T^ r UC-NRLF \' ESTABLISHED 1889 » THE OLDEST AND LARGEST REVIEW IN THE ENGLISn LANGUAC DEVOTED TO POETRY AND DRAMy ^oe^^^pre^ TITLE REQISTBRBD AS A TRADE MARK Autumn Number From Morn tcHMidnight, A Modern Mystery in Seven Scenes By GEORG KAISER Some Modern Belgian Poets By FEDERICO OLIVERO At The Littld'Pipe, A Hungarian Folk Play in Two Scenes By LILLIAN SUTTON PELEE Richard Dehmel By EDWIN H. ZEYDEL (Ccmplete Contents on the Inside Cover) IL Entered at •econd-ciMt matiei ai itie Post Office at Boston, July 22, 1903. $l,bQ a Copy $6.00 a Year Editors CHARLOTTE PORTER, HELEN A. CLARKE, AUTUMN, 1920 RUTH HILL From Morn to Midnight, A Modem Mystery in Seven Scenes Georg Kaiser Translated from the German by Ashley Dukes Nameless Jens Peter Jacobsen Translated frem the Danish by Jeannette Kiekintveld Some Modern Belgian Poets Federico Olivero The Full of the Moon, An Irish Play in One Act Gertrude Herrick La Femme Qui Rit Dora Neill Raymond Richard Dehmel Edwin H. Zeydel At the Little Pipe, A Hungarian Folk Play in Two Scenes Lillian Sutton Pelee Ford Madox Hueffer A Bolshevist Theory of Art Three Translations from Verhaeren Les Pauvres La Petite Vierge La Saint Jean Songs of the Chippewa Whirling Wind Exults in the Storm A Bridegroom's Songs Texan Sketches L The Dam IL The Norther III. Violets in the Fall Lawrence Marsden Price Geraldine P. Dilla Eva May Sadler Portia Martin Albert Edmund Trombly An Arabesque ■ Florizel to Fiametta Among Friends Jens Peter Jacobsen Translated from the Danish by Jeannette Kiekintveld Dora Neill Raymond 317 363 364 379 392 393 422 432 454 460 463 465 467 469 470 NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS POET LORE is published quarterly in the months of March {Spring Num- ber), June {Summer Number), Seyaljeriiber {\:Autufho.\Number) , and December {Winttr Number). '.." :''• • '"' ' ' ' ' Annual subscription $6 00. Sing^.e"cqi?ie;o $5:5G,''-. ]'/. \\l '. .'.'. V LILLIAN SUTTON PELEE 431 Andros {Noticing that the tree has been struck by lightning). — Did it strike him, too? {He goes to Mihaly, turns him over and listens to his heart.) He is dead. But there is no sign that he has been struck by lightning. Ferencz bdcsi {Prophetically). — Not by Hghtning — by Him. {He crosses himself solemnly.) Andros {He has been examining Mihaly for some marks). — It is clear now. In putting back the cross he stuck the point of it through his trouser-leg. When it jerked him forward he became frightened. {He looks at the open, staring eyes of Mihaly, from which even death has not yet removed the fear.) Yes, poor boy, he died of superstitious fear. Ferencz bdcsi {Moving away from Andros). — Don't find ex- cuses, lad. God struck him down for his blasphemy. Terez {In a tone of azve). — He died in sin. I will pray for his soul. I will ask Father Istvan to let me join the Sisters, and I will pray for his soul all — my — life. Andros. — It was not God, I tell you, Terez, that killed him. It was his own silly fear. {Places his hand tenderly on her shoulder) Terez {Shrinking fro^n his touch). — I — will— pray. As a nun God will hear m.y prayers. He will forgive — (Andros shakes his head sorrowfully as if words were useless at this time of grief.) Curtain FORD MADOX HUEFFER By Lawrence Marsden^rice THERE is a line of little steamships which plys , its trade between Rotterdam and Mannheim carrying on a mixed passenger and freight traffic. On the deck of one of its vessels I was spending my first day on the continent. The sun was shining brightly, the sky was blue and the waters at least bluish, as they wound their way through the marshy Holland banks; there were windmills on either side and at the scattered landing places now and then a boy and girl, wide-trousered and short-skirted, would come down to the river's edge to meet the boat. Who ever would have believed that such windmills and such pairs really existed except on blue china.? Europe was more than living up to my expectations. Most of the passengers were Dutch, several were German, and numerous other nationalities were represented. The jumble of tongues produced a delightful atmosphere of foreignness that was partly dispelled by the voice of an Englishman, who took exception to the way the Dutch sat on the top deck playing cards in night-caps and "pyjahmas. " For my part I rather liked it as well as everything else strange and Dutch and unconventional. After som„e discussion of this and other matters my com.panion gave m.e his card,. which bore the nam.e Ford Madox HueflFer. I may have looked at it rather quizzically, thinking that Hueffer was an unusual nam.e for an Englishman. He misread my thoughts and asked if I perhaps knew Ford Madox Brown the artist. As I was a person of no education except for what I had been able to pick up at an American college, I answered in the negative, but when he spoke of the pre-Raphaelites I had some- thing to say, for I had visited the Liverpool gallery only about a week before, and this was m.y first opportunity to give rein to my enthusiasm. He listened with interested, or polite, or perhaps amused attention until we were interrupted by an Armenian merchant, who said he knew seventeen languages, had been speaking five of them on the boat and would now talk a little 432 LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 433 English. As this exercise did not interest me I walked on, leaving my acquaintance discoursing patiently with the intruder. Seated at the sunny stern I found a fair-faced young girl with pre-Raphaelite hair reading a beautifully illustrated child's version of Kirig Arthur. She was willing to share its wonders with me, and we were both engrossed in it when I saw the Englishman standing before me again, for Christina was his daughter. Sev- eral years later I learned that she was named after Christina Rossetti, and that she was the inspiration of a beautiful poem. I had reserved no cabin, so I had to sleep that night on deck. I remember that my acquaintance lent me the pillow and blanket which contributed more than the stars to my enjoyment of the night. The next day he took the train, while I remained on beard the beat in order to spend a few hours at several of the large Rhine cities. I did so against the advice of my fellow- traveller, who said the Germany that was worth seeing was in the small towns. Finding me obdurate he invited me to call on him in Heidelberg, for that was the temporary destination of both of us. As it turned out I spent several pleasant evenings with him and his family at the Molkenkur looking down on Heidelberg castle and on the Neckar valley far below. I do not know what we talked about, but I know it was not art and poetry, for it was not until many years later that I learned I had been entertained by a poet unawares. Neither did he talk to me of sports, of hunting, golf, and cricket, of experiences on a farm in Pennsyl- vania, ef drives over New England roads, of a visit to California, or of lectures given in a German university. I had the impression all the time that I was conversing with an easy-going, rather fastidious gentleman of leisure. For my part I made just no impression at all on him. I have since read nearly a thousand of Hueifer's anecdotes relating to people he has met and I find I figure in none of them., which is a reassuring sign that I did not give m.yself away, A few years later