UC-NRLF v $ 00 g RUNG CHAP BOOKS JBERT CRACKANTHORPE [GNETTES stels in Prose ITED BY GUIDO BRUNO IN HIS GARRET ON USHINGTON SQUARE, NEW YORK [ay 1915 Fifteen Cents BRUNO CHAP BOOKS Vol. 1 MAY 1915 No. 8 THE body of Mr. Crackanthorpe, when found in the * Seine, had probably been in the water for six weeks. The face was not recognizable, and his brothers were only able to identify him by his linen and a sleeve- link, with which they were familiar. The theory of suicide is the popular one, but there are those who think that the young man met with foul play. He was a son of Mr. Montague Crackanthorpe (formerly Montague Cookson), Q. C., D. C. L., his mother being the Mrs. Crackanthorpe whose essays on social subjects, such as "The Revolting Daughters", have been widely discussed. Born on May 12, 1870, Mr. Hubert Crackanthorpe married, on Feb. 14, 1893, Leila, younger daughter of the late Mr. R. J. Somerled Mac- donald, a descendant of, Flora Macdonald. She is a grand-daughter of the late Rt. Hon. Sir William Grove, and known in the literary world as a contributor to "The Yellow Book" and "The Savoy." Mr. Hubert Crackanthorpe had done literary work of a strange sort. His "Wreckage", a volume of stories, went rap- idly into a second edition, and his last book, "Vignettes", received many favorable notices in England. The Critic, Jan. g, 1897 Copyright 1915 by Guido Bruno M820090 95 BRUNO CHAP BOOKS R. Crackanthorpe was just and refined, never forcing the note ; there are delicacy, distinction, discretion in his quiet fearlessness of manner. He makes no researches into the black mire of life, resolved to be at all costs a master in the science and secrets of the sewer. The brief stories of "Wreckage", written in so fresh and pure an English, so crisp a style, are uniformly sad, but of no sickening sadness ; no scene is drawn, no character imagined, no phrase chosen for its naked horror of ugliness or gloom. Take "T'he Struggle For Life." In less than six pages we have the story of a poor woman selling herself in the street for the pittance which will buy her starving babies food, while her brutal husband riots with prostitutes in a pothouse. We say with Rosetti that "it makes a goblin of the sun." Let us also say with him : "So it is, *ny dear. All such things touch secret strings For heavy hearts to hear. So it is, my dear." The terrible rapid pages are full of an aching poig- nancy. The straightforward sentences hide an inner appeal. The telling of the misery becomes a thing of dreadful beauty and its intensity goes nearer to the heart of the whole dark matter than many a moving sermon. The artists' abstemiousness in Mr. Crackan- thorpe, the refinement of his reticence, never chilled his reader. "The pity of it! The pity of it!" That was the unspoken yet audible burden of his art. Mr. Crackanthorpe had three chief gifts : skill in dramatic narration a sense of situation, a lively feeling for the value and interpretation of gesture, posture, circumstance; secondly, analytic skill in the conception and presentation of character; thirdly, descriptive and pictorial power, readiness of vision, with a faculty of sifting and selecting its reports. His longest performance, the last story in the posthumous "Last Studies" shows that he had it in him to use all his gifts harmoniously upon an ample scale; but it is probable that stories upon the scale of "A Conflict of Egoisms" in Wreckage, of "Battledore and Shuttlecock" in Sentimental Studies, and of the masterly "Trevor Perkins" in Last Studies, would have remained the happiest and most distinctive channels of his art. Lionel Johnson in Acad, Mar. 20, 1897. BRUNO CHAP BOOKS 96 WE seem to see in Hubert Crackanthorpe not only a very interesting, but a positively touching case of what may be called reaction against an experience of puerilities judged, frankly, inane, and a proportionate search, on his own responsibility and his own ground, for some artistic way of marking the force of the reaction. To have known him, however little, was to decline to wonder perhaps how a boyishness superficially so vivid could bend itself to this particular vehicle, feel the reality of the thousand bribes to pessimism, see as salient the side of life that is neither miraculous coincidence, nor hairbreadth escape nor simplified senti- ment, nor ten thousand a year. What appealed to h'm was the situation that asked for a certain fineness of art and that could best be presented in a kind of foreshortened picture: the pos- sibilities of some phase, in especial, of a thoroughly personal relation, a relation the better the more intimate and demanding, for objective intensity, some degree of romposition and reduction. Henry James, preface to last studies. 97 BRUNO CHAP BOOKS To Hubert Crackanihorpe HUBERT, who loved the country and the town, Has left his friends; and England sees no more The young, slight figure, musing on the down, Nor France his quiet eyes, that o'er and o'er Traveled her landscape, shaping it so well. His joys were there, but pity for mankind Drew him where surging cities moved his soul: He wrote of men and women, wrecked and pined With bitter sorrow; and the misery stole Into his life till he bade life farewell. Pity he could not stay, for he was true, Tender and chivalrous, and without spot; Loving things great and good, and love like dew Fell from his heart on those that loved him not; But those that loved him knew that he loved well. Too rough his sea, too dark its angry tides! Things of a day are we; shadows that move The lands of shadow; but, where he abides, Time is no more; and that great substance, Love, Is shadowless. And yet, we grieve. Farewell. Stopford A. Brooke BRUNO CHAP BOOKS 93 VIGNETTES from the Saturday Review hitherto uncollected. 99 BRUNO CHAP BOOKS Tthe loyal friends of my beloved son, who saw in the unfolding flower of his manhood a renewal of the bright prom- ise of his early youth, I dedicate, for an ab- iding- remembrance, these last fragments of his interrupted work. Blanche Alathea Crackanthorpe. BRUNO CHAP BOOKS 100 Tout paysage est un etat (Tame. I 1 dE English Midlands, sluggishly affluent, a massy pro- * fusion of well-upholstered undulations; Normandy, coquettish, almost dapper, in its discreet rusticity, its finnikin spruceness, its distinguished reticence of de- tail ; the plains of Lombardy in midsummer, all glutted with luscious vegetation; Naples, flaunting her blatant, Southern splendour ; Switzerland, tricked out in cheap sentimentality, in a catchpenny crudity of tone; Anda- lucia, savagely harsh, with its bitter, exasperated col- ouring .... In every country there lurks a personality, and the contemplation of the memory of the lands where one has lived, of the books one has cherished, of the women one has loved, brings with it a strange sense of the incomprehensible promptings of caprice. With the fluctuations of mood, Musset seems puerile or passionate; Ami-el, lachrymose or exquisitely sensi- tive; Baudelaire, macabre or impassively statuesque; Browning, turgid or ruggedly splendid; Pater, turtuous or infinitely dexterous ; Meredith, irksome or gorgeously prismatic. In love, a naive philosopher once declared, "II n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants." There are women whom we worshipped years ago, who would certainly fail to move us today; books that enthralled us in childhood, which we hesitate to open again; places we had read of with delight and for that reason shrink from surveying .... And so tonight, beneath the lime-tree, by the dog- rose hedge, whilst the grasshoppers scrape their cease- less chorus, and the flies roam like specks of gold, and the fawn-coloured cattle stalk home from the pastures, I wonder dreamily how I have come to love so steadfastly the whole wayward grace of the country- side the melancholy of its wide plains, burnt to dun colour by the Southern sun; the desolate silences of those dark, endless pine forests that lie beyond; the hesitating contours of the wooded slopes; the distant Pyrenees, a long ragged, snow-capped wall; the daz- zling-white roads, stretching between their tall, slim poplars straight towards th^ b^ri/on; the t'^b'ed- down, white-faced villages, huddled on the hilltops; their battered, sloping roofs, tilted all awry, like loose- 101 BRUNO CHAP BOOKS fitting, peaked cape of faded-red tiles; the farmyards, strewn with dingy oxbedding, and littered with a de- crepit multitude of objects, which, it seems, can never have been new broken earthenware pots, rickety rush- bottomed chairs, stacks of dead branches, still rustling in their brown, winter leaves; the slow-paced oxen ploughing the land ; the peasants, men, women and children swaying in line as they sow the maize, with the poultry pecking behind; 'the jangling bells of the dilapidated, yellow-wheeled courier; the marked-days, the sea of the blue berets, the press of the blue blouses, the incoherent, waving of ox-goads, the brist- ling of curved horns, the shifting mass of sleek, fawn- coloured backs ; the narrow, ramshackle streets of the town; the line of plane-trees on the place d'armes, beneath which groups of grave bourgeois are forever pacing; and the Gave, spurting over the rocks, under tne old Norman bridge .... The sun slips behind a bank of inky cloud, slowly trailing its pale-green stain, and the old, penetrating charm of this tiny corner of the earth returns, and the old longing to bind myself to it, to have my place in its life, always, through the years to come .... The oxen have gone their way along the road; the lengthy twilight shadows steal across the garden; from the church-spire up on the hill the Angelus rings out; quite near at hand a tree-frog starts piping his shrill, clear note, and the cockchafers their angry whirling; and then, of a sudden, the violet night has fallen, wrapping all earth and sky in her mysterious, impenetrable blackness .... BRUNO CHAP BOOKS 102 I T was New Year's Eve. The old scene. A London night; a heavy-brown atmosphere splashed with liquid golden lights; the bustling market-place of sin; a silent crowd of black figures drifting over a wet flicker- ing pavement. The slow, grave notes from a church tower took command of the night. The last one faded; the old year had slipped by. And then a woman laughed a strident, level laugh; and there swept through all the crowd a mad feverish tremor. The women ran one to the other, kissing, wildly welcoming the New Year in; and the men, shouting thickly, snatched at them as they ran. And the cabmen touted eagerly for fares. Across the road, by a corner, a street missionary stood on a chair an undersized, poorly clad man, with a wizened bearded face. . . . "Repent . . . repent . . . and save your souls tonight from the eternal torments of hell fire" . . . The women jostled him, pelted him with fond jibes; and one a young girl broke into a peal of hysterical laughter. And I mused wonderingly on the ugliness of sin. 103 BRUNO CHAP BOOKS REVERIE. I dreamed of an age grown strangely picturesque of the rich enfeebled by monotonous ease; of the shivering poor clamoring rightly for justice; of a help- less democracy, vast revolt of the illinformed ; of priests striving to be rational; of sentimental moralists protecting iniquity; of middle-class princes; of sybaritic saints ; of complacent and pompous politicians ; of doctors hurrying the degeneration of the race; of artists discarding possibilities for limitations ; of press- men befooling a pretentious public; of critics refining upon the busman's methods ; of inhabitants of Camber- well chattering of culture; of ladies of the pavement aping the conventionality of Nonconformist circles. And I dreamed of thisr great, dreamy London of ours; of her myriad fleeting moods; of the charm of her portentious provincialty ; and I awoke all a-glad and hungering for life .... BRUNO CHAP BOOKS 104 THE FIVE SISTER PANSIES. A HESE are their names Carlotta, Lubella, Belinda, Aminta, Clarissa. By the old bowling-green they stand, a little pompously perhaps, with a slight superfluity of dignity, conscious of their own full, comely con- tours -a courtly group of rotund dames. Heavy Car- lotta, the eldest, lover of blatant luxury, overblown, middle-aged, in her gown of rich magenta, all em- broidered with tawdry gilt; Lubella, wearing portly velvet of dark purple, sensual, indolent, insolent as an empress of old, gleaming her thin, yellow eye ; insig- nificant Belinda, bedecked in silly sentimental mauvrt, all for dallying with the facile gossip of gallanterie, gushing, giggling, gullible ; unsophisticated Aminta, with tresses of flaming gold, amiable and obvious as a common stage heroine; and Clarissa, the youngest, slylv smirking the while, above her frock of milk- white innocence. i05 BRUNO CHAP BOOKS IN THE LANDES. CjlNCE sunrise I had been traveling along the *~ straight-stretching roads, white with summer sand, interminably striped by the shadows of the poplars, across the great, parched plain, where, all the day's length, the heat dances over the waste land, and the cattle bells float their far-away* tinkling ; through the desolate villages, empty but for the beldames, hunched in the doorways, pulling the flax with horny, tremulous fingers; and on towards the desolate silence of the flowerless pine-forests .... And there the night fell. The sun went down unseen; a dim flickering ruddled the host of tree- trunks, and the darkness started to drift through the forest. The road grew narrow as a foot-path, and the mare, slackening her pace, uneasily strained her white neck ahead .... Out of the darkness a figure sprang beside me. A shout rang out words of an uncouth patois that I did not understand. And the mare terrified, gal- loped forward, snorting and swerving, from side to side .... And a strange superstitious fear crept upon me a dreamy dread of the future; a helpless presentiment of evil days to come ; a sense, too, of the ruthless nullity of life, of the futile deception of effort, of bitter revolt against the extinction of death; a yearning after faith in some vague survival beyond .... And the words of the old proverb returned to me mockingly, "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor is the ear with hearing." BRUNO CHAP BOOKS 106 SPRING IN BEARN. A F a sudden it seems to have come the poplars, flut- "tering their golden-green; the fruit-trees tricked out in fete-day frocks of frail snow-white; the hoary oaks unfurling their baby leaves; and the lanes all littered with golden bloom .... The blue flax sways like a sensitive sea; the violets peep from amid the moss; beneath every hedgerow the primroses cluster; and the rivulets tinkle their shrill glad songs .... Dense levies of orchisses empurple the meadows, where the butterflies hasten their wavering flight; the sunlight breathes through the pale-leafed woods; and the air is sweet with the scent of the spring, and loud with the humming of wings .... It lasts but a week a fleeting mood of dainty gaiety; a quick discarding of the brown shabbiness of winter for a smiling array of white and gold, fresh- green and turquoise-blue .... And then, it has flitted, and through the long, parched months relentlessly blazes the summer sun. 107 BRUNO CHAP BOOKS BIBLIOGRAPHY Wreckage: Seven Studies. London. W. Heineman. 1893. Profiles. A Conflict of Egoisms. The Struggle for Life. Dissolving View. A Dead Woman. When Greek Meets Greek. Embers. Vignettes: A miniature journal of whim and senti- ment. London. J. Lane, 1896. Last Studies: London. W. Heineman, 1897 Anthony Gastius' Courtship. Trevor Perkins: a Platonic episode. The turn of the wheel. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWE1 LOAN DEPT. ^^jittassaag?' Renewed books are subject to immediate -APR 1 6 1967 11 RECEIVED 7 '67 -12 DEPT LD2lA-60ro-2,'67 (H241slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley