hall again until the 
 programmes were improved, and I imagine many 
 other people are in the same boat. 
 
 More Music-Hall Songs 
 
 HOW little do we know the consequences 
 of our acts. " I say there is not a red 
 Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, 
 can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world 
 must smart for it : will not the price of beaver 
 rise ? It is a mathematical fact that the casting 
 of this pebble from my hand alters the centre 
 of gravity of the Universe." That was Car- 
 lyle's way of putting it. Somebody wrote a 
 book of theatrical reminiscences : the book set 
 Mr. William Archer pondering on the fatuity of
 
 Books in General 
 
 music-halls ; Mr. Archer's article made me try to 
 remember comic fragments of music-hall songs ; 
 and my observations would appear, judging from 
 the quantities of correspondence they have 
 produced, to have tempted whole families to 
 spend their evenings trying to recall the popular 
 choruses of their youth. 
 
 Numbers of them seem to have better memories 
 than mine. Whole verses of More Work for the 
 Undertaker (I think it was Mr. Dunville's song) 
 reach me. The scheme may be illustrated by 
 one stanza : 
 
 Sammy Snoozer laboured on the railway ; 
 
 His work he was very clever at ! 
 
 Sammy one day was a-polishing the metals 
 
 With a lump of mouldy fat. 
 
 Up come a runaway engine, 
 
 Sammy stood upon the track ; 
 
 He held out his arms, for he firmly believed 
 
 He could push that locomotive back. 
 
 (The drum : Boom ! !) 
 (Chorus) 
 
 More work for the undertaker. 
 
 Another little job for the tombstone-maker ; 
 
 At the local cemetery they've 
 
 Been very very busy with a brand-new grave, 
 
 For Snoozer* 's 
 
 Snuffed it ! 
 
 I am afraid that I should have to grant Mr. 
 196
 
 More Music-Hail Songs 
 
 Archer the verse : the second line, especially, 
 cannot be called a model of good craftsmanship. 
 But the chorus is very neat. It was varied with 
 each verse. Another correspondent's specimen 
 finishes with " For Frederick's fragments." 
 
 I must bow to the correspondent who suggests 
 that the success of the song about the bride with 
 artificial limbs was at least as much due to lines 
 he quotes as it was to " 'Arf a woman and 'arf a 
 tree." His lines are : 
 
 I can't change her ! 
 
 No matter how I try, 
 
 But ril chop her up for firewood 
 
 In the sweet by-and-by. 
 
 An equally impolite chorus is that of Herbert 
 Campbell's 'Blige a Lady which another corre- 
 spondent sends. The conductor, on a rainy day, 
 asked the inside males to give up a seat to a lady 
 and go outside, and the reply was on the lines of 
 
 Said I, " Old chap, she may have my lap, 
 But I don't get wet for her" 
 
 That is very typical music-hall ; and it will be 
 observed that it gets its effect by sticking close, 
 as Wordsworth advised, to the natural phrase- 
 ology and sequence of everyday speech. 
 
 Mr. Albert Chevalier, I admit, I did not 
 mention. He has not been primarily a music- 
 
 197
 
 Books in General 
 
 hall artist, and Mr. Archer himself made an 
 exception of his songs. Some of Mr. Gus Elen's 
 certainly might be quoted : e.g. 'E dunno 
 where V are and Whafs the Use of looking out 
 for Work ? I am afraid that I am not sufficiently 
 well informed to answer questions as to the 
 sources of supply of modern music-hall songs. 
 The only thing I have observed is that large 
 numbers of the worst ones are composed by 
 persons whose names suggest that the use of the 
 English language is with them rather an acquired 
 than an inherited characteristic. How far the 
 practice prevails of a particular star employing a 
 tame author to write the words of all his songs 
 for him I do not know. I have never consciously 
 met a writer of music-hall songs, though I did 
 know one man who made two attempts to produce 
 what he thought the right sort of commodity. 
 He sent them to an entrepreneur, but all his wit 
 was wasted. The chorus of one song mentioned 
 a well-known and much-advertised comestible : 
 this wouldn't do, as all the vendors of similar 
 articles would be jealous and, possibly, refuse to 
 advertise any more on the programme. In the 
 other song the author had had the misfortune to 
 hit upon an idea which had been used before. 
 His refrain was : 
 
 And when the pie was opened 
 The birds began to sing. 
 
 But there was an old song with the same tail to it. 
 It was a song about a pigeon-pie which was no 
 198
 
 More Music-Hail Songs 
 
 better than it should be. This reminds me that 
 in tabulating favourite music-hall subjects one 
 should certainly have mentioned bad smells. 
 Throughout history any reference to unpleasant 
 smells has moved the Englishman to roars of 
 laughter. Perhaps it is because we so thoroughly 
 dislike them. I don't think that these odours 
 take all nations in quite the same way : but 
 travellers on the Continent are sometimes tempted 
 to think that most nations do not notice them so 
 much as we do. 
 
 The music-hall versifier, usually feeble when 
 funny, is certainly at his worst when serious. 
 Such of the war-songs as I have heard are dread- 
 ful. Perhaps those I have not heard are better. 
 Early in the war I was looking into a music-shop 
 window in Upper Shaftesbury Avenue and saw 
 two typical titles. One was Only a Bit of Khaki 
 that Daddy wore at Mons, and the other was 
 The Little Irish Red Cross Nurse. I did not dare 
 to buy them, but I could not help admiring the 
 ingenuity of the author of the second who had 
 managed to work the perennial Irish Girl theme 
 so neatly into the new subject. All music-hall 
 poets seem to be obsessed by Irish girls. They 
 will even work them into translations of foreign 
 songs which do not mention them. Five or six 
 years ago a German music-hall song which had 
 nothing whatever to do with Irish girls was im- 
 ported and became very popular here. The 
 ideas of the original were largely preserved, 
 
 199
 
 Books in General 
 
 but an Irish girl had to be stuck in. But quo, 
 Musa, tendis ? If I go on like this I shall end by 
 agreeing with Mr. Archer. 
 
 Utopias 
 
 I SAW recently a very entertaining article by 
 Mr. Walter Lippman in the New Republic 
 on the subject of Utopias. Mr. Lippman 
 raised the question of why it was Utopias had 
 gone out of fashion. Since Mr. Wells wrote his 
 Modern Utopia no one has had a shot. 
 
 It is, of course, not the longest period in human 
 history which has gone without a new Utopia. 
 As far as I know, nothing of the sort was con- 
 structed between the time of Plato and that of 
 Sir Thomas More. Reasons might, no doubt, 
 be discovered for this long lapse. The Romans 
 were too realistic to bother about such things, 
 and in the Middle Ages the only people who could 
 write were priests, and they probably did not 
 dare outline any other perfect society than that 
 of the New Jerusalem. In fact, Utopias of any 
 merit have until recently always been produced 
 at long intervals : with the exception of Bacon's 
 New Atlantis and Campanella's City of the Sun, 
 which were, I think, published in the same year. 
 The nineteenth century must have produced 
 more imaginary states of this kind than all its 
 200
 
 Utopias 
 
 predecessors put together. And if we stop con- 
 structing Utopias, this will happen not because 
 we have ceased to hanker after them, but because 
 the complexities of civilization have become too 
 unmanageable to handle. When the structures 
 of society and industry were comparatively 
 simple, a man could invent an ideal state which 
 would not look too far removed from the states 
 he knew. We can still go on dreaming of little 
 paradises, such as that in Morris's News from 
 Nowhere ; but what it is difficult to do is to 
 describe fully an imaginary community which is 
 world-wide, or, at any rate, in contact with the 
 whole world, which has to face the problems of 
 race, and which has to take over from existing 
 civilization our highly developed methods of 
 manufacture and distribution of labour. Mr. 
 Wells did try to depict a state that might grow 
 out of the existing order ; but his picture is 
 notably less complete than those of older writers. 
 He could only hope to produce his effect by giving 
 us a series of cinema glimpses of various aspects 
 of life. Personally, I doubt whether any one 
 else will even attempt the job. 
 
 One could wish that somebody would make a 
 thorough study of the principal Utopias that the 
 mind of man has conceived. Such a study would 
 offer many interesting paths to research. We 
 might find out, for example, to how great an 
 extent the Utopians of various ages and nations 
 have been influenced (as Plato was conspicuously 
 
 20 1
 
 Books in General 
 
 influenced) by the transient conditions of their 
 own time. For instance, the great variety of 
 opinion which Utopians have held with regard to 
 the precious metals would be worth examination. 
 Some have held them in great respect ; others 
 have vindictively suggested that they should be 
 put to the basest possible uses. Again, how far 
 has each writer of this kind been influenced by his 
 predecessor ? It can scarcely be supposed, for 
 instance, that Campanella did not lift his com- 
 munistic ideas bodily from Plato, or that Mr. 
 Wells's class of Samurai owed nothing to the 
 same inspiration. Sometimes one sees a quite 
 minor and obviously personal idea lifted clean 
 or adapted with slight alterations which make 
 it all the more curious. For example, in More's 
 Utopia brides and bridegrooms before marriage 
 always inspected each other in a state of nature. 
 It is to be presumed that More had some peculiar 
 crank on this subject ; for he mentions the 
 possibility of concealing deformities as though 
 it were a common practice that should certainly 
 be guarded against by law. When we get to 
 Bacon we find this odd idea copied, with the 
 difference that it is now the friends of the respec- 
 tive parties that make the examination. 
 
 The endless queer details in Utopias would in 
 themselves make such a study amusing. Plato's 
 passion to secure that no mother should know her 
 own child ; the preposterously exact account of 
 the amount of money subscribed towards the 
 
 202
 
 Utopias 
 
 foundation of the new state in Theodor Hertzka's 
 Freeland ; the wonderful battle between the 
 fleets of, if I remember rightly, Abyssinia and 
 Europe in the same book ; the trains going two 
 hundred miles an hour, so smoothly that people 
 played billiards on them, in Mr. Wells's New 
 World. I remember another Utopia, an obscure 
 eighteenth-century one, in which persons who had 
 committed murders were given the choice of 
 being executed in honour or surviving in disgrace. 
 If they chose death they were led to the scaffold 
 amid universal applause, their names were in- 
 scribed upon rolls of honour, and their relatives 
 were given fat jobs. Then, again, one could have 
 a quite interesting chapter on the various literary 
 devices by which authors have precipitated 
 readers into their supposititious communities. 
 More's introduction with the bronzed and 
 bearded seaman who went out with the com- 
 panions of Columbus and was stranded on an 
 unknown island is as charming as any. Later 
 dodges have been more far-fetched. Mr. Wells's 
 transferment to the twin-world of this one is very 
 subtle ; Edward Bellamy made his hero wake up 
 after centuries in a room where he asked for 
 Edith (his old fiancee) and was conveniently 
 answered by another lady of the same name. I 
 say nothing of the books which lie on the out- 
 skirts of Utopian literature, such as various 
 grotesque Utopias and anti-Utopias and books 
 like Lord Lytton's The Coming Race and W. H. 
 Hudson's The Crystal Age, which last is, I 
 
 203
 
 Books in General 
 
 believe, the only book on record which purports 
 to have been written by a man who dies in the 
 last chapter and describes his own demise. And 
 the practical attempts to set up working ideal 
 communities such as the Oneida community 
 which developed into a prosperous " Mfg. Coy." 
 are another pleasant by-way. 
 
 I think that with all the peculiarities of time 
 and place, all the eccentricities of personal taste, 
 and all the genuine varieties of ideals allowed 
 for, a student of Comparative Utopianism would 
 probably find that there was a good deal in the 
 way of method and a very great deal in the way 
 of aim that all Utopians have in common. Mr. 
 Yeats once suggested that if we put together 
 whatever the great poets have affirmed in their 
 finest moments we should come as near as possible 
 to an authoritative religion. In the same way, 
 one feels that if one tabulated the ideals of the 
 most successful writers of Utopias we should be 
 able to extract, if not a residuum of agreed 
 schemes, at least a common element of aspiration 
 which we might fairly say represented the per- 
 manent ideals of the human race respecting the 
 ordering of our life on earth. Really intelligent 
 and altruistic men and nobody without some 
 intelligence and some altruism would bother to 
 conceive a Utopia have a tendency to dream the 
 same sort of dreams. To take it on its negative 
 side, no deviser of an ideal state, as far as I am 
 aware, has proposed immense inequalities in the 
 204
 
 Charles II in English Verse 
 
 distribution of wealth, crowded and insanitary 
 houses, child labour, wars of aggression, or 
 sweating. There are large numbers of indus- 
 trious and accurate people in this country and 
 America who are hunting for subjects about 
 which they can write volumes of " research." 
 I wish one of them would write the book I 
 suggest. 
 
 Charles II in English Verse 
 
 I WAS talking to a man the other day about 
 books that ought to have been written and 
 have not been, when it occurred to me that 
 somebody might publish a very amusing selec- 
 tion of panegyrics written on undeserving 
 persons : say, the less immaculate of the English 
 kings. I once thought of writing a life of Charles 
 II, each chapter of which should be headed by an 
 extract from some contemporary poem about him. 
 The contrast between the character and private 
 and public actions of this monarch and the 
 descriptions of him by literary eulogists would 
 have been illuminating. Gross flattery was the 
 habit of the time. James the First was given, 
 very unfairly as I think, the title of the British 
 Solomon ; and the Royal Martyr, who after all 
 had some virtues very highly developed, was 
 written of in terms which would have been t&- 
 treme if applied to St. Francis of Assisi. But no 
 
 205
 
 Books in General 
 
 one, not even his father, received such whole- 
 hearted praises as Charles II. 
 
 His career as a recipient of them began early. 
 When he was a child Francis Quarles's Divine 
 Fancies were dedicated to him. The Dedication 
 was headed : " To the Royal Bud of Majesty and 
 Centre of our Hopes and Happiness, Charles," 
 and began : " Illustrious Infant, Give me leave 
 to acknowledge myself thy servant, ere thou 
 knowest thyself my Prince." The hope is held 
 out that the illustrious infant will become " a 
 most incomparable Prince, the firm pillar of our 
 happiness and the future object of the world's 
 wonder." Addressing then the boy's governess, 
 Lady Dorset, Quarles becomes even more rhap- 
 sodical : 
 
 " Most excellent Lady, 
 
 " You are the Star which stands over the Place 
 where the Babe lies. By whose directions' 
 light, I come from the East to present my Myrrh 
 and Frankincense to the young child. Let not 
 our Royal Joseph nor his princely Mary be afraid ; 
 there are no Herods here. We have all seen his 
 Star in the East, and have rejoyced : our loyall 
 hearts are full ; for our eyes have seen him, in 
 whom our Posterity shall be blessed." 
 
 One could scarcely hope that Quarles's successors 
 
 would quite live up to that. 
 
 206
 
 Charles II in English Verse 
 
 Dryden's poem on Charles's return to England 
 is pitched a little lower. It certainly contains 
 lines like 
 
 line winds that never moderation knew, 
 Afraid to blow too much, too faintly blew ; 
 Or out of breath with joy would not enlarge 
 Their straightened lungs . . . 
 
 but that is a mere excess of avowed fancy. When 
 he wrote his Threnodia Augustalis on Charles's 
 death, Dryden decidedly went one better. 
 Perhaps it was that he had had twenty-five years 
 of Charles's reign in which to appreciate fully 
 the King's reverend qualities. He calls him 
 
 That all-forgiving King 
 
 The type of Him above, 
 That unexhausted spring 
 
 Of clemency and love. 
 
 He apostrophizes the Muse of History : 
 
 Be true, Clio, to thy hero's name ! 
 
 But draw him strictly so 
 
 That all who view the piece may know ; 
 He needs no trappings of fictitious fame, 
 The load's too weighty. 
 
 The anguished poet almost blasphemes against 
 heaven for taking away so peerless a sovereign ; 
 until he remembers that " saints and angels " 
 
 207
 
 Books in General 
 
 had been done out of Charles's company for so 
 long that their turn might fairly be considered 
 to have come. And there is the further conso- 
 lation that a James has succeeded a Charles : 
 
 Our Atlas fell indeed,, but Hercules was near ; 
 or, as the Earl of Halifax put it, 
 "James is our Charles in all things else but name. 
 
 Which Charles himself at least knew to be un- 
 true. 
 
 The Halifax extract comes out of another 
 funeral poem On the Death of His Most Sacred 
 Majesty. " Farewell," he cries, 
 
 great Charles, monarch of blest renown, 
 'The best good man that ever filled a throne. 
 
 He sketches Charles's career. He compares his 
 exile to the banishment of David (an open crib 
 from Astr&a Redux) and says of England that, 
 when he came back, 
 
 to his arms shefied 
 And rested on his shoulders her fair bending head. 
 
 He " Us from our foes and from ourselves did 
 save." Only the almost inevitable comparison 
 to the Almighty can do him justice : 
 
 20*
 
 Charles II in English Verse 
 
 In Charles so good a man and- King we see 
 A double image of the deity. 
 Ob ! had he more resembled it ! Oh, why 
 Was he not still more like, and could not die ? 
 
 What did become of Charles is suggested by 
 " the Lord R " in a poem which appears in 
 Miscellany Poems : 
 
 Good kings are numbered with Immortal Gods 
 When hence translated to the best Abodes, 
 For Princes (truly great) can never die, 
 They only lay aside Mortality. 
 
 After which we are told that the deceased is in 
 Olympus passing the nectar round ; an occupa- 
 tion that should have suited him very well. 
 
 Perhaps the suggestion will be adopted. Let 
 some publisher with a series of anthologies get 
 somebody to compile The Hundred Most Ful- 
 some Poems in the English Language. It would 
 be a more entertaining book than most. Very 
 few examples, I think, would be drawn from the 
 last hundred years. As respects the monarchs, 
 Great Elizabeth, the Great Jameses, the Great 
 Charleses, Great William, Great Anne, and the 
 Great Georges all got their full share of adulation. 
 The break comes, I think, with George IV ; 
 since whose accession we have lost the habit. 
 Any one who should address his sovereign to-day 
 in words like those addressed to Charles II by 
 
 o 209
 
 Books in General 
 
 his subjects (e.g. Great George, the planets 
 tremble at thy nod) would be suspected of pulling 
 the sovereign's leg. 
 
 The Most Durable Books 
 
 THE question of what books one would take 
 with one for a prolonged sojourn on a 
 desert island is an old one. I thought it 
 had lost its interest for me, as too remote. For I 
 do not propose to live on a desert island ; and 
 if ever, by accident, I am cast upon the shore of 
 one, clinging to a solitary plank, it is unlikely 
 that I shall have spent the last hour on ship- 
 board selecting mental food for a highly prob- 
 lematical future as a hermit. But a letter from 
 a distressed man in the trenches revives my 
 interest in the question. He complains that he 
 very rapidly exhausts the books that are sent 
 him ; that few of them are much use as permanent 
 companions ; and that, as they take up room, 
 he can carry only a small bundle of them about 
 with him. He cannot make up his mind which 
 ones to get and stick to ; and he ends by putting 
 the ancient poser to me : " What three " (it is 
 always three) " books would you rather have 
 with you if you had to live on a desert island ? " 
 He adds, with somewhat unnecessary bluntness, 
 that he will not believe me if I say that one of 
 them would be the Bible. 
 210
 
 The Most Durable Books 
 
 I suppose there must be some definition of 
 what a book what one book is. Otherwise 
 one's first impulse is to demand, as the com- 
 panions of solitude, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
 the Dictionary of National Biography, and the 
 Oxford English Dictionary say some hundred and 
 twenty volumes in all. With these one could 
 spend a fairly long life in retreat without ever 
 reading the same page twice. One might even 
 read with a definite scheme which would give 
 one the semblance of systematic inquiry united 
 with a happy unexpectedness of route. Suppose, 
 for example, one were to start each day from 
 something one had seen in the morning. A boa- 
 constrictor, for instance. Having twisted its 
 neck and left it for dead castaways are very 
 powerful fellows one would go home to the old 
 hut and refer to Boa in the Encyclopaedia. Hav- 
 ing learnt all about its anatomy, progenitiveness, 
 and habitats, one would then refer to the Oxford 
 Dictionary for the derivation of its name. Under- 
 neath the philological discourse would be quota- 
 tions from authors who had referred to the beast 
 or to its feathery similitude. The swift advent 
 of the tropic night would find one still immersed 
 in the D.N.B. lives of these authors. On a large 
 rock outside one would keep, with a charred stick, 
 a list of the objects already dealt with ; once in a 
 way perhaps, for sentiment's sake, one would 
 start from an old word again and revive memories 
 of the Boa Trail. A person of simple tastes, 
 granted the island produced enough goats and 
 
 211
 
 Books in General 
 
 not too many constrictors, might well spend in 
 this way a life as contented as Horace's. But 
 to select those three books would be cheating. 
 
 One might fairly suggest, in such a connexion, 
 that a book is either (l) any single coherent work 
 by one author, or two in collaboration ; or (2) 
 any series of works which either has been, or 
 might reasonably be expected to be, published 
 in a single volume. The edition for island use 
 would not, however, necessarily be a one-volume 
 edition. This rules out these distended works of 
 reference, whilst letting in every single piece of 
 creative literature that exists. There may seem 
 to be an unfair discrimination between author 
 and author, the poets, especially, as a body, 
 being at a great advantage over the novelists ; 
 but if novelists will be so verbose they must suffer 
 for it. What, then, would one's three books be ? 
 
 I can think of a good many books that I have 
 not read and that I hope to enjoy reading. There 
 is The Life of John Buncle, there is Old Mortality, 
 there is Hard Times, there is Tom Paine's Rights 
 of Man, there is Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity 
 and I am imperfectly acquainted with the works 
 of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. 
 (I have also not read Ordeal by Battle, and I 
 don't intend to.) But the mere fact that one has 
 not read a work which one knows to be interesting 
 is not enough to qualify it. It would be enough 
 if one were proposing to be marooned for a 
 
 212
 
 The Most Durable Books 
 
 fortnight or three weeks and then taken off the 
 island by " willing hands " ; but the books one 
 wants for a residence of many years are books 
 one is sufficiently familiar with to be certain 
 that they will not grow stale at the fifty-fifth 
 reading. 
 
 Well, Gibbon is a large and a very long book. 
 I have been through it once, and I am pretty 
 sure I shall do so again. But after that I sus- 
 pect that the passages with pencil-marks beside 
 them will satisfy me. I certainly could not, 
 just after finishing it, recommence it at once, as 
 Lord Randolph Churchill used to do, or make a 
 practice of dipping into it daily. Great as it is, 
 it is not sufficiently varied or sufficiently human. 
 For perpetual reference no general history, I 
 think, would do ; one must have something 
 more of the flavour of everyday humanity in it. 
 And every mood and every kind of character 
 must be represented. Though the books may 
 supplement one another, one finds one's choice 
 growing at once very narrow. Even Horace 
 Walpole's Letters or Saint-Simon's Memoirs 
 would pall at any rate on me. Shakespeare 
 will do ; but I cannot personally think of any- 
 thing which, for me, would contest the other 
 places with Boswell and Rabelais, unless it were 
 Morte d? Arthur. 
 
 There are people, no doubt, who would take 
 Don Quixote or Montaigne. One man I know 
 
 213
 
 Books in General 
 
 thinks that Tristram Shandy would go with him. 
 But Sterne is too short ; one would get to know 
 him by heart in a month or two. Robinson 
 Crusoe would have obvious advantages, especially 
 in an illustrated edition which would provide 
 one with useful models when one was cutting 
 out one's garments. But I think I should take 
 the three I have mentioned unless, indeed, I 
 approached the matter from quite a different 
 angle. There is a strong case for taking a 
 selection of the more morose and bewildered 
 modern novels say La Curee, Le Paradis des 
 Dames, and UAssommoir, or a judicious selection 
 from Artzybascheff, Mr. Cannan, and Mr. D. H. 
 Lawrence. For these would do a great deal to 
 reconcile one to one's lonely lot. Whenever one 
 was regretting the world of men one would find 
 an everflowing spring of consolation in them. 
 " After all," one would say, after each agued 
 page, " there is a good deal to be said for a desert 
 island." 
 
 The Worst Style in the World 
 
 THE word " euphuism " is commonly em- 
 ployed : it is also commonly confused 
 with " euphemism." The thing is very 
 properly condemned, and the book that gave it 
 its name is usually condemned with it. But it is 
 probable that John Lyly's Euphues has frequently 
 214
 
 The Worst Style in the World 
 
 been abused by persons who have never opened 
 it. At any rate, confessions of having read it 
 are few, and have usually proceeded from the 
 small minority who have found merit in the 
 book. It is very interesting, therefore, to see that 
 Messrs. Croll and Clemens have just published, 
 through Routledge, a new edition, fully anno- 
 tated. A generation unfamiliar with it will have 
 a chance of reassessing it. 
 
 The work is in two parts. Euphues : The 
 Anatomy of Wit was first published in 1578 ; 
 Euphues and his England in 1580. How imme- 
 diately popular it was is shown by the fact that 
 (my authority is Mr. Arundell Esdaile's Bibli- 
 ography of English Tales and Romances) four 
 editions of the first part, three of the second, 
 and then at least seventeen editions of both 
 parts together were published in fifty-eight years. 
 (His name, incidentally, is spelt on various title- 
 pages Lylly, Lyly, Lylie, Lilie, Lyllie, and Lily : a 
 diversity worthy of " Shakspear.") For a time 
 almost everybody with any pretensions talked 
 and wrote euphuism, very often employing Lyly's 
 fantastic alliterations, antitheses, and superfluous 
 imagery without the content of sense that Lyly 
 always had. Some writers openly ridiculed it. 
 Shakespeare and Jonson made sport with euphuis- 
 tic characters ; and Sidney (who, I think, did not 
 entirely escape the influence) ridiculed this 
 
 Talking of beasts, birds, fishes, flies, 
 Playing with words and idle similes. 
 
 215
 
 Books in General 
 
 But the development of English prose was 
 sensibly changed by it, and its effect may be 
 traced in the prose of Donne, Taylor, and Browne. 
 The book itself, however, like all extravagantly 
 mannered books, had its slump in the end. 
 Early in James I's reign the wider public seems 
 to have turned away from it, and in 1632, E. 
 Blount, the publisher, prefacing an edition of 
 Lyly's plays, referred to him as a forgotten poet 
 whose grave he was digging up. Blount's own 
 language is a terrible example of what Euphuism 
 may come to. He calls his author " a Lilly 
 growing in a Grove of Lawrels " : 
 
 " These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a 
 Churchyard ; But I have gathered the scattered 
 branches up, and by a Charme (gotten from 
 Apollo) made them greene againe, and set up as 
 Epitaphes to his Memory. A sinne it were to 
 suffer these Rare Monuments of wit, to lie 
 covered with Dust, and a shame, such conceipted 
 Comedies, should be acted by none but wormes." 
 
 From 1636 to 1868, when the late Professor 
 Arber (a man whose memory has not been 
 sufficiently honoured) published his edition in the 
 " English Reprints," Eupbues never appeared 
 again, save in two brief eighteenth-century 
 adaptations. For almost a hundred years his 
 name was never mentioned ; Lilly the astrologer 
 was much better known. Most eighteenth- and 
 nineteenth -century critics dismissed him as a 
 216
 
 The Worst Style in the World 
 
 man who, in Sir Walter Scott's words, deformed 
 his works " by the most unnatural affectation 
 that ever disgraced a printed page." One of the 
 few exceptions was Charles Kingsley, who in 
 Westward Ho ! attacks Lyly's critics with tre- 
 mendous enthusiasm : 
 
 " I shall only answer by asking, Have they ever 
 read it ? For if they have done so, I pity them 
 if they have not found it, in spite of occasional 
 tediousness and pedantry, as brave, righteous, 
 and pious a book as man need look into ; and 
 wish for no better proof of the nobleness and 
 virtue of the Elizabethan age than the fact that 
 Euphues and the Arcadia were the two popular 
 romances of the day." 
 
 Turning at this stage, on a sudden impulse, to my 
 Encyclopaedia, to see whether sense is talked 
 about Lyly there, I find that the article on him 
 is by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Life is full of 
 surprises. 
 
 The truth of the matter is that everybody is 
 right, except those who do not trouble to read the 
 book. Kingsley is perfectly correct ; it would be 
 difficult to find a book of the time finer in feeling 
 or inspired by higher conceptions of conduct. 
 Lyly is as full of common sense as of refinement ; 
 and the fact that he drew much of his discourses 
 on education and religion from other writers does 
 not diminish the impression made by his attitude 
 
 217
 
 Books in General 
 
 to life. His narrative does not come to much ; 
 most of his space is occupied by harangues, 
 debates, treatises, and letters ; his Neapolitan 
 and English love-stories move at a snail's pace. 
 But his first discussion, by the way, is on 
 heredity and environment which, with startling 
 modernity, he calls Nature and Nurture he 
 usually argues about things of perennial interest, 
 and always with subtlety, delicacy, and an insight 
 into the human heart. Still, Sir Walter Scott 
 really was not exaggerating the monstrosity 
 though it is not uniformly monstrous of his 
 style. It takes some patience to put up with 
 the construction of his sentences and his re- 
 current bunches of similes in order to follow his 
 argument. On the second page you fall plump 
 into this sentence : 
 
 " The freshest colours soonest fade, the keenest 
 Rasor soonest tourneth his edge, the finest 
 cloth is soonest eaten with the Moathes, and the 
 Cambricke sooner stayned than the course 
 Canvas : which appeared well in this Euphues, 
 whose wit beeing like waxe, apt to receive any 
 impression, and bearing the head in his own 
 hande, either to use the rayne or the spurre, 
 disdayning counsaile, leaving his country, loath- 
 ing his old acquaintance, thought either by wit 
 to obteyne some conquest, or by shame to abyde 
 some conflict, who preferring fancy before friends, 
 and this present humor, before honour to come, 
 laid reason in water being too salt for his tast, and 
 218
 
 The Worst Style in the World 
 
 followed unbridaled affection, most pleasant for 
 his tooth." 
 
 The mania for balance and alliteration is shown 
 here, but not the equally characteristic passion 
 for piling animals and plants, mainly out of 
 Pliny, into mounds of comparisons. They are 
 most tolerable when the statements made are 
 least verifiable. Here are two specimens : 
 
 " The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the 
 Sea-Crab, and is immediately recured : the 
 Torteyse having tasted the Viper, sucketh 
 Origanum and is quickly revived : the Beare 
 ready to pine licketh up the Ants and is recovered: 
 the Dog having surfetted to procure his vomitte, 
 eateth grasse and findeth remedy : the Hart 
 beein perced with the dart, runneth out of hand 
 to the hearb Dicbanum, and is healed." 
 
 " Then good Euphues let the falling out of 
 friendes be a renewing of affection, that in this 
 we may resemble the bones of the Lyon, which 
 lying stil and not moved begin to rot, but being 
 striken one against another break out like fire, 
 and wax greene." 
 
 Yet sometimes he will conclude a paragraph of 
 such abnormalities with a short, humorous, or 
 pathetic sentence which is most effective ; and 
 even sentences bearing the evident marks of his 
 style sometimes move one strongly in their 
 context. I may quote such sentences as Lucilla's 
 
 219
 
 Books in General 
 
 two complaints : " But I would to God Euphues 
 would repair hither that the sight of him might 
 mitigate some part of my martyrdome," and the 
 extremely sibilant but musical " O my Euphues, 
 lyttle dost thou knowe the sodeyn sorrowe that I 
 susteine for thy sweete sake." What a really 
 judicious critic would do would be to ridicule 
 the style and admire the book. 
 
 The Reconstruction of Orthography 
 
 RECONSTRUCTION is a blessed word, 
 and very comprehensive : but I doubt 
 whether the Government, when it 
 established the Reconstruction Committee, 
 anticipated that it would be asked to consider 
 the problem of Spelling Reform. The Simplified 
 Spelling Society, however, has sent it a memorial 
 urging that " the reform of English spelling is 
 eminently one that merits the practical considera- 
 tion of the Committee." The signatories in- 
 clude a number of scientific and other professors, 
 scores of teachers, and a tail composed of " men 
 of business, men of letters, editors, etc." The 
 editors do not include any man who edits a 
 London daily or a literary weekly, though the 
 directive minds of the Lady's Realm and the 
 Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald are in the move- 
 ment ; and the only " men of letters " are Messrs. 
 William Archer, H. G. Wells, Eden Phillpotts, 
 220
 
 The Reconstruction of Orthography 
 
 T. Seccombe (at whom I am surprised), and a few 
 persons who combine authorship with business 
 or with " etc." One did not want this piece of 
 negative evidence to convince one that authors, 
 as a body, will fight Simplifyd Speling to the last 
 mute k. The memorial makes the usual points 
 about saving children's time, facilitating the 
 acquisition of foreign languages, lightening the 
 work of teaching defective children, and assisting 
 aliens who are acquiring our tongue. We are 
 also told that " the demand for a rational spelling 
 may be compared to that for decimalizing our 
 coinage and our weights and measures." 
 
 This comparison seems to me very misleading, 
 if by decimalization is meant the introduction 
 of the Continental metric system. For this 
 latter is uniform in various countries, whereas 
 the reform suggested by the Simplified Spelling 
 Society would do nothing to approximate the 
 sound-values of our letters to those of letters in 
 foreign tongues. Cosmopolitan systems have 
 been proposed, very complex and full of odd new 
 letters ; but this Society's suggestions, whilst 
 eliminating some difficulties for the foreigner, 
 would leave English just as difficult for a French- 
 man to pronounce as French is for an English- 
 man. Take the phrase (I find it here) " A Ferst 
 Reeder in Simplifyd Speling." A Frenchman 
 would still mispronounce it. If he wished to 
 indicate those sounds in the French way he would 
 write (I am not a phonetician) something like 
 
 221
 
 Books in General 
 
 " E Fceust," etc. So the Society had better not 
 pitch its promises too high. This, nevertheless, 
 remains a minor point. The chief considerations 
 undoubtedly are the domestic effects of this 
 piece of Reconstruction. 
 
 It sounds all very simple and convincing when 
 people say : " Our spoken language has diverged 
 from our written language : let our written 
 language be made the same as our spoken 
 language." But directly you go into the matter 
 you find that the difficulties are enormous. 
 That we have no one spoken language is a 
 commonplace. Our speech varies from fashion 
 to fashion and from locality to locality. " Edu- 
 cated " English at present has an increasing 
 Cockney element in it. The common " cultured " 
 pronunciation of " No," for instance, embodies 
 an " o " sound which is anything but pure. 
 Many rustics, however, still pronounce it with a 
 good broad vowel. Even the spelling reformers 
 do not agree about words. A. J. Ellis thought 
 the " r " at the end of " proper " was still there ; 
 Sweet thought it had disappeared. As a matter 
 of fact, it is both there and not there : in some 
 classes and parts it is pronounced, in some it is 
 not. And it is quite possible that it will become 
 universal again. 
 
 This gets us on to the question of change in 
 time. The Reformers can be met both ways. 
 If it be argued that phonetic spelling fixes pro- 
 
 222
 
 The Reconstruction of Orthography 
 
 nunciation, why have we abandoned the old 
 pronunciation of words once phonetically spelt ? 
 Shakespeare pronounced the initial " k " in 
 " know " and " knee." We have dropped it 
 out. And we have no guarantee that spelling 
 these words according to our present slack pro- 
 nunciation would not be followed by another 
 divergence. The history of the word " sea " is 
 odd. In the Middle Ages it was spelt " see " 
 and pronounced " say." In Tudor times the 
 spelling was altered to " sea " in order to make the 
 spelling correspond to the sound (the same as 
 that in " great "). We have reached a pro- 
 nunciation which the original spelling would have 
 correctly represented ! If it be argued that 
 spelling does not fix pronunciation, the case for 
 the reform is seriously weakened. The truth of 
 the matter is that nothing can fix a pronunciation, 
 but that the written word, especially in an age of 
 universal literacy, does exercise a pull. And that 
 pull can as well be exercised by our present 
 spellings as by new ones. I think it was Titus 
 Gates who went to the scaffold, or somewhere, 
 crying " Lard ! Lard ! " Had he been a spell- 
 ing reformer he would have quite unnecessarily 
 assimilated the spelling of " lord " with that 
 of the name of the white stuff they keep in 
 bladders : a distinct loss to the language. Mr. 
 Murison, in the Cambridge History of Literature^ 
 points out that the word " kiln " was originally 
 pronounced as spelt ; then for some time the 
 " n " was dropped ; then the old pronunciation 
 
 223
 
 Books in General 
 
 returned. The same thing happened to words 
 containing the diphthong " oi." " Join " and 
 " oil " were, in Middle English, pronounced as 
 they are now. But for centuries men called 
 them " jine " and " ile," a habit that still persists 
 amongst many of the most eager supporters of 
 Spelling Reform. " H's " were dropped whole- 
 sale and then picked up again. We never know, 
 in fact, whether we shall not return to an old 
 way of speech ; and we might as well do that 
 as diverge from an old way of writing. 
 
 The great consolation of conservatives in this 
 matter is the length of time during which the 
 enthusiasts have continuously failed to bring 
 about a change. This is the oldest of the Cam- 
 paigns. It was already old when in 1585 a book 
 was published with this title-page (differently 
 accented) : 
 
 " AEsopz Fable'z in tru Orto'graphy with 
 Grammar-notz. Heryuntoo ar al'so jooined the 
 short sentencez of the wyz Cato imprinted with 
 lyk form and order : both of which Autorz ar 
 translated out of Latin intoo English. By 
 William Bullokar." 
 
 I don't suppose that the Reconstruction Com- 
 mittee will find time to consider this matter. 
 But if they do think of handling it they should 
 realize that they are going to put their hands into 
 a nestful of the largest hornets. 
 224.
 
 Mr. James Joyce 
 
 Mr. James Joyce 
 
 MR. JAMES JOYCE is a curious pheno- 
 menon. He first appeared in literary 
 Dublin about (I suppose) a dozen 
 years ago : a strangely solitary and self-sufficient 
 and obviously gifted man. He published a small 
 book of verse with one or two good lyrics in it ; 
 and those who foresaw a future for him became 
 certain they were right. He published nothing ; 
 but his reputation spread even amongst those 
 who had never read a line he had written. He 
 disappeared from Ireland and went to Austria, 
 where he settled. The war came, and soon after- 
 wards his second book Dubliners was issued 
 and reviewed with a general deference, after 
 wandering about for years among publishers 
 who had been fighting shy of it because of its 
 undoubted unpleasantness and a reference to 
 Edward VII. Another interval and A Portrait 
 of the Artist as a Toung Man began to run 
 serially in the Egoist. "The Egoist, Ltd.," has 
 now published this book, and nobody is sur- 
 prised to find all writing London talking about it. 
 Mr. Joyce has only done what was expected. 
 
 Whether this book is supposed to be a novel or 
 an autobiography I do not know or care. Pre- 
 sumably some characters and episodes are fic- 
 titious, or the author would not even have 
 
 p 225
 
 Books in General 
 
 bothered to employ fictitious names. But one 
 is left with the impression that almost all the 
 way one has been listening to sheer undecorated, 
 unintensified truth. Mr. Joyce's title suggests, 
 well enough, his plan. There is no " plot." 
 The subsidiary characters appear and recede, 
 and not one of them is involved throughout in 
 the career of the hero. Stephen Dedalus is 
 born ; he goes to school ; he goes to college. 
 His struggles are mainly inward : there is nothing 
 unusual in that. He has religious crises : heroes 
 of fiction frequently do. He fights against, 
 succumbs to, and again fights against sexual 
 temptation : we have stories on those lines in 
 hundreds. All the same, we have never had a 
 novel in the least degree resembling this one ; 
 whether it is mainly success or mainly failure, 
 it stands by itself. 
 
 You recognize its individuality in the very first 
 paragraph. Mr. Joyce tries to put down the 
 vivid and incoherent memories of childhood in a 
 vivid and incoherent way : to show one Stephen 
 Dedalus's memories precisely as one's own 
 memories might appear if one ransacked one's 
 mind. He opens : 
 
 " Once upon a time and a very good time it 
 was there was a moocow coming down along the 
 road and the moocow that was down along the 
 road met a nicens little boy named baby 
 tuckoo . . ." 
 226
 
 Mr. James Joyce 
 
 " His mother had a nicer smell than his father," 
 he proceeds. There is verisimilitude in this; 
 but a critic on the look-out for Mr. Joyce's 
 idiosyncrasies would certainly fasten upon his 
 preoccupation with the olfactory which some- 
 times leads him to write things he might as well 
 have left to be guessed at as one of them. 
 Still, it is a minor characteristic. His major 
 characteristics are his intellectual integrity, his 
 sharp eyes, and his ability to set down precisely 
 what he wants to set down. He is a realist of 
 the first order. You feel that he means to allow 
 no personal prejudice or predilection to distort 
 the record of what he sees. His perceptions may 
 be naturally limited ; but his honesty in register- 
 ing their results is complete. It is even a little 
 too complete. There are some things that we 
 are all familiar with and that ordinary civilized 
 manners (not pharisaism) prevent us from im- 
 porting into general conversation. Mr. Joyce 
 can never resist a dunghill. He is not, in fact, 
 quite above the pleasure of being shocking 
 Generally speaking, however, he carries con- 
 viction. He is telling the truth about a type and 
 about life as it presents itself to that type. 
 
 He is a genuine realist : that is to say, he puts 
 in the exaltations as well as the depressions, the 
 inner life as well as the outer. He is not morosely 
 determined to paint everything drab. Spiritual 
 passions are as powerful to him as physical 
 passions ; and as far as his own bias goes it 
 
 227
 
 Books in General 
 
 may as well be in favour of Catholic asceticism 
 as of sensual materialism. For his detachment 
 as author is almost inhuman. If Stephen is 
 himself, then he is a self who is expelled and 
 impartially scrutinized, without pity or " allow- 
 ances," directly Mr. Joyce the artist gets to work. 
 And of the other characters one may say that 
 they are always given their due, always drawn 
 so as to evoke the sympathy they deserve, yet 
 are never openly granted the sympathy of the 
 author. He is the outsider, the observer, the 
 faithful selector of significant traits, moral and 
 physical ; his judgments, if he forms them, 
 are concealed. He never even shows by a quiver 
 of the pen that anything distresses him. 
 
 His prose instrument is a remarkable one. 
 Few contemporary writers are effective in such 
 diverse ways ; his method varies with the subject- 
 matter and never fails him. His dialogue (as 
 in the remarkable discussions at home about 
 Parnell and Stephen's education) is as close to 
 the dialogue of life as anything I have ever come 
 across ; though he does not make the gramo- 
 phonic mistake of spinning it out as it is usually 
 spun out in life and in novels that aim at a 
 faithful reproduction of life and only succeed in 
 sending one to sleep. And his descriptive and 
 narrative passages include at one pole sounding 
 periods of classical prose and at the other dis- 
 jointed and almost futuristic sentences. The 
 finest sustained pages in the book contain the 
 228
 
 Mr. James Joyce 
 
 sermon in which a dear, simple old priest ex- 
 pounds the unimaginable horrors of hell: the 
 immeasurable solid stench as of a " huge and 
 rolling human fungus," the helplessness of the 
 damned, " not even able to remove from the eye a 
 worm that gnaws it," the fierceness of the fire in 
 which " the blood seethes and boils in the veins, 
 the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart 
 in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels 
 a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender 
 eyes flaming like molten balls." Stephen, after 
 listening to this, 
 
 " came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs 
 shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as 
 though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. 
 He passed up the staircase and into the corridor 
 along the walls of which the overcoats and 
 waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, 
 headless and dripping and shapeless." 
 
 No wonder. For myself, I had had an idea that 
 this kind of exposition had died with Drexelius ; 
 but after I had read it I suddenly and involun- 
 tarily thought, " Good Lord, suppose it is all 
 true ! " That is a sufficient testimony to the 
 power of Mr. Joyce's writing. 
 
 This is not everybody's book. The later 
 portion, consisting largely of rather dull student 
 discussions, is dull; nobody could be inspired 
 by the story, and it had better be neglected by 
 
 229
 
 Books in General 
 
 any one who is easily disgusted. Its interest is 
 mainly technical, using the word in its broadest 
 sense ; and its greatest appeal, consequently, is 
 made to the practising artist in literature. What 
 Mr. Joyce will do with his powers in the future 
 it is impossible to conjecture. I conceive that 
 he does not know himself : that, indeed, the 
 discovery of a form is the greatest problem in 
 front of him. It is doubtful if he will make a 
 novelist. 
 
 Tennessee 
 
 EETERS from strangers can usually be 
 accounted for. But why on earth I, more 
 than any one else, should have received a 
 letter from America asking me to contribute 
 towards the re-establishment of a backwoods 
 library I don't know. This, however, has been 
 my experience, and I trust that I am not 
 endangering the new Anglo-Saxon Entente by 
 relieving my feelings in the following : 
 
 LINES 
 
 Written on receiving from the Librarian of a 
 College which educates " the mountain youth of 
 Tennessee " a request for " a book " to assist in 
 the re-formation of the Library, which was 
 recently destroyed by fire. 
 
 230
 
 Tennessee 
 
 Mine ears have heard your distant moan, 
 
 mountain youth of Tennessee ; 
 Even the bowels of a stone 
 
 Would melt at your librarians -plea. 
 Although we're parted by the ocean. 
 
 Pm most distressed about your fire : 
 Only I haven't any notion 
 
 What sort of volume you require. 
 
 I have a Greene, a Browne, a Gray, 
 
 A Gilbert White, a William Black, 
 Trollope and Lovelace, Swift and Gay, 
 
 And Hunt and Synge : nor do I lack 
 More sober folk for whom out there 
 
 There may be rather better scope, 
 Three worthy men of reverend air, 
 
 A Donne, a Prior, and a Pope. 
 
 Peacock or Lamb, discreetly taken, 
 
 Might jill the hungry mountain belly, 
 Or Hogg or Suckling, Crabbe or Bacon 
 
 (Bacon's not Shakespeare, Crabbe is Shelley). 
 And if for this is on the cards 
 
 You do not like this mental food, 
 I might remit less inward bards : 
 
 My well-worn Spenser or my Hood. 
 
 Long fellows may be in your line 
 (Littles we know are second-raters), 
 
 Or one might speed across the brine 
 A Mayflower full of Pilgrim Paters. 
 
 231
 
 Books in General 
 
 Or, then again, you may devote 
 
 Yourselves to less Aesthetic lore, 
 Yet if I send you out a Grote * 
 
 For all I know you 9 II ask for More. 
 
 thus proceeds my vacillation : 
 
 For now the obvious thought returns 
 That after such a conflagration 
 
 A fitting sequel might be Burns. 
 And now again I change my mind 
 
 And, almost confidently, feel 
 That since to Beg you are inclined 
 
 You might like Borrow, say, or Steele. . . . 
 
 Envoi 
 
 Yes, Prince, this song shall have an end. 
 
 A sudden thought has come to me 
 The thing is settled : I shall send 
 
 A Tennyson to Tennessee ! 
 
 But, as a matter of fact, unless I get a special 
 permit for the export of second-hand books, I 
 shan't be able to send them even that. 
 
 * Or, with an appearance of greater generosity, one might 
 return them the Pound they sent us some years since. 
 
 232
 
 Sir Wm. Watson and Mr. Lloyd George 
 
 Sir William Watson and 
 Mr. Lloyd George 
 
 EPRESENTATIVES of literature and 
 art " usually appear in the Honours 
 Lists, and they are usually queer repre- 
 sentatives. The knighted litterateur, as a rule, 
 is either a second-rate man or a man long past his 
 prime. Possibly more men than we know of 
 refuse these knighthoods. For myself I do not 
 see what on earth a really distinguished artist 
 wants with a knighthood, unless he is poor, and 
 thinks that a title would add a guinea or two per 
 thousand to the price of his work. If Sir Samuel 
 Johnson, Sir Charles Dickens, Sir William Blake, 
 Sir Robert Browning, Sir W. Wordsworth, Sir 
 S. Taylor Coleridge, Sir George Meredith stood 
 beside Sir Lewis Morris and Sir W. Robertson 
 Nicoll, Sir Henry Dalziel, and Sir Hedley le Bas 
 (of the Caxton Publishing Company), I do not 
 conceive that those eminent writers would be 
 held in greater honour than they are, or that 
 literature would cut a more important figure in 
 our social life. The one man to whom a knight- 
 hood may usefully be given is the deserving 
 person who has worked conscientiously for years 
 without adequate recognition and of whose 
 existence the public might to his and its 
 
 233
 
 Books in General 
 
 advantage be officially reminded. As the crown 
 of a famous career a knighthood is absurd. 
 
 Sir William Watson has presumably got his 
 knighthood for being one of the most industrious 
 of the war-poets and a war-poet congenial to 
 the Powers-that-now-Be. Twenty years ago he 
 had a greater reputation than he now has, and 
 wrote several good and many respectable poems. 
 He is still skilful, and can echo effectively the 
 accents of Wordsworth and Milton ; but he is 
 certainly not a man of whom one thinks when 
 one is estimating the vital forces in contemporary 
 poetry. A new volume, The Man who Saw, 
 has just appeared. The title-poem is about the 
 Prime Minister : 
 
 Out of that land where Snowdon night by night 
 Receives the confidence of lonesome stars, 
 And where Carnarvon's ruthless battlements 
 Magnificently oppress the daunted tide, 
 There comes no fabled Merlin, son of mist* 
 And brother to the twilight, but a man 
 Who in a time terrifically real 
 Is real as the time ; formed for the time ; 
 Not much beholden to the munificent Past, 
 In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour ; 
 No faggot of perfections, angel or saint, 
 Created faultless and intolerable ; 
 No meeting-place of all the heavenlinesses, 
 But eminently a man to stir and spur 
 Men, to afflict them with benign alarm, 
 Harass their sluggish and uneager blood, 
 
 2 34
 
 Sir Wm. Watson and Mr. Lloyd George 
 
 Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal ; 
 A man with something of the cragginess 
 Of his own mountains ; something of the force 
 That goads to their loud leap the mountain streams. 
 
 Sir William proceeds to a peroration on 
 
 the man of Celtic blood, 
 
 Whom Powers Unknown, in a divine caprice, 
 Chose and did make their instrument, wherewith 
 To save the Saxon ; the man all eye and hand, 
 The man who saw, and grasped, and gripped, and 
 
 held. 
 
 Then shall each morrow with its yesterday 
 Vie, in the honour of nobly honouring him, 
 Who found us lulled and blindfolded by the verge 
 Of fathomless perdition and haled us back. 
 And poets shall dawn in pearl and gold of speech, 
 Crowning his deed with not less homage, here 
 On English ground, than yonder whence he rose. 
 
 This must certainly be the most eulogistic poem 
 ever written about a British politician. 
 
 There is nothing about Mr. W. M. Hughes, 
 Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, or Lord Devonport 
 in the volume ; these, perhaps, will be dealt 
 with in Sir William's next book, which, I do 
 not doubt, will be ready before long. But Sir 
 Edward Carson gets his meed in a sonnet To the 
 Right Hon. Sir Edward Carson, on leaving An- 
 trim, June 30, 1916, and another sonnet acclaims 
 Lord Northcliffe to whom, possibly, there is a 
 
 235
 
 Books in General 
 
 delicate allusion in the line quoted above, 
 beginning " Whom Powers." The sonnet is 
 called The Three Alfreds ; the three being King 
 Alfred, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Alfred Lord 
 Northcliffe : 
 
 Three Alfreds let us honour. Him who drove 
 His foes before the tempest of his blade 
 At Ethandune him first, the all-glorious Shade, 
 The care-crowned King whose host with Guthrum 
 
 strove. 
 
 Next though a thousand years asunder clove 
 These twain a lord of realms serenely swayed ; 
 Victoria's golden warbler, him who made 
 Verse such as Virgil for Augustus wove. 
 Last neither king nor bard,, but just a man 
 Who, in the very whirlwind, of our woe, 
 From midnight till the laggard dawn began, 
 Cried ceaseless, " Give us shells more shells" and 
 
 so 
 
 Saved England ; saved her not less truly than 
 Her hero of heroes saved her long ago. 
 
 It is a pity that there could not have been added 
 some reference to Lord Northclifre's conviction 
 that nobody in his senses ever dreamed of using 
 shrapnel against wire. Had the shells passage 
 been expanded it might have been less cacopho- 
 nous. As it stands, it gives rise to the suspi- 
 cious illusion that the sibilant cry was uttered 
 by Mr. (or is it Sir ?) Wilkie Bard. But no ; 
 it was " neither King nor Bard.' ; 
 236
 
 Stranded 
 
 Stranded 
 
 >" I thought, "I won't take any 
 books with me. I want a rest. I 
 shall swim. I shall catch fish. There 
 is sure to be a billiard-room in that pub., and 
 pretty certain to be a few people who play 
 bridge. The overtaxed brain must be allowed 
 relaxation. So good-bye, Plato ; good-bye, 
 Spinoza ; good-bye, Samuel Rawson Gardiner ; 
 good-bye, Freud. I won't take any of you." 
 
 I had been in the place twenty-four hours, and 
 had plumbed the depths of my neighbours' 
 incapacity to play any games of skill or chance 
 (except possibly I did not ask this loo and 
 vingt-et-un), when, sauntering down the main, 
 and indeed the only, street, I caught sight of the 
 words, " Grocer, Chemist, Tobacconist, Draper, 
 and Circulating Library." It would be un- 
 gracious, I felt, to let such versatility go un- 
 recognized. Besides, one might as well take a 
 novel or two out with one in the boat. It might 
 make the intervals between the bites seem a 
 little shorter. So in I went. 
 
 A young girl with a pigtail escorted me past 
 the Quaker Oats and the Gold Flakes, under a 
 little low doorway and into a back room. " A 
 shilling deposit, and twopence on each book," 
 
 237
 
 Books in General 
 
 she said ; and left me to the shelves. There 
 were books there all right : about two thousand 
 of them, reaching from floor to ceiling on both 
 sides. There was no sort of order, alphabetical 
 or otherwise, so it was no good expecting to find 
 a particular author right off. The only thing 
 for it was beginning somewhere and going 
 steadily along the rows. 
 
 B. M. Croker : yes, I think I read a great many 
 of hers in my youth. They were about penniless 
 young ladies going to India and getting married. 
 It is no good tackling this one. The Gateless 
 Barrier, by Lucas Malet ; that was about 
 spiritualism, and pretty average tosh it was ; I 
 shall probably come to Sir Richard Calmady 
 presently, but I shall give him a miss too. The 
 Iron Pirate : I liked that rather, but it would be 
 a pity not to like it so much now. I feel the 
 same about Saracinesca, The Witch of Prague, 
 and In the Palace of the King, which are all in a 
 lump together where some late devotee has 
 replaced them. Marion Crawford, upon whose 
 every word my childhood hung, I dare not 
 attempt you again ; even A Cigarette Maker's 
 Romance and the chronicle of Mr. Isaacs (who 
 enjoyed Kant and deluded me, for a time, into 
 the belief that I should like him too) will be 
 more dear to the memory if they are not restored 
 to sight. Count Hannibal : that was the man 
 who either massacred somebody or escaped 
 massacre on St. Bartholomew's Day. He had a 
 238
 
 Stranded 
 
 great square jaw and eyes that made you jump ; 
 and women cowered and obeyed when he emitted 
 a short, sharp oath or looked like emitting one. 
 William Black I never liked at any time, so 
 nothing by him need detain me. Flames ? 
 No. Dodo ? Oh dear, no. Ships that pass in 
 the Night ? No. There was edelweiss in it, 
 and an old man who was otherworldly and 
 read nothing but Gibbon. Queen Victoria 
 thought highly of it, but I don't want to 
 read it again. Nor Red Pottage either. The 
 husband and the other man (I think) had a duel. 
 They drew straws, and the man with the shortest 
 straw had to kill himself. What the lady 
 thought about it I don't remember. But one of 
 them was a Lord, New Zealand came in some- 
 where, 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 dis- 
 tinguish really imaginative literature, but I am 
 not tempted. 
 
 It is not reasonable to expect a man at this 
 date to return to A Yellow Aster, or Moths by 
 Ouida. As for The Silence of Dean Maitland, 
 the predicament of that respected ecclesiastic 
 with the undisclosed sin on his conscience is still 
 fresh in my mind, and I still remember how my 
 elders, when it first came out, debated whether 
 such a book ought to be written, and whether 
 Maxwell Gray was a man or a woman. Of The 
 Sorrows of Satan I recall little of the plot, except 
 
 239
 
 Books in General 
 
 that the Devil was a gentleman. I think that 
 the first sentences were : " Do you know what it 
 is to be poor ? Not with that poverty that 
 on ten thousand a year, but with that grinding 
 poverty that," etc. How many years ago is it 
 since that immortal paragraph, reproduced in 
 facsimile from the author's own script, appeared 
 in the Strand Magazine, with pictures of the 
 great novelist in divers postures ? It would be 
 Ethel M. Dell now, I suppose ; but they don't 
 seem to keep Miss Dell's works in this Circulating 
 Library, of which the circulation seems to have 
 stopped many, many, many years since. They 
 keep instead Frankfort Moore and G. B. Burgin. 
 
 Anthony Hope now. Here is The Intrusions 
 of Peggy. There was a grizzled inventor who 
 lived in the Temple, and he had a daughter (?) who 
 shone like a sunbeam amidst the dusty shades 
 of the law. Anthony Hope, who was very 
 nearly a first-rate writer, must have put it 
 better than that ; but I'm sure that that is what 
 it was about. Seton Merriman now. This is 
 better. But will or will not a reperusal of The 
 Vultures and Rodents Corner diminish the respect 
 that still survives in me for him ? He gave me 
 immense pleasure at one time ; can I risk it ? I 
 don't know. 
 
 With meditations like the above I roamed up 
 and down before the frayed and wrinkled backs 
 of these veterans, fascinated by so systematic a 
 240
 
 Stranded 
 
 recovery of the familiar. Then I remembered 
 that the sun was shining in a blue sky, only 
 slightly fleeced with cloud ; that the salt wind 
 blowing shoreward was driving broken sunlight 
 over the waves ; that there were as good fish in 
 the sea as ever came out of it ; and that I must 
 really take care of my health. Catching sight 
 of She and Many Cargoes, which I have read at 
 least ten times apiece, but am always good for 
 again, I detached them from their faded com- 
 panions and took them into the front shop, 
 meditating upon the astonishing sluggishness of 
 this shop, where even Mrs. Barclay had not yet 
 penetrated and Garvice was a cloudy speculation 
 in the far future. 
 
 I paid my one-and-fourpence and stepped out 
 on to the cobblestones. As I passed into the 
 sun, it occurred to me that it was not surprising 
 that even the minor works in this library were 
 like old friends. For and things like these do 
 strangely remain known, yet for a time, unre- 
 lated I spent a summer in this village fifteen 
 years ago. 
 
 241
 
 Books in General 
 
 Mr. Ralph Hodgson 
 
 MR. RALPH HODGSON is a poet who 
 has still not quite got his due. He 
 has just collected into one volume 
 (Poems), with a few others, the verses published 
 in a series of " Flying Fame Booklets " with Mr. 
 Lovat Fraser's charming and ingenious cuts. Ten 
 years' work goes into seventy pages, so that a 
 charge of over-production is scarcely possible. In 
 the circumstances Mr. Hodgson might have in- 
 cluded one or two poems, The Last Blackbird, for 
 example, from his earlier book. That book as a 
 whole, however, was not comparable with this, 
 which contains The Bull, indubitably one of the 
 finest poems of our generation, The Song of 
 Honour, which is almost as good, and many 
 charming lighter lyrics. Eve, particularly, is a 
 feat. Mr. Hodgson makes a delicate tripping 
 song out of the Fall of Man ; he pictures Eve, 
 " that orchard sprite," 
 
 Wondering, listening, 
 Listening, wondering, 
 Eve with a berry 
 Half-way to her lips, 
 
 and the serpent, a graceful beast, 
 
 Tumbling in twenty rings 
 Into the grass. 
 242
 
 Mr. Ralph Hodgson 
 
 The whole story trips like that. 
 
 " Eva ! " Each syllable 
 Light as a flower fell, 
 " Eva ! " he whispered the 
 Wondering maid, 
 Soft as a bubble sung 
 Out of a linnefs lung y 
 Soft and most silverly 
 " Eva ! " he said. 
 
 But and this is the achievement one is not 
 left with a sense of inadequacy and triviality. 
 For the feeling throughout is sincere, and the 
 nature of the calamity is conveyed as clearly by 
 Mr. Hodgson, who makes the small birds chatter 
 with sorrow and indignation when Eve falls, as it 
 would have been by another man with all the 
 paraphernalia of darkening heavens, thunderous 
 voices, and long Latin words. 
 
 But this poem is not on the same plane as The 
 Bull and The Song of Honour. No writer has 
 ever entered more completely into the feelings 
 of an animal than does Mr. Hodgson as, in a 
 setting of tropical forest and swamp, he shows the 
 defeated, expelled, and dying leader of the herd 
 remembering his calfhood, and his early fights, 
 and his prowess and his final fall, whilst the 
 obscene birds circle round overhead waiting for 
 his death. The Song of Honour, an attempt to 
 echo the Hymn of Praise sung by all things to 
 
 2 .3
 
 Books in General 
 
 their Maker, is, in the nature of things, more 
 disjointed and impressionistic, less exact and 
 well-shaped. It owes as much as any poem can 
 decently owe to another to Christopher Smart's 
 Song to David. But the strength of feeling never 
 fails, and parts of the breathless paean are very 
 beautiful. 
 
 The music of a lion strong 
 
 That shakes a hill a whole night long, 
 
 A hill as loud, as be, 
 
 The twitter of a mouse among 
 
 Melodious greenery, 
 
 The ruby's and the rainbow's song, 
 
 The nightingale's all three, 
 
 The song of life that wells and flows 
 
 From every leopard, lark and rose 
 
 And everything that gleams or goes 
 
 Lack-lustre in the sea. 
 
 I heard it all, I heard the whole 
 
 Harmonious hymn of being roll 
 
 Up through the chapel of my soul 
 
 And at the altar die, 
 
 And in the awful quiet then 
 
 Myself I heard, Amen, Amen, 
 
 Amen I heard me cry ! 
 
 I heard it all and then although 
 
 I caught my flying senses, Oh, 
 
 A dizzy man was I ! 
 
 I stood and stared ; the sky was lit, 
 
 The sky was stars all over it*
 
 Double Misprints 
 
 I stood, I knew not why, 
 
 Without a wish, without a will, 
 
 I stood upon that silent hill 
 
 And stared into the sky until 
 
 My eyes were blind with stars and still 
 
 I stared into the sky. 
 
 Those are two of the last stanzas, and even 
 standing alone, I think, give something of the 
 quality of the poem. They certainly are charac- 
 teristic in the simplicity of their language. 
 
 Double Misprints 
 
 TAKE the following paragraph from the 
 
 Connersville (Ind.} Herald : 
 
 I 
 
 " The Guest Day meeting of the literary club 
 will be held at the home of Mrs. L. A. Frazer 
 to-morrow afternoon. Mrs. De Morgan Jones, 
 of Indianapolis, will lecture on ' William Butler 
 Meats and the Garlic Revival.' ' 
 
 I think the Lady of Shalott should have been 
 brought in. Double misprints are rare, but I 
 remember another which also was perpetrated 
 in America but which has not quite so con- 
 vincing an air of sheer accident as this one. A 
 Colonel, who had fought in the Civil War, was 
 described in his local paper as " a battle-scared 
 veteran." This imputation on his courage 
 
 2 45
 
 Books in General 
 
 brought him to the office with a big stick and a 
 demand that the paragraph should be reprinted 
 with the offensive remark corrected. It was : 
 but another misprint crept in and the word 
 appeared as " bottle-scarred." Every one who 
 has dealings with the Press occasionally corrects, 
 amid the mass of quite meaningless " literals," 
 a misprint that really makes some sort of sense. 
 I myself in the last few months have had to 
 emend printers' references to Mr. Hotairio 
 Bottomley and Mr. Edmund Goose. The former 
 one felt tempted to leave uncorrected, the 
 derangement of letters being so extremely apt. 
 
 The History of Earl Fumbles 
 
 " rT^HE late Earl (Eorl ?) Fumbles was of 
 lowly birth. He was born in the thorp 
 JL of Stoke Parva in 1850, the son of a 
 penniless timber-wright. Outdriven from his 
 first school, he became a fighting-man. He was 
 a dreadless and fearnought wight, and was once 
 left for dead on the field, bleeding at every sweat- 
 hole. The saw-bones brought him through. 
 Coming back to England he saw the haplihood 
 of making a gold-hoard in the soap-trade. He 
 set up a business with the gold of others ; got 
 rid of his yoke-mates by sundry underslinkings, 
 and soon became amazingly wealthy. An 
 earldom followed ; though it is markworthy 
 24.6
 
 The History of Earl Fumbles 
 
 that on the morning after its bestowal a great 
 songsmith wrote to the Daily Score to say : 
 ' The Gusher of Fair-Name is befouled.' In 
 1910 Lord Fumbles went as sendling to the 
 King of Siam, with a bodeword from our King. 
 In the back-end of the next year his health gave 
 out ; he became bit-wise worse ; and he died 
 last night of belly-ache. Lord Fumbles was often 
 to be seen at Sir Henry Wood's Out-Road Glee- 
 Motes at Queen's Hall, but he was almost a 
 comeling at the House of Lords. He was cun- 
 ning in Kin-lore, and in his fair wonestead at 
 Fumbles wrote a great book on the stem-tree of 
 his kin. By ill hap he was an eat-all and rather 
 soaksome. He will be buried on Wednesday 
 in the bone-yard at Fumbles, in which lich-rest 
 his wife already lies. The earldom goes, by out- 
 of-the-way odd-come-short, to his daughter." 
 
 This little biography may have puzzled those 
 who have got thus far. They may have thought 
 it absurd. I compiled it with the help of 
 " C. L. D.'s " Word-Book of the English Tongue, 
 just published by Routledge. " C. L. D." (the 
 initials are, I observe, those of the author of Alice 
 in Wonderland) is one of those enthusiasts who long 
 " to shake off the Norman yoke " which lies so 
 heavy on our speech. He follows, that is to say, 
 in the footsteps of the late Rev. William Barnes 
 (of Dorset), who asked his countrymen to call 
 a perambulator a " child-wain " and an omni- 
 bus a " folk-wain." " What many speakers and 
 
 247
 
 Books in General 
 
 writers," he remarks, " even to-day, call English, 
 is no English at all but sheer French. Neverthe- 
 less, there are many who feel not a little ashamed 
 of the needless loan-words in which their speech 
 is clothed, and of the borrowed feathers in which 
 they strut. Over and over again it has been 
 said, and most truly, that for liveliness and 
 strength, manliness and fulness of meaning, the 
 olden English Tongue were hard to beat." " In 
 this little Word-Book, therefore," he says : 
 
 " after having chosen a few thousand stock loan- 
 words, I have striven to set by the side of each, 
 not indeed " synonyms," but other good English 
 words, which may stand in their stead." 
 
 Which is certainly (or, I think I should say, 
 " ywis " or " in good sooth ") a pure English 
 sentence. 
 
 One primary fault " C. L. D." avoids almost 
 entirely. He does not (as he might have done 
 had he cared to take all the astonishing Latin 
 words from Johnson's Word-Book) load the 
 dice by including in his list of " loan-words " 
 words which we hardly ever use. There are a 
 few. Only a scientist would say " acephalous " 
 when he meant " headless " ; and the general pub- 
 lic does not need to be warned to say " grind," 
 " bristly," " stalkless," and " barefooted," 
 instead of " comminute," " aristate," " acau- 
 lescent." and " discalced." It would never dream
 
 The History of Earl Fumbles 
 
 of saying acaulescent. Where our author errs is 
 where he would inevitably err : in suggesting to 
 us (i) Saxon words which we simply won't use, 
 and (2) Saxon words which do not take the place 
 of the Latin words of which he disapproves. 
 Take, for instance, as an instance of the latter 
 category, this very word " disapprove." All he 
 can give us is a list of " strong " words beginning 
 with " hiss " and " hoot," none of which gets 
 the exact shade of meaning required. Similarly 
 with " decry," for which his suggestions are 
 " boo " and " hoot." In suggesting " clean," 
 " flat," etc., for " absolute " he is merely booing 
 and hooting the slang use of that word, but he 
 has not found a Saxon equivalent for the real 
 " absolute." For " complimentary " he gives 
 " smooth-spoken " ; but how would, say, the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury like to get a letter of 
 thanks beginning : " My dear Archbishop, 
 Many thanks for your very smooth-spoken 
 remarks " ? For " uncomfortable " he can only 
 suggest " writhing " as though we could say 
 that we had spent a fortnight in a most writhing 
 hotel ; and for " temporalities " he has nothing 
 but " loaves and fishes " which is simply 
 offensive. If one began using words like these 
 promiscuously, one would simply (here I consult 
 the Word-Book again) be asking for misluck. 
 
 To turn to the other lot, it is altogether too 
 late to ask us to say " rede-craft " for " logic " ; 
 "backjaw" for "retort"; "handmaid" for 
 
 249
 
 Books in General 
 
 " servant " ; " outganger " for " emigrant " ; 
 " wanhope " (a most beautiful word, I admit) 
 for " despair " ; " scald " or " songsmith " for 
 "poet"; "hight" or "yclept" for "de- 
 nominated " ; " uplooking " for " aspiring " ; 
 " fourwinkled " for " quadrangular " ; and, 
 above all, to replace " depilatory " by " hair- 
 bane." " Ereold " and " foreold " for 
 " ancient " are no longer possible ; and the man 
 who should say that the King was crowned and 
 besmeared in Westminster Abbey would be 
 quite unable to persuade people that he wasn't 
 merely a rather coarse satirist. In cases where 
 both terms are alive, the Latin is often more 
 convenient because shorter than the Saxon. 
 If we always used " breach of wedlock " instead 
 of " adultery," many modern novels, and most 
 Sunday newspapers, would use up twice as much 
 paper and ink. (There was once a half-way 
 word : the mediaeval heralds used to say that the 
 leopard was " begotten in spouse-breach between 
 the lion and the pard.") In proposing " hand- 
 grip " for portmanteau, our wordloresman is doing 
 an audacious thing : adopting a bit of modern 
 American though, as often as not, the term is 
 shortened, across the water, to " grip " tout court. 
 
 There remain, of course, a very large number of 
 words for which " C. L. D." does provide genuine 
 living synonyms which, in many cases, are 
 stronger and terser than the originals. Even 
 here, of course, there are occasional difficulties ; 
 250
 
 On Destroying Books 
 
 we have, at any rate in print, thrown over 
 "C. L. D.'s" favourites "belly-ache" and 
 " gripes " in favour of " colic " simply because 
 they are what is called " good sturdy Saxon," 
 altogether too apt and sturdy. As for his 
 proposal of " ropes " and " manifolds " for 
 " intestines," all I can say is that I much prefer 
 here to remain under the Norman yoke. At the 
 same time, too much Latinity is a nuisance and a 
 danger to the vividness of our tongue ; and, 
 whilst refraining from following " C. L. D." to 
 his thorps or Barnes to his folk-wain, I think I 
 shall sometimes find the Word-Book useful. 
 
 On Destroying Books 
 
 IT says in the paper " that over two million 
 volumes have been presented to the troops 
 by the public. It would be interesting to 
 inspect them. Most of them, no doubt, are 
 quite ordinary and suitable ; but it was publicly 
 stated the other day that some people were 
 sending the oddest things, such as magazines 
 twenty years old, guides to the Lake District, 
 Bradshaws, and back numbers of Whitaker's 
 Almanack. In some cases, one imagines, such 
 indigestibles get into the parcels by accident ; 
 but it is likely that there are those who jump at 
 the opportunity of getting rid of books they don't 
 want. Why have kept them if they don't want 
 
 251
 
 Books in General 
 
 them ? But most people, especially non-bookish 
 people, are very reluctant to throw away any- 
 thing that looks like a book. In the most 
 illiterate houses that one knows every worthless 
 or ephemeral volume that is bought finds its 
 way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is 
 not merely absurd to keep rubbish merely because 
 it is printed : it is positively a public duty to 
 destroy it. Destruction not merely makes more 
 room for new books and saves one's heirs the 
 trouble of sorting out the rubbish or storing it : 
 it may also prevent posterity from making a 
 fool of itself. We may be sure that if we do 
 not burn, sink, or blast all the superseded editions 
 of Bradshaw, two hundred years hence some 
 collector will be specializing in old railway time- 
 tables, gathering, at immense cost, a complete 
 series, and ultimately leaving his " treasures " (as 
 the Press will call them) to a Public Institution. 
 
 But it is not always easy to destroy books. 
 They may not have as many lives as a cat, but 
 they certainly die hard ; and it is sometimes 
 difficult to find a scaffold for them. This 
 difficulty once brought me almost within the 
 Shadow of the Rope. I was living in a small and 
 (as Shakespeare would say) heaven-kissing flat 
 in Chelsea, and books of inferior minor verse 
 gradually accumulated there until at last I was 
 faced with the alternative of either evicting the 
 books or else leaving them in sole, undisturbed 
 tenancy and taking rooms elsewhere for myself. 
 252
 
 On Destroying Books 
 
 Now, no one would have bought these books. 
 I therefore had to throw them away or wipe 
 them off the map altogether. But how ? There 
 were scores of them. I had no kitchen range, 
 and I could not toast them on the gas-cooker 
 or consume them leaf by leaf in my small study 
 fire for it is almost as hopeless to try to burn 
 a book without opening it as to try to burn a 
 piece of granite. I had no dust-bin ; my debris 
 went down a kind of flue behind the staircase, 
 with small trap-doors opening to the landings. 
 The difficulty with this was that the larger books 
 might choke it ; the authorities, in fact, had 
 labelled it " Dust and Ashes Only " ; and in any 
 case I did not want to leave the books intact, 
 and some dustman's unfortunate family to get 
 a false idea of English poetry from them. So in 
 the end I determined to do to them what so 
 many people do to the kittens : tie them up and 
 consign them to the river. I improvised a sack, 
 stuffed the books into it, put it over my shoulder, 
 and went down the stairs into the darkness. 
 
 It was nearly midnight as I stepped into the 
 street. There was a cold nip in the air ; the sky 
 was full of stars ; and the greenish-yellow lamps 
 threw long gleams across the smooth, hard road. 
 Few people were about ; under the trees at the 
 corner a Guardsman was bidding a robust good 
 night to his girl, and here and there rang out the 
 steps of solitary travellers making their way home 
 across the bridge to Battersea. I turned up my 
 
 253
 
 Books in General 
 
 overcoat collar, settled my sack comfortably 
 across my shoulders, and strode off towards the 
 little square glow of the coffee-stall which marked 
 the near end of the bridge, whose sweeping iron 
 girders were just visible against the dark sky 
 behind. A few doors down I passed a policeman 
 who was flashing his lantern on the catches of 
 basement windows. He turned. I fancied he 
 looked suspicious, and I trembled slightly. The 
 thought occurred to me : " Perhaps he suspects 
 I have swag in this sack." I was not seriously 
 disturbed, as I knew that I could bear investiga- 
 tion, and that nobody would be suspected of 
 having stolen such goods (though they were all 
 first editions) as I was carrying. Nevertheless 
 I could not help the slight unease which comes to 
 all who are eyed suspiciously by the police, and 
 to all who are detected in any deliberately 
 furtive act, however harmless. He acquitted 
 me, apparently ; and, with a step that, making 
 an effort, I prevented from growing more rapid, I 
 walked on until I reached the Embankment. 
 
 It was then that all the implications of my 
 act revealed themselves. I leaned against 
 the parapet and looked down into the faintly 
 luminous swirls of the river. Suddenly I heard 
 a step near me ; quite automatically I sprang 
 back from the wall and began walking on with, I 
 fervently hoped, an air of rumination and un- 
 concern. The pedestrian came by me without 
 looking at me. It was a tramp, who had other 
 
 254
 
 On Destroying Books 
 
 things to think about ; and, calling myself an 
 ass, I stopped again. " Now's for it," I thought ; 
 but just as I was preparing to cast my books 
 upon the waters I heard another step a slow 
 and measured one. The next thought came like 
 a blaze of terrible blue lightning across my 
 brain : " What about the splash ? " A man 
 leaning at midnight over the Embankment wall : 
 a sudden fling of his arms : a great splash in the 
 water. Surely, and not without reason, whoever 
 was within sight and hearing (and there always 
 seemed to be some one near) would at once rush 
 at me and seize me. In all probability they 
 would think it was a baby. What on earth 
 would be the good of telling a London constable 
 that I had come out into the cold and stolen 
 down alone to the river to get rid of a pack of 
 poetry ? I could almost hear his gruff, sneering 
 laugh : " You tell that to the Marines, my son ! " 
 
 So for I do not know how long I strayed up and 
 down, increasingly fearful of being watched, 
 summoning up my courage to take the plunge 
 and quailing from it at the last moment. At 
 last I did it. In the middle of Chelsea Bridge 
 there are projecting circular bays with seats in 
 them. In an agony of decision I left the Embank- 
 ment and hastened straight for the first of these. 
 When I reached it I knelt on the seat. Looking 
 over, I hesitated again. But I had reached the 
 turning-point. " What ! " I thought savagely, 
 " under the resolute mask that you show your 
 
 255
 
 Books in General 
 
 friends is there really a shrinking and contemptible 
 coward ? If you fail now, you must never hold 
 your head up again. Anyhow, what if you are 
 hanged for it ? Good God ! you worm, better 
 men than you have gone to the gallows ! " With 
 the courage of despair I took a heave. The sack 
 dropped sheer. A vast splash. Then silence fell 
 again. No one came. I turned home ; and as 
 I walked I thought a little sadly of all those 
 books falling into that cold torrent, settling 
 slowly down through the pitchy dark, and sub- 
 siding at last on the ooze of the bottom, there to 
 lie forlorn and forgotten whilst the unconscious 
 world of men went on. 
 
 Horrible bad books, poor innocent books, you 
 are lying there still ; covered, perhaps, with mud 
 by this time, with only a stray rag of your sacking 
 sticking out of the slime into the opaque brown 
 tides. Odes to Diana, Sonnets to Ethel, Dramas 
 on the Love of Lancelot, Stanzas on a First 
 Glimpse of Venice, you lie there in a living death, 
 and your fate is perhaps worse than you deserved. 
 I was harsh with you. I am sorry I did it. But 
 even if I had kept you, I will certainly say this : I 
 should not have sent you to the soldiers. 
 
 256
 
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