I began to read in the pages of Harper's Monthly the details of his interesting connection with the Pre-Raphaelite group. Later I began to know him as a critic ef art, literature, and life, as novelist and as a poet, and little by little I pieced together the story of his life, and a picture of his personality. If I knew this writer only from his books I should gain the im- pression that he was relatively unapproachable, that he fled before merchants and shunned the companionship of the common or 432.iS5 434 fORI) MADOX h'UEFFER travelling American. If I tried to form an opinion by reading Violet Hunt's (Mrs. Ford Madox HueflFer's) Desirable Alien or Zeppelin Nights I should strive in vain to reconcile the traits of Serapion and of Joseph Leopold, but I should only be able to conclude that their model was in some way a very disagreeable person. Self-disparagement as practiced in the best English circles involves also disparagem.ent of one's immediate family. Moreover Flueffer always insists in theory that the poem not the pcet counts, but why then does he tell of the poetic side of the life of Christina Rossetti which he knows so well. I propose to in- dulge as much as I please in what he calls "chatter about Harriet," and caring little whether my subject is justified in being a Catholic or a To'-y or anything else that he may be, I shall try to trace out how he became what he is. Ford Madox Hueffer comes from a race of non-conformists. The great-great-grandfather Brown was the father of non-lancet surgery. He lost his practice because of his professional hetero- doxy and died in a debtors' prison. His son, a Whig, by a quarrel with his Tory patron, spoiled not only his own naval career but that of his son. When this son. Ford Madox Brown, turned to painting he saw things with his own eyes and painted them as he saw them. For this offense his name became anathema among the early Victorians. Dickens demanded that Brown, Millais, and the Pre-Raphaelite leaders should be imprisoned. Brown was subject to persecution of this sort throughout his life, and died in his old age in comparative poverty and disrepute. Ford Madox Brown had three children. Oliver Madox Brown the only son, died at the age of eighteen after having already won distinction as a poet, novelist, and painter. Lucy Brown married William Rossetti, the brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina, and the second daughter, Catherine Brown, married a German doctor of philosophy, Franz FIuefTer, the father of Ford Madox Hueffer. Franz Hueffer had recently taken a hasty departure from his native country as a result of a practical joke he had played on a professor of Berlin university. Hueffer, then a student, and the professor were to address royalty from the sam.e platform on the following day. Hueffer's rooms adjoined the professor's apart- ments, so he was able to overliear the professor rehearsing his LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICJ«: 435 speech. Being possessed of a remarkable memory HueflFer deliv- ered this speech the following day, anticipating the professor, who was left to stammer a few commonplace impromptus. Hueffer wisely took a hasty departure from Berlin, passed his doctor exam- ination at Gottingen, and sailed for foreign soil. As he was an accomplished linguist, a favorite pupil of Schopenhauer, and like his master an Anglomaniac, the transition to English surroundings was an easy one. He took up his abode in Chelsea, about half way between the homes of Carlyle and William. Rossctti, with both of whom he was connected by strong bonds of friendship. As musical critic of the London Tim^s, he held a position of power and influence. He administered stern critical justice, unin- fluenced by bribes or threats, both of which were oiTered in abun- dance. As a Wagnerite he was held in opprobrium by the pre- vailing public opinion. On the whole, he brings to a fitting close the succession of Ford Madox Hueffer's non-conformist ancestors. It was in his grandfather's house, however, that "Fordie" spent most of his boyhood days and received the impressions that dominated his later years. His grandfather lived in an old Georgian house. No. 120 Fitzroy Square, the house which Thack- eray describes in The Nezvcovies. Here Brown carried on the struggle against Ruskin, Dickens, and the Victorian self-righteous- ness, in the early days, alone. Later he joined hands with the Pre-Raphaelites, though he did not go to their length in the direction of medieval rom.anticism. Still later he followed the lead of the social and aesthetic reform.ers of whom William Morris was the chief. The Rossettis, Swinburne, Hohnan Hunt, and a score of other notable men of art and letters were habitues of the Brown house, and Brown was m^eanwhile helping another score of poor poets out of the gutters for which they seem.ed to show a fatal proclivity. Thus the grandson was exposed in turn to Fabianism., anarchism., aestheticism., and all the other "isms" of the time. Here, w^e will not say he drifted, but rather he swam counter to every current. He says of him.self: "I must personally have had three separate sets of political opinions. To irritate my relatives, who advocated advanced thought, I dimly remember that I pro- fessed myself a Tory. Amongst the bourgeoisie, whom it was my duty to epater, I passed for a dangerous anarchist. In general speech, manner, and appearance I must have resembled a so- cialist of the Morris group. " HueflFer's education was of a most sporadic nature. The conversations he listened to in his grandfather's house formed its 436 FORD MADOX HUEFFER chief element. These were later supplemented by his attendance on the socialistic meetings of William Morris and his group. During the frequent intervals of non-attendance at school he was educated by his Aunt Lucy to be a genius. "Fordie" felt this to be a misguided effort, but submitted with docility. While his more brilliant cousins could master important roles in Greek plays, he could do no better than to represent the mob and rush in at the proper moment with the proper ejaculations. We find out incidentally that he spent many seasons with relatives in Paris where he learned to prefer the French language to his own. In one of his anecdotes he appears as a boy of nine or ten visiting relatives in Westphalia, in another as a young man studying at Bad Soden under the tutorship of an atheistic Lutheran pastor, who persuaded him to read Nietzsche, when, as he says, he should have been reading Catullus, for Hueffer Is enamored of the true classic spirit, too much so to tolerate the renaissance figures that sparingly grace the marts of London and profusely adorn the bridges of Berlin. HueiTer also studied music and before he had reached maturity he had a "nodding acquaintance" with nearly every Instrument but the piano and the drum. A single Incident which he relates for another purpose shows the state of advancement of his education shortly before the death of his father In 1889. At the last school to which he was sent the modern language master began one day to direct innuendos at ilm because he attended concerts rather than language classes. At first Hueffer paid no attention to this, for, as he says, his father had always taught him that schoolmasters were men of Inferior Intelligence, to whom personally one should pay no 'attention, though their rules of conduct must be exactly observed. ^^hen It occurred to him that the attack was aimed at Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner quite as much as against himself. Filled with fury he launched an Invective against the teacher, considerately speaking In German In order that the others might not understand. Incidentally he quoted Victor Hugo to the eff"ect that in order to utter such sentiments ^^ il faut etre stupide comme un maitre (Tecole qui ri'est bon a rieti que pour planter des choux." The irate schoolmaster threw an Ink pot at his pupil, destroying his suit. Mutual apologies followed, and for the mo- ment the matter seemed settled, but HueflFer was regarded as a disturbing element in the school and he was soon dismissed on a technicality. The founder of the school, wishing to prevent huckstering among the boys had provided that any one of them 1 A LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 437 engaged In trade should be dismissed. Hueffcr at the age of sixteen had already produced a successful volume and had re- ceived money for it. He was accordingly debarred from the school. This volume was evidently Brown Otvl, a fairy story il- lustrated by Ford Madox Brown. The death of his grandfather marked a critical point in Hueffer's life. He kept company for a little time with the Fabians and the aesthetes, but their dogmatism drove him from camp. The Fabians had codified in hundreds of tracts what their mem- bers should believe about God and man, and the aesthetes held no one a poet who was not secure in the details of the life of Beatrice or in the Cuchullain saga. In despair HueflFer turned to the "Henley gang." This group was boisterous, self-vaunting, and piratical, but its members at least had red blood. They be- lieved that a man should have his sharp struggle with life and be a writer only incidentally. It was their influence that drove Hueffer away from London for his "tussle with the good red earth." Then began the period which he mistakenly calls his thirteen lost years. These were not lost years, however, even had they done nothing else than to give him the material for his book The heart of the Country (Part II in Engla^id and the Efiglish), wherein he preserves for posterity a sympathetic and convincing picture of the struggle for existence and the thought life of that passing type, the English farm-laborer. The chief value of this epoch in HuefTer's life was that it brought stability to his views, where a conflicting ferment had held sway before, or to put it otherwise, he assimilated selectively in this period the too abundant mental pabulum of his previous years. It was now that he first found time to trace theories back to their first principles and first called himself a Catholic and a Tory. Religion he concluded must eventually be founded on faith rather than reason, and m.ankind must seek the highest efficiency of the few rather than the greatest good of the greatest number. The various sects of Protestantism and socialism, so he argues in The Critical Attitude, are merely temporizing with ulti- mate necessity. Hueffer combines his religious and social views with political liberalism. He criticizes frankly the marriage reg- ulations of his church and believes in the fallibility of the pope. He believes in self-determination for all parts of Ireland. He V suffered violence for his opposition to the Boer war and to a less degree, no doubt, for his championing of woman suffrage. Hueffer produced very little, it is true, in his thirteen country 438 FORD MADOX HUEFFER years; a treatize on the art of his grandfather, another on Ros- setti's art, a study of the Cinque Ports, which laid the basis for later historical novels, and some poems which appeared under the title The Face of the Night. For these poems, however, few as they are, he would deserve literary immortality. Sweeter and more appealing poems than those in A Sequence^ then The Great View, An End Piece, and To Christina at Nightfall have not been written. Toward the end of this period HueflPer came to know well his neighbor Joseph Conrad and collaborated with him on two novels. The Inheritors (1901), and Romaiice (1903). This marks for HuefTer the beginning of a rather industrious period of novel writing. He was already resuming connexion with London life although he retained his Kentish hom.e. In the year 191 1 he suddenly realized that he had grown up and wrote for his children, Christina and Katherine, Ancient Lights and Certain New Re- flections, Memories of a Young Man. He tells them in the preface that he wants to preserve for them the story of his life, to save them pains he has suffered, and to compare his childhood days with theirs. This is another way of saying that his critical faculties have developed, a fact which is sufficiently attested by his collection of essays that appeared about the same time called The Critical Attitude. In the year 1914 he set himself down to the task of analyzing seriously the technique of Henry James, whose work he so much admired. Naturally then, his novel The Good Soldier (1915) is even more strongly reminiscent than his earlier fiction cf his m.aster. In the year 191 5 appeared two anti-Prussian volumes from Hueffer's hand, both of them notable for the mass of material they marshal together and the deliberate- ness of judgment they display, but Hueffer suddenly resolved to contribute blood instead of sweat and ink to the cause. What led him to this step is very clear. It was the death of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier and "the death at the same time of another boy — but quite a commonplace, nice boy." Although lie was forty-four years of age, Hueffer managed in 1917 to secure a second lieutenancy in the British army. The product of the next two years was a collection of Poems Written on Active Service. II In reading the work of Ford Madox Hueffer one is reminded LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 439 ever and again of his grandfatlier. That Hueffer has the pictorial -V*^ instinct is obvious from his descriptions. He docs not cover his literary walls, gallery fashion, with pictures, but here and there, at just the right place architecturally, he hangs a landscape painting that cannot be forgotten, as that of the chess-board pattern of sunlit, Pre-Raphaelite Hessian harvest-lands where he first heard of the death of Holman Hunt, or the view of the French shore that flashed upon his eye one day in his Kentish home, a picture which symbolized for him the spiritual nearness (>f England and France. In the last chapter of the work Between St. George and St. Denis, Iiuefi"er tells us how a poem originated >^ out of the feeling of that moment. Hueffer shares the literary "'\ creed of his grandfather and the other Pre-Raphaelites.-. It is his firm belief that ar t exists for art's sake and should not be ma^T'X^ Ilke^-Ii^4»4-{ftaide n ot social THo titT^ His o'ppogTTTUn'to Shaw is \ not based solely on political differences. Art should benefit the j state, Hueffer maintains, not by advocating specific reforms but V^ by telling the truth, by describing man as he is and showing the-'^ practical working out of his ethical code. In this way Henr}' James has benefited the English people and Flaubert might have benefited the French people had they read his UEducation Sentimentale betim.es and pondered on it. Hueffer stands with his grandfather also in his aversion to affectation and to medieval ^ romanticism. The language of the author should be the natural language of his own time. He abhors Stevenson's sentence: "With interjected finger he delayed the motion of the tim.epiece" which "set back the English language fifty years. " He finds dis- tasteful the preciosity of Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel and holds it not to the credit of d'Annunzio that in a recent work he has used 2017 obsolete words that cannot be understood by a modern 3^^ Italian without the help of a medieval glossary. Like his grand- father Hueffer craves companionship in artistic endeavor, and V deplores the fact that the author of to-day, while he lives and \ ^ writes must carry on without the help of sincere and unbiassed "^ literary criticism. He satisfies this craving in some measure by literary colla- boration and, according to H. G. Wells, by playing the part of , the good uncle to young talents. Grandfather and grandson have -♦^ a like literary conscience. The artist's business in life, as they see it, is to produce precisely accurate impressions and not to shirk the hard tasks. As the grandfather was the first to repre- sent light on the canvas precisely as he saw it, so we find the 440 FORD MADOX HUEFFER grandson striving to give a correct impressionistic picture of London in the present or in the future, or to define precisely his feeling toward France, or the exact difference between the England of to-day and that of his boyhood. All this he does without a glittering generality. His faithful picture is made up of homely, interesting commonplaces. The style in these descriptions is always clear but is sometimes conspicuous by its very precision. Hueffer accounts for this himself. In a certain sense, he says, he is tri-lingual. His homely poetry he has always thought out In colloquial English. In matters of pleasures of the table, of wines and the like, he has been apt to think In German, but whenever he has framed a prose paragraph with great care, he has framed it in his mind in French or more rarely In Latin and then trans- lated It into English. This seems most unplauslble when one first reads It, but in reality It is easy to Identify these labored passages of foreign origin. They stand naturally only at critical points in his writings. For the most part, however, the uncon- scious limpid style prevails, tending even toward the colloquial, as might be expected of the teller of anecdotes, while the too frequent use of the weakening word "very" tends to lend to his descrip- tions the characteristic nonchalance of English conversation. This one word will frequently give the clue as to the authorship of passages In Conrad and Hueffer's joint works. Hueffer has himself afforded a further clue which will be mentioned later. Where Hueffer's novelllstic style is other than simple it Is due to the intrinsic difficulty of the theme. The writer of the novel of pure adventure can make the task easy for the reader, but Hueffer often essays, as in The Good Soldier, to relate In sequence the impressions that the contacts of life make on the pivotal characters. But In life the first impression Is sometimes a wrong one, which is corrected by a later experience; and an adequate conception even of our nearest acquaintances may come only after a cycle of experiences, perhaps never at all. An Impres- sionistic novel, in Its nature, demands much concentration on the part of the reader, and the style of the author Is not the chief factor In the difficulty. There is not the slightest uncertainty as to what Hueffer has set out to accomplish as a writer. "My whole life as a conscious artist," he says, "has been a matter of selecting this or that il- lustration so as to convey to readers this or that Impression." Hueffer Is an Impressionist and a teller of anecdotes. All his writings show this but none so prominently as his descriptive LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 441 wc.rks. Ill ItHir N'olunics, Memories and Impressions, England and the English, Between St. George and St. Denis and When Blood is their Argument, Hueffer has laid bare for us the mainsprings of three civilizations of to-day, the English, the French, and the Prussian, and presented total views of them that deserve to be- come classic. Interwoven are about a thousand significant anecdotes and incidents. One who reads only the first named of these works will simply think that the author is a favored mortal who had the good fortune in his youth to come into contact with artists, kings, poets, and composers galore, and indeed Memories and Impressions is in many respects the most fascinating of Hueffer's writings but as one reads farther one gradually becomes aware that the perceiving and interpreting of anecdotes is not a matter of mere good luck but of specially trained skill. Hueffer admires James and Conrad for their ability to seize an incident, an affair, a little piece of life, and squeeze the last drop of information out of it. This talent he possesses himself in a rare degree. He tells us once of a walk he took with a Westphalian relative, a Geheimratin, along the highway. Inside the " Wandhecke'' the school children were singing loudly '^Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlem." As the Geheimratin heard them sing her eyes filled with tears. That is all, but Hueffer devotes about fifteen pages to the narration of this episode. In order to explain the signifi- cance of the '' fVandhecke" one must know about the Prussian agrarian policy in Westphalia, in order to understand why the children sang so loudly one must understand the ultimate aims of the Prussian educational policy, in order to comprehend why the eyes of the Frau Rath filled with tears one must know not only her life history but the political history of Westphalia as well. Meanwhile HueiTer has given us more information than most historians, held us in greater suspense than m.ost novelists and left us with a craving for more explanation. This is but one ex- ample of many. The anecdote is as much HueflFer's weapon of attack as the statistical table is the ordinary economic historian's. Not that Hueffer disdains to support his conclusions with figures, where it can be done, but for the most part he deals with the spirit- ual and mental wants of man that defy measurement and tabula- tion. There is a personal side of Hueffer's anecdote telling that is also interesting. The strict standards of truth that prevail in his literary school are always compelling him to break through his reticence and confess his personal bias and his point of ob- ^ FORD MADOX HUEFFER 442 servation. So we find him describing himself as a small boy much impressed by the Victorian figures that surrounded him, or as a young man learning from his Westphalian relatives to abhor the protestant Prussians, as the average reader without special knowledge or special gifts but always catholic enough in his tastes, reading in his youth the adventures of Harkaway Dick and later Scott, Shakespeare, Dickens, Turgeniev, Flaubert or James. Always we have the picture of an obscure and passive observer never that of an individual of whom some one might once have heard. HueiTer's two anti-Prussian works of 191 5 both bear titles suggested by passages in Henry V. They are put together with an art that is alm^ost too well concealed. When Blood is their Argument is a title to warn off all but the lover of sensation, and the dry sounding titles of the chapters will ward off this individual but the book itself is neither hysterical nor dull. It is coldly and convincingly annihilating. Its "Leitmotif" is the poverty of that thing that calls itself German culture. The second volume Between St. Denis and St. George, A Sketch of Three Civilizatio7is was, in its origin, a response to Shaw and certain pacifists. It developed, however, into a con- structive piece of work. There is no vaunting of England in the essay. The only virtue he claims for England in the critical days was that of correctitude. She acted as the society of nations might expect a civilized nation to act. That to HuefTer's mind is the modest contribution of England to civilization. She has taught people how, in a populous world, one can bump elbows with another without giving constant cflFence. Entirely without grandiloquence, Hueffer pays to France as finely expressed an hom.age as that nation has ever received, though his fervor is restrained by the feeling that "to praise one's own team" is an impropriety. Toward Germ.any he is strictly fair. The im- pressionist's veracity and the artist's conscience do not forsake him even in these polemic writings, which, almost alone of recent products, their class, deserve a permanent place in literature. In regard to Goethe, however, Hueffer may be more biassed than he realizes. It will be remembered that as a part of the "Kulturkampf" the Prussian directors of German education began to assign to Goethe a more commanding place in the world literature than had hitherto been claimed for him, until he shortly came to be treated as a superman. At the same time he was made to play the role of a nationally-minded poet, which of course he LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 443 was not. One of the leaders of the new policy even went so far as to declare that the house in which Goethe was born should stand a little higher than the manger of Bethlehem. None were more offended by the new policy than the Catholics, and Alexander Baumgarten, a member of the Society of Jesus, was impelled to write a very conservative book on Goethe which reflects the oppo- sition of the time. With the disparaging spirit of this work Hueffer seems to be in an agreement, which leads him to criticize much in Goethe's work that is in harmony with his own literary principles and practice. Goethe's lyric poetry was impressionistic in Hueffer's sense; it exactly reproduces the emotion of the moment. His Ilermarui und Dorothea is a simple and unostentatious epic of a sufficiently even character; a Homer who never nodded would be intolerable. Dichtung mid Wahrheit is not so much an account of the author as of his times, corresponding to Hueffer's Memories and Impressions in that respect. Goethe tells us, it is true, what sort of clothes he wore as a youth and how he dressed his hair, but after all does not Hueffer do the same, and for a similar im- personal purpose.? Of course I do not mean to say that Goethe was in any sense a modest individual. There was no especial reason why he should have been so, though we would have all been grateful to him had he possessed this final charm. Hueffer goes so far as to say that all that one may derive through the medium of the German language is of slight value. Every child should learn enough German to appreciate the poems of Heine, else his life will be rendered poorer by his ignorance, but that much German one can learn from a governess. The rest of German literature appears to him a doubtful boon to the world. This view is not unique; we have heard similar opinions freely expressed of late, but rarely from persons in any way qualified to judge. The German philological system of education, Hueffer says, with greater justice, is a positive bane, for it sub- stitutes a derivative learning for real contact with literature and it induces men to become leading authorities in petty specialties instead of seeking a broad humanizing education. HI Hueffer assigns to the novelist an important role in modern life. Flaubert, James, Turgeniev, and Conrad have by their pictures of life, helped to guide the world into its proper course. 444 FORD MADOX HUEFFER "Such work as theirs is truly educational, truly scientific. The artist of to-day," he says, "is the only man who is concerned with the values of life; he is the only man who, in a world grown very complicated through the limitless freedom of expression for all creeds and all m_oralities, can place before us how these creeds work out when applied to human contacts, and to what goal of human happiness these moralities will lead us. " When Hueffcr, about 1902, began to train himself to write novels he had too high an esteem for them to enter upon his task in an amateur fashion, learning the technique of his art as he went along. He had felt the spell of his four chosen masters and studied their craft, but that was not enough. He published his first two novels under a direct apprenticeship to Conrad. This self-suppression is the more remarkable in view of the fact that Hueffer actually helped to discover Conrad. That happened about the year 1894. Hueffer relates that in the early days of liis retirement Mr. Edv/ard Garnett came down to his village, bringing with him a great basket of manuscripts that had been submitted to his firm.. He found the Hueffer household all dressed more or less mediaevally as befitted disciples of socialism and William Morris and drinking mead out of cups made of bullock's horn. While Garnett was reading his MSS, he suddenly threw one across to Hueffer saying "Look at that." Hueffer says: I think that then I had the rarest literary pleasure of my existence. It was to come into contact with a spirit of romance, of adventure, of distant lands, and with an English that was new, magic, and unsurpassed. It sang like music; it overwhelmed me like a great warm wave of the sea, and it was as clear as tropical sunlight falling into deep and scented forests of the East. For this MS was that of Jlmayer's folly, the first book of Mr. Joseph Conrad, which he had sent up for judgment, sailing away himself, as I believe, for the last time upon a ship going towards the East. So was Joseph Conrad "discovered." A few years later we find Hueffer and Conrad as friends and neighbors in the south of England. In 1901 and 1903 two novels appeared under their joint authorship. The reader of Memories and Impressiofis (191 1) will feel Hueffer's personality on every page of the Inheritors while Conrad's critic, Richard Curie says the work bears very little impress of the touch of Conrad. In Memories and Impressions Hueffer tells us of the changed world he found about 1905, on his return to it after his period of retire- LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 445 ment in the country. Because of its quickened pace, its big projects, its lavish and showy display of money it was almost incomprehensible to him.. In his "lost" years he seemed to have dropped the thread of its development. For the change that had com.e over it he held the Boer war responsible. The Inheritors was apparently born out of the emotions of that time. In the heartless Greenland project with its hypocritical professions of the great moral aim and in the self assurance and predestined success of the "dim-cnsionists" we have the Boer war and the post-bellum race reflected in an exaggerated way. The spheres of life in which it plays are those familiar to Hueffer rather than to Con- rad; the editor's office, the studio and the old-fashioned French interior. The old artist Jenkins of the ruddy face and archaic, silver hair of the King of Hearts is of course HueflPer's grandfather. Ford Madox Brown. HueiTer's early experiences with various literary men have also left their im_press on this novel. Oddly enough even the discovery of Conrad by HueflFer and Garnett (Lea) has its record in this novel. On the whole, one is justified in believing that Conrad's share in this novel was almost ex- clusively a critical one. Romance (1903) is, on the other hand, a work of genuine collaboration. Richard Curie surmises that Conrad must have had a great deal to do with the middle part of this book. I be- lieve that the work is the product of a fairly even fusion of effort throughout its length. To the English Reviezv of 191 1 Hueffer has contributed an article on Joseph Conrad which, short as it is, is the most authoritative comment we have on him. In this article Hueffer indicates that the narrative part of Romance was done mainly by Conrad and the descriptive part by "another writer," though "that apportionment of the task was never consciously made between the two." The manuscript evidence of the col- laboration which he presents is taken, it is true, from the opening and closing portion of the book, but it is not difficult to find Hueffer-passages even in the more central portions where John Kemp is adventuring in the West Indies. The following passage, for example, is obviously Hueffer's as the over-numerous Very's' show: "The room was very lofty and coldly dim; there were great bars in front of the begrimed windows. It was very bare, con- taining only a long black table, some packing cases, and half a dozen rocking chairs. Of these, five were very new and one very old, black and heavy, with a green leather seat and a coat of arms worked on its back cushions." Moreover, it is not hard to be- 446 FORD A4AD0X HUEFFER llevc that the youthful coal-ccUar appreciator of Ilarkaway Dick should liavc let his soul revel freely for a time in the imagining of hair-breadth escapes, such as those of John Kemp. Indeed the very details of these adventures may seem familiar to those whom Providence vouchsafed a few sweet, stolen, youthful hours with Dick. Hueffer's later novels fall into two groups, for he has given us alternately studies of past and of present day life. To the form.er group belong The Fifth Queen and How She Came to Court (1906), Privy Seal (1907), The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908), The Half- Moon, A Romance of the Old World and the New (1909), Ladies whose Bright Eyes (191 1), and The Young Love II (191 3). To the latter group belong Jn English Girl (1907), Mr. Apollo (1908), A Call (1910), The Panel, A Sheer Comedy (1912). (the American edition is called Ring for Nancy), Mr. Fleight (1913), and The Good Soldier (191 5). On the whole his work in the historical field has been of greater distinction and more even merit than that in the field of modern life. For, to put it roughly, in the modern novel he has fallen short of Henry James, except in point of style, while in the historical novel he far surpasses Walter Scott. He has in the first place the artistic conscience that Scott lacked, and then he is master of the modern technique and reveals his characters, situ- ations, and scenes with the impressionistic flash, where Scott has recourse to enumerations and circum.stantial description. Hueflfer seems to have studied all the details of armor, of costume and all the forms of speech as thoroughly as the first master of historical fiction. He shares with Scott an interest in the super- stitions of the past. In fact, superstition seems to be a pet Madox hobby. Oliver Madox Brown devoted his work The Dwale Bluth (1876) to that theme. Ford Madox HueflFer's brother, Oliver Madox Hueflfer, has written a treatise on witch-craft, and folk-lore supplies plot and atmosphere to more than one of Ford Madox Huefifer's historical novels. HuefTer far surpasses Scott, however, in his grasp of the sordid economic facts of life. His characters act usually from economic rather than from chivalric or religious motives. The Fifth Quee^i and hozv She Came to Court, Privy Seal, His Last Venture, and The Fifth Queen Crowned form a trilogy dealing with the career at court of Katherine Howard. In the course of writing Hueffer became more and more enamored of his heroine, as well he might, since she is so charmingly portrayed. A com- LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 447 parison of this novel with certain passages in The Critical Attitude would seem to indicate that it was Katherine Howard who con- verted him definitely to Catholicism, and yet it will scarcely be asserted that Hueffer was partisan in his apportionment of lights and shadows when drawing the picture of the religious struggles of the time of Henry the Eighth. This trilogy of works is, no doubt, Hueffer's greatest achieve- ment in the field of the historical novel, but for sheer poetic beauty Ladies whose Bright Eyes surpasses it. This tale has something of the joy of life and spring-time thrill of the poetry of Chaucer, with whose period it deals. In it, the author has an opportunity to set off in a jaunty fashion modern ideals and virtues against ancient ones and nothing affords him greater pleasure. It is a tale that makes life seem more worth while, more full of romance and happiness. "Romance is the -flavor of any life at any time," the modern Dionissia says without the least sententiousness, and "happiness is not the sort of thing you can put in the bank and draw upon. It must be found from day to day by homeless wanderers upon the road." In the novel The Halj-Moon Hueffer worked decidedly in his own field for he knew the town of Rye intimately, and that, for Hueffer means to know all the stages of its past as well as its present; moreover he had also made an especial study of the economic situation of the Cinque Ports and had written a solid work on the subject in 1900. The first Englishman to die on the soil of Manhattan was Edward Colman, a native of Rye, the companion of Henry Hudson. The first part of this novel is especially good, for here all the events take place in the town of Rye. The plot is a little difficult to handle after Edward Colman and Anne Teal become separated hy the then uncharted Atlantic, yet they are held together after all by the occult power of witch- craft. The plot of The Young Lovell is also rather tenuous, but it combiner well the eerie atmosphere of folk lore with the hard economic facts of the life of knight and monk and commoner. Into it are woven legends well known in Northumberland to-day such as that of the laidly worm of Spindleston and the lady of Glororen. The-castle itself, however, is fictitious as there is no third castle within sight of Bamburgli and Glororen and between Dunstanburgh and Bundle Bay on the coast of Northumberland. Of Hueffer's studies of the present, three are what he might call dpwn-toAvn novels, that is to say novels dealing with people 448 FORD MADOX HUEFFER actually engaged in the business of life. In them Hucffer permits himself to argue a little about politics and public morality, despite his professions about art for art's sake. An English Girl, dealing with American frenzied finance, is the least satisfactory of this group. The work has to a less degree the haziness of background that prevails in The Inheritors. In the second-named novel l^hoebus Apollo descends to earth and tries to fathom the miOtives of its remarkable inhabitants. He meets just such people as Hueffer perhaps met at the Fabian club. The improbable cle- ment in Mr. Apollo is easily overlooked and its technique is good, nowhere falling into the banalities of Kennedy's The Servant in the House or Jerome's The Passing of the Third Floor Back. In this novel, as well as in Mr. Fleight, Hueffer shows that he knows something of the class of people who struggle for a livelihood, a knowledge which elsewhere in HueflFer's modern novels is not es- pecially apparent. Mr. Fleight is a novel of literary and political life. HueiTer has presumably used m.odels from real life for his characters but has distorted them slightly for satirical purposes. American readers, who may think HueiTer unduly ironical in his treatment of American conditions, characters, and politics, may feel more reconciled after reading this satire on English conditions. According to HuefFer's own theories actual life is the proper theme of the novelist, and one wonders why he has not written more abundantly of it. Of the thousand significant anecdotes of life he has related, comparatively few are actually utilized in his novels. Perhaps the momentary revelations of human nature that he has been permitted to witness scarcely suffice to indicate full rounded characters. Hueffer himself commients on the fact that we of to-day can actually know but a handful of human beings. His individual reticence narrows the circle still more closely. He tells once of inviting a group of rather close friends to dine at his club on Good Friday; in the course of the repast he first learned that all present were Catholics. He relates the in- cident, of course, to throw light on the nature of London life. It throws rather more light on his own. There are, as a matter of fact, only three novels of Hueffer that may be regarded as intimate studies of the psychology of the modern man. These are The Call, The Panel {Ring for Nancy) and The Good Soldier. In these three particularly one recognizes the pupil of Henry James. In the second one, HuefTer even gees so far as to let James's novels play a role in the story. All three of these novels deal with a trite theme, the eternal triangle, the LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 449 man placed between the one whom he loves and the one to whom he is in honor bound. The Call is the least satisfactory of this group. It may be regarded merely as a preliminary study, while The Panel treats of the subject light-heartedly, but with a hidden vein of seriousness. ~ HueflFer's latest novel. The Good Soldier, shows his powers at their full development. In The Spirit of the People, written in 1907, he relates a certain incident merely to illustrate the English- man's fear of a display of emotion. A guardian had become so attached to a ward of his that it seemed best she should leave for a long journey. The guardian asked Hueffer to go with them in a dog-cart to the station, where the leave-taking took place in perfect, outward tranquility, though one of the two suflfered from shattered nerves for years after and the other died at Brindisi at the beginning of the journey. This anecdote with only slight variations form.s the climax of Hueffer's The Good Soldier. He has reasoned back from this and determined what kind of husband, wife, and ward might have had such an experience and has criticized the conventions of life that make such an experience possible. Here at last we have a novel that deals with the vital problems of human life, that shows "how our creeds and conventional moralities work out when applied to human contacts and to what goal of human happiness those moralities lead us." Of course Mr. Dowling of Philadelphia is in no sense HuefFer and Dowling's Protestant and American opinions are anything but his. Florence is no American type whatever, but a kind of modern Madame Bovary. The minor American characters and the leading English ones are probably drawn from actual observation. This is at last a novel such as one might expect from the pupil of great masters, a story based on observation and human experience, told with the cold analysis of Flaubert, but tempered with the tolerance of Fontaine, a study of conduct such as James would have attempted and rendered also in James's impressionistic manner, but with Huef-^ fer's clearness of style. IV It is vain to attempt to describe Ford Madox HueflFer's poetry^ \ To say that it is impressionistic would not distinguish it from that -A' 450 FORD MADOX HUEFFER of others. Tliis brief poem can serve to represent the particular quality of his impressionism: You make me think of lavender, And that is why I love you so; Your sloping shoulders, heavy hair. And long swan's neck like snow. Befit those gracious girls of long ago, Who in closed gardens took the quiet air; Who lived tlie ordered life, gently to pass From earth as from rose petals perfumes go, Or shadows from the dial in the grass; Whose fingers from the painted spinet keys Draw small heart-clutching melodies. To call Hueffer's poetry, tender, simple, and humble would be to give an inadequate description. To quote H. G. Wells to the eflFect that Hueffer had produced sweeter and deeper poetry than Tennyson Avould merely arouse interest. Nothing will serve better than t'^ recall another of Hueffer's own "small heart-clutching melodies." To Christina at Nightfall Little thing, ah, little mouse. Creeping through the twilit house, To watch within the shadow of my chair With large blue eyes; the firelight on your hair Doth glimmer gold and faint. And on your woolen gown That folds a-down From steadfast little face to square-set feet. Ah, sweet! ah, little one! so like a carven saint. With your unflinching eyes, unflinching face, Like a small angel carved in a high place, Watching unmoved across a gabled town; When I am weak and old, And lose my grip, and crave my small reward Of tolerance and tenderness and ruth, The children of your dawning day shall hold The reins we drop, and wield the judge's sword. And your swift feet shall tread upon my heels. And I be ancient Error, you New Truth, And I be crushed by your advancing wheels . . . Good-night! The fire is burning low, Put out the lamp; LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 451 Lay down the \vear\' little head LTpon the small while bed. L^p from the sea the night winds blow Across the hill, across the marsh; Chill and harsh, harsh and damp, The night winds blow. But while the slow hours go, L who must fall before you, late shall wait and keep Watch and ward, Vigil and guard. Where you sleep. Ah, sweet! do you the like where I lie dead. It is after all his poetry that of all Hucffer's work is most surely immortal. Hueffer says of Christina Rossetti that "though the range of her subjects was strictly limited within the bounds of her personal emotions, yet within those limits she ex- pressed herself consummately. She lived . . . seeking al- most as remorselessly as did Flaubert himself . . . for correct expression — for that, that is to say, which was her duty in life. Importance was the last thing on earth she would have desired." If an}^ poet's mantle has fallen on Hueflfer's shoulders it is surely hers. The word emotion alone m.ay be misunderstood. His poetry is emotional if we grant that every beautiful impression is an emotion. Of course Hueflfer has admired m.any and different poets in the course of his life but he has imitated none consciously and consistently. One cannot imitate emotions, and the form in HuefTer's case, is something that adapts itself to the changing moods. If Browning influenced To All the Dead or The Starling HuefTer was not conscious of it at the time of writing but as he says, "Influences are queer things and there is no knowing when or where they may take you." HuefTer does not care for the most part for Browning's poetry but confesses a deep admiration for German verse: I know that I would verj^ willing!}^ cut off my riglit hand to have written the JVallfahrt nach Kev'aar of Heine, or Im Moos by Annette von Droste. I would give almost anything to have written almost any modern German lyric or some of the ballads of my friend Levin Schiick- ing. These fellows you know. They sit at their high windows in Ger- man lodgings; they lean out, it is raining steadily. Opposite them is a sliop where herring salad, onions and oranges are sold. A woman with a red petticoat and a black and grey check shawl goes into the shop and buys three onions, four oranges and half a kilo of herring salad. And there is a poem ! 452 FORD MADOX HUEFFER And yet HucfFer has surely not imitated Heine. He has woven the everyday scenes of life into his poetry and has done so in colloquial language, it is true, but the simple, musical, popular verse melodies of Heine he has avoided in his most careful verse. As he says: "'vers libre' is the only medium in which I can convey ><^any more intimate m.ocds. 'Vers libre' is a very jolly medium in which to write and to read if it be read conversationally and quietly. And anyhow symmetrical or rhymed verse is for me a cramped and difficult medium — nr an easy and uninteresting one. " This is quoted from the preface to his last collection of verse called On Heave^i and Poems Written on Active Service. The recent war has brought to our ears the songs of many English poets, all of whom went through much the same experience yet who have many different messages to bring back. We could have known in advance that Hueffer's verses would contain no polemics and no heroics. What he seems to be saying is this : England is a beauti- ful country, and even where it is dingiest it is lovable, and when one is called upon one goes out quite willingly to die for her. Of course one is homesick sometimes: The French guns roll continuously And our guns, heavy slow; Along the Ancre, sinuously. The transport wagons go, And the dust is on the thistles And the larks sing up on high . . . But I see the Golden Valley Down by Tintern on the Wye. For it's just nine weeks last Sunday Since we took the Chepstow train. And I'm wondering if one day We shall do the like again; For the four: point-two's come screaming Through the sausages on high; So there's little use in dreaming How we walked above the Wye. Dust and corpses in the thistles Where the gas-shells burst like snow, And the shrapnel screams and whistles On the Becourt road below, And the High Wood bursts and bristles Where the mine-clouds foul the sky . . . But Fm with you up at Wyndcraft, Over Tintern on the Wye. LAWRENCE MARSDEN PRICE 453 It is not easy after all to leave beautiful England and its joys, and die a muddy, unsightly death between the trenches, but it's the thing to do and one does it. After that it seems only right that the boys who do it should share in what they died for. They ought to have a heaven, and the heaven ought to be as they want it, a materialist's heaven. "I know at least," the author says, "that I would not keep on going if I did not feel that heaven will be something like Rumpelmeyer's tea-shop, with the nice boys in khaki, with the haze and glim.mcr of the bright buttons, and the nice girls in the fashions appropriate to the day and the little orchestra playing 'Let the Great Big World.' . . . For our dead wanted so badly their leave in a Blighty, which would have been like that." So he paints for them, in one of the most remarkable poems of the collection, a heaven that would serve the purpose. This most recent collection shows that our pcet has found a medium that he can handle with an ease that promises abundance in the years to come, but whether he is destined to produce any more of those rare and exquisite miniatures of his earlier poetic period, is a question too much dependent on mood and circum- stance to permit of an answer. A BOLSHEVIST THEORY OF ART By Geraldine P. Dilla WHEN the best known of Russian writers, Count Leo Tolstoi, first published his book entitled What is Art and Mr. Aylmer Maude trans- lated it into English in 1897, a great storm of protest was aroused, which awakened defenders and expositors of the famous Russian's theory. Now most of us look a little more critically at doctrines made in Russia. When from reading newspaper accounts of the Bolshe- viki's activities and magazine discussions of their so-called principles we turn to a survey of Tolstoi, we are struck with a strange resemblance. This explicit reliance on the taste, the ideals, the judgment of the most untutored common man as opposed to the cultivated and educated man — what is it but Bolshevism applied to art criticism.? Even the most sympathetic Mr. Nathan Haskell Dole, says in his Life of Tolstoi: "A great deal of the criticism in What is Art? Is delightful, satirical and justified; but as one might suspect, Tolstoi goes too far, including with decadents, impressionists, and symbolists, [what Tolstoi calls] 'the meaningless works of the ancient Greeks, — Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and especially Aristophanes, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, Michael- angelo, Bach, Beethoven, and of late years, Ibsen, Maeterlick, Verlaine, Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and all that immense mass of good-for-nothing imitators of those imitators!'" (p. 364). Again Mr. Dole tells us that "Tolstoi was absolutely charm.ed by the vigor and bea-uty of Nietzsche's language and so carried away that he quite forgot himself; he especially liked the way that Nietzsche gave Christianity its coup de grace.''' (p. 365). That we may recall exactly what Tolstoi believed, I shall review his entire book What is Art? This brief statement of his doctrine will prove that this famous Russian unconsciously held a theory of art which is a very good counterpart in artistic criti- cism of Bolshevism in present government. 454 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recalL APr>io'64-3;^K ft^ fi^g^^ STACKS ftB k '69 RECEIVED MAR 27 '69 -3 PM LOAN DEPT. t^ ^ ^ '\^]^ ^ X^ A 7/ LD 21A-40m-ll,'63 (E1602slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